everything i read in may 2024

welcome to the Virginia Woolf–Anne Carson–Merve Emre fan club

When I started writing this newsletter, I had this vague, inchoate feeling that there were people out there with similar reading tastes—people who read every Merve Emre piece as soon as it hits the internet; people who remember reblogging endless Anne Carson quotes on tumblr; people for whom the phrase “Virginia Woolf fanfiction” is unbelievably enticing.

Critics of social media—and arguably Substack is kind of social media, now—tend to assert that posting online is basically an exercise in egocentrism, of inflicting your uninteresting and banal and unoriginal opinions on other people. This is one use of social media, but it’s not the only use. Writing online doesn’t have to just be about you—it can also be a way of finding other people who are interesting and knowledgeable and fascinating and also totally unknown to you, until you come across each other through a shared interest. I like how

Henrik Karlsson

put it: “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

This is basically why I like writing here—I want to share the things I’m fascinated by, and I trust that doing so will lead to people sending me truly great recommendations. This will add to my already-endless list of books to read and films to watch, but the point isn’t to complete the list—I don’t think any human aspiration can be fully completed, because our lives are so finite!—it’s really just to go as far as possible, and have as interesting a time as possible.

So here’s what I did in May:

• Read 8 books (3 novels, 1 short story collection, 3 essay collections, and a Greek tragedy)

• Watched 4 films (2 that came out this year, and 2 from the ‘70s—including a Rohmer film highly recommended by a friend!)

• Became obsessed with the chocolate nib horchata from Dandelion Chocolates (maybe the perfect summer drink?)

• Spent far too much time on Depop…no damage to my budget yet…

Books

Cover of the new edition of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, printed with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Designed by Pablo Delcan, who does really incredible cover and editorial work!

Fiction

On a recent trip to NYC, I bought Michael Cunningham’s The Hours at McNally Jackson. The novel follows Virginia Woolf as she tries to write Mrs. Dalloway; a 21st-century woman named Clarissa living in NYC with her wife Sally and seems, essentially, to be the contemporary version of Woolf’s protagonist; and a post-WWII American housewife reading Mrs. Dalloway and feeling unsettled and unhappy in her domestic life. I’ve been describing this to everyone as “Mrs. Dalloway fanfiction,” and was quite pleased to come across the writer

Pete Tosiello

’s reading diary for 2023, where he makes the same comparison. “Didn’t know it was full-on Virginia Woolf fanfic,” he writes. “Anyway it’s lovely.” Agreed.

My visit to NYC coincided with the Bookforum reading and party. While there, I mentioned The Hours to a few women I was speaking to—I literally had the novel in my handbag—and one person said that she loved it, it’s one of her favorite books, and she’d also met Cunningham once and found him to be a deeply articulate, charming, warm person. I’m always happy when the things I’m reading contribute to serendipitous little moments like this!

I also read the San Francisco-based novelist Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s first 2 novels, The Revolutionaries Try Again and Aphasia, before attending a Q&A he did for his third novel, American Abductions, at Medicine for Nightmares, an excellent bookstore and gallery space in the Mission. Cárdenas is the rare novelist that combines unrepentently experimental writing—formally very exciting to read and stylistically so ambitious—with a really excellent sense of plot and rising tension. The first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, follows a young Ecuadorian man trying to decide whether he should remain in the US, where he went to a prestigious college, or return to his home country and improve its political and economic future. It’s a really beautiful exploration of changing friendships, youthful political idealism, and the compromises we make in adult life. Aphasia—I think it’s fair to call this a sequel?—continues his story and explores how we continue and contradict the traumas of our childhoods…but I almost hate using the word “trauma,” which really flattens what the novel is trying to do!

And then for a forthcoming piece, I read Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck: Stories—so I won’t say too much about it now, but Eisenberg is basically the queen of short fiction to me, and I have never regretted anything I’ve read by her.

Nonfiction

I read two exceptionally good essay collections—and then I also read Lauren Oyler’s essay collection, lol.

The first was poet and essayist

Amy Key

’s Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone, which addresses an enormously popular theme right now—how to arrange your life not around love and romance, but around friendship and community—in an especially beautiful way. It’s one of the most emotionally raw and sincere works I’ve ever read on romantic loneliness, and Key’s background as a poet is very evident—the language is beautiful. A Substack note I posted about it earlier this month, including a quote from the book:

I also read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. O’Gieblyn is the essayist to read when it comes to the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence and technology—in her work for Harper’s, The Baffler, n+1, and other publications, she always escapes the tired clichés that occur when people are uncritical of technology or, alternately, critical to a point of unrigorous fearmongering. In God, Human, Animal, Machine, she reflects on her experiences growing up in an evangelical Christian family, going to Bible school, losing her faith, and then realizing that many of the theological questions of religion—like, What’s a soul? What’s consciousness?—are also central concerns in artificial intelligence and transhumanism.

