Hard to write about this book without spoilers, so let me just say I raved to the group chat that this deserves to be as well known as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and a dear Goth friend got it from the library and read it and replied Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Which is the correct reaction.
One of the most spectacularly unreliable narrators I have encountered, telling an entirely different story from the one she thinks she is. So brilliantly and exquisitely done. Just read it. (NYRB Classics is about my favorite publisher these days, reprinting so many twentieth century women writers who should be incessantly praised.)
I am so profoundly torn about the shuttle program. It represented the democratization of space. Its astronaut class, the thirty-five new guys, was the first to include women and people of color. Dad and my brothers and I got up before dawn to watch Columbia’s first launch. When I took the kids to see Endeavour in Los Angeles, I cried. This awkward camel of a spacecraft made the universe bigger: no shuttle, no Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’m such a fucking fangirl, I have NASA plates on my car.
But NASA straight up murdered the Challenger 7. The agency’s budget peaked during the Apollo program, and the diversity of astronaut class eight was an attempt to build public support for space exploration. It kind of worked! Everybody loved Sally Ride, the hot bi butch with the name right out of Mustang Sally! That line of reasoning led to putting a social studies teacher on top of a missile and, in the presence of her parents who were on camera as these events took place, blowing her up.
NASA’s position was: look at all we can do, with how little money! Everyone can play, even the girls and the brown people! Just keep letting us fly rockets. Politicians were all, I wish to associate myself with these impressive feats! But no, you can’t have any more money. Meanwhile engineers at Morton-Thiokol knew the O-rings would fail at low temperatures. There was an impassioned conference call about it the night before the launch. NASA had so many chances not to kill these seven incredible and accomplished people, and it missed them all.
And then seventeen years later, it did it again.
I think this particular book hit so hard in this election year because we are all of us helpless passengers on a spaceship out of control. Anyway, my hyperfixation – after this book I borrowed everything the SFPL had on the space programs. My standouts: Michael Collins is the best writer of the Apollo astronauts – as somebody somewhere said, his Carrying the Fire reads like EB White got a trip to the moon. First Man is an extraordinary, very literary biography of Armstrong, adapted into maybe my favorite space movie since The Martian. (Armstrong was a near-contemporary of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose An Angel at my Table made a striking compare-and-contrast to First Man. Tl; dr much better to be a weird clever man in the 20th century than a weird clever woman.)
Bringing Columbia Home is the kind of awkwardly written but almost unbearably moving account of the recovery of those astronauts. Leaving Orbit, about the last flights of the shuttle, has a similarly elegiac mood. Finally, the podcast The Space Above Us, which deals with crewed space missions one at a time, kept me and Jeremy enthralled on an entire 12-hour road trip home from Portland. A gem of the genre.
Posted in bookmaggot, grief, history|Comments Off on favorite books i read in 2024: challenger
In January 2014, the four of us were flying home from a Christmas trip to Australia. We transited in Auckland and I called my mother, who had seen her oncologist while we were in the air. “He said that it is in my stomach, in a knot. He said that this is the end.” Whenever I fly through Auckland now I can feel it, my knees buckling, my 8yo and 11yo trying to hold me up. We flew on to San Francisco where I held my beloved and very elderly cat Bebe while I booked my own flight back to Australia. I left Jeremy to take care of those scared little kids, and I never saw Bebe again.
When I got to Barraba Mum had been set up in the palliative care room at the local hospital, which had its own lounge with foldout sofas. My brothers and her friends would come and go. We played mah jongg for hours. I curled up with Mum on the sofa and we watched the Last of the Summer Wine on my laptop. Her friends had made her a beautiful patchwork quilt and we wrapped ourselves in it. There was so much joy. The nurses said it sounded like we were having a family holiday, and we were. We told a lot of jokes. One morning I asked her what she wanted for breakfast: “Gin and tonic.” “Coming right up!”
I sometimes say that Mum went nova. In four weeks she poured out twenty years of unconditional love. When Bebe died, Mum held me and said, “It’s okay to cry.” I said “Mum, if I start crying, I’ll never stop.” She said, “Yes you will.” I think about that all the time.
When she died, the nurses let me help wash her body, and I cried, and I kissed her cooling flesh. It was the honor of my life to attend at my mother’s death. I think of the radiance of her love, and I think of my clarity in the moment. Let me carry that grace in my heart and hands all the days of my life.
We wouldn’t exist without the obliterating smack of cosmic rock that plowed itself into the ancient Yucatán. Both stories are present in that moment. The rise and the fall are inextricable.
Posted in bookmaggot, history|Comments Off on the last days of the dinosaurs, by riley black
In current traffic conditions, a taxi from JFK takes about seven years to get to Lower Manhattan. It gave me a lot of time to think. The phrase I thought about was structural violence. The soaring new condos with their empty billionaire penthouses are panopticon eyes glaring at the property values below. While as a queer theatre kid I am contractually obligated to love New York, Succession and the art of Diamanda Galas and Basquiat and the memoirs of ballerinas and the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton have always kept its icy, Gothic nature in sharp focus.
