medialog march 2k26
books
mona awad, bunny — eh. there were things i liked here, but it was a net negative. what i liked: for better or worse i do relate to being a student at a private college in new england and wanting to kill everyone else there for the crime of being happy, and awad does capture that experience. in general i thought she wrote well about loneliness, and, relatedly, i liked that the book took friendship quite seriously, particularly the way that when you are so lonely you want to die making one (1) friend can transform your entire life. (i’ve seen people say that the queer subtext is unconvincing, but i actually like it better if the reason she feels she can’t say all those things to her friend is not because her feelings are secretly romantic but because grandiosity is culturally permitted in romantic expressions in a way it isn’t, these days, in platonic ones.) did not love the writing overall but she does have a voice. however… okay, so, first of all: writing about a writer—already dicey. writing about a writer not just having graduated from but presently at an MFA program—thinnest of ice; i’m not sure there’s evidence this can be done well although i suppose it’s not theoretically impossible. writing about a writer at an MFA program who gets the kind of critique people might lob at the very novel you are reading—is that a crack i hear? writing about a writer at an MFA program whose travails are proven by the events of the narrative to begin and resolve because of the fact that she actually is the most specialest writer and True Artist and all those other dumb bitches are in fact just jealous? CRASH: you have plummeted into the freezing depths below! absolutely not! are you fucking kidding me? my god. brandon taylor’s self-insert’s coworker crying about his powerful portrait of his boyfriend all over again. bad writing, and more than that: undignified. however the book club chat about it was fun.
sidebar/coda about my experience of this book: so i read it and being the unsophisticated idiot i am i took all the supernatural stuff at face value, like, sure, they’re summoning up these golem-men, whatever. then i go on goodreads (i know) and reddit (i KNOW) and sooo many people are like, actually it’s about how she is mentally ill and hallucinating all of this, you can tell because xyz, and i’m like, oh that literally did not occur to me, because i am stupid. but then i kept poking around and found someone talking about how she went to a reading and awad said she had never intended that interpretation, and also learned there’s a sequel where the bunnies (not worth explaining) tell their side of the story and it’s not “this bitch was crazy” it’s “here’s the Lore of how we did all the supernatural stuff.” so that was funny. one point for dummies.
aja raden, stoned: jewelry, obsession, and how desire shapes the world — this is the kind of pop history book i never read but i picked it up because it was written by the hot and awesome jewelry designer in that diamonds documentary i watched in february. i don’t know that i would have enjoyed it without her vibe in my head, and i don’t know how far i would trust her depiction of historical events, but i did have fun, and also realized that disreputable pop history is about where my tolerance for european history maxes out. there was a moment reading this book where i understood what had gone down with mary and elizabeth and that whole thing but the moment has passed. my favorite thing was learning about the guy who invented cultured pearls, because it is crazy that he did that, and also, by the way, did you know pearls are fucking disgusting?
kazuo ishiguro, the buried giant — tragically found this a huge disappointment! just a fucking chore to read, start to finish, and like—i don’t know, maybe this is an unfortunate consequence of so reliably writing books that make the reader want to kill themselves, but it’s almost like, knowing it was ishiguro, i was kind of bracing myself for the devastating ending the whole time, and then when it came i didn’t really feel anything. but, again, i also really couldn’t get into it at any time before that, so… maybe that’s why. i can’t tell if my tastes have changed since i read what were then his complete works in a year or so in high school, behavior which at that age should be in the DSM, or if i just felt like his whole Thing didn’t work with the arthuriana-adjacent setting… also i think the amnesia thread had me paranoid that it was going to be like the unconsoled. (it wasn’t. thank god.) anyway. i’ll still read klara and the sun at some point.
mary robison, why did i ever — i liked the voice of this SO much that i really wanted to love it as a novel and as a novel i’m not sure it held together so much… but the voice is incredibly fun and really, really, really specifically relatable in some ways i’m not sure i have ever seen before. i liked also that it was a book about a Woman Fuck-Up who’s, like… actually an actual legitimate fuck-up. do you know what i mean? like an actual legitimate unglamorous disaster, despite working in a hollywood-adjacent field. at some point while reading it i was like “oh THIS is what jenny offill was doing in dept. of speculation” and then i googled to see if anyone else had pointed this out and found why did i ever included on a list on offill’s website of books that were important for writing dept. of speculation so… i’m a regular sherlock holmes, clearly. we do a practice of artistic openness! but that book is kind of useful for illustrating what i mean, because dept. of speculation is like, oh no she fights with her husband and their kid breaks her arm and he cheats on her, and then why did i ever is like, well she’s three times divorced and one of her kids is in witness protection and she’s out here violating traffic laws and losing her cat and fucking up her career. i’m not saying one set of problems is inherently worthier of or more compelling in fiction than the other… i’m just saying i found it refreshing.
