Last week, the Daily Mail warned readers to beware of werewolves linked to the full supermoon. It also asked if pictures on its homepage proved the Loch Ness monster is real. My YouTube homepage offered me a video called “Lemuria: The Real Story” between pre-writers’ strike “A Closer Look” segments and unofficial “Best of Jiminy Glick” clips. A grown woman in Tennessee allegedly fatally shot a four-year-old-girl point-blank in the chest while demonstrating “firearms safety.” The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill printed a future-award-winning front page response to its campus’s most recent shooting comprising terrified text messages from students hiding from the gunman and seeking news of their friends’ safety. An unidentified moth with a large peacock-blue fuzzy body and regular-brown wings landed on my mother’s trailing lantana flowers. Taylor Swift announced her Taylor Swift The Eras Tour movie/documentary/it-doesn’t-matter-I’ll-see-it-twice starring herself, which will be coming to theaters October 13, and August slipped away like a bottle of wine. Hurricane Idalia brought the fifth highest tide to Charleston, South Carolina, near where I am currently living. And summer was declared worst of the seasons by me.
That was my three-minute attempt a Harper’s Weekly Review . . . Not the best, but maybe not the worst? Idalia was the first tropical weather South Carolina has seen this year, and while Florida, where the storm made landfall as a Category 3 storm, is still cleaning up, the Island Packet, the local paper here in Beaufort County, has been running the usual post-storm roundups: stories about how lucky we were, slideshows about times we weren’t so lucky, slideshows of people cleaning up downed tree limbs, and FYIs to watch out for copperheads that evacuated the woods before the storm and may now be inside or around your house. Summer is fun! There is another tropical depression “worth watching.”* ’Tis the damn season, as Taylor would say. I have always felt that the term “tropical depression” sounded like another name for summer sadness. The only good thing abut summer is making this joke every year:
Juno also recognizes that summer sux. Her annual vet appointment happens to fall in late July, and by then, she has usually put on a couple of pounds because once the temperature is over 83 degrees, she refuses to leave the house except to pee, and then I am scolded by the vet for letting her get a little bit overweight, even though I try to explain that it comes off right away as soon as the weather turns and she wants to run around. (Don’t scold me! We are trying to get healthier!)
During a break from the Idalia rain last Wednesday, Juno and I walked down (i.e., I made Juno walk down) to the beach, and what had felt like relative calm just a block back at my parents’ house in the pine and oaks was some pretty real wind. (Wind in a hurricane? Who knew?) Juno wanted to turn around before our usual place, a small pier a quarter mile down, and my rain coat basically turned into a kite. I found it alarmingly difficult to walk against the wind, and we tried running, which must have been hilarious to the seagulls, who were similarly flying in place. It was like swimming against the tide, which peaked the same time the storm did in our area. My parents’ yard extends beyond some pine trees and sand dunes down to the beach and had a few puddles of ocean water left in it the next day.
I have been trying to think of hurricane novels and coming up short. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Salvage the Bones. A High Wind in Jamaica. There is a madcap quality to that one—anything goes on the high seas!—that reminds me of Our Flag Means Death. Have you seen it?!?! The best. I am hoping the writers go full on The Great (RIP) with it, so that Stede does not, in fact, get caught in a rowboat in a dress and then executed after having escaped a jail in Charleston, South Carolina, by disguising himself as a woman and walking right past the jailers, even though that is what he is most famous for. Stede and Ed (“Id”?)** forever.
Juno and I did do a very summery thing over the Labor Day weekend by going to the beach, where I finished a very summery book: Talk, by Linda Rosenkrantz. The book is famously all dialogue, and infamously, the plot has been sculpted from recorded conversations the author had with friends over the course of a summer in the Hamptons in the early 1960s. There’s Marsha, Emily, and Vincent, BFFs. All obsessed with their analysts, their lovers, their friends’ lovers, art, gossip. It reads sort of like if Nora Ephron crafted a romcom out of her essay on the women’s movement (RIP)*** or Girls but with the secretaries on Mad Men. It’s the conversations that could be happening off-screen in Emma Cline’s The Guest****, and Salinger is the Sally Rooney of the day. Early on, Emily and Marsha argue about why ice floats, and no one whips out their phones to google, which is a charming exchange all-around and also somehow . . . calming? Back when it was okay not to know things, and expertise was understood and valued. I could be reaching. There is also a chapter called “Emily, Marsha and Vincent Discuss Orgies,” in case the gorgeous clothes and the women’s movement (RIP) weren’t enough to induce entire-era FOMO. (FOHMO? Fear of having missed out?) The characters are smart, cool, and very selfish. It’s nice as a beach read because you can go dunk your head in the waves before moving on to the next chapter when it’s too much. It’s an interesting idea for a novel. More autofiction than autofiction. The cover of the book is the author sunning with a microphone beside her, looking young and beautiful. Summer. I guess it has always seemed like the season for the girls in that Janis Ian song*****. Google it, and then let’s look up why ice floats.
*Tropical depression 13 is Hurricane Lee now.
**While awaiting the second OFMD season, I’ve been re-watching Flight of the Conchords. This exchange!
***Oh, sweet baby me, going to Bush-era pro-choice marches around the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle, listening to The Postal Service****** and wearing your boat-neck Delias T-shirts that were two-for-one and your periwinkle-blue Dickies from Hot Topic with your white Keds, you could have stayed home. It made no difference.
****Ugh, should I turn that into a pitch for the new Bookforum (which: hooray!)?
*****FINE. I won’t do that to you. Here is Liz Lemon’s Version. At 1:23 for the monsters who don’t want out-of-context 30 Rock.
******Have you read that piece in The Ringer about Give Up turning 20? lolsob.