The Buttlist vol. 1: Distractions edition (and PSA wash your hands!)
Hi! It's your friend, Butt Praxis, with my first weekly newsletter. I've typed and retyped the following sentence several times and there's no way to phrase it so it doesn't sound annoying: I've had enough people both irl and online asking for my thoughts and recommendations in a more centralized place, so here it is.
I don't feel comfortable, generally, posting lifestyle content on any other platforms because it feels tone-deaf to me? To be thinking about buying things or spending time on things when so many things are so very fucked up. But thinking about how fucked up everything is all the time makes a person less healthy and therefore less able to do things. So this newsletter is mostly about everything I'm thinking about that isn't how fucked up things are, which is mostly clothes, sorry.
EDIT: This one turned out to not really be about clothes much, sorry again.
What I'm reading
On Mommy's-reading-chair-leave-her-alone:
Worn: A People's History of Clothing, by Sofi Thanhauser
My review so far
It is, unfortunately, not a book about clothes. There is quite a bit in the book about textiles and fashion, but it's primarily a book about racism and misogyny. Which is great if you're not ALWAYS THINKING ABOUT THAT ANYWAY. There is still quite a bit about textiles and fashion so I am still chugging away, but it is not bedtime reading, despite the excellent prose and pacing.
What IS bedtime reading?
As You Like It, the Arden edition, specifically
Butt Praxis lore drop
I love William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare is my friend. About a hundred years ago I took an intensive Shakespeare course at Oxford from a man named Valentine Cunningham, who had a thick bristle brush of white hair and black rectangular glasses and said things about my essays like "It's a bit blokish, but it reads well; it's got flow." He liked the Arden editions, specifically, except for the history plays, for which he liked the Oxford editions. They have extensive forewords and footnotes that are well-researched and occasionally even funny. Did you know there's a whole field of Shakespeare research that matches the costumes the theatre company had on hand to the parts they were used for? Because fabric and clothing was so expensive, costuming was a real constraint for Renaissance-era playwrights.
On As You Like It: regular readers of this newsletter will discover that I will read or watch anything in which a girl dresses like a boy and makes everyone feel gay. AYL is actually NOT my favorite of these plays, because that's Twelfth Night, mostly because I like Viola better than Rosalind. Maybe if Amanda Bynes had played Rosalind in a teen comedy version of AYL I would feel differently, but she didn't.
The best part of AYL is the friendship between Celia and Rosalind. It's a sweet and accurate portrayal of adolescent bff-hood, whether ribbing on each other or ganging up on a victim who doesn't think ladies should talk like that. Kind of a PEN15 vibe. It's a nice change after A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was bedtime reading last week, when Helena and Hermia were throwing aside years of friendship to fight about some loser. Anyway, As You Like It is great, recommend recommend, third-favorite after Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
On The Calculation of Volume 1, Solvej Balle
If you're doing a low-buy/no-buy like me, you may find yourself with a little extra cash to do something stupid with. May I recommend (this is not an affiliate link; I have no affiliate links because I do not think anyone would ever pay me to advertise them but if they would, they certainly haven't tried yet) [the New Directions New Classics Book Club](https://www.ndbooks.com/shop/product/new-classics-club/) ?
Ok why doesn't markdown work here when it does everywhere else? Whatever.
Some of these books aren't easy reads but exactly zero of them are duds, and the extra one they send you when you subscribe, The Maids, is phenomenal. The copy on the cover makes you think it's subtly horny or whatever, but it's actually so not horny as to become almost perverse. Cozy and melancholy and a little unsettling, which I can also say is true of On the Calculation of Volume 1, so far. It's billed as "sci-fi" which I get but it's "sci-fi" the way, like, Kafka's Metamorphosis is sci-fi.
What I'm Watching
A.P. Bio, Netflix, currently
We loved English Teacher, so some algorithm somewhere threw this at us. We like comedies about bad people who never learn anything, but we are uncomfortable with cringe. It's hard to find a comedy that can balance that but the writers as of season 2 do a great job. And the episodes are 20 minutes long, so we can watch a whole episode after the children go to bed and still have time to clean up the house and pack lunches and play video games, etc.
What I'm playing
Infinity Nikki, Infold Games
You're unlikely to ever see a "What I'm playing" section again because I don't play any video games except this one. It's an open-world platformer (like Spyro or Castlevania) set in a gorgeous world full of deep lore, and the whole thing is about clothes. You are Nikki, a Stylist, which in this game makes you a mage, more or less. Stylists harness "the power of Whim" (it's magic) to do...anything, really. Really. Fairly early in the game, a city loses power, and Nikki's response is "I can make an electrician outfit and fix the power grid!" This is not played for laughs, and indeed this is what you do. The clothes maketh the Nikki, and the Nikki maketh the clothes: the entire focus of the game is on crafting, collecting, and wearing garments. The garments are lovingly rendered and modeled by people who really understand clothing construction. You can tell which fabrics were used and where the seam lines are on the garments. Every single item in IN is craftable in real life, if you have the time and material, even Momo's cloaks (he's a cat, sort of) and the clothes on the NPCs.
