Notes
It’s my birthday Friday! I’m keeping Kimbertide low key this year. If you want to play along, watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Muppet Movie, play an arcade game, or eat some pizza.
Finished reading: Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin 📚
Another sweet romance set in the Toronto Muslim community from Uzma Jalaluddin. This one has Shop Around the Corner/She Loves Me/You’ve Got Mail vibes. It includes a community dealing with racial hatred and coming through in a joyous way. Highly recommend.
🔖🎭📚 Read It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama by Michael Paulson (NYT, gift link) via Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter.
When I was in Europe reading censorship news from the US, I kept thinking, “I just want to fight censorship and make theatre.” Turns out these two things are related.
I’m signed up for Threads. I’ll actually use it when it implements ActivityPub and/or is available in-browser.
Finished reading: You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi 📚
I read this start-to-finish in about 8 hours. It’s a romance that illuminates grief and what can come after. It made me cry. It made me hungry. Highly recommend.
My On This Day page surfaced this blog post today:
Constructing websites as constructing ourselves: Thinking out loud
I still think about this all the time. I still feel that as I build my site, I’m building myself.
Apparently my idea for what counts as the prettiest hair is bound to the year 1993. This soft hair on Deanna Troi, with thin bangs, the front pulled up, tendrils in drint of the ears, and big loose curls in the back resonates for me as true beauty. (ST:TNG 7x11 Parallels, airdate 11/29/93) 🖖🏻
Finished reading: Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin 📚
This is a beautiful homage to Pride & Prejudice, as well as to the Toronto Muslim community. A sweet love story with beautiful language. And so much tasty-sounding food and drink! Highly recommend.
📝 Brilliant gem from Jaya Saxena in today’s #1000WordsOfSummer letter:
my writing got better the moment I allowed myself to be the kind of writer I am, even if I don’t work the same way as the writers I want to be.
📚 Me, reading Ayesha At Last: This is a Pride & Prejudice retelling, I know this, so when is Khalid going to go all Mr. Darcy?
Author Uzma Jalaluddin, on page 40: Here you go.
I am on Day 4 of a migraine. I’m about to try a new medication for it. Here’s hoping it makes a difference.
Picard: I feel as if I’m in the Scottish Highlands.
Colonist: The cornerstone of every building was taken from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen…
Me, A Jerk: Those aren’t in the highlands.
🖖🏻
Hey friends, what are some good values statements from organizations? (I’m deliberately not defining criteria for good, but please feel free to explain why you think the ones you mention are good.)
🔖 Read What Is A Third Place? (And Here’s Why You Should Have One) by Emily Torres (The Good Trade).
I’ve been thinking about third places, their role in fiction, what they look like online, & how they overlap with affinity spaces for a few days so it felt like serendipity when this hit my inbox.
📚💬 “To me intellectual life is fundamentally different from academic careerism.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work
📚💬
It is precisely because common structures of evaluation and advancement in various academic jobs require homogenous thought and action… that academia is often less a site for open-minded creative study and more a space of repression that dissenting voices are so easily censored and silenced… it is dangerous for us to allow academic institutions to remain the primary site where our ideas are developed and engaged." bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work
🔖 Read Katy Simpson Smith on Writing a Southern Woman Louder Than Herself.
Writing, as a career, is inherently boat-rocking.
📚💬 “Science fiction is the literature of social and technological change.” Nalo Hopkinson, “What is science fiction for?” in Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination
🍞 This bread is from Simple Mills’s Artisan Bread mix. It has a beautiful crack, but vinegar as a leavening agent leaves something to be desired. The texture is a bit dense. Motivation for me to use the copy of Gluten-free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day I ordered on @cygnoir’s recommendation.
In response to @mbkriegh’s :
This post reminds me of Austin Kleon’s writing on Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius”:
I myself feel the same way about choral music, as well as a variety of other forms of collaborative art (theatre, movies & TV, video games). I’ve been a choral singer and I’ve been a soloist, and for the longest time I thought my worth as a singer was to be measured by how often directors wanted to give me solos. But over time, I’ve come to realize that people don’t want a choir or chorus full of bad singers, that being a choral singer is a special skill, and that I tend to get chills more often listening to a good choral piece than a solo.
Finished reading: The Widow of Rose House by Diana Biller 📚
This is a lovely romance set in Gilded Age New York, where a scandalous society widow and a famous inventor fall in love as they try to exorcise a ghost from the Gothic mansion she just bought. Content warning: spousal abuse, neglectful parents, bad treatment in a mental health facility.
💬📚 “Real life is people leaning on each other when things are hard. It’s loving each other so much there’s no question about facing things together. It’s fighting for each other and with each other and being damned grateful for every morning you wake up together.” The Widow of Rose House, Diana Biller
Halfway through the week of no school or camp and we’re not doing too badly, thanks to grandma time, the pool, and a moratorium on screen time limits…