Little april list
Spring is coming with a strawberry in the mouth
Foreword
I’m a little bit low on newsletter concepts and motivation lately, so I have let a few weeks lapse now without writing anything here. We are so saturated with content though—much of it lacking in thoughtfulness—that I increasingly think if you don’t have something to say, just listen and wait!
As you’ll see below, waiting has been a feeling I’ve started to grow more comfortable with (maybe that’s too generous—maybe I’m just learning to live with and in waiting, even as it remains uneasy). This winter has been arduous and equivocating, sending us signs of spring only to withdraw them and drop massive amounts of snow and freezing rain. For much of 2025, I’ve also been waiting for my rescue puppy to grow in confidence—until late March, it was hard to leave her alone for more than a few minutes without a tantrum, and for a while, even going for walks on the city streets was too overwhelming and she would become frenzied or reactive, despite being notoriously calm and sweet indoors. I’ve had to discover a patience not ordinarily in my nature, to reorganize my life around compassion and care in ways that have been taxing but are, of course, worthwhile. Spring is promising the balm of sun and warmth, maturity for sweet Flora the puppy, and as cliché as it sounds, new life. I am also a May baby, and so spring’s promise of renewal always feels especially poignant as my birthday approaches. Doors and windows will open—literal and symbolic—and patterns will reset. I will step back into light.
Top notes
Im/patience, at the intersection of urgency and paralysis, pent up and cooped up, needing to stretch, basking in soft fabrics and sunlight, cleaning and reorganizing, sweet berries and fresh baked goods, exasperated, unsurprised, curious, waiting.
Reading
The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff
In the past few years, my friends and I all read Matrix, Groff’s queer take on Marie de France and the medieval convent, and we had long, admiring discussions about it. In her newest novel The Vaster Wilds, Groff deploys the same precision when it comes to the granularity of the past, giving a profoundly embodied, haptic, sensory account of a young servant girl who escapes the Puritan settler family for whom she works and flees into the wilderness of the early colonial United States. As in its predecessor, The Vaster Wilds is interested in processes of coming to ethical consciousness, telegraphing the ways in which domination is normalized at the expense of interdependence and care; the move toward the latter is onset by rapturous entanglements with the natural world, especially animals. This is also an investment in the tension between creation and destruction, where the impetus to build and develop may not sustain life so much as trample over it, and where death and loss are sacred rather than terrible. The reiteration of these themes across both Matrix and The Vaster Wilds are not so much repetitive as they are developed in complementary ways—I like seeing an author’s preoccupations spelled out and sustained, so that we as readers might start to think with them and join them in this web of theorizing life’s big questions through fiction. I also liked that this is set, serendipitously, on the precipice of a spring thaw… I’ve been thinking a lot about seasonal reading or reading in coordination with one’s environment.
Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nuñez
One of my TBR short books, I found this sort-of biography of Susan Sontag to be incredibly endearing and captivating. I say “sort-of” because it is described as a “memoir of Susan Sontag,” which is to say that it does not account for her life so much as the relationship that Nuñez had with her while working briefly as her assistant and then dating her son. What I love here are the details that show us Sontag’s vulnerable underbelly—her intense admiration for and envy of Elizabeth Hardwick’s sentences, for instance, and her frustration that her own prose was not adequately beautiful, or that she could not thoroughly remember details from scenes in her life on which she later attempted to write. These admissions of lack or partiality show something human beyond the apparently spiky, deeply serious character we’ve been accustomed to see in Sontag.
Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution, Yasmin El-Rifae
El-Rifae offers an overview of the work of activists in Cairo’s Tahrir Square who developed street teams to fight sexual violence against women protestors during the 2012 Egyptian Revolution. This isn’t just a straightforward nonfiction report however but at times takes a narrative or diaristic turn, following different activists both before, during, and after the intense days of organizing.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of shapes in this work and El-Rifae’s account of it. Last summer in our Feminist Formations reading group, I led a week on “Forming Movements” which took seriously questions of arrangement, calibration, and positioning as both aesthetically and strategically meaningful, as in the tactics of encircling street harassers used by the Women’s Army in Born in Flames. In Radius, El-Rifae opens by talking about circles and their power to both connect and enclose, becoming variously uniting or fearsome. She also describes the ways in which street teams took on numbered roles: “Peter will light the flare and he and numbers one to four will fight their way in. She and her partner Sara will move with numbers five to eight, who will be in a circle around them, and behind them will be the rest. Then numbers one to ten will make a corridor, standing with arms linked, facing each other, and the only peope who will pass through will be her and Arwa and the girl or the woman or the women or the girls who are in the middle now.” Shapes, or forms, give structure and foreclose or enable possibilities—we need to understand and think with them. I think I’ll have to finish Caroline Levine’s Forms book at some point.
Watching
Hacks (HBO)
I tried Hacks a few years ago and couldn’t get past the first two episodes, but when I gave it another go last summer, I was locked in. This has to be the best TV comedy in years—the writing and performances are so smart, specific, and surprising. I also think that while this show is yet another in the long lineup of media about the entertainment indusry (think: The Other Two, The Studio, The Franchise, The Morning Show, Reboot), it succeeds in large part because it isn’t enamoured with itself or celebrity. When The Other Two was cancelled, I wrote about how its satire of Hollywood was undercut by its own obsession with cameos and name-dropping, reinforcing the fame-worship of which it claimed to be critical. More recently, Seth Rogen’s The Studio has dripped with insider-y terminology and gossip, assuming everyone is or should be so fixated on the entertainment industry as to follow jokes about Scott Rudin—even though I am, I think shows like this operate on the self-important belief that this is more universally of interest. In anycase, I like that Hacks doesn’t rely so heavily on this kind of out-of-touch egoism—it’s just consistently funny and clever.
The Rehearsal (HBO)
With only one episode out at the time of writing, I am already itching for more from the second season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, which promises to revolutionize airline safety through comedy?? It’s obvious to say but I love Nathan’s commitment to the bit and to concocting elaborate schemes (maybe I should commit to more scheming in 2025).
Wanting
Materialistic things like in-unit laundry and a longer bathtub and to paint my walls a neutral pink or blue, or to get my hair done blonder and go to a spa where someone can tell me all the things that are wrong with me and then flush them out with some sort of secret ancient scrub or massage. For my home to smell really good and be really clean all of the time. To dress up and go out for dinner somewhere snazzy with my friends for my birthday, or to go on vacation to Montréal for a few days. Time to meditate and do yoga in the mornings and for my (sweet, sincere) puppy not to climb on me when I try to practice.
More urgently though: basic things like cheaper groceries, more sunshine, affordable and safe public transit. Other structural things like a free Palestine, accessible gender-affirming healthcare, and for Pierre Pollievre to not be elected next week.
Currently:
Reading:
The Wall, Marlen Haushofer
Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State, Stephen Dillon
Writing:
Slowly outling/drafting ideas for chapter 2 of my dissertation, which will also be the basis for a conference paper at the end of May
A short guide to the work of Martha Rosler (forthcoming soon)
A commissioned essay on Claire Denis (forthcoming later this spring/summer)