but my oldest daughter, who is 10, is beginning her first week at a sleepaway arts camp at a boarding school in New England. It's hard not to feel like this is an early pay-in to the university-industrial complex, although if it were, it would objectively be a dumb one; admission is not competitive, the camp has no famous alumni, the instructors vary from novices & dilettantes to quietly successful professionals, and the whole thing just doesn't run long enough to produce anything that's really finished.
I know all this because I went there for several years myself and found it massively valuable. "And loved it" would also be accurate, and I hope my daughter does too, but the complete disregard for extraneous shit like recognition and competition, to say nothing of college, really did foster a focus on coming together to do the work that I haven't found anywhere else.
I'm writing this letter in a few stolen minutes while the younger kids watch Netflix. I don't expect my 10-year-old to understand how rare and special it is to get a week to focus on just making a thing; but, later, I hope she'll remember how it feels to experience that purity of commitment, and work to recapture it where she can.
I'm jealous, is what I'm saying. Six Bad Things:
- "While he lived, Paul Bunyan served as the master of the Michigan lumberwoods; since his death, its only master has been the hodag." So begins FEARSOME CREATURES OF THE LUMBERWOODS, a book by my friend Hal Johnson, who was my counselor at the same camp my daughter's attending. It's a reboot, more or less, of the 1910 original by William T. Cox, which collects stories about American cryptids like the hodag, the Hyampom hog bear, and my personal favorite, the slide-rock bolter, which slides down mountains at incredible speeds and eats whole villages strip by strip over the course of a few days. The hodag, incidentally, is the actual mascot of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and a statue of it stands in front of the Rhinelander Chamber of Commerce. Hal has nothing to do with this, as far as I know; but many a dark and unaccountable tale has unfolded in the lumberwoods.
- In Novellas That Start Out As One Thing And Then Turn Out To Also Be Another Thing, we have Nicola Griffith's SPEAR (which starts out as a Celtic fantasy) and Catherynne Valente's COMFORT ME WITH APPLES (which starts out as a Bluebeard retelling). Bookshop.org does spoil (?) what SPEAR turns out to be, so maybe it felt less like a twist to others than it did to me. Anyway, you'll be hard pressed to improve on Griffith and Valente for prose, and these are short books, so maybe a good introduction to their work -- SPEAR was mine to Griffith, from whom I'll certainly seek out more. Griffith also narrated the audiobook of SPEAR, which is a fantastic way to experience it.
- Speaking of audio, Meegwun Fairbrother's narration of Cherie Dimaline's THE MARROW THIEVES is also very good. Canadian post-apocalyptic First Nations fiction, about a world where sleep has fled most of the world -- who've turned, in desperation, to the people famous for making dreamcatchers. This is an embarrassing one for me because I literally own a gifted copy of this book, but I ended up listening to it because I so rarely sit down with a physical book any more.
- For reasons not fully accessible to consciousness, I've been shoring up the holes in my classic anime literacy; I finished COWBOY BEBOP a number of months ago and just finished NEON GENESIS EVANGELION as well as THE END OF EVANGELION. I don't know what I was expecting, and that may be because EVANGELION has compromised my memory by sending a cascade of micro-strokes to perforate my hippocampal formation. I think it probably rewards deeper analysis, but on first watch it sure does feel like they just threw the Book of Revelations and Robotech at a wall and kept what stuck. But it's definitely an educational experience to watch this kind of conventional-feeling Mecha Versus Kaiju series spiral into a lumpy mix of psychological horror, cosmic horror, and paranoid geopolitical thriller, chopping off plot threads like a drunk Norn until the whole thing collapses into surrealism -- or possibly, in Dan Olson's memorable phrasing, an ocean of Tang.
- I officially liked Tim Kreider before he was cool; I discovered THE PAIN -- WHEN WILL IT END (at thepaincomics.com, which self-respecting browsers now won't open because it doesn't support https) a few years before he hit it big with The Busy Trap, material he's now returned to (w/elaboration) in a new NYT piece called The American Scam. This, in turn, led me to his newsletter, The Loaf. I think he's a truly great cartoonist, although that dimension of his work seems to have been very nearly erased from the Internet, but his prose is worth reading for its massive contempt for hustle culture and just absolute lack of bullshit. If you like his writing, you won't go wrong by handing him your email.
- I picked up the first volume of GUNNERKRIGG COURT at the library a couple of weeks ago, but my daughter grabbed it first; and since it is of course exactly her shit, we're now reading it in parallel. It's very much a creature of its time; there's a specific Early-Oughts Webcomic energy about it that's hard to describe. I was shocked to learn that it's still going! Anyway, it's an enjoyable mishmosh of dark academia, science vs. magic, the obligatory cute robots and sidekick critters and diffident brushes with queer content that no Early-Oughts Webcomic would be caught dead without, and so on. Really good to read with a 10-year-old who isn't into sharing much these days.
My cover artist is still working, so I don't have a date for books yet. "Sometime in the fall" is I think pretty safe but not 100%. I'll make sure you have plenty to read in the meantime.
🌞,
Matt
|