So, the dragon’s head tried to eat the Pisces Full Moon two nights ago. But the dragon has no stomach so couldn’t get its fill. Lists are always incomplete, alas, and so are perfect for the moment. The esoteric teachers I learned from don’t do rituals on eclipsed moons, because, they say, our intentions during eclipses always carry with them some shadow of our own petty evils. Mine over the past few days or so has been to spend all of my time writing an essay that was little more than personal vendetta pretending to be intellectual polemic.
Then I heard myself say to a new oncologist from John’s Hopkins yesterday: “I don’t care as much about living long as I do about living well.” In that moment, I deflated my own participation in viciousness, in one form sickness takes in me. I trashed the writing, shut the computer after the Telehealth appointment, and drove with my husband in the rain to pick Theo up from preschool. I saw the third dead black bear of the season on the side of Route 29. I missed a call from my father. I didn’t feel rage. I felt the utter weight of something else, how my whole life I’ve managed unbearable synchronicities, small and large, either by drugging myself or turning my words into a knife.
Christina Sharpe wrote a beautiful essay for the Yale Review about the “domestication of atrocity” that occurs when we allow ourselves to be convinced that the rhetorical choices we make about about tone, syntax, description, epithet, subjects, objects, argument, form don’t matter.
recently led a Substack chat about Sharpe’s essay, and I found the conversation that Kennedy held space for on Monday to be as moving as the text itself. “Language is one way we make and sustain relation. Words are one way we begin the work of unmaking and changing the shape of the world,” Sharpe writes in the essay. And: “Meaning is in crisis. And we are embroiled, everywhere, in contests over meaning—which are also contests of power, contests over living. And dying.” What does it mean when the self-ordained women writers of culture want to locate the contests of power, living, and dying in the rhetorical register of the surface-level group chat?What relations, as readers, do we cede—to self, to other, to world, to truth—when we’ll read about “the end of the world” through an analysis of the social media habits of tradwives and celebrities but not through an analysis of the dead and dying in Palestine, Lebanon, cancer centers across the U.S.?
This is not to say we can’t write and read intelligently, ethically—funnily, movingly—about social media and the internet. About culture and death. Celebrity and cancer. Politics and a good meal. “Pop” with “depth.” “Soft” and “sharp.” We can face, sometimes, briefly, what’s unbearable through good writing, true art, the right language. Excellent critique. At least that’s what Sharpe says to me.
If you’re hungry for this, there are plenty of newsletter writers who are doing good work every week, writing essays and opening up space for complex, nuanced, and interesting conversations about domestic life, political action, food, the environment, pop culture, music, feminism, spirituality, illness, among other myriad topics of love and concern. I don’t know of anyone on here writing about Taylor Swift better than
, for example, whose analyses of Swift’s music, career, and celebrity moves are undergirded by a sincere appreciation of the music and a good-natured, critical eye for the mode of the celebrity musician in the year of our lord 2024. I’m not a Swiftie, but my four-year-old and his favorite preschool teacher both are. I credit BDM’s essays for my ability to participate in probably twenty percent more conversations with my kid and his beloved Ms. E and to begrudge way less than I normally would have the number of Taylor-Swift-Eras-Tour-TV-Dinner nights I have had this summer, lol. This kind of writing also helps me grapple with an understanding of what the figure of a pop superstar is and is not for, culturally speaking.If you’re looking for critiques of illness narrative, the cancer experience, and what “living well” requires of us in an age of healthcare AI, corporatization, and decline, you could do no better than to read
, and the late Jake Seliger, , Andrea Gibson. Bayne is an exquisite writer who works in publishing and has revitalized her dance practice post-chemo. She’s good for personal, incisive critiques of what we’re all trying to do with illness narrative, anyway, as well as a wonderful ability to channel her own experiences with dance and mobility into arguments for the importance of embodied living before, during, and after illness, if there can ever be an “after.” Stillman brings her unique perspective as an ER doctor to tell the harrowing tale of injustice, bureaucratic mess, and emotional intensity that is trying to find adequate, life-prolonging care for a loved one dying of cancer. Her husband, Jake Seliger, also wrote poignantly and matter-of-factly about his experience with cancer, treatment, and healthcare insufficiencies, right up to his death. His essay reflecting on the mistake that we cancer patients often make—falling prey to the cultural narrative of “more is always better” at the expense of enjoying what’s left of our lives beyond poisonous treatment protocols—impossibly moved me and is a guiding factor in my own treatment decisions. Gelderloos more often writes about contemporary politics and what an adequate anarchist response might look like and offer in terms of societal revolution and repair. He also is living with terminal brain cancer and writes from that position, elucidating the daily struggles and joys of life under the pressure of needing persistent care and supervision from the medical industrial complex. And Andrea Gibson, of course, is one model for how public figures might/should use their platforms when living with mortal illness in late-stage capitalism. I love Gibson for their advocacy and their open-heartedness.1For brilliant, class-based analyses of pop culture, feminism, and film, as well as critical-theory informed narrative about what it feels like to age, work, be in community, do activism, teach, write, and delight in beauty as a queer femme/woman, start and stay with
