monthly digest: august 2025
looping ghosts, chatting to strangers, and more
🎶 I’m doing good I’m on some new shit (pistachio milk)
I’m saying yes instead of no (that’s a lie actually I’m saying no at my usual rate)… 🎶
It was nice to come back to Michigan after my trip to Eugene. I still have a lot of work to do in Oregon so I’m considering hiding in the University of Oregon’s library’s basement. Surely there’s some corner of the basement nobody ever visits, you know? I just have to work out a showering situation.… I also went to Bowling Green where I saw Joanna Russ’s childhood writings and—almost as importantly—this llama:
One part of coming home that is a little bittersweet is that Buster, the family dog who has previously featured here for his love of the production work of Jack Antonoff, has passed from “surprisingly spry for his age” to clearly declining. He is very old, and I’m glad to be reunited with him while he’s still around, but it’s sad to watch.
August in housekeeping
After going back and forth about doing this for a while, I’ve decided to make Taylor Swift Studies its own “section” here, meaning you can opt out of receiving emails from it. In the past, I haven’t really wanted to do this because something about the Taylor posts felt essential to the DNA of this place.
It still feels that way, but… this newsletter has grown so much since the end of the Eras tour, and Taylor’s cultural saturation has become so crazy, that I think it’s only fair to give people an opt out. You can see instructions on how to do that here. I wanted to make this extremely niche meme I got from… some place I don’t remember… the header:
Taytoru Gojolor But I reminded myself of the existence of “copyright law” and opted for symbolic representation.
If you want to read the essentials of the TSS back catalog, I think the list that went with this podcast is the best place to go.1
I’m not sure if there are people who are opted out of the general email section but in to one of the niche sections, but if there are, I am unsure if you are automatically opted into the new one. If you are, apologies. I’m not sure how heavily anybody uses the sections, to be honest, but they give me peace of mind about the chaos I’m sending into your inbox.I sent an email out earlier this month to people who usually read this newsletter but don’t pay for it asking them to consider paying for it. A number of you did! Thanks. <3 BDM Industries appreciates your support.
The Evangelion rewatch series has faced many delays but it faces its final one (streaming platform problems), so that is why you are getting this and not that. A bit more below.
August in fiction
an august ghost story
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, but I can’t tell which one of us is crazy. I'm not even sure which one of us is dead.
This story is based on a dream. The stuff about the street and the jacket and starting over and over is from the dream, but the rest is not. In the dream, what would happen is that I’d “rewind” back to some totally new storyline but then I’d always end up on the street etc. But often that new story had nothing to do with the street, it was sort of a liminal place I kept going back to after bombing out.… This version is of interest to me in my long running “studying myself” project but not what I wanted to write.
I think you can tell I was reading a lot of Carol Emshwiller when I was writing this story, incidentally. Not to say it’s Emshwiller-like, just… Emshwiller-influenced.
August in posts
We are the daughters of the cockroaches you didn’t stomp on. Or maybe the children of the hired hands you didn’t shoot on the trail? August brought us a taymergency that was followed up by some taycrankiness about brands and their taypportunism. Regarding my great (great?) aunt Josephine, my mother tells me the line is “never should have come to Oklahoma,” no “back.” BDM Industries regrets the error.
August in reviews
August in writing abroad
August in perfume
August in Evangelion
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We were supposed to finish Evangelion today but… the streaming version I was using began mistiming my subtitles to an unwatchable degree, and everything I tried did not fix it. So I ordered the Bluray and sent this email out a day early as an explanation. I am very sorry. Based on my feelings about the other Rebuilds, once I have finished it, I will then set that Bluray on fire. I feel like that will smell bad.
August in research
I’m interested in the way my brain reliably produces certain facts that can only be called “wrong.” For instance, “The Dispossessed was the first novel by a woman to a win a Hugo” is something it often supplies. This is not true. That was The Left Hand of Darkness. I literally have a timeline I made where this is not true, and yet I still get it wrong. Why do I keep thinking this? I’m putting this error in here in the hopes that this will finally fix it because I will remember writing this paragraph.
Anyway… I ran across this advertisement when looking for news articles about C.L. Moore (as “Catherine Kuttner”). It’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen?
The actual article I was there for is less memorable. And I mean, the ad’s obviously not supposed to look like that, but honestly, knowing that just kind of makes it worse. Like the scanner was made out of the They Live! glasses.
One observation from my travels: digital communication has really robbed of us is the friendly doodle. Le Guin’s correspondence is full of doodles. Tiptree would write dialogue on postcards or draw in little gags (like a lurking octopus). We gotta bring back doodles. Now more than ever. I’m doing my part (see, my user picture).
Also, I finally found a place selling the issue of Foundation where Le Guin is accused of creating “totalitarian propaganda.” One hitch: it is in New Zealand. At first when I was putting together an order of Foundation issues I was like “ugh, this is going to be really expensive.” It turns out the New Zealand dollar is actually pretty weak, so, in fact, it was surprisingly inexpensive given that it’s being shipped from the other side of the world. Sorry to my New Zealand subscribers re: your dollar.
August in enjoyable harmonies
The dog days of August will be overcome by the posts of September…
September ghost story
I thought this one might end up being the longest ghost story, but I think it’s still a bit shorter than June’s. Its origins are slightly mysterious in comparison to some of the others: I opened up my Notes app and saw I had written down a ghost idea at some past date, but I’d forgotten writing it down.
Which is, I guess, why you write things down.
Some books I have pre-ordered.…
Bookshop links are affiliate links.…
Why Christians Should Be Leftists (Phil Christman)
Happiness and Love: A Novel (Zoe Dubno)
Swallows: A Novel (Natsuo Kirino)
A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories (Jonathan Lethem)
Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters (Joanna Walsh)
September in Weird Sisters
Again, Dangerous Visions should get some kind of write-up in the next month, though I’ll admit I’m a bit stalled on it. So far, outside of the presence of My Girls, I think it’s a bit weaker. A,DV has also raised questions for me like “do I hate Kurt Vonnegut?” but since I’ve only read something like three Vonnegut stories, one of which is this one, this question will have to remain unanswered until some future date. It’s not tomorrow. Or next year. Maybe in 2029 we’ll settle the Vonnegut question.2
On the other hand, even though she was extremely open about not really liking it, I really liked Le Guin’s entry (The Word for World Is Forest) and I think I want to defend it against her charges that it’s too moralizing. Miyazaki should have adapted that book instead of giving Earthsea to his poor son—despiséd, rejected Goro.…
September in perfume
We’ll be doing some perfumes from Zoologist!
September in Evangelion
OK, September is when we will actually, finally, reach the end of Evangelion. Unless something else goes wrong. Nothing will go wrong. Nothing will go wrong. (Nothing) will go wrong. Nothing (will) go wrong. Nothing will (go) wrong. Nothing will go (wrong).…
Also please enjoy this article partly about the episode that was written several months later and does not ever mention me. “Sitman and Adler-Bell spent more than an hour in March on an episode about Taylor Swift”—it’s true… and nobody else!
Was Tiptree’s “A Momentary Taste of Being” written as a kind of response to the Vonnegut story in A,DV? It feels possible.
I'm not going to opt-out, I'm a strong believer in "if you don't like me writing on Taylor, you don't deserve me writing on Eva". Or maybe I'm too lazy. But I'm going to steal that NAH I'D WIN and dump it on a first worthy /a/ thread. First media with her I enjoyed! Huzzah!
So sorry about Buster ❤️