Week of 8/25

Books

I am currently reading Letters to Gwen John by painter Celia Paul, which I like a lot. The conceit is that Paul writes letters to John, who died in 1939. Paul acknowledges at the beginning of the book that John will never read her letters, but does this as a creative (therapeutic?) exercise, because she believes they have so much in common: Paul had an affair with painter Lucien Freud, who was older and much more famous. John had an affair with August Rodin, twice her age and much more famous. I just got past the part where Paul details how the independent John came undone after her affair with Rodin, which disappointed me to hear, but as Virgil writes in Georgics, “All men on earth, and beasts, both wilde and tame, Sea-monsters, gaudy fowle, rush to this flame: The same love works in all; with love ingag'd” (happens to the best of us, in other words). Much talk of motherhood (Paul had a son with Freud, John had no children) and economics (both had to work as models in order to survive, although Paul was eventually represented by a gallery and paid a small stipend; Freud also bought Paul an apartment in a nice area, which made me jealous, although nothing comes without a price I guess). Anyway, I’m 150 pages in, of 300, so who knows what else is to come.

I also finished Moliere’s The School for Wives which was fun, although era-appropriate messed up: an old dude obsessed with not being cuckolded adopts a four-year-old girl and sends her away to a convent to be brought up as the most boring woman alive so that she might be a perfect wife. Instead she grows up blunt and honest and kind of wickedly funny, and (spoiler alert) falls for a hot dude who woos her and seems to (sort of?) respect her. Go figure.

Thirdly I read another book written and illustrated by Akiko Miyakoshi, of Little Shrew, called Tea Party in the Woods. It’s a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” and features some truly horrific/haunting animal illustrations, so I recommend it, although I still like Shrew the most. Her books are a great combination of sweet and familiar and utterly unfamiliar/disturbing. I only wish I had a child to expose them to (please let me babysit your child and traumatize them…j/k).

Comics/Manga

I just finished the new Moon Girl Scholastic book by Asia Simone and Stephanie Williams, since Amy ordered it and everything that comes into this apartment must be read by me, one way or the other. I thought it was very cute and I loved the roller derby content. I read Upstaged by Robin Easter, which I also thought was very cute—so interesting to read explicitly queer comics for kids, very heartwarming, and not something I could’ve found when I was that age. I read Nino Bulling’s Firebugs, which was decidedly not for kids and about the main character, Ingken, stewing over their gender identity and how it might affect their relationships, and doing nothing—their well-meaning friends and lovers all trying to get them to understand that in order to make change, you gotta do something, even if it hurts. At first I was disappointed by the minimal art style but after awhile I started to realize that the calligraphic lines worked well with the story. Before that I read Matthew Erman’s Loving, Ohio, an atmospheric Midwestern cult story full of dread and random murders. I liked the art (by Sam Beck) a lot and the vibes of the story, although I was disappointed (although not very surprised?) that it kinda went nowhere.

TV/movies

Amy and I spent most of the week catching up on Love is Blind UK. I didn’t think it differed a ton from the US version, but there were some high points, like I have so many questions about Benaiah, and I was so shocked about Sabrina and Steven. I’m always obsessed with how long someone can keep it together before revealing their true nature. A couple of months? A couple of years? Relevant to our next attempt at viewing, Worst Ex Ever, a Blumhouse documentary series following Worst Roommate Ever, which was amazing—it sounds cheesy but each episode had such great storytelling. Unfortunately the Ex iteration has been dreary and sad, mostly about the many ways in which the system fails women who have been abused and harassed. (We’re only two episodes in…maybe it gets better? Amy says we can give it one more episode.)

Anime

I finished watching Mysterious Disappearances (Kaii to Otome to Kamikakushi), which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, but I oddly liked quite a bit by the end. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone because it’s an ecchi anime (ie a vehicle to make weird jokes about its main character’s giant rack), but hear me out: said main character, Sumireko Ogawa, works in a bookstore after precocious success as a first-time author at the age of fifteen, after which she suffered a debilitating creative block and never wrote again. In hopes of picking up the pen, she gets involved in some weird folkloric stuff, including an entanglement with her spooky coworker and his kid sister. Each episode is about a “curiosity” which is usually a fusion of a yokai/Japanese supernatural being and an urban legend, sometimes bastardized to exist in the present day. For example my favorite episode was about a garei, a “picture ghost” that embodies a work of art. In this case the garei inhabits a vtuber avatar, kept alive by the parasocial relationships it maintains with its fans. Anyway, approach with caution, because there’s a lot of mildly to majorly gross trope-y stuff in it, but once I got past that stuff I thought it was an interesting watch.

Now I’m semi-watching True Beauty. I did read a fair amount of the Webtoon (it was the first one I read), but got bored after awhile. So it’s interesting to see the setup once again. I thought the Webtoon was charming in a way that the anime can’t be (with all of those Ren & Stimpy-esque still frames of the main character looking weird and disgruntled), but I’m still into it, at least until something better comes along.