Some things I wanted to show you

I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m a bit scattered and don’t really know what I’m doing (hope that’s okay / thank you for being here). I assume this is what most people trying to come out of burnout look like. I find myself looking for clues I am interested in things again, excited about new book ideas, eager to research down a random rabbit hole. But then I get another editing job that I don’t feel like I can turn down for financial reasons as gas prices climb and I shift the just-for-fun stuff to the side.

But spring weather is here and the windows are open and there’s a bottle of rose in the fridge waiting for the day I can read in the hammock. It’s all working out in the big picture (I tell myself as I chain myself to my desk for another weekend).

On yellow : “Yellow is a color of joy, of gold, of money, of spring, but also of evil and madness. It is yellow wallpaper that drives Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s narrator crazy as she tries to claw it off the walls to free the woman she fears is trapped behind it. Yellow is the most visible color—it has high luminance and reflects tremendous amounts of light—and so it is a color of warning, of caution. It became the color linked to Judas in medieval depictions of the Bible, and took on associations of jealousy, betrayal, and evil. But it is also the color of the smiley face, the color of the lemon, the color of the sun. Maybe it is the bothness of yellow—the way it is both a symbol of evil and good, of happiness and insanity—that makes it so unpopular. It is stark and vibrant and menacing, pushing us at our extremes, reminding us that madness and joy aren’t so far apart.”

Bitch: A history : “ ‘Bitch’ is a word with bite. Once a straightforward insult, it is now used in so many different ways that it’s no longer clear what it means. Bitch is a linguistic chameleon: there are good bitches and bad bitches; boss bitches and perfect bitches; sexy, difficult, dangerous or even psycho bitches. … A single word can tell us a great deal. The journey of bitch, from a literal term for a female dog to one of the most charged words in the English language, shows how language shifts alongside changing ideas about gender, power and identity. In this case, it suggests that sometimes you really can teach an old dog new tricks.”

How to Get to Know Your Neighbourhood : “Beyond satisfying our curiosity, getting to know a neighbourhood is a way to build capacity for compassion, to avoid that all-too-human inclination to see others as less real than ourselves. Really being with the people who live around you is an essential part of recognising our shared humanity, even our shared fate, recognising that we each belong to something larger than ourselves.”

Why we still need to champion women’s writing : “Several commentators pointed out that in 2023, the shortlist for the Booker Prize featured more men called Paul (three) than female writers in total.”

WATCHING1 :

The Hunger Games* (Spencer read this to me); Apocalypse Woof* (Nova Nelson is always a comfort read); Mad Men Carousel* (as I was doing my rewatch); Funny Story* (excellent romcom); and, frankly, an absurd amount of editing for clients, which takes up a lot of my book-brain availability

( *these are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through any of these links I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you )