Weekend Catch Up!

Hello friends!

Sorry about missing last week's Catch Up! The horrors of my lit seminar continue and I decided that I really need to work on not working on the weekends for it. So from now until September, the Catch Up is going to come to you, piping hot, on Saturday mornings. That should give me enough time to get a second wind from doing serious academic writing and thought.

Or, I fucking hope so.

The solstice has come. We had the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, and you know it was beautiful. June has good vibes. So many good things happened in Junes past: Yaga, my friend's wedding(s?), les kidlets, Potema and it's both wrath (pride) month and hope (Indigenous Peoples Day). It's if the colour orange could throw a party, that's what June's like. Good vibes, catching up with friends during the daylight, and spending time with others under the inky cerulean twilight. Bring on meteor showers, and burnt coffee midnight adventures.

With the season change too, I've been reflecting. I'm apparently reaching an appropriate midlife crisis age. Am I suddenly going to just mcfucking lose it, and decide now is the time to buckle down to become the real adult that's eluded me? Or will the midlife crisis somehow manage to kill my imposter syndrome? I'm kinda worried that if anything, it'll just bulk out the imposter syndrome more. Or I'll publish some milquetoast literary novel and scoff about ever having felt strongly at all.

Or maybe I'll decide to take up some kind of esoteric instrument to give the bagpipes player in my neighbourhood a run for their money. Maybe I'll just start a collection of very strange effects pedals to run with a theremin to make very specific suburban nightmare music. The future is already kind strange.
But hey, it's still June.

So that means only pretty okay, if not good vibes for right now.

What I've Been Watching

I grew up on '90s X-Men and X-Men'97 is a beautiful continuation of that series. The animation is so good. I was absolutely ready for the series to be nostalgia bait, or like any of the live action MCU universe shows (pointless and no cohesive storytelling) but there's so much crammed into 10 episodes.

I love how Morph is non-binary, I love that Charles and Magnus are still the best exes to I tolerate you-ish friends, and I absolutely love how chilling the anti-mutant factions are. I wish there would have been more than 10 episodes so that certain events could have been sat with a little more (but Disney+ did release the episodes weekly) or that there could have been slower, filler episodes but hey maybe that will happen for the next season.

Dallas Green is one of those artists that I feel like I grew up listening to Alexisonfire, then got into his solo project (City and Colour) super hard and forgot that time is always going forward. I remember Dallas Green like how I probably see myself mostly in my head: late twenties, maybe early 30s. And then I look up from avoiding time to see how grey both of us have become.

This is a beautiful album, wonderfully mixed about the death of a friend. Your late 30s are fucking weird, especially during a pandemic.

Before Rite Here, Rite Now I had different expectations. I was sure Copia was going to die. I thought it was going to be more general jokey rather than remember you will die and that things are cyclical. Including death or how bands change sound so slowly over two albums and two EPs that you don't really notice.

I really enjoyed how well the ghoulette's vocals were mixed throughout the show (especially Mad Gallica), I loved the little easter eggs like the cat petting room backstage, or the significance of the red Tom Baker Fuck You jacket. I am a little confused, or maybe perplexed, about some choices for song arrangements but I'm not a composer or musician. The post credit scene will be feeding Ghost fans until the soundtrack drops.

We stan a short king. Just before the end of last year Drumeo released an Offering from ii (Sleep Token's drummer). Listening to people talk about what they do is fascinating, especially when they can do it by using their technical knowledge in a way that's not gatekeepy. This was one of the better ways I've spent an hour (at least) in the last two weeks, Sleep Token songs are so beautifully put together and each album is so different stylistically from the others. One day in the future, I hope I'll be able to see them.

What I've Been Reading

I haven't been reading as much as I normally do. Between the lit novels and the Eye of Sauron, reading for fun or pleasure has been pushed aside. Which is shame during wrath month.

Sandra took a deep breath. It was just a matching algorithm, based on simulated text. Nothing more. People used generated text all the time for all kinds of things. Who hadn’t at some point let a mailbot answer some routine work emails or at the very least let autosuggest fill in a word or two? Was this really so different?

Carolina Yoachim over at Clarkesworld wrote a neat little potential love story (Our Chatbots Said "I Love You," Shall We Meet?) about AI chatbots and their humans. I thought this was clever and I enjoyed the ending.

Gorey and O’Hara transformed their suite into a salon, furnishing it, in suitably bohemian fashion, with white modernist garden furniture rented from one of the shops in Harvard Square. A tombstone, pilfered from Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground or perhaps from Mount Auburn Cemetery and repurposed as a coffee table, added just the right touch of macabre whimsy.

When my children were much smaller, I would read them The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey. This was a hold over from high school, my incredibly talented friends would do art assignments in the style of the Gashlycrumb Tinies or I think someone once printed it out entirely and stapled into a sketchbook for some assignment.

For wrath month, I offer up a neat little history by Mark Devry (over at lithub) called Edward Gorey, Frank O'Hara and Harvard's Gay Underground.

Let me tell you. Let me. What we teach the kids if the worst happens. What we tell them about… what we… because we love them.

I am so excited for this. I really liked Premee Mohamed's The Annual Migration of Clouds and I'm looking forward to the follow up novella. This is an excerpt of the first chapter from We Speak Through the Mountain which came out on Tuesday I think.

Small Mammal Update

Delphine has been particularly clingy in the last couple of weeks. She's made sure to come bother me so I pet her more than I put words down on an never ending lit analysis. She comes and is more sharp than the feedback. She's a good little co-author.

What I've Been Working On

I'm hoping to get another book post up soon. We'll see how class goes. I have been reading, I just haven't been able to read or write for fun as much anymore.

And always, thanks for reading to the end. I hope you have a good weekend.