weekly recs & reviews.

Famesick, DTF St. Louis, Yiddish anarchists, front porch music & more.....

You know the drill. Reading/Watching/Listening recs galore, and some more personal shares below the paywall. If you have steady income and you appreciate my work, I hope you’ll consider supporting this labor! (& Happy May Day weekend!)

READING.

For Feminist Food Journal, Jesse Roth wrote a thorough and thoughtful history of Yiddish anarchism. So much to learn from the successes and failures of the past. It’s a beautifully written must-read piece for anti-Zionist Jews, anarchists, and liberation-minded folks of all types: “From the ashes of these systems, anarchists seek to build a world based on mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, direct action, and collective decision-making. Yiddish anarchism, in particular, came from the Jewish experience of statelessness, of being a diasporic people who always lived (until the invention of “Israel”) outside of and beyond the nation state.”

I very much appreciated The Baffler series on how difficult it is for most writers to earn anything close to a living wage from our words: “A side hustle can be treated as evidence that one has not been ‘successful enough’ with her creative work to survive on it as her sole source of income. In this way, silence conceals from a collective narrative not only the privilege of wealthy writers but also the side hustles that underwrite the creative work of writers who aren’t wealthy, those dubious gigs so many of us have had to do at one point to pay the rent and buy groceries while trying to survive the MFA program, waiting on the late magazine fee, burning through the book advance.”

Kawante Harris’ dispatch from a women’s prison in Texas is a brutal but important read. The title says it all, with a built-in content note: “How Prisons Turn Traumatized Women Into Unpaid Crisis Workers.”

ICYMI, I read and loved Candice Wuehle’s novel Ultranatural, a story of the horrors of rural-poor girlhood and pop star celebrity-dom. It’s a sort of magical realist Britney Spears retelling that begins in Appalachia and ends in a jaw dropping nightmare. Still, it’s got so much heart, and the female friendship that runs throughout is so potent. I talked to Candice about the themes of sex work, patriarchal control, femininized survival strategies, magic, and more— check out our conversation here.

I also read (listened to) Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, and my heart was really full the entire time. I am just two years older than Dunham but I was a solid four years