And then, one fairy night, May became June.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I was eight years old, one of my closest friends ran out of school with me on the last day. It was a golden day, and the pavement was hot through the thin soles of our shoes. When we hit the ground outside the school, by one of the big trees, she started to yell. “We’re in grade four,” she shrieked, not minding the people around us. “We’re in grade four!” A small child started to cry. I’ve always remembered that, even if most of the third grade has faded to a distant memory. Yesterday (at the time I am writing this) was the last day of grade eleven. I got off the bus into a warm summer day, plodding through my route home, and took a quiet pleasure in thinking I’m in grade twelve. My windows are blocked by the proliferation of bright green leaves, and there’s a pile of laundry on my chair I still haven’t done, and I’m in grade twelve. This time next year, I will have graduated high school. It does not feel like enough time has passed for that to be the case. I still remember the colour of all my elementary school classrooms. I am still grappling in the dark, solemn at the prospect of becoming someone new.
I am writing this wrap up post about a week before the end of the month. On June 28th, I will be on a plane, so I will be in Europe when this post goes up. (If it does. My capacity to correctly use technology is limited at best, so there’s a strong chance this goes up in July or, you know, never.) I have not seen Europe in three years—which I know is a privileged thing to miss, I do. Some people spend their whole lives dreaming a of a place and never get to see it. I’m lucky that I get to go back to Serbia this summer. Isolation has done nothing but exacerbate my wanderlust, drive up the urge to be somewhere, anywhere else. And the strangest part of this graduation, the last one before the big one, is that my chance is coming up. Every day, my inbox rattles with a new global scholarship opportunity. I have a budding pros and cons list for majors in English, journalism, psychology, and political science. (If I had it my way, I would do eight degrees in a row and never leave academia.) Here it is. The future, bold and vivid and rushing forward. There’s nothing to do but step out and greet it.
This is the sixth of my monthly wrap-up newsletters. My aim with this recurring section of nowhaunting is to describe and comment on the media I have engaged with during the month, give some personal updates on life and writing, then provide some thoughts on what lies ahead. Each month of the year feels precious and distinct to me, so the goal of this is to collate thoughts I would have had on my Tumblr into a cohesive article.
This month I listened to Delta by Mumford & Sons, Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie, Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain, and Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan. These albums, most of which were recommended by friends and peers, do not reflect my music taste so much as they were welcome integrations. I took part in a session at school that introduced me to some of these great songs, which I’m thankful for. Here, I wanted to highlight a few albums for review.
Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain is an astonishing freshman effort. Cain’s gorgeous, haunting voice effectively tackles complex melodies and lyrical content concerning Americana, religion, and isolation. “God loves you, but not enough to save you,” she croons, a gut punch of a beginning to the album’s penultimate track. While Cain’s voice is strong and her lyrics evocative, the repeated use of vocal fry and extended track lengths of many songs hold this album back from greatness. Standout tracks include American Teenager, Thoroughfare, and A House in Nebraska.
Widely considered one of his greatest albums, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde lives up to its reputation. While Dylan’s voice is an acquired taste, and some of the more folksy songs require an adjustment period, this is a masterpiece from a talented lyricist. These songs create a dreamworld, blurring the line between perception and reality. Mythic city personages dance across the lines of this work, in particular Visions of Johanna, appearing to us as strangers who have deep importance to our guide. This is music at its finest, more fairytale than frivolous. Standout tracks include the aforementioned Visions of Johanna, I Want You, and Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
Let’s see. In June I saw seasons 1 to 3 of GLOW, season 2 of Hacks, season 2 of Seinfeld, and oh yeah, seasons 5 through 10 of Friends. At this rate, I will have finished the tenth season by the time this goes up. Now, I’ve often said that me watching a lot of TV tends to indicate poor mental state. It’s true, though, because I was in bed sick from a bad reaction to my booster shot for a week. Hence, it was very easy to just keep looping through laugh tracks. However, I am quite fond of sitcoms and have no regrets—at least in this regard.
GLOW is a much better show than its marketing suggests. Far from being a glitzy reproduction of women’s wrestling with no complexity, this show’s writers afford their characters serious depth. Many topical social issues are dealt with, complex story arcs span seasons, and Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie) is a dynamic protagonist who gives the story some realistic charm. While the show deals with race poorly (as the actresses wrote an open letter about), there were promising signs that this would be rectified in the fourth season. However, it was shut down by Netflix, and I remain bitter over the lost potential of Ruth and Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin).
Friends is one of the most popular sitcoms of all time. While many of the jokes have aged poorly, and certain plot beats (e.g. the rampant misogyny that propels many stories) make viewers cringe today, it is evident why so many people tuned in to the exploits of Monica, Chandler, Joey, Rachel, Ross, and Phoebe for ten years straight. Aside from a mediocre ninth season, the show is consistently funny, heartwarming, and charming. The stakes are low. Conflicts are resolved at the end of the episode. All Friends wants to do is make you laugh and care about the Ross/Rachel relationship. I have enjoyed watching this show more than I like to admit in front of people who think I have good taste.
