Hi! You’re here! I’m here! Look at us! This is 2-7 more exclamation points than I normally allow myself to use in an email but I! am! fired! up!
June feels like a good time to be starting a new thing. It’s my birthday month and the first month of summer,1 and that school’s-out serotonin floods my lizard brain even though my person brain knows we’re past that. There’s a big feeling of freedom and a 200% increase in my use of 😈 🤑 🦎 and 🍹.
And I left my job at the end of May, so the school’s-out energy is actually kind of real for the first time in [not doing the math] years. I was a big-time summer camp kid, but I guess in adulthood I’m using my free summer time to email people about stuff I like. Maybe I’ll also cobra-stitch a lanyard. Definitely I’ll also get a sunburn.
But anyway here we go.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this book…
I made it about 32 and 3/4 pages into Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil In America before I cried.
The chapter is about funerals — homegoings — and at this point, he’s writing about the orca that carried her dead calf around the Pacific Ocean for more than two weeks.
It was always a question of letting go. If the whale let her calf go, it would sink to the bottom of the ocean and become a memory.
Once, I had a conversation with a poet who also lost their mother. As we charted our shared grief, the poet told me something they had learned from another poet. “Well, we have two mothers,” they began to tell me. “The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down.”
There is putting down the metaphorical corpse, and then there is the carrying of the physical, but the hesitation to part with both comes from a similar place. A mother who has lost a child carries with her not only the corpse of that child, but the potential for what that life could have been. I mourn both the actual body and the potential for the whole person it held. How much better my time in the world could have been spent with all of the once-living people I’ve loved, still here.
That drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of something with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink.
I was doing just fine, honestly, until that last bit. (And here I will go ahead and confess that I've never seen Titanic, so it’s not even that.) If you’ve grieved someone then maybe you felt what I felt when I read it — that you’ve just been ambushed by a poetic reminder of the desperation. I won’t claim to know the particulars of anyone else’s grief, but I think that’s the same feeling that makes someone throw themselves on an open casket or leave a bedroom untouched for years.
Abdurraqib’s grief for his friends and for his mother, who died when he was young, is threaded throughout the book, though it’s not the book’s stated purpose. We’re here to talk about Black performance.
A Little Devil is at its most effective in On the Performance of Softness, a late-in-the-pages chapter written as a series of vignettes that hop around in time from 1994 to 2019, dropping in on Abdurraqib’s own life and the Wu-Tang Clan. Here we’ve got everything Abdurraqib and this book do so well: Black performance as a window into something bigger (non-romantic love). Cultural criticism that isn’t self-serious but is deeply thoughtful. Memoir-ish passages with that underrated quality of being genuinely moving. One vignette uses Wu-Tang’s “Triumph” video imagery of people bursting into a swarm of bees in a way that’s going to hang around in my mind’s eye for a long while. And it was on page 263, the last page of this chapter, that I cried again.
But let me be more specific about what you’re getting if you read this (and you should). Do you want…
Gorgeous writing? ✔️
An ode to Josephine Baker? Or Merry Clayton? ✔️
An essay on Beyoncé at the Super Bowl and bad jobs? ✔️
An essay on Whitney Houston that’s also about Soul Train and Carlton Banks and measures of Blackness? ✔️
A little bit about how tap dancers used to carry around tap shoes and throw them at each other’s feet as a challenge in the streets? ✔️
Honestly, read the whole book for that last one.
let me tell you about this cat…
I happen to know this cat’s real name. It’s Jackpot. Jackpot is cared for. Jackpot lives in a nice home on a nice street. But nothing else I’m about to say about Jackpot is real.
It was 3 p.m. on a Tuesday when a teenager hopped the fence at Jackpot’s people’s house, and so Jackpot was pretty mad. It was the kind of mad that comes from being embarrassed — a sort of blustery and directionless angst — because Jackpot was snoozing on the old overstuffed chair when the kid hopped the fence and took the bike. In broad daylight, he hopped and took and Jackpot snoozed and it was all too much because the thing about Jackpot is he believes he is absolutely not to be fucked with.2
So Jackpot’s primary business now is constant vigilance. While the other cats on the block nap on porches and prowl under houses, Jackpot is on neighborhood watch, a fluffy block captain with a pink badge. That’s right, buster, keep moving, he thinks as a very tall man who absolutely does not see him there strides by. [It’s important that you know that Jackpot’s internal monologue sounds like Rorschach in that Watchmen movie.] Dogs are interrogated, package-delivering ankles are swiped, youths are followed. But most importantly, an ego — Jackpot’s particular ego — is soothed. Bolstered, even. And it’s 3 p.m. Wednesday when Jackpot decides he’s earned a little snooze.
let me tell you about this shirt…
It’s terry cloth, it’s absurdly expensive, and I bought it for myself in May for my birthday, which, again, is in June.
Yes, it’s very soft. Yes, I feel a level of joy while wearing it that might actually justify the price tag. Yes, a food truck guy with great eyebrows complimented it. And yes, my husband said I look like “a nice lady drug dealer.”
For the record, I would definitely gently remind you to hydrate if I sold you ecstasy.
Depends on whether you define summer by date or by heat.
This may also be factual.