That’s incomplete, as anything about the city must necessarily be. We visited the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. It’s extraordinary, an entire subway station filled with buses and old carriages, their period advertisements intact. The surveyors and engineers and miners who built the subway challenge your gaze in exquisite photographs taken during construction. The contributions of immigrant and Black workers, and the way the political machines divided and exploited them, are carefully described.
It’s a terrific museum and I love museums, even the bad ones. I’m still thinking about an hour I spent last year at the museum of Las Vegas, New Mexico. It dwelt on Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, cowboys he recruited as cavalry whose exceedingly brief (and horseless) campaign in Cuba formed the mythos for his presidential bid. The Rough Riders took their name from Buffalo Bill Cody’s stage show, and included Ivy League athletes and glee club singers as well as frontiersmen. The white version of the Wild West is a PR campaign designed to erase the Black and indigenous history of these lands.
The Rough Riders met to celebrate their weeks-long active service every year for the next seventy years. In her book The White Possessive, Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes:
It takes a great deal of work to maintain Canada, the United States, Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Australia as white possessions.
Since I read that I haven’t been able to stop seeing the work, in everything from high-end residential architecture to little museums. What if we just… stopped?
Posted in history, politics|Comments Off on structural violence and little museums
…there is no exclusively ‘white’ history of Australia—when we—First Nations people—have always been here. There is no ‘Black’ history of Australia in the last 240-plus years, either. We are each other’s shadows. To make sense of our shared history, we need to go back to the very beginning.
For Easter I rewatched my favorite film, Jesus of Montreal, and reread my favorite novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Both of these, along with the sonnets of Donne and Hopkins, the complete novels of Graham Greene and the second season of Fleabag, describe unhappy love affairs with God, which I suppose makes that one of my favorite genres. At one point Angel Archer quotes Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” in its entirety. My unsettled mind latched onto “Reason, thy viceroy in me” and has been worrying it like a broken tooth ever since.
It’s easier to leave some parts of the church than others. It’s easier to leave the smiling horrible minister who was raping a teenager in the vestry, and all the others like him, easier to leave the inerrancy of scripture and a scholarship fund called Sons of the Parish than it is to leave sixteenth century choral music and the enigma of Jesus himself, remote as the Nabateans one minute, immediate as any other Palestinian freedom-fighter the next. I think Jesus is hardest to understand, or maybe believe, when he is at his simplest and most direct. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Okay I get that, I do, but Jesus I’m genuinely worried I haven’t saved enough for retirement?
Consider the lilies of the field, says Jesus, and I consider them a lot actually. Louise, my house’s benevolent ghost, planted calla lilies and roses in the garden, and while I indulge her survivor roses, I dig the calla lilies out by their roots as soon as I catch so much as a tender leaf unfurling. Sure, I can say they’re invasive and toxic to cats and that I’m trying to nurture wildlife habitat here, and God could say the same about me. This is Ramaytush land, pull me out by my roots, three-person’d God, you coward. So the lilies of the field are cold comfort to be honest.
My high school librarian Marie Suchting, may her name be blessed forever, never reread anything – she didn’t have time – but I circle back endlessly searching for clues. How in God’s name did I end up here? What ridiculous superposition of texts made this set of choices seem logical? I just wanted to be safe and happy and not to have to hurt anyone, and here I am working in the tech industry. Humbling to acknowledge how much of my ethics I owe to Hawkeye Pierce, how great my debt to Felicity Kendall in The Good Life. Reason, thy viceroy in me, frankly derives its political legitimacy from highly dubious grounds.
Having traced my mother’s family to the Kingdom of Mercia I am in gales of laughter over the title of the most important surviving text in the Mercian language: The Old English Martyrology. Even other people who knew my mother and grandmother don’t think it’s as funny as I do. Story of my life.
Three years ago Daria described the fall of the Soviet Union to me. She said, Nastya, one day the light went out and the spirits came back. And we returned to the forest.
I’m sad she’s dead, for the usual human and parasocial reasons.
I’m genuinely curious if also worried about what comes next.
And I’m angry, I am so so angry, about the British empire.
As a white Australian I exist because of what Britain saw as surplus population it could send to administer its stolen wealth. The ways in which my life was predetermined, the ways in which I was raised and educated to be a colonial bureaucrat, were callous and calculating and fundamentally genocidal, and have left me traumatized.
The thing about Elizabeth. The thing! That I managed to grope towards just now, is that she was a human sacrifice to empire. She had no choice and no escape. She had to do her duty.
And she did her duty flawlessly. She was incredible at it. A genuinely awe-inspiring triumph of will.
And she shouldn’t have done that. For two reasons. One (the most important) is because the Empire is a death cult that murdered millions on her watch. The other is that her performance of that duty is and always will be forced on the rest of us as the standard we will inevitably fail to meet.
I admire her. But I will not seek to emulate her. Her indulgence of powerful men and her racism were ruinous even in her immediate family, and catastrophic for the world. What she did so amazingly well is a thing that should never have been done.
