You don't need to like that feeling

[sovay]

It took nearly another hour on the phone even with the unobstructive assistance of another customer service representative, but we have health insurance again and it will only cost slightly more than half as much again, which was of course too much to begin with.

I have not read The Outsiders (1967) or Rumble Fish (1975) since high school at the latest and yet as soon as I read that Mary Renault was one of S. E. Hinton's favorite and influential authors, it made such sense to me that I want to re-read to see the likeness, beyond all those beautiful doomed young men.

The eye-rattling industrial hyperpop of Sophie's "Ponyboy" (2017) was something extremely different.

It would be really nice to be able to read José Esteban Muñoz or Mark Fisher on the queer hauntological dancefloor of Midland's Fragments of Us (2024).

We lit the candle for my grandfather's yahrzeit.

Comments

[sovay]

What a relief! But >:( to the increased cost.

Thanks! Yeah.

I have never read (nor heard much about) any S. E. Hinton and I am now intrigued by 'influenced by Renault'.

She's a definitive name in American YA; her books were always in libraries when I was growing up and most of them have film adaptations, at least one of which Hinton co-wrote herself; also the ones I can remember reading were in fact good. She wrote a loosely linked cycle of novels set around Tulsa, Oklahoma where she grew up and in the 1960's when she was a high school student at the time of her first novel—a teenager writing about teenagers, for teenagers, because she saw nothing that resembled her life in the literature with which she was provided, although then it is fascinating that her books are so intensely male, not merely their first-person narrators but the strongest relationships in all of the books that I can recall. I would be really interested to hear how they read to someone who comes to her from Renault. Without re-reading, I feel like Alexias/Lysis and Alexander are ghosting a lot of what I can remember.