We (Molly & Paul) are a married couple that have simply never been able to shut up, but we have a wonderful toddler and have found that it's hard to get thos...
I was going to call this "inside you there are two middle aged detectives" but, critically, one of these men is John Banville's Quirke. Quirke is not a detective, but a pathologist and a man in the grand crime tradition of "guy who gets to come along...for some reason." In my experience reading period crime fiction from the UK and Ireland, people are always blithely obstructing justice* so nobody…
I started this draft in December as an "end of the year perfume diary" but alas, it is now the beginning of a different year! If only there was a designation of time that spans both... What I took to New Mexico : Reve D'ossian I mentioned Oriza Legrand's Reve D'ossian a few months ago so it's not a new sample, and I've worn it frequently throughout the season, including to a Christmas Eve mass in…
One of my least clearly articulated but nonetheless household-shorthand level concepts is "Ghibli gender." The seeds of this idea were planted when I finally watched Porco Rosso at the inappropriate age of 30 (the appropriate age is 40). When Porco needs to overhaul his iconic red airplane, he finds that the male workforce in his corner of Italy has mostly fled to seek other opportunities during…
The other day I posted a Substack note about The Nutcracker : So you know how a lot of girls will cite Labyrinth as an early sexual awakening moment? I would like to see how many of those girls grew up to be a little too into Hades and Persephone in their middle school mythology unit and furthermore I would like to offer Drosselmeyer (Nutcracker, most versions, not Princess Tutu) as another load…
The household has been miserable with illness this past week—some kind of vile mashup of cold and norovirus symptoms has felled all three of us and left our daily routine in shambles. There's been a lot of miserable, huddled TV-watching, is what I mean. Last night Molly suggested "Let's watch Emma, I liked it," and I said "Sounds great," so couchbound and blanketed we settled in. In the interests…
The popular writer I am tired of is talking about the disappointing void of meaning in marriage without religion today. Once again I do have to hand it to her that she's good at saying things people are already thinking. I remember reading a blog post from Sarah Perry about how “with the nationwide adoption of no-fault divorce and the elimination of the social stigma of divorce, the nature of…
I've decided that I'm too lazy to properly do accent marks on this little blog so you'll have to imagine them. Consumption John Banville As a fan of John Banville's Quirke and Strafford books, of which the fourth really seemed like the last, I was excited to read his new novel Venetian Vespers without much info going into it. It's kind of a mystery, it's kind of gothic. I would say the best genre…
"I can't believe these seasons finished the same way," I half-joked to my husband as the credits rolled on season 3 of The Diplomat , an extremely stupid show. The other "these" was season 2 of AMC's Interview with the Vampire , an extremely good show. Paul, who tolerates a lot of vampire talk and has a lot of exceptions for a self-professed vampire hater, did not watch IWTV with me but he lets me…
Package I thought was lost but showed up weeks later This little box from the delightfully old-school website The Perfumed Court contained some real heavyweights (and a coffee caramel candy), and I also think I got one of the last portions of the old Apres L'ondee, so losing it was frustrating! But it showed up unceremoniously a few weeks later. Apres L'Ondee discontinued EDT: I have the current…
I have a few bigger things I want to write about in the immediate future but my thoughts have not cohered nearly enough for any of them so here's some more perfume detritus. Every year, my family goes to Hilton Head Island for the last week of August. Long sad story short, we had a house there from when I was about 4-28. I consider myself to have partially grown up on HHI. It's still enormously…