i am an autumn
postscripts #8: on the vanity of performing aesthetics, and everything i want to consume
ruminations
Hi friends!
Growing up in Southern California meant I never got more than two seasons in a year (1. summer, 2. slightly chillier summer — occasionally, rainy-flood-the-streets summer, and increasing in frequency as the years churn on, inescapable-heat-stroke-september summer). I yearned and hungered for the mythological cascades of scarlet and golden foliage, biting breeze, and chunky sweaters that weren’t cropped short because there was a legitimate need to stay warm. I lumbered through September’s humid hot and sunny days, praying to the seasonal deities for the transition into my first ever real season; I tried to usher in the chill with more PSL’s than I care to admit, pulled out my knee high boots, started making apple cinnamon tea in the mornings. The first days of October came, and I was still sweatily shucking off layers after making the short trek to my classes. I was pissed. This was not the Northeast fall my romantic, idealist self had been promised.
Fall crash-landed into place overnight. I suddenly found myself shivering in the evening breeze as fall break began. The night my dad landed in Philly to visit me over our long weekend, I rejoiced in the need to actually wear my trench coat for warmth and not just style (it really all comes down to the trench coat for me. If you wear a trench coat in LA, people will most likely laugh, no matter the time of year). I visited the Poconos with some of my classmates to see the foliage, and found myself wearing a beanie and clutching my hand warmer. Putting on my chunky sweater ceased to be an aesthetic performance in fashion or an exercise of self-voyeurism. I was so much colder than I’d ever been in my life and I loved it.
There’s something humbling about your rituals becoming practical. The candles I lit every fall in LA functioned like altars to a moodboard. Ambient lighting was just that — ambient, not warm. A seasonal latte really only served to position myself in a timeline: here I am, autumn-coded! If there is no autumn of my aesthetic dreams, I will act it out and pretend it is true. I am performing for me, but also for others who might validate my performance, from which I can then take irrefutable evidence to trick myself into believing that this aesthetic character I aspire to be is achievable. In reality, the temperatures probably never fell below the 60’s. It is a bit of a vain and narcissistic thing. But now that the weather demands all the things I once performed — heat, layers, slowing down — I find myself a little embarrassed by how hard I once tried to simulate what’s now simply life. And even now as the weather chills, I continue to wonder if the climate here actually necessitates that I dress the way I do, consume the way I do, act the way I do. Am I just an insufferable, sweater-obsessed caricature of an East Coast transplant? Do I take myself too seriously? Am I narcissistic for assuming I take myself too seriously, or that anybody is watching at all? Some might say so. Possibly. Probably. The only thing that really matters at the end of the day is if I am happy, and if that is coming at the cost of someone else’s joy. I don’t think joyfully vomiting cinnamon and pumpkin at every turn is hurting anyone, so expect me to continue joyfully vomiting cinnamon and pumpkin until I start missing the sun.
With that said, I thought I’d share my seasonal to-consume list — books I always enjoy reading or want to read, films I love or want to see when this time of year comes around:
Films (*means I’ll be watching for the first time)
Movie moodboard: tragedy of earnestness, pastoral femininity, folklore meets postmortem glamor, temporal longing, academic aestheticism, girlhood gothic, cozy melodrama
The Princess Bride (1987)
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)
Ever After (1998)
*Tuck Everlasting (2002)
Little Women (2019)
Dead Poets Society (1989)
(Tim Burton’s) Corpse Bride (2005)
*You’ve Got Mail (1998)
Knives Out (2019)
*Sleepy Hollow (1999)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Books (*means I’ll be reading for the first time)
Finding myself drawn to: scholarly decay & erotics of knowledge, gothic lit, feminine terror, beauty and rot, soft apocalypse, violence and catharsis, epistolary fragmentation, melancholy
Babel (R.F. Kuang)
*Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (V.E. Schwab)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
*The Familiar (Leigh Bardugo)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen - everyone wants to read P&P but I think this one is vastly underrated)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa)
Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)
*Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare - recently required reading for a class, surprisingly enjoyed the morbidness once I got over the shock)
*Carmilla (J. Sheridan Le Fanu)
*Lapvona (Ottessa Moshfegh)
With how much I have on my plate for school, I’ll consider making it through even a fraction of this list a success.
Music
I was going to try to build a playlist for this but the honest truth is I have a most neurotic method of listening to music. As curated as the rest of what I consume may be, I feel the most out of control when it comes to music and sounds. My brain fractures as my senses develop a life of their own; I’m fundamentally incapable of exerting any sort of control. In all my 23 years of life, I have never been able to listen to a playlist all the way through that’s been curated for any particular mood — I actually haven’t even been able to stick with a single playlist of my own — because experiencing music is an effervescent, fleeting, primal thing for me. Forces out of my control and consciousness seem to dictate a small set of songs that will scratch my brain in just the right way, though I can never pinpoint why — sometimes it’s the production, other times it’s the lyricism (although by and large, it’s often the production or instrumentation) — and I will be physically unable to pleasurably listen to any other collection of songs for the next period of time, anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months. In my mind, I have a schema of what sort of sounds, instruments, or beats “feel” like fall; but I could never listen to them and feel successfully “immersed” into the right season or mood. I can only listen to whatever songs I have fallen hyperfixated to, then furiously vomit words and thoughts onto paper (or a blank document) in a cathartic act of sensorial and intellectual excretion.
So, I leave you with my record of poor attempts to curate a mood playlist:
Made last fall. The songs on this tell you nothing about the season, only which songs I developed an unhealthy sonic attachment to during that era of my life — which chords, beats, arrangements were tickling my brain right. Not a fall playlist, more like a coping playlist that coincided with fall.
Put together for this season! I tried very hard to stick to “fall” sounds; vibes-wise, it’s a considerable improvement from last year. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that being surrounded by more fall foliage has helped convince my brain to align with sounds accordingly. I still felt more like a slave to the impulses of my senses than an individual in control of which songs I would enjoy.
in rotation
“You You You” Maisie Peters: My not-so-small not-so-kept secret, one of my favorite indie (maybe not so indie anymore) artists. I’ve long enjoyed Maisie’s sharp lyricism and range in her instrumentation and sound, her ability to capture pain, pettiness, and pleasure in equal measure and make it sound like a warm blanket. Her third album is allegedly coming soon, and this is one of two singles she’s released ahead of her project. It hurts but it’s so perfect, and I love the way she plays with the word “you” from the verses to the chorus. She had an intimate show in Brooklyn, NY last night and I’m forever upset I couldn’t snatch tickets.
tiny joys
The blue beet from a 15th century manuscript on herbs, housed in Penn’s special collections. It’s become somewhat of an icon and celebrity in manuscript studies interest groups on campus; it has its own sticker, stamp, even a plushie. I desperately want a sticker. Like really, really, bad. (fun fact: the plant is apparently called a woad, and looks nothing like this)
the blue beet in question. from Penn Libraries .
loose threads
Does performance stop being performance when nobody’s watching, or when everyone is?
Realizing you are a tea person when you’re drinking coffee, and a coffee person when you’re drinking tea
I can’t tell if this ache is nostalgia or inflammation
The divine right of a girl to carry a novel she has no intention of reading that day
People at Penn dress so well. Oversized blazers, houndstooth patterns, tights and boots, loafers with buckles, the prettiest coats.
Woe is the fact that the class you signed up for called “Lessons of Horror” will, indeed, require you to watch horror movies.
See you next week <3
Cherie