i'm not like other autumn roundups!
season re-reads + fall and her mysteries + an october oracle reading
“It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance. It’s not easy to talk about something that, even as it encourages us to seek it, resists explanation. Something that wafts like smoke around the edges of the page.”
The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions by Maud Casey
fall roundup guide:
part i: something old | re-reads + the dark delicious void of mystery
part ii: an october oracle reading | a spooky message for the month
part iii: something new | a piece of a poem about a Bulgarian church
intermission: featuring a mini autumn music playlist
part iv: art | two surreal fairytale-esque paintings
part i: something old | re-reads + the dark delicious void of mystery
Her Body And Other Parties // Carmen Maria Machado:
If you haven’t already seen this book on a billion fall reading lists, I’d be shocked. Her Body has become a modern feminist horror classic, ubiquitous on a certain kind of weird, well-read woman’s bookshelf. We’re starting with it anyway, because widespread praise doesn’t always suggest an overrated story.
When it was first published in 2017, I remember being 22 and reading a library copy on the train. It might’ve been fall, or it might’ve just been fall in my memory. The book is one of those thick, hearty paperbacks unique to Graywolf press. You don’t have to be gentle with it—a fitting metaphor for the eight stories it holds.
Every October, I read, not the entire collection, but the Law & Order fanfiction-coded novella at its center, Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU. It’s a story told in vignettes, each a re-imagined episode starring the show’s characters Benson and Stabler outrunning their doppelgängers, searching for missing and murdered victims. The two haunt and are haunted by a gothic New York, a Manhattan that tilts at an odd angle like a fractured neck with a pair of girls-with-bells-for-eyes and a thumping sound no one can locate.
This novella feels like all the best parts of Halloween: spiky and spooky, a low-hum of unease, cozy if you delight in ghosts and occult, liminal spaces.
Each capsule is like staring at a dark shimmering surface and finding a distorted reflection has overtaken the original:
“Ritual”: Benson goes to a new age shop in the Village. “I need a spell,” she says to the proprietor, “to find what I am seeking.” He taps a pen against his chin for a few moments, and then sells her: four dried beans of unknown origin, a small white disk that proves to be a sliver of rabbit bone, a tiny vial that appears empty— “the memory of a young woman losing her virginity,” he says—a granite basin, a wedge of dried clay from the banks of the Hudson."
According to Her Body lore, the idea for the story came to Machado while she was bedridden with a swine flu case so bad she admitted she probably should’ve been hospitalized. But instead, she took to bed, sweating bullets, dipping in and out of consciousness while Law & Order played on Netflix in the background for days.
In the craft book 1000 Words by writer Jami Attenberg, Machado discusses the mysteries of the creative process in a letter:
“Your subconscious is your best friend as a writer; it spits out beautiful bizarre ideas and solves narrative problems and also has a wicked sense of humor. So many magical and memorable moments of my own work emerged from that under-place. The girls-with-bells-for-eyes from “Especially Heinous”? Came to me, unbidden, in the shower, halfway through shampooing my hair.”
My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing // Carl Phillips:
The above is an apt bridge for my next fall re-read. My Trade is Mystery is a craft book in the form of seven essays by poet Carl Phillips. It may seem strange to include a craft book in an autumn reading roundup, but maybe, again, it’s also about the book’s physical feeling: a deliciously slender hardback, a drab gray cover with that strange purple blobby shape, like a raw gemstone.
With blunt one-word chapter titles like Ambition, Silence, Practice, it’s a book you might read in a deserted park on an early October afternoon, your coffee a cream-less black in a cardboard cup, a flaky croissant on a napkin on your lap:
“To acknowledge limits to what we can know about a thing—to acknowledge mystery—is not, to my mind, an admission of defeat by mystery but instead a show of respect for it, and to this extent—I mean this as secularly as possible—it’s a form of faith.”
I’m reminded of a different craft book the takes mystery up as its primary subject:
“It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance. It’s not easy to talk about something that, even as it encourages us to seek it, resists explanation. Something that wafts like smoke around the edges of the page. Especially when there is, in our culture, an increasing intolerance for ambiguity.”
The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions by Maud Casey
Fall is a season that feels full of mystery to me. Maybe I’m thinking of the traditional tales about this time; Halloween—a day when the real world softens and splits like mushy earth, creating a portal to a second place. Or as Machado calls our creative inner worlds: the under-place.
I Have Some Questions For You // Rebecca Makkai:
On to a literal mystery—one involving murder, a New Hampshire boarding school, and a podcasting narrator grappling with the fickleness of memory. Another popular fall pick, I’m sure.