Those are screenshots from the mobile game, which looks way better than it has any reason to. The PC version is gorgeous, but my husband wanted to play Diablo again, so now I have a PS5 slim, which is functionally a Nikki machine plus we use it for tv. I've been playing this game every day since it was released a month and a half ago, and a few weeks in I noticed my face felt different: I had been smiling more. Absolutely HORRIBLE, INCREDIBLY FUCKED UP THINGS are happening on screens, generally. If you want to look at a different thing on a screen so you can breathe and focus on what you can do in the world, there are worse ways to do so than Infinity Nikki.
Caveat: It is technically a "gacha game" which means there's a whole system where you spend money to get chances to get rare clothes, so if you're vulnerable to that kind of game, you probably shouldn't play this. You do not need to spend money to get the outfits that advance you in the game. The "f2p" ("free to play") experience has been pretty good for me although I did toss them $5 for a month of in-game currency because I want them to keep making this game for me.
Advice Corner
Ok, a little bit about clothes. Last week, my coworker asked me:
Q: "What shoes can I wear with jeans that aren't heels or sneakers?"
A: I don't see loafers going anywhere. I like the loafer style because a slip-on style shoe is less likely to get fucked up over time since you're not going to stretch out the mouth (is that what the shoe opening is called?) and tongue or smoosh the back in weird ways because you are too tired to lace and unlace the shoe every fucking time you put it on or take it off. A rounder toe will wear better than a square toe because hard corners on shoes chip and scuff into round corners anyway. If you want soles you can replace, look for a "goodyear welt" or other stitched-on sole. If you're lucky, there's still a cobbler somewhere in your vicinity who can put a new sole on an old shoe for like $20.
I love loafers on other people. I think they look great with all varieties of outfit and they can dress up jeans and a t-shirt into something that passes for "business casual" in most of the country by now. Personally, honestly, I do not wear loafers. I wear Merrell Jungle Mocs because they are indestructible, ugly as hell and they make me a couple inches taller. They are frequently on sale so I would not pay full price for these if you can help it. But I do love these horrible shoes.
In general, when choosing a casual shoe, consider the following:
- Lifestyle – I think the most beautiful casual shoe ever made is the short lace-up boot of the Victorian era. The ones with like a hundred little eyelets that tightly fit the ankle. They're around! It's possible to own these! But I don't have time to lace a shoe on the go because I have two small children who are vaguely confused by the concepts of "shoe" and "go". So I know if I bought the perfect boot, I would never wear it. FIT and COMFORT are included in lifestyle. Odds are you're not going to wear a shoe that hurts you, and you shouldn't! Think about how much you're walking and under what conditions. If you're in a snowy city and are likely to encounter salted roads, a suede or patent leather shoe is not for you.
- Material – Your shoes should last (that's a shoe pun). You should seek a material that wears well. There's "sustainable" shoe brands out there pitching you fall-apart flats made out of recycled plastic or whatever. Cool, fine, but if you're buying a pair a year, that's a whole lot of shoes. The most sustainable shoe is the shoe you already own. It should probably be leather***. Not "vegan leather", which is plastic. Leather, like most natural materials, looks good old. It looks great when it's scuffed or refinished. It develops a "patina", right? It looks old but there is aesthetic and moral value in something that looks old but still functions just as well as it did when it was new. You don't really get that with any other shoe material.
***Or, and don't tell anyone I said this, but if you really really really really don't care what you look like, you can wash the wool Allbirds pretty much indefinitely. Wool is GREAT. If you find wool shoes, that's probably a good purchase. But please don't tell anyone Butt Praxis told you to wear Allbirds. - Aesthetic – I love ugly shoes! I think a hideous shoe makes an outfit really avant-garde and interesting. But you might not want to look avant-garde or interesting. You might want to look, I dunno, "put together" or "like you have ever seen another human being before". If you feel really icky about the way a shoe looks, don't buy it, even if the fit and the material are right. You won't wear it and then you'll have to buy another shoe and now we're back where we started. And if you DO feel great about a really weird shoe, as long as it fits your lifestyle and is of a durable material, fuck yeah, buy the really weird shoe. Plan your life around it. Why not. Everyone needs a purpose.
Do you want advice? Doesn't have to be about clothes. Email or hmu on Bluesky and I will answer in a future newsletter, keeping you anonymous, of course!
What do you mean, "wash your hands"?
The Norovirus! Is going around! Unfortunately, it does not have an envelope, so hand sanitizer, which generally works by fucking up the virus envelope and killing the virus inside, doesn't work on it. And neither do most surface cleaners. What does work is soap, water, and scrubbing. So right now, hand sanitizer is great against flu and RSV (that sucked, btw, for everyone except our baby who got the shot against it), but it won't work against the norovirus so hand washing is more important than usual.
That Norovirus photo is making me hungry
I'm God's worst-cookingest soldier and I've made this recipe twice and came out great both times. https://missionchocolaterecipes.com/brown-sugar-nib-cookie/
Regular brown sugar is fine.
That's it for Vol. 1 of The Buttlist! There should be a footer under this with like, buttons and stuff, so let me know if there isn't. I hope you liked this, and if you didn't, I hope you like the next one.
Cheers!
