I have spent most of April deep in the feeling that I’m somehow just two weeks behind the world in general, everything’s clogged up, I’m unbelievably stupid, and so on and so on. Grouchy, easily annoyed, whatever. Missed my Proust and Powell installments. Hunkering down and focusing on one thing is all well and good, but when you take a break you feel a little like the guy in the Twilight Zone episode who emerges to discover everybody else has died. Well, at least my glasses aren’t broken. At this time, anyway.
This month I have felt like my brain is made of cheese—a structurally unsound cheese—maybe that cheese that has the live maggots in it that you have to buy on the cheese black market. My memory feels like the one thing that has not recovered from the great 2022 unpleasantness; I was talking Ben Lerner and how I didn’t love 10:04 and thought I wouldn’t really like his other books and my interlocutor was like it’s funny and I said I don’t remember it being funny but if I read more Lerner I’ll approach it with that idea. Then I thought to check what I had actually written down about 10:04 two years ago. Do you know what I said? Do you know what the hell I said? I said:
What I had not been told about 10:04, however, is that it’s often very funny.
Oh? Oh?
Anyway, here’s what happened this month, while I can still remember it.
April in posts
I wrote about Ursula K. Le Guin and then I did it again. I complained about my health insurance. I complained about people online being annoying about other people online. Unfortunately at this point I ran out of time to keep complaining.
April in reviews
April in Japanimation
April in perfume
April in archival footage of Taylor Swift playing “Shake It Off” to Franciscan nuns
April in research
I read a lot of very interesting stuff, none of which I can quote. However, one thing that did tickle me was that one writer, who had lots of problems with her feet and her back, mentions at one point getting Famolare shoes. These are shoes with special wavy soles. I have wanted a pair of Famolares for maybe four years.
I don’t think the Famolares made much of a difference for her, but this does not reduce my desire to own a pair, because my interest has never been orthopedic. I just think they look groovy.
Next month: May, the month I was born, aka the only important thing that’s ever happened in May or ever will except for the appearance of Our Lady of Fatima who scares me a little personally.
Some May preorders.…
The Last Straight Woman (Phoebe Bovy)
The Fifth Year (Marlen Haushofer, trans. Shaun Whiteside)
The Field Guide to Nepo Babies (Fran Hoepfner)
What’s So Great About The Great Books (Naomi Kanakia)
Hollow Inside (Asako Otani, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
Entangled States (Karmela Padavic-Callaghan)
The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Sylvia Plath, ed. Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil)
In summary: everybody is releasing books next month.
May in Japanimation
Ocean Waves (Tomomi Mochizuki), May 9
Pom Poko (Isao Takahata), May 23
May in perfume
I am doing a milk themed post next month. I did not plan that to coincide with “Taurus season” but I guess it’s appropriate.
May in Taylor Swift Studies
I’m probably gonna write about the New York Times interview, which was loads of fun. I especially liked the part where she stared at the camera and said “evermore, as my worst-selling album since my debut, doesn’t deserve any rights. I’m going to talk about cathartic ranting bridges and not even mention ‘champagne problems.’ Any daughter of mine has to work for her keep. Pick up the pace, flannel coat.”
Anyway, I think the faithful TSS readers will not mind if the post is not an immediate reaction and percolates a little. Also… I do think we’re still going to get Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version) this year, since she said that was finished. (Of course she’s getting married but unless she ties that to an album release somehow that’s not really my beat.) All to say… summer is a season of high Swiftian alert.…
i think getting dinner with jack and suddenly doing press again were clues btw. a storm is coming...
Since I established myself here by commenting on the Blake Lively - Justin Baldoni lawsuit, I thought I would point out that New York magazine did a detailed account of the history of the movie and the aftermath based on all the information that's been made public in discovery. The gist of the whole thing seems to be that both Lively and Baldoni have issues that came into conflict as they were making a play for big budget movie greatness, largely having to do with the difference between who they are personally and who their friends are.
Baldoni is a good looking guy with an ability to actually make movies, who has a bunch of friends with money that thought they could use his talent to make a big splash in Hollywood. They gave him the money for the rights to a Colleen Hoover book and to hire a big star, without asking whether he really had the skills to work with women who were going to be hyper-sensitive about the sexual dynamics of the story and the production. For Baldoni's part, his TED-talk feminism wasn't sufficient to suggest that he ought to have a lot of women he trusted working in the production, so he could get feedback about how to address Lively's concerns ASAP. Based on the story, it doesn't look like he has a lot of female friends, period, and that his sense of himself as a female ally may have more to do with getting along with his wife.
Lively is a talented actress who was getting advice on how to negotiate industry politics from two people with world-historical charisma, Ryan Reynolds and Taylor Swift. Reynolds and Swift make decisions based on the sure and certain knowledge that, whatever they do, massive numbers of people will really like them. Lively is less charismatic and less secure in herself, and she therefore took more time to react negatively to things that were bothering her, but when she did, she was adopting strategies that assumed the public wouldn't judge her (as it already had) as someone who was a "difficult actress".
When the production ran into problems, Lively used her power to get what she needed, but Baldoni's backers started working the PR angle on her being trouble. The lawsuit was essentially her best way of getting out the fact that the Hollywood machine that keeps women subservient had been working on Baldoni's behalf. At this point, with Baldoni dismissed as a defendant, it's literally a lawsuit by an actress who is likely to lose a decade of her career against a PR industry that makes money by defaming women in public.
The question for the Lively-haters would really seem to be - What has Lively done that is so bad that it's worth taking the side of a multi-million dollar industry whose main purpose is to humiliate women in public because they're women?
Also worth mentioning, although Swift is not a main character in the New York article, they do quote a number of communications she had with Lively, which give a sense of Swift's views of how to exercise power. Nothing surprising, but she did encourage Lively to act in ways that Lively might not have done on her own, for better or worse.