Kimberly Hirsh

🔖📚 Read “I think, like marriage, home is a fantasy” - Kelly McMaster interviewed by Amanda Montei

Here are all of my intellectual intentions and here is this adorable, smiling, chubby baby, swallowing it whole.

When writing real life, there is always going to be a connection between what is happening at the breakfast table and how you are showing up on the page.

📺 Watched Velma. The two primary criticisms - that it relies too heavily on meta-humor and that the characters are selfish & don’t grow - are spot on, and yet I still found it compelling enough to watch all 10 episodes.

🔖 Read Monkey House: Strange Reflections at the Singerie by Kate Zambreno (VQR).

📺 Me, watching Bridgerton: How can anyone tell these Bridgerton brothers apart? They all have the same coloration. I guess two of them are a little taller? But I’m not sure.

🔖 Read The Winter Zoo by Kate Zambreno (The Yale Review).

For a few years when M. was a toddler, our family went to Knoxville - the place of my mother’s birth - for The Collective library conference. W. would present and M. and I would wander about town, exploring the best haunts and generally enjoying the adorable downtown and the home of the 1982 World’s Fair.

One of the places I took M. was Zoo Knoxville. We were there in mid-March so it was pretty much a winter zoo like Kate Zambreno talks about here, and our experiences there were very similar.

🔖📝 Reading Revision can be fun. No, really. by Charlie Jane Anders.

…revision can actually be kind of exhilarating at times. Because instead of thinking of the revision process as fixing my garbage draft, I’ve started to think of it as unwrapping a series of presents that I wrapped for myself before.

🔖 Read How to Scale Back, Even When It Seems Impossible.

Do you need to lose something else to find yourself? Katie Pryal writes about how she had to let so many things go to create space for herself to thrive.

Just learned that it would cost £22 to have 100g of Tchai-Ovna’s Faeries Blood Tea shipped to me here in the US. Yikes.

📚 Purchased 2 different books from museums to be shipped directly to my house rather than carrying them home myself:

• Sarah Bernhardt - Et la femme crea l’etoile exhibition catalog (Petit Palais, Paris)
• Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination exhibition book (Science Museum, London)

Time for a needs assessment! Micro.blog community, what resources do you need in the Micro.blog Community Library?

Want to read: The Light Room by Kate Zambreno 📚

📚 Here comes the BBC with a list of the 100 Greatest Children’s Books of All Time. Maybe when I’m recovered from jetlag I’ll see how many are on both this and Time’s 100 Best Fantasy Books list.

🍿 Watched Howard.

It’s always striking when you realize the outsize influence an artist has had on you, and watching this it really hit home what an influence Howard Ashman has been on me. I think tomorrow is its lady day on Disney+. I hope they’ll release it for purchase after that. I’d buy it.

🔖 Read The Healing Power of JavaScript.

❤️

Home again and happy to be here.

Last full day in Europe and I’m spending it alternating between packing and lying down. Don’t underestimate how much stuff you can acquire in 4 months, even when you’re doing your best to be really selective.

I’ve created playlists on YouTube for all 3 Micro Camps, in case you, like me, have a long flight and might want to download and watch them all on the plane (if you have YouTube Premium, that is):

• Micro Camp 2021
• Micro Camp 2022
• Micro Camp 2023

Happy World Goth Day!

Tomorrow I will go home, where I will have access to all my goth perfumes and jewelry.

Today, I give you this photo of Sarah Bernhardt wearing her bat hat, which I hope to recreate with a needle-felted bat.

📺 Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures is exactly the Star Wars show I would have written as a kid:

• Kai Brightstar
• Nash Durango
• The Crimson Firehawk

Brilliant targeting for its audience.

📚 Revisiting Time’s The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.

N. K. Jemisin:

Don’t think of fantasy as mere entertainment, then, but as a way to train for reality. It always has been, after all.

“Y’all” is the best contraction. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

A while back I said I was going to get obsessed with Sarah Bernhardt (I seem to have said it somewhere other than my own website ☹️) but never followed through. But today I went to the Sarah Bernhardt exhibition at the Petit Palais and now I’m recommitting myself to this plan.

If you want to read about the exhibition, here are a couple articles:

• The Original Influencer Was French—A Show Dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt Celebrates the World’s First Superstar
• Why Actress Sarah Bernhardt Was the First Modern Celebrity
• Before Taylor Swift or David Bowie, There Was Sarah Bernhardt

Did you know Sarah Bernhardt was a goth multipotentialite? She acted, directed, sculpted, painted, wrote, ran a theatre, and led charity work. She had herself photographed in a coffin and was super into bats. And she was friends with Oscar Wilde. And she kept acting even after having her leg amputated and began her film career at age 56. I love her.

Announcement time!

Do you write a blog? Send it to me and I’ll read it!

Finished reading: Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale 📚

A sweet historical romance involving a Quaker and a rakish Duke.

🔖🌐 Read Webring History.

animated email gifs, web counters, scrolling and/or blinking text, midi background music that could not be turned off and the “under construction” images.

I’d forgotten about midi background music! This quote is basically a list of things that made the web feel fun for me. I’m going to work on recapturing that vibe, even if the tech looks different.