I know it’s September, but better late than never? Luckily, I have the greatest excuse in the book, which is that I moved apartments for the first time in three years. Believe it or not, uprooting your entire life can really put a damper on any creative or intellectual pursuits. I don’t think I slept properly for upwards of a month, and now that the move is completed I feel as though I’ve competed in the Amazing Race or something. I’m still fervently stalking antique furniture warehouses in the city for the perfect coffee table and armoire, but I’m at least 65% unpacked and ready to start acting like a person again. I actually read a lot this summer, mostly on my daily commute, and though I didn’t hit the theaters as much as I would like to I did watch movies at home. This will be a pretty informal entry, but I think it’s important to ease yourself back into the writing practice even just for consistency’s sake.
Truthfully — and I’ve expressed this many times already — I don’t know what my future on Substack will look like. I love writing newsletters and essays, but the platform has changed to become more like the platforms I was initially avoiding by being here. I wonder if other longtime users feel the same. I loved Substack because of its retro blog-like interface and refusal to integrate traditional social media features like video, audio, or The Feed, but that’s all gone out the window. I’ve been getting back into pitching more traditional publications, and I’ve also been editing my novel, which is obviously consuming a vast majority of my brain space right now. Nevertheless, I am held captive by tradition, and it felt sacrilegious to skip a season entry when I’ve maintained this feature for the last two years. So here it goes.
What I Watched:
1) The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968) - Criterion Channel
I’ve been thinking about ‘dad movies’ as a category lately — not movies that dads already watch (Cheaper by the Dozen, Back to the Future, Blazing Saddles), but movies that dads need to watch. Frank Perry’s The Swimmer is the most urgent entry on that list. Starring Burt Lancaster at his most barrel-chested, the film is a winding, gorgeously shot hallucination about the falsities of the suburbs. Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, a suburban father who vows to swim his way across the neighborhood. This leads to many hilarious scenes of Lancaster diving into an in-ground pool without even saying hello to its owners, but it’s also really unsettling. The Swimmer pokes fun at the lack of stimulation inherent to suburban life, in which an aging, bored father must find fulfillment in turquoise pools instead of wide open seas. There are a lot of very well-written monologues for women in this film, which reminded me that the monologue is really a lost art. Basically, it’s The Suburbs Dream of Violence: The Movie, and I think every dad should be forced Clockwork Orange-style to watch it.
2) Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
I watched this on the TV at a Victorian inn on someone else’s Prime account on the 4th of July while fireworks were blazing in the distance, so obviously I cried so hard that I felt nauseous the next morning. These days it feels like so many gay love stories are focused on ‘yearning’ — the glances, the hand touches, the straight-boy-playing-gay-who-won’t-do-a-sex-scene of it all. I find this tendency borderline homophobic. Gay men and women have had sex for as long their straight counterparts have. If Brokeback Mountain was made today (probably as an HBO miniseries) I could easily see it being sanitized into a sort of ‘will they won’t they’ love story that never was. But in Lee’s film they will and they do. I find this to be one of the most romantic stories of all time, with a beautiful screenplay and passionate love scenes. It also features some of the best casting I’ve ever seen; basically every bit part in this film was played by someone who became a star. But seeing Heath Ledger in old age makeup is almost too much to bear. It is tragic to think that we had a true spiritual heir to Marlon Brando, and now we have fucking Paul Mescal (sorry… actually no, I’m not).
3) Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli, 1956) - MOMI
Continuing the theme of ‘films about gay men that made me weep’… Tea & Sympathy is a shockingly tender queer love story made in the 1950s, and it’s crazy how well it has aged. Deborah Kerr stars as the Laura Reynolds, the dissatisfied wife of a prep school coach who seeks solace in a friendship with Tom Lee (John Kerr), a Sensitive Young Man assigned to her husband’s dorm. Lee displays all the traditional signs of gender abnormality in a man — not dressing like shit, enjoying classical music, rejecting the crew cut, etc — and he is mocked mercilessly for it. His classmates call him ‘sisterboy’ because the film censors wouldn’t allow them to use the word ‘sissy’. Tea and Sympathy unveils the absurdity and inherent homoeroticism in toxic masculinity in a way that feels prescient. Any scene in which Laura tries to console Tom caused me to break down in tears, because Kerr speaks with such moral clarity. It really illustrates the long history of camaraderie between women in horrible and imprisoning heterosexual relationships and gay men who are unable to leave the closet. The prep school boys’ cruelty is so emotionally violent, and despite the slightly botched ending I do believe this is an Essential Text if you are interested in queer cinema or American cinema, period. If a Sensitive Young Man never approaches me for comfort when I am a wise 40-year-old woman I will consider it a failure of my life. Thank you to Michael Koresky for the wonderful Q&A afterwards!
What I read:
1) Green Girl (Kate Zambreno, 2011)
Baby’s first Kate Zambreno. If I had read this ten years ago it probably would have blown my mind, and I still think that it probably inspired a lot of the stream-of-consciousness feminine malaise novels that came after. I loved it a lot. The protagonist of Green Girl is an American department store worker in London. She’s young and film-literate and sad, and she surrounds herself with other young and film-literate and sad people. I found the perspective of the American seasonal worker in Europe to be interesting, especially because I lived in London in 2019 and recognized a lot of the guilty behaviors exhibited by the American expats of Green Girl. Zambreno’s prose is so propulsive and lush; I found myself wanting to walk and read when I dismounted the train simply because I couldn’t stop. It feels specifically written for me and women like me: those of us who worshipped the female Catholic martyrs and watched The Passion of Joan of Arc on a broken laptop, who brought pictures of Audrey Hepburn to hairdressers who said, “I cannot make you look like Audrey Hepburn.” But it’s still quite literary and structurally interesting. It’s not just about the protagonist, but about every young woman protagonist within this tradition.
2) The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway, 1926)
I try not to prescribe to the idea of people having irredeemable, no-nuance red flags, but there is one thing that without fail tells me what kind of person someone is, and it’s if they prescribe to the “ew dead man authors are so boring ew Hemingway ew overrated” way of thinking and reading. I just will not think of you as a serious person if you say that to me! Anyways, it’s hot out, and so obviously the temptation to fall back into the languid prose of the Lost Generation is at an all-time high. Hemingway’s classic high school English assignment novels are a major blind spot for me; I love A Moveable Feast and some of his more minor novels, but I’ve skipped a lot of the heavy hitters. I chose The Sun Also Rises because I wanted to read about bull-fighting, and it is, obviously, as beautiful as its reputation would suggest. I went into the novel already knowing its infamous last line, and so I knew it was barreling toward something, creating the narrative rhythm of bulls charging down narrow Spanish streets toward their death. It’s atmospheric and moody and funny, and it will make you want to drink vermouth and walk into the ocean.
3) Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934)
Okay, so I guess my reading theme for the season was ‘expats’. Not at all surprising. I am openly bitter and jealous of everyone like the central family of Tender Is the Night who can fly to Europe every summer because their dads invented aerosol cans or blood diamonds or AI security software, but at least my heart is pure <3 While this novel isn’t as strong as Fitzgerald’s short stories or The Beautiful and the Damned, I enjoyed it as an almost episodic saga of a couple falling apart on the French Riviera. The story’s protagonist is Dick Diver, a pioneering psychiatrist who met his wife while treating her for what we would probably now call PTSD resulting from childhood sexual abuse. The plot purports to mirror the struggles Fitzgerald was facing in his own marriage to Zelda. I assumed this would make the novel extremely biased, but Fitzgerald sends up his own ego more than anyone else’s, portraying himself as a dithering, chronically adulterous alcohol who sleeps his way through Europe to avoid confronting his failing marriage. Against all odds it was a fun read!
