Untethering from the Doom Box

The other day I was in a bad mood and I dragged myself outside for a walk with Matt. I told him all about the book I'm reading (a biography of a producer in early Hollywood), and the sunshine and fresh air plus my interest in the stuff I told Matt improved my mood extraordinarily. When I got home I picked up my phone and looked at Twitter, and I felt my good mood drain away. I felt it, the way you can feel your bladder deflate when you pee. 

I looked at the phone in my hand and I went: oh. 

Later, I told Matt about this, calling my phone the Doom Box. Now, every time I pick it up, I think about that phrase. I keep opening Twitter and feeling that draining sensation. It used to make me happy to interact there, but not so much now. I know I'm not getting the best of it, for obvious reasons, and I'm sick of fighting the algorithm to see and be seen. I had been thinking about taking a long break from it once Wire Mothers was out, and now that I've had this insight, and I'm near the end of the initial promo cycle for the book, I'm closer to doing so. (As for the other monsters in the Doom Box, Facebook is scrapple to Twitter's steak for me, and for whatever reason, IG offers almost no dopamine hits compared to the others.) 

My main question about this is no longer "how do I promote myself?" - because the Wire Mothers launch has not gone smoothly, and I seem to have sold copies nonetheless - but "what do I do with my time instead?" I think the answer has to do with the Star Trek: Voyager project I've semi-begun and am going to start in earnest when Jami Attenberg's yearly 1000 Words of Summer project begins on June 1. But I also hope to write some more about film on my Medium page and some more about myself here. And I want to read some damn books; my writing/reading balance has been way off lately. 

I've said this before, but: as a writer, I didn't really make career progress until I engaged on Twitter. I got most of my cornerstone opportunities there, whether by chance or by effort. I don't know if I have enough career momentum to slack off on it and still find success, but I want to try it and see. I'm in a phase now where writing is its own reward, and finding people to read my work isn't like selling encyclopedias door to door. That won't be true forever, but it is for now, so it might be a good time to untether. 

It's spring here, which means the exact weather that people think happens all year round in LA: sunny, mild, pleasant breeze. The weather is nicer and more consistent than any May I can remember in LA. It was over 100F in May 2017, the month I got my MA from CSUN; it was an annoyingly hot weekend to celebrate. 

Tomorrow Matt and I are going to the Academy Museum to look at a Casablanca exhibit, as well as the Dykstraflex and whatever else is on at the moment. We got a flyer in the mail that shows some of the Casa objects on display, and one of them is the model globe from the opening, which is grayscale in color. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd use a black and white model of Earth, because it's Earth, why wouldn't it be in color, but it appears they did. I eternally love movie stuff/secrets like this. 

Speaking of which, I just finished a biography of Jean Harlow's husband Paul Bern, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1932. Even though the likely cause of his death has filtered through to the public after 90 years of MGM coverups, the circumstances are still swathed in questions that no one can answer because everyone is dead. Death surrounds this story: Paul, Jean, their close associate Irving Thalberg, Paul's previous wife, they all died unexpectedly, all prior to 1938. One of the few major players involved who lived a long life was LB Mayer, of whom this book has given me an appalling impression. Jack Warner may have been a cartoonish supervillain (with unerring instincts), but Mayer was the kind of to-the-bone horrible that doesn't make for good stories after the fact. He was just bad, just mean, just selfish. Perhaps this book was wrong in casting him as such a perpetrator - it's wrong about a bunch of other things - but I tend not to think so. 

As Conrad Nagel's eulogy of Paul put it: 

Hollywood is cruel and brutalizing to those seeking success. In no other place is the struggle for success so cruel. It is difficult not to bow down to one of Hollywood's false idols -- the keenest and most dangerous being insincerity. 

But I still fall to my knees. I can't help it. The fact that I'm considering another novel set in the 1930s and intricately entangled with film, despite how the Casa novel exhausted me, demonstrates how helpless I am, how strong is Hollywood's power over me. 

My Peculiar Monstrosities

Something I learned in 2023, like really seriously learned it, was to slow down. My father said to me so many times when he was teaching me to drive, "Don't get in a hurry." This phrasing stuck in my head and repeated itself to me again and again when I was in Norway and Sweden in September. Writer/editor me would revise him to "don't hurry" or "don't rush it", but "don't get in a hurry" expresses the heart of the advice in a way the revisions don't. Get in a hurry. In a hurry as a state of being, rather than hurry as a verb. Don't get there. Stay out of a hurry. 

I kept trying to rush to and from places, rush experiences, in Sweden and Norway, and the experiences kept going wrong. When I slowed down it was fine. Where I live, I sometimes try to take driving shortcuts when I'm behind, and I wind up being later than I would've been if I'd just gone the normal way. The more I get in a hurry, the worse things go.  

I don't know what this has to do with the rest of the post, but it came up as I was writing about Twitter, and doesn't feel like it belongs somewhere else, so in it goes. 

Lately the films I've been watching are often extreme. I know why - it's self-flagellation, and it doesn't speak well of my mental health, even if it's a better coping strategy than others I'm aware of - but that's not keeping it from happening. 

One direction I considered for this post was writing about Night and Fog, Alain Resnais's half-hour exploration of the concentration camps, blending footage from the 1950s with archival footage that you know exactly what it looks like. (That fucking bulldozer shot.) Having researched WWII on and off for the past...two years? something like that? I knew that some of what was said in voiceover was embellished, if not flat-out untrue. I don't know why, because who the hell needs to embellish what happened at Auschwitz, but I'm sure of it. And I realized as I was listening to the VO and comparing it to what I knew to be true that Resnais had made a propaganda film. In this case the propaganda is for the right side, so it's not objectionable per se, but that's still what it is. 

Another direction is to write about All Quiet on the Western Front, the 2022 version, which I adored even if it was challenging to watch. (If that's a propaganda film, it pushes for full historical contextualizing and to stop shoving children in front of cannons, which are political messages I can get behind.) The main thing I thought about while watching was how world cinema of the 21st century keeps proving that Hollywood has totally lost its way. Not only do we actively discourage the avant-garde in American filmmaking - as we always have - we keep making worse, longer films and elevating filmmakers who focus on narrative/characterization and totally drop the ball on visuals. 

A third direction is to talk about how my book is going. I'm in a strange place. I've written over half of it, and have gotten stuck in a spot where I have to 1) romanticize a character I don't like 2) retcon and fit events into an existing narrative framework, which I thought would be fun, but currently isn't 3) figure out my main character's reactions after she does bad or iffy things 4) write the setting of Paris, which I've only visited once, twenty years ago. A few scenes have been emerging from my pen, but it's a little like gaining ground in a car stuck in the snow - a few inches here, rock back, a few inches there, rock forward. So I went back to the beginning and reread the first 80 pages to start working on the major changes I'm going to have to make (redoing a bunch of conversations, changing the writing style altogether in some parts, altering the main character's age from high school to college). That process was demoralizing enough that after taking notes, I got stuck again on the point of actually doing the revisions. 

I wrote a paragraph on each of these directions rather than going on at greater length on any one of them because I'm considering trying to write something like my peers are writing, a Substackish thing. I think the field is much too crowded for me to enter it the same way my peers are, and I'd have to force myself to write on a regular basis rather than here and there when something comes up. But not being on Twitter means I'm not recording my thoughts on film and the writing process as often as I used to. (Which is good? Fewer opinions on Twitter = a better world?) I was not a wholly unpopular tweeter, so maybe I could grow the audience for my books if I expanded in another place on what I might have tweeted. I'd likely choose Medium if I was doing this. And I opened up a window there this morning with the intention of writing a full post about Night and Fog and propaganda. But again, the field is crowded, and the truth about me as a writer is that I don't want to sharpen my elbows. I just want to do my thing. 

I gained a lot of confidence from staying off Twitter for the past six weeks. I gained a lot of peace. I missed my online friends - I missed their wit, and I missed the reinforcement that I am not alone in my peculiar monstrosities. I missed all the opportunity that grows in that place. It's - this word truly is not an exaggeration - wrenching having to decide between on and off Twitter, and the middle ground of "sometimes" has always been a hard space for me. (And "sometimes" does nothing for literary promotion.) 

I don't know where I'm going. I know I'm not going there in a hurry, or that if I am, I shouldn't be. Twitter is nothing if not fast, so perhaps it's better out of my life, promo be damned. 