And I read Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment. I can’t help myself; whenever there’s a fuss kicked up about a book and everyone seems invested in dunking on it, I need to read it for myself!¹ I’m sad to say that, even though I really admire Oyler as a critic, the essay collection was…not great? Many of the essays are situated in this weird place, where the topics (poptimism, Goodreads reviews, etc) seem mostly of interest to the terminally online…but then if you’re that terminally online, you’ve likely read most of the references Oyler mobilizes in the essays, and you’ve heard most of the arguments she presents to you. She has style as a writer, and she’s very funny. Not a lot of new arguments or positions in the essays, though.

Plays

For a new-ish book club, I read the play Electra by Sophocles, which follows two royal siblings, Electra and Orestes, the children of Agamemnon, and how they seek revenge on Agamemnon’s murderers—which tragically means seeking revenge on their mother, Clytemnestra, who encouraged her lover to kill Agamemnon when he returned from the Trojan war.

I specifically read the Anne Carson translation, which is as delightful as you’d expect, and is part of the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series, whose inaugural editor, William Arrowsmith, wrote that:

The [series] is based on the conviction that poets like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides can only be properly rendered by translators who are themselves poets. Scholars may, it is true, produce useful and perceptive versions. But our most urgent present need is for a re-creation of these plays—as though they had been written, freshly and greatly, by masters fully at home in the English of our own times.

Carson’s translation has an appealing freshness and emotional clarity. When Orestes describes his pursuit of justice and revenge, he says he will “break on my enemies like a star.” And when the Greek chorus chides Electra for her single-minded devotion to her father Agamemnon’s memory, they say: “why / melt your life away in mourning? Why let grief eat you alive?”

And maybe this passage will be relatable to anyone who’s an older sister of a promising but slightly uncommunicative, and maybe unreliable, younger brother:

I would LOVE to see an actress deliver the last line…Oh? I saved his life without hesitating, with a touch of disdainful pride

Films

The poet Kazim Ali, who published his first novel earlier this year, told the New York Times about how he had to do a “narrative diet” to learn how to write fiction:

During the pandemic, he decided to try his hand at long-form prose. While other people were learning to salsa or to speak German, he said, he put himself on a “narrative diet” of two novels a week and a movie every day.

“It was a completely kleptomaniacal education,” he said. “I’ll read Annie Dillard and steal this and I’ll read Baldwin and steal this and I’ll read Morrison and steal this and I’ll read Nabokov and steal this. Like, oh, that’s a way to get a character through a doorway, or that’s a way to explain how this person got the money to get on a plane so they could have this conversation that I needed them to have.”

This idea of a narrative diet—and specifically watching more films to sharpen one’s narrative instincts—was so exciting to me, and I’ve finally decided that I’m going to do something similar this summer. A movie every day is a bit ambitious, but maybe…one a week? Two a week?

I ended up watching 4 films in May. The first—I went to the San Francisco premiere of Gary Hustwit’s Eno (2024), a brilliantly constructed documentary about the influential producer and self-described “non-musician” Brian Eno. Eno is well-known for his contributions to ambient music, and to his fascinating, tremendously inspiring ways of using randomness and constraints when working with musicians.

The film honors Eno’s approach in content and form—at each screening, a new version of the film is generated by a program that selects from hundreds of hours of footage to create a new work. The result ends up being narratively very satisfying—the editors, including Maya Tippett (who was present for a Q&A after the screening!), as well as the programmer behind the film, did an incredible job making the generative experience feel coherent and almost plot-driven. If you’re in San Francisco and missed the premiere, Eno will be showing at the Roxie Theater again in July—I’m hoping to catch 1 or 2 more screenings to see what different versions of the film are possible!

I’m not even that much of an ambient music head, but I’m obsessed with Eno (many designers are, I think!) and wrote a post earlier this year about how I use his Oblique Strategies card deck for new projects:

oblique strategies for starting a new project

What else did I watch? The French New Wave director Éric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon (1972), which was a beautiful, tender story about love, affairs, and choosing what life you want to live. Incredible fashion inspiration. Everyone looked great in a very low-key way! Afterwards, I had the distinct pleasure of revisiting Becca Rothfeld’s essay on Rohmer for Cabinet: “Two Lives, Simultaneous and Perfect.” Here’s how Rothfeld describes the protagonist of Love in the Afternoon:

[H]e has already broken the fourth wall to confess to us, the viewers, that he has frequent pangs of dissatisfaction. “The prospect of quiet happiness stretching indefinitely before me depresses me,” he admits. “I dream of a life comprised only of first loves and lasting loves. … I want the impossible, I know”…Frédéric becomes especially despondent in the afternoons, when he thinks with stinging longing of the “other lives unfold[ing] along paths parallel to mine.” The impossible thing that he wants is everything, every life and every love at once.

