Happy Saturday, bibliophiles, and more importantly, HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃🍬🐈⬛ I hope you all have a wonderfully spooky day!
Four posts in a week (Sunday Songs is coming as scheduled!)…I probably haven’t done that since, what, 2020? Yeah, the only reason I could keep up posting so many things per week on here was because being inside during COVID gave me way more time on my hands. The only reason it happened this week was because half of them (including this one) were pre-planned. Enjoy it while it lasts!
GENERAL THOUGHTS:
Unemployment summer is over, and I’m here to report that unemployment fall is…not nearly as fun. Most of the past few months got swallowed up by job hunting, which was pretty disheartening, to say the least. Thankfully, I did get a job after all! I should be starting it soon, which, after months of sending out my resume and getting either no response or rejections, is a huge relief. Just to give you all a heads up—my schedule’s still up in the air, but you can definitely expect things to slow down over here in the next few weeks since I’m getting ready to start my job. Thankfully, it should give me enough time to still do a lot of the creative things I love, but my posts will probably be less rambly (maybe for the best) and less frequent.
Anyway, that’s taken up most of what’s notable from September and October, but I did have some time to go on vacation! I loved being among the fall leaves in Vail, and it was a much needed break. And between the job stuff, looking at grad schools (you want something scary for Halloween? EEK! Grad school tuition 😭), and trying to be a functioning adult, I did my best to try and make time for all of my creative stuff. In spite of employment, my book ramblings and alien drawings will persist. One of the highlights of September was reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s Words Are My Matter, which jumpstarted my inspiration for worldbuilding and writing, so she’s been putting kindling on the fire for the past two months. I’ve also become a sort of woke book fairy—I went through my bookshelves at home and found some books to donate (with trans people, people of color, queer people, etc) to a little free library near my neighborhood. Women want me, Republican legislators fear me.
Thankfully, 2026 has been stacked in terms of great things to watch, read, and experience. More on this below, but having a new Becky Chambers book to read made my month! I’ve been occupied with Taskmaster, The Great British Bakeoff, Avatar: Seven Havens, and Abbott Elementary. I also watched You Can See Everything a few days ago, and…all I’ll say is that I need some sort of soul shower. I feel like Elizabeth’s Holmes’s eyes are imprinted on the back of my corneas. Christ.
But the best experience of all was the Monday before last, when I finally got to see Phoebe Bridgers in Denver! I’ve missed out on multiple chances to see her, and it was worth every penny to see her on this tour. I dressed up like an alien and screamed along with hundreds of strangers to “I Know The End,” and I think that healed the place inside of me that had been raw since 2020. Phoebe Bridgers, you are a national treasure. I’ll talk about it more soon, but in the meantime: there’s nothing like hearing the opening chord to “Motion Sickness” and then feeling the entire arena shake from everybody cheering.
And if you haven’t already: for those of you here in the States, VOTE! Yes, this system may be corrupt, but participating in democracy—and keeping the dream alive—is the best path forward to make sure that we can at least try to rein in this horrific administration. Check your registration if you haven’t already, and if you can, vote early!
SEPTEMBER READING WRAP-UP:
I read 14 books in September! I began the month on several very high notes, and ended it in a slight slump. But thankfully, that meant that there were so many books in between that were good or great—and I had some fun reading books for Bisexual Visibility Week and the first half of Latine Heritage Month!
I read 12 books in October! I think this may be my worst reading month in terms of the amount of books read, tied with February. Understandably, it’s because a) I’ve been getting ready for my job, and b) several of these books were sizable. But even though the month started out with a lot of misses, nothing redeems a reading wrap-up quite like a new book from the woman, the myth, the legend: Becky Chambers!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
So last week, I got a comment on one of my Sunday Songs posts commending my song/book pairings. At first, it was nice to be recognized…and then I realized that the comment reeked of AI, was inexplicably posted four separate times, and came from a website that makes AI-generated playlists based off of book pairings. BOO, TOMATO, TOMATO!! USE YOUR BRAIN! Anyway, as always, you can get your completely AI-free, human-made, pretentious book-music pairings from an exhausted post-grad right here, and you don’t have to use up enough water to fuel a city to do it. There’s no excuse to use AI for much of anything these days. But this? Why deprive yourself of fun?
This week: Ziggy Stardust didn’t need a lawyer, but I’m defending him anyway. Plus, Björk does show tunes and Cate Le Bon enhances everything that she touches.
I need to relinquish any shame that I have left about discovering great songs via social media. Sometimes you can stumble across random gems just from seeing some art on your cousin’s story. That’s the case with “Mefus,” and man, am I glad to have found this. How else would I have found a sunny, ’60s-inflected instrumental from some Welsh-language band that I’ve never heard of before? (I listened to all of this album, Fel Efeilliaid, the other day—it’s worth a listen, but “Mefus” remains my favorite track.) For all of the musicians desperately trying to sound like the ’60s and nosediving, Pys Melyn make it look easy; their plinking organs and shuffling drums seem like they were plucked straight from 1966. It sounds like what Wes Anderson would listen to on his morning jog. (Can’t you see this song soundtracking some of his meticulously-framed shots?) “Mefus” means strawberry in Welsh, and for a wordless song, it perfectly evokes summer sunlight and the carefree happiness of picking strawberries. Normally, I don’t gravitate towards instrumentals in terms of songs I have on repeat, but “Mefus” is nothing short of enchanting, a time capsule of the ’60s and of summers without a timestamp.
For all of the innovation on Post, I feel like there’s a case for “It’s Oh So Quiet” being one of the more solid pieces of proof of Björk’s genius—and the song isn’t even hers. It’s a cover of a Betty Hutton song from the ’50s, a show-tuney B-side that Björk’s tour manager at the time would frequently play in the van on tour. (That version is also a cover, in a way—it’s an English translation of a German song from 1948, “Und jeszt ist es still.”) Hutton’s version is loads of fun, but having listened to this cover for so long, it makes me weirdly anxious—it’s not supposed to be that fast! It’s too compressed! But it’s one of those covers that’s all but eclipsed the original, and it’s easy to see why.
Post is already a fairly weird album, considering how mainstream it got back in the mid-’90s, but nothing gets weirder than a solid stretch of cutting-edge electronics being unceremoniously interrupted by a ’50s show-tune popping up behind you like a jack-in-the-box. Strangely, the transition is barely jarring. To be fair, “The Modern Things” has the right kind of rhythm to ease you into “It’s Oh So Quiet.” But to me, it’s proof of Björk being a truly mercurial, unexpected presence in music. She morphs her tales of mysterious, post-apocalyptic, moss-covered presents and futures into a Broadway-like tune complete with clicking heels and a ’40s-style big band. And though Betty Hutton was doing some pretty impressive yelling on her own, you can’t talk about “It’s Oh So Quiet” without how Björk punctuates it with ecstatically wild screams. It cranks the intensity of the original—which already evoked the devil and bombs exploding—up to a thermometer-shattering level. It goes beyond love or lust and into something so all-consuming that it’s scarcely quantifiable in words—AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! And that’s why I think that mouse-quiet feinting between each chorus, slowed down from the original, works so well; it stretches out that tension like an accordion, truly lulling you into a false sense of security before the brass section detonates in your face. WOW, BAM! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
And I can’t not talk about Spike Jonze’s music video, and not for the plain reason that it’s an iconic touchstone in the history of ’90s music videos. “It’s Oh So Quiet” was the first Björk song that I ever fell in love with. I remember being genuinely spellbound by it when I was around six or seven (no way of getting around that). On its own, it felt like some part of my impressionable brain had been cracked straight open. But paired with the music video, which I distinctly remember watching with my mom huddled in the dark around the family computer, it was like tapping into some magical, unknown realm that I had no access to before. Of course, the magical realm was Björk, and I’d never be the same again. But the music video is just a pure joy. I’d fully believe it if this was just the effect that Björk naturally has on her environment: turning a sketchy tire shop into a dance floor, bringing mailboxes to life, and compelling entire hordes of strangers, from goths to businessmen in their suits and ties, into a spontaneous dance routine. And then she flies off. Manic pixie dream girl activities for anybody else, but that’s just Björk, and she’s naturally like that. It’s all very Amelie, pre-Amelie. Inexplicably, I started welling up when I rewatched the video for this post. Maybe it’s because it will always be that portal’s entrance to somewhere wondrous.
My formal apologies: sorry, Crane Wives, I wasn’t familiar with your game.