On Lars von Trier and Leviathan

In grad school, I elected to write a literature paper about Paul Auster's Leviathan. I came to class ready to discuss the novel, certain I'd understood what Auster was getting at, only to learn of the existence of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and to hear how Auster was reflecting that pivotal work. I sat there for a while, listening, and then raised my hand and explained that I'd believed the leviathan of the title was a sea monster, i.e. the whale that swallowed Jonah, and that allegorically that monster was a national fear and despair lurking under the scrim of American life in the late 20th century. No matter how wrong the class lecture told me I was, I still thought this was a valid theory of the novel. The professor, bless her heart, encouraged me to write my final paper on this theory. And I did. 

In my reading, the leviathan is a societal force. It resembles a beast of the deep, in that it is invisible, massive, and dangerous. It is large enough to gulp its victims without even stretching its jaws. The leviathan, this societal force, is the loss of identity suffered by the Baby Boomers when they discovered their failure to make lasting change, and it’s their dawning realization of mortality.

(me, 2014) 

I was embarrassed that I'd missed the point Auster had built into the book, but as I researched and wrote the paper, I came to believe that my point of view - although informed by contemporary ideas and influences rather than those of a classical Western education - was valid, too. I wrote about Vietnam, the atomic bomb, and President Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech. I got an A, as I recall. 

*

Lars von Trier first caught my eye in the early aughts with Dancer in the Dark. Good God did I hate that movie. I was young, and obsessed with Björk, and utterly infuriated that the bad guy won and the good girl lost. And while I understood what von Trier was getting at by shooting lush, stationary musical numbers vs. stark, wobbly handheld real life, it didn't keep me from being annoyed by the handheld sections. 

Some years later, everyone went on and on about Melancholia, so I saw it. My favorite part was the tableaux that open the film: slomo textures and painterly colors, in weird scenarios, flawlessly composed. The whole wedding section, shot in handheld not-great DV, I could not make head or tail of; why would he shoot something so ugly and annoying and dragged-out when he could provably make such beautiful pictures? The third section was more comprehensible, but still puzzlingly long and odd. 

More years passed. In 2021, I noticed while browsing Kanopy that both volumes of Nymphomaniac were available, and I had a strong guess that they wouldn't be for long, so I watched them. Snap. Everything fell into place. I don't know if it's because I'd watched Funny Games (2007) and absolutely loved it, reframing my sense of what extremity in film does and how it works, or because I'd simply gotten older, but I found Nymphomaniac a profound work, and a necessary one. One of those films that stretches cinema beyond entertainment, that makes itself a text to pore over. And that it was an extreme film, a blasphemous film, was part of its intellectual intentions! Oh, this trolling Dane, how I suddenly admired him. 

Deciding to start fresh, I watched Breaking the Waves, von Trier's breakthrough and still probably his most well-regarded film. It opened up my understanding of his reputation, and confirmed what I thought he was up to, but I didn't connect to it as much. 

Yesterday I watched The House that Jack Built. This review warned me away from it, but that review is wrong, I believe, and falls exactly into the trap that von Trier has set for the viewer. 

VERGE: 
No. No, no, no! You're constantly trying to manipulate me. 
And with children, the most sensitive subject of all.

Don't let him manipulate you! I want to shout at Richard Brody. See past your emotional reflex and turn on your brain. 

The central juxtaposition of House is violent death as an art form. Jack says this himself, repeatedly, trying to convince Verge that his project is to make art from murder. Verge insists that art springs from love. (Verge is Virgil, the greatest poet of antiquity, and Jack is a serial killer. Who would seriously believe von Trier positions Jack to win the argument?) 

I recognized that the sacred (art) is the profane (violent death) in this film. I had previously hypothesized that Nymphomaniac intended to make a saint out of the title character: a saint of sex, someone for whom sex is an all-encompassing, glorified pursuit. (She even has a wound that refuses to heal!) The conversation between Joe and Seligman is a religious debate, about fishing and sex and God and love and life itself; it's a debate between extremes - the debauched and the pure - but what's pure and what's debauched shifts over the course of the film. In Dancer in the Dark, an absolute innocent commits a brutal murder (and the most luscious visuals exist in the mind of the blind woman). In Melancholia, Justine's depression debilitates her, but she is also voluntarily in thrall to it - in love with her own sorrow. In Breaking the Waves, God gives Bess a mandate to commit sin. 

I started to see von Trier's project as crashing together two abstract ideas that it would be blasphemous (literally or culturally) to consider in the same breath. Sex and death is an old, easy collision for film, but sex and saintliness? Innocence and violence? He's doing extreme cinema, but the characters' behavior - the sex and violence, in graphic detail - is a ruse. The extremity is in putting together ideas that have traditionally remained far apart, in considering them as reflections of each other. It's sort of Hegelian, and sort of deconstructionist, but (impishly and) productively so, in a way that doesn't leave the deconstructor with a vacant lot. 

Yet. 

As ever when I have ideas like this, where I think I've figured out what makes challenging art hang together, I remember Leviathan. Someone else has probably figured out the metronome of this art, and it's probably a more classical rhythm than I could recognize. Not knowing Hobbes, that day, will haunt me forever. 

Then again, I found support in the text and in other scholarly articles for my theory of Auster's novel. I argued that theory successfully, in my own small context. 

Lars von Trier in a promo photo for The House that Jack Built. Knuckle tattoo is not pshopped

At the end of all this thinking and developing, I don't want to look up the prevailing theory of von Trier's cinema. I don't want to learn that I'm either parroting an established idea or that I'm dead wrong. I'd rather hang out here, where I semi-privately think I have a good idea that helps me understand a challenging group of artworks. I don't want to be Pauline Kael, so idiosyncratic that she can't really be trusted. As a critic I try never to lead with my ego or my unique reactions - otherwise I'd gush about Gothic literature and melodramas, insist that Shutter Island is better than Goodfellas. I know better than to confuse those preferences with informed criticism. 

On whose authority am I right or wrong about Lars von Trier, anyway? Yours? His? Richard Brody's? Please. A consensus about art is fragile and temporary. I'd like to know about that consensus, and perhaps be informed by it, but being part of it doesn't sound appealing. 

So I shall declare that I loved The House that Jack Built, and that I think von Trier is much less of a troll than he is creating art via unusual variants on thesis/antithesis. There's some trolling, sure, but not the malignant kind. Around 2005, he said a film should be like a stone in your shoe, and no matter how hard I squint, I can't find a way to disagree with that sentiment. 

This Spot in the Road

I think I finished my book today? Scattered applause requested, because I'm not sure yet

— Katharine Coldiron (@ferrifrigida) February 19, 2022

The book I've been working on for two years directly, and several more years indirectly, is a collection of straightforward critical essays about bad movies. Originally I planned to write about the following media: 

• Plan 9 from Outer Space 
• Cop Rock 
• The Teen Agers films (1946-48) 
• Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) 
• Death Bed: The Bed that Eats 
• Ruby 
• Showgirls/Staying Alive 

By the middle of last year, I'd written half of these and published a few. I got stuck on the Showgirls/Staying Alive essay, about which I was quite intimidated (a lot of people have written about Showgirls), and then I lost half a year to circumstances out of my control, during which I barely wrote. I also had a mini-brainwave about how I'd chosen to approach this project: I'd written criticism about these films without writing much on how the audience receives them. With this in mind, I decided to write about two other films: 

• Girl in Gold Boots
• After Last Season

Between November and February, I wrote the remaining essays from the first list, including 4,300 words on Showgirls & Staying Alive. I also wrote a 7,700-word essay on Quentin Tarantino, which required a ton of research and which I still can't believe I turned in on time. Since January I've written 2,000 words to order on Switchblade Sisters (which might end up in this bad-movie book), and I thought intensely about what I wanted to say in the essay on Girl in Gold Boots. 

For two weeks I tried to write this essay, and kept failing. I got way into the weeds, trying to sort out what it means to like a film, the difference between pleasing graphic design and actual art, and how moral value attaches to aesthetic value. It was a mess. Ultimately I splurted out 1,500 words of deep confusion about what I was trying to do, which I think is itself something, but which might also be background for the real essay. If the real essay exists, it's either going to be so methodical it's practically philosophy, or it's going to be totally bizarre. 

I was saving Season for last, because I wasn't quite sure what would happen when I saw it again, when I tried to put ideas about it together in sentences. Yesterday I watched the film in the morning, sat down to write about it in the late afternoon, and finished 3,100 words about it around 11 PM. I read these words again this morning and it's a finished essay. I'm astonished, because I really thought this essay would be impossible - the film is impossible - but it was one of the easiest things I've written in the past year. 

