Today, we got TWO FEATURED PETS for the price of one! Please, meet Penny (left) and Poppy (right):
Tell me more about Penny, human companion Grace! “Penny is my first child and also my soulmate (don't worry about it) who was rescued from a high-kill shelter and has been with me for nine years. We think she's around 11. She has more feelings than any dog I've ever met, and enjoys smiling and staring deeply into your eyes to give you that sweet sweet oxytocin. If she meets you once she will remember you forever and always greet you with a special and insistent "hi friend, pet me" growly sound. She's gotten me through some really tough times and I would give her all my money if she asked, but luckily, she cannot.”
Okay, what’s the dirt on Poppy?
“Poppy is a Very Good Sport and also the funniest dog I have ever known. She's maybe two years old and adept at finding new things to destroy when left unsupervised. We call her Floppy Poppy because her default move is to flop over on her back.”
“Together they are so cute and so sweet and obviously the queens of our household.”
I feel so much better about the world now.
SO, I had a heavy advice column this week, but I think I did okay:
Dear Care and Feeding,
Many years ago, before I got married, I had an abortion. I do not regret it, and it was the correct choice for me at the time. (I was a freshman in college and had no familial support.) Now I have two kind and lovely daughters in their early teens, and I am wondering if this is something I should talk to them about.
My husband is unsure, leaning toward no, and I can’t say I exactly relish the idea of having this conversation with my daughters, but especially considering the current political climate in the United States, I feel like I … should? Just tell me if I should, and if the answer is yes, how to do it.
—Is This Something to Share?
I finally started Fleabag. Why didn’t you SAY SOMETHING? (Everyone said something.)
Here is a piece about re-examining the work of Francesca Lia Block you will almost certainly enjoy:
Hell yeah! Why hide it? Block’s novels found me at an age when I was at high risk of believing it was cool to be bored by everything; in the nick of time, by the grace of luck, Block made it seem cool to be swooningly, squealingly excited about everything. With her words in my head, fruit tasted sweeter; music gave me chills; the teal-green gleam of traffic lights made me weep. I had never cared for movies before, but suddenly I wanted to see every film ever made and then make my own. I began taking photographs, and my best friend, who also loved Block, agreed to pose artistically nude for me. We got into a big fight over the resulting photos, which was my fault—but it was definitely Block’s fault that I wrote a short story about it afterward, and that it ended like this: “My heart is a crystal. My mind is a crystal, hard and clear and sharp-edged and so, so cold. I am smoke. A firefly.”
I had a crush on the world. That’s the Block aesthetic, really: a heart-doodling teen-girl crush on the world. It was a craving that Block’s books awakened and agitated but never quite sated: like candy, they were gratifying in the moment but always left me wanting. One summer night I succumbed to an urge to reread all of them in a binge and came away so frustrated I had to lie down on the living room floor, pressing my cheek against the rug lest I careen into space with yearning.
But what was it I wanted? A place, I thought, a physical place—Block made me want to live “where it was hot and cool, glam and slam, rich and trashy, devils and angels, Los Angeles” (Weetzie Bat). In a 2013 interview with The Toast, Block claimed that fans often told her, “I moved to LA because of your book,” and I don’t doubt it for a second. It was entirely because of Block that after high school I went to Los Angeles to study film.
This lovely piece on folk music and Rhiannon Giddens and Frank Johnson and, well, read it:
To grasp the significance of what the twenty-first-century folksinger Rhiannon Giddens has been attempting, it is necessary to know about another North Carolina musician, Frank Johnson, who was born almost two hundred years before she was. He was the most important African-American musician of the nineteenth century, but he has been almost entirely forgotten. Never mind a Wikipedia page—he does not even earn a footnote in sourcebooks on early black music. And yet, after excavating the records of his career—from old newspapers, diaries, travelogues, memoirs, letters—and after reckoning with the scope of his influence, one struggles to come up with a plausible rival.
There are several possible reasons for Johnson’s astonishing obscurity. One may be that, on the few occasions when late-twentieth-century scholars mentioned him, he was almost always misidentified as a white man, despite the fact that he had dark-brown skin and was born enslaved. It may have been impossible, and forgivably so, for academics to believe that a black man could have achieved the level of fame and success in the antebellum slave-holding South that Johnson had. There was also a doppelgänger for scholars to contend with: in the North, there lived, around the same time, a musician named Francis Johnson, often called Frank, who is remembered as the first black musician to have his original compositions published. Some historians, encountering mentions of the Southern Frank, undoubtedly assumed that they were merely catching the Northern one on some unrecorded tour and turned away.
There is also the racial history of the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Johnson enjoyed his greatest fame. In 1898, a racial massacre in Wilmington, and a subsequent exodus of its black citizens, not only knocked loose the foundations of a rising black middle class but also came close to obliterating the deep cultural memory of what had been among the most important black towns in the country for more than a century. The people who might have remembered Johnson best, not just as a musician but as a man, were themselves violently unremembered.