What I love about IHSQFY is the way it captures the strange feeling of returning to a place, changed by time but in other ways, static. Makkai shows us how we remain vulnerable to these abandoned spaces, at any moment dragged to the past, triggered by a scent, a sound, a memory shaken loose.
And of course the New England boarding school of it all telegraphs autumn, even though Makkai herself laments boarding school novels where it’s always fall. By no stretch of the imagination is this a cozy mystery—it asks questions about complicity, condemns the carceral system, holds our obsession with white girl innocence to the light. But my copy is a chunky hardback that I love to hold. There’s a cozy, intimate feel to the story, too—the protagonist, Bodie, has a great sense of humor. You feel attached to her former classmates, know them by first AND last name in a nod to that weird high school tick borne out of the necessity to distinguish between all the Taylors, Jordans and Chris’s.
Maybe it’s also that fall simply feels nostalgic:
“Imagine me (remember me), fifteen, sixteen, dressed in black even when I wasn’t backstage, my taped-up Doc Martens, the dark, wispy hair fringing my Cabbage Patch face; imagine me, armored in flannel, eyes ringed thick with liner, passing the pay phone and—without looking—picking it up, twirling it upside down, hanging it back the wrong way.”
The pay phone in this passage is itself a mystery—young Bodie is able to eavesdrop on phone conversations around campus with the press of a button. It only works with the gym phone. It’s technically impossible. A kind of magic.
Even the last lines of the novel (don’t worry, they give nothing away), gesture at that crisp fall sensation:
“…the stalwart trees and ephemeral flowers of New Hampshire: painted trillium, bunchberry, hemlock, sheep laurel, white cedar, bloodrot.
Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made sugar out of nothing but light.”
part iii: an october oracle reading | a spooky message for the month
Nothing screams October like a little divination. I asked the oracle deck what this group needed to keep in my mind for the month of October. Here’s what She said:
Sylvia Plath // The Dark: living in the dark, intensity, fury
Ghost: memories, what haunts you, unfinished business
Noose: anxiety, threat, self-sabotage
Eileen Chang // Fate: outside forces, events falling into place, acceptance
Agatha Christie // Trickery: suspicion, deception, the missing piece
my intuitive interpretation: October may be a dark month emotionally. Opening the reading with Sylvia Plath is a pretty clear sign of this. But what I’m feeling is that we have some agency here. Or that agency over ourselves and our lives is the central struggle of this month.
We may be suspicious of our own motivations, this could be because we’re being swayed by faulty memories or an impulse for self-sabotage. If we read the cards in order: we’re weathering a dark period as a result of unfinished business or hauntings. It’s causing anxiety. But then something good: things falling into places, acceptance of what is, of what has been. Because we’re accustomed to darkness, we may be suspicious when the light comes.
The self-sabotage, however, leads me to believe that we’re the main tricksters here. In Buddhism, there’s a concept about how we often make things worse for ourselves. There’s the first wound from the event, but we make more wounds by ruminating on the event. In October, maybe it’s time to release grudges, clear away stuck energy, and trust that when things fall into place, you may be the only missing piece; move to align with the rest of your life—complete the puzzle.
part iii: something new | a piece of a poem:
A few weeks ago, I picked up Michael Ondaatje’s poetry collection A Year of Last Things. I knew of Ondaatje, but had never read him. Right away, I could tell I was going to like this collection.
One of the poems, “A Night Radio Station In Koprivsjtitsa” had a graf that felt like the perfect read for a fall day:
The candles in the sunlight of this Bulgarian church / flicker sideways to imitate a village dance / but above in dark murals the devil pisses / into a bowl, witches stir ointments.
There were the 38 Martyrs of Plovdiv / and 19 Female Sinners whose fates remain unknown. Just as in painting after painting / of the seemingly never completed Last Supper / there’s no betrayal or treason, only a busy table / of garlic, onions, local breads, a squid, a fish.
Most stories remain unresolved / undiscovered, like the breaking of a rule.
The secret of a famous poet’s glass eye / revealed only when found beside / his body in a mass grave near Sofia.
intermission: featuring a mini fall playlist:
part iv: art: noah davis
A couple of years ago, for my 26th birthday, I visited the L.A Museum of Contemporary Art. Well, really I wandered through a weird exhibit for a few minutes, then spent the next three hours in the gift shop.
I poured through piles of art books, stumbling on one with a beautiful baby blue cover. It contained paintings by the late Noah Davis. I loved them instantly.
These don’t necessarily summon fall itself to my mind, but the spirit of it with their haunting, playful fairytale quality.
That’s all for now! I think I might do this kind of random roundup for every season? In the meantime, happy autumn-ing, Diehards <3