troisoiseaux

Read The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley, about a fact-checker at a magazine that is clearly the New Yorker (although, in retrospect, I don't think it's ever actually name-dropped?) in early 2000s NYC, who plays detective when an attractively eccentric young woman he meets as a source disappears shortly after making vague comments about something "nefarious" going on at the farmer's market where she works. It reminded me a bit of Dwyer Murphy's An Honest Living, but more picaresque than neo-noir. I enjoyed the narrative voice, with its scattered references of a brain full of trivia - particularly about 19th century American communal societies like the Shakers, Oneida, and Amos Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands - and turns of phrase like: "There was a long theremin solo, which sounded slightly like a little girl soprano and slightly like the inside of a lemon."

Two... warnings, I guess? ( Major spoiler, but I knew it going in because of another review. ) Second, there is one wildly unexpected, deeply weird scene involving ( animal death. )

FINALLY saw Maybe Happy Ending, which is as good as everyone has said and definitely deserves all of its Tony noms! It's charming and funny - very Pixar, rom-com vibes - and just melancholy/bittersweet enough to stop short of being twee.

In a futuristic Seoul, Oliver (Darren Criss) is an early-generation Helperbot whose beloved owner, James, is definitely going to pick him up from the home for retired Helperbots any day now; Claire (Helen J. Shen) is a comparatively newer model but, as the iPhone to Oliver's Nokia, model-wise, is suffering the effects of planned obsolescence more quickly. After Claire shakes up Oliver's twelve-year-strong routine of puttering around his room waiting for James and talking to his plant, they decide to sneak out and road trip to Jeju Island, so Oliver can reunite with James and Claire can see the world's last remaining fireflies. On the way, Claire makes Oliver promise that, even though they're pretending to be a human couple, they won't fall in love; Oliver is like, "we're robots! we can't fall in love!" If you have consumed any media ever, you can see where this is going.

I loved the physicality of Criss' performance; he moves like a Disney animatronic come to life, emphasizing the difference between Oliver as a Model 3 and Claire as a more lifelike Model 5. (3 vs. 5 is a whole thing, plot-wise, but also sets up the joke that got the biggest laugh: when they stop at what turns out to be a "love motel" to recharge (literally), pretending with varying degrees of success to be A Normal Human Couple, they run into another guest who makes a comment along the lines of "where did you find a 10 like her?", to which Oliver cheerfully chirps, "actually, she's a 5!") Shen is also fantastic; she and Criss play well off each other, and their voices are gorgeous together.

Besides Criss and Shen - and not counting the understudies/stand-bys, or the two additional actors appear as Claire's former owners in pre-recorded flashbacks, or the orchestra - the rest of the cast consists of one actor who plays Oliver's favorite jazz singer, appearing whenever Oliver plays his albums (this musical has diegetic and non-diegetic numbers!) and another who plays James, James' son, and all of the bit parts. (There's a tongue-in-cheek nod to this in the running joke that Oliver thinks all humans look alike.) And also Oliver's plant HwaBoon, who's the third lead, really, and gets its own bio in the playbill.

The set and effects were fantastic; watch this trailer, which also shows what I mean about Criss' physicality. The moving shadow-box set pieces and neon reminded me a bit of National Theatre's Angels in America, actually, although the set pieces were lush with detail where AIA was minimalist. The scene with the fireflies was absolutely breathtaking: up until that point, the stage was very segmented in terms of what you could see, but after the first firefly appears as a little light on the tip of a conductor's baton wielded by the aforementioned jazz singer, they "open up" a full view of the stage to reveal a forest grove of full of "fireflies" and the orchestra performing on stage, and there were little blinking firefly lights along the balcony railings, etc., as well as the stage!!

Anyway! 10/10, definitely worth taking a 6 am train to NYC, I hope this wins all the Tonys.

Read Extra Salty by Frederick Blichert, a novella-length retrospective on cinematic masterpiece Jennifer's Body, part of a series of pop culture commentaries published as cute little pamphlet-sized books by ECW Press. Thoughtful recap of the movie's themes and the horror tropes it embraces and subverts, how the studio's mismarketing (and general societal misogyny) contributed to it being critically panned on its release in 2009, and its afterlife as a cult classic and then as a movie for the #MeToo moment that came out a decade too early to be appreciated.

