A sweet-bright February hello from the day after a glorious sunset. In the remaining weeks of this month, I have a new poem coming out in Aniko Press’s third issue, and the thirteenth issue of Starling will go live. The latter is happening on the 22nd. There’ll also be an online reading of sorts, with a selection of audiovisual morsels for you to consume. If that’s your jam. [Here a slow, low-stakes ba-dum-tss.] But that’s the promotion out of the way.
I received a small pumpkin in the mail recently, along with another of the ornate cards from this newsletter’s Best Supporting Contributor. Also in the package—which was larger than any exchange between myself and this friend has ever been—was a collection of DVDs. As a result, C and I have come to communicate our love through screeds of live iMessage reactions as televisual events unfold. Not unlike K and I, really, with A Discovery of Witches.1 The show C has got me hooked on is supernatural as well (though, crucially, not Supernatural), which is funny because I don’t much go in for that kind of thing. I loved It (2017), for example, but could’ve done without the clown interrupting.
They’ve been texting each other, K and C—sending screenshots of my live reactions. And then sending me screenshots of their reactions to those screenshots. And so life goes on. In writing this, I’m realising how many of my friendships have become digital. Every single one of them now lives in my phone.2
The television show I’m watching is a favourite of C’s, and I’m enjoying it. I can appreciate the supernatural plot elements as a high concept vehicle around which the character relationships—the thing I do go in for—then orbit.3 Plenty of it hasn’t aged well, either in terms of special effects (which we love, because camp) or ideology (which you can’t help but acknowledge, and wish in tandem that these characters could exist un[Creator’s Surname]ified). And—not discounting those things with a “but”—there are some excellent zingers. And compelling performances.4 And it’s nice to step into a world I can so readily share with someone I love. (I know it always comes back to love with these newsletters. But it’s all we’ve got.)
Watching a show as truly serial as this one is also a great crash course in structure. The tags between scenes are so tight I’m automatically a step ahead of what’s coming. Sometimes it spoils the humour or pathos of a misdirect, but I can’t help acknowledging its usefulness. There’s a circularity of plot inherent to this show. It’s the same as in any good storytelling—callbacks that fuel comedy by making you feel part of something, an in-joke; loss that hurts all the more because you so recognise the absence. Perhaps I notice it so much here because this show was made pre-binge era. But I’m also always unpacking television.
This show feels safe to do that with, especially because I’m not sitting here wishing I’d made it. Sometimes when things fall especially into my ballpark I’m filled, alongside love,5 with a kind of heavy-tongued sadness, reminded of the screen that exists between myself and the creative process behind this product, and of the distance between myself and the people who are getting paid to wake up each day and put it all together. To get to see it through. I’m very aware of my paradoxical relationship with storytelling: consuming it out of love; becoming so devoted to it that I decide I want to spend my life surrounded by, and actively involved in, it; finding myself unable to engage with it because it has consumed me back, and what was an embrace has dissolved into perceived rejection.6 With that said, all I seem to write about is wanting to write. What I’ll do when I feel I’ve been allowed to is currently beyond me.7
In other news, I’ve been playing a lot of Quordle. I’ve settled in to a new job. I’ve been waking up early, and coming home in traffic, and am beginning to think that love and all the rest is anchored in distance, and that the gap in between is potential, and that’s best and worst of all. And over the course of writing this newsletter I’ve had texts from C and K. They’re like wet gold paint and the whole sky. I’m gonna send back the full gamut of tongued emojis.
Stay glad and gorgeous,
T
I realise now I hadn’t mentioned the title of the show in the previous newsletter. Perhaps I’ll come back and delete this in the future. Who knows! You can have that title for the price of this bouquet’s one.
[Here a very large kiss to England]
I’m trying to let myself say things like this without reflexively being like, “oh, gag, exhausting!”, because, sure, maybe, but I’m also sick of this Marvel-disease tendency to undercut any kind of sincerity with a yoink! I’m full of laffs! So, here we are. (It also disrupts the flow something awful.)
And a terrible Irish accent which could have so easily been avoided, and narratively would have been stronger had the character been English, anyway.
And inspiration, of course. (And aspiration!) (And perspiration!) (Nope!)
Promise it’s not always this tortured, xoxoxo.
Hint: it’ll be love.
It’s always love. Even the writing about wanting to write is love. About joy, or the lack of it en route to abundance.