octavia butler, dawn — the first of three novels i have elected to read in the hopes that they will imaginatively structure this one project that has been stalled for 1 billion years because something i have learned about them makes me think there might be some thematic overlap it may be productive to encounter. this book was… fine, i guess? i mean i didn’t like literally anything about it because i think maybe aliens are like dragons for me and my brain has a hard boundary around engaging with them seriously in fiction (you know, i was never a horse girl, either…) and i found the characters totally flat and while i was sort of vaguely hoping for a different experience than i had had when i skimmed mind of my mind (i think) for the science fiction class i was failing in college the semester i dropped out, unfortunately i think i do just really really really hate butler’s prose, which is like, competent enough but which i find very boring and, worse, very much in what i think of as that science-fiction corniness range that is above anything what chatGPT’s default mode reminds me of, although it has recently occurred to me that perhaps this is common in all kinds of genre fiction and i just associate it with science fiction because science fiction is actually the genre i am most liable to be suckered into reading based on the ideas seeming interesting or because someone told me it was good. but, i dunno, i wasn’t, like, mad. you know how i get mad sometimes? this wasn’t that. this was just like, okay, well, everything this books is doing has nothing to do with anything i like about reading, so… i don’t know if it’s good or not. i’m not equipped to assess this kind of project. did i find it educational in the way i was hoping? there was some thematic overlap but i don’t know that i found it productive.
robert heinlein, starship troopers — space book number two! (i am waiting on my hold for number three.) this book is like… it’s very much a boys’ military adventure that happens to be set in space that is basically an excuse for a lot of dialogue about moral codes bouncing off the thought exercise of the world depicted and also fantasizing about how what if you joined the army to look good in front of a pretty girl (who is also joining the army, to be clear, and is a brilliant mathematical mind who turns out to look pretty cute with her head shaved, which… okay, for a man in 1959, honestly? i don’t hate it) and then boot camp made you a man, a man who knows what it is to stand for something, to fight for something even, actually so much of a man that—i am not making this part up—one day you briefly cross paths with your dad who stopped speaking to you when you enlisted but then after your mom died realized what he had to do was join the army, inspired partly by your example, and who is so proud of you for doing this brave thing that he has now also given himself over to, and then at the end of the book you guys are actually serving on the same spaceship? like, what if? i mean the dad stuff is crazy. you want to be like, “men will literally write boys’ military adventures about what if their dad credited them with making him a man instead of going to therapy” but the thing is you can’t because heinlein has you beat because it’s already IN THE TEXT that his dad is like “sure, i was going to therapy, but obviously that didn’t do anything, because what i needed to do, psychologically, was join the army.” OKAY THEN! true ijbol shit. anyway. all that said—i would actually say that heinlein is an example of the Sci-Fi Nouns Barrage done genuinely well, in a way that i don’t know i would have appreciated if i had not already developed such an allergy to it. the book’s narration feels like this guy is explaining his life and job to someone else in his world, not to “the reader” from our world, and despite the constant nounsing, the voice feels natural, cheesy like a teenage boy in the 50s who mostly wants to talk about how he loves the army so, so much, rather than like a stilted and clunky science-fiction writer aggressively Building World at you. again, if i’d read this twenty years ago i think i would have been like, “lmao, what,” but with the wisdom of age i can see that he did something here that is actually quite hard based on how often other people fuck it up. also Given The Historical Circumstances Of Science Fiction Publishing In The 1950s i’ll go ahead and say it’s rad that his protagonist is secretly filipino and you find this out in the last chapter (although when his dad shows up you do learn his given name is not johnny but juan). i don’t anticipate reading more heinlein but if a trusted source made one of his books sound extremely interesting i’d consider it. and yes, before you ask: i DO feel guilty that it turns out i like robert heinlein more than octavia butler. sorry to feminist jesus.
