002: '40s Italian novels, '70s NASA scandals, '80s Estonian animation, etc.
Welcome to Sick Sad Motherslug 2.0, now with playlists! Curated by me just for you guys, each issue will include a collection of songs inspired by my current listening and the general feel of the season.
In the first one, you will hear spiritual jazz, experimental ambient, art rock, and even some throwback Princely dance, among other things. (Can we make Princely, as an adjective to describe Prince-influenced music, happen?)
🎙️ Appearance Alert ~ Optimism Vaccine Podcast
Some of you may not know that my first online pieces were for culture blog-turned-podcast Optimism Vaccine, started by some old friends of mine who are super smart and funny. I will be joining them to talk about Cuties, the new French coming-of-age film out now on Netflix, and the paranoid, reactionary QAnon-adjacent chatter surrounding it.
I’m quite thrilled to add crazy pedophile conspiracy theories to the list of bullshit that brings me to mind. I’ve been on the podcast only once before, and that was to discuss, as one does, nu metal. (One of those early pieces was a review of Save Me from Myself, the autobiography of Brian “Head” Welch, Korn guitarist and born again Christian.)
Where: Right here or Apple Podcasts/Spotify; episode drops Thursday the 24th so mark your calendars or something.
These are not the Cuties we are discussing, but they are the Cuties of my mind’s eye.
🧶 Book ~ The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg (1947, New Directions)
If Françoise Hardy’s tormented and agonizing relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Jacques Dutronc, father of her son and eventual husband, had resulted in his murder at her hands, events may have transpired much as they do in Natalia Ginzburg’s white-hot novel The Dry Heart.
Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye, it’s a nice slim paperback with a beguiling cover, minimalist yet fierce, evoking tone and themes. Just the type of book I love to own.
Sometimes he sketched in his notebook, but he no longer drew my face. He drew trains and little horses galloping away with their tails streaming in the wind. And now that we had a cat he did cats and mice too. Once I told him that he should put my face on a mouse and his on a cat. He laughed and asked me why. So I asked him if he didn’t think we two fitted into these roles. He laughed again and said there was nothing mouselike about me. Still he did draw a mouse with my face and a cat with his. The mouse was knitting, with a frightened and ashamed expression on its face, and the cat was angrily making a sketch in a notebook.
Where: I bought mine at Literati in Ann Arbor, but you can get yours from Bookshop.org or an independent bookstore near you.
🚀 NASA Scandals ~ The Apollo 15 Postal Covers Incident
I wasn’t planning on expanding the categories into such deep niches so soon, but what else could I do after finding out about the great Apollo 15 postal covers incident of 1972?!?
Let’s answer your burning question right away: a postal cover is what they call the part of the envelope that includes the stamp, postal markings, and other identifying info. Sometimes they make commemorative postal covers to celebrate special things like trips to the Moons, which is partially what happened here.
The scandal ball was set rolling when the Apollo 15 spacemen took 400~ unauthorized postal covers (and some authorized ones too, actually) all the way to the surface of our friend, the Moon. This probably would have been fine if not for the fact that some of the unauthorized covers ended up with a German art dealer named Hermann Sieger who sold them for exorbitant prices.
NASA frowns on profiting off trips to the Moon, so this didn’t work out well for anyone except Seiger, I suppose. One of his “Seiger covers” sold for over $50,000 as recently as 2014! Good grief.
As for the Apollo 15 spacemen, none of them ever flew again. By 1977, all three had left NASA.
Where: Wikipedia, of course. The page is so much longer than I anticipated, as is the case for all the best Wikipedia pages. My two favorite mini-digressions from it are the internal link to astrophilately (the fine art of collecting space-themed stamps) and the See Also reference to Robert Heinlein's 1950 story "The Man Who Sold the Moon,” about a privately funded lunar mission that is paid for in part by covers taken to the Moon. Can’t you see Elon Musk pulling some shit like that?
🐷 Poems ~ "Pigs" and "Slop” by Ellen Welcker
Surprise! Poems. I love the form and repetition in “Pigs,” the way each line unfurls into an image that sure sounds like it’s about pigs but is really about you and me. “Slop” is a response to a poem by Major Jackson called “You, Reader,” in which it is said that any small town only has one notable death, that of the pig-farmer. Welcker references this farmer in another brilliant litany of images depicting tangled up notions of what makes us who we are.
I have debased myself: the skin of my belly
hangs loose as a sigh, so yes. I see
how this slop unfurls before me: a sea
of nutritious glop and I sing its praises.
I am a mother, after all. Tell me again,
how you ate what I would not, could not;
how your skin burned like mine and I shamed
you for it, buried you beneath an idea
of something delicious that would
finally satisfy me.
Where: Electric Literature, my favorite online literary magazine.
🇪🇪 Viewing Material ~ Excerpt from the animated Estonian film Spring Fly (1986)
This was posted in the Facebook group Soviet Visuals, but I can’t find much about it online except for an entry on the Estonian Film Information System’s website, which you should definitely click on to see two more stills from the film.
It’s directed by Hardi Volmer, who is also a puppet theater set decorator and singer in the Estonian punk band Singer Vinger. The ESFI page describes the film as a “parable examining questions of ethics in human relationships based on the ‘The Fly, the Cockroach and the Spider’ by Anton Hansen Tammsaare.” Other keywords include egocentrism, predestination, philosophizing, facing death, homilies, and my favorite: ridiculing the laws.
Where: This hallucinatory clip is thankfully available right on Facebook.
Coincidence: The Fly we all know with J. Goldblum also came out in 1986!
🎹 Podcast ~ The New Yorker: Fiction – Kristen Roupenian Reads Shirley Jackson
If you don’t know this series, it consists of modern authors reading classic short stories from The New Yorker, handpicked by that episode’s reader, which is then discussed after the reading with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. Sometimes they are pretentious as hell, but this isn’t one of those!
I know Shirley Jackson’s 1943 story “Afternoon In Linen” from The Lottery and Other Stories, but I really enjoyed the post-reading discussion and Roupenian made one statement in particular that resonated with me so hard it is now orbiting me like my own personal Moon.
“There is no character that I will follow farther into bad behavior than a little girl who reads books.”
Where: Right here or on Apple Podcasts/Stitcher.
🍐 Food Doodz Archive ~ Peeping Tom Pear
Those of you who know me from Instagram have seen pieces of my personal collection of anthropomorphic ephemera throughout the years. (See a vast community’s worth of such images here!)
I spent too many late nights on eBay buying shit like midcentury greeting cards and marketing materials and too many long afternoons in antique malls buying shit like teabag holders and dish sets and now this stuff just sits around because I don’t presently have the space to display any of it, so I’m going to include some in the newsletter from time to time.
Today we have a midcentury Valentine’s Day card featuring not one but two puns and a creepy anthropomorphic pear spying on his crush with binoculars. That’s love!
You made it to the very end! Here is one last thing for you. It is silly.