Happy Earth Day

I got you a link roundup.

Music-cover sheet for 'Spring Blossoms' by Joseph Edward Carpenter and Stephen Ralph Glover; various spring flowers under trellis, purple flowers in the centre, strawberries below, crocuses and snowdrops on the side. Via Wikimedia Commons.

I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldster-adjacent content. Now and then I’ll pass some of it along to you in a link roundup like this one.

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• “You see a lot more women my age on TV now, but No. 1 on the call sheet is not always a plus-size fading flower.” - in The Cut/NY Magazine Juan A. Ramirez profiles Bridget Everette, whose Somebody Somewhere (a favorite show of mine!) returns with its second season on HBO Max tomorrow, 4/23.

• “That day, at the cathedral, I was wearing my father’s watch, an Armani jacket made for him, one of his shirts, and one of his hats.” - in GQ, novelist and bookseller

  Emma Straub
  writes a moving tribute to her late father, horror writer Peter Straub, and his personal style.

• “Her latest book, “Sovereign” (Minor Matters Books), features a selection of her photographs of women who range in age from their mid-fifties to their early nineties, posing naked, frequently outdoors and in natural settings.” - In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot writes about Jocelyn Lee’s new photo book.

  

• “Despite the stroke she suffered in 2020, she still looks vibrant and tough, with her smoky blue eyes and roughed up, rock ’n’ roll hair. Walking is a challenge (she takes it slow these days) and she can’t yet play guitar, but her voice is thrillingly unaffected.” - I did not know 70-year-old singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams had a stroke in 2020! In The New York Times, Penelope Green profiles Williams on the occasion of her forthcoming memoir, Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You, out Tuesday.

  

• Happy Earth Day! This 2020 McSweeney’s piece by

  Kimberly Harrington
  (very specific to shelter-in-place times in 2020, but still hilarious) made me literally laugh out loud.

• “…we invited 12 seniors, ages 71 to 88 and from several states, to tell us about what it’s like to be an older person in American society today.” - At the New York Times opinion section, “What Happened to America? We Asked 12 People in Their 70s and 80s.”

• “It was a story, at its core, about a disappearance, a disappearance of one’s younger self…” - at LitHub, author Andrew Porter on writing his new short story collection, The Disappeared.

• Meet Sandy, the Queen of E. 12th Street: (via Susan Alexandra on Instagram)

susan_alexandra

A post shared by Susan Alexandra (@susan_alexandra)

• “Thanks for everything. May I never see another fucking email from you again.” - at Little Old Lady Comedy, Rebecca K. Morrison writes “Open Letter To Weight Loss Companies Pursuing Me Like An Ex-Boyfriend Who Won’t Accept Our Breakup”

• “We don’t come into our agency until we’re older and by then we’ve already figured out a way of living that’s contingent on powers greater than ourselves, on other people. There’s so much unlearning that needs to be done before we can live authentically.” - in Tricycle: the Buddhist Review, Ann Tashi Slater interviews memoirist Melissa Febos (who writes the

  Third Thoughts
  newsletter) about “turning toward a more authentic life.”

• In

  Esoterica Magazine
  , an excerpt of Howard Lovy’s novel about “two middle-aged musicians whose forty-year-old song goes viral, forcing them to navigate through fame, aging, regret, and new choices late in life.”

• RIP Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun, pianist, and composer who passed away in March, at 99. In n+1, an appreciation of her music by J. Mamana.

thejerusalemite

A post shared by Nina (@thejerusalemite)

• “The reason it works is we both think we’re the one who got lucky.” - Writer, Girls of a Certain Age blogger, and Everything is Fine podcast co-host

  Kim France
  in The New York Times Vows section, on her recent marriage to Paul Green of Paul Green Rock Academy fame. Mazel tov, you guys! 🥂🎉

• “We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around.” - in

  Maria Popova
  's The Marginalian, Nick Cave on the art of growing older.

• If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you might notice that this link roundup lacks a cartoon at the top by New Yorker cartoonist Carolita Johnson. That’s because I’ve pretty much run through all her vaguely aging-related material in prior link roundups. If you’d like to buy prints of her cartoons, or otherwise support her wonderful work, visit her Linktree. She’s also got a Patreon you can contribute to.

• Welcome new subscribers! So many of you have recently come aboard, and I’m thrilled to have you here. I invite you to tool around the archives and check out the vast variety of interviews, personal essays, the burgeoning podcast (I’ve got plans!), link roundups and other bloggy things.

That’s all I’ve got. Have a great rest of your weekend…

-Sari