Ally > Recent Status Updates

[The facts in this dive into Lankton are v cool but I'm finding the essay structure in this collection janky. Walker lays out the zoom out/zoom in approach she's using in an earlier chapter - there's a version of it that works in socioeconomic reportage (if cliched) but here the switch between dishy and journalistic is jarring & the through lines get lost. And here the last zoom in is a very abrupt suicide joke?]

[what is happening with this extended Devil Wears Prada/The Intern/Gone Girl fanfic whatever? did we all really write and read essays like this in 2018? what were we doing with our lives?]

[Setting this one aside & might come back when I'm feeling more generous - it's sweet and occasionally thoughtful, but too mild, too... comforting the comfortable for me rn? It's full of cultural references, but the most recent is One Art from 1976. Who cares what Freud said about anything?! I feel like the target reader is a wealthy 80-year-old... in 1985. (This'll hopefully change when we get to the gay part?)]

In a kinder world, one where my father's early years had been less desperate [...] I suspect that he would have chosen a very different line of work. As a professor like my sister, maybe, or as a writer, like me.

[In what world could a career as a lawyer be a loss!? I can't relate to this world in which professor or full-time writer is a "line of work" that can be "chosen" and not a lottery win!?]

[L Morgan Lee is a great actress - why did she not narrate the whole book? Saoirse Ni Shuilleabhain sounds like a 50-year-old accountant in a student improv show doing a 17-year-old bit, it's too painful, I am going to have to go read this one visually.]

A T2 bacteriophage.
The wind squeals against the walls of the station as Kinsey stares hungrily at the photo of the virus.

[ok, this is well-executed silliness, but giving the main character of an infection story an infection paraphilia is silly]

For months at a stretch, Kinsey's isolated six-person research team curls in on itself, touching itself and talking to itself and mutilating itself and eating itself, and -- when it comes to the members of the team who _aren't_ Kinsey -- fucking itself.

[the humans, you see, are the real tentacle beasts]

Kinsey is the first to see it.

[this is just the second sentence, but it packs in so much information. like, we know Kinsey is gay. because her name is *Kinsey*.]

Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interaction.

[oh darlin]

How should I be
both beautiful and strong? It was as if
the atmosphere had a pink
story. The atmosphere was pink
for a while as I walked back,
and heavy. Never look a deer
in the face. The whites of human
eyes give me away. Like a gift.
To a god.

- "Wonderland"

Does it hurt to say we saw.
Can you tell us what we saw, was it.
Just some glorious raccoon in
Gelatinous debt.

- "Me and All That is Unsolved, Me and the Fire"

Let the heavens fade lilac to orange on
the longest night. I'll leave you candles.
May racoons walk their spidery prints all
over the dirt, may berries sprout
magic. I leave you my pleasure and joy
for which I worked so hard.

-- "Will and Testament"

Somewhere swings open a gate we all know we all want.

-- "T4T"

[the italicized quote in "I Just Chose My Place and Let the Circle Form Around Me" seems to be from Christian Metz's account of the founding of the Ebenezer, later Amana, utopian communes]

This audiobook narration from Avi Roque is very, very bad, I’m not sure I can do this - each word is inflected totally independent of the flow of the sentence or the sense of the paragraph. The emotions flip wildly from one sentence to the next and don’t particularly match the direction of the text. It’s like a 2019 computer-generated voice but less clean. It feels like maybe it was read without rehearsal/direction?

Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child's brain.

[OMG! Picking up a Cheerio and eating it changes the brain! Every experience of conscious life changes the brain!

I am greatly appreciating the storytelling & sense-making in this book, but jesus all of the science & generalization is so bad]

But after seeing [Bette] Davis on-screen, he abruptly stopped his practice of putting pennies on his eyes every night before he went to bed in his misguided effort to make them smaller. He now realized that "my infirmity, or infirmities, might be forged into weapons."

Back straight, tummy tucked,
my stance wide and precise
as I wager a bet on myself.
What I want to say is this:
all this time, I have been able
to balance my little life in my hands.
That I go through the turn
and keep landing on my feet
is a goddamn miracle.

- "Cartwheel"

For without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments.

I have read the report -- inconclusive.
Yet, I know how much your brain weighs,

your liver, your heart. Your ordinary,
damaged heart. I know it by the gram.

- "Autopsy"

As I am writing this, my son’s friend synchronistically tells him, “This LEGO creature I made spreads brain attack and eats away at the person.” I marvel at the synchronicity and think, “What a fitting image for the trauma-inducing parent.”

[This dude is such a doof, it’s kind of adorable.]

[in trauma] He becomes stuck in an adrenalized state. His sympathetic nervous system is locked on, and he cannot toggle into the relaxation function of the parasympathetic nervous system.

[A friend calls it "Mars rover-ing" when thrashing because there are too many tasks to prioritize - I'm fascinated by the attraction to mechanistic, digital models for fuzzy, analog, organic processes. Trauma as a busted switch.]

Later, when I learned about auras...

[goddamn it where are my people that both deeply value and study emotional experience and also care about what's actually really real]

The thing is, no matter what, at some point, you have to leave the game behind and find out who you really are. [...] "Everyone's got their own Finland," he'd said.

"Like, I feel everything too much. I always have, but like even more lately. And it's selfish to make that your guys's problem, you know? I don't wanna be a burden, so I just keep it in, and try to limit the damage to just me if I can."

"Girl," Tab said, "with all due respect, you know that's crazy, right?"

"But..."

"No buts!" she insisted.

He didn't need to know about the hand in the crowd, about the shove. I wouldn't have been able to get the words out if I wanted to.

[this theme of how we protect those around us from the full extent of the garbage we face, is so well threaded through the book, but especially here - I both feel too seen and want to scream.]

This sound I didn't even know how I could make escaped my throat, halfway between a goose honk and an eighteen-wheeler horn.

[first trans honk, iconic]

We hadn't talked about whether we were dating or not, or if either of us was thinking about it, or if that was something we even wanted. We just happened to be exes that made out sometimes, you know? Nothing complicated about it at all.

[6 month speedrun to lesbian mess, impressive]