july

• 02 jaws - dir. steven spielberg
  film horror
  +

  a thing you need to understand about me is that i don't usually get properly scared by horror content. i used to, but at some point the rest of the world got scary enough that the fictional stuff doesn't bother me all that much, anymore, generally. now. with that out of the way. at one point during jaws i was jumpscared so badly that i leapt a foot into the air and splashed my entire drink on my face. my hair smells like raspberry seltzer and the person next to me leaned over after the movie and asked if it was my first time seeing it because it was very fun to watch my reactions.
• 06 spook: science tackles the afterlife - mary roach
  book nonfiction
  +

  i really wanted to like this book, and at points i did, but the jokes and the casual voice were just not my thing. i'm not a scientist by any means, but i am super curious about scientific stuff, especially in this vein of research — buthalf the time, as soon as something really interesting was brought up, roach declared it too complicated to bother understanding and glossed over it, which frustrated me. if you handed me a version of this book with none of the jokes and 300% more in-depth research on, say, the offhandedly-mentioned quantum psychicist approach to ghost studies, i think i would like that a lot better.

  (if you, person reading this, are equally intruiged by quantum physics in ghost research, may i recommend the paper Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come by karen barad? a lot of it went over my head, since, again, i'm not remotely a physicist, and don't even really have a surface-level understanding of quantum physics — but even so, i found it super interesting. here's a pdf.)

  there were a lot of really compelling bits, though, even if i wish there'd been more details. the research into electromagnetic effects on the human brain and whether those could either cause hallucinations that make people think they're seeing a ghost or make the brain more perceptive to actual ghosts that were already there was super interesting! i'd love to see what research has been added since this book came out in '05 — i might look into that on my own later, if i remember. i'd say i want a sequel to this that updates on the last two decades of study, but given the above paragraph, i might prefer just digging for the research by myself.

  it's also super possible that i would've enjoyed the tone more if i hadn't read it in the midst of a weird depressive episode. i have a copy of another of roach's books already, so we'll see if it vibes with me more whenever i get around to reading that one, i guess.

• 17 graphic voodoo: comics, black bodies, and other grotesqueries - dr. yvonne chireau (a morbid anatomy online talk)
  lecture nonfiction, history
• 22 horrific imaginations - david demchuk (an augur literary society talk/workshop)
  workshop horror
• 24 liminal women and lover's leaps in myth and history - dr. kirsten ellen johnson (a morbid anatomy online talk)
  lecture nonfiction, history, folklore
• 26 our wives under the sea - julia armfield
  book horror, literary, lgbt
  +

  hauntingly beautiful & beautifully haunting. left me desperately wanting more details on what leah actually saw down there & what was on leah's paper that juna gave miri at the end — i know sometimes details left unexplored are more striking, but i would've loved this book to be another 100 pages long. i wish the characters had spoken more — the whole book felt very deeply true to the brainfog grief brings with it, but i found myself wanting miri to lash out more or fall apart entirely, yknow? overall i loved it, though.

  a few favorite quotes:

  • The deep sea is a haunted house: a plqce in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness. Unstill is the word Leah uses, tilting her head to the side as if in answer to some sound, though the evening is quiet — dry hum of the road outside the window and little to draw the ear besides.

  • I loved her hard and at a distance, which made it easier to do, experienced brief but powerful compulsions to hug her and almost never did.

  • I remember the slip of the craft across the water, long metal nose and sculpted conning tower, the way it seemed to dip and slink, eel-like, white lights along its spine and finial. I watched it float, not bobbing, seeming less to sit upon the water than to hang within it,half-submerged and threatening to sink. I remember turning to the woman on my right and saying I wasn't sure a ship like that could possibly withstand the ocean's weight on top of it, that the crew would all be crushed, that we ought to speak to someone. [...] By the time I looked back there was nothing — bob of gulls upon an undisturbed surface, gentle sense of something pooling in my wrists as if my heart had momentarily stopped.

  Now the thing is, from everything I know and everything I have otherwise experienced, it seems unlikely that the ship could have gone down that quickly, and certainly not with such minimal disturbance on the top. But even so, this is what I remember and short of getting in contact with the other wives onboard the viewing deck that day, none of whose names I even recall, there is no way of checking this scenario for accuracy. What I remember, then, becomes what happened: Leah leaving like summer from the ocean, not by degrees but all at once.

  • I found an online group for women who liked to role-play that their husbands had gone to space. I'm not entirely sure how this came about, though I believe it was probably a byproduct of my fruitless search for a support group that really spoke to me. I spent several days moving through the message boards, reading conversations between women about their fantasy husbands, learning forum slang, not posting anything. MHIS [my husband in space] was a common acronym, as was BS [before space], EB [earthbound], and CBW [came back wrong].

  MHIS was such a loving partner, a typical post might run, a friend and helpmeet, a wonderful father, but ever since he came back things have been different, I wonder if he CBW.

  • I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain. I see her impatience in the skin of my neck, her anger in the way my hands move. I see her when I press my tongue into the inside of my cheek with irritation yet refuse to do anything to make a situation better. I see her when I assume people are worse when they turn out to be.

  • I had brought a Welsh dresser from my mother's house, a wine rack, a large oval mirror. The latter was a mistake — it seemed to haunt me about the flat as I tried to find a suitable place to put it, appearing at times to reflect not me but my mother's empty house, as though on a time delay. I tapped the second knuckle of a finger lightly against the glass and it sounded like something knocking to be let in.

  • cw: body horror / eye horror

  I think about this now with a peculiarly glassy sensation, as though I might raise my hand to my face and find it made of some hardened material, as though my thoughts might turn out to be equally so. I am thinking about all of this when the sound machine abruptly shuts off in the next room adn Leah makes a soundhalfway between a cry and loud exhalation and I realize she is standing in the doorway to the hall, naked and still wet, and that one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semisolid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. When it bursts, it falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white and I put a hand over my mouth and noise as though anticipating a smell.
• 27 barbie - dir. greta gerwig
  film comedy? i guess?
  +

  not 100% sure how i feel about this one. aesthetics and costumes were absolutely on point, but it felt sort of confused about its politics, in a way that was in-your-face enough that i couldn't just turn off the leftist part of my brain and have fun with it. this is a movie that's trying to say something but getting bogged down in the fact that it is, still, at its core, a toy commercial.

  that said, i do want every single one of barbie's outfits.

• 29 a whole lot of board games:
  • telestrations
  • just one
  • ready set bet
  • captain sonar
  • phantom ink
  • beyond balderdash
  • coup

favorite: