podcasts

D.E.A.R.

Happy Drop Everything And Read Day to those who celebrate! This is me in the 1970s:

a kid curled up on a sofa, reading a paperback copy of Beverly Cleary's Ramona the Pest

Lately I’ve been working my way through the Klickitcast podcast from a few years ago, in which Phil Gonzales and John McCoy discuss nearly all of Beverly Cleary’s books (so far they’ve skipped the picture books) in publication order. They read some as kids, read some or all to their kids, and are coming fresh to some (the YA novels, in particular). Right now I’m waiting for Socks to come in for me at the library, to reread before listening to that episode.

Other sustained silent reading that has sustained me recently: two picture books that absolutely lived up to their buzz, Paka Paka con la Papa (gave me field-scientist feels, would pair with Lab Girl) and Every Monday Mabel (an observation not original to me: Mabel is in a fandom and her intense feelings about it are shared by many! just not by those immediately around her. Her fandom is the garbage truck). And a Cynthia Kadohata middle-grade novel about international adoption that I somehow missed for ten years, Half a World Away.

[Not Endorsed by the Constitution of the United States of America]

It’s my body
It’s not Pepsi’s body
It’s not Nancy Reagan’s body
It’s not Congress’s body
It’s not the Supreme Court’s body
It’s not Cosmopolitan’s pink twat body
It’s not George Bush’s ugly-conscience,
never-be-responsible, let-the-world-rot body
It’s not Cardinal O’Connor’s Catholic Church-
homophobic-hate women-hate queers-
oppressive-DEVIL-SATAN-no children body
IT’S NOT YOUR BODY

Karen Finley, “Aunt Mandy,” 1990 in Aperture [pdf, cw: death, medical trauma, misogyny, doom]

I ran across that poem while reshelving periodicals in college, and never forgot it. A woman’s life isn’t worth much often pops into my head as an explanation for this or that.

In “things I was thinking about before the giant news hairball,” I believe we are in a golden age of podcasts. My favorite this week was a Harriet the Spy episode on Not How I Remember It, a podcast whose tagline is “GenX moms revisiting the books of our childhood.” It’s two friends who reread a book that at least one of them remembers (The Pistachio Prescription was the episode that first caught my eye), and talk about it from scratch. From this episode:

  • “I feel like she wasn’t so much spying as judging.”
  • “All the pictures in my copy are a little terrifying.”

I love their east coast (I think) accents and how much fun they have and the way they don’t try to impress anyone or be experts.  And often the book they reread is not the book they remember! The most prominent memory of Harriet the Spy for one of them was the bits about reading under the covers with a flashlight.

I pulled some weeds in the garden and found these secret overachievers. About a year ago, I planted a few fava beans from the fridge that were past their prime. They grew and bloomed but then fell over and I forgot about them. This is about double the volume of beans planted, so I am well pleased.8 fava bean pods, some large, with US quarter for scale