Infinity Pilled
A great moment in my marriage this month: Sam asked, humbly, if I thought I could get an orange oil stain out of his white shirt. I was hype as hell to try….and I did it! Was there a stage where I thought I’d actually created a worse stain? Yup. Was there an additional stage where I thought I’d fully ruined the shirt? You bet. Can anyone tell that by looking at it now? Nope. Huge wife win, and a coup for me as someone who legitimately loves to do laundry. This is what it’s all about, folks. (It = marriage, life, etc.)
Reading Writers is going strong! Episodes with Rumaan Alam, Lauren Michele Jackson, Torrey Peters, and Annelise Ogaard are available now. If you’re a listener who could spare even $1 a month on Patreon, it would be welcome. We (or maybe just I) actually do have a dream of offering more Patreon-only content/special features but it’s the type of thing that won’t make sense without participants. Passive consumption not allowed. See you on Thursday in Brooklyn perhaps?
No new Meant For You because I’ve been busy trying to make other things happen. Not least of which—well, maybe least of which 🙁 — is my fiction.
Reading:
As with last month, blue titles have been discussed on Reading Writers, though their episodes might not be out yet. My tentative December plan is to not start (or buy!) any new books, but only work on finishing the 5 dozen I’m partway through. Pray for me. If it works next month’s stack will be eye-popping.
The Secret Garden — This was fun to revisit as an adult. I thoroughly enjoyed the first half but the book loses steam midway through and devolves into magical thinking/law of attraction stuff mixed with a little treacly, obligatory Christianity. The phonetic accent work is intolerable and the end is strangely anticlimactic. But you should read it if you haven’t since childhood.
Murder Most Serene & The Necrophiliac — Annelise brought these two books to our attention and I’m so glad she did. The Necrophiliac is a pervert’s delight, meticulous and extraordinarily fucked up. Authors should write novels like this more often. Not books that replicate the subject matter (necessarily) but works that give voice to a discerning, obsessive freak who experiences true passion via their strange addiction.
The Necrophiliac is exactly as it should be but Murder Most Serene is the superior work, I think. Denser, odder, more textured and complete. This is writing for other writers to learn from, or at least for me to learn from.
Tibet on Fire — I read this book for research and it provides exactly what it promises. Clear, concise, moving.
Peter and Wendy — Demented, hilarious, bizarre, familiar. One of my favorite books this year and I’m not joking. The use of the narrator alone is fascinating.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens — An earlier, shorter work that’s nowhere near as good as Peter and Wendy but has some of the same delightful and/or disconcerting weirdness. If nothing else, it’s interesting evidence of how Barrie built and refined Peter’s lore. Surprisingly macabre and dark at moments though of course it has nothing on Wittkop.
Perfection — Scoop alert for blog readers: we’ll be discussing this at the Thursday Reading Writers x Bookforum event! So I can’t give much away here but I….had a strong reaction. Hopefully the live event’s audio will be clear enough for us to run as a podcast episode, so keep an eye out for it before the end of the year. It should, at the very least, be transcribed and made available that way for anyone who can’t be there in person.
Teenager — I have absolutely no idea how i feel about this one. It sort of stayed in the same gear from start to finish which was unsatisfying, in part because the book itself seemed restless for a change. (In tone? pace? Very difficult to say.) The ending was not a cop out, which I appreciate, and obviously I loved pure-hearted Kody, an exemplary Boy for the ages. I bet it was fun to write, possibly more fun than it was to read, though it required more focus and discipline to compose than a casual reader might recognize.
Inferno (Musa) — I’ve never read The Divine Comedy before (I know, my general lack of education could make one weep) and I got very attached to this translation. Mark Musa is charmingly tart in his introduction and footnotes, and I believe he loved the original with, as we say, his whole pussy.
Catholic dogma is bonkers but at least Dante had fun with it. It’s very cool that despite seeming to buy into the nonsensical hierarchy of which sins are most sinful—prostitutes worse than mass murderers? Ok, sure—Dante hated corruption and called out tons of churchmen by name for being total pieces of shit. Love how grotesque and goth it gets at the end. (Yeah, I’d be gnawing on that bastard’s brains, too!) Can’t wait to get deep into Purgatorio.
Inferno (Bang) – I actually started Inferno via this version, but it made me want to read “the real thing,” which is when I bought a copy of Musa. I can imagine someone loving this translation. That someone isn’t me. The art is fantastic, though.
The Kings and Their Gods — Probably my least favorite Berrigan book so far but I’m glad I read it because I now have a different perspective on Kings’ tedious awfulness and the Bible as a whole.
Error Analysis Report (web novel) — I’m making myself vulnerable by sharing this with you. (Not really. I air my sexual tastes publicly on a regular basis and nothing here is surprising.) The masturbation video scene is kind of a triumph, I think. The ferris wheel scene, not so much. It’s not as good as my favorite BLs by any stretch and I skimmed parts of it but I’m glad I came across it. I’ve been in magpie mode with fiction for a while now and there are some sophisticated observations here of certain teenage interpersonal dynamics that I’d love to explore in my own (original) story. The language is awkward but I’m pretty sure it’s a fan translation so we should be grateful for what we get.
