The Romance and History of Porches, Astronauts Adrift in Space, Bigfoot's Curious Relationship with Florida
Plus friendship breakups, waterbed fanatics, book club cookies, and more.
Good morning chickadees, I hope you slept well. After a lifetime of being an avid, vivid dreamer, a couple months ago, I began losing touch with most of my dreams, but after far too long in the strange and unfamiliar darkened halls of sleep, I was recently visited by a dream so lucid that it felt as if it came to me from an area of the universe where I exist almost in lockstep with this variant of my self; the differences so infinitesimal that the heart beating within my chest in this world struggled to make sense of its faraway echo in that world. The message that was sent fell into the lap of my dream-self and left an impression so indelible that I awoke with the impact of it heavy on my waking mind. I am someone who believes dreams (at least mine) are often prophetic and have dreamt lucidly before, so this came not as something particularly startling, but distinguishing enough that I haven’t let it wither away with time. The tools brought to me from that dream world are ones I’ll be taking forward with me in this one. I feel refreshed and, funnily, awakened. Here’s today’s song.
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Too Many Tabs Open
Inside the two-year fight to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas
Did You Know That Poetry Used to Be an Actual Olympic Sport?
She died riding her beloved horse. Now, it will be on Olympic stage in her memory.
He Wrote a Story About Joy, Then Built a Tiny World to Match
Did the U.K.’s Most Infamous Family Massacre End in a Wrongful Conviction?
People are flying across the world to illegally climb California’s redwoods
Binge Reading: New Books on the Eating Disorder Industrial Complex
Did You See This
The Los Angeles Times is “decoding H2[O] during [LA]’s most sizzling season” with their big, wet guide to water — from where to find the best selection of water in the city and hydration supplements, to why the Berkey water filter is currently embroiled in scandal, and this particularly scintillating story about a handful of waterbed adherents throughout Southern California. I knew waterbeds were invented in the 1960s, but had no idea the creator of them was a 24-year-old graduate student who called his prototype the “Pleasure Pit.” Hilarious. The story also features a pleasant sky-blue background and the occasional thick, bubbly font made to look like water droplets that I wish I could trail my fingers across.
Alexandra Tanner wrote in April of posting into the vacuum that is an alt account and how it helped reshape the way she processed the riptides of her emotions; it made me think fondly of the ways in which a smattering of friends and I have created a sort of shared diary — a vestibule of intimacy birthed by our willingness to inhabit fully our most vulnerable and pronounced selves, the nature of our humanity acting as the glue that holds us together. The space we share is small and confidential and diaphanous — a sluice for our emotions and all their incongruities, a playground for us to laugh, to cry, to shriek together — and the space Tanner created for herself, then invited her own friends into, seems much the same. To air out the ugliest, the most dazzling, the most temporal, the most singular of your feelings is a distillation for an audience of mostly yourself but also your more perceptive, compassionate, sympathetic friends. I could write at length about this, but instead, I suggest reading Tanner’s story — it’s the superior option.
All I really thought about the internet’s favorite topic last week was that, while Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm’s life would personally leave me despondent, I was mostly just wondering why so many of these stories about trad wives continue to ignore the factors of race — particularly whiteness — and affluence that are involved in maintaining the mythos surrounding this very deliberate sphere of influence; like hello, their narrative ultimately hinges on a one-dimensional and exclusionary perspective that intersects almost effortlessly with white supremacist ideals.
I also think so many people are filtering their humanizing of Neeleman through pity because they’re being made to understand that what, for them, is just a passing trend — cottagecore, trad wife, whatever you want to call it — is a fallacy. This is not a lifestyle these women are simply dressing themselves up with, but the natural order of the religion they were cultivated within and continue to choose for themselves every day. They present it as an enviable option for women most like them, something outsiders either perceive as execrable or desirable, and they work to appeal to both sides of the pendulum. Now the unsuspecting sides of their audiences feel that they’ve been made fools, and so wish to see Neeleman as one too. This piece, published here on Substack, on “the imagined victimhood of conservative women” does a good job of reaching toward some of my feelings about the whole thing. I think it’s time I finally read They Were Her Property.
Was anyone else a Sweet Valley High fan as a kid? I still remember vividly meandering from the children’s quarters of the library into the sprawling young adult section and, almost as if by some sort of divine calling — but really, I was just drawn to the retro covers — plucking a copy of Sweet Valley High from a shelf, flipping through its pages, and shoveling the rest of what looked like a series into my arms. I blew through the stack I’d taken home and went back for more a few days later. This became something of a ritual for me.
The books were silly and dated and terribly formulaic, often contradicted themselves (due to the cabal of ghostwriters behind the series) despite an alleged “bible” that kept coherent the lore of the Sweet Valley universe, and not to mention that they were morally questionable at times. But there was still something intoxicating about them to me as a child. I enjoyed living vicariously through the neatly contained adventures that took place on the page, and they acted as a break from the more adult, literary fiction I was already reading.