I rewatched Valley of the Dolls yesterday (SPARKLE, NEELY, SPARKLE!) so then I watched this:
Jia, always worth it:
The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon. It was not a single structure but a thirty-four-million-dollar campus, built in the nineteen-eighties and spread across forty-two acres in a leafy, white neighborhood ten miles west of downtown Houston. A circular drive with a fountain in the middle led up to a bone-white sanctuary that sat eight hundred; next to it was a small chapel, modest and humble, with pale-blue walls. There was also a school, a restaurant, a bookstore, three basketball courts, an exercise center, and a cavernous mirrored atrium. There was a dried-out field with bleachers and, next to it, a sprawling playground; during the school year, the rutting rhythm of football practice bled into the cacophony of recess through a porous border of mossy oaks. Mall-size parking lots circled the campus; on Sundays, it looked like a car dealership, and during the week it looked like a fortress, surrounded by an asphalt moat. At the middle of everything was an eight-sided, six-story corporate cathedral called the Worship Center, which sat six thousand people. Inside were two huge balconies, a jumbotron, an organ with nearly two hundred stops and more than ten thousand pipes, and a glowing baptismal font. My mom sometimes worked as a cameraperson for church services, filming every backward dip into the water as though it were a major-league pitch. There was tiered seating for a baby-boomer choir that sang at the nine-thirty service, a performance area for the Gen X house band at eleven, and sky-high stained-glass windows depicting the beginning and end of the world. You could spend your whole life inside the Repentagon, starting in nursery school, continuing through twelfth grade, getting married in the chapel, attending adult Bible study every weekend, baptizing your children in the Worship Center, and meeting your fellow-retirees for racquetball and a chicken-salad sandwich, secure in the knowledge that your loved ones would gather in the sanctuary to honor you after your death.
So, I decided that since Jesus stuff is really upsetting to a lot of people, for obvious reasons, but also I have a lot of readers who want to talk about Jesus/God/belief, I’m going to make each week’s Wednesday post a place for that. This means that you can just skip Wednesdays if you don’t want to read that stuff, which I think is a solid plan. Starts tomorrow!
Perhaps an opportunity presents itself in one of the weaker arguments that anti-trans activists have in their arsenal, the argument that they sometimes summarize as “if you give a mouse a cookie...” as though that were a real expression with an obvious conclusion. I still don’t really know what the second half of the sentence is supposed to be! “If you give a mouse a cookie... you better believe he’ll eat it,” maybe. “If you give a mouse a cookie, next thing you know he’ll be fucking your wife for free.” In any case, one thing is clear, however the sentence ends, it is going to try to persuade you not to give that mouse that cookie. The phrase comes from the title of a children’s book published by the American author Felicia Bond, which I haven’t read, but which appears to be a little capitalist fable about how if one feeds mice, one soon becomes obligated to supply them with grooming products and other domestic comforts. Now, when it comes to feeding mice, no such legal or ethical obligation can be said to exist. But the argument, mediated by the tale of a cartoon mouse, is presumably designed to explain to rich children why it is good for mommy and daddy to hoard their wealth away from the poor. Other titles in Bond’s series that we are invited to finish would include “If You Take a Mouse to the Movies [He’ll Turn Into a Homosexual],” “If You Give a Dog a Donut [She’ll Start a Union],” and “If You Give a Pig a Party [You’ll Be the First One He Purges].”
If you give a teenager some hormone blockers, though... they’re going to want to transition when they can do so. It is an argument, and I think facially a very bad one, that is designed to explain a fact that might otherwise trouble those who dislike trans people. A large majority of people who self-ID as trans when children, and are given puberty blockers, later decide, when they reach an age where they can take HRT, that they will indeed do so. Trans people have a pretty good explanation for this phenomenon: the kids were mostly right, and so they transition as soon as they can because that is what they want to do. The alternative explanation, known as the “if you give a mouse a cookie” argument, is that the kids are deluded, but that once they are on the puberty blockers, they are committed/concerned about sunken costs, and so they change sex to save face. It’s not an argument I’d love to have to sign off on myself, because it is self-evidently quite stupid. But remember that the general line of argument against provision of hormone blockers for kids is that it sets them on an irreversible path towards transition that they may regret. So the overwhelming evidence that the path is indeed reversible, that most choose not to reverse it, and that most people who transition express quite the opposite of regret, is a rather unfortunate development for those who wish to keep alive the spirit of dispute. So, in the spirit of Diderot, I’m going to try to defend the proposition that Kids Are Changing Sex For No Good Reason.
Music was very important yesterday, here is the music that mattered to me, which happened to be very country:
usually the big group stage version of songs sucks but this a GREAT “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her”
if we are already listening to MCC, then obviously my morning pump-up is due:
beautiful lucinda
more lucinda
a paul simon song that builds until it breaks
this Dave Matthews and Emmylou duet on “My Antonia” is my whole life
angel from montgomery
wish you were here
thunder road but with melissa
love you, always
nicole
Holy SHIT that is my musical childhood (just add Nanci Griffith and Indigo Girls). I'm listening to MCC all day today, thank you!
Every time I listen to Paul Simon I weep because someday we'll lose him.