That means, aside from the Gold Boots essay, the book is complete. 

Which might mean the book is, in fact, complete. It's possible the Gold Boots essay won't work out. I'll give it a couple of weeks and another strong try before I really give up, but it seems ever more likely that I'm not capable of saying what I'd like to about this goddamn stupid lovable movie. 

So, as I said on Twitter, I think I might have finished my latest book today. Yay for me, I think? I'll probably write some interstitials to sculpt it into a real book and Lord knows finding a publisher hasn't gone well so far, but reaching this spot in the road means I can begin to move on from this whole period of my writing life, creatively. Move on from film crit as the only thing I do and swerve back toward the other stuff I do. Up next is a novel, my first in more than five years, so I'm looking forward to that. 

There's a lot more news, but not sharing it here means I'll have to write another post soon. 

Like the Bad Thing

I'm in a bad mood today. It might be the weather (windy, hot, dry), or it might be a feeling that everything I've done recently has only been half-done (yard work, friendship, whatnot). But the last time I felt this way, it was because I hadn't written anything in a while, and once I wrote I felt better. (Like constipation.) Blogging isn't really what my muse has in mind, but it'll have to do; all the other projects on my plate require too much research. Those projects include a long essay on Tarantino, a long essay on two dance films, and two other film essays that haven't shaped up yet. 

The Tarantino essay was something I accepted as a lark but it's taking on much bigger proportions. I half-joked to Matt that I felt sure no one else in the world would ever again ask me to go on at length about Tarantino, and I definitely could have written the thing without research or refresher-watches, just bullshitting for several thousand words. Alas, my tactics have changed. I've borrowed or bought a lot of books about him and am reading them, slowly. My target is Kill Bill, and I had a very safe, simple thesis about it before I started reading. Now I think there'll be a few prongs. 

what you get when you ask me to write about something

The main one is that Kill Bill is a hinge, an artistic midpoint, and the films themselves express Tarantino's waning interest in mixtapes and growing interest in the static Western. That's pretty easy to prove. He kinda laid it out for us. The tougher sell is writing about rape-revenge films and other exploitation genres that Kill Bill draws from, and critics have mostly ignored that angle. (Just incidentally, every single writer-at-length on Tarantino is male.) Obviously, his films are such rich texts that no one book or essay will explore all possible angles for his work, but I'm amazed at how many writers seem to have missed one crucial influence or another. They don't seem to be reading each other. One guy's writing about samurai films, the other's writing about Westerns, but they're not writing about how those two genres both go into the T-blender (and how they echo each other outside the T-blender anyway). Not all of us can have brains as encyclopedic as Tarantino's, but I expect people with PhDs to do better than this. All I've got is a library card and I plan to do better. 

[I understand that Tarantino has, at best, a questionable personality. He's fallen in and out of favor with the public so often that I'm sick of worrying about it and am just gonna write about his films.]

I might have mentioned here that the last essay in the bad film book, the one I haven't written yet and should have written three months ago, is a dual piece about Showgirls and Staying Alive. Staying Alive is easy, few people have bothered with it, but a surprising number of people have written about Showgirls, and that has made me intimidated to start. It's a movie in which I have limited interest. I guess the kinder way to say that would be focused interest, but I said what I said; I don't enjoy watching it as much as I do the other movies I've written about in this book. So there's that too, that in studying it I have to watch it and think about it a bunch. I shouldn't have saved this essay for last, I should have saved an easy one for last, but I love the grotesque and delicious Staying Alive so I thought that enthusiasm would carry me through. 

I'm kind of glad I didn't write the essay over the summer, though, because the other day I had an idea for how to rejigger the entire book that I think will make it better and more saleable. I was telling Marissa about how Showgirls has been "reclaimed" by writers who argue that it's a good movie, not a bad one, and how silly I think that is. (She agreed.) The same thing has happened to famed bomb Ishtar, which, look, I know Elaine May deserves a good reputation, but Ishtar is terrible. It's terrible! Don't redeem it, don't reclaim it. It's bad. That's it. 

I started thinking about about why people bother to "reclaim" movies at all, why they try to prove they are good rather than just letting them be bad. Multiple reasons for this pattern exist, but the main thing I'm sure of is the cognitive dissonance. The critic knows she has good taste and yet she likes this movie that is objectively bad, so she has to turn it around and make it good to make this preference make sense, and she uses all the power of rhetoric she can summon to do so. 

There is just no need for this. It's possible to like something bad without redeeming its reputation. Just go on and like the bad thing. They won't take your membership card away. 

The best example for this in my own life is Girl in Gold Boots, an MST3K classic that is truly a shitty little movie. It's skeezy and cheap and badly made (by one of the schlockmasters of the 60s, Ted V. Mikels), about criminals, go-go dancers, and generally people with bad lives and no taste. I genuinely love this movie. Not just the MST of this movie; I love the movie, and I really, really don't know why. There's nothing in it that's good, nothing I can argue for as having objective quality. But I have such affection for it. I watch it when I'm sad. 

I got to thinking I could write about the mystery of loving this movie, could try and dismantle the - to quote myself, in the Plan 9 book - mechanism in me that loves bad movies. I don't know if I'll ever understand what makes that mechanism run, but I can try, and in the trying I might uncover some cool stuff. 

Then I started thinking about where this essay would fit in with the others. So far I've written a book that intends to explore the ways that bad movies are bad: how they go wrong. If I add this essay, along with another, I might be writing about something else altogether: how we as audience approach bad movies. 

The other one I'm thinking about is on After Last Season, which is truly the most baffling piece of cinema I've ever come across. It's the only movie I've ever seen that has completely resisted my attempts to analyze it. Even in the most opaque art films I can determine influences and the filmmaker's general concerns, and sometimes intentions, but this one...it's a piece of outsider art from a person who doesn't seem to have any creative urgency at all. And look, it's terrible, too, don't get me wrong, it's incompetent in every particular. But more interestingly, it fails to cohere around any significant ideas or intentions, creating something that's almost abstract, coupled with mundane failures of filmmaking. 

How do we approach a film so poorly made that it offers us no entry points? With Neil Breen, we can figure out what the films are saying about the man who created them, but After Last Season doesn't speak the way Breen's films do. It's anonymously bad, but outrageously so. What do we do with it? 

These angles, to Season and Boots, alter the angle of the book. They make the book more thoughtful, and more about the audience than about the movies themselves. I think they make the book more useful as criticism and hopefully more interesting as essay; I have to admit to being stumped by Season and to loving Boots, and I have to work out what these reactions mean in a wider context of studying bad film. 

Writing the Plan 9 monograph was a breeze. These are much bigger challenges. But now that I've thought of these ideas, this more significant arc for the book, I'm having a hard time giving them up. 

And would you look at that. The hour I spent working on this post has cleared my bad mood right up. Gotta love that Senokot. 

Two Bookshelves

I'm not quite on schedule on the bad film book, because May has been a Break. I've tried to rest and sleep aggressively to get my body back to normal after stopping horse work at the end of April. Of course that means I have insomnia and weight gain, and I've almost completely lost my concentration. I'll get back on track in June, I hope, with the book and my body. I'm trying to finish a cross-stitch project that turned out to be a hell of a lot more work than I thought, and when that is done, a small daily residue of despair, of not-finishing, will evaporate. It should be done in the next few days. 

It's a very fun piece, but larger than expected (I even misjudged how much Aida I'd need, which is why the upper and lower borders are tiny), and the purple is just...so much. I'm going to end up using two full skeins of embroidery thread on it, which I believe I've never done on a non-kit project. My larger projects have tended to represent a show I was binging while I stitched, and this one is Bob's Burgers. Just started season nine. 

I'm reading Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz, and it's...interesting. I don't know if I'd call it a good book, but it's absolutely worth reading: dense with beauty and steeped in a rare way of seeing the world, breathless with love, seductively artless. Few books have the persistent, seemingly haphazard, lapping movement it has. I half-wish I'd read it while I was a Fitz fangirl in my early teens, or at least known then that Zelda was a writer too. I find it interesting that my education on Fitz didn't include that information. 