Interestingly, this is something I still do — read within my preferred wheelhouse, fall into a reading slump, use more conventional, pithy fiction to escape said slump, et voilà. I’m pretty sure the chronic mentions of Elizabeth (the sensible twin) and Jessica (the mischievous one) being “perfect size sixes” were what advanced my understanding of redundancy in writing. The series was so formative for me that I started a newsletter (talk about coming full circle) that I physically distributed amongst my friends every week, named The Unicorn Club, inspired by characters from the Sweet Valley Twins series.
I haven’t read the series since I was a child, although I will occasionally listen to a Sweet Valley episode of Teen Creeps for nostalgia’s sake. Learning of Francine Pascal’s (the original writer and creator of the series) passing made me gasp so loud that my husband thought something terrible had happened to me, but I was merely of a time in my life that helped nurture my childish visions of hopefully someday becoming a writer too. Maybe this will be the year I step back into the world of Sweet Valley, just to see what it’s like from the future. If not that, though, maybe I’ll just find an episode of the television adaptation on YouTube.
Imagining 14-year-old Layan Albaz calling and calling her best friend, Samaa, after hearing of several martyrs who shared the same last name as her friend’s family being hospitalized nearby, and finding herself met with the incessant ring of a dial tone instead of the voice of her closest confidant on the other end of the line is gut-wrenching. For Albaz to then lose both her legs nine days later is such an unfathomable experience that my heart physically aches for her. To pile atop the loss of her home, her best friend, and her legs that had to be amputated without anesthesia, one of Albaz’s sisters and her niece died in front of her. “To this day it’s in my mind. Just right in front of me,” she said. Others in her family died too, including a newborn baby. The friendship necklace that bound her to Samaa was lost to the rubble of Gaza’s destruction. She underwent five more surgical procedures, and still, only one of them could be performed under anesthesia. She traveled to the United States on her own to receive additional surgery and to be fitted for prosthetic legs. There is more to Layan Albaz’s story, like the relationship she has developed with her sorta kinda foster sisters, the unity she shares with her physical therapist, that she has hopes and dreams that live beyond the atrocities that have been inflicted upon her.
As an international adoptee, I love discovering stories of other adoptees, and this particular account, written by a woman who, along with her two brothers that were also adopted (into separate families), began searching for their biological mother, is one of them. I really appreciate any adoptee’s willingness to speak to their experiences and felt a lot of kinship in Casey Khan expressing how her '“real,” “actual” family is her adopted family, yet still, how impactful a moment it was to recognize herself in the face of her biological mother.
Remember “Bad Art Friend”? This story is like that if it were a soap opera instead of a staged play. Or maybe the other way around? Whatever. There are so many moving parts to this piece that I kept scrolling back up to look at the pictures of each person involved so I could imagine them as they were portrayed on the page. But trying to commit their images to memory proved impossible as I found myself so consumed in the theatre of their past lives that they blurred inexorably together. This is a spiderweb of a shared narrative about a group of once-upon-a-time friends sleeping together, fracturing their relationships, and cratering (and cannibalizing) their lives, which they then, as writers are wont to do, draw upon for inspiration to write blithely about one another’s responsive behavior as an unflinching result of it all.
This was hypnotic — everyone seems to be almost perfectly supercilious, the tension is so heavy that it’s practically veiled their lives in the condensation of what once, rather than what now is. Telling someone, “I’ve already imagined the thing that you’re going through, and I’ve written it down — that’s how unoriginal you are,” is absolutely wild. Ada Limón and Ann Beattie even make the briefest of appearances. I now legitimately want to read the stories everyone wrote about the seismic shifting of their lives.
The history of the American porch is more romantic and impressive and influential and practical in the evolution of the United States than I realized. This essay thoughtfully chronicles the transformation and significance of porches throughout American life, especially in the context of changing climates and health beliefs over time. It also addresses the decline of porches in the modern age, which I’m not denying, but I also feel like they’re alive and well in the Southeast. I swear, whenever I’m visiting that part of the country, I pass at least half a dozen people a day sitting on a porch, enjoying the view, and an almost-envy blooms in my chest.
I don’t have much to say about this story, published in The Paris Review, about a Bigfoot conference held in north-central Florida a couple of months ago, other than that I really liked it and think many of you may too.
NASA and Boeing don’t want people saying their astronauts are “stranded” in space, so I’ll put it this way instead: after just over two months, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore continue to float aimlessly and indefinitely among the stars. Why? Because they’ve been made to languish while waiting for the spacecraft they traveled to the cosmos on to hopefully be fixed juuuust well enough for them to finally, safely return home to their families, their lives, and the solid earth beneath their feet.
New on the Shelf
Two books titled The Horse were released this week, and The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, written by Timothy C. Winegard and published by Dutton, is one of them. “Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands. Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back.”
Now available in paperback is Clarice Lispector’s The Besieged City, translated by Johnny Lorenz and published by New Directions. “Rich with visions, miraculous horses, and linguistic ecstasy, The Besieged City stars Lucrécia. Clarice Lispector’s heroine is a materialistic girl free of the burden of thought: “Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.”Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors—soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus—are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with São Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, São Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive—a viaduct—it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman’s superficiality—her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s parlor—that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on ‘the mystery of the thing.’”
