I won an honorable mention in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest for a short story I wrote about a childhood friendship evolving in strange ways over time.
Give it a read here: https://winningwriters.com/past-winning-entries/we-go-way-back
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Yes I found time to write an entire novel and get it published but never got around to making a blog post about it. Sorry. But the rumors are true: my debut novel The Disassembly of Doreen Durand has been out for about two months! Here’s a bit of a bloggy wrap up I suppose. Needless to say, it’s been a whirlwind experience. I’ve cycled through all the stages of egomania and now I’m out the other end working away on book two (bit heavy on the sophomore slump vibes atm). It’s weird to see people just discovering Doreen now while I’ve not exactly moved on, but no longer have her on my mind every waking moment, as it was while I was writing it.
Hey what’s the book about anyway?
The book is about Doreen Durand, who sees a terrible accident from her window, but does nothing about it. She doesn’t try and help, doesn’t call the police, she just watches. She stays holed up in her apartment while the consequences of her inaction pile up around her.
Sounds bleak! Isn’t summer 2021 supposed to be like, happy?
It’s a bit dark in places, I’ll admit! But the story quickly unfolds into something else, then something else. Then something else entirely. Doreen falls into the company of a mysterious, immeasurably wealthy woman with a strange name and the two of them run away together. A gloomy cop tries to track them down. It’s a literary thriller, a mystery, a meta-physical comedy, and honestly, sometimes a light-hearted beach read. I don’t know how these things work out, but this is what I’ve got for you and I think you’re going to like it. Reviews so far have been good!
Wait, I thought you were the knitting guy on YouTube?
I still am! But I’m unbrandable. I’ll always be knitting. I’ll always be writing. I even knit a sweater to celebrate the book launch: https://youtu.be/GV05jGAuGIk
OK so you just randomly wrote a book and now it’s here?
Well I’ve always been writing and working away at little projects. To be a published author was always one of those big life goals I’ve had, and as I worked on my writing, it became more and more of a realistic goal. It’s all baby steps and pipe dreams until one day it starts feeling really feasible. I wrote a novel, which taught me hey I could actually do this. Then I wrote another novel, which landed me my agent. Then I wrote another novel and that’s what’s sitting in bookshops today.
Where can I buy a copy of this fantastic-sounding book and stop pretending I’m not actually you asking these questions in third-person?
Where all good books are sold, throughout the UK! Foyles, Waterstones, etc. all have physical copies. You can order the book online from those same retailers, Bookshop.org, and of course the evil empire. If you’re buying internationally, you can order from Book Depository. I think Waterstones also ships internationally with no extra cost.
Now what?
Well if you read it and liked it, tell a friend! Drop a little five-star review with an online retailer or Goodreads, or just shout about it into the void. If you didn’t like it, read it again. In fact, buy another copy and read that new copy. And if you still didn’t like it, well, now you have two beautiful books. It really has a gorgeous cover…
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A lot of my favorite things this year reflected that attitude. Fiction sort of failed everyone this year. The Queen’s Gambit was about as entertaining as flipping through an old JC Penny catalog on a Sunday (which is to say, somewhat fun, nice fashion), but nowhere near as entertaining as playing actual chess. Playing chess with strangers around the world on the Chess.com app was the most entertaining video game I played this year—and this was the year I cracked open Skyrim again and let is suck away my stuck-at-home time.
Actually that’s not quite true. The best video game I played this year was Super Mario Odyssey, which was just pure art and fun. This year was also the Year of Video Games for me and nothing I played was more clever, entertaining, and creatively admirable than Odyssey. (Praising Mario and chess—didn’t expect to be doing this at the start of this year!)
Continuing my veering away from fiction, I’ve mostly been reading Karl Ove Knausgård. A Death In The Family, the first volume in his My Struggle series, is my favorite book of the year and I’m about halfway through the next volume now. I started reading him cautiously, then obsessively once the book’s strange hold took over me.