I'm also audiobooking The Secret History. Outlook hazy so far. And I'm reading shorter books at as fast a clip as I can manage while still working on Lisa. This month I reorganized my bookshelves, you see, and discovered that I have two entire bookshelves full of books I haven't read. Like, not two shelves, but two bookshelves, two shoulder-high pieces of furniture fully loaded with books not yet read. So I'm trying to move through them. 

My bookshelves have been messily stacked instead of organized for over a year. It used to be my favorite thing to do when we moved, but the last two times, I organized them just a few months before we were asked to pack them up and move again. So this time I waited ages before organizing them again. As many books as I have now, it's tedious instead of fun to keep doing it (and I really didn't want to jinx us into moving again). But I finally got to the point where it was more annoying not to find the book I wanted than to spend a week stacking them on the living room rug and reassembling them on my shelves. 

In forward-facing writing news, a bunch of stuff has appeared or been published lately. This essay about the Teen Agers, which surprised me by doing pretty well, and this essay about Cop Rock, which surprised me by sinking like a stone. This interview with Kate Durbin was a small part of a large raft of publicity for her new book, but it meant a lot to me. This podcast featured me, about as enthusiastic and opinionated as I ever get. This issue of a fascinating literary project featured a bunch of my horse cross-stitches (keep clicking on the spinning object at the bottom). And this very nice review of Ceremonials appeared. 

In inward-facing writing news, I started a new blog for the book project I might be doing after I finish the bad film book. That project is a catalogue of the films of 1977, and I'm not sure of the final form it will take - a general discussion of trends and significance that mentions many films, or an encyclopedic listing of the films and how they cohere to trends and significance. In any event, I'm watching as many films from that year as I can, and offering up my notes on them here. It's less a blog like this one than it is an online notebook to help me track my progress. 

One thing I'm less learning than I am seeing in action is how much old years are like new years. Most of what I'm watching is mediocre, or genuine dreck. While I still think 1977 is meaningful in cinema history, I also think I've likely seen most of the gems already, because they have lasted and been talked about. There's a lot of cinematic dreck in a given year and we live through it in real time, but the stuff that's worth watching later usually sits in the thresher, glittering, while the chaff blows off and away. Watching more of the films from a given year demonstrates that films aren't getting worse; we just don't usually watch the bad ones four decades later. 

What's ahead of me is a lot of hard work, no matter how you slice it. After I finish the bad film book, I've either got the 1977 book or the Casablanca book ahead, and I have three finished or near-finished books I'd like to get published, all of which have very different audiences. I should probably find an agent if I can, although I'm frustrated and doubtful about that, and it's too long to get into why. I'm contemplating plunging into an extremely difficult long-term project (not writing, but literary) and am genuinely scared of the work it will take to do it. 

I'm feeling discouraged, is the point. Lots of things are clicking, and I'm certainly counting my blessings. But although there are five shelves of books I've read, my eye keeps jumping back to those two I haven't. 

There's one other thing on my mind, to do with talent and effort. I tried writing it here but it ended up long enough to be its own post so I will post it another time. Stay tuned. 

Reduced to Summary

On February 10, a book blogger wrote a post dissecting some of my reviews at Locus, mostly of books by people of color. She discerned a pattern in my reviews that indicated racial prejudice. I believe that she called me out usefully on some mistakes, and that she otherwise selectively read and quoted me in ways that misrepresent my body of work. 

This was all ignited because I reviewed the second volume of an epic fantasy series without reading the first volume. That choice infuriated readers and book bloggers, whose attitude toward books differs in significant ways from that of book critics. One blogger decided to look closer at my work, and these two issues - my purported racial prejudice and my choice to start with book two of a series - got conflated, when I'm not sure even the blogger intended that. 

There's a great deal to be said about all this. The question of whether it should be a requirement to read books in series from the get-go in order to assess later books is an interesting one, when I stand back from it. Up close, the philosophy dissolves. For a few days I was a useful strawman for a lot of necessary arguments on Twitter about book criticism, even though I don't believe everything that's been said about my work and my critical posture is accurate or even helpful. I'm glad that my work has stirred up conversation about diversity in publishing, even as I'm devastated about being the subject of so much wrath. 

I think I became a target for everyone who is mad about authority imbalances in book criticism. I respect that, but given how little I'm paid and how little I'm known, I find this silly. Hitting me is not really punching up for almost anyone. 

I drafted a very long blog post explaining what I think and feel about this whole incident, how painfully it hits me given my history with race and racism, and some of the personal and professional aftermath. Ultimately, I don't think it's useful to make public. The above is all I want to say for now. 

Also, there's a lot more for me to tell you. 

Electric Dreamhouse Press, a UK publisher headed by my friend Neil Snowdon, is going to publish my second book this year as part of their line of Midnight Movie Monographs. My monograph is about Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. I wrote this short book in the space of about six weeks in mid-2020, and I haven't had such fun writing a book since Highbinder (which still languishes, alas). I'm really pleased about joining the small but scrappy field of Ed Wood studies. 

The book contains my central arguments about why it's worthwhile to study bad film. I've been building on those arguments to write a series of essays that I hope will be a whole book about bad film, eventually. I've written about Ruby (1977) and about a series of 1940s films starring "the Teen-Agers," and up next is Death Bed: The Bed that Eats. Other essays will be on Cop Rock, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, and a tricky dual piece about Showgirls and Staying Alive. I'm ahead of the schedule I made for these essays, which feels good. 

However, I keep getting intuitive signals to work on the Casablanca novel, which has been at a bare simmer in the back of my head for years. Last night I attended a reading with Lance Olsen and Lidia Yuknavitch, and something Olsen said temporarily turned up the heat on that burner. I've made a very tentative plan to write that book once I'm finished with the bad film essays - sometime in the fall, ideally - but if this keeps up, I'll have to pause the bad film essays and set to the novel. I simultaneously feel excited about the project (I haven't written a novel in years) and preemptively annoyed. It's going to be so much work. 

Anyway: the Plan 9 book represents pure joy for me, as it was an intellectual problem which I got to solve to my satisfaction. That the result will be a book (and a beautiful book at that, given EDP's past performance) is extra whipped cream on an already-nice sundae. I found out about the Midnight Movie Monographs series around three years ago, and idly wondered what movie I could write about for 100 pages. My mind supplied Plan 9 from Outer Space, and even though it was a weird choice, the more I thought about it, the more I supposed I could do it. How would I write 100 pages about Plan 9? Well, last year, I wrote until I found out. Thankfully, Neil was interested in what I produced. 

Both of my first two books, as it turns out, will be about weirdnesses my mind picked up and played around with, private obsessions I never thought would go public. Of everything I've written, these two books are the most fringely me, and I'm bemused that they are the two going out to bookstores in bound form. I think this means you ought to write what you love, or at least that I ought to write what I love. 

As for the third book, I recently made a (digital) handshake agreement with Blue Arrangements to publish my conceptual novel, Victorian Spam. It's a tee-tiny press, just two people, and all of us are burdened by lives and jobs and other projects, so we are all taking a relaxed attitude to the timeline of this book. I estimate that it'll appear in 2022, and it, too, is super weird. Yay! 

None of these three books has anything to do with any of the others. Ceremonials is lyric fiction, Plan 9 is straight nonfiction, and Victorian Spam is...other. All of them are ekphrastic in some way, and I created all of them, but those are the only two elements I can think of that they have in common. 

As for the fourth book...I finally, finally, finally finished the Misfits essay back in December. A couple of weeks later, I got an important blessing from one of the real-life characters in the essay. Thus, Weird New Shit, my book of hybrid film essays, is really truly completed. It's taken me four or five years to write and assemble these essays, which is four or five times longer than I usually work on a book, so I'm thrilled to be done. I'm shopping it to a few presses I think will like it before I try agents, and have consequently racked up a few rejections. 

I don't think there'll be news on that one for some time yet. My expectations for it are so large and unrealistic that it's probably better to let it settle as a project before it goes into the world, anyway. But I do suspect it'll be the fourth book. Mostly I'm glad to be done. 

Somehow I never put it on the blog that an essay of mine was published online at Conjunctions a few months ago. It's called "All Cities Burn" and when I shared it in November, I said I thought it was the best thing I've ever written. These days, with so many different projects coming to fruition, I don't really know if that assessment has meaning. Read it and let me know what you think. Maybe the most arresting thing I've ever written? Either way, being in Conjunctions is an honor. 