Listening:
Rosalía’s Lux is a stunner, and I played it relentlessly for 5 days after its release. It was so overwhelming that even upon initial, partial listen—I put it on while I was cooking—I found myself on the verge of tears. Its intensity is actually why I purposefully took a break to listen to other things, starting (and pretty much ending) with nerdneko’s Stargazing Youth. I knew it was only a matter of time before I started liking Vocaloid music and here I am. I’m really addicted to this album. I can listen to it for 8 hours a day, no problem. If you said I had to pick something to only listen to all day, it would be this. Hell, double it. Make it all week. Two weeks! Don’t test me.
I use Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer to interrupt Stargazing Youth at the gym because “sparkle” and “Dawn” are too chill for working out and none of it’s great for running. I’ve also been putting on Kodak Black’s Just Getting Started in order to, you guessed it, force myself to stop playing Stargazing Youth. (Am I going to have to pay a hypnotist to move on from this album?) I guess Kodak Black sucks politically or whatever, but who doesn’t? Sincerely….which celebrity doesn’t? I’m not saying everyone gets a pass for anything and everything, but I know virtually nothing about Kodak Black and I kind of want to hang on to that ignorance. I just adore “Zeze“ and “my name Kodak Black but when you see me I’m white,” and I like this album. From where I’m standing, Kodak Black’s greatest flaw has nothing to do with him praising Trump. The real issue is that he’s not nerdneko.
Watching:
Don’t get me wrong, I love Demon Slayer. As I said last month, the animation is spectacular, the characters are vivid, and I don’t get bored during fight scenes, which is a rarity. But I think Sam enjoys it even more than I do which is sooooo cute. We devoured everything on Crunchyroll, then drove a long(ish) way to see Infinity Castle in theaters. It closed the next day! But at least it was still an option for us. Sam would have been so unhappy to have to wait five months or however long it’ll take to hit streaming. かわいい！
I hate movies and Infinity Castle is long (2 and a half hours) but this runtime felt fine to me. The film is not perfect—I could make some criticisms about the pacing/repetition and the inspirational non-sequiturs (Tanjiro’s dad effortlessly and instantly kills a bear, then turns to him and says “never give up” ?????)—but it could have been twice as long and I would have been happy. I wish it had been 5 hours. In fact, I would have watched 8. Follow it up with 30 back-to-back loops of Stargazing Youth and you’ve got yourself the perfect day.
I haplessly saw a TikTok that gave way, way too much away about plot developments later in the Infinity Castle arc and I’m kind of heartbroken both that it was spoiled, and that the deaths in question occur. But some of these were foreseeable and I don’t respect adventure stories where no important characters die. Gonna ask my momma to get me the books for クリスマス so I can spoil everything for my own damn self. She hates when I ask for manga, I think because in her mind it’s all porn.
Here’s a little tip if you’re going to start watching shonen anime that actually features young male characters. Even if you’re not a weeb, pick subtitles instead of dub. Obviously this assessment is subjective but the voices are usually much less annoying in Japanese. The English is cringe!
We also watched Erased, the anime, which I was so impressed by. I liked the art style a lot (Satoru as a kid is soooo………well……..かわいい!) and the story is great. The ending is absurd but I enjoyed everything up until that point, so who really cares. (Also, I’ve read the ending is not faithful to the manga, but the live action versions might be? Looking into this.)
If you have any anime recommendations, by the way, please let me know. I might have already watched a series but not mentioned it here because I saw it a while ago or I just don’t have anything to say—we’ve been watching Gachiakuta, for instance, despite me thinking it’s not very good—but chances are if you’re seeing this, you know my taste and have great taste of your own. 😘 I have a long To Watch list but am always happy to add more. It’s scary to think of missing out on something wonderful.
My TikTok algorithm, which thinks I fetishize Asian men (no comment,) convinced me to binge Physical: Asia. It won my allegiance within the first 10 minutes of Episode 1 thanks to that montage of Superbon knocking people out with neck kicks. This show was so fun. It gave me the high of The Challenge‘s best seasons, Season 1 of The Devil’s Plan, and my discovery of Traitors. Like those shows, Physical Asia has its weak spots so I fast forwarded liberally, but overall it made me happy. Some of the many joys: Türkiye’s arrogant women and the two Commie Corridor-looking guys. Team Japan, obviously, but especially Soichi, the thinking woman’s Katsumi. Mongolia’s whole vibe. Which men’s bodies impress the other men, how bad they want to touch each other’s muscles, and the amazement with which they react when they get lifted off the ground. The sweetness of the Thai competitors. The steely, slightly villainous Koreans, who perhaps only seem villainous because of their outrageous facial symmetry and home team advantage.
The one blot on this otherwise perfect canvas is Team Australia who I’m afraid will be heading to hell when parkour guy’s 8000th uncalled-for backflip inevitably opens up a dimensional portal. They all seem to be good-natured people, but enabling parkour antics + being excessively Australian, per my recent studies, probably land you in the 8th circle, “sowers of discord” level.
It must be the most incredible feeling to know, with true confidence, that you can accomplish a physical feat better than anyone else around you. Or just that you can accomplish it, period. I’ve really only experienced this once in my life, back when I was deep in Pilates, and I challenged three men to a plank holding competition. But there were no stakes, it was just for fun, and it combined plank holding, which I enjoy due to bodily attributes that give me an advantage; and cunning, which is the only way I’ve ever won anything. Anyone want to go up against me in a nerdneko listening marathon?