Everything that’s been said about Knausgård is true: his books can read sometimes like blog posts, he’s very self-indulgent and esoteric, and there’s a real guy-in-your-MFA-class connotation with his books that had put me off reading him for so long. But all that’s just the zeitgeist. When you read him, his book’s strange spell builds slowly. This is, after all, just this guy’s life, cut open and dissected, but then you start to realise that, no, seriously, this is this guy’s life. When he writes about his childhood, his own children, his failings, his desires, he does so without any varnish and I’ve never read anything like it before. He presents his life with so much intimated detail that I found myself remembering moments from my own childhood while reading, feeling intense nostalgia, and I think that’s evidence alone that he’s doing something really extraordinary.
More non-fiction… my favorite movies of the year are Boys State and Collective. Both are fly-on-the-wall documentaries, presented with hardly any narrative interference. Boys State follows high schoolers at a mock-government summer camp where they campaign and debate to create a representative government. It’s heartbreaking and hilarious watching the kids succumb to the ills of populism and cosmetic politics. But there’s also quiet triumphs as you see their political conscience start to form in real time. It makes you hopeful for the future. Also scared.
Collective follows a team of Romanian journalists as they uncover the criminal negligence in the aftermath of a 2015 nightclub fire. 27 people died in the actual fire, but 37 more died in the following days due to a corrupt healthcare system. It’s difficult to watch, particularly a seconds-long clip shot undercover by a doctor exposing the level of deprivation in a hospital. Whole arms of government collapse and rebuild during the filming and there’s glimmers of hope there. Just barely.
So that was my 2020. I can already tell you that 2021 is going to be a whole lot better. 🥰[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
(Gosh blogging really did die off once everyone decided to sound like a UN observer on the internet and I can’t say I’m not guilty of it.)
So lockdown. I went through all the normal phases as everyone else. The bouts of self-censorship: saying first “I know there’s people suffering in much worse ways than me but I’m mad that my Norwegian cruise got cancelled.” Then throwing all cordialities to the wind and straight up complaining about my cancelled Norwegian cruise and my cancelled Tenerife trip and the concerts and lectures I had booked throughout 2020. Lectures! I became gross like everyone else. Grouchy hibernation.
I bought a Nintendo. I baked bread once. I jogged and jump roped. I bought plants. Sometimes it’s better to just do these things and tune everybody else out. I spent more time at the park than at home to the point where I’ve now memorized different dogs and their schedules — not their owners, just the dogs. And also birds — promptly at seven o’clock every night, swarms of green parakeets fly down my street.
Other things I’ve been reading/watching/listening/doing:
Here’s a slice of the freewheeling, carefree, brain-numbing playlist I’ve been relying on lately. Very baseline pop, very disco, very gay. Lots of 4-count beats, synths, and also Lana Del Rey (still on my Lana kick). Also sidenote: disco revival seems to be the popular thing to call the new Gaga/Dua/whatever but I’m not so sure. But also I’d be interested to see how much of that chatter drives people to queen Donna Summer as it rightfully should! Anyway, it’s all the kind of music that makes me thing “Global unrest? What global unrest?”
More coronavirus-specific things: Animal Crossing, Fiona Apple’s new album, and Florence Pugh’s Instagram cooking stories. But those have all gone untouched for months now and already feel like relics from some bygone era. Time passing feels bizarre, etc.
More recently:
The whole world seems to be having second thoughts about capitalism’s current amalgamation and we’re getting itchy. The art that’s coming out of that errr, conversation, is really great and I’ve been overindulging in all of the eat-the-rich narratives on offer, the first and most obvious one being Parasite of course, which I loved. The fact that a movie like it has reached the level of pop culture woo-hooing that it has is a mighty testament to everyone’s overall fed-upness with grrrr, just not having enough money! basically. (I mean, that’s the shallow, easy emotion the movie exploits of course, but the larger conversation surrounds whom are the parasites; or are we all parasites; or is capitalism the a parasite; etc.). Outside of that lens, the movie was still the most properly, straightforwardly entertaining movie I’ve seen in ages.
Treading in darker territory is the film Atlantics, which I saw… maybe just a few days before Parasite? Making for a strong double-bill. Atlantics is about a woman in Senegal whose boyfriend joins a migrant ship bound for Spain just days before she is to enter into an arranged marriage with a wealthy property developer. I knew nothing about the plot other than that initial premise and I think that’s really the ideal situation to be in before seeing the film—but needless to say, surprising events occur! The film tackles the issue of blame and consequence at its most basic, human-to-human level, and does so in a way that is so literal but still inventive and unpredictable.
