A Secular Wednesday

bc yesterday was a day off for me

And there is a LOT to cover. I will not bother to do a whole thing about the Brooklyn preschool article bc you have either read it obsessively or will not care, but that link is here.

I’m working my way through a lot of Scandi-horror right now, and this list has been helpful, I watched Villmark Asylum yesterday, mostly through my fingers, and it’s tremendous. It’s on Amazon Prime for free.

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Soraya Nadia McDonald @SorayaMcDonald

"Racism tethers them to each other." Serena knows it. Naomi knows it, too and they’re not going to let it drive a wedge between them. (blue words are from Serena’s personal essay in Harper’s today; red are mine from ESPN The Mag in March)

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I am teasing Louis’s perfect and PAINSTAKING ranking of all the songs in the new Oklahoma! by the extent to which they fuck, as it is a subscriber-only post:

16. “It’s a Scandal! It’s a Outrage!” The crux of Ali Hakim’s song is “Women, amirite?” It’s about fucking, but there’s nothing less sexy than being pathologically afraid of commitment. Well, the archaic idea that a woman is her father’s property. That is less sexy.

15. “The Farmer and the Cowman.” The farmer and the cowman should be friends. Friends with benefits? Maybe, but that’s not really the point here. While there’s almost certainly a porn that shares this title, this song simply does not fuck.

14. “Many a New Day.” If there is an anti-fucking song in Oklahoma!, it’s this one. Why should a woman who is healthy and strong blubber over a guy? But Laurey is singing about the prospect of other lovers in the future, so the possibility of fucking is still there, just over the horizon. (Side note: the last time I saw the show, Rebecca Naomi Jones angrily snapped an ear of corn in half while making eye contact with me, and it was thrilling.)

13. “Oklahoma.” The way that Damon Daunno sings “honey lamb” absolutely fucks. The song as a whole? Not so much. It’s a bop — and the brief reprise that closes this production is downright chilling. But that’s not how we’re ranking songs.

12. “Lonely Room.” I mean, on the one hand, it’s a song about how Jud never gets to fuck. On the other hand, Patrick Vaill’s voice. A tough call, but given that this is essentially an incel anthem, it would be inappropriate to rank it any higher. (The cruelest thing this production does is abruptly cut from “Lonely Room” to the next scene without allowing for applause after Patrick absolutely crushes it.)

11. “Kansas City.” Will Parker is a total babe, but he’s so relentlessly goofy that it really undercuts the fuck of it all. Even though he’s singing about his debauchery, you never get the sense that he fucks. Neither, for that matter, does Kansas City.

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On parenting while depressed:

A trip down the parenting aisle in the bookstore reinforces my emotional responsibility as I scan titles like Calm Mama, Happy Baby; Happy You, Happy Family; and Happy Mum Happy Baby. Then there are the articles regularly splashed across my newsfeed urging me to adopt the “17 Habits of Very Happy Moms,” offering to let me in on the “10 Secrets of Happy Moms,” and informing me where I’m going wrong with “4 Things Happy Moms Never Do.” One magazine hit close to home when it warned, “millions of children are caught in the web of maternal depression.”

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Sara Luterman @slooterman

There is a new Julia book from @SesameWorkshop and it is A DELIGHT. #SeeAmazing

autism.sesamestreet.orgCircle of Friends | Sesame Street and AutismCome along with Julia as she experiences camp with her friends for the first time.

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Beloved friend of myself and the newsletter Natalie Walker did a podcast episode about the worst movie I have ever seen and I get mentioned!!!

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Obviously, I was going to read and share anything about ponies:

Horses lend themselves to stories. In America in particular, wild horses, manes streaming, nostrils flaring, hooves thudding, carry with them something of our projected national psyche.

A woman named Marguerite Henry understood this. In 59 wildly popular books, featuring the mostly true stories of famous equines, from a plucky burro who lived in the Grand Canyon to a plain brown stallion in Vermont, Henry, who died in 1997, harnessed horse stories and turned them into a best-selling genre over which she still reigns supreme. But there was only one place where her stories turned the horses into “forever a part of the rocks and streams and wind and sky”: the islands of Assateague and Chincoteague, in the archipelago of Virginia’s Outer Banks.

And so I found myself one morning last summer, soaked to the bone, enduring the third hour of a deluge of pelting rain, in a little red kayak filled at least a third of the way up with storm water. I was following the myth of a pony Henry launched into legend in 1947 with her children’s book about a real pony that lived here, “Misty of Chincoteague.”

