It’s been a while. Below are my missed synaptic connections, thoughts I’ve turned over and over in newly-formed neurons but couldn’t quite electrify into fully-functioning thoughts.

  • i’ll make a myth out of you: make me into something better; or pretend i’m someone better
  • a table set for you and who: an invitation into harry’s house
  • here’s the succession plot: can we stop renewing this for another season


💌


i’ll make a myth out of you

It’s summer in New York. Muggy skies, sweltering humidity. I like writing about the seasons, the constant change with a recognizable face.

I spent the spring wrapped up in the most famous of abduction myths, Hades and Persephone and the melodramatic way the Greeks explained away the despair of a season. My understanding of the tale was caked with assumptions: what I knew from Homer’s source material through countless reinterpretations by classical scholars and antiquity fans. I had to dust off canon from criticism, and revel in the lack of fact in myth: I’ve found my own interpretation in the sea of stories and there’s something comforting in that we all have a branch of myth that we believe in and carry with us.

I think I’m writing this now, when the spring has bloomed and summer is not yet ripe, because I spent the past few months spinning these sensibilities in my head in search of meaning. I have two working theories.

theory i: make me into something better

The first is the the promise of escapist transformation. For Gawker, Jenny Zhang wrote “Forget Horse Girls, Embrace the Mythology Freak” last fall, and these ideas make a weary sort of sense. The antiquity poets and orators were obsessed with transformation; they wrote it into the tragic tales of characters and promised it would reveal something truer about the divinity within someone. That perhaps they were more or lesser than all along. For the rest of us, it’s one of those things where you had to have been there to know what it really meant; something contradictory about how the Greek stories were so unkind to women but the nebulous forces of girlhood molded us closer to a mythic past: “I would trace the contours of an alternate reality in my mind and envision where I could fit in, the new roles and selves I could inhabit.”

Our lives are so simple. I am realizing (now) we spend most of our postgraduate existence reckoning with how unremarkable our lives are, and we weigh ourselves down with the stones of denial and continue to swim against the current toward elusive novelty. The New Yorker did an excellent elaboration of Greek tragedy as a coping mechanism during the pandemic, and I’m reminded that theatre is merely a projection of feelings we’re too scared to have as humans. Instead, we dress them up in the vilest of situations. Gods and monsters. This is my misplaced nostalgia rearing its head; the reason why we first hear a myth as a child and it still haunts us when we grow up.

“But often there is no existence-altering transformation, no magical shifting of skin and bone, spirit and soul; you discover that it’s merely yourself staring back at you from the fold. To go from a lore child to a lore adult is a crushing, drawn-out process of realizing the mundanity of most existences.”

theory ii: pretend i’m someone better

The second is a perverse approximation of cultural capital. Nothing screams well-cultured and well-read like a comfortable familiarity with the religious rites of Western civilization. To cite references to these gods is to speak the secret language passed through lineages that are not yours. I can make my citations, but I will never make it all the way to the pinnacle of the Western canon.

Possessors of high cultural capital don’t read Percy Jackson; they were tutored in Latin when young and grew up in halls adorned with marble statues. Someone said the Greeks had importance, and that importance became the bedrock of the West, and then their stories became codified in scholarship. This is the prestige that Hades and Persephone and spring carry. When we hear the myth for the first time, the humanities are made accessible and resonant to the far caches of society. We continue listening because it maintains the appearance of a learned person; the exclusive luxury of familiar knowledge.

I love articulations of high versus low culture, because that’s the inner conflict of cultural criticism’s existential existence (what is culture? who gets to criticize it? what critiques are valid and uplifted?). It’s a tension that plucks taut in the in-between spaces of the educated elite and corporate glamour. You’re supposed to be well-versed in the Iliad in stuffy dining hall discussions, but you should also go to the beach with a copy of Madeline Miller’s Circe. (As an aside and unsolicited book review, I finally hate-finished Circe out of duty. It was fine. I think she gets a lot of undue praise for her poetic eloquence, when her prose is simply good, sometimes great. There are occasionally breathtaking lines, but she writes overall in a very restrained tradition.)

I have started, and have only ever gotten a few chapters into, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but that’s the vibe. The cover features a marble bust of a figure that only could have been important enough to be carved into stone. It represents the smooth classical curves of a culture that was here long before we were, and will endure long after we are gone. We get close. We get close by reading the sources and fixating on characters and dropping references when it suits us. These old stories are still held in esteem because they are divine mirrors of who we are and we keep reaching out toward them. Maybe if we insist upon it enough, we can claw our way to belonging.

a table set for you and who

an invitation into harry’s house

This is the the Harry Styles album review that literally nobody asked for. We’re in Harry’s House, sitting in his living room listening to this album on vinyl with a glass of sparkling wine. No lede of music review has brought me greater joy than this one in Pitchfork: “When a teen idol becomes a rock star, he announces it with a Rolling Stone spread […] When a rock star becomes a lifestyle influencer, he announces it with a Better Homes & Gardens cover.”

There was no one more surprised than I was two-and-a-half years ago when I sat down and listened to Harry’s sophomore album, Fine Line, at length and became a fan of his music. I still think Fine Line is a modern masterpiece and Harry has entered the select echelon of musicians where I could sing along to almost all of the discography during a live performance. Harry’s House is calmer; less morose than Fine Line and less bombastic than his debut, Harry Styles. This album has dominated my Spotify rotation for the last two weeks, and so I’m here to make sense of what I’m hearing.

Curated domesticity envelopes this album; and make no mistake, he wrote this in the cozy blanket of indoor quarantine vibes. If Taylor’s folklore stopped lighting candles in the woods after midnight and turned on the diffuser by the reading nook instead to produce Harry’s Harry’s House. I have learned one truth from the most recent Harry Styles album cycle: he is not a good lyricist. But that’s okay. He has a great voice and an even better production team; amplified by lots of suave charisma and rocker flair that carry his sound further than other contemporary young male artists. The lyrics on this album aren’t great, largely relying on repetitive hooks and clipped imagery to invoke sensation. That’s cozy quarantine vibes, I guess—just vibe, sparse substance.

  • house highlights: daylight, satellite, late night talking, as it was, keep driving
  • house goodlights: grapejuice, little freak, cinema, matilda, music for a sushi restaurant
  • house lowlights: daydreaming, boyfriends, love of my life

here’s the succession plot

can we stop renewing this for another season

In a matter of months, we’ve watched three shows about brilliant tech founders creating and destroying their fortunes. Something Adam, something Elizabeth, something Travis. It must be fascinating when the glamour and luxury of tech only exists as an app on the phone or within a Wall Street Journal expose; and most, if not all, people, are completely detached from the drama. They love the schemes and solitaire. But it all feels so provincial, parochial even, when you’re one of those tiny people in the big office building looking up.

This New Yorker feature said it better about modern grifter series, “True Grift”: “Bad Entrepreneur TV, even when it’s good, makes for more antiseptic viewing than earlier antihero sagas.” They call it comfort food. That we’re not stupid; that it’s the hubris of capitalism portrayed by attractive celebrity counterparts.

I don’t have much to say or show for the past few months of succession spring except to say, it’s not comfort food. It’s tonic water. It is bitter and unappetizing. It sours everything around it.

these past months

  • watched: if haven’t recommended bridgerton season 02 yet, then i haven’t spoken to you since last year
  • read: this is a series of essays published in the last few months about vibes and places that i enjoyed as a call and response; and i still don’t really get the vibe shift
  • listened:
  • quoted:

“talking about the weather is a way to acknowledge how absurd it is that time passes and yet here we are, standing in the middle of it, mixing memory and desire.” —”fool’s spring”