I think one of the main furies we experience out here in capitalist 2020 is to whom do we funnel our rage. Yes, we want to stop factory farming, fast fashion, plastic waste, etc. but who do we need to yell at to make it all go away? There’s a crushing sense of helplessness that settles in, once you blast through the rage embedded within all the Made In China existential blame shifting—because ultimately there is no one single person. You could track down the highest-up of the higher-ups and they’d still tell you to check with reception because that’s not his department. What Atlantics does so perfectly and fearlessly is it creates a physical manifestation of that rage. In the conclusion of the film, a single individual is forced to reconcile with and take responsibility for abstract global turmoil, and it’s a profound visual moment. Parasite has its own visceral, almost slap-happy opening of that valve, where that rage is let loose, but Atlantics does do in a much more mournful, worldwide wave. There’s more gravity to it.
Then on the theater route (and also on that same slap-happy route as Parasite), is the new (adapted) play The Visit, which I saw this past weekend at the National Theatre.
Eh.
It was good! It was actually really good, not as best as it could be, but good. Leslie Manville was an absolute stunner, superstar, diva, amazing of course as she should be. The staging was phenomenal (HOW that stage is so massive always boggles my mind). She plays a billionaire who comes to a dying town, promising its residents wealth if they do one thing for her. And yes that one thing is morally compromising and yes the play spends the next three hours figuring out what decision to make, of course. (First half is perfect, then progressively bad, almost boring unfortunately, but I suppose there’s something about sticking to the source material that can be restricting for an adaptation.)
It’s another story of that same capitalist struggle. (And also a cautionary tale about listening to billionaire saviors, hmm…) The ending left me unsatisfied because it didn’t address the very obvious theme at hand: consequence and compensation. Just like Parasite, there’s a simmering rage that runs throughout it, and the audience, just like the townspeople in the play, get stuck with a jittery urge to find a place for their blame. Who is to blame? Who needs to take responsibility? Only Atlantics is bold enough to not only give physical representation to that feeling, but give an actual answer.
There’s violent death throughout Parasite, Atlantics, and The Visit, of course. The weight of the deaths feels different in each. In Parasite, its cathartic, alleviating, grim; filled with rage, but with a hint of the silly. In The Visit, it’s inevitable, logical, premeditated, procedural. But in Atlantics, it’s etched into every character. The consequences of not just the global, abstract problem are made manifest, but also we are given a resolution to those consequences, and there is and assigned weight to every action. The degree of accountability to which actual human individuals will some day, in one way or another, be held to, is precisely, mathematically demonstrated. There are sequences and images in Atlantics that I’ll never get out of my head solely because of that power they have and that’s why, gosh, I think it’s better than Parasite I guess!
Anyway, bye.
It was a fantastic year! Honestly. (OK, yes, politically, world-view-y, for-all-mankind-y, there’s layers of nuance that “fantastic” kind of flies in the face of, but this is a blog, not the Dead Sea Scrolls [omg what if it was though], and as far as the marbles in my own personal human head are concerned, they had a great time rolling around this year.)
…
Now I’ve been sat here for five minutes trying to remember all of the things I enjoyed this year and I can’t think of a single thing—or if I can, I can’t confidently say it was something from 2019.
I mean, the whole end-of-the-year list industrial complex really is a joke if we’re being honest here. Taste is subjective. Calendars are dumb. Time is relative. Measuring its passage is needless and immature. Et cet eraaaaaa. And now that we’re at the end of a whole decade it’s even more bonkers. All that being said:
LANA DEL REY
I never thought I’d see the day I turned back on to her, but here I am playing her new album on repeat every day. Gosh she’s good at what she does. I enjoyed her back when she first popped up as this sort of wishy-washy enigma. I liked the music, mostly. I liked the bandwagon of conspiracy theories that followed her around, which, in hindsight all read very misogynistic and shallow. I stopped listening to her almost entirely since then—until now. And now? I’m making up for lost time. I love nearly all of Ultraviolence, a few songs off Lust for Life, and all of Norman F****** Rockwell. Haven’t touched anything from Honeymoon yet, but I will. And, in a shocking twist, can’t stand any of the first big hits she came out with.