. I’ve relished teaching Jolie’s essays to my students in the past, particularly her essay on girl culture and the failures of feminism, which is truly the best Barbie film analysis available. Jolie strikes a tone of generosity and sharpness that I have tried and failed to emulate for years. She’s a prodigious writer whose essays and notes about illness, celebrity, and social media in the time of genocide should be touchstones for us all.For thinking through and about food, nourishment, politics, and the intersection of food and culture (which is not so much an intersection as it is the heart of life, tbh), I have learned more from Kennedy than anyone else in recent years. Kennedy’s essays nourish my mind. Her perspective on the ethics and pleasures of feeding oneself in a way that reflects care and concern’s for one’s locality, history, and the larger environment changed the way I fed myself and my family throughout these years of illness and grief. Meanwhile, “Shelf Offerings” from
is an immediate must-read in my inbox, too. Sripathi’s recent essay on the pantry as an installation and the exotically expensive/morally bankrupt/patently ugly aesthetics of Khloe-Kardashian-inspired pantry hoards was maybe the only thing that got me and my husband through an insufferable trip to Montana with my white-cosplaying-as-Native sister-in-law. I always read for her blend of insights on family mealtime, DIY literary culture, and political activism rooted in the local, for raising big questions about food ways, water, and climate crisis through the lens of writing and baking in the Midwest, and always has the best insights about life arising from her work as a farmer on Virginia’s eastern shore. ’s recent essay on postpartum hospital food is one that I’ll discuss with an upcoming “mother’s salon” at a local apothecary. Finally, so few people write about desire, restaurants, culture, and the personal with the storytelling rigor and moral clarity of . Her latest on the band Pulp, its song “Common People,” and the miserable effects of rich people pretending to not be rich was incredible.It’s harder for me to get into newsletters adjacent to or about the topics of spirituality, magic, and the esoteric. When you’re sick for a long time, you tend to develop standards that are more idiosyncratic than they are anything else. Or that’s just me. Easy to start here, though: No one does weekly astrology forecasts better than
. Fearnley’s not out to make you feel good necessarily2, but she is going to tell you the truth, and in beautiful sentences. Her astro updates are always informed by cogent film analysis; it’s become fun to hurt myself on how little i know about movies at the foot of Fearnley’s weekly writing. is a constant companion on the journey to approach literature through the tarot and vice-versa. Recent essays on spirituality, magic, and faith I’ve enjoyed come from on making America magical again, ’s essay on Weil and hermeticism, among other things, (it made me cry-in-a-good-way), and ’s essay “Holy Gifts,” on the passing of an elderly friend, which made me feel better about dying myself, somehow.“What makes death OK?” A dharma question of the late Rob Burbea’s that I’m always asking myself these days. I’d also be remiss not to mention in gratitude
’s Notes about the incomparable goodness that is David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full Of Gods. A book that is as much a pleasure to read as it is a spiritual awakening. Speaking of, the magician Alan Chapman’s newsletters and videos are intense and weird. You kind of have to decide for yourself whether you think he’s walking a path of delusion or devotion (not that it can’t be both). But I love the work of that—deciding for myself. Chapman’s Barbarous Words are on Substack if you have $13 a month to spare. Otherwise, just listen to his podcast conversations with Duncan Barford, who is the more literary of the two, anyways. Barford’s tarot podcast Hierophany is the best tarot podcast out there.Speaking, finally, of literature, I get many of my own reading recs from a lot of the people above, especially Kennedy, BDM, and Jolie. Also Lyta Gold. I didn’t have painkillers while recovering from my first of two surgeries while pregnant last month, and distracted myself by getting prickly in a footnote about Gold’s essay on “weird,” but mostly I love her newsletter for the way she writes about fantasy and sci-fi books with the blend of devotion and criticism that I appreciate. (The ability for a writer to walk in hate and walk in love, at once, as the Buddhists say, is obviously something I hugely value, and a common strength shared by the writers I’m recommending here). Gold’s response to Neil Gaiman’s sexual predation is the right one. I also enjoy essays about books from
, , and , the latter of whom I just subscribed to after this exploration of discursive versus depth fiction (dunno if he would describe it like that, but that’s how my brain has sorted it) in the wake of Brandon Taylor’s scathing LRB review of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (now shortlisted for the Booker).I wanted to write something beautiful and true for you guys this week, but I’ve been too caught up in trying to right my own perspective, my own affects, in the tides of the Substack app, agent query letters, increasing pain, oncology appointments, the baby, breech still, vigorously kicking me every three seconds in the gut, genocide, the cruelty of all people who seek presidential power, all these various unfit distractions from (inadequate participations in!) death. So here are recs, my cultural lights this week. I’m already horrified over who I’m leaving out. Oh, this one! I’ve found psychotherapist
’s work at the intersection of Jungian analysis and somatics to be helpful and grounding, especially in understanding that “shadow work,” whatever the internet or your favorite spiritual Instagram account means by that term, can’t really be done alone, the tension between aloneness and union another theme of anything Piscean, lunar, eclipsed.I’m happy, of course, to offer interpretative help and guidance for those of you who want an astrological or tarot lens on what this week’s full moon eclipse might sync up with for you. This is the first north-node eclipse we’ve had in this area of the sky in 18.6 years. It was sitting with Saturn and Neptune; it makes death and grief bigger. But when things get bigger, we can sometimes get a better view of what and who they are, what and who we are, too.
Comments are open for paid subscribers and so is the chat. Sending well wishes and gratitude.