At the Roxie (my neighborhood theater and one of my favorite places in SF), I also watched Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (2024), which follows a father and daughter living in the serene, remote Japanese village of Harasawa.

It’s a story about myopically profit-driven corporations (specifically, a Tokyo-based firm trying to open up a glamping site near the village) versus a tight-knit community that is intimately aware of the delicate ecological balance between humans and nature—one of the climactic scenes of the film is a community meeting, where the villagers press the corporation’s representatives on how their plans will pollute the local water supply. A seemingly banal topic, but beautifully dramatized, along with alternately lovely and unsettling scenes of the father going about his daily routine in the village. The film turns unexpectedly into a thriller-ish direction at the end, which I keep on trying to analyze and interpret and come to some settled opinion on, but perhaps all I can say is: It’s a great film (although the soundtrack was heavy-handed at time) and I really do recommend!

And the final film of the month: Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Buñuel has the most enticing film titles—charming, elliptical, compelling. (I watched That Obscure Object of Desire at BAMPFA last year in the east bay, purely because the title was so good.) The film follows 6 bourgeois, sex-obsessed, politically corrupt friends as they attempt to sit down and eat dinner together, while being constantly interrupted by strange deaths, unsettling dreams, and unexpected guests. This Letterboxd review basically sums it up:

buñuel could have said "eat the rich" but instead he said "the rich don't eat" because he's a cryptic bitch

Interviews

I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersections of life and writing: How to arrange one’s life to make time for writing; how one’s life should inform one’s writing; how much to write about one’s life, relationships, and personal experiences.

I love writing from the I, from the subjective experience. At the same time, I don’t want to overshare and I don’t want to reveal the lives of others, especially when they have entrusted me with something vulnerable. For this reason, I’m much less inclined towards the personal essay, but much more incliend towards reading fiction and writing literary criticism.

All of these themes show up in

Sara Fredman

’s amazing interview with Merve Emre, where the esteemed literary critic and professor discusses why she doesn’t post her kids on social media, and why she’d rather write about her marriage and parenting in a less direct but still honest way. There are so many good passages in the interview, but I’ll just pick out one. Fredman asks how one can write ethically about one’s family, and Emre responds:

[F]ictionalizing is one approach. The other—and this is what I think about in criticism all the time—is just relentless sublimation. You don't have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism…and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.

Relentless sublimation—an alternative path to writing about the self, without really writing about the self? Anyways, do read the rest of the interview—I really revere Emre; she’s such a consistent source of insight and clarity—and especially the amazing interpretation she offers, at the end, on the film Anatomy of a Fall.

"You Don't Have to Write an Essay About Your Marriage and Your Divorce"

Articles

Everyone I’ve been reading, everyone I’ve been speaking to offline, agrees that this election year feels surreal. It feels surreal because no one is talking about Biden, no one is enthusiastic about Biden, we can’t even imagine developing any enthusiasm about Biden.

Perhaps it’s because he has shown no moral leadership, no ethical clarity (can we even expect that from American presidents? and yet how can we live in this world if we don’t demand it from them?) when it comes to Palestine and Gaza and Israel’s continued genocidal attacks.

Joshua P. Hill

has an excellent analysis of the Biden administration’s despicable level of inaction as they attempt to determine what level of bloodshed is acceptable, and what level is suddenly a humanitarian disaster (but haven’t we reached that point already?):

The primary reaction from the White House, from the President to the Secretary of State, has been silence.

…[T]he Biden administration is still assessing whether the Israeli strikes that killed at least 45 displaced Palestinians sleeping in a tent camp in Rafah is a violation of the President’s "red line," according to what two U.S. officials told Axios. It is immensely difficult to take this statement seriously. The idea of a red line is meant to be unambiguous. If the line is crossed, it’s crossed. That’s it. That is what the phrase means. Red lines are not blurry, are not flexible, are not meant to be moved around based on political calculations and excuses…

The lesson is simple; in politics actions mean everything and words mean little. That axiom can be applied both to Israel and to its allies. Most importantly, we, those who want to stop the genocide and help free Palestine must internalize it. We cannot take our governments at their word, we must compel them to act.

