Links
🔖📚 Read Sherlock Holmes self-insert fanfic written by a 7th grader in 1903.
I love this so much.
🔖 Read Frida Kahlo’s life of chronic pain by Carol A. Courtney (OUPblog).
Looking for examples of chronically ill and disabled creatives to be models for myself. Frida Kahlo is such a great one.
🔖 Read Welcome to Your Cronehood by Catherine Newman (Cup of Jo).
I am not psyched about menopause. I’ve already lived a lot of my life for me rather than other people, so I feel ahead of the curve there.
🔖🗺️ Read How Paris Hopes the Summer Olympics Will Transform the City—for Good by Lindsey Tramuta (Condé Nast Traveler).
This is a fascinating article. Paris’s commitment to hosting the most sustainable Olympics ever and transforming an underresourced area for the long-term is inspiring.
🔖📚 100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read by James Folta (Lit Hub)
This is the kind of content carefully calibrated to please me, specifically.
🔖📚 Read Notes on Romance Novels as “Camp”.
Andrea, author of the Shelf Love newsletter, does an amazing job of arguing for romance novels as Camp.
📚🔖 Read The Literary Power of Hobbits: How JRR Tolkien Shaped Modern Fantasy by Verlyn Flieger (Literary Hub)
Dr. Flieger says:
- Tolkien created modern fantasy via fae-ery, the creations of secondary worlds.
- The inclusion of hobbits in Middle Earth grounds Tolkien ’s fantasy.
🔖 Read Ten Years Out of Academia by Anne Helen Petersen.
I’m 3 years out from my doctoral defense and 6 months out from holding an academic job. I told an internet friend:
Right now it feels like librarian is the identity that was always really mine and academic was borrowed.
🔖📺 Read The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice.
For 20 years, I couldn’t say what I watched the former president do on the set of the show that changed everything. Now I can.
Woof. I don’t think stories like this will move the needle for Trump supporters, because I don’t really think anything will move the needle for Trump supporters.
But I kind of hope they turn some non-voters into voters.
Today:
- woke up way too early
- read about Romance Writers of America filing for bankruptcy and the absurd way they’re trying to blame it on Courtney Milan 🔖📚
- had my first mammogram (later than I ought) (they used cute stickers to mark my sebaceous cysts)
- caught up on Season 3 of Bridgerton 📺
🔖📚 Read Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker Made an Irreverent, Charming Kids’ Book by Stephen Bell (Harper’s Bazaar).
I’m super curious to see the book. The article only contains one sample page. It’s gorgeous and I look forward to seeing more.
📚🔖 Here is the actual study with the evidence of the correlation between fiction reading and cognition.
🔖📚 Read If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain.
It’s always good to look at the actual studies behind news articles like this, but the evidence that reading fiction is associated with improved cognition suggests the importance of libraries, I think.
🔖 Read a pair of pieces about art and mothering:
The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering by Jessica Grose (NYT Gift Link)
“Is This The Best Use of My Time?” Sara Fredman in conversation with Catherine Ricketts, author of The Mother Artist.
🔖📚 Read How Pregnancy Forever Transforms the Body and the Mind by Lucy Jones (Literary Hub).
🔖📚 Read What Eve L. Ewing’s Career Trajectory Tells Us About Black Women’s Place in Mainstream Superhero Comics by Ravynn K. Stringfield.
Dr. Stringfield does an awesome job illuminating how Eve L. Ewing’s comics career highlights structural inequality in the comics industry
🔖📚 Read A Daughter Becomes a Mother: On Inhabiting Both Roles in Fiction and in Life by Heidi Reimer (Literary Hub).
🔖 Read The films that gave us unrealistic expectations about what makes a ‘home’.
…I too had one of those houses I had always dreamed of. But it wasn’t by design… It was by living my life and creating a home that served the needs of that life.
🔖📚 Read Tackling Ballet’s History of Anti-Blackness as a White Woman.
The infinitely kinder cousin of ignorance is curiosity.
A great short piece that’s about cultural humility as much as anything.
🔖📚 Read My Son’s Love Life Is None of My Business, Except It Is by Yukiko Tominaga (Electric Literature).
This is a lovely piece about love and dealing with our children growing up.
🔖 Read The Messy Places Are Where the Learning Happens: On Being a Beginner by Michelle Boyd (Digits and Threads)
A great reminder to deliberately be a beginner sometimes.
🔖📚📝 Read Mothering and Writing Are Both Undervalued Labor, so How Do Women Do Both? .
An excellent excerpt from the book The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity.
🔖📝 Read An Oasis in the Desert: Why Libraries Are the Best Places to Write.
I love to write in a library carrel. More than once I’ve considered getting one for our home office. I wonder if my favorite local library branch has them. I haven’t noticed. Next time I’m there, I’ll check.
🔖🧶 Read This Is Your Brain on Fibre by Michelle Woodvine (Digits & Threads).
A great article that explores a lot of the reasons fiber crafting is good for our mental health.
🔖 Read You are having a midlife crisis. It’s fine.
This is an interesting pairing with The Cut’s The Case for Marrying an Older Man.
The former points out that a woman partying at midlife is not, in fact, a revolution. Which pairs fascinatingly with the latter’s framing of being a young artist supported by a partner as a brilliant life hack. I’m curious what the author of the latter’s midlife crisis will look like.