Scapegracers; Questlove; deejaying books
I’m not exactly a music person1, and afaict we have very different tastes, but I’ve spent kind of a lot of time thinking about Questlove and his process ever since coming across his thoughts on deejaying:
“For every record you spin, you have to know five records that go perfectly with that record. So for me it's like a chess game. I'm thinking about the payoff song that's going to be 20 songs from now and how can I build up to that moment.” - Questlove (NPR) (via)
It’s fun to think about deejaying book recommendations, too (even when I can’t quite follow Questlove’s more concrete tips for crafting a set).
I recently finished the last book in H.A. Clarke’s brilliant Scapegracers trilogy. Fucking incredible books, they taste like Jolt cola and Black Lemonade2 and cherry chapstick and half falling asleep out on park benches after sneaking out to midnight RHPS but also the first time you ever watched But I’m A Cheerleader3. They get the feeling of being a certain kind of teenage girl uncanningly right - all sharp and gross and ridiculous and dangerous and desperate and playful and angry and confused and powerful. They make me ache with love.
Okay, then. Scapegracers is the big payoff. How do we get there?
“One of Questlove’s tricks is to play a song that might not be familiar to a younger crowd but that a slightly older crowd will recognize. Then he’ll transition into a modern song that sampled it, or he’ll do the opposite… there’s nothing more fun than the discovery of ‘Oh, I know that song! That’s where that comes from?”
let’s start with a popular banger, Demon Copperhead (should you have to read David Copperfield, too? I haven’t) (this is David Copperfield but modern Appalachia and the opioid epidemic and it is brilliant)
Which slides us neatly towards the more indie-feeling Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White - another angry hard Appalachian novel but [gender]queer and autistic and less opioid-focused, more of a magical realism labor union kinda story
We can lean harder into the magic with The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow, which follows witches growing up and into their power in a world that doesn’t want them. Still involves labor rights but more in the broader context of suffrage and related issues, and has a lot about very gendered forms of magic and where the categories break down. It’s also drowning in this awful bittersweet powerful angry guilt and love among sisters who’ve survived abuse and the agonizing desperation of bringing a baby into the ugly mess of things with you
that was a lot of pain, maybe we should play the Magical Boy graphic novels as a breather? A trans boy discovers that he’s the latest descendent in a long line of anime-style magical girls, so there’s a common thread of strangely gendered magic being messed around with, but way lighter and more fun
continuing to catch our breath, this time with an old classic (echoes of kid discovers magic, not exactly a magical school but., stolen magic and stolen lives (but the deaths barely count)), a super strong nostalgic childhood fav of mine - The Lives of Christopher Chant and the rest of the Chrestomanci books
And then picking up the pace again, darker and more intense, we turn to Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy. (These are the only dark academia or magical school books really worth reading.) We get here from Christopher Chant via childhood magical education, but Scholomance also loops back to the earlier books in our set with so much on hurt people hurting people, guilt and anger, stolen lives and stolen magic. (also climate crisis and ecological devastation, but let’s leave that here for now)
A sharp transition into hot pink softball romcom bouncy fun - Grand Slam Romance by Ollie Hicks and Emma Oosterhous! These graphic novels have a faster, brighter beat, young energetic rough brash filthy-minded sapphic friendship and love.
Still bouncy fun but also veering angrier, sharper - The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz - punk rock time-traveling feminist scifi!
and finally we get to Scapegracers - angry girls and the sensation of being at loud parties like in Newitz, pure spunky pastel fun like in Grand Slam Romance, a genderqueer autistic-coded protagonist like in Compound Fracture, witches growing into their power like in The Once And Future Witches, and all the rest
I like thinking about the structures of things.
Writing, for instance! Here are some great resources on writing from a place of structure, doodling out little diagrams for how the shape of a narrative should flow and fit together:
How Rebecca Skloot Built The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Assembling the written word: McPhee reveals how the pieces go together
and of course McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
(If you’ve never read any McPhee, you could do worse than to start with my actual favorite book of his, Uncommon Carriers. (At least one of the essays from it is available in isolation - A Fleet of One))
But also, jungle gyms were invented by Sebastian Hinton, whose father (Charles Hinton) coined the term tesseract for a 4d hypercube. He was inspired by CH’s attempt to teach kids about the 4th dimension by getting them more familiar with the 3rd dimension.
“Hinton theorized that since we spend so much of our lives simply walking in straight lines, and not using all of the three-dimensional space around us, we have an even harder time making the mental leap to fourth dimension.
His solution was to train young children, namely his own kids, to internalize the third dimension. To pull this off, Hinton built his children a series of stacked bamboo cubes. He labeled the bamboo in all three directions, Fannin says: "Where the junctions would be, he would put X, Y, Z coordinates." Then he attempted to turn these stacked cubes into a game. "He would say, 'X2, Y4, Z3 — go! And all the kids would race each other towards the correct coordinate,'" says Fannin.”
- Matt Ozug, Inside the weird and delightful origins of the jungle gym
(Charles Hinton also invented a baseball pitching machine powered by gunpowder)
Also, (not a Hinton invention), these traps.
Addenda
We’ve spoken before about New Mexico whiptails being a female-only species, but I just learned that a honeybee with two fathers and no mother has been discovered - the first ever observed in nature!
by which I mean, I have extremely strong opinions and a bunch of important playlists that I listen to on repeat in certain contexts, but I don’t like most music and most of the time would prefer to hear none at all
check out this ingredients list if you want to be horrified by what we drinking in high school
a hilarious candy-pastel campy rom-com about gay conversion camp, where the cast was so good that somehow Natasha Lyonne wasn’t even the hottest one there - don’t try to understand the blurbs, just go watch it if you haven’t yet
I've only read the Chrestomanci and Scholomance books, but I love those with my whole heart. Will definitely check out Scapegracers and some of the books on this setlist.