“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.” — Nabokov, Mary
Well, it’s spring again, and everything is different. It’s such a shift that I had to attach a dramatic epigraph to this missive. This time last year I had just started to take my Substack “seriously.” I was posting frequently, staying late in my frigid cubicle to type essays with so much steam and urgency. If I’m being honest — and why wouldn’t I — this spring felt much more languorous. I allowed myself to become swept up in big feelings; I daydreamed and twirled my hair and threw myself across my mattress like a Southern Gothic debutante overcome by desire. I blinked and it was April, then May, but I sat still while freckles formed on the bridge of my nose and the sun gradually returned to the sky. Spring always comes like a dream. It is my least favorite season for its murkiness and total lack of motivation to arrive; but this spring was as sweet as summer. I scrolled the weather app begging for an unseasonable beach day. I bought soft serve from trucks and shivered in the sixty degree weather with bare, goosebumped legs.
And then everything sped up; I was Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, careening through life at 2x speed. After six months of unemployment, I finally secured a job that feels so wonderful and fitting that it’s slightly surreal. I glanced at the calendar and realized that my time, previously mine all mine, was now back to being sliced up and doled out like a cherry pie. But I prefer this. Even the cave people had hunting and gathering to break up all the sleeping and species-propagating. When your time isn’t yours alone it feels more valuable. Call me a terrible square, but I am glad that Friday and Monday have meanings again outside of simply designating New York Times crossword difficulty levels. I’m like a dog that needs a task to feel happy. Most of the things mentioned in this post are things that filled up my days; they occupied my mind in the lead up to this moment. Here they are, pollinated just for you; take a tissue in case you sneeze 🤧
What I watched:
Canoa: A Shameful Memory (Felipe Cazals, 1976) - New Plaza Cinema
Canoa: A Shameful Memory is cheerfully, relentlessly violent. It stands out in my mind as a life-changing first watch. On one hand, it’s a tongue-in-cheek ‘school trip’ film aligned with Hausu, its saturated colors and surrealist arid landscape a playground for irresponsible young adult activists. On the other hand, it’s a troubling, deeply upsetting history of state-sanctioned atrocities that emerged from the cleaving of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ communities. It threads the needle of tone: the violence is treated with weight, but there are moments of humor, especially because of the charming Rankin/Bass style first-person narrator. Based on the real murder and attack of students that took place in San Miguel Canoa, the film is a minefield of intersecting political arguments, and yet it never feels pedantic. Everyone these days loves to christen even vaguely political cinema with the nuanced distinction, but Canoa is truly nuanced and not at all a slog. Yes, the village priest incites violence against the city-dwelling students. But it is also true that the secular government had neglected and profited off of rural communities for years. Two things can be true at once. Secularism is not always the tool of liberation. The film was only bolstered by the wonderful post-screening discussion with scholar Gema Kloppe-Santamaría. It was probably the best post-screening talk I’ve ever had the pleasure of sitting through. (S/O film programmer/comrade Steve Macfarlane for putting me on)
Summer Vacation 1999 (Shusuke Kaneko, 1988) - BAM, NewFest
I felt extremely lucky to catch this film on a rare 35mm print thanks to NewFest. I asked for a ticket based on the very little I knew about it — that it was a hybrid science-fiction/romance starring a cast of women playing young boys at a deserted Japanese boarding school. My first thought was: Wow, this movie is so special. And my second thought was: Wow, this is the exact plot of a Les Miserables fanfiction I penned during my freshman year of high school. The four boys are trapped by a complicated web of conflicting desires wrought upon them by the arrival of a mysterious boy who resembles a dead friend. It’s erotic without being explicitly sexual, each lingering stare loaded with meaning. The adult women played the boys with an eerie realism reminiscent of the Shakespearean gender-swapping tradition. The stakes felt so high, because when you’re a teenager, they are that high! It’s a queer, cross-dimensional love story about jealousy, grief, and really well-tailored uniforms. I wish I could tell you where to watch it, but it might just be one of those rare ephemeral films that finds you when you need it the most.