While I was struggling through the emotional aftermath of the February 10 incident, I started cross-stitching tiny portraits of the horses I work with. I've made about a dozen, using various patterns and editing them as needed to communicate what the horses look like (and act like), and have a couple more to go. My plan is to give these to the owners of these horses as parting gifts; I've given my notice at the barn, and will be stopping work there within the next month or so, I hope. I'm sorry to go, but the work is tearing up my body, and I'm turning 40 this year - too old to withstand another summer like 2020's. 

The one portrait I can't seem to settle on how to make is for Quinn, a gorgeous Friesian cross who is smart and eager and generally a lovely horse once he gets out of his anxious head. But he almost never succeeds in doing that. I love him so much and will miss him so much and I don't know how to capture him in cross-stitch without doing a massive, photorealistic portrait, much bigger than 3 inches wide. I don't have time for that. But how can I sum him up in such a small space? 

How can any of us, horse or human, be reduced to summary? 

Congestion

Yesterday I slept most of the day, on and off, dozing and then getting up to eat or watch a movie and then dozing again. It felt really good. Not much in my life at the moment is urgent, like, with a deadline or consequences, so I'm drifting a little. Spending whole days sleeping is good once in a while, like yesterday, but today, drifting does not feel good. I want to want to do things - writing or chores or editorial. But I don't really want to do any of them, or at least not one more than the other. In trying to decide what to tackle and how, I'm a little frozen, so instead here I am writing a blog post. 

One thing did get done today: my husband and I bought a cemetery plot. The timing may seem weird, but: plots always go up in cost, we have a little money to spare right now, and we're sure about where we want to go. I feel so good about this decision - having a big, final, expensive choice all settled and in order, getting something done as rare and useful as this - that I want to tell everyone, but it's also an odd, macabre thing to talk about or announce. I feel like we bought a house (a very small, very inexpensive, very specific kind of house), but with virtually none of the hassle and responsibility of being a homeowner, so I want to rejoice. Given what we actually did buy, that's weird, right? 

The weather is changing. It's overcast in the mornings now, cool and a little humid, until the sun breaks through and it becomes SoCal again. It's giving me congestion that is definitely not COVID but of course, fear, anxiety, etc. 

I've watched a pile of movies lately, from In a Lonely Place to Repo! The Genetic Opera, including a couple of docs, one about giallo (thumbs-down) and one about cult film (thumbs-up-ish). In general I am tired of the conversation about film mostly being among men. I am tired of that. Watching Magic Mike for the first time I thought about the male gaze, and how that film goes with its flow while kind of stumbling into the female gaze now and then, which doesn't make much sense because the premise depends upon the female gaze, thus the ultimate gender philosophy of Magic Mike is really kind of a mess, which of course has been true for Soderbergh since sex, lies, and I considered the wildly different attitudes of women at male strip clubs and men at female strip clubs, and how wherever you go the phallus is the point, and how deeply goddamn annoying that is, which led me to "W.A.P.", and then I just stopped thinking about it altogether because I really needed another feminist to bounce all this off of, but it didn't stop me from feeling sure that more women need to talk and more men need to shut up in film discourse. In general. Across allllllllll the genres and pockets of participation, from buffs who don't really know what they're talking about to talking heads on Hitchcock DVDs. There were guys in the cult film doc who were barely coherent. It pissed me off to have to listen to them. 

For quite a lot of years now I have wanted to own a full-size replica of Tom Servo. It took six weeks, but the one I bought on Etsy finally arrived. Here is a picture of me with him, and I promise you, I really was this excited. 

After taking the pic, I put him on a chair and just looked at him for a minute, smiling like a goober. I don't know why this puppet brings me so much joy, why I'm such a fan of this inanimate channel for comedy, really I do not know - but I am, and it does, and now he sits next to the TV so whenever what's on the screen is uninteresting I can just look at him and grin. 

Are we all as deadened and drifting as I am? I think I'm okay - there is happiness in my life (clearly), I can do what I need to do in order to live without dragging through it, I don't care much about missing dinners out or parties or concerts, I still feel love and sorrow and all the emotions in between. But all my days are the same, one upon the other, and it means I have a condition that's sibling to boredom but not quite it. Foreshortened motivation, based on having nothing at all to look forward to, no consequences for failure or sloth. I like my quiet life, and even though the days stretch out, I can always find something either practically or artistically useful to do for my brain. Yet I feel like two-thirds of myself. Whatever's missing is not fatally missing, but I do notice its absence. Is this familiar to anyone out there? 

Anyway, come see me read (virtually) at Vroman's on Monday. Deets here. 

The Additional-Fire Effect

Just now I opened up edits on a review and I had one of those moments where it all crashed on my head, the whole and entire weight of what I've gotten myself tangled up in for the last two years, all at once, CRASH. The edits were asking me to do the exact opposite of what I've trained myself to do because editors generally prefer it (reiterate the same point in the intro and conclusion, don't be too colloquial, don't go on weird tangents). So I thought about putting myself in the mindset of this editor's wishes, when I had just spent the whole morning in the mindset of editing my own non-review-related work, and had only an hour or so before I had to put myself in a teaching mindset, after spending a few minutes first thing this morning in self-promotion mindset...[pop]

All summer, the tarot has been telling me to be patient and things will improve. Things are improving exactly at the time and in the ways the tarot said they would. This is spooky, but also great, but also, even as things improve, my responsibilities are not decreasing. CRASH.

The best thing to do when I'm feeling overwhelmed is to accomplish a pile of small, overdue things. Getting the oil changed in my car, calling my website vendor, doing some chores for an authors' group I'm involved with. But instead I'm just making list after list of things to do and worrying about email replies I haven't received. Rearranging rather than doing.

There's good news. The last couple of weeks have been emotionally unnerving, but I channeled that energy into writing the Last Tango in Paris essay I'd 3/4 given up on. I couldn't stop working on it for the past two days, not even to go volunteer with the horses. Now, it's essentially done. That means I've written nine of the ten essays for Weird New Shit, which means I'm on track, and not behind. I will finish it by the end of 2019. That feels so good that it throws a blanket on some of the fires elsewhere burning in my freelance life. The blanket is semi-flammable. I elect to feel good about the smothering effect today and worry about the additional-fire effect tomorrow.

via GIPHY

In the past couple of months I've stopped drinking almost entirely. I tried this out early in the year as a Decision, but it didn't stick, and so instead I'm trying it as a habit with occasional exceptions. My relationship with alcohol has never been addictive, so my motivations for the teetotaling habit are about feeling good, changing the physical cycles my body goes through daily and weekly, and sitting with psychological discomfort instead of blotting it out. I'm using vaped cannabis a little bit here and there, but it's so different from booze. I can't really get used to it or predict how it will affect me, so I like it less. Also, I have only been marginally successful at rewiring my brain to believe that cannabis is OK. Drugs were very, very not okay in my family, and that training has lasted despite the increasing legality of weed and, you know, being an adult with my own judgment.

Next week an interview that's been in the works for two years is actually being published. I think. I won't believe it until I see it. This week, a review is going up at a publication I labored to break into. Ask me about it sometime.

All right, enough, I need to spend the afternoon accomplishing small, overdue things. Oh fu--CRASH

Chocolate Broccoli

I came to the blog because I wanted to write freely.  - HDT, paraphrased

This week probably evens out to neutral if I weigh it all together. Totally rotten stuff happened, annoying stuff happened, strong accomplishments happened, connecting with others happened. I didn't leave the house much, but when I did, I went to a reading and met someone cool.

I'm nervous about August 15, because a bunch of bills are due and a handful of deadlines are happening. I've got work due for the Washington Post and the Women's Review of Books and the books have not arrived at my house yet. I was supposed to have been working on a website recently, but I feel in over my head about it, and I need to put together the materials for a class I'm going to teach in September, but I've just been trying to meet review deadlines. Really I need to go back to using my Excel spreadsheet, with all the books & their release dates & deadlines, but it grew so tiresome to update that I am relying on post-it notes, which isn't working. Organization shall set me free, I know it. But staring at the pile of ARCs in terror is quicker.

My schedule for the year included writing a hybrid essay in July, and I didn't. It's about Last Tango in Paris, which I rewatched early in the month (or in June maybe?), and which, as I said on Facebook, I found very different than when I first watched it, when I was, oh, twenty. Part of this is life experience, but another part is watching so many movies in between and finding that Bertolucci, while he knows better where to put the camera than plenty of other directors, is not the all-time genius I thought he was. Others have done better, even if they didn't get Brando.