anna burns, milkman — have said as much already but i loooooooved this book. loved it loved it loved it. the voice was so good, it was like addictively good, just completely delicious, i wanted to swim around in it forever! i could have read another five hundred pages. you can tell it’s really good because she’s constantly using commas “incorrectly” and it never bothered me even once!!!!! miraculous stuff. the structure is incredible too, the mix of compression and expansion, how delicately it’s built while retaining all the while the sense that this woman is simply talking out loud, remembering something that happened when she was young (and that too is expertly handled, the fact that it’s a first person narration with an incredibly clear sense of distance, significant distance, distance enough to grant the narrator language she didn’t have then, but it still feels so close to the story she lived at eighteen). people don’t usually talk about worldbuilding for novels that take place in the real world, but the way she fleshes out the distorted minutiae of life in the troubles made me think of the best of SF/F, this sense that a world already existing is illuminated to us piece by piece. it’s a book about living at a dangerous and disorienting time, about the external complications and internal effects of a life spent under the constant threat of surveillance and retaliation from all possible sides, and it’s also a book about when you’re a teenage girl and an older man is being weird at you and everything in your body knows he’s being weird but he never says anything you could readily identify as having crossed an undeniable line so you never say anything at all. and it’s funny! i can’t stop thinking about how much i loved this book.
stories
c. l. james, “shambleau”; fritz leiber, “a deskful of girls”; & craig strete, “mother of cloth, heart of clock” — i read these three stories because b. d. mcclay, whose writing i like, has been doing a series on genre stories at the point, and i figured it would be a good way to continue poking around the genre world with the benefit that even if i didn’t like any given story i would probably enjoy reading what she had to say about it. (the announced fourth story, vonda mcintyre’s “aztecs,” is more of a novella, and i haven’t decided yet if i want to commit to this at that length, lol.) “shambleau” was a perfectly competent example of two different things i am not likely to be much interested in (westerns, alien stories); “mother of cloth, heart of clock,” a first-person narrative from the voice of a lab animal soon to be put down, was good but also made me so sad i have a hard time saying i “liked” it, which, again, is i suppose a point in its favor; “a deskful of girls,” which i found here on the internet archive and has also been anthologized in the best of fritz leiber collection, was a fucking KNOCKOUT! i could not believe how much i loved it, or how many Things I Loved leiber managed to fit into this story: a sort of chandler-adjacent noirish narrator; name-dropping parapsychological pioneer j. b. rhine; evil psychiatrist; ghosts; and oh by the way the whole story is a commentary on the dehumanizing nature of female fame????? i mean i was thrilled beyond imagining. i liked it so much that i am presently reading leiber’s novel conjure wife and having a great time with that, too. but, i mean, this story—if you’ve got some time i really do recommend checking it out; it’s SO good, and he lands the plane just beautifully. (do i feel bad that that’s two white guys from the 50s whose SF/F offerings i have preferred to the works of octavia butler? i do. i wish it weren’t so.)
marne litfin, “daisies” (published in electric literature) — okay i have to confess that i did look this up because at some point in getting horribly sucked into lindy west discourse i found someone on reddit saying that the third in carmen maria machado’s former marriage had published a short story with a main character who is in an unhappy throuple with a married couple. SORRY. wow i am sinning against feminism all over the place here. anyway. this didn’t wow me, but it did have a nice brisk energy that kept me reading until the end (NOT a given), and, contra my prurient motivations in seeking it out, it’s really just mostly a story about taking a time out on the challenges of life to go hang at the beach with a very good friend, and i kind of like that this was a topic they decided was worthy of writing a story about! it also… hmm, how to put this delicately… it captures a certain vibe, particularly pertaining to the manner in which gender is discussed but also more generally, that some people may perhaps at times find certainly harmless and not anything worth being rude to people about or anything but, you know, kind of precious or corny, but in a way where i was like, yes i am familiar with people who are precious and corny in this way, not in a way where i was like, this story is giving me hives.