Who Am I This Time? (Jonathan Demme, 1982) - Spectacle Theater
Picture this: Christopher Walken in full make-up, eyeliner and foundation smeared on his young-ish, angular face. Susan Sarandon in a cheap sweater set. John Cale-produced soundtrack, for some reason. These are the ingredients that comprise Jonathan Demme’s insane made-for-television movie. Based on a Raymond Carver story of the same name, Who Am I This Time? is an audacious sixty minute flick about a community theatre troupe performing Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s like if someone went into my subconscious and crafted my dream movie. Christopher Walken plays an awkward, borderline asexual hardware employee who comes alive with sexual charisma only when he is on the stage. New-in-town cutie Susan Sarandon auditions for a local production and clinches the role of Stella, acting opposite Walken’s Stanley. She is mad with desire for Walken, and their scenes together throb with body heat, but their interactions have no pulse out in the real world. Or is the stage the real world… Jonathan Demme boldly asks this question. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is awesome in the biblical sense of the word.
The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997) - Metrograph
Ang Lee is the master of melodrama, and he serves it up American style in this insane holiday movie. Starring a cast that I’d call, “Wow, they’re in this??”, The Ice Storm revels in the stilted way that American parents interact with their children. Kevin Kline is heartbreaking as an affable father to an always effortlessly cool Christina Ricci, and Tobey Maguire is the master of the perverted teenage boy smile that always seems to stay slapped across his shiny adolescent face. The complicated, unspoken marriage dynamics of the upper class Northeastern neighborhood come to the fore at a key-swapping party that ends in a tragic weather event. It’s all clean lines and glass houses, a study in the clinical, late ‘90s interior design of the aspirationally wealthy. But it’s also deathly serious, like a Douglas Sirk film. It wants you to smirk, but it wants tears to well. When Sigourney Weaver pulled out a copy of Philip Roth’s When She Was Good after cheating on her husband, I almost pointed at the screen and cheered.
What I read:
Worry - Alexandra Tanner
I devoured Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel in approximately 48 hours. I was even tempted to be late to social outings because I was so wrapped up in the world of Worry. I think it’s very hard to write about the current state of the internet. Many people have tried, and many times it rings false. But Tanner so perfectly articulates the constant, low-frequency thrum of anxiety associated with being chained to Twitter and Instagram. For a long time, I tried not to write about internet culture, because I wanted my writing to be a haven away from those tendencies. And then I realized that that statement made me a hypocrite — 75% of my audience comes from Twitter. Social media has become a crucial element of environmental storytelling, especially for modern deflationary realist novels. Worry has captured the trap that is ‘being online’ with more precision and empathy than any other book I’ve read in the last few years. And more than that, Worry is a story about how easily our parents can become radicalized, how difficult it is to mediate your relationship with siblings through the screen, and how the Internet is a mother in the way it soothes and wounds in equal strokes.
“Will you or will you not eat a pear in the next three to four days?” she tries again.
“I can’t know that about myself,” I say.
Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
My roommate is one of Roth’s biggest defenders. She moved into our apartment with The Plot Against America — or maybe this is one of those dreamlike anecdotes that never really happened, and yet feels symbolically real, and so may as well be true. I bought Portnoy’s Complaint for a few bucks at a random church book sale (Philip Roth, how did you end up at a Methodist parish?), and I sat down to have my eyes opened. Of course, I loved it. It’s the funniest book I’ve ever read. Yes, it’s abhorrent at times, but I felt a guilty identification with Alexander Portnoy’s perverse Southern belle, nicknamed ‘Monkey.’ While reading, I started to understand the mid-century affinity for the humorist title — that’s what Roth is really doing in this book. You have to believe that it’s self-aware, even if it’s not. Every time he says something so disgusting that you want to slam the book shut, he comes back with a funny quip that pulls you back in. And for all of his perversions, he describes every woman as so utterly sensual and beautiful (from his friends’ mothers to strident co-eds) that you can’t help but fall in love, too. When he talks about baseball, it’s like David Foster Wallace talking about tennis: pure poetry, located somewhere mushy in his otherwise calcified heart.