It's misogynistic, natch, but I found the misogyny the least interesting thing about the film, and certainly the least curious. Poor characterization, a sort of exuberant attempt at metatext, and unexpected inconsistencies leaped out at me a lot more than the fact that the woman of the pair is usually naked and the man is usually clothed, that he's a weird obsessive creep and she's I think actually a teenager?, and of course The Butter Scene. It's all so run-of-the-mill. Men are trash. I am Jill's utter lack of surprise.

Anyway, the essay is about the uses of the body, and in that way it only glances at Last Tango, so it shouldn't have been such a chore to write that I failed to sit down to it for thirty-one days. But I did. And now it's August and I've got to gear up to write about Mildred Pierce, which I've been looking forward to since last year. Can't decide whether to try and squeeze out two essays in the next six weeks or leave Last Tango for later. Scarf down the broccoli with my eyes shut so I can enjoy the mousse? Or just eat the dang mousse and put the broccoli in the fridge?

Or both at once, if you're an UTTER WEIRDO

My bylines are getting better and better, and my emails are getting answered more often, and I'm proud of that. But - and this is something I learned in high school, and continue to relearn every freaking year - the better one does, the more in demand one becomes, until one's responsibilities crush one like a steamroller crushes a cartoon character. I feel flat. I'm tired enough from assignments and successful pitches that I don't have the energy to pitch books I haven't placed. The backlog grows, and my deadlines loom, and I feel proud but also very tired. I want to get off. I want to stop. I want a week where I'm not exhausted either by work or by guilt for not doing work. Which, truly, are equivalent burdens.

Part of the problem with this profession is the timeline of it all. My non-review work has been rejected a bunch lately, which means it's time to find more markets to send it out to. If I don't do that now, then my lag time, while I wait for responses, will be much longer later, and I won't have anything useful to do with that time. It's like missing a round when you're round singing (eg "Row Row Row Your Boat"): it messes up the pattern down the line.

[This is part of why I haven't found it easy to slow down reviewing, because I worry that if I say no now, I won't have anything at all to write about later. Plus, the timeline for press publicity varies wildly from one book to the next. Sometimes I get info for a book next month that looks amazing, so I don't want to turn it down; sometimes I get info for a book in six months that just looks okay, but my schedule is open for then, so I don't want to turn it down. This is how I end up with two dozen books on my desk.]

The timing issues at the moment are a) researching more markets for the hybrid stuff that keeps getting rejected and b) the sense that I need to query agents. I did some research recently on who might want to see my essay collection. It'd probably be wise to query them now, so when they get back to me in a few months I'll have more completed essays to send them, and hopefully the essays I sent out on submission a few months ago will have gotten accepted.

See how it all fits together? It's obnoxious, having to plan like this, especially when the people you're planning for and around are often bad planners, or at the very least unpredictable.

Oh and: I'm now the sole reviews editor at Barrelhouse. That's great, for a variety of reasons, but it's...more. More work, more prestige, more worry.

In just two weeks I'm going on a kind of vacation, but freelancers out there know that vacation is a trap and a lie, even more so than in a reliably scheduled profession. I'm going to try and schedule out my time this month so as to treat the week like a vacation (I'm planning to write the Mildred Pierce essay that week, so it won't really be a break, but it will be a break from reviews & pitches & editing).

Before I leave, there's a lot to do. I placed a portfolio of eight reviews for September books, so I don't have to worry about pitching them all, but I should probably read at least half of them this month. That placement leaves me with two August books I still have to place and...four? reviews I've placed that I have to write (let's see: Steinberg, Skibsrud, Earley...okay, three), plus three books for Locus. I've settled in to reviewing three books per month for Locus, and I LOVE it, it's some of my most unpredictable and thus wonderful monthly reading, but it's a thing semi-permanently on the list.

Damn. Writing all that out. I guess I do do a lot. Maybe that's why I stopped using the Excel spreadsheet: it's horrible to see the traffic and not know what to do to thin it out.

Plan Vaguely

Last week I worked intensively on my next hybrid essay, a study of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman. I'm nearly finished. It's less hybrid than the pattern has been so far, as I didn't have any ideas for a thread of fiction to weave in. Instead, I integrated quotes from Cixous, repetitive thoughts, and, if I'm lucky enough to find a graphic designer to help me, a few diagrams. The only titles I've come up with are either lame or obvious, so I'm hoping a good one comes along soon. I wanted to submit it to True Story, because I thought it might wind up long enough (>5,000 wds), but it did not. So who knows.

It's good to be almost finished with this one. Dielman is the most sophisticated film I've written about for this collection so far, the least mainstream. I worried about how that would impact my writing about it, but it seems to have come out okay. Also, the more of these I write, the less it seems like a fluke that I'm writing them, and the more it feels like a collection. That's a big relief.

Three more to write this year. Next is Last Tango in Paris, which I'm not really looking forward to seeing again, but which makes a point I've never seen another film make. I hope to finish that one before the end of July. In August I've arranged to spend a week away, in a nurturing creative environment, and I want to draft the one about Mildred Pierce there. (I was also thinking about starting on a bigger project involving Plan 9 from Outer Space during that week, but I applied for a couple of residencies with the Plan 9 project so maybe I should leave it alone for now.) The final hybrid essay will be on The Misfits, and my calendar says "fall" for that.

I didn't want to give myself really tough deadlines in case some other project or job became a huge, unexpected time-suck. There's nothing worse, for me, than setting a goal and not meeting it. Doing that makes me feel worthless - a whole different thing than just reworking a calendar. I can make writing plans a few months in advance, but beyond that I try to plan vaguely, then sharpen up my intentions when the time comes. If the next two essays go really well, I might end up finishing the Misfits essay in September, but I'm not ruling out being in-progress on it by the time December comes.

I also wrote a handful of other things, articles I didn't expect to write and a couple of reviews. And I read a bunch of books and sent a bunch of pitches and shot my mouth off on Twitter, resulting in more opportunities, for some reason. I'll never understand this. It's like how, in Mass Effect, rude-ass Shepard is treated exactly the same as kind-hearted Shepard. Why. People should be nicer to nicer people, shouldn't they?

I continue to count down the days until my little women's fiction story, "After Gardens," releases from the Wild Rose Press. You can preorder it on Amazon here. Eight more days!

Ruby & Purple

Last week was challenging and then all right, with great variability, and the best of my attention was spent on productivity. I read and pitched and wrote and read some more. I started a fight on the internet, and it was helpful for plenty of people but quite deleterious for me. Multiple reviews went live after a couple of dry weeks. I had a piece published that took a lot of research and time to assemble, and it kind of vanished without a ripple, which bums me out. A silly Twitter thread I did on Mansfield Park got more attention. Also, I finished up the fourth in Laurie J. Marks's Elemental Logic series, a tetralogy of books that has been one of the purest pleasures of my year. The first draft of my review was 1,300 words, and I could have gone on and on and on after that.

I had a lot to think about and process after the last couple of weeks, and that might be why this week has been snoozy and unproductive. I have a pile of ideas to write about, and no motivation whatsoever to write them. Some of this feels like perfectionism, some of it overwhelm. Luckily, there's always reading to do when I can't seem to write.

Last night my brain gave me yet another idea I don't necessarily have the time for: an essay that breaks down the 1977 film Ruby, which is truly awful, but which I love, and which is a failure that I suspect has an interesting and/or sad story behind it. My guess is that Ruby once had a good screenplay; excavating its layers shows that, most probably, someone came in to "enhance" it with zeitgeist elements and screwed it up. There's cliche, genuinely compelling drama, cheesy Exorcist imitation, unique combinations of genre elements, and deeply stupid horror scenes. It's a very both/and movie, the kind of bad art that fascinates me bottomlessly.

This is bad art idea #3, after essays on Plan 9 and Death Bed, so it's starting to seem more likely that I have a book about bad art in me - less a hope than a likelihood. I wish I could pursue it now, instead of pursuing all the other crap I want to/have to write first, but it's probably better to let it marinate anyway. In the meantime, if you're interested, Ruby is on YouTube, and a less grainy version is available with a Rifftrax track attached, the existence of which I think I'll use in the essay.

Of note, I'm writing this on my tiny purple laptop, which I bought after dragging my too-heavy-for-airport-walking laptop to Iceland, and which in terms of processing power and etc is worth about what I paid for it ($200), but which has the major advantage of being purple. I know I'm not the only person who is suckered by aesthetics when making purchases. Purple and dip-dye are the two most reliable ways to make me buy something.

