april recs
short essay by olivia laing, autofiction about taylor swift, some films, illinoise the musical
Hello hello. I write to you from the conclusion of what I’ve been calling my Hell April, a breathless quarter-marathon of work obligations and travel that I’m finally, now, limping towards the finish line of. In the past month I’ve been in: Chicago, Boston, Lexington (Virginia not Kentucky), Des Moines, Ankeny, and New York, while teaching two classes a week in Iowa City, and participating in a documentary project. And all of this, in a compressed amount of time, has been enough, in some moments, to make me feel many raisins short of a fruitcake.
At some point I gave up, more or less, on trying to do my creative work in a meaningful way. It could wait. It has.
At LaGuardia yesterday morning I watched the sun rise, gold and red and fat as a peach. I thought, I did it. :) I thought, also, I don’t know if this is how I should live. But I was remembering also, my early twenties self and how perpetually comfortable with, no, inviting of, a certain kind of travel I was.
Off I went on trains, planes, buses, all the time, as long as it was cheap as hell. I took buses overnight to meet my friends in small cities that were the midway points between us. I found, somehow, $395 tickets to Europe and then learned some bitter lessons. Lessons about visa applications when one is not a US citizen. About how the dirt cheap plane tickets are never refunded or changed. There was one Spirit Airlines route from Baltimore to Chicago that I flew at least ten times one year to see my family. It departed at 5:30 am. The flight was $90 a pop, round trip. I would take the train to BWI from DC the night before and sleep at my gate.
Little idiot, I think, when I remember this, but with affection.
Anyway, I don’t travel like I used to anymore. Truthfully I wonder, in self-critical moments, whether I’ve cleaved too hard to comfort. Come to value it too much. Then I remind myself that my brain might be conflating “too much” with “at all.”
For me, it has been part of the work of adulthood to accept the hard and serene fact of my body. That if I take care of it it takes care of me. That it has needs and limits and preferences. That I need it to last me, all through my life.
I’m feeling calm as I write this. Rested, even. Tonight, I’ll teach my final class of the semester. Some of you’ve emailed asking what exactly it is I’m doing at the Workshop, course-wise.
Over the past few months I advised thesis students, taught a workshop (peer critique of student work, which I accompany with short lectures and discussion beforehand), and taught a seminar. I designed the seminar, called Unforgettable Voices, to focus on the memorable fictive voice across a range of texts. How do we find “our” voices as writers, how do we embody the voices of characters unlike us, how do we create voices on the page that are as close to unforgettable as we can form them? We studied writers like Marguerite Duras, Maile Meloy, Ayad Akhtar, and Perumal Murugan, among others, trying to find these things out.
I’ve loved teaching. I really have. I’ve found it at its best to be a really beautiful form of intellectual inquiry, a way to think out loud. My students have been great. What a lucky thing.
In any case! That’s the word from Iowa City/various airports of these United States. If you’re in/near, Iowa City, come to my reading with Shane Book this Thursday. And here’s the second half of this newsletter installment, now, on stuff I’ve liked of late that I want to pass along to you.
some things I’ve been reading etc
My favorite shortform thing I’ve read in a minute, from my friend S (listen to her lovely and award-nominated podcast Sounds Gay here btw), a short essay titled Green Fuse by Olivia Laing. Capturing something so essential in so short a space. Sentences I want to eat. Here’s a taster.
Bad news keeps drifting in. C has lost her sight. Last summer, two tiny tumours seeded in her brain, located just beneath her optic nerve. As they grew, her vision deteriorated. By winter, the lights had gone out altogether.
Nature is a strange factory, relentless in its productivity. We like to think life and death are opposite states but, really, it’s all tangled up together, the cherry blossom and the cancer: a never-ending production of more, a monstrous fecundity.
I deeply enjoyed Tavi Gevinson’s wild, thoughtful, sly, funny, and often quite moving Fan Fiction, a lightly-Nabokovian homage as 75-page zine about fame, selfhood, adolescence, narrative, and well, Taylor Swift. You can read it online, but I do sort of recommend printing out and reading it as our riot grrrl foremothers intended. Fan Fiction’s billed as a satire, but I’m not convinced of its label. What I experience it as is a clever and rewarding autofiction, which is not to say that I think that it is all factually true—the most important part of the A-word is fiction, after all. Tbh I just also felt a certain kind of joy in seeing an artist and writer I like a great deal put out something fun and punk like this.
Honestly I have been feeling ennui re: the discourse sandworms of the nonfiction literary internet of late, most recently involving Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment. For me, happening upon Sallie Tisdale’s Violations was a beautiful antidote to all of it. I love Tisdale’s writing, so much. One of the best non-fiction voices I’ve met in a minute. I might just have to fuck around and write about this book at length sometime this summer.
I saw and loved Illinoise the musical. I had tiny quibbles (could have used a little bit more Narrative Clarity aka words lol, could have deepened its relationship to place…Illinois is probably the second most interesting American state after Wisconsin imo). But it has been a minute since I saw something that made me feel such JOY. It’s beautiful. The dancing is absolutely transcendent. It was very cool to see an album I’ve loved brought to new life in this way. Especially if you like Sufjan’s music and can get decent seats, go.
Helen Vendler on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, of interest to me bc I am a devotee of one Thomas Stearns Eliot, and because Helen Vendler passed away recently and I never knew her work.
Finally, some film recs:
Love Lies Bleeding: a mad, trippy, gay, nasty, sweetly romantic delight full of blood, teeth, and twists.
Tree of Life: daring, formally nuts, deeply sincere. one of the great works of art of our age...brought me to tears. polarizing, but imo almost all risks-everything art is. five stars, haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Problemista: pure delight!!!! go see it everyone. julio torres and his team are brilliant. please circulate the memo widely: immigration to the U.S. is cruel and wretched and so many other things, and also immigrant art can be funny.
The Host: my king bong joon ho ate with this one...actually scary actually funny actually smart...both delightfully pop and deeply intelligent...we bow down and hope to learn
Dune 2: epic and pleasurable. honestly a beautiful adaptation. torn between 4 and 4.5 stars. the lighting design alone is jawdropping, let alone the visuality of the worldbuilding. will be thinking of giedi prime and the eclipse-set scenes for days. chalamet does a really great job HOWEVER paul atreides is written in a way that does not solve for The Frodo Problem*, so demon feline twink with alopecia austin butler (as feyd-rautha) steals the show. everything was so MENA/arab coded...it makes sense bc of the source material but i was still genuinely startled. MOST IMPORTANTLY and unfortunately i will never know my true unadulterated feelings about this movie because during the climactic fight scene my friend W said, so sincerely, "oh no.....Sarah….he's about to fight a hard boiled egg" and i shook with laughter for the next five minutes :(
*Questing Hero On Whom Everything Depends Simply Cannot Be Interesting For Some Reason
I have not yet seen Challengers but I will be remedying this immediately.
ICYMI: Celeste Scott interviewed me for The Creative Independent.
Until soon, be well,
xx
STM