I was not alone. It was by now approaching 8 a.m. All around me on the water in the channel, which runs between Chincoteague Island and the uninhabited nature preserve of Assateague Island, were other pony-seekers. We sat quietly, noses of our craft snug in stands of sea grass to keep the boats still in the pelting rain, craning occasionally to look for wild horses. We were a flotilla of readers whose hearts were stolen by a cream-and-tan spotted pony, a creature we all knew from poring over Henry’s pages in grade school, who once swam these waters.

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sarah miller @sarahlovescali

This dal from madhur jaffrey is the best thing I’ve ever eaten

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My Monday Care and Feeding column:

Dear Care and Feeding,

We have a wonderful newborn baby boy in our house (we were asked to take guardianship of a family member’s son while she is in rehab), and he cries, like all babies. At night it is usually brief, as we’re up with him soon after it starts, but sometimes it will go on for a while because, well, he’s a baby.

It’s summertime, so our windows are open. We recently received an anonymous letter in the mailbox from a neighbor saying that the baby’s crying is “ruining the neighborhood” and “disturbing the peace.” It even insinuated that our 4-week-old may be violating a city noise ordinance!

My fiancé thinks we should just ignore it, but I can’t shake the feeling that maybe we are doing something wrong by leaving the windows open. I can try to keep a better handle on it during the day, but I worry about putting an air conditioner in his room at night, because I won’t hear him through the monitor over the A/C.

Although this arrangement is technically temporary, I have no idea what our end date is. Realistically it will be another few months before his mother is released from treatment and likely longer before she is given back custody.

What is your take? Can we leave the windows open so long as we’re quick about getting to him? Do I have to suck it up and install an A/C? I wonder if I’d be more accommodating if the note hadn’t been so outrageous.

—It’s a Baby

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Galey @missgaley

I can't stop laughing. Poor thing looks like she's plotting everyone's murder.

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I have been reading a lot of stuff about the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago recently, and this story really hit hard:

"Boys and girls," says the principal, "quiet down. This is a very solemn occasion."

It's Tuesday. The boys and girls of Rooms 301 and 303, 5th and 6th grades at Jenner Academy of the Arts, are standing in a semicircle around a lectern outside the school's front doors.

From a block away comes the buzz of big construction machines, the noise of the neighborhood's new homes going up.

"On a mild fall morning in 1992," the principal, Zelma Woodson, resumes, "Jenner lost one of its children to the violence."

Everybody in Chicago at the time knew the child's name: Dantrell Davis, 7, hit in the head by a gang sniper's bullet as his mother walked him to school in Cabrini-Green.

On this mild fall morning in 2008, I ask a couple of the boys and girls if they know much about Dantrell. Not too much, they say.

"He'd be 14 now," one says.

"Twenty-three," I say.

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You may have to give them your email address to read this, but it’s worth it (a long free-ranging look back at the early days of the AIDS epidemic):

Aids starts with the deaths. With the dying. At first there was only confusion, incomprehension. Bodies that quickly became unintelligible to themselves. Nightsweats, shingles, thrush, diarrhoea, sores that crowded into mouths and made it impossible to eat. A fantastically rare form of pneumonia. Dementia in men of twenty: brains that shrank and withered. Tuberculosis of the stomach, of the bone marrow. A cancer meant to be slow-moving, to manifest benignly in elderly men from the Mediterranean, which burrowed from the outside in: from marks on the skin, to the stomach and lungs. Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of cats, diseases no man had ever died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’

Later, there were tests. A virus detectable in the blood. You were ill, but you might not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986:

I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this time for keeps … The perception that knowing you’re dying makes you feel more alive is an error. I’m less alive. There’s less life to lead. I can’t give 100 per cent attention to anything – part of me is thinking about my health.

There were jokes by now: ‘What turns fruits into vegetables?’; ‘What does gay stand for? – Got Aids Yet?’ The sex that had made illness the future became suspect. ‘The problem with sex is I get the feeling that I’m not even supposed to think about it,’ Oscar Moore wrote in his PWA (Person with Aids) column for the Guardian. ‘[I am] supposed to be beyond sex. The trouble is that sex is not beyond me.’ ‘My whole being has changed … Even with safer sex I’ve felt the life of my partner was in my hands,’ Jarman reflected. ‘I’ve come a long way in accepting the restraint. But I dream of an unlikely old age as a hairy satyr.’

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MUSIC VIDEOS:

why not

duffy

emmylou

also emmylou

kd lang’s jericho, which is so beautiful I insist you listen

kate bush, the sensual world

the hold steady, chips ahoy

don’t worry, baby

george michael

southern cross (we don’t have a lot of time w David Crosby left and he’s my treasure)

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I love you all very much. I am on the eighth day of my period, still going very strong. These words swim before me.

xoxoxoxo

n