In a little less than a month, a short story I wrote will go on sale as a standalone ebook at the Wild Rose Press. It's priced at only $0.99, so if you'd like to support me, I hope you'll pick it up. I'll have more news about that, promotional links and whatnot, soon.

Less Yes

This week I pulled waaaaay back on what I expected to accomplish. I focused on physical health and nourishment, and I read books: one dumb book, one okay book, and one extraordinary book. Maybe this balances out the sheer production of last week, the two essays I wrote, and maybe it balances out the week's astrology and the emotional upheaval I felt. And pulling back worked - I feel grounded and comfortable now, where I felt messy and ridiculous on Monday. But it's time to go back to producing: promises to keep, miles to go. Three reviews this week. An essay I pitched and now have to draft. Interview questions, a press release.

One thing I produced this week was a fairly good try at a book proposal. It's the second one I've written, and it required different resources than the first. This one is for a book that I have a better idea about, but the earlier one had lots more facts and figures I could leverage. I assembled this one based on a conversation at AWP, and I have no idea what'll happen with it. Maybe nothing.

The pile of books I have to read and review is not actually so bad right now. Sheer volume-wise, that is; the timing of them sucks, as it's five books on one release day, four books on another, nothing for a month, etc. I've started saying no a little bit, but more often I've just stopped saying yes. That's a weird distinction, but it's real: people offering things specifically to me happens a lot less often than people tossing opportunity in the air and seeing who grabs it. In the last month I've hung back instead of grabbing. I don't know exactly what's up this month, while I wait for the results of a few lines I threw out and plan for the events I'm organizing my summer and fall around. It seems smarter to wait a bit before saying yes more than I have.

I have been watching an awful lot of movies lately. Few of them have been extraordinary. A lot of them have been nice (Dumplin) or useful additions to a body of knowledge (Dressed to Kill, Inferno) or fun (Ant-Man and the Wasp). But nothing has really surprised me, or deviated from the middle 50%.

I also heaved a big sigh and dove into Werner Herzog's oeuvre. He's a mind I'm very interested in, from what I have heard and read about/by him, but until now I haven't put my money where my mouth is. So now I'm doing that, actually watching his films. Something about his timing and camerawork is stark and alien, like Cronenberg, but even more sterile. I like it.

Switching back to movies has been pleasant. It's an odd truth about me: I'm on much more solid ground thinking and working with movies than with literature. This doesn't make sense, because I'm a writer and a book critic, professionally. But no matter how many books I read, I still feel more comfortable in film. There's an innate ease to the way my brain processes the film, how wholly I feel I've absorbed it, while I feel like there's always more to process in a book, and usually I've only touched my subjective experience of it.

This week has been very light on social media for me. I don't know if it will last, but every time I opened the apps, I felt strangely hollow. Like how you feel half an hour after eating too many Cheetos. It's not real food, and your body knows it. I hope this sensation isn't temporary, as I've been wanting for years for social media to loosen its grip on me.

Next week I'll be reading the fourth and final book in Laurie J. Marks's Elemental Logic series, and I'm so sorry to be finishing the series. It's some of the best saga-type fantasy I've ever read, and one of the best novelistic projects. The books are so rich and thick and fully developed that I feel like I've lived a whole life, reading them, or even more than one.

My friend Kathleen drew new covers for the tetralogy, which is how I heard of it in the first place.

No big conclusions for now. Still it moves.

Interacting with the Material World

You might have seen it on social media, but KERNPUNKT revealed the cover art for my book. It looks like this:

Art by Mariana Magaña

It's so much prettier even than I imagined. I love it.

Managing the book release in early stages has reminded me a lot of wedding planning. A great deal can be done a long time in advance, but a lot of what must happen has to wait for the right moment to be planned. Calendaring and lists are essential. I was born to do that kind of work.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on, too. A long story I wrote, "After Gardens," known on this blog as "the hot springs story," is going up for sale at the Wild Rose Press as a standalone ebook in mid-June. This press has been supportive and helpful all throughout the process of turning "After Gardens" into a commercial ebook, and I'm very happy it found a home there. However, the way this ebook requires promotion is completely different than the way Ceremonials does. Different audience, different kind of press, different goals, different approach. It's like switching alphabets. For this reason, I've been dragging my feet on promoting "After Gardens," but I need to get going on it.

Less striking, but just right for the content 

It's being sold as women's fiction, which is about right. (For the record, it's hard to find markets for short stories that qualify as women's fiction. Both readers & publishers prefer that genre in book length.) I hope it does well for the press, of course, but I feel weirdly indifferent to this project. Submitting to TWRP was my last shot with this story before I trunked it permanently, so I'd nearly severed my investment in it when it was accepted. Of course I'm very happy they accepted it and are selling it, and I'll do my best to promote it, but it feels like someone else's work, and that makes it more of a chore and less of a pleasure to promote.

A few weeks ago I put together a schedule for writing the remaining hybrid film essays I have to write for the collection I'm assembling. I gave myself ample time to write them in order to be finished by the end of 2019. At the time, April still had some days left in it, so I set a goal to finish something else nagging at me that isn't part of this project, a partially written essay about abandoned places, before May began. I succeeded (and the process of writing it was fraught, so hooray, go me, I did something hard), sort of. I thought I had a three-strand braided essay, but what I actually had was one lyric two-strand essay and a separate, much more straightforward single essay. When I was finished with both, I knew the lyric one was missing something, but I submitted it to an urgent opportunity before figuring out the missing bit. (This is a rookie mistake and I'm ashamed of making it. Oh, well; I'll fix it and send it out elsewhere, when it's actually ready.) Mostly I'm pleased that I met the goal of finishing those two pieces, which have been dormant for over a year, waiting for me to put butt in chair and finish them.

There are three main threads in my creative work right now: a) books, b) hybrid film essays, and c) everything else. What I wrote at the end of April falls under c), but now that it's done, I have to return to b). The one I scheduled myself to write in May is a little obnoxious, as it relates to Jeanne Dielman, a static three-hour film mostly about a woman doing domestic chores, but I knew I needed to get it out of the way before I went wild writing about Mildred Pierce.

Earlier this spring, I bought a handmade creativity candle. I wanted, on the first day of May, to burn it and do a tarot reading to restart/redirect my creativity. I've written easily 100,000 words of book reviews in the past 18 months. That's great, but considering that volume of work, I think I need a genuine ritual to direct energy into the collection I want to finish, which requires more intuition and less brain than reviews.

I didn't succeed in that goal. May has come in strange. I feel like I need more time to think, and then I get bored and anxious inside my own head. I'm sleeping thickly, with upsetting, disruptive dreams. My emotions are labile, slippery. [private circumstance], in a way I haven't been since my early 20s, and I have no idea what that's about. Literally all of this could be stress, the unbearable stress of freelancing, built up over time, refusing to come to an actual head but bubbling ceaselessly under a thin and all-too-permeable layer of self-control.

I'm writing this here instead of somewhere private because it's all of a piece, the emotions and the creativity and the stress and the book(s) coming out and what I'm accomplishing and failing to accomplish. For me there's no separation between succeeding at writing that lyric essay - which I think is one of the more meaningful things I've written, if not really one of the best - and failing to do the laundry today. At the end of a given day, the measure of it is how much I have interacted with the material world instead of shutting it out. That's the only mark of success or failure I have to go on right now.

I worry that this sounds too bleak. I'm sorry. I feel weird right now. There's a big deadline coming up in about two weeks, so I could use that as an excuse, but of course there'll be more coming after that and after that; if it's an excuse, it's a permanent one. Seeing Avengers: Endgame yesterday overclocked my emotional state in a way I can't explain at all, since I don't have a lot invested in the MCU, and I'm still recovering from that, which is embarrassing to admit but absolutely true. Ceremonials being a real thing that's coming, all five of my desired blurbers agreeing to review the MS, people jumping in to offer their influence to help me and the book, is exhilarating, but also a brand-new experience that I don't seem to be integrating easily. I landed a fascinating opportunity this summer, but it'll drain my financial resources instead of adding to them, which is a very unkind cut at the moment. Etc. All the great stuff is as overwhelming and stressful as the less-great stuff, and often they seem to be entwined.

At least I cleaned the apartment over the weekend. Looking at the clutter was getting to me, and now it's a lot better.