4) Blue Movie (Terry Southern, 1970)
Terry Southern is best known as the screenwriter for some of the most representative films of the 1960s: Easy Rider, Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, to name just a few of his contributions. You could say he narrativized that period of American history, one I have an immense fondness for. So I was excited to learn that he had written a controversial novel about a demanding genius director (fashioned, no doubt, after Stanley Kubrick) attempting to film an ‘erotic’ European arthouse film that is really just an extended porno. The book is funny, extremely offensive (obviously), and also genuinely sexy at times. He is nowhere near as poetic as Anaïs Sin, but they are spiritual siblings linked by a preternatural ability to find the sensuous within the absurd. It’s kind of the closest I’ll get to a fun and summery book. Do not ask me for a beach read recommendation, because I will have you reading mid-century edgelord smut.
What I Did:
1) Returned to wired earbuds
I am historically fickle when it comes to how I listen to music. I was a wired earbud proponent for a very long time, until my favorite pair broke right before Christmas in 2021 and I bought a pair of AirPods that I basically hated. I went back to wired over-the-ear headphones in 2023, connecting a pair of PortaPros to my iPhone with a convertor, but the sound quality was so bad that I switched to Sony wireless over-the-ear headphones in 2024. Those served me well until this summer, when they mysteriously broke. Thanks to moving costs I decided to go back to the original Apple wired earbuds, and I feel awesome. The sound quality is pretty good, and they’re easy to throw into your purse. I promise this has nothing to do with “Headphones On” by Addison Rae, though as a former fan of Miranda Cosgrove and Hilary Duff’s music careers I did, of course, enjoy her debut album.
2) Read my favorite childhood book series before bed
For the past several years I have fallen asleep to YouTube videos at least a few times a week, intermixed with the occasional sitcom. Like a colic baby I am a fussy sleeper, and so the more stimulation, the better. My parents love to tell the story about how they used to turn the vacuum on when I was a newborn because eventually I would become so overstimulated that I would simply fall asleep. I’ve been trying to break that habit recently by reading something nice and gentle before bed. My author of choice is the still-criminally under-celebrated Madeleine L’Engle, creator of A Wrinkle in Time and its four sequels. I’ve been rereading her two interconnected series (dubbed ‘chronos’ and ‘kairos’) before bed, and it’s made for a much smoother highway to sleep. It also reminds me of the years I spent lying under the covers with a flashlight reading way past my bedtime.
3) Moved in with my boyfriend
I really do not prescribe to the idea that women should ‘set themselves up’ to enter a monogamous long-term relationship, sitting like dolls in a salon chair becoming perfectly coiffed and remaining chaste until their Prince Charming saves them from singleness. If you had told me on New Year’s Day 2024, that in a mere four months I’d be meeting my current boyfriend I would have laughed in your face. I was partying right up until the very last minute, and then I met him, and I still like to party but now I get to come home to someone I really love. I say this because I think that timelines are bullshit, and while I am sure that some people whispered about my decision to move in with a man after about a year and a half of knowing him I do not care. When you know, you know. We are way too deep in the shit of human history to wait around like a bunch of HR executives plotting a calibrated ‘timeline’ of escalated intimacy. When I walked into Washington Square Park on that April day last year I knew as soon as I saw him that he would be my boyfriend, and he is. That’s just the way it goes.
‘On repeat’ playlist:
Gentle on My Mind - Roger Miller
Death with Dignity - Sufjan Stevens
Light and Love - The Lemon Twigs
Dreamboat Annie - Heart
Concrete & Clay - Unit 4+2
Here Comes My Baby - Cat Stevens
Crown on the Ground - Sleigh Bells
Bizarre Love Triangle - New Order
Pretty in Pink - The Psychedelic Furs
Agree about the feed it’s so terrible—also loved Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project when I read a few years ago, have never read her novels but this one sounds so good!