Oddities and Odysseys: The mental molasses edition
Plz enjoy your biweekly weird literary content. PLEASE.
Here we are, lucky newsletter #13, and we are fresh out of things to talk to you about.
Y’know, in our sometimes day job of helping clients plan out their own newsletters, we always advise them: “Everyone has about three months in them, and then writing a blog/newsletter gets really hard—so it’s good to have some extras already drafted before you hit that point.” Feeling: 1) chuffed that this advice was absolutely spot on; 2) devastated that we did not heed that advice.
So, please enjoy the dregs of our brain, in newsletter form. Know that we’re swimming through mental molasses just to get it to you. You better appreciate it! (Or else!)
Tbh, we’ve still got a lot of weirdness stuck in the sticky corners of our sticky minds, so it will still be worth scrolling onward, we promise.
—Jaclyn & Kirstyn,
Diachro Co-Captains
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ “The book that sank on the Titanic and burned in the Blitz” {BBC News}
You think you’re unlucky? Try being this book!
One of the most lavishly decorated books the world has seen was despatched from London to New York in April 1912. The jewel-encrusted edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was taken aboard the RMS Titanic and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, exactly 110 years ago.
A replacement was finished at great expense by the late 1930s but it was promptly incinerated by German bombers as the British capital was ravaged during the Blitz.
The young man behind this extravagant presentation of the polymath Khayyám's poetry would soon drown in an English seaside resort.
This story is making us rethink Samuel Beckett’s oft-repeated line: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Probably best to leave it alone sometimes.
“All the books that (probably) radicalized Lindsay Weir” {Lit Hub}
It’s generally agreed that the television show Freaks and Geeks was cancelled far too soon. (Like, Rolling Stone literally listed it as the number one “Worst Decision in TV History” a couple years ago.) Most superfans cite the “honest portrayal” of teenagedom, and people relate hard to its cast of characters.
Take, for example, writer and theatre-maker Brittany Allen, who just can’t let go of the character Lindsay Weir (played by Linda Cardellini). In this article, she imagines all the books Lindsay would have gone on to read, had she not been struck dead by TV executives.
I see Lindsay reading a lot of tetralogies, for some reason. I think the first book [Spring Snow] in this controversial, stirring series [Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy] would ignite Lindsay’s suspicions re: American empire and Western excess. But before that, I think Kiyoaki, our hero, would appeal to her as another person torn between worlds and modes of self-expression.
The tortured relationships at the heart of this novel are also rendered with all the drama and pain of high-school love.
This one is now on our personal TBR lists! Allen also mentions titles by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Octavia Butler, and Julio Cortázar.
“Why Libraries Need Librarians” {Vox}
How might Lindsay Weir find all those books to radicalize her developing brain? At least some of them would be recommendations from the almighty local or university librarian (🫶). This article pulls no punches right out the gate, decrying the apparently wide-held belief (??) that librarians are nothing more than “warm bodies who exist to check books in and out”:
But then, libraries are undervalued in general, perhaps because they are such radical institutions. The truism is that if you tried to invent the public library today, the right would never let you get away with it—giving so many things to the public for free, and subsidizing them all with taxes, imagine. How many other spaces do we have left where a person can go and spend hours on end and still not be expected to buy anything?
The article goes on to break down the specific skills and specialities librarians have, ending by pointing out public librarians are also “de facto social workers” in a world where “public libraries are one of the only third spaces left that don’t charge money.”
PROTECT YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS. Also did you know along with books, movies, and music, you can borrow instruments, recording equipment, and even seeds from certain branches?? USE YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS.
“How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre” {Serious Eats}
Enshittification: it’s not just for the internet and air travel, anymore. It’s also got a vise-grip on our food 😩. Food editor Genevieve Yam writes:
I first tasted [a Honeycrisp apple] 10 years ago. … The apple’s paper-thin skin produced an audible crunch, and a burst of sweet, tart juice immediately filled my mouth. I chewed carefully. I couldn’t recall the last time I ate an apple for pleasure, on its own. … The Honeycrisp apple was revelatory for me: It was an apple that I truly enjoyed eating on its own. …
As recently as September of this year, I had several Honeycrisp apples from a local farm that were terribly mushy and flavorless, making me wonder if they had mistakenly labeled another apple variety—nothing about those apples was like the fruit I had once loved.
What happened to the Honeycrisp? Well, exactly what you think did:
To satiate the public’s hunger for the Honeycrisp, a once highly seasonal apple available only in Minnesota, growers have made the apple variety available year-round by planting enough fruit to store for long periods of time. …
The Honeycrisp is a victim of its own success, and has become exactly what [Honeycrisp creators] Bedford and Luby despised about the variety’s predecessors: a boring commodity apple.
Sure, this may seem like a pretty silly issue in the face of *vaguely gestures around the burning world*, but it illustrates how capital seizes upon ANYTHING WE LOVE and then RUINS IT. (Except libraries???🤞)
OF COURSE the writer of Chocolat would offer this writing tip:
Behold: “Toilet Tweaks for a Fresh and Functional Bathroom Upgrade”. (Is this fetish content? Maybe. But either way you’ll get some sick ideas for decorating your bathroom.)
🌊 Co-Captains’ Log 🌊
JACLYN: In honour of January, the cruelest month (in which, incidentally, both of us have been cursed to have been born), I would like to know: What’s the coldest weather you’ve ever experienced or coldest you’ve ever been?
KIRSTYN: For the past three years, I’ve been living in a flat where my heating didn’t work, my boiler didn’t work, and my single-glazing windows didn’t really work either. The cost of living crisis has been so intense that I’ve only just finally saved enough to be able to fix them. So, I think I’ve been living in a three-year-long January, and I no longer know what being warm means. Happy new year.
Extremely high quality content.