weekly digest #26
too many bugs, winter love, the details, the tenant of wildfell hall – miniseries edition, the thing from another world, surprise cake
It’s tiny bug season here in midcoast Maine. You’d think this is no big deal (they’re tiny!) but they are in fact so tiny that they can fly right through the window screens. I’m not sure what kind of bugs they are – some kind of gnats or midges – but they’re nocturnal and attracted to light. If you’re not careful, the entire wall above your lamp will be covered in them. Half of them will die overnight and leave their bodies for you to deal with the morning. I keep all my windows open anyway because I refuse to give up the cool sea breeze while I can get it. I just turn off everything but one special LED bulb that I turn down to 1% brightness.1 This isn’t enough light for a physical book, but I can use my ereader (also at 1% brightness).
Last year I used candles as my only source of reading light in the summer, but the bugs would occasionally fly directly into the flame and die in the hot wax. Then the wax would cool and their bodies would congeal inside the reformed candle. This was not my favorite thing in the world.
I kept burning candles though, so I guess I didn’t really care about their little bug deaths. There are just so many of them.
reading
I finished Winter Love by Han Suyin (published 1962), a novella about the short-lived romance between Red, a college student, and her married classmate Mara in 1944. Sometimes I go into books with unfair expectations. I see a slim, half-forgotten book about a doomed lesbian relationship at the tail end of World War II, and I want it to be perfect. I want to have an emotional experience that is special because it is rare and unpredictable, and when I don’t have that spark of whatever unnameable thing it is that makes a book change your life, I feel let down. Which is all to say that this was well written, and interesting, and I liked it, but I was disappointed because I wanted it to be something impossible.
It did make me think a lot about my own second novel, a half-drafted manuscript that has been in varying stages of abandonment for years because of my disability, but I could probably find a way to keep working on if I decided to be patient with myself and go slowly.
I then read The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson (published 2022, English translation 2023), another recommendation from my aunt. In the midst of a disorienting fever, the unnamed narrator recalls another fever in her past, prompting her to sink into memories of four people who had a significant impact on her life. She reflects:
Time folds in on itself, as it often seems to do under the influence of fever, and I suddenly find myself standing side by side with the me from twenty-four years ago. The brink of insanity lies at thirty-nine degrees, but not far below, at thirty-eight, there’s a clearly discernible valley where I wouldn’t mind spending my days. In that band your guard drops, and figures from the past are given access, though not as ghosts. Thirty-eight: a temperature where the body’s ability to stay alive is intact even as your interest in being an alert and informed social being cools, so as long as you can bear to have the past slinking about your legs like a pack of dogs, this valley offers a pleasant lassitude.
The narrator bounces back and forth through time, without an always-clear chronology, and we come to form a sense of her character and her life through the stories of the people she’s loved. She is a reflection of them as much as they are of her, and a portrait appears in these reflections. It’s a beautifully crafted book.
I’m currently reading The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, which I’ve been curious about ever since I read Northanger Abby three years ago. Udolpho is the archetypal Gothic novel, and was hugely popular at the time of publication, though I suspect that it’s mainly known now for being satirized by Jane Austen. I’ve been considering a big Austen reread and I wanted to read this before revisiting Catherine Morland. (Side note: has anyone been watching The Other Bennet Sister? Would you recommend it?)
watching
I was still thinking about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and sad to have finished it, so I watched the 1996 BBC miniseries. Apparently the were hoping to recreate the success of their 1995 Pride & Prejudice miniseries, but not only is Tenant a less popular source material, this just isn’t as good of an adaptation. (Spoilers ahead.) It has a very made for tv look to it that P&P mostly manages to avoid. This show has some really nice moments – Arthur, Helen’s eventually abusive husband, is a charming suitor, and on the screen it’s clear that all his red flags at first come across as the romantic actions of a dashing hero. Gilbert, however, comes across as a bit of a lunatic. We never really see how his bond forms with Helen – in the book, it’s through conversation that they overcome their initial mutual dislike and find an intellectual equal in each other. We also don’t see Gilbert’s restraint, his waiting years for Helen to be free, which sets him apart from the other men who pursue her and proves him worthy or her love. (Think what you will about the morals at play, but this is a key piece of the novel.) Instead he chases after her immediately, hoping she’ll leave her husband while he’s still alive. The absence of the long waiting period also removes Gilbert’s agonizing over the class difference he discovers when he learns Helen’s true background. I guess there were enough hurdles between the two of them already, and the writers just wanted to get to the happily ever after without yet another source of conflict, but I thought this was a compelling, if sometimes frustrating, part of the story. This was worth watching, but probably only if you also enjoyed the novel and wanted to stay in its world a little longer. I wouldn’t bother with it as its own thing.
I also watched The Thing from Another World (1951, dir. Christian Nyby) with my parents. When a spaceship crashes near a scientific research post in the North Pole, an Air Force crew is sent to help retrieve it and search for survivors. They excavate a frozen body – an alien that turns out to still be alive and begins picking them off one by one. It’s an adaptation of Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr., the same novella that would later be adapted into John Carpenter’s The Thing in 1982, but for some unfathomable reason the alien here doesn’t shapeshift, which is kind of the core of the whole story as far as I can tell?
This is a fine movie. There’s the beginning of something interesting in the tension between the airmen and the scientists, some of whom argue that the alien might not mean to harm them, but might be scared and confused, and they should try to communicate with it. This quickly devolves into a non-discussion, though, as most of the group decide that they have to kill the alien before it kills them. Also the alien looks and acts like Frankenstein’s monster. Okay!
listening
I listened to a pretty random assortment of albums I already knew I liked this week: Otis Redding’s The Dock of the Bay, Harmony Woods’s GRACEFUL RAGE, PUP’s Who Will Look After the Dogs? and The Unraveling of PUPTheBand. Sometimes you’re just listening to whatever!
eating & drinking
For dinner this week my parents made miso salmon and coconut rice (delicious), chicken & aspargus stir fry, fajitas, caesar salad tacos, pork tenderloin with pineapple chutney and corn salad, and broccoli cheddar soup. My mom was gifted a fresh loaf of sourdough, but she doesn’t eat gluten any more, so I had some toasted with mascarpone and fig jam. Ricotta would have been my preference, but we had some mascarpone left over from some recipe, and it was good with the fig jam.
making
I’m continuing to make progress on both my scrappy sweater and my hinterland dress mock up, though they both have a ways to go. I like working slowly (and usually have to) but it means there’s not always something impressive to show at the end of the week.
shopping
I haven’t even been looking at stuff on ebay. I’m free from the shackles of capitalism.
kitsch corner
Look at this wonderful cake. Based on the sign in the background, it appears to have been made by Claudette Tidwell for the Tennessee Chapter of something. I couldn’t figure out where this photo originally came from (it’s now been posted on pinterest so much that reverse image search is useless) but I did find a recipe for something similar on tastemade.
See you next week.
xoxo,
Franny 💋🥕
I also make this light pink, but that’s unrelated. Just vibes.