Here we are again, a week closer to the start of a new administration. I’ve been thinking about the kind of dumb shock with which I greet the day’s news lately. There's anger too, of course, and deep cynicism—I screamed at the television earlier this week while watching the Senate impeachment vote, listening to certain Republicans' dispatches from a craven, truth-averse alternate reality. But because of the virus death toll—a bewildering abstraction, incomprehensible—I also spend part of the morning just sitting mutely with my mouth open as I look at headlines and graphs, at the shameful dark purple of this country on the worldwide map graphic in the New York Times. In this image at least, we are a bruise, a stain on the globe. I realized today that for all of my pessimism, I just didn't think we would reach this level of dysfunction and chaos in my lifetime. We're nearly a year into this new life, and a part of me remains stunned. It's tiring to be a little bit stunned every day, don't you think?
The sun is out. That's a thing. And the week's distractions have been plentiful: baking a cake, marinating things in delicious shio koji (introduced to me by my fermenter friend, bless her), buying books compulsively, and watching a Swedish show called Honour about a group of women who prosecute sex crimes. Kind of like a Swedish Sex & the City meets SVU. Very watchable, whatever that means, although I find myself terribly distracted assessing women's plastic surgeries and fillers. We need a name for this novel combination of wonder, envy, and revulsion. At this point they've all had "work." I peer at the good work, fascinated, deepening my own wrinkles, and when I see bad work, I have a burning desire to know whether the person whose face it is thinks it looks good or whether she's disappointed.
(Content warning: abuse, sexual assault)
Yesterday I was suddenly and completely thrown off emotionally by this Page Six story about Armie Hammer's ex-girlfriend and the all-consuming abusive relationship they had. The piece is headlined scandalously (“He wanted to ‘barbecue and eat me’”) but the rest of the piece actually contains the most resonant description of a toxic, obsessive, abusive relationship I’ve read in a while. Well, since last month, when FKA Twigs’s spoke publicly about her relationship with Shia LaBeouf (and sued him). I related to everything Hammer’s ex said so much that it made me a bit sick for the remainder of the day:
“He quickly grooms you in the relationship,” she explained. “He kind of captivates you and while being charming, he’s grooming you for these things that are darker and heavier and consuming. When I say consuming, I mean mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, just everything.”
“He sucks out all the goodness you have left,” she said. “That’s what he did to me. I gave and gave and gave until it hurt.”
“He did some things with me that I wasn’t comfortable with,” she said. “For God knows what reason, he convinced me that these things were OK and he put me in some dangerous situations where I was not OK, where he was heavily drinking, and I wasn’t drinking that way and it scared me. I didn’t feel comfortable.”
This weird “cannibalism” thing is what’s getting all the media attention (surprise, I have much to say about that too), but this woman’s description of this relationship laid me low, made me think about the fact I am simply one in a million women who have been in the same relationship with a maniac. Many are dead. Those of us who aren’t are lucky, and yet there are a million more women lined up for their turn. It is just so, so dark. What is it that compels some people toward a love laced with the threat of violence or obliteration?
I think some part of me is preparing to wade back into the muck of my life and be ready to think and talk about it more when the paperback of my book comes out in a few months. That feels like something I might have to do some kind of training for. Yesterday I felt the weight of that, or the pressure, or just the ill feeling of identification, and it knocked me off kilter. Though in life now I am healthy and well and hashtag grateful (to a truly obnoxious degree sometimes), there are things in the past that cast a long fucking shadow, man.
In far better news, a couple days ago I went on a masked date with my boyfriend to cherished local bookstore Moe's and we each bought three books. One of his (The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith) is sitting here on the couch and I just flipped through it and was charmed to find that we both pencil in a lot of exclamation marks as we read, a nerdy little habit.
Mine were Dubravka Ugresic's Nobody's Home, Daisy Johnson's Everything Under, and Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother, which I've read in the past 48 hours. I like to read a lot but that rarely happens. The book is about the author's much younger brother and his death from AIDS. She travels from Vermont, where she's living at the time (with her first husband, Allen Shawn, son of New Yorker editor William Shawn—I didn't know that and have now had to read everything about him, them, etc.) to her native Antigua to be with her brother as he lays dying. She eats her mother's food and is comforted by it, although their relationship remains very strained. Throughout the book, she's trying to understand the nature of her familial bonds. She is reluctant to call it love, the thing that calls her home, the thing she feels for her brother, so she takes it apart and examines it. He dies in the middle of the book, and she reckons with grief until the end. I've been trying to pinpoint what it is about My Brother, besides pretty writing, that propelled me through it and I don't quite know how to explain it, but there is something about the quality of the intimacy established between writer and reader that is gripping. That magical feeling certain memoirs elicit, of being alone with the author, being told a secret.
This week I also started reading The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning by Long Litt Woon. (I guess I need to read about death.) The author moved from Malaysia to Norway as an exchange student when she was young and met her husband there. When he dies suddenly at age 54, she copes by adopting a mushroom-foraging habit and becomes deeply rooted (sorry) in the mycology community. The book is about transmuting grief, the interconnectedness of living things, weird hobbyists, and it contains truly mind-blowing mushroom facts (like that some are luminescent or that “the world’s largest living organism is a honey fungus…found in eastern Oregon, where it covers a stretch of woodland corresponding to almost four square miles”). !!!
Mycology is something that completely freaks me out and also interests me greatly. I spent a long time studying Russia and there is a robust culture of foraging and mushroom love there. I’ve always been particularly interested in this two-volume book from the 50s called Mushrooms Russia and History. It was written by a pediatrician, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, and her banker husband, R. Gordon Wasson. You can buy volume II here for $4,500.00!
Even though I am a bit phobic about fungus, I love to eat mushrooms and I’ve always wanted to better understand their significance. Read this great New Yorker writeup about the Wassons and their book from 1957:
He and his wife, who was born in Russia, were taking a walk in the Catskills one day in 1927, when she came upon some mushrooms and went into ecstacies over them. He came to realize that Russians are mycophiles; Anglo-Saxons are mycophobes. Russian literature is saturated with friendly talk about mushrooms. In English literature he has not found a singe reference to mushrooms that is appetizing. The people of Asia and Europe are divided in these two ethnomycological groups—mycophobe and mycophile. The reason for this difference is what the Wassons try to answer This book is their first report. They hope to get a second one out in 10 or 15 years. The origin of religion may be involved. The cult of the divine mushroom is a cherished secret among the remotest tribes of southern Mexico, and he & his wife have shared in it. He has taken the divine, or hallucinogenic mushroom four times. It tastes awful. You are shaken by the experience. You see marvellous architectural visions, all in color. He has communicated the experience to "Life". At their home, the Wassons serve many kinds of mushrooms. The only all-mushroom store he knows of in N.Y. is the Reliable Mushroom Company on Rivington St.
They hope to get a second one out in 10 or 15 years! Reliable Mushroom Company! Oh why does it have to be 2021. I’d love get my hands on this book. In the meantime, I’ll finish The Way Through the Woods and I welcome any mushroom recipes you particularly like.
A few good things I read this week:
This horrifying piece in the Irish Independent about the unspeakable violence perpetrated by nuns at “mother and baby homes”
This Timothy Snyder piece in the NYT about divisions in the Republican party,
”pre-fascism,” and what comes next in American politicsThis interview of Karl Ove Knausgaard by Lydia Kiesling in the Paris Review
"marvelous architectural visions" *sighs wistfully*
Thanks for this. On mushrooms...I like soaking dehydrated wild foraged mushrooms in veggie stock and adding them to soup and vegan curry.
Cheers!