Little april list

Juleen Compton, Julio Torres, trampolines, cake.

1. Perhaps it is odd (or fitting) to be working with the genre of the list so soon after completing my Special Fields List, a step toward PhD candidacy that I began last July. The list was made up of 90 book-length texts in my fields of American literature, gender/sexuality studies, and performance theory, and reading it was both exhausting (I averaged about a book every 3 days) and gratifying. Since I do not originally come from a literary background, and took only wonderfully unique seminars in my undergraduate degree, I have no experience with survey courses or canonical views of the discipline. I really needed this reading list to give me a more thorough, traditional foundation, in addition to my slightly kooky cultural studies/critical theory training. Highlights were a lot of women’s writing from the 60s-90s, especially novels by Toni Cade Bambara, Sylvia Plath, Shirley Jackson, Marilynne Robinson, Dionne Brand, Chris Kraus, and Jamaica Kincaid. I will take a 21-day exam on them all later this month.
   

2. I tried something new this winter—trampoline lessons! The beginner course ends this week and I am both proud of how far I have come and surprised at how petite that distance actually is. Trampolining is far more difficult when you are an adult with a bad back—according to our instructors, you experience more Gs that a fighter pilot, though for only a fraction of the time. Consequently, it has been a tremendous exercise in patience and control. As someone who has historically had a tendency to rush everything, I’ve been focussing on mastering form and building slowly, rather than spaghetti-ing up to the ceiling (there is a medical student in the class who has barely mastered the basics yet begs to try a backflip every week, arguing that he could do them on his friend’s trampoline when he was a kid. I fear that one day he will be working in a hospital and claim he can do open heart surgery because he played Operation). I am also doing yoga every morning and learning how to slow down and listen to anything other than my email notifications/anxious inner monologue.
   

3. I have a new website. I switched web services this spring for ethical and financial reasons, and now have a shiny new home for my portfolio. Feedback is welcome, as are words of adoration.
   

4. I keep cancelling and restarting my Criterion Channel subscription, but I was delighted last week to discover that a Juleen Compton program has been added to the service! Compton is one of the most underrated woman directors of the 60s and I had the pleasure of seeing The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean (1966) through a UCLA virtual archival screening at the height of the pandemic. Norma Jean draws 60s pop cultural references and fashion into a kind of sinister, feminist fairytale set in the desert. This week, I watched Compton’s debut Stranded (1965) and saw the early indications of this style in her idiosyncratic (though very Nouvelle Vague-inflected) editing and use of sound. It was around this era that she was hanging around Varda and her peers in Paris, and picked up a lot of techniques from the French iconoclasts that weren’t entirely familiar yet in Hollywood. If you’ve ever thought “I like Truffaut, but I wish his movies were more spooky, more thoughtful, more feminist, and more queer,” then you will be delighted by Compton. She was also the subject of this 2019 New Yorker story.
   

5. I have been watching more films recently, particularly those that are adapted from novels on my Fields list, but I’ve also just been out to the Lightbox to see Julio Torres’ Problemista. Some aspects of the ending fell apart for me, but god, Tilda Swinton is so terrifically monstrous! I think the last thing I saw her in was The Eternal Daughter, which has such a completely alien mood to this one, and I’m just stunned by her range. I also love Torres—both Los Espookys and his surreal stand-up special My Favorite Shapes, as well as basically everything he has done since I first found his work in 2016 (don’t fact check this year). His humour is the perfect marriage of deadpan and whimsy. I wish the film were even more Julio, even weirder—sort of like this promo that he and Tilda were in for Them magazine (this video also made me laugh because I think if I were a director I would either make unhinged little films exactly like this or terribly serious, political, dusty period pieces):

6. Now that I am done reading for Fields, I can read for pleasure for the first time since July. I’m starting with Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You and Judith Butler’s first trade book Who’s Afraid of Gender. I loved this review by Dana Stevens, who describes working with Butler at Berkeley, particularly emphasizing their generous pedagogy. I also enjoyed the beautiful characterization of gender as something never to be domesticated: “like a deer encountered on a walk in the woods, gender should be allowed to take off at a run to wherever it’s headed, to lead a free life without fear of unasked-for intrusion.” I’ve had a galley of the book on my coffee table since the fall, but my commission to review it was cancelled and I’m only just getting to start it now, after it has already been released into the wild.
   

7. Speaking of gender and public discourse, I read Merve Emre’s conversation with Moira Donegan (published as part of the NYR/Lithub series “The Critic and Her Publics”) over breakfast on Tuesday. Donegan is a gender columnist for The Guardian whose precise and uncompromising commitment to feminism is wise and urgent at a time where feminist writing can often feel unfocused or overly commercial. You might also know her as the creator of 2017’s Shitty Media Men List, an episode which she recounts in the interview with Emre.
   
   But what strikes me most about their conversation is how it ends. Emre has Donegan do a close-reading of Judge Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion when Roe v Wade was overturned. I love how Donegan points out the way that Sotomayor addresses the public, rather than the court, and casts doubt about the court’s commitment to procedure and authority. Donegan says: “You are not doing it because you have real legitimacy to do it. I think that’s a tricky conundrum we find ourselves in as feminists and as Americans: we’re facing organs of political power that cannot be moved by threats to their legitimacy, that are content to be seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the public so long as they have numbers.” Later, she contrasts this with the style of Judge Alito’s delivery of the majority opinion, and adds: “The kind of demonstration that Alito is making is of his peevishness, of his disrespect for argument, and of his disrespect for the other side. That is itself a demonstration of his power. It is a demonstration of the irrelevance of legitimacy. It is a public that he’s holding in contempt.” This seems to me an apt diagnosis of political discourse and the rhetoric of power today.
   

8. I am really looking forward to baking a big chocolate cake for some of my friends this weekend. I love that cake is not just dessert—it’s celebratory. Cake is gratitude, relief, joy, and optimism. It is important to have cake-occasions in our lives, and if not, to invent them.
   

9. Last night, I leafed through Feelings: Soft Art, a book that I keep sitting on top of my bookcase, usually laid open to show some of the images. Consequently, I don’t flip through it enough.
   I’m really intrigued by this idea of “soft art,” and considering the works by Tracey Emin, Carrie Mae Weems, Bunny Rogers, Ryan McGinley, Senga Nengudi, Petra Collins, and others, I was struck by how this art imparts softness not only through texture, haptics, or shape, but also has a kind of accessibility or hermeneutic gentleness, if such a thing makes any sense. The book itself is also literally soft. Here is the page I have it open to now:

   

   Nolan Simon, The Lamb or Be nice and don't trouble your head about a thing

10. Now that I am back on Substack, I am enjoying the little chats that we can have in the comments with one another, but I am not sure how much I love this genre of writing, or if I even know what it is for me. Anytime I come up with something interesting to say, I want to save it in a file where I keep my ideas for pitches to actual magazines and journals who will pay me and offer a bigger platform. Perhaps this is cagey, but a girl must (and greatly desires to) eat, despite the Prince of Canada Galen Weston Jr’s efforts to make this more challenging. I suppose this is an opening to solicit feedback or requests—what makes these newsletters un/enjoyable for you and is there a particular style or format that is best?