To be fair, before one of my dear friends sent me some of their newer material, I primarily associated The Crane Wives with the kind of folk-pop that goes viral on TikTok from really corny DnD edits. I swear that’s happened multiple times. Real shame for a band with a fantastic name. But as with a lot of things, I didn’t dig deep enough—and there’s more to them than meets the phone-sized eye. It seems like a lot of their songs on their latest album, Beyond Beyond Beyond, expanded their palette considerably. I, for one, didn’t expect to come into “Predator” with a bassline faintly reeking of Radiohead, of all bands. (See also: “Black Hole Fantasy,” which has a great six-minute languish to it.) It seems like they’re undergoing a kind of Shakey Graves arc, splintering out from the folk model and into more adventurous territory. Sure, “Predator” has its missteps—easy on the handclaps, dude—but it’s got a real propulsive instrumental, darkly askew and more alternative than I’d given them credit for, a tale of being trapped in your own harmful habits (and getting tangled up in the same harmful habits of other people). It’s refreshing to know that I was wrong about a band—and it was to fun to realize that The Crane Wives had more to them than meets the eye.
I put this on my Sunday Songs lineup because I’d listened to it again for the first time in a while, and predictably, fell in love with it all over again. But I didn’t stop and think that I’d be really writing about “Moonage Daydream.” What do you even say about “Moonage Daydream?” One of the most memorable singles from one of his most iconic albums of all time. The song that gave the name to Brett Morgen’s biopic/documentary/mind exploration from 2022. It was the track they put in Guardians of the Galaxy to great effect back in the day. The lyrics gave me my username on several other social media platforms. What the hell do you even say about “Moonage Daydream” that hasn’t already been said?
In a lot of Bowie fan spaces, there’s a kind of aversion amongst the die-hard fans towards the Ziggy era. I’m behind some of it—I feel like there’s a tendency for a lot of Bowie fans to gloss over all of the other radical transformations (both personal and musical) that he made over the span of his career in favor of only fixating on Ziggy Stardust and the glam era, and maybe a bit of his late ’70s work as a treat. On the one hand, it really is a disservice to disregard decades of his career, and if you listen to Bowie but only acknowledge the ’70s, you’re depriving yourself of so much of the mercurial artistry that he’s praised for. How can you understand that transformation if you don’t see the radical leaps he made from suit-and-tie pop star in the ’80s to the electronic, experimental mastermind of the ’90s, and so on? It’s made it weirdly uncool to like Ziggy the deeper you get into fan spaces.
Yet I find myself so defensive of the Ziggy/glam era; even as somebody who’s been poring through his discography for the better part of my life, it remains my favorite period of his, both aesthetically and musically. Part of that’s purely nostalgic, of course—you never forget your first love, and this is the first version of Bowie that I fell in love with. The specific confluence of the glam rock sound at its finest, the visual aesthetic, and the sci-fi themes combined with the inherent and coded queerness of a lot of lyrics scratches a way too specific itch in my brain. Yes, it was a persona like all the others, but I think we often gloss over the fact that every persona inadvertently represented parts of himself. For me, I’ve always seen it as something of a product of the shock and alienation he felt being thrust into the spotlight after being a struggling folkie barely making a splash in the industry for years. He was alien, no matter how he dressed. He felt like an alien.
And that’s what makes “Moonage Daydream” so staggering and important to this day. Beyond the hastily-crafted concept behind The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, it still stands as the cornerstone of what the album represented. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that ZiggyStardust, as grandiose as it is, has so many moments wanting to experience something real; I imagine it was a consequence of Bowie struggling to find a foothold anywhere and feeling alienated himself. From the quiet moments in “Soul Love” to the plastic-clad downfall of the titular “Ziggy Stardust,” there’s a yearning for the real behind the artificial. And that desire is what culminates in “Moonage Daydream,” a more straightforward love song behind all of the classically sci-fi lyrics. Behind the spandex, rayguns, and sensuality, Bowie wants to peel back what’s fake and fully fall in love. Could I be reading too much into it? Probably. But I think that’s what makes the yearning of this track feel authentic. Ziggy was always much more than the makeup and spandex—it was Bowie’s own desire to touch reality behind the artifice of modern life that he found himself suddenly faced with.
Also, the guitar solo just rips. God bless Mick Ronson.
