Monday Miscellany: The screaming meemies

Notes from November 10 - 16

Nov 18, 2025

I come to you this evening on the tails of an unexpectedly long routine doctor visit, feeling sore of arm1 yet staunch of spirit, ready to wish you a happy new week and tell you about some recent media consumption. But first, here are a few photos from yesterday at the renaissance faire:

Not to brag, but our knight won the final joust. And everyone else died. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Huzzah! Onward!

Read this week

Library due dates and publisher release dates had me picking up short stories and essays this week, to varying effect.

First, Stag Dance by Torrey Peters, an anticipated book of this year that I wanted to prioritize before we roll into 2026. This is a collection featuring a short novel and three stories, each focusing on the subject of gender through the lens of a different genre or style—as she describes them, speculative fiction (“Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones”), teen romance (“The Chaser”), western / tall tale (“Stag Dance”), and horror (“The Masker”). They are all so strong, which is impressive considering how different they are from each other.

“Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” opens the book with an imagined future in which human bodies are no longer able to produce sex hormones, meaning that everyone has to actively choose their gender and receive replacement therapy accordingly. In my notes, I wrote: “the way the first story ends—HELL yeah.” The rest of the stories have equally compelling premises and aside from a brief lag that I felt partway through “Stag Dance” (which could have been user error, what I get for reading while sleepy), they kept me engaged. Pacing aside, I really did love the folksy terminology and cadence of “Stag Dance,”2 which had me giggling at phrases like “the screaming meemies.” I’m glad I read this and I look forward to whatever Torrey Peters does next.

My Little Donkey by Martha Cooley was a gift from the publisher3 that sounded right up my alley: “a collection of searching, curious, and surprising essays catalyzed by the author’s move in her sixties to a small Italian village, exploring selfhood, coincidence, inheritance, and the impermanence of identity.” My reading experience, however, was pretty hit-or-miss. Cooley writes many of the essays in fragments, and while I love this technique when done well, it didn’t always work here; I found myself wondering at the end of some of them what the point had been. I’m curious if arranging the fragments in a different order might have better guided me through her thought processes? There is one piece, “Something to Pay,” that I found flat-out distasteful, as it focused on Cooley’s decision to voluntarily put her cat down before her move to Italy—in my mind this choice went completely against her proclaimed love of and interest in animals, and it really gave me the ick.4

I did really enjoy a few of the essays, though, including “No Such Thing,” which is about silence, music, tinnitus, practice, perfectionism, and ease; it felt particularly cohesive and relatable to me. There’s also “If Only For a Moment,” which extols the virtues of boredom and made me want to revisit Manoush Zomorodi’s Bored and Brilliant. And “Fluke,” a musing on coincidence that is especially effective thanks to its brevity and focus. If every essay had been as strong as these three, the book would’ve been a slam dunk, but alas, it didn’t quite measure up to the poignant whimsy and thematic cohesion suggested by the marketing blurb.

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Seen and heard this week

Our household recently switched from Spotify to Qobuz,5 and something I discovered this past week that I’m now kind of obsessed with is a shuffle-type button that appears when you’re browsing the albums in your library and will choose a random one to play. What a perfect tool for those of us suffering from decision paralysis! Its selections this week were a couple of throwback bangers.

Better Half (2013) is an EP by Good Graeff, a twin sister duo that unfortunately no longer seems to be actively making music. I found out about them when they came through Winston on tour circa 2014-2015, probably opening for someone we liked at The Garage. Their music is mostly upbeat, kinda poppy and kinda rocky, with cello! I think I slightly prefer their other EP, Good Job Go (2015), but I was happy to be reminded of this one.

The Civil Wars have been on my mind recently because of this reel that Jordan stumbled across and sent me:

@georgia__coan

Georgia Coan on Instagram: "The Civil Wars are my Roman Empire …

I could talk for a LONG time about the details of what went down with this band and what caused their eventual breakup. Do not get me started. When I was in grad school I had the opportunity to see them live, and I didn’t go because at the time I didn’t know their music very well yet, but I never got another chance and I’ve regretted saying no ever since.

Anyway, all that to say it felt like perfect timing to revisit their first album, Barton Hollow (2011), this week. It’s mostly low-tempo americana, with a few more lively tracks, and the main draw, for me at least, is the HARMONY. These two had some of the best musical6 chemistry I’ve ever heard. And the emotion! The longing! Unmatched. The title track is my favorite:

A couple more views from NC Renaissance Festival on Sunday

Haiku round-up

Haiku is a poetic form that originated in Japan, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern. At the beginning of 2024, I started writing one every day, and while traditional examples include thematic reference to the seasons, mine tend to be a bit more all over the place. Here are this week’s efforts—enjoy!