FLORENCE PUGH
Was intrigued by her back in Lady Macbeth. Then this year I saw Midsommar and Little Women and loved her in both. She’s just got it and I hope she hangs onto it.
WATCHMEN
It’s the best TV show. For me it might be the best ever, honestly. Everything about it feels like a miracle, there’s not a single misplaced beat, and the fact that it’s so rigorously, unabashedly linked to the graphic novel makes it all the more miraculous. I can’t imagine what it would be like to watch Watchmen without having read the original comic, but I would hope it would be just as fulfilling. Aside from the mythology, the easter eggs, the perfect, absolutely perfect plot twists; the slow burns; Regina King; Jean Smart; the music; aside from all that, it’s the most radical, daring show about America. What it has to say about race, our current political battle stations, and history is electric and so NOW. Everyone in America needs to watch it.
(It was so good it made me go back and re-read the comic for the first time since high school, which I was happy to find, still holds up today. The show and the comic perfectly compliment each other, I’ve truly never seen anything else like it.)
PROCRASTINATING MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL
I hit 60k subscribers and one of my videos hit 1 million views this year. Yet, I only made five new videos this year. I’m horrible. I’m a horrible knitter and horribly lazy. My goal for 2020 is to finally learn how to knit a sweater. I don’t know how! Can you believe it? 2020’s the year. It’s going to happen.
In the meantime, I’ve been meandering over on my animation channel, which has *ahem* a hearty 104 subscribers, barely any views, zero monetization. Drawing mooses! Drawing grocery store self-checkouts!
THE FAREWELL and LITTLE WOMEN
Two stunners. A tie for Best Picture, please. And here’s to quiet, low-stakes, human dramas with powerful, relatable performances. Both movies blew me away and I just wanted to live in their worlds. Also, Little Women made me really wish I hadn’t grown up in such a testosterone-laden household with two brothers, or, at least, that the 90s’ twisted brand of masculinity had had the intelligence to make space for the 90s version of Little Women to exist as much for boys as it did for girls back then. I had never seen any of the previous versions until this years’ and it’s just… essential. It’s life.
Rapid fire round to close:
Not sure how this project got started. I wanted to experiment with objects interacting with each other and with having multiple animations happening at once. With clutter, basically. The most impressive animations I’ve ever seen have always dealt with clutter—lots of little moving parts all smashing together, like the teddy bear hallucination in Akira or the dream parade of junk in Paprika. Somehow this line of thinking led to a moose.
So much of animation happens in a void, especially when you’re doing it all on your own. A lot of amateur animation, including my own, involves one thing placed on an empty plane. The character or object I’m animating takes so much priority that the background or the actual environment it’s been placed in takes a back seat.
Having nothing but an empty void, logic tries to force itself into the situation. How does a moose end up here? Well lets have it come out of a pipe. Where does it go? Well lets have a portal of some kind. And where’s that portal going to come from? Another moose from the pile of mooses?
(I still can’t believe mooses isn’t a word. “A pile of fish” sounds good, makes sense. “A pile of moose” sounds so weird and I just can’t get behind it! Is it because it’s probably more common to see just one moose on its own instead of a whole bunch of moose together? [Now, see right there it kind of sounded alright… maybe I’m coming around to it.])
Animating a moose is hard. I’m never going to draw another one again. I’m not satisfied with a few of the movements I’ve done—especially the walk cycle. Their weird little inverted back legs throw me off. And their antlers are these big massive scoops that I’ve screwed up 50% of the time. The main moose spends half the video looking more like a deer.
That being said, I’m proud of the finished clip!
The most time consuming sequences were the shortest bits: the pile of mooses, the office workers running away. I lost my mind at times, but it’s so satisfying to watch them now. Then all of those earlier elements I wanted to experiment with accumulating in the final moose drop from the ceiling, smashing the desk. From an empty void to a full background. Multiple layers of animation interacting with each other.
When kids are doing something cute and you get out your camera to document it, their need to please kicks into overdrive and they’ll still be cute of course, but with a noticeable, performative tilt. It’s not necessarily off-putting (because kids are cute!), but you’re seeing a child already, in a tiny, subtle way, not being their authentic self.
This is the exact problem that plagued the new season of The Great British Bake Off, which ended this week. It’s still good old Bake Off, so the three-challenge structure is always going to be a winning formula, but this season was far and away the worst entry in the series, the fault of which I think lies on the poor casting.
