weekly digest #12
march 16-22, 2026: the little sister, star trek, cereal complaints, knitting updates
On Monday I voted in person for the first time since moving to Maine and discovered that my paper ballot went into a wooden box that looked about as old as the state itself. I’ve voted in half a dozen different Pennsylvania polling places, but they all had electronic machines. There wasn’t really anything all that surprising about the lack of machines here (our town’s population is less than 3000), but I was charmed by the box. It was the most interesting thing in my week, which was otherwise spent staring out the window at fog and complaining about my muscle pain.
reading
I finished The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler, the fifth Philip Marlowe novel. Sheltered, small town Orfamay Quest (hall of fame character name) hires Marlowe to find her brother, gone missing in a seedy suburb of LA. The case spirals into a deeper mystery involving blackmail, murder, gangsters, and Hollywood starlets. It’s probably my least favorite Marlowe novel so far, but it’s not terrible. Chandler’s prose is always sharp and stylish, even when his plots get convoluted. I find noirs fascinating as products of their time – they’re dark, stylized snapshots of life in a specific moment. There is always some misogyny to be expected, but the women are particularly bad in The Little Sister. Even the madonnas turn out to be whores and they all throw themselves at Marlowe. I’m not exactly offended by it – I generally find the female characters in noirs pretty fascinating – but it muddies the story here a bit. Several women are so underwritten that their motivations don’t track, which is kind of a problem in a crime novel.
I love the way Chandler writes though. Events feel huge and inevitable, Marlowe always showing up too late. He’s constantly entering a room just abandoned, finding a gun already fired, stumbling onto a body, trying to piece together disparate elements of a disaster and get to the truth. And the truth is never satisfying – the case is solved, but there is no justice. The police are corrupt, the DA just wants good press, and there are always too many bodies by the time the story ends.
Marlowe knows the game is over before the case is even halfway through. He muses:
Who am I cutting my throat for this time? A blonde with sexy eyes and too many door keys? A girl from Manhattan, Kansas? I don’t know. All I know is that something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not go into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I’m an ectoplasm with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
Then I started Close Range by Annie Proulx, a short story collection that includes Brokeback Mountain. I’m read seven of the ten stories, but have a good chunk of the book left since Brokeback is the longest and the last.
watching
I’m still watching Mad Men, Deep Space 9, and Downton Abbey. Now that we’re in season 2 of DS9 and the show has hit its stride, I think it’s one of the strongest entries in the Star Trek canon so far – I’ve watched The Original Series, all the TOS movies, The Next Generation, and the first two reboot movies (don’t even get me started on that garbage). The Original Series will always have a special place in my heart, and none of the other shows can touch it aesthetically, but I love seeing how the show can expand and become more ambitious while still sticking to the ethos of the original – imagining a better future for humanity, while using sci-fi as a storytelling device to explore contemporary issues and ask questions without easy answers. (I get the impression that the current Star Trek shows have strayed into generic action/adventure territory, but as I haven’t watched them yet, I’ll hold my tongue for now.) I also love that TNG and DS9 question TOS’s original assumption that Starfleet is always a force for good, and sometimes show the human protagonists being on the wrong side.
Downton Abbey continues to be unpredictability soapy and entertaining. But Anna’s storyline in season 4 is pretty unbearable to watch. I have a lot of thoughts about how the show has dealt with sexual assault and harassment so far, and how they’ve largely avoided confronting class-based power dynamics that have been a huge part of gendered violence historically, but I want to watch more of the show before I get too deep into it – it’s always possible they’ll address the issues they seem to be deliberately ignoring.
listening to
A snippet of I Just Wasn't Made for These Times in an episode of Mad Men reminded me how much I like Pet Sounds, which I listened to all the way through a couple times. More people need to be playing the theremin in pop music.
I got a song from Legally Blonde the Musical stuck in my head and listened to the whole cast album. It’s not a very good musical1, but it’s familiar in the way a ratty old sweatshirt is comfy, and singing along to it got me out of a bad mood. Something about the title track made me think of Waitress, and I listened to that a couple times too. I don’t love this show like some people do, but I think it’s a fine musical with a handful of very good songs.
eating & drinking
For dinner this week my dad made corned beef and cabbage, corn risotto stuffed poblanos, citrus shredded tofu and cabbage, sesame spiced turkey meatballs and smashed chickpea salad, grilled chicken and wild rice gratin, and baked ranchero eggs. The meatball and chickpea salad was good but was better with the addition of roasted cauliflower and absolutely should have a tahini sauce on it.
I’m finally moving on from corn Chex for breakfast every morning. I was going to switch to Special K, but I hadn’t eaten it in a long time and it’s not as good as I remember. Apparently they’ve changed the formula. The nice thing about the internet is I can google “special k cereal changed” and find dozens of people on reddit as annoyed by this as I am. I’m going to switch to Raisin Bran Crunch when I finish the box.
My sister sent me some delicious coffee from one of her favorite shops in New York. It’s from a Korean roaster called Clarimento, their #202 Costa Rica blend, and is fruity and light without being overly acidic. It’s very very good. I only wish there was more of it.
making
I’ve been making good progress on my scrappy sweater. I’m about halfway through the back panel and I definitely prefer the squares to the stripes I had before. It’s a riskier move, since I have uneven amounts of each color left, but hopefully I’ll be able to distribute them evenly without running out of what I need.
shopping
I haven’t bought anything this week. I’m hearing the siren song of vintage sewing notions on ebay but I am resisting!!
kitsch corner
This vintage ceramic clown toothbrush holder, posted by a Brazilian antiques dealer on instagram, would have been perfect for my old apartment. It reminds me of Heather, who has an impressive vintage clown collection. Since it was posted last year, I assume it’s already sold.
See you next week.
xoxo,
Franny 💋🤡
it’s a show that includes such genius lyrics as “hand me my dog (dog)/hand me my bag (bag)/and that american flag/proud to be american” and “when I need to relax/I just put on some tracks/from this cd I bought for the store”