134: AWARDS SEASON

THIS WEEK: I was on a podcast and watched some good TV

COMMUNITY BOARD

Goodreads / Letterboxd / Instagram / Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)

Last week, I was a guest on the Limousine podcast, hosted by my friends Leah Abrams and Heather Akumiah (author of Bad Witches), who also host a reading series in NYC under the same name. (They also just launched a Patreon this week with a close reading of The White Lotus finale.) We recorded in early January and it was so much fun. We talked about Challengers (obviously), me writing responses to Vogue articles at thirteen as a kind of fanfic-criticism, and I made a case for why being a little bit of lush can’t be a bad thing. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or with the link above!

I’ve been listening to the first half of Bon Iver’s new album, SABLE, fABLE, since it came out as an EP (just SABLE then) in the fall and loving it, so it comes as a surprise to no one that I’m completely obsessed with the rest of the album. All of Disc 1 is, of course, my absolute favorite and I still get shivers at the line in “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS,” when he sings “I get caught looking / in the mirror on the regular / and what I see there resembles some competitor.” On Disc 2, I love “Everything Is Peaceful Love” and the very precious video, as well as “I’ll Be There” and how it transitions to “If Only I Could Wait.” I typically prefer to listen to albums on shuffle but this album is so carefully arranged that it feels most special listening to it in order. I love the way in which background vocals in one song anticipate the fuller appearance of the singer in the song that follows, and how he uses ellipses and phatic noise as interludes.

If you’ve not already watched The Pitt, someone you know has and is demanding that you get into it. When I first saw the trailer for HBO/max’s new medical drama, I was confounded by the streamer’s choice to put out what seemed to be a melodrama more fitting for network TV. While I’m not above soapy melodrama (I didn’t watch 16 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy for nothing), it seemed like a strange direction for HBO to go in and I feared that it spelled doom. Thankfully, I had no clue what I was talking about. Going into the show, all I really knew about it was that it was basically ER for a new generation. I don’t know much about ER but The Pitt feels truly original (despite several appearances from Grey’s actors¹) and has me excited about narrative TV again. Each of its fifteen episodes is an hour of a day shift for a group of doctors and nurses working in an understaffed emergency room in a Pittsburgh hospital. The show is made to feel, as much as possible, like an actual shift and so they largely forego any background music and we see a lot of the procedures happening in real time—no “Chasing Cars” montages here. The intense quiet and focus on minutia make the show so much more suspenseful and dramatic than if hospital carts were crashing all over the place and people were constantly slipping in blood (though that does happen at some point).

Despite unabashedly loving the film and tv adaptations of David Nicholls’ One Day, I’d never managed to make it through the four-hundred page novel that they’re based on. Last weekend, inspired by a friend’s mom to get back into audiobooks, I decided to put One Day on while I cleaned my bathroom. I finally finished it between my recitations on Friday and let me tell you: I was irritated for about fourteen-and-a-half of this book’s total sixteen hours (16 hours!). I don’t know if it was because there were no charming actors to mitigate more annoying elements or the fact that a written text allows for a better/closer look into a character’s interiority, but I found both of the leads totally insufferable in a way I never felt with the adaptations. Oh! My! God! There were so many points, particularly in Emma Morley’s sections, where I actually expressed my frustration out loud. Still, no matter how annoyed I got, I couldn’t stop listening and the kind of perfect final flashback was totally worth it. As I wrote on Goodreads, it was really brave for David Nicholls to put the best part of the entire book at the very end.

Other things in progress: AppleTV+ won’t give us season 4 of The Morning Show but they have given us Your Friends and Neighbors, so I’m getting the Jon Hamm fix that I really need. When it’s not a watch commercial (you’ll see), it is a pretty good show about a man who loses his job in finance and starts stealing and pawning luxury watches from his, well, friends and neighbors. I also started Dying for Sex and am making my way through Haley Mtolek’s No Fault. As is my right, I will be seeing Pride and Prejudice on the big screen this week—I hope I cry.

1. I love an actor committed to playing patients in medical dramas