At kick-off, there was some buzzy internet controversy over the new season having the youngest cast ever, with only one or two middle age people, and not even a token (and always a fan favorite) elderly person. We love our grandparents! But there were none. (Now, brief sidenote: maybe this means they’re cooking up a Senior Bake Off series, since they already do a Junior Bake Off. The world needs it! Anyway.) This year, everyone on the show was very bright, very young, and very, very, painfully self-aware.
Sure it’s a testament to the outstanding State of the Union of Being a Kid Today in 2019 but more so it’s an indictment of just how much media (in whatever form you want to think of it) has twisted the way we be ourselves for other people. We’re already too clued-in to the act of portrayal and putting a camera on that—on a group of sensitive (soft?), striving (climbing?), thriving (flaunting?) young adults made for a horrific display, with each episode ratcheting up the intensity of just how much these kids did not want you to see their real selves.
Bake Off contestants are rarely as competitive as other reality show contestants out there. They’re more likely to encourage each other rather than sabotage, to speak kind words rather than curse or back-stab, and the show comes closer and closer every year to embracing its function as a personality platform than an actual game to win. Traditionally, the younger the contestant, the more likely they are to recognize the ulterior purposes of the show—the branding, the personality commodification, the virality—and act accordingly.
Kids (myself included—I’m a kid!) have grown up with the internet for the majority of our lives and have been conditioned to recognize all the trappings of an estimable businesses empire in all its branded, franchised glory—be it a soft drink, or, more and more often, an actual human being. As adults now in our twenties and thirties and, jeez, forties, we’ve learned civility offline and online, perhaps better than our parents, certainly better than our grandparents—but a different kind of civility. A kind of politeness as a form of self-curation rather than something more deeply felt—less scrappy fear-of-god and more glowed-up™, logic-minded, fear-of-missing-out. Still shame-based, but less abstract and wishy-washy; definitely less two-faced—and honestly, maybe it’s a good thing! (We’ve all seen firsthand the limits of classic civility when a parent or grandparent gets on the internet and lets loose.)
But it makes for bad TV.
Not a single contestant on Bake Off this year showed their teeth. Everyone had an ulterior motive—whether cashing in on the exposure outright or doing so in a more abstract, subconscious way. No one was there just because they wanted to bake the best pastries/cakes/whatever better than anyone else. No one was even there to make great TV. Fame and glory in the traditional trophy-confetti-woo-woo-#1 sense was left on the back burner and instead the contestants were tripped up in this strange song-and-dance of nailing perfect civility balanced with quirk, generic attractiveness, and emotional intelligence.
Which would all be fine if there was transparency to the charade. Imagine how much better of a show it would have been had one of the more explicitly cordial contestants really explained why they wanted to come off looking good on TV? Imagine if the cameras had caught one of them saying the word “Instagrammable” and gone from there? Imagine the psychic dread and drama that could have been unearthed had one of the contestants confronted the kid who insisted on wearing a buttoned up shirt and tie in every single episode and asked him just what the hell he actually thought he was doing?
I don’t want to see your personal brand before I see you. You can wear a tie. You can be obsessed with Halloween. You can be everybody’s friend. You can hold hands with your pals during every round of judging. Fine. Cute. Sure. If that’s the reality you want to construct for yourself on this reality TV show, that’s OK, that’s safe, but for the audience it’s truly deadening because we know that veneer is only half the calculus at play.
OK, it’s a baking show, I know. It has to be cute. And normally none of this would be cause for complaint except in this season the ultra-sharp self-awareness actually got in the way of the baking. There were multiple breakdowns, and not just small, simple tears. The first few stemmed from the normal failures and mishaps in the kitchen (the over/under baked pie/cake, the artful set piece falling apart in slow motion), but as their frequency increased as the season went along, the rawer and more uncomfortable they became. A good cry from a contestant, which would normally be endearing and cathartic for the viewer, became uncomfortable and hard to watch, inspiring sympathy still, but also this blog post to try to figure out what is going on with us. Us kids! The final episode with its multiple meltdowns and panic attacks was a bleak, depressing watch.
Perhaps the answer is deconstruction. Working backwards.
