Finally, something fun
Unintended hiatus over—just in time for spring break!
It has been a while, my newsletter friends. The vibe of 2023 so far has felt more grrwtf than lolsob, which has had me mulling over some things. When I last signed off, I promised something fun. No more “women’s troubles,” as Mr. Hall in Clueless might put it . . . grrwtf/lolsob. [Pauses to donate to the Brigid Alliance and stick some pins in many, many wax dolls.]
Now somehow it is already March, and the pollen is falling so thick, the line at the car wash is longer than the Chick-fil-A line at lunchtime, which, if you have never been to South Carolina during lunchtime, those lines are long.
[Voice off-screen] “How long are they?”
[Adjusts tie] “Well, Ed, they’re so long, you bring your own eggs to the the drive-through.”
Winter feels like next year’s problem—at least in South Carolina; I have been in Seattle this last week for AWP, where winter still seems very much like a thing. Juno loves the winter, and very sadly for us both, I could not bring her. Here she is as the backyard’s reigning Snow Queen:
Back before pollen was coating everything*, I had been thinking of writing something about the Netflix show Wednesday, which I enjoyed very much, like basically the rest of the world, but also was not perfect in ways I wished people had written or talked about. I could overlook how the love-interest-slash-monster-slash-barista went from zero to villain in half a second (it did feel as if a scene showing at least some confusion or conflicted feelings was missing, right?) and that the ending felt almost like a slapdash cross between one of the Harry Potters [Pauses to donate to The Trevor Project] and Stranger Things (Netflix, can it not always be some secret government lab thing ffs).
The big thing I wanted someone else to write about, so I could stop thinking about it, was Wednesday’s relationship to the macabre or darkness or whatever you want to call it. That embrace of the gloomy, the creepy, the mysterious, the kooky, and/or the spooky [snap, snap] in the original TV show felt exciting, like a relief because it was such a contrast to the John Birch Society-y families portrayed on typical sitcoms. The Munsters played with this comparison a bit more explicity, with the blond, pep-squad cousin Marilyn living with them: that she’s the freak is largely the joke. The Addams Family felt like it was more for those who identified as different. Their supposed weirdness was the norm, which successfully carried over to the movies from the 90s. Yes, there are those iconic scenes at the elementary school (College first, Wednesday!), but the family is presented as the baseline, so that the teacher wearing that dumb, infantilizing pink bow who is unnerved by Wednesday’s drawings of witches being burned alive is the off one. Dark or morbid-seeming subject matter extending to pain and tragedy occupied their attention and their creaky mansion, but either abstractly—like talking fondly about a disaster or violent event in history—or directly on the bodies of the family (Morticia and Gomez getting, uh, excited by any mention of torture; Uncle Fester recalling washing ashore in a fishing net after nearly drowning in the Bermuda Triangle; the kids electric-chairing each other or attempting to guillotine the baby). They are either bystanders enjoying carnage passively or consenting participants (aside from camp counselors who really, really deserve it, and even then, get tied up off-screen).
So I was sort of disturbed, not in a Morticia-Gomez kind of way, when Wednesday lifts a hammer to bludgeon a confession out of the love-interest-slash-monster-slash-barista, a “normie” as the show puts it, since he doesn’t go to their school for (super wealthy?) outcasts. I can almost hear someone saying, “But he actually was the monster. Don’t you get it?” Wednesday performing, or almost performing, physical violence on someone begging to be spared, and the show not presenting the scene in a comedic way, operates outside of the rules of The Addams Family universe. It’s a lazy choice that took me out of an otherwise fun little world. Tsk-tsk.
For all that, I didn’t mind the Gossip Girl mystery-text ending (xoxo). Wednesday has more of a Little J, upstart Queen Bee feel, but I could also see her moving into full-on Blair territory. (BRB, re-watching all of GG, minus the HBO reboot, which, as an old, I am legally not allowed to watch.) While we are in the GG neighborhood, i.e., the Upper East Side, I’ll also take this opportunity to mildly chastize the host and producers of a podcast that I really like, 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s. In the very excellent episode on Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” [Pauses to mumblebelt the chorus: You said that I was naive andIthoughtthatIwasstrong], there was zero mention of Loeb’s two small, but pivotal appearances on GG as herself: first, as host of the concert where we see Rufus Humphrey perform with his one-hit-wonder band Lincoln Hawk, who play the aforementioned one hit, “Everytime,” that somehow lets him afford his Brooklyn loft that’s magically both in Williamsburg and Dumbo, plus an art gallery and all those waffles; then, in the finale as Rufus’s post-Lily wife. How could they leave that out? Are there no millenials at The Ringer to explain the cultural significance of GG?
I was going to write all of this up back in the non-Seattle winter times, and then I read Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger around New Year’s and could think of nothing else until approximately a week ago. Wednesday aside, I usually try to stay away from anything horror: gore, ghosts, possessions. It all keeps me awake at night**, so I do not know what possessed me to pick up a novel with the following blurb from Stephen King prominently on the cover: “Several sleepless nights are guaranteed.” Check, and check.
Actually, I am trying to figure out some writing things, and I had seen this book recommended repeatedly. It will leave you terrified and sleepless, but also in the best way. I can’t think of another book I have thought about so much. I am convinced that Sarah Waters is a genius, tbh. I don’t want to give much away, but a middle-class doctor becomes involved with a declining, impoverished, aristocratic family and their crumbling mansion in post-WWII England. The ending is pretty much perfect? “You!” Ahh, someone reach out to me so we can talk about this book. I have been thinking about just how sneakily she weaves hints of suspense in a genre that is full of tropes, but then she upends them all, and like in most Gothic novels, the answer becomes so obvious and was there all along. There are three or four truly hair-raising scenes, but by the end, the fear is replaced by absolute rage and indignation, which is probably what has kept me thinking about it for all this time.
Last week, I read what has become a new favorite short story, “The Trojan War Museum,” by Ayşe Papatya Bucak, from her collection The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, and have now been thinking mostly about that.
Here is a cute springtime Juno pic as a chaser, and that’s it for this installment. Kind of fun, right?***
*I mean, pollen is on everything everything, including my computer screen and the countertops inside the house . . . It’s kind of like the dust that’s actually ancient tree-ring bugs in that episode of The X-Files with the loggers and the guy who was extremely underused in Deadwood as the activist—I’ve been sleeping with the lights on at home, just in case. Come to think of it, I think that episode is set near Seattle?
**Hmm, maybe I will keep a light on overnight here in Seattle, too, since I am just clawing my way out of my late-winter cocoon.
***[Hey, I can leave, I can leave, ohhhh, but now I know that I was wrong, ’cause I missed youyeahyeahImissedyouuuu]