What Kate Likes on March 24th, 2023
Consistency! Characters! Cats!
When I started this newsletter last summer, I intended it partly as a grand experiment in consistency. I wanted to see if I could write something worth sharing every week. As I keep saying at the top of most of these posts, I wanted an excuse to write about the stuff I was enjoying, mostly just so I could spend more (intentional) time thinking about everything from Eavan Boland to Smallville to Jack Kirby.
Unsurprisingly, I failed pretty quickly at the consistency part of that experiment. And I know why: I was putting way too much pressure on myself to write something “worthwhile” on a weekly basis. What do I mean by “worthwhile?” Don’t ask me. I just know it’s a nebulous roadblock in my head, the phantom of perfectionism my undergrad writing pedagogy professors tried their best to eradicate from my thinking.
But it’s still there, and it’s getting in the way of the “consistency” part of this newsletter. Obviously I’m not going to have a literal essay in me every week—that’s a standard I would never put on my students, so it’s pretty stupid to put it on myself. So I’m correcting course, and I’m prioritizing getting this out every week, even when I don’t have Big Thoughts to share.
I’ll still have Big Thoughts to share every few weeks, I hope. But, on top of those quasi-essays and in the spirit of consistency over deep dives, I’m changing the rules of my experiment. Instead of pressuring myself to find the time and energy every single week to write something focused and polished for this space, I’m going to dump out a list of stuff I’ve been digging that week: books, music, TV, whatever.
Welcome to Kate Likes Stuff. Sometimes it’s not that deep.
Last Saturday, Cassidy and I binged the entire second season of Shadow and Bone on Netflix. I’ve decided it was an objectively bad season of television, mostly because it was like, beyond poorly paced. But I still loved it—it was a chaotic, rushed mess, yeah, but it was true to its characters. And I will always love fantasy that writes for its characters instead of its plot.
That led me to revisiting the real reason I care about Shadow and Bone in the first place: Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology. Set in the same “Grishaverse” universe as the original Shadow and Bone trilogy that gave rise to the TV show, Six of Crows has one of the most compelling cast of characters in any contemporary fantasy series I’ve ever read, YA or otherwise. This is maybe my fourth time reading these books, and they somehow still delight me. Again: characters over plot (though the heist plots are pretty fucking good, too).
I also just started The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu. I wrote in my post about the Stan Lee biography that I’m hungry for more prose about comic books. I’ve only just started this one, but it fits the bill, and I’m already learning more about the early history of the comic book outside of the superhero genre—I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this one soon.
Meanwhile I’ve been rereading If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton for class. Very excited to finally teach this book, grateful to have a class where it fits on the syllabus. Here’s one of my favorite poems from the front half of the book.
“Donut Plains 4” by Stephen Sexton, from If All the World and Love Were Young I’ve been on a Marvel deep-dive and recently started rereading some of the old Marvel single issues I bought and collected between, oh, 2012-2016 or so. I started with All-New Ghost Rider (though annoyingly I apparently never bought the first three issues, screw you College Kate). Again: characters first. I don’t care all that much about Ghost Rider lore, frankly, but this series really makes me care about Robbie Reyes.
I really like the song “Younger & Dumber” by Indigo De Souza. It makes my brain vibrate. Simple as that.
Finally: I like my cat the most in the world. I like her the best of all these things. It’s her birthday on Sunday. Six! Everyone say HAPPY BIRTHDAY LEELA!!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY LEELA
hbd leela <3