movies
natchez — this is a documentary about a mississippi town with a very intense sense of history and tradition around its antebellum mansion tourism industry. i really, really liked it. in many ways it’s a “fun” watch, but it’s also an uncomfortable one, a movie that lets its subjects reveal themselves without ever seeming to aim for any kind of “gotcha” (i actually remember noticing that the movie seemed deliberately edited to avoid “pausing for applause”). the filmmaker also gives space not only to the traditional tours but to a set of mississippians, mostly black, who are working to put out there a more honest history than that which the town tells about itself, and it was very interesting to see them doing that work and reflecting on it; i was particularly interested in pastor rev’s thoughts on how in order for his work to be effective he simply has to meet people where they are to whatever degree is possible, even when it requires demonstrating the patience of job. i don’t know if there are plans for this movie to hit streaming but if you get a chance to see it i would really recommend it; herbert packs a lot into 86 minutes about this deranged country of ours. the scene where the drag queen slips out of the mental health benefit being held at that one really racist guy’s racist antebellum house for some air or a smoke break and there’s a handful of protesters with signs not about the racism but about the gay stuff… america, tbh.
nirvanna the band the show the movie — really fun! gets around my usual aversion to time travel by following back to the future rules i.e. it’s okay if you make it stupid. also i have to imagine that if you’re a fan of the show some of the stuff (like the montage that was presumably clips from the show) hits a little harder, but i thought they did a great job making the movie totally accessible to anyone coming in cold. some GREAT jokes, a story about how friends can be annoying but also friendship is the most important thing in the world (popstar vibes)... i had a great time!
ninotchka — a very serious soviet communist in france on state business encounters a somewhat ridiculous frenchman who is instantly smitten with her; sparks fly—predictably, but it’s lubitsch, so also delightfully. this movie has a very different story and energy from cluny brown, but it shares the central premise of a guy falling for a woman because he finds the fact that she’s a total freak with idiosyncratic passions totally intoxicating, which, like, i dunno, he just gets it. (she falls for him, meanwhile, more or less because he’s kind of stupid… like i said, he just gets it…) i had never seen a greta garbo movie before and i do understand why she was like the biggest star in the world for a while now; there’s a scene where she’s dressed up in a big capitalistic ballgown where despite the fact that she is greta garbo, professional gorgeous person accustomed to attending events in beautiful gowns, she carries herself with a certain awkwardness like she’s a little girl playing dress-up… really good shit. this is also maybe the most palpably horny old movie i have ever seen, in that i have never believed two actors in black-and-white wanted to fuck each other so bad it made them look stupid more than i did with garbo & melvyn douglas in this movie… honestly their chemistry has rarely been matched in the era of color! some people on letterboxd are really mad at this hollywood studio romcom from 1939 for its depiction of communism and the soviet union, which in many regards could not be me but is everyone’s right i suppose, but while you should obviously not turn to this movie for a serious or even fair treatment of the issues at hand, i will say that i liked the direction the movie took regarding ninotchka’s principles more than at a certain point i expected to.
rudo y cursi — rewatched this for the first time in ages because n. had never seen it and for some reason i really wanted him to. i don’t really know why i feel so fondly towards this movie, which i guess is more or less a comedy but also mostly kind of a bummer, but diego luna and gael garcia bernal are so great as a pair of dumb brothers whose moderate soccer gifts seem to promise escape and ultimately mostly just make their lives worse that i’m kind of like… i mean, what else do you need? at one point in this movie gael garcia bernal’s character releases as a single a spanish-language cover of “i want you to want me” and the glimpse of the video we see in the movie truly has lived in my head rent free for what has to be at least a decade now. the specific mustache/hair combo they saddle diego luna with is one of the most successful attempts in screen history to disguise that a movie has cast one of the most beautiful people ever to live as a character who’s not supposed to be that hot. colin farrell in miami vice levels.
project hail mary — i found this very cute! on letterboxd i gave it four stars while saying i felt like i was overrating it and i stand by both of those things… it is basically a children’s movie for adults (i have to assume it is too long and too wordy for most children to sit through, but i can imagine this being a very earnest middle-schooler’s favorite movie for a long time), it is undeniably america-brained, it is wildly optimistic about the learning curve for interspecies communication… but ryan gosling is as sincerely charming as i have ever seen him and that little rock critter who becomes his friend is a real good little movie critter! plus sandra hüller does karaoke and it’s a big effects movie set in space that doesn’t look like a video game. while it was happening i thought it had return of the king endings disease but then the actual ending was so endearingly feel-good i was like well that’s fine then. obsessed with ryan gosling’s parade of nerd t-shirts, some of the best costume work i have ever seen that didn’t involve, like, sewing mirrors onto a gown or whatever. ryan gosling wearing an “i had potential shirt”... hottest he’s ever been to me. i will not be taking questions at this time.
