089: hot tooth

THIS WEEK: microutopia and my vacation reads

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I thought I was going to spend this week organizing my life—setting up my calendar for the semester, tidying up my bookshelf, offloading my desktop files to my external hard drive—but instead, I’ve spent this week in Matilda-mode i.e. reading all day and making hot chocolate on the stove. The hot chocolate mix I’ve been using is a somewhat **fancy** one from Duchess Bake Shop in Edmonton, Alberta, which my sister got for me while I was visiting over the holidays. The set comes with handmade marshmallows and they are the best marshmallows I’ve ever had. Katie Merchant wrote earlier this week about microutopias and I realized that the act of measuring out the hot cocoa mix, pouring out the milk (I use whole milk at home), and watching the two blend in the pot is my current microutopia. It takes five minutes and I do it in my cheap pan but it feels incredibly decadent. Prior to developing this recent ritual, I was dreaming about getting myself a dedicated milk pan after seeing the gorgeous ones from the Austrian brand, Riess, at Salter House. It doesn’t look like SH has them anymore but I might dig around and see if I can find one. Though by the time I find one I like, I’ll probably have returned to my occasional 2 packs of Swiss Miss mixed with hot water. Here’s what I’ve been reading in Matilda-mode:

I just finished Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a book that I bought like ten years ago, read about 100 pages of and then thought, ‘nah, you’re alright,’ and put it back on the shelf. Full disclosure, my experiences with Zadie Smith’s fiction have usually gone down this route: I found Swing Time unbearable but forced myself to finish it; I got through one and half stories in Grand Union before the physical aversion I was experiencing made me stop; The Fraud lost me with its corny euphemisms about lesbian sex fantasies. White Teeth was definitely better than those other novels and now I can say that I’ve read it. I don’t have any strong feelings abut the book, negative or positive. What’s most compelling about it for me is its existence as an artifact of the late 20th century, of a time when a novel like that felt new and exciting. I don’t say that with any sense of sadness or feelings of loss. I’m just trying to reconcile my own ambivalence about the brilliancy of the novel with its ecstatic blurbs, the claims of its era-defining capabilities…I may have more thoughts soon. (Or I may finally get to tidying my bookshelf and it will end up hidden in the back row.)

my 2014-era bookstagrammer shot

Post my rewatch of The OC , I was desperate to read something that would give me insight into how they pulled any of it off. I wanted to know everything about everything—the music, the script, the moments of metafiction. After a cursory Google search (something like ‘books on teen shows’), I came across Thea Glassman’s Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek: How 7 Teen Shows Transformed Television, which I requested as a Christmas present. Request fulfilled, I spent the day on Wednesday finishing Glassman’s book in between episodes of Mad Men. The book wasn’t really what I wanted and at times was pretty corny, but it’s a good entry point into getting a sense of what went into making some of the most iconic teen tv shows of the 90s and 2000s. Because it doesn’t focus on just one show, I wanted it to have a bit more of a critical perspective, something that tied all these shows together beyond being teen shows and sharing writers and showrunners. Because we live in such a different era of television and have a different relationship to it now, there are things we take for granted, choices that can feel minor in the grand scheme of things. The challenge of a book like Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek is to convey the magnitude of those things that we could easily write off, to make their impact more felt. Glassman’s book struggled to do that effectively, never spending enough time on the historical and cultural landscape that would offer the necessary context.

When I was still in Alberta, I also read my sister’s library copy of Emma Cline’s The Guest, which I know people were going crazy over last year. Somewhat similarly to Zadie Smith, Emma Cline is one of those writers who I’ve tried to love but whose work hasn’t really knocked me out the way it’s been suggested it should. Many years ago, I read and loved a short story that she had in The Paris Review (I think it was “Marion,” which is in her collection Daddy) but then read The Girls and felt that it didn’t have any of the magic that had captured me before. I can see how The Guest, a novel that follows a young woman, Alex, as she strays through the Hamptons after being unceremoniously dumped by her richer, older boyfriend (or sugar daddy, depending on how you want to see it), can seem transgressive. Not that I’ve done a deep dive on this but a lot of the positive reviews seem to suggest it is saying things that we don’t say, in a way that’s never been said before. That just doesn’t feel true. I didn’t watch half a season of The Girlfriend Experience for that to be true. Another element that seems to have captured everyone’s attention is the novel’s seemingly Gothic elements and its strange ending, the possibility that **spoiler** the character might no longer be alive. I’m open to that interpretation, though I’m not sure that it improves the book in anyway.

Thanks for reading! In all honesty, I feel like I’m still trying to wake up—to the day and to a regular routine. This week, I’m watching Mean Girls: The Musical: The Movie.