a pivot.

a note on not meeting my self-imposed deadline | + Twisters! sex theory books! & more <3

scene from the writing table. (also the dining room table.)

Dear ones, 

I had to pivot. 

I spent the last month attempting to finish a book that simply deserves more time. My goal was to complete the entire manuscript before P and I left for Europe, but that deadline is now less than one week away and I still have course syllabi to prepare. I thought about having a meltdown about this. I’m great at meltdowns! But instead, I pivoted. I called on my old friend radical acceptance. I inhaled, I exhaled, and I said, “I wanted to finish before the end of summer, but the end of summer isn’t really until September 21st.” And so, I will have a few more weekends, after school starts, of extremely focused writing time. 

Though my brain has tried to convince me otherwise, this is not the end of the world. 

On Monday, I started getting signs that this deadline was too much. The evening concluded in a panic attack (and Twisters!; I’ll say more on that below). By the time the weekend came, it was clear that this chest-tight overwhelm — familiar from the time I was nearing the end of my master’s thesis, and my PhD dissertation (though not my memoir, that one flowed) — needed tending to. I didn’t want to push through this time; I wanted to pivot, and protect my bodymind health.

Let this be a cautionary tale! Don’t agree to write a book for a press during one of the hardest years of your adult life then have your partner get brain cancer then start a new demanding full-time job and save the bulk of the writing for a few months of summer after you have surgery! But if you do do that— remember that you can pivot. We LOVE a pivot. 

As for the Europe trip, here’s the deal: I got accepted to the Feminist Spatialities conference in Dublin, which is thankfully mostly on my work’s dime. Since we’ll be across the ocean already, P understandably requested we make some time to visit the place he called home for 16 years, just outside of Barcelona, in Catalunya. I have an essay in me about travel, class, and the ecological crisis, but I also have syllabi to prepare, so TBD on that. I do know that I’ll be sending some travel diaries with the notes those weeks, so more to come either way. I’m excited! Slash, it’s complicated!

Below: a look at a portion of my book research reading list (for new folks, this section is usually much more full of article and newsletter links, but I’ve just been all-consumed with book stuff this week) + a hearty capsule review of Twisters (I’m keeping this section before the paywall today because I’d love to connect with more movie nerds on here)  + music listening updates + gratitude list! 

You know the drill: summer sale (yes, til Sept 21st) is on, just $30 for full access to all my ~content~ + the benefit of feeling good for supporting a working-class writer/precarious academic who is out of a job in nine months. Xoxoox 

I love you!

love & solidarity,

raechel

Reading. 

Books about sex & gender & sex panics & porn & sex work & theory! The bibliography for this book is massive, so this is just the stack I’ve been working with this week. 

White Feminism by Koa Beck; Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin eds. Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder; Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel; The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan; Sex, or the Unberable by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman.

Watching. 

Before I tell you what I thought of Twisters, there are some things you should know. On the way to the theater, I left my friend a shaky-voiced message about how stressed I was. As I mentioned above, on the way home from the theater—due to a number of factors not related to the movie—I had an actual panic attack (this is not common for me; I am stressed a lot, anxious too sometimes, but full blown panic attacks are pretty rare). I was also two days away from my period and earlier that day cried over a fundraising letter from Farm Sanctuary. I was EMOTIONAL, and absolutely nothing in my path felt casual. Which is all to say: take my somewhat  glowing review of Twisters with a hearty grain of salt!! And note: this will be full of spoilers. 

***

I loved the original Twister. It is an extraordinarily solid disaster movie with a satisfying emotional arc and perfect 90s side characters (RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman; and this guy and this guy who seemed to be in everything during that era; and Alan Ruck! And Carey Elwes! Peak 90s!). 

Twisters tries to follow the same formula but with some updates: we get fancier CGI, people of color (albeit mostly under-written), and, I’d argue, a contemporary attention to trauma. In Twister, Helen Hunt definitely had trauma, and we saw evidence of it in her stubborn, obsessive draw to the tornadoes. In this version, our protagonist Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is also traumatized from a storm tragedy, but her trauma symptoms are even clearer, which feels like a testament to all of our growing vocabularies and awareness about the body keeping the score and all. In any case, I was genuinely moved by her experience with loss and its aftermath. 

After the devastating opening scene, we fast forward five years and find Kate and Javi (Anthony Ramos) reuniting where Kate works in New York, for the first time after the tragedy they both survived in the fields of Oklahoma. I admit I was nervous when we first learn that Javi is in the military, eager to use the pentagon’s vast budget to fight tornadoes through a new mobile tracking team called Storm Par. He convinces Kate to join him, which she agrees to do for one week. I assumed he was going to be a good guy and that we’d be encouraged to root for the US military to defeat the axis of evil tornadoes. 