Followed this up with Right, Down + Circle by Cole Nowicki, a love letter to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater from the same Pop Classics series. More personal than Blichert's, it's as much a memoir about what skateboarding, video games, and this particular video game about skateboarding have meant to the author as it is the story of how Pro Skater came to be and its pop culture impact. (This was actually my favorite of the two, although - or maybe because? - I was less familiar with Pro Skater as a piece of media.)

Read A Gallery of Rogues by Beth Lincoln, sequel to The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, collectively a rollicking middle-grade series about young Shenanigan Swift and her sprawling extended family of nominatively-determined eccentrics— and, in this one, the Swifts' estranged French relatives, the Martinets. And a gang of theatrical art thieves! And an Interpol agent who is the long-standing ~nemesis~ of Shenanigan's uncle Maelstrom! Once again, this book feels like was written specifically to appeal to my 10-year-old self - it somehow reminds me of a whole bunch of memorable MG books circa the mid-2000s, including The Mysterious Benedict Society, Lemony Snicket, The Willoughbys (by Lois Lowry, apparently??), and Roxie and the Hooligans, with the added bonus of being casually, joyfully LGBT-affirming and diverse - but I don't actually begrudge it for arriving two decades late.

Read The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini (translated from Spanish by Jordan Landsman), a collection of short stories I picked up after hearing about the titular novella, in which a young man is offered a secretive academic fellowship alongside - it turns out - his twenty-three doppelgängers. I'd actually gotten my wires slightly crossed and assumed that this book was only the titular novella - which I had also assumed was, like, an actual novel? - so the short stories were a surprise, but they were great: lyrical, atmospheric, and strange, with a tendency to end on an abrupt, unsettling note that rattled around my head for a while afterwards.

Apparently the universe has decided to fuel my Arthuriana kick, because I recently checked my local Little Free Library and found that someone had left a bunch of 1970s-90s Arthurian-retelling novels— it didn't feel fair to take the lot, but I did grab Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex (1978) (with an inscription indicating that it was a birthday(?) gift from the original owner's grandfather(?) in 1979) and Ian McDowell's Mordred's Curse (1996). Read the McDowell first, which is an ~EdGy~ retelling* (impressive, really, given the starting premise): ( ... )

All that aside, McDowell's Mordred is a foul-mouthed little freak*** and I love him; his Arthur is, as one character describes him, half priest and half soldier, a bit of a prig but not wholly unsympathetic, even as he passes from the object of Mordred's hero-worship to betrayed rage to a sort of not-quite-apathy. This book also goes full-on Mordred/Guinevere, and it's actually... really cute? They're close in age and education, bonding over Roman poets and games of chess (no, seriously, WHERE did the "playing chess with Guinevere" trope come from?); ( spoilers! ) I am increasingly amused by how many Arthurian retellings have whatever knight is central to said retelling be in love with Guinevere (Kay in The Idylls of the Queen, Mordred in The Wicked Day) because she is kind of the only option unless you want to make up an entirely new character.

( Footnotes )

Read Suzanne Collins' latest Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, aka the tragic backstory of Katniss' mentor Haymitch Abernathy. I thought the theme of the Hunger Games as carefully edited propaganda was interesting - what gets cut; what gets orchestrated so the audience sees what the Capitol wants them to - but otherwise it felt like more of a rehash of the original trilogy (specifically the second book) than the first prequel, and I didn't have the knowledge or nostalgia for the original series to catch, or care about, all of the easter-egg details.

Read In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life by Jeopardy! superstar Amy Schneider, which featured significantly more sex and recreational drugs than I'd expected from a memoir by someone who is, again, famous for winning Jeopardy! but, like, good for her.