“Forgive the luxuriating, but these are probably the most poignant hours of my life I’m talking about — I learn the meaning of the word longing, I learn the meaning of the word pang.”
The Houseguest: And Other Stories - Amparo Dávila
Feverish, flushed, and hallucinatory, The Houseguest is one of the only collections of short stories that has not bored me. I have trouble with the form. Often, I find that the short stories want badly to be a novel, or they want to be disparate short stories published in various literary magazines rather than dressed up as a singular volume. But The Houseguest is unique because each story feels like a small vignette within a larger, interconnected world. They are linked not by characters but by a tone of quiet dread. Dávila’s prose is sodden with existential fear, the small terrors that make up every day life. The Houseguest is like staring at the tiles on your bathroom floor for so long that you start to notice patterns, and it scares you. She reminds me a little of Clarice Lispector mixed with Věra Chytilová but neither of those comparisons are totally apt. Her writing is singular — you have to see it to believe it. I read it in Central Park on one of the first beautiful bright days of the season, and its unsettling mood is so strong that I became suspicious of everything around me. While it’s often described as an example of magical realism, Dávila seems to know something that we don’t; namely, that the occurrences in The Houseguest are not as mystical and unreal as we might want to believe.
“But I owe myself to pain. To the pain I practice day after day until achieving its perfection. To the pain of loving her and seeing her from afar, through a keyhole. I love her, yes, because she slips smoothly along the stairway like a shadow or a dream. Because she doesn’t demand my love and only occasionally peeps into my solitude.”
Everything/Nothing/Someone - Alice Carrière
My friend Liv has been urging me to read this book for months now — hi Liv! I knew it was going to be an intense, personal read, and I predicted that it would pierce me. The author was born to a pair of formidable and intense parents: celebrated artist Jennifer Bartlett and controversial Gilles Deleuze protégé-turned-actor Mathieu Carrière. We read so many books about the prominent figures of the mid-century art world, and yet we hear so little from the people in their lives who became detritus in their wake. When your parents are larger-than-life, you cope by reducing yourself to nothing. There is no space left for you. Caught between their messy divorce at a young age, Alice discusses her early obsession with self harm as a way to draw boundaries in a home where no boundaries existed. Her parents shared secrets about their sex lives and personal traumas so often that Alice craved a way to establish where her body ended and theirs began. As she grew up, she was misdiagnosed with many mental illnesses and prescribed many pills, until she no longer knew what was a side effect and what was a symptom. But her experimentations with reckless behavior came to a sudden halt when her mother was diagnosed with dementia, and she was forced to parent her parents. In this way, Alice reveals an uncomfortable but absolute truth: sometimes the real cure for neuroses is not more pills or more therapy, but less self-involvement. You can heal yourself by caring for other people; it’s a reminder that your interior world is so very tiny next to the vast, shocking, beautiful exterior world that you ignore by spending precious time self-reflecting. Or as Jemima Kirke said, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”
“I was put through psychological testing. For the first test, I had to draw a picture of myself. I finished and handed it to the doctor. ‘Where is the body?’ she asked. I looked at my self-portrait. I had drawn a giant, blank oval surrounded by squiggles of curly hair. The head shape and the hair squiggles took up the entire page. ‘Oh,’ I said. I stared at my picture. ‘I guess I forgot.’”
What I did:
1) Reread my favorite novel
Sometimes, when I want to remember why I am writing a novel, I have to return to the best of the medium: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I recently reread it for the first time since spring of 2020, when I spent lonely pandemic days in an empty apartment finishing my Lolita adaptation studies thesis that I had started in the fall of 2019. Agonizing over the book for the sole purpose of cracking Nabokov’s many riddles, I put it away for a few years before picking it up again. The spine is now cracked, the pages still littered with neon post-it notes scrawled with my half-formed observations. Rereading it this month for pleasure rather than to mine its contents for points that fit my argument, I basically sobbed the whole way through. I first read Lolita in my teenage years, and my relationship to it has evolved, though it has always existed as a sort of shining talisman of what literature can do and be. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Nabokov is the best to ever do it. Each sentence flows perfectly into the next, his prose packed with clues and allusions and yet somehow entirely original. I reminisce about the last lines specifically as tying Lolita up with a bow: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” I do get choked up thinking about the fact that half a century later, Lolita is still enjoying immortality.