Reading Chloe Norman’s interview with Jessica Anthony, author of The Most, published by Little, Brown and Company this week, is what put this new release on my radar. “It’s November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn’t particularly happy in his job, but he fulfills the role. Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis champion with a key shot up her sleeve, is now a mother and homemaker. On this unseasonably warm Sunday, Kathleen decides not to join her family at church. Instead, she unearths her old, red bathing suit and descends into the deserted swimming pool of their apartment complex in Newark, Delaware. And then she won’t come out.”
Another new paperback release is National Book Award-winning author Yu Miri’s The End of August, translated by Morgan Giles and published by Riverhead. “In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag. Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.”
The Wedding People, written by Alison Espach and published by Henry Holt & Company, is a novel that I am assuming, based on the description and (admittedly) the cover, sits outside my typical area of interest, but after reading Espach’s The Adults when it was initially released and falling in love with her writing, she is one of those authors whose every piece of work I will read regardless of what it’s about. More than a decade passed between Espach’s debut and sophomore novels, so I am honestly just considering the last couple of years a feast after so long a famine. “It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn't here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she's dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can't stop confiding in each other.”
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The Graze
My husband and I watched John Waters’s Serial Mom this week, and it was just the laugh I needed.
Did anyone else’s YouTube algorithm put this song on their homepage? I honestly love it. It’s morbid and hilarious, but is also just really good.
I haven’t stopped listening to Moses Sumney’s latest EP, Sophcore, which was released on Friday. It is drenched in the sultry, sweaty sounds of R&B and evokes long, balmy nights roaming the city with friends, only to spend the next day luxuriating in bed with your lover. Molly Lambert spoke with Sumney for Vulture, and he discusses throughout the profile “radical vulnerability” and how sadness and sensuality can exist in concert with one another, along with romance, isolation, and not feeling of this earth; it made me want to be his friend. Love’s Refrain is so beautiful I could cry.
After premiering live on the Criterion Channel last week, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is now streaming on their platform so I finally watched the movie this weekend and need desperately to talk with anyone else who has seen it.
The energy I wish to embody this month is “playfulness,” and the whimsicality of Madonna’s What It Feels Like for a Girl is already helping me shed July’s enfeeblement, allowing me to welcome a more lighthearted spirit with open, jocular arms.
Sour Reflections
One of my friends in my IRL book and perfume club is hosting a potluck tea party for us to discuss her selections this afternoon so I made a floral, minty herbal tea blend for a cooling, hydrating drink to sip on what will surely be another hot summer day. I also baked rich, nourishing maca, cinnamon, and ginger cookies that I dreamt (unrelated to the aforementioned dream above) of earlier in the week and decided to bring to life. They came out a little ugly, but one of my friends said they look like the surface of the moon, which is a perspective I will now embrace. Despite their otherworldly appearance, they are so good, so yummy, and I am in love with their earthy, gingery flavor and soft mouthfeel. I think they’ll be perfect companions to mugs of hot chocolate and cups of peppermint tea and dessert after a hearty stew this fall and winter.
Don’t forget to join us for book club this month! We’re reading Hangman by Maya Binyam.
Last week, a few of you pledged subscriptions to Barn Sour, and I may or may not have shed a tear or two from how moved I was — and still am! — by the gesture. I know loves from my life read Barn Sour, but it’s hard to gauge the overall sentiments of my readership, so it means a lot to me knowing that some of you are enjoying this so much that you’re willing to support it in such a big way. It’s unbelievably amazing to me! I am grateful beyond belief. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love being here with you all. I would also love to know what aspects of Barn Sour you’re enjoying the most so I can refine them in the most beneficial way for you. <3
Layan's story made me sob, and the fact that she lost her matching sun pendant friendship necklace from Samaa after holding onto it for so long through all this tragedy breaks my heart even more. And hearing these countless stories of young children undergoing several surgical procedures without any anesthesia or pain medication makes me so sick to my stomach. May she get the care, peace, justice, and safety she deserves. Thank you for including her story and for this wonderful Barn Sour post 💗
Wow that essay on cruising was too good! I loved this part:
If cruising, like every human project, was flawed and sometimes dangerous or problematic, it was at least, and could be again, an attempt at more: more pleasure, more joy, more contact, more freedom than is currently accessible to us. It was an effort to construct a social ecology with room for different uses of the city, different possibilities of experience, and an understanding of how communities with diverse interests and practices might learn to coexist. That is a vision worth preserving.
The Bigfoot article was a fun read and made me chuckle a few times. When I was 8, I was convinced I saw Bigfoot. But then I got older and thought it was most likely somebody wearing a Chewbacca costume because I didn’t think Bigfoot would casually be crossing a deserted church parking lot in the middle of the day in Sacramento.
Of the ones I’ve read so far (slowly catching up), these letters have been nourishing my curiosity. I’m delighted I’ll be able to read your writing more often here at Barn Sour. Thank you for sharing with us all these essays/articles, books, and especially your thoughts <3
I’m enjoying all of it, but my music lover heart does appreciate discovering new songs from the ones you share, and I really love the Too Many Tabs Open section as I can get to a few after I finish reading the letter and save the rest for another time.