I finished Moby Dick!!! (At approximately 3 am, because I could not fall asleep last night, to the point where I just gave up and was like I might as well listen to the last hour of the audiobook. So, in a way, I microdosed the experience of the 25-hour Moby Dick read-a-thon.) The last couple of chapters are action-packed to a point that's almost disorientating given the slow, strange ramble of the preceding 130-odd. ( ... )

In assorted thoughts on the last third or so: oh, the irony of chapter 105, in which Ishmael goes on about how commercial whalers can't possibly hunt whales to extinction, unlike that other time we thought humans couldn't possibly hunt an entire species to near-extinction (i.e., buffalo); like many things about this book, I genuinely can't tell if this was supposed to be ironic or sincere. I found the whole "Pip goes mad after nearly drowning and starts talking about himself like he's a different person who died" thing super creepy. Did the narrative mention the fact Ahab had a son at any point before, like, chapter 128? There was a whole eleventh-hour theme about fathers and sons that I was not expecting. Ended up liking Starbuck best (loved Chapter 123: Starbuck Contemplates The Trolley Problem); spent most of the book wanting someone to punt Stubb off the boat because he was just so obnoxious. I still have no idea what accent John Gallagher Jr. was doing in Swept Away but this audiobook's narrator (Pete Cross) does the same accent for the Pequod's carpenter, so that's a dot that may or may not connect to anything.

Read Lady Susan by Jane Austen, which I guess I'd always assumed was an unfinished novel, but it turns out is actually a completed novella! It also turns out to be a very fun read, as an epistolary novella in the form of letters from different people all complaining about each other. The titular Lady Susan is a sort of genteel Becky Sharp, just an absolute scheming menace out to get hers at the cost of other people's hearts, engagements, and happiness— although Becky, a scrappy outsider trying to scam her way up the social ladder, makes a more sympathetic anti-heroine than Lady Susan, who spends most of the book trying to force her daughter into a marriage against her will.

As a fun little side note, I picked this up because of one of those Tumblr "spin the wheel and vote about your result" polls: Who's your Jane Austen roommate? I got Reginald de Courcy and was like, who?, and so I ended up reading Lady Susan through a lens perhaps unique in the history of people reading this book, namely, "Reginald de Courcy: good roommate?" My conclusion is that, if considering the question based entirely on personality and not on logistical considerations of, e.g., introducing a wealthy Regency man to the concept of a chore wheel, he's rather annoyingly spineless and easily led but I could probably live with him. Definitely not the worst option, at any rate— the person whose reblog brought the game to my attention had gotten Lady Catherine de Bourgh!

Finished Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, which is more like a collection of increasingly bizarre vignettes than a novel— I didn't know, going into this, that Hval is a musician apparently best known for trippy feminist concept albums, but this was in fact basically a trippy feminist concept album as a book. To be honest, it got a bit too weird for my tastes by the end - at least once in a burst-out-laughing "WTF??" way - and I kind of wish she'd done more with time-traveling Edvard Munch and the vengeful teenage model of his painting "Puberty" since this was one of the things in the blurb that had piqued my interest, but there were some stand-out scenes and, overall, I liked how reading this felt like being pulled along a current, from idea to weird tableau to resonant idea.

I'm currently reading two different novels that happen to complement each other surprisingly well. Girls Against God by Jenny Hval is so, so good in a way that's kind of hard to explain— the most straightforward plot description is that a woman who sought refuge in black metal while growing up in a stiflingly religious small town in 1990s Norway starts a band that's actually a coven of witches, but somehow, while technically correct, I feel like that suggests a completely different book than the one this actually is. More than anything, it's one of those books that feels like being swept along by the current of a river of words and ideas and imagery, if that makes sense? Anyway, I'm so into this.

The other book is Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, which so far is about a woman on a solo retreat at a convent in rural Australia to clear her head about her failing marriage. I hadn't planned to read these concurrently, or thought of them as a literary wine-and-cheese pairing, but then I was struck by these two quotes—

From Girls Against God:

When this spell, language, is used to create gods and mythology, it becomes so complex and self-referential that in fact it seems real, perhaps even self-aware. That might actually be what the singers in the old parish choir dream of: making God real through song, through their own real bodies, although they themselves of course would say that God is already real, that he exists.

From Stone Yard Devotional, on the narrator observing the nuns at Vespers:

Watching the women, I'm convinced that the words they're singing are meaningless; that instead, this ritual is all about the body and the unconscious mind.

After neglecting Moby Dick for a couple of weeks, I made a good dent in the audiobook over the weekend. I'm through Chapter 78, which was WILD— ( ... )