The Cate Le Bon kick was bound to lead me to Dry Cleaning someday, but as with Me Oh My,my older brother was the impetus for listening to their newest album, Secret Love, which Le Bon produced. I’d vaguely heard of them in relation to her, but I’d never gotten around to listening to them. There’s no doubt that Secret Love has Le Bon’s magical fingerprints all over it; her thrumming bass, blasts of saxophone, and angular sensibilities translated well to the palette that Florence Shaw and co. already had going. Nonetheless, I have mixed feelings about the album. I think I’m just not fully on board with Shaw’s kind of post-ironic, dead-eyed kind of spoken word style. Sometimes it works in diagnosing the many ills of modern life, but at worst, it feels like some faux-deep thinkpiece I would’ve had to read for my women and gender studies minor. (Lookin’ at you, “My Soul/Half Pint.” That one just made me roll my eyes. “Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like/Five hundred years” pack it up, dude.) There’s only so much deadpan meanderings about how terrible society is before it starts getting old.
But “Hit My Head All Day?” Now this is something special. Unfortunately, it kind of ruined the rest of the album for me because nothing was quite so good as this (save for “Cruise Ship Designer,” one of the album’s more energetic tracks that reminds me a lot of Wire/Talking Heads). In a gloomy, six-minute sprawl buoyed by slinking, ’80s bass, Shaw sings as though she’s trapped in an ever-shrinking box, contorting her limbs to sharp corners. The lyrics muse on extreme desensitization and the desire to feel anything, everything, even if it means, well…hitting your head all day: “When I was a child, I wanted to be a horse/Eating onions, carrots, celery/I simply must have experiences/Manipulate me, wiggle my arms.” It’s reminiscent of Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch” in its desire for connection, though this is decidedly drier and angular than Gabriel’s synthy, impassioned pleas. Here, Shaw’s dreary delivery makes the case all the more for the narrator’s lack of stimulation; you really do believe that she’s desperate to the point of banging her head against a wall.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Translation State – Ann Leckie – “I simply must have experiences/Manipulate me, wiggle my arms/I hit my head in different places…”
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Here in the U.S., September 16th-23rd is Bisexual Visibility Week, and September 23rd is Bisexual Visibility Day!
To me, visibility—true visibility—for the bi+ community is more vital than ever right now. In contrast to decades ago, when bisexuality wasn’t in the public conversation, today, it seems that bisexuality has enjoyed a more nuanced mainstream understanding. Yet this visibility came with the price of misunderstanding and stigma, much of which continues today. It’s already a handful coming from straight people, but what breaks my heart the most is when it comes from within the LGBTQ+ community. Sadly, it’s more common than you’d think. It manifests in a lot of sinister ways within the queer community, from the stereotype of bisexual women only dating men to the widespread jokes this year in particular about bisexual people only being allowed to celebrate pride for half the month. Sure, they may not be all that sinister on the surface, but when they repackage the same stereotypes about bisexual people (bisexuals only being bi for attention and bisexuals being “less queer”), they become regurgitations of the same demons that we’ve been facing for decades. And don’t even get me started on the stereotyping, particularly from lesbians and gay men, about how bisexuals are somehow co-opting queerness by exhibiting same sex-attraction or that we’re somehow “unclean” because we may have dated other genders. Especially considering that bisexual people are more likely to consider or commit suicide than their lesbian or gay peers, as well as reporting higher rates of depression and sexual assault, this rhetoric always has a consequence.
When did we all forget that we should all be on the same side? I’m so tired of saying something to the effect of the last paragraph in these posts, but this rampant biphobia—and infighting—justkeeps happening. Whether bisexuality/biphobia is the issue or not, all of this casual queerphobia only serves to divide us further. There are real, present threats to the LGBTQ+ community, especially here in the U.S., that are so much more pressing than some fabricated issue of who’s more queer and who doesn’t deserve to be queer. Even if the issue was remedied, we should be quick to remember that after the word transgender, the next word that the government tried to erase from Stonewall National Monument’s website was bisexual. We need to focus on the real, tangible threats to our community, not on pointless squabbling that only makes enemies of each other.
To all of the fellow bisexuals who may be reading this: you are bisexual enough, you are queer enough, and you do not have to justify your identity to anyone. When I embraced my bisexuality in my teens, I felt freer than ever before. That’s exactly what claiming this identity should be all about: the idea that you cannot be boxed in by a society placing you on a single track for the gender you should be attracted to. In a perfect world, it should bring you that freedom, and never fear. We can all work towards that world, someday.
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, what did you think of them? What are some of your favorite books by bisexual authors? Let me know in the comments!
Today’s song:
That’s it for this recommendations post! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