music
i have started to catch up on 2026! for a song, let’s go with the opening track for my favorite album of the month, which i keep describing to people, in true boss baby tweet fashion, as triangulating the spot between different charly bliss albums:
mirah, dedication — was sort of disappointed not to love this because of how i think advisory committee is basically the greatest album by anyone ever, but i did think it was good. the production is very nice and warm, some of the melodies are pretty, and i am happy that she is so happy about being a parent!
yumi zouma, no love lost to kindness — indie rock with a reliably good groove hitting a sweet spot between fuzz and crunch, plus some pretty good hooks; i liked this a lot!
hannah jane lewis, riding in cars with boys — very very pretty hook-driven country from a [checks notes] brit??? alright! lewis has a great ear for melody and her production is really quite lovely, looking forward to a full-length album from her because these five songs were quite sturdy and enjoyable!
liz cooper, new day — this album was extremely cool and interesting… maybe too cool and interesting for me personally to revisit much if at all. but i liked listening to it and i would recommend it to people with more interesting taste in music than i have!
ratboys, singin’ to an empty chair — this album was really great and i LOVE the lead singer’s voice. for shuffle listening i definitely prefer the faster rock-er tracks to the slower country-er tracks but i do think that as a project it makes for a really well-assembled straight-through listen with a very nice album arc.
harry styles, kiss all the time. disco, occasionally — lol. lmao, even. certainly not the worst thing i’ve ever heard but almost spectacularly mid… too shiny to be interesting, too meandering to be fun, too lackluster to be danceable… i don’t know what this guy is doing
PONY, clearly cursed — my aforementioned album of the month! great hooks, sugar-sweet vocals with a slight edge, bright guitars with just enough fizziness that everything feels covered in soda bubbles… simply and truly an Album For Me.
leigh-anne, my ego told me to — this was actually pretty good! way better than her EP last year; little mix is 3 for 3 on alumnae putting out respectable solo projects. not really my thing taste-wise, especially since it does get a little samey at album length, but the production is very nice and a few tracks are intriguingly weird in a fun way!
the format, boycott heaven — i forgot until i listened to this album that i have this thing with nate ruess’s voice and singing and also maybe his whole Deal where when i’m listening to it i can’t figure out if i find it really cloying and annoying or incredibly visceral and compelling or like maybe somehow both at the same time? anyway… so i don’t really know how i feel about this album. but at least some of the tracks have stuck around by virtue of the fact that spending three and a half minutes wondering “do i love this or hate this” is an interesting listening experience (more so than, for example, “do i like this a lot or like this kind of”... being torn between an 8/10 and a 3/10 is more interesting and much rarer than trying to decide if something is a 6 or a 7, you know?). so… that’s something.
lia pappas-kemps, winged — pretty enough but besides “towers,” the song that caught my attention, not worth a second listen
charli xcx, wuthering heights — ok i loved this lmao. it feels like the framework of making music for a story, for perhaps even this specific story (emerald fennell’s “wuthering heights” which i have not seen) in all its excess and melodrama, gave charli some kind of permission structure for tapping into the starry-eyed swooning that so enraptured me back on true romance all those many many many years ago and which she has determinedly remained too cool to ever indulge in again… and while ultimately as documented here brat wound up unlocking her archive for me such that now i finally get vroom-vroom and all the rest, it was still a treat to hear charli playing around with lushness and space again!!! “dying for you” in particular i can’t get enough.
underscores, U — massively disappointed by how much i didn’t like this, lol. my introduction to underscores was wallsocket, which i think is a true for real legit masterpiece, and which is so varied and bold and fun and painful and loud and quiet and lovely and great, and i would not use even one of those words to describe this album. i have never delved into their back catalogue so maybe wallsocket was an outlier and this is a return to form (certainly on listening to wallsocket once and then seeing them described as a hyperpop artist i was like, …what?)... but… i dunno. this is like an ironic performance about pop music, which i guess is probably the point, but is not interesting to me, a person who likes pop music and also other kinds of music but doesn’t like things for conceptual reasons basically ever. it’s so dynamically and sonically small, melodically dull… ah well. we’ll always have “cops and robbers”