But Storm Par isn’t the good guy, which we won’t know for about the first twenty-five minutes of the film. The foil to Kate and Javi’s military-backed, heavily PhD’d team is the “redneck” YouTuber storm chasers led by Tyler Owens aka the “Tornado Wrangler” (Glen Powell). The camera frames them, at first, as obnoxious social media influencers, with lots of macho Americana oozing from their big red truck and Tyler’s cowboy hat. But Tyler’s crew is not the stuff of MAGA chuds—we don’t get nearly enough of them, but I loved every moment we had with the queer, hillbilly-punk, Black and brown sidekicks, played really endearingly by Sasha Lane, Brandon Perea, Katy O’Brian, and Tunde Adebimpe. (Shoutout to Cherokee critic Shea Vassar for pointing out that there were no indigenous leads, which is a missed opportunity for a region that has such a large native population.) 

Kate is annoyed by Tyler’s whole deal, assuming he’s a gimmicky frat boy with no respect for science or nature. But us knowledgeable audience members know: Glen Powell’s charm will take care of that skepticism very soon. In addition to Tyler’s admittedly swoony good looks, Kate is also won over by the fact that the Tornado Wrangler team does disaster relief mutual aid work anytime a tornado hits a town. Meanwhile, Storm Par has partnered with a Real Estate tycoon to create predatory opportunities for land buying after people’s homes are destroyed. 

“it’s free.”

Ladies & gents, we are rooting for the rednecks!

The rest of the movie is full of action, more trauma flashbacks, a slow-burn romance (with no consummation, which I was fine with!), some really tender scenes of communities picking up the pieces of their disaster-stricken towns, Maura Tierney (whom I love, but she for sure got the worst part of the script imo), a really Americana rodeo scene, and lots and lots of country music. When it ended, I knew that it could have been a stronger film—it needed sharper writing, more laughs, not to have Kate wearing a completely extraneous holster—but I was still fully rooting for these characters, and was, ultimately, PROFOUNDLY MOVED! 

My biggest concern while watching, on and off, was that I got sucked into patriotic propaganda. The American romance was strong—-the cowboy hats, the American flag standing strong in the harsh winds at the rodeo, the country music. And, unfortunately, the omission of the phrase “climate change.” (There is one line about how the storms are getting worse, which I assumed, hopefully, was at least a nod to the reality of ecocide.) But then there is also the military project being in cahoots with developers, and the mostly not-white cast (though, unsurprisingly, both leads are white). What could I glean as a takeaway from this somewhat incoherent amalgamation of critique and celebration? It’s especially interesting to think of these tropes—-corporate coastal elites, hillbillies, rich people, poor people—in this current political moment. Our cultural signifiers are so confused in the popular imaginary right now! Wealthy coastal elite Donald Trump supposedly has flyover country vote, but flyover country actually looks more like the multiracial crew in Tyler’s truck. JD Vance is not actually Appalachian, Kamala Harris is definitely a coastal prosecutor….Would any of the Tornado Wranglers even vote, or would they be too busy feeding people after a storm? As always, I so appreciate when the mainstream movies give me an excuse to ask these questions.

Then I realized: Twisters was directed by Lee Isaac Chung. Chung is the child of Korean immigrant parents and grew up in Arkansas. You may remember him from the gorgeously quiet and contemplative Oscar-nominated Minari about his family farm. That film had such reverence for the land, and I realized that, with a huge budget and different task, Chung finds a way to do the same here. Reviewers keep saying that Twisters is a “monster movie” where the monster is the tornado, but Chung sees more beauty than horror in the clouds and the winds. Chung maybe is a bit of a patriot—again, I never expect radicals to be behind the cameras in Hollywood—but I felt like I could root for his version of the heartland. He made a film about beautiful nature in catastrophic conditions and how people take care of each other in the midst of it. I kind of loved it. <3 

no doubt he likes America more than me, but I’m still here for his storytelling.

Oh, and last but not least: Glen Powell! He did it, I’m sold! I still stand by my C+ rating of Hit Man, I still think Set It Up was bad, and I still think he sometimes looks like a muppet, but he was smokin’ hot in this movie and I’m charmed by how unabashedly try-hard he is in Hollywood. This dude LOVES movies and he REALLY wanted to be a movie star. He’s not shy about any of it, and honestly I’m kinda just happy for him! I mostly agreed with this Anne Helen Petersen reflection on his “It” qualities, especially the part about how he likes women. 

OKAY OKAY, I get it.

Listening. 

I have my summer 2023 & summer 2024 playlist on rotation, along with some instrumental writing playlists.