April Enthusiasms
Earlier this year, my husband Sam saw me reading Ball Four and said something to the effect of “is baseball going to be your thing now?”
This was jarring. I don’t like to dwell on my dilettante tendencies and like even less the suggestion that someone else notices them. But let’s look at the facts. In 2022, I got really into tarot and the Beach Boys, not just the music but everything around them: documentaries, podcasts, books. In 2023, I tried out local churches, spent a bunch of time and money on Jujutsu Kaisen, and looped this piano version of the Hollow Knight soundtrack so many times that Christopher Larkin was my top artist of the year on Spotify. Then I moved on to practicing kana, playing an excessive amount of phonk and discovering intriguing reviews to go along with it. (I might not be a 22 year old who wears a baseball cap inside the gym, but I lift and I matter.) Last year, I used a YouTube video to fix a cat toy with a bowline knot and I still think about how cool it would be to know how to tie a bunch of different types. I generally have no use for knots outside of shoe securing purposes. But it would be cool, wouldn’t it?
“Do you think I’m autistic?” I asked Sam.
“You wish,” he replied. (???)
I’d like to talk to you about some of my latest pleasures. Conveniently, discussing my pleasures is one of the pleasures. Baseball is not yet among them.
Listening:
The recent big finds are Desire’s new album, which Jamie clued me in on, and Hiro Ama’s Music For Peace and Harmony, which has already become precious to me. All I can say about it is that I think it lives up to its name. Games People Play, meanwhile, is quintessential Italians Do It Better, with lyrics seemingly written in a single ketamine-fueled recording session. “I told a story nobody wants to see.” Oh yeah? You told it…but they didn’t want to see it? “When you reach through the television screen/I can give you anything.” Ok. If you say so. This is music doctors play while they’re trepanning you to release the demon of wanting to hear words that make sense. At the moment, my favorites are “Cold as Ice” and “The Judge,” which has the stupidest lyrics of all. (“Everywhere you turn, time to feel the burn” and “1984 I don’t want you no more/1984 you’ve been such a bore.”) Totally sublime. Whenever I think about it, I have to listen to it. I’m going to do that right now… Ok, actually this song is maybe about a street worker turning down clients? She works “9 to 5” as in 9pm to 5am? No wonder it spoke to me. Verdict overturned, court is now adjourned!
My choices are otherwise overdetermined by TikTok, KinnPorsche (see below) and my delusional attempt to learn Japanese. I’ve been wearing out the predictable viral hits—AiScReam and the “Yummy” remix, which I’m late but fully devoted to—and I made the wise decision to go all in on SKAIISYOURGOD’s discography instead of sticking with the one song. I found this via Shazam’s inaccurate identifying of the Heeseung theme (the closest I can actually find is here) and thank god for that happy accident. It only took me 85 plays to realize the chant is “I got it/you want it/you know I got it. That’s not in the original, which I also love. The shocking interlude where she imitates a a crane (?) is endearing.
From there, I branched out into Chinese ballads via playlists like this one, which I think, based on my kanji “knowledge,” translates to “Chinese old style music.” I’ll show my work: middle (中) + county (国), which together mean China; old (古) + style (I’m not confident about this one because it’s 風 in kanji; just guessing based on context and similarity); song (歌) + music (曲). Kinda sorta possibly understanding this string of characters on sight, in a language I’m not even studying, was such a rush. Am I a savant? Should I be teaching a college course? In conclusion, please give 中国歌曲 a chance.
I made a playlist that includes most of these plus a bunch of other artists like Bonbero, YU-ki 😃 and Lex, a kid I’m ちょっと obsessed with. The song he sings with his sister makes me very emotional. (That First Take channel is so fun, by the way. Creepy Nuts are かわいいい. Fellow JJK fans/SatoSugu folks, enjoy this extra crushing version of the song. Avril Lavigne, what are you doing here?!) My playlist has a lot of pop this time around, but pop in a different language so it’s educational. I’m saving the phonk, Russian rap, medieval music, and majority of Japanese hip hop for another collection.
I’ve also been loving Jamie’s Trauma Plot playlist and Aunt Lisa, a collection put together by the niece of a woman with good taste who recently passed away.
