Audio by Jules Keohane
Two autumns in six months.
One icy and slice-y as you walk on a copper carpet of spongy leaves; the other one alternately madly stormy, and wind-still and blue.
Autumn is the gentlest time. It is time ‘to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials’ and ‘let the rough winds fly’ (from ‘Day in Autumn’ by Rainer Maria Rilke).
My summer was taken up by moving back home, my mother’s 80th birthday, Christmas and its good things, my mother’s accident, and wedding planning. ‘Taken up’ makes it sound like I’m resentful that I missed out on other things. That is not true.
All of these – bar my mother’s suffering – were lovely life things. But then she rallied her bones despite her fear of falling again and travelled thousands of kilometres to be present at our wedding. Now THAT is a lovely yes-to-life thing, if ever there was one.
The day after we left Berlin in November last year, it snowed. We missed the spectacle by 24 hours.
Winter for me will set in for me on 1 May this year. It’ll be the first day my children will both be out of the country for an extended period of time. They’re leaving together.
After these busy months of goodness, 1 May feels to me like it might be a cold and quiet place – without even a pretty cushioning of snow to soften winter’s edges.
Little thank yous
Without my children around to keep me young and lively and busy doing things like watching Chappel Roan’s tiny desk concert (music lovers, she’s this generation’s Cyndi Lauper and Pink Pony Club is a banger of a pop song you won’t get out of your head after two listens), what will I do?
Between staving off cellular degeneration, intellectual and social rigidity, and the inevitable sag towards old fartiness, I plan to spend some time developing Love Letter more.
It’s been going for two years and for something that wasn’t meant to ‘be a thing’ it has turned into a surprise pocket-rocket. I want to find ways to thank and honour my paid subscribers for their loyalty and enthusiasm for this project.
If you, as a paid subscriber, have any desires or needs, or ideas about how you might feel more loved up and appreciated by me, please drop me a line by clicking here:
It’s quite something to know that there are people who value your work enough to pay directly for it. It bolsters me in the face of all the AI-generated boringness that fills my feed these days. It makes me realise that real art, real writing and real conversation might become niche interests, but that there will always be people who crave ‘real’ like cartoon sand-crawlers crave water in cartoon deserts.
What to do next
When I’ve let two or three letters go by without some recommendations, someone always contacts me directly to ask what I’ve been reading, watching and listening to.
Here’s what’s been going on in the limited free time I’ve had recently. Links embedded.
Music
A truly beautiful song – Libations: Omnyama – by the South African pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini has found its way into my consciousness via a link from a regular reader in Italy. Thank you, Edna!
In quiet moments, I’ve been listening to Elliot Moss’s song Slip and also to Siv Jakobsen’s Space
Reading
A poem I keep returning to this past month is Aurora Levins Morales’s ‘Red Sea: April 2002’
A novel called The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers by Finuala Dowling. I wrote on @readingdarling that all the hard work Dowling did off the page means you see nothing but story unfolding smoothly before you on the page. Don’t be put off by the strange cover. And when you’re done reading the book, look up ‘Koringa’. I didn’t realise she was a real person until I’d finished the novel.
A book called Fl!pped by Tracey Hawthorne, which I read ages ago, finally made it on to my @readingdarling feed. I wrote: ‘Fl!pped contains one of the most curious – and yet entirely believable – scenes I've ever come across in a book. It also sent me on a long and fascinating dive into cicadas. If nature (and insects) interest you, you might need to know also that there is about to be a rare emergence of cicadas in the US round about now. I have read some fascinating articles about cicadas in recent months since reading this novel.’ I was reading Fl!pped while in Croatia last year, which was synchronous as I had an experience with cicadas like I’ve never had before. You can read that Love Letter here.
Podcast
My golden year of podcasts was 2018.
That year, I was driving forty minutes to an industrial area every day where I’d been installed by a company wanting me to write a family and company history.
I think it might have been in that year that I listened to a remarkable story about a prisoner in Somalia whose mental health was saved by the doctor in the cell next door to his, who – get this – tapped out, in code, the whole of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy on the wall between them.
Before the doctor could begin to tap the story, he had to figure out and teach the tapping code without ever speaking to his neighbour.
I recently re-listened to that episode of NPR’s Rough Translation, and it amazed me all over again. People are often very shit, but people are also wondrous and amazing and full of brilliance. Listen to the whole episode via a link on this page.
Watching
On a recommendation from Seni and also Jules, we watched All of Us Strangers. It is haunting. Excruciating, in fact, and I don’t really know how to say this without saying it like this: it fucked me up. I couldn’t speak afterwards. It reminded me of other things that had had the same effect on me over the years, and that list is further down.
I watched Scoop, the movie about the women who clinched the interview with Prince Andrew about his friendship with a slime ball sex pest. The movie was of a piece with the 2022 movie She Said and the (more hysterical and irritating) Morning Show series. Both document an important historical time in which men have been made hesitant about their casual gropiness and lewdness towards women. Many men will have you know they feel hemmed in, even victimised by this. All the women I know have celebrated the surfacing of this until recently mostly-hidden pestilence.
We started watching Baby Reindeer last night. Only two episodes in, but I hear good things. It’s very uncomfortable to watch.
On Friday, we had a wind-down-from-the-week movie called Wicked Little Letters. One probably doesn’t need to say more than ‘Olivia Coleman’ to recommend it. Also, she plays with Jessie Buckley as her nemesis. The two of them were in The Lost Daughter, where Buckley plays the young version of Coleman. Buckley also played the girlfriend in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which was weird but good. And it has this memorable poem about coming home called Bonedog she recites in it. When last did you see a full poem recited in a movie?
Things that fucked me up
A few things I’ve watched or read in the past fifteen years made me so sad, I couldn’t even cry. I realise that what they have in common is a longing that can’t be realised, often a longing for a particular relationship that cannot be had. It was so in All of Us Strangers, as I said above, and it was so also in:
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffennegger. The book slayed me. The movie much less so. I believe there is now also a series.
Bright Star, the movie by Jane Campion about the poet John Keats and his beloved Fanny Brawne.
Where the Wild Things Are, the movie adapted by Dave Eggers from the book by Maurice Sendak. In the movie, it wasn’t wild Max who ate my heart, it was the wild things themselves: their longing, their rage.
One Day, the 2024 drama series.
Happy autumn, Southerners. Happy spring, Northerns.
Love,
K.
Oh how wonderful, so many the things came into my consciousness through you, so I'm so happy I could once return the favour. His music just takes me to a mythological yet homey place.