In June I read Felicity by Mary Oliver, Passing by Nella Larsen, Like Me by Chely Wright (for a second time), Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Washington Square by Henry James, Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, Slow Days: Fast Company by Eve Babitz, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, and Book Lovers by Emily Henry. I may finish another book or two before I leave for Europe, but this post can be amended to reflect that. It’s been a decent reading month, although I think I’m still struggling to lose the mindset that more books means better reading. In the summer, I’m concentrating on classics.
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton might be my favourite memoir ever. It is fun, insightful, and engaging with a strong authorial voice. Alderton is an adept writer, keeping her tone conspiring and irreverent while giving the reader great advice. I understand why this book has had the reception it did—my choice to read it was based on the number of times I saw it recommended. It’s everything I want from a memoir. Often I think major personalities don’t need to write about their lives (because they’re not very good at it), but give me a British writer chatting about her crap ex-boyfriends any day of the week.
Book Lovers by Emily Henry holds the dishonourable distinction of being one of the worst books I have read in my entire life. Its repeated attempts at being funny or subversive fall as flat as Henry’s overused metaphors. Like Everything I Know About Love, I read this one based on hype, and unlike Everything I Know About Love, this was a crap novel that undoes my faith in contemporary literature as a whole. Nothing about the caricatured and contrived exploits of Nora Stephens can convince me that this book is worth the time it takes to read it. (As an aside, if one of my clients pitched something as egregiously offensive as Frigid, I would simply chew them out for it. RIP to Nora, but I have a backbone.)
This month I watched The Half of It (for the second time), But I’m a Cheerleader, Double Indemnity, and Desert Hearts. It is likely that I will watch a few movies on the plane, so this may not be a holistic portrait of my movie-watching this month. (I do recognize the unbearable pretension I wrote that last sentence with, but I enjoy writing these damn things too much to make myself sound likeable.) And, at long last, after saying I would do a list of movies to watch to beat my executive dysfunction, I wrote one. My summer watchlist is a thing of beauty, at least to me, because the amount of time it took to make something that was supposed to make better use of my time is insane.
The Half of It is an excellent film that holds up even better the second time around. Alice Wu is a great director—she crafts beautiful, thought-provoking shots that frame the story in such a wonderful way. One of my favourite aspects of this film is how the imagery associated with the ‘double human’ (Plato’s twin halves theory, the one where we were all born as two people fused together until the gods got scared), and how mirroring Ellie and Aster’s faces during key moments (the window while they text, the water when they lie next to each other) throughout the story reflects that they must complete themselves.
Double Indemnity earns its reputation as a Hollywood classic. The script is tight, smart, and unforgiving. Across the board, the performances given are fleshed out, meaningful, and bring something new to the story. And the film’s apparent subtext, where Keyes is so close to Neff that he cannot place the other man’s role in the central murder, struck a chord with me. This is a well-written, well directed (Billy Wilder never fails to surprise me), and evocative psychological thriller I would recommend to anyone.
After approximately six months of thinking, writing, and forgetting to update my Substack about page, I finally did it. The oddly formal tone has been removed, more delightful details have been shared, and I no longer claim to post once a month when the reality is I will post when I have an idea. During promotion for her fifth album, Taylor Swift said that she only wanted to write songs when they were great. That is the same way I feel about writing. I don’t want to put out mediocre articles for the sake of having sent a newsletter that week. I want to write when it’s great. If this is going to be a museum of what I was like as a teenager, I want it to be well-curated and have a cute adjoining pastry shop. (Is that my Tumblr? The metaphor is getting away from me.) Next month, as I’ll be travelling, I will gain some experiences to write about that aren’t ‘I sat at home and watched Friends all day’ and ‘I had to break up with with my boyfriend because I came to terms with being a lesbian.’ Granted, I did get the cool girl article out of that one, and it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written. Malcolm and Clara, a novel I’ve been workshopping for more than a year now, is on its third iteration. I am not sure what the interest in my prose is on the internet, but rest assured that the present state of the story is the best yet.
Being a writer is a bit like being a self-critical Sisyphus. Imagine if you not only had to push a boulder up a hill every day, but you criticised your own form and sometimes sent the boulder rolling back down halfway up out of annoyance with the way it was turning. I say had, even though writing is a choice. The fact of the matter, however, is that a story inside you has got to come out. In any form. In any fashion. If your life becomes a daily diary entry, fragments of other lives stolen away to repurpose as poetry, characters bubbling up in idle moments—there’s a story, and it’s got to come out. Otherwise you will be unbearable at dinner parties. Keeping this in mind, I’d like to pronounce this as my personal favourite of my monthly wrap up posts. And I would like to sincerely thank anyone and everyone that reads them, from treasured mutuals to pressured best friends to any exes wondering what I’m up to.
Final note: self-critical Sisyphus would have been an excellent title for this publication.
really enjoyed reading this! the half of it is one of my fave movies and your thoughts on it capture exactly how i feel about the movie