WFH Library Links 14 - January 28th, 2022
Reading
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I enjoyed Gemma Sieff's introduction to the writing of Evan S Connell, a midcentury American writer I'd never heard of. I always appreciate a profile of someone's relatively-unknown personal hero that makes reading more seem necessary; and that is certainly the case here.
"I was enjoying life on the Left Bank so much that I felt obligated to leave,” Connell wrote. “Those nurtured in the Protestant midwest of America will understand this, otherwise it cannot possibly be explained because it makes no sense.”
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One of my resolutions for this year is to be less of a reflexive 'not into movies' person. To that end I'm trying to watch at least a few movies each month - more on that below. With that in mind, The Baffler's 2021 Film Roundup by AS Hamrah was a great primer on the smaller pictures I'd missed last year.
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Ted Gioia wrote a great piece arguing that, for artistic or athletic excellence, you don't need a mentor, you need a nemesis. I'll be taking applications, come after me on Twitter-
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Last year Maggie Gyllenhaal directed an adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novella "The Lost Daughter". Her film was widely lauded as a courageous, perhaps epoch-making, reappraisal of femininity and the expectations of motherhood (The New Republic: she “breaks the taboo on regretful motherhood”). Yet as Berg and Wiseman contend in their essay on the film, such reviews are closer to wishful assertions of the Myth of the Perfect Mother by those looking for an easy opponent than they are intelligible commentary on our canon (one woman among other, but Lady Macbeth would like a word). There is something desperate in this rush to applaud the breaking of taboos, the piercing of myths; it leaves room for suspicion that the breaking of the taboo might be as mythical, as impossible, and as shorn of nuance, as the taboo itself.
"There is, of course, some comfort to be had in the thought that the things that cause us pain reside outside us—that, like a witch’s curse, we could break their spell by uttering the right words, saying the right things (or, like the young Leda, turning our backs to them and walking out the door). But this too is a myth.
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Last week I finished a collection of William H Gass's excellent essays, which were fascinating commentary on the art of fiction writing and reading. I can't find the title essay of the collection, "Fiction and the Forms of Life" online, but I'd recommend any of his writing you can find. His attention to the words and sentences that comprise literature is unflagging, and I was inspired by his refusal to admit more than this into critical consideration. Characters? mere focal points for dialogue and literary language. Ideas? unacceptable unless digested enough to form part of the world of words in question. Authors? omnipotent gods of the their wordy universes, but, heaven help us, they'd better not get cute about it (that means you, Nabokov). It was particularly fun to find the title essay focused on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, one of my favorite novels.
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Anton Jager on hyper-politics: In recent years, after two decades of the 'end of history', politics has reentered the Western public sphere with a vengeance. Yet, in the lapse of tradition carved out by those decades of technocratic managerialism, older political organizations have withered, and nearly two generations have grown up in the profoundly apolitical void they've left. Politics has restarted, but it is only happening at the discursive level: everything is scrutinized for its ideological character, within the camps or headspace of either side, slotted wherever it fits our priors - and here comes the next Discourse. Much is politicized, little is achieved. This essay does as well as anything I've read to explain the bizarre, "political" but distractible landscape I've come of age in.
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The Complete, Gabriel Smith - this is a really fun story. I loved Smith's ingenious way of structuring the whole edifice around jokes.
"The girls listen to podcasts that say the future had been killed by seemingly abstract things. The boys listen to podcasts by people who haven’t yet heard the future is dead. They talk of interplanetary colonization, the hunting of rewilded animals."
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Appreciated this piece from Freddie deBoer on the forgotten time when Gen X was the Political Generation - "every generation is, when they're young, which means the youth still aren't coming to save you." Its a necessary reminder to anyone hoping that "Gen Z will save us from guns/climate change/etc" that their narrative has come and gone before, and before, and before...
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Danielle Carr lambasted the current vogue of "attachment theory" for Gawker (because she's just an avoidant in denial, of course)
"What if, in a god-tier self-own, the anxiouses are in fact getting exactly what they want — to blame someone else for their fear of being seen, or maybe to engage in the weird but existentially noble hobby of being in unrequited love?"
Listening
Politics Theory Other considers the growth of "rentier capitalism" as a more useful critique than the popular "financialization": while previously productive things can be 'financialized' into rent-earning assets, the deeper issue is the rise of rentier capitalism (the author being interviewed also uses 'balance sheet capitalism') attempts to acquire/hold as many such assets as possible in order to earn those rents, rather than productively using their capital to earn profits.
Watching
Another Round (2020) - a group of Danish teachers, in various states of malaise, decide to test the proposition that we're born with a blood alcohol content 0.05 below happiness (and promptly forget that this was their goal).
Out of the Past (1947) - a good noir film from the late 40s; I'm still laughing about Robert Mitchum's line, kicking off a montage of his seemingly-distant past as a fixer and PI, "this was about three years ago..."
In the Mood for Love (2000) - this movie is gorgeously constructed and filmed. Nearly every element I noticed was praise-worthy: the thematic music, the colors, the outfits, the use of food and moments in normal life as the components of the plot, the ambiguous double-scenes... really great.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - another excellent, fun movie. Loved the way that any trouble the duo get into is only revealed to the audience at about the speed they figure it out themselves ("who ARE these guys?"). Built real tension and intrigue in the chase scenes. P.S. - you didn't see LeFlors out there, did you?
Blue Jasmine (2013) - he might have let them be the only redeemable characters in this movie, but man, Woody Allen really does not like the working class.
I hope you all have an excellent weekend!
Let me know if any of these pieces resonate with you, and please send me back anything I should be paying attention to! If you enjoy this newsletter, tell a friend.
Alex
Some of my other writing can be found here.
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