this is about Anne's book/but also to Anne--

I'm reading Anne's novel, The Enhancers. 

I have it next to our bed, and because of this time/this part of the semester, it only gets my eyes/I only get to enter it for a tiny sliver each night. I told this to Anne at a party (shock of the century that we actually went out one night! it was very covid-safe), right before introducing her to our daughter, Loulou, who's recently newly exposed to the cool literary spaces we bump into through work/writing. Anne talked to Lou very familiarly and kindly--not at all catering to her 11-year-old-ness. I liked watching Anne's earrings as she talked.

The novel is (so far): sci-fi soft-dystopia girlhood rebellion girl friendship in warped bourgeois values--the middle class is the medium, etc.--and also, very blatantly, is (about) climate grief. The main character is constantly cataloguing extinctions and loss--as a way of inscribing upon the world.

I twitter-clicked on this essay yesterday and it's a lovely complement: To Live in the Ending | Journal (kenyonreview.org)

"How is it possible to stay with the trouble without staying in the horror? For decades, [CA] Conrad’s answer has been to bring themselves back to the radical present of their own body through ritual. For their most recent book, Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration, they began by assembling field recordings of animals who had gone extinct or nearly extinct within Conrad’s lifetime, making a card for each animal with its name and facts about its life, families and habits. They then drove to Walmarts, those contemporary consumer embodiments of Manifest Destiny, in all fifty states, often stopping to spend the night. (To entice travelers to shop in its stores, Conrad explained to Naimon, Walmart allows people to camp in its parking lots. Each night the parking lots fill with a mix of high-end campers and homeless families living in their cars.) To perform the ritual, Conrad plays the field recordings, returning the coos, grunts, wails, calls, and songs of the disappeared and disappearing animals to the air. They bathe in the sounds of extinct vibrations, moving a set of speakers slowly up their body from foot to head before entering the Walmart, still listening to the recordings on headphones. Moving in spiral against the grid of the aisles, they walk until they reach the center of the store and then kneel or lie down to write, remaining open to whatever interactions might arise from being a large, queer, glittering body on the floor of a Walmart during regular store hours."

I don't know if I already knew of Conrad's project; did you, Anne? It's such a nice overlap!

Last night, Lou and I were lounging in mine and Phil's bed, about to read some Nancy Drew (this is something we do somewhat ironically/sarcastically but also because the frocks and strange salads are so satisfying), and she flipped through Anne's book and asked if she could read it when I was done. (This may or may not happen.)