And

Hamilton Nolan

, in “The Left Is Not Joe Biden’s Problem. Joe Biden Is” has a clear-sighted rebuttal of an argument that never fails to enrage me—this idea that the kids (millennial and Gen Z voters concerned about climate change, economic inequality, student debt, Gaza, etc) are somehow holding the Democratic Party hostage by withdrawing their votes; that in doing so they are naive and unaware of the threat Trump and the Republican party poses to the country; that their selfishness is destroying progressive politics and American democracy more generally; and that they need to get in line ASAP and start campaigning for Biden.

But, as Nolan asks,

[W]here exactly is this enormous group of left wing activists who are unable to understand that Trump is worse than Biden? For one thing, I am on the left and I know a lot of people on the left who go out in the streets and protest Israel, and in November, most of those people who are politically engaged will vote for Biden, because he is not as bad as Trump. Some portion of them will refuse to vote for Biden out of sheer disgust at the direct role he has played in the murder of thousands of civilians. In the context of 150 million voters across America, the number of those people is small…[but] any electoral damage is 100% the fault of the Biden administration itself. Look in the mirror.

The article is specifically addressing an earlier piece by Brian Beutler, who sees Biden’s leftist critics as naively attempting to gain leverage over Democratic party politics by withdrawing their votes. Nolan’s critique of thsi argument (bolding mine):

Beutler writes as though there is some enormous group of highly engaged left wing activists who personally command large numbers of votes and who are making a tactical choice to boycott the election in order to try to exert leverage on Biden administration policy. In reality, this is just not true. Yes, there are some left wing activists who will not vote for Biden. Is this group going to throw the election to Trump? No. What Biden needs to worry about is not highly engaged activists making some considered calculation not to vote for him, but instead millions of regular ass people who will not vote for him because they don’t feel excited about him. They will stay home because he has not given them an inspiring thing to vote for. That is approximately one thousand times more likely as a scenario for Biden to lose than “left wing activists marshal millions to stay home as negotiating leverage.” Obama excited people. So they turned out to vote. In 2020, people hated Trump so much that they were excited to turn out to vote. Now, Biden is the incumbent and he owns what the government is doing and he has achieved the nifty trick of actively supporting a crime against humanity and isolating himself on the world stage and thereby causing deep moral revulsion within the left wing of his party at the exact same time that he needs them to rally to support him during election season. This is not a problem of miscalculation of leverage; it is a problem of doing something horrible and turning off his political allies right when he is supposed to be pulling them into his coalition.

I’ll close with a recent piece from Charlotte Shane’s newsletter, “To Speak is to Live: The Impossibility of Silence” where she writes about the political beliefs we are silent about, and the political beliefs we are moved to speak about. Like Shane, I’m vegan (though very incompletely and inconsistently), and the decision to not eat meat, and to see the meat and dairy industries as responsible for a terrible level of cruelty in the world, has been essential to my ethical world view. Like Shane, I don’t talk about that decision much.

But some issues feel different. Palestine, as Shane notes, feels different—it feels like something has to be said:

What changed, that I find myself incapable of excusing the sort of political and social noninvolvement I used to overlook? Partially it is the nakedness; the meticulous documentation; the repetition of such distinct, unequivocal sins; the glaring parallels between this and holocausts of the past. If this is not the tipping point for action, if tens of thousands of dead civilians, burned babies, sniper-shot children, mutilated women, dismembered men, bombed hospitals, and mortared homes, carried out with American-made weapons, paid for with our taxes, while our rulers insist these obscenities are just, moral, and negligible, and violently repress anyone objecting—if this doesn’t move you, nothing will…

We share the world with these people, the people who gleefully inflict genocide, and the people who watch with their mouths closed. They have, wittingly or otherwise, forfeited an essential part of themselves. Those who turn from the dying live as if they themselves are dead.

Not a very positive, upbeat note to end on, I know. But it is an honest one. I’m here in my apartment, safe and well, and I get to spend my time thinking about pleasurable things. What I’ll read next, what films to see, which friends to text, what I’m bringing to a housewarming tonight. All this peacefulness and serenity alongside the absolute devastation in Rafah.

We have to, somehow, shift between awareness of this and tacit repression of it—sometimes it’s the only way to get through life. But it would be irresponsible to repress it all the time, and pretend like nothing is going on, and pretend that the world is exclusively about art and culture and these fine, beautiful things that fill up our screens. The world is also about people, the creators and maintainers of art and culture, who are dying for impossibly cruel reasons. We’d live in a better world, an ethically and aesthetically richer world, if the safety and wellness I’m experiencing today were available for many, many others as well.

1. This instinct for drama, and the attendant desire to formulate my own lukewarm, weeks-delayed take on a much-discussed book, means that I will be reading Honor Levy’s My First Book—eventually. The San Francisco Public Library hasn’t purchased any digital copies yet.