The best reality show on TV right now is Terrace House, a Japanese sensation with a cult following everywhere else in the world that has had plenty of other write-ups explaining just what exactly it is. But what I will say is that the reason it’s so successful with what it does is because it provides its own built-in audience:
Each episode is methodically sliced into vignettes, interrupted by a panel of in-studio commentators who offer up their opinions on what we’ve just seen.
It’s a genius structure that creates an addictive sense of family, an added layer of characters to invest in, a self-correcting feedback loop. The panel’s main purpose is to act as a salve to the “reality” of the people on the main show. The young adults on Terrace House are just as neurotic and self-editing as the contestants on Bake Off, but the entire design of Terrace House is to deconstruct that inhuman environment, to see beyond the automatic artifice the cute kids put on for the camera. The commentator format coupled with the open-ended structure of the main show creates a never ending cycle where a perception is created, then destructed, a persona is introduced, then turned into a person. We see the most human portrayal of a human.
There’s no sense of risk in either of these shows. Both Terrace House and Bake Off have such reliable, low-stakes formats that they could go on churning for years to come, but where Terrace House has a built-in fail-safe keeping its reality in check, Bake Off is wildly off mark, spiraling into an empty shell. Bake Off‘s neurosis is perhaps a natural response to the early reality shows of the 00s, infamous for their exploitation of the id. The shaky, jagged cinematography of a cameraman chasing after a delirious contestant having a meltdown, boom mics bouncing into frame, became almost a trope of the genre. Producers micromanaged (and obviously exploited) these personalities who hadn’t yet been refined by the internet and social media.
Things have changed mostly for the better since then. I’m not saying Bake Off should embrace more grime and lowest-common-denominator drama (although, I would actually love to see some baking sabotage if I’m being honest). I just want it to be realer with its casting. Go after the actual amateur bakers, not the ones with easy book deals in their sights, not the ones who have already, horrifically, begun their brand work. When there’s a breakdown inflamed by artifice, let it flame out, let the whole tent burn down. Give me less self-regulation and more regular old self—with maybe an emphasis on “old”.
I just got back from the Edinburgh Fringe where I saw, among a mountain of others, the inimitable comedian, actress, and millennial-scream-masquerading-as-a-cabaret-singer that is Catherine Cohen. This was the second time I’ve seen her now and it was just as thrilling and piercing of an experience as the first. She deserves the world’s attention, but honestly I’m not sure the world even just barely deserves to have her.
Her schtick (if we’re squeezing her into the phonebook of Fringe acts) is simple: she dresses up millennial rage, sexy confessions, and “Why am I like this?” woes into a sequinned, come-hither cabaret act. The songs—which are, by the way, properly addicting pop songs—are gruesomely honest, with lyrics that make you guffaw and laugh but then wince at how accurately such a foundational, human truth you assumed would be kept burrowed deep inside of your own selfish, bashful self could be so easily excavated by Cohen, tossed around, and kicked aside with one of her white patent boots.
She doesn’t stop. There’s a tendency for comedians to present their kernel of truth about the world or human nature and dance around it, spend minutes on the dissection of the thing, and come at it from every angle, filling an hour, milking their One Keen Observation for everything it’s got, but Cohen doesn’t. Nothing is precious. She moves at a rapid pace, stomping through her routine with no time to spare, ploughing ahead to her next song or her next joke with ad-libs and on-the-fly crowd work stuffed in between without fear or trepidation or losing the thread or alienating a crowd because it’s 2019 for hellsake and there’s just not enough time. She doesn’t second guess herself for a second. She doesn’t flinch.
This was the Fringe and so the crowd was a mix of everything. There were tourists and students and locals and young people and old people and people wandering in with no idea what they were in for and people like me who had seen the light of Catherine Cohen and were desperate for more. Like all Fringe shows there was a slight tension in the air. At one point a row of very bro-y university-age men were sniggering amongst themselves over some aside and Catherine paused. She turned her eyes to them and cooed into the mic. “What are you boys talking about over there?” The guys jostled each other the way they do and laughed uneasily, but their response wasn’t required, Cohen already had her set of props. The boys were already in the volcano. She danced around them, cutting into them—the idea of them, the essence of a row of rowdy straight boys—with her signature wit and seduction that honestly fails all description and has to be seen in person to be believed. She segued effortlessly into her next song about needing a man who, “Doesn’t care if I live or die.”