Reading:
I found out about Jesse Ball’s existence at the start of March and was confused as to why his work was previously unknown to me. Almost everything in this world is unknown to me but I manage to be put out by the persistence of that fact when it asserts itself in the literary sphere. I bought A Cure for Suicide and initially adored it, became less enamored as it progressed, and was displeased by the end. I’m still glad I read it. I respected the way it disappointed me enough to want more of his work so I picked up Autoportrait and wow. What a hit. Reading it made me want to imitate it (as it itself is an imitation) but I’ve already told everyone everything about myself. So, we’ll see if that urge holds up.
I bought Woman to Woman years ago despite the fact that I’ve never seen any of Duras’s films (I don’t like movies) and the only work of hers I’d read was The Lover, of which I’d retained nothing. I think I acquired the book because Sarah Nicole Prickett mentioned it somewhere, maybe even on her tumblr; I bought it that long ago. I don’t want to diminish how much I trust her taste, but my willingness to buy books I have no business buying is a problem. I set a 5 per month purchase limit on myself for this year and have managed to stick to it, but even a single book per month allowance would be too generous. I have scads of unread books in my home. Plus, I get galleys, and my block’s Little Free Library is a magic portal that mysteriously provides the exact titles I’m interested in.
Most of Woman to Woman made no sense to me as in, I had no idea what they were talking about. But incredible moments came through.
I’ve since read more Duras, and The War blew my mind. But I expect to return to this at a later date, to discuss in depth alongside the The Human Race.
Then there are various Buddhist texts: Thich Naht Hanh’s My Master’s Robe, which I loved and had not read before, and The Raft is Not the Shore, the transcript of a series of conversations between Daniel Berrigan and Thich Naht Hanh. I’ve read this at least as many times as whatever my other most-read book is and I make new annotations with each round. In her introduction, bell hooks says it’s among the books she cannot live without, that there are lines and passages she has spent years of her life contemplating. I wish the tapes were on Youtube, or that I could somehow listen to them. I wrote the Cornell archives to ask if they have them but haven’t heard back yet. That would be a fun pilgrimage. (Edit: Cornell wrote back that they don’t have them and, per the man who maintains DB’s website, the tapes seem to not exist anymore. This is a true tragedy.)
I’ve also been reading The Mind of Clover by Robert Aitken. I love my copy, which is pictured here. I buy used books almost exclusively, with or without the 5/month limit. I buy a lot of out of print books, but even when new is available, I prefer used. During last year’s girls’ trip, we went into a “used” bookstore where everything was in pristine condition and marked down a dollar or two from its list price. We joked about this weird place sporadically for weeks and once, in the course of joking, I said, “pre-owned books should actually cost more than brand new ones.” It’s felt sort of true to me ever since.
I think the first Aitken book I read was The River of Heaven and it pissed me off. Zen Buddhism annoys me on a pretty regular basis, which has helped me realize that I enjoy being annoyed. The Mind of Clover is pretty palatable but still irksome from time to time. I’m getting a lot out of it. It’s hard for me to say much about any Buddhist book because I want let their lessons cook in me for a while before I try to explicitly draw from them in essay/letter form, and I’m not interested in summarizing them or trying to convey their full impacts in a sentence or two. To treat them this way would be to squander and disrespect them. This goes for The Human Race and War, too.
But there is a very sweet and funny joke Thay mentions in My Master’s Robe that I’ll pass along. (If you’ve read much of his writing you’ve probably come across this particular anecdote before, where he talks about seeing his aged master sewing a robe for him the night before his ordination ceremony. It’s incredibly moving.) Many years later, when the robe became too shabby to even be worn, he said his friends called it “the robe of thirty-seven lifetimes of asceticism.” That is so funny. Just a couple of dudes clowning on each other’s robes. Tale as old as time.
Watching:
I finally binged KinnPorsche, a Thai soap opera about mobsters fucking each other and falling in love. There’s one straight couple in a character’s back story but don’t worry, they die. It took me until episode eight or nine—after scenes in which 1) bagged sliced bread is repeatedly brought to people on trays and prominently displayed on tables otherwise full of cooked food, 2) a mafia family throws a black tie gala to unveil their new product: sliced bread, and 3) Kinn and Porsche tease each other sexually with, you guessed it, sliced bread—before it dawned on me: this show is sponsored by sliced bread.
Needless to say, it has my highest recommendation. I laughed my ass off and thought the acting was mostly great. I’m so fond of all the guys in it except for Build. Feel free to watch these 13 minutes of the fellas crying and hugging each other on stage. I certainly did, twice.