An Honest Post

There's a lot going on in my writing world - perhaps too much for me to organize my thoughts into one place. I feel like I haven't written an honest post here in a really long time. As the number of people who pay attention to my work grows, I find I'm holding my tongue more and more. I didn't think I'd ever want to do that, but that's where I am. Here's some honesty, though not about everything I have to say.

Weekly To-Do, 2/17/19 - 2/23/19

I'm still kinda working myself to death a little bit on reviews. Everyone except my editors is trying to help me stop, with minimal success. There's a film essay I wanted to write this week, but I'm almost too nervous to start it, because I've only written reviews for so long. And because I'm so occupied with everything that has to get done before the end of March. (It's a lot.) My spreadsheets are still keeping me sane, but the different willingnesses of the spirit, flesh, and mind make productivity vary.

Disclaimer: I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them entirely. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Edits on Revenge review
Gutter Prayer review
Edits on WW review
Tiny edit on Sissy review
Edits on Body Myth review

Reading:
Amberlough
You Who Enter Here
This Never Happened
The Conviction of Cora Burns

Pitching/Queries:
Broadly
Assay
TLS
JTL production

Followups:
Prairie Schooner
Albuquerque Journal
Brevity

Correspondence:
Barrelhouse business
Anita
Emma/Reid/Amy
Heather
Graywolf
Nathaniel
Neal

Other:

Barrelhouse
TWRP business
Kernpunkt contract (!!!!)
Promote Handbook review
Promote Gatsby's Child review
Best F(r)iends watch & notes
Seek help from everywhere on permissions thing (hours and hours of work)
Promote Western Wind review
Promote Ramadan interview
Felicelli interview
Promote Locus year in review

The Book Arbiter

Suspicious fish is suspicious

I'd like to caption the above with "every book critic ever" 

I've been meaning for a while to write about this essay, "The Movie Assassin," which got a fair amount of attention when it came out at the end of September. I've read widely varied reactions to this article, from total angry dismissal to "I feel seen." I loved it, found it worth reading repeatedly, considered what it meant to me in multiple dimensions, still am not sure that I've written, below, everything I have to say and think about it.

The main thing the essay made me want to repeat is how important I find it not to go with the flow of the crowd when writing criticism. 27-year-old Sarah didn't like The English Patient perhaps for immature reasons, but twenty years later, she has the language to express what's wrong with it, and in my view it's the same thing that's wrong with a lot of prestige pictures: it's not good just because a preponderance of influential people say it is.

Everyone had agreed to care about this thing, to call it good, to give it nine Academy Awards. But it was just a piece of shit sprinkled with glitter that everyone, including me, agreed to call gold.

Opinions like this (that The English Patient is bad) are difficult to defend. They make people mad who are deeply invested in everyone agreeing on what's gold and what isn't. They can be easily dismissed because they're fringe, because the rest of the crowd disagrees. They are problematic for people who are easily occupied or entertained by essentially mediocre art.

Which is most people, in fact - and I don't say that with any insult in my heart. Mediocre art needs an audience and the audience needs mediocre art. Sometimes I need to watch Easy A instead of Wild Strawberries. But I know that most people are going to like Easy A more than Wild Strawberries, because the latter is much harder to like, and is reaching out to a narrower shred of the audience.

The moment now strikes me as so incredibly East Coast—this notion of consensus—which I would later run away from, and then, in a strange way, miss.

All this background is important when writing criticism, I believe. It's the reason that, even though I understand a hell of a lot more about movies than I understand about books, I don't want to write film reviews (anymore; I used to want it more than anything). It's why I don't like talking with friends about movies, for the most part. If someone asks me what I think of this or that, I don't want to tell them, because the answer will likely make the person's mouth turn down or their brow furrow. American film of the 2010s generally isn't that good, because the camerawork is pedestrian and the screenplays are impossibly safe and the characters are circumscribed and technology makes them aesthetically lazy. I see these flaws, just for starters, in virtually every movie. If you ask me if I saw a given movie, I would so much rather say no than yes, because no continues the conversation, and yes is likely to kill it.

I would be a miserable sod as a film critic, not because I don't like movies (I adore them), and not because I want to be a killjoy (I prefer to cheer for people's art), but because I know too much about movies to be anything but cynical about contemporary American film.

Every time I thought about the fact that other people all over the city were reading it, I would shake my head and try to think about something else. When I walked by the theater and saw people in line to see it, I felt sick.

The review for which I felt this go-with-the-flow problem most keenly was for Belly Up, which I reviewed on assignment for LARB in May. I knew, from the hype it was getting and various indications in the text, that it was likely to be a big hit critically. I knew I couldn't fake a good opinion of it, and I thought I was way too early in my critical career to be doing that, anyway. So I told the truth and said that, even though the book was compact and well-executed, I found it chilly and distant, that there was no human spark in the stories.

And I felt bad about it for weeks. I didn't want the author to think I was being mean for no reason. I didn't want to negatively impact her career or readers' opinions of her book. I didn't want my review to be the reason she sold even one fewer copy of her book. But I was assigned to review the book and I had to do it truthfully.

If you write thousands of sentences that have absolutely nothing to do with what you think or feel those sentences are still what you will become. You can turn yourself into another person. I turned myself into another person.

I had a different crisis in reviewing CoDex 1962. It was the standard-issue who-do-I-think-I-am crisis, the one where this book has been lauded all over the world and it's a twenty-year achievement by an acknowledged young master of literature, and I'm a little baby critic who didn't really think the trilogy was a trilogy so much as it was three books pushed together, and the last one was maybe a little hastily written? to finish a trilogy the writer had lost enthusiasm for or moved creatively away from?, so I wrote a lot of weasel words like seems and I think, but my editor would have none of that. He said I praised the book enough in other paragraphs that I could ding it a few times without sounding like a jerk. I wasn't necessarily worried about sounding like a jerk; I was worried about sounding like I didn't know what I was talking about.

But I'm fairly sure I do. Just because every critic in the world was falling all over themselves to love CoDex 1962 didn't mean I ought to ignore my reservations about it. I didn't trick LARB into accepting that review (it was another assignment, in fact). They wanted my words. I had to offer them truthfully.

It was the best thing I’d ever written.

I think the error comes in believing that because other people are reading and/or purchasing your criticism, you are automatically correct in any given opinion. That because I write book criticism, I am The Book Arbiter, that I know for good and all what people should enjoy and what they shouldn't. I don't believe that, because I don't believe "should" is how audience enjoyment works. My opinion of 2010s cinema is not correct for the vast majority of moviegoers alive today. It would be irresponsible of me to write that opinion down as reasonable criticism, even if I do think I'm right. I'm a critic, and proud of my work as a critic, but I'm not an arbiter. I don't believe any single critic is, or should be.

The audience is the only arbiter that matters.

It took Sarah Miller twenty years to reaffirm her opinion of The English Patient. It's interesting to me that this was the book/movie she chose to make her point, because my opinion of the source book is extremely unusual for a heavy reader: I can't stand it. If given the opportunity, I would bow out of reviewing it, because I don't understand what it's doing well enough to form a reasonable or useful opinion on it. This happened to me earlier in the year with Sarah Vap's Viability, to which I had the opposite reaction. I loved it, but didn't understand at all. After a few months of trying to write the review I apologized and tapped out. Embarrassing, but better than lying.

I knew there were people who made money saying things they thought were actually true, or important, but I figured I wasn’t good enough to do that, because otherwise, people wouldn’t keep asking me to write stupid stuff.

Of the movie The English Patient I don't have much of an opinion, except that I liked it more than the book. Maybe Sarah's right, and it's a pretentious, very pretty piece of fluff. It wouldn't be the first time I thought that about a well-lauded film. 

---

Some sad stuff has happened this week. My husband's uncle (his mother's sister's husband) has passed away after a short illness. We subsequently had to cancel a family get-together for this weekend that we'd all been looking forward to. Plus, the week in public life has been very cruel.

But there's plenty of good news in my life (and I'll bet in yours too). My review of Tommy Orange's nominated-for-everything There There appeared in the Times! Literary! Supplement! on November 2. Here's a link, but it's behind a subscription wall. Also, I went to a cool event over the weekend and met some new and interesting L.A. book people.

I wanted to let you know, those of you who get my blog posts via email, that the traffic might increase unpleasantly soon. I am doing a project to track all the work I do on a weekly basis as a freelancer, and the best place I know to record all that tracking is here, on my blog. I'll post that progress until someone yells at me to stop or it's no longer useful. Until then --