2) Went to a baseball game
Believe it or not, I admire the circumscribed elegance of baseball. It’s basically theater: all crisp lines and shapes, the action happening in tableau. I grew up going to Minor League games with my father in Kentucky (go Bats!), where my hands would grow increasingly sticky from soft-serve and fountain drinks. I enjoy the way that baseball is drawn out, an exercise in endurance, like a Hamaguchi film. Plus, I can kind of follow what’s going on — my secret lore is that I played softball in my elementary and middle school years. It was just what you did during the summers in the South. I was never that good, but I was fast. My coach would throw me up to bat and covertly encourage me to get hit by the pitcher so I could ‘walk on’ to first base. From there, I’d steal bases with the sort of suicidal speed associated with being a gangly fifth grader. All this to say, I saw the Cyclones play, and the absolutely sublime portrait of Americana rendered by the stadium lights illuminating the vacant, off-season, skeletal rollercoasters brought a tear to my eye.
3) Ditched shuffle
I think we all suffer from the paralysis of choice sometimes, and this manifests most obviously in the ‘shuffle’ function on any streaming service. I found that more often than not, I was queuing the same five or six utterly unrelated songs over and over again. Eventually, it wasn’t even out of a desire to hear these songs, but out of a strange compulsion. I decided this month that I’d commit to listening to albums, as God intended. There is something very relaxed about pressing play on a self-contained work of art; I didn’t press skip and let the album play to the end. Perhaps this is aligned with my last wrap-up post, in which I mentioned an obsession with CDs. I miss the discipline of sitting with one thing from beginning to end. It’s just another way to lead a slightly more analog life, which is one of my forever goals. Rather than trying to curate the perfect list of songs to take me through six subway stops, I pick an album. It’s been a nice way to reconnect with music I loved in my childhood — like Katy Perry’s perfect debut pop album One of the Boys, an anomaly in her now unlistenable discography. This might seem obvious to anyone who grew up before the dawn of music streaming, but it’s easy to forget that albums are meant to be enjoyed chronologically. It quiets my brain to enjoy forty-six minutes of uninterrupted music from one artist; it is like a little gift.
4) Took early walks
As of writing this paragraph, I have just been hired at a new full-time position. However, I was in the trenches of unemployment for about six months, and I would not have maintained any shreds of sanity if not for my early morning walks. Real morning walk-heads (walkmans, if you will), might laugh when I suggest that my ‘early’ walks began around 8 a.m. My unemployment mission was to start waking up at 6, but now I have a job. C’est la vie. But rain, sleet, or shine, you could find me circling Prospect Park before 10 a.m. on basically any weekday. I have lived near the park for four years, and it is still revealing itself to me — I didn’t know the Tennis House existed until today, literally, though maybe I once stumbled upon it and forgot. I love avoiding eye contact with the other pedestrians, wondering if they, too, are calling themselves freelancers to cope with the recent lapse in employment. “Why are you here at 11 on a Tuesday?” I want to ask. By the time I exit through the South Gate, it is just starting to get truly busy. It is one of the few things I’ll miss about being unemployed. I was clocked in to Prospect Park, and I was racking up overtime, baby!
On repeat (album edition):
Blue Banisters - Lana del Rey
Armed Forces - Elvis Costello & the Attractions
When the Pawn… - Fiona Apple
Viva Hate - Morrissey
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic - The Sundays
God’s Favorite Customer - Father John Misty
Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen
i cannot explain why but i really needed to read a piece like this <3 beautifully written
hi alex <3