There’s a push-pull relationship in comedy right now of the expectation to be self-effacing, but not too clever; to be aware and political, but not too self-righteous, not too cloying; to be smart and self-regulating and to really “get it” but not to come off as too cool, too alienating, too satisfied with how much you’ve figured out your own neuroses. Those rules don’t exist at a Catherine Cohen show. She’s burned the whole thing to the ground. She wants to be famous, she wants to be thin and pretty and loved, she wants you to be obsessed with her and she will tell you these things outright, with no dressage, with no set up, with no punchline, even, with zero self-doubt or even the slightest hint of parody. These are the things she wants and you will worship her, you will agree with her when she says “Wow, I have an amazing voice,” you will believe her when she drinks from her water bottle and says “This is just a light little snack” and you’ll be so entranced by her at this point that you’ll believe anything she tells you about the world and how it works because it’s hers.
You walk away from a Catherine Cohen show worried. Is there a place for this kind of thing in the world? Is there an audience outside of comedy clubs and tastemaker websites and five-minute late night sets where Cohen can actually be a superstar—the kind of superstar she kitschily says she wants to be but also because she flat-out deserves to be one?
There’s a sizeable population that will cast her off as too crass, too inappropriate, too selfish, too gross. And in the waning days of meet-me-in-the-middle diplomacy, can the kind of people that are instantly allergic to this sort of thing become Cohen converts?
It’s a hard question to ask because it requires a certain amount of staring into the abyss of America—what we value and how we value it; what our relationship is to intimate truths and how we honor them or avoid them or if we even recognize them at all. But the magical thing about Catherine Cohen is that that is where her comedy genius lies. No, not in dancing on the edge of the abyss, not towing the line—that would be all too easy for her. No, you can find her very much deep down in the abyss itself. Stare hard enough into it and you’ll see her dancing down at the bottom, preaching to whoever’s there to listen.
Recently finished Three Women by Lisa Taddeo and it drove over me like a steamroller. It’s a thousand things at once: First, an exploration of female desire, as the book states clearly as its objective; but also a stunning document of the decline of America, the soulessness of its cultural infrastructure, the way it terrorizes women then demonizes them for fighting back; it’s the most relevant, urgent book I’ve ever read.
The book’s mission is to document these things unflinchingly, not to resolve them. There’s no hypothesis it seeks to prove. The course of the three women is frustrating, upsetting, admirable, horrific, enviable, joyous, and depressing all at once, and it doesn’t care what you think. In fact, it doesn’t even want you to think. It’s simply presenting three lives as they stand, with as much truth and emotional accuracy as possible, no matter the contradictions. It’s so precise a book that it could be carved in stone.
I walked away from it wanting something fixed—not knowing what, but knowing that something needed done, something changed—but I’ve only recently come to terms with the fact that the book doesn’t care, that that isn’t the book’s intent. Any reaction the reader has is his own gut reacting, nothing else. The book’s only job is to exist like a monument. It’s a chilling exchange.
I also read Trust Exercise by Susan Choi just before Three Women. (I wasn’t consciously planning on a deep dive into sexual politics and demagoguery but that seems to be exactly what I did!) Trust Exercise was a frustrating book to read in a lot of ways, entertaining in others. It’s very much a writers’ book, with its playing around with perspective and reader expectations. Like Three Women, the visceral experience of the book itself is the point of its existence; it’s not making a ruling on its own complicated case.
If anything, Trust Exercise wants you to question who owns a story. Is your own retelling of an experience automatically betraying the truth? Does the mere fact of perspective distort any attempt at fact and impartiality? Does the violence of trauma just rip everything to shreds? The “exercise” at the heart of Trust Exercise sits uncomfortably alongside the unwavering (nearly stagnant) presentation of the Three Women. If we’re meant to question everything and no lens to look through is correct, then what exactly is the point?
I think, out here in the pits of 2019, that the whole point of both books is to champion the act of just looking. Just have a look. There’s not enough of it going round these days.
(Sidenote: I love that I can just END these posts without any proper wrapping-up or conclusion. Just blah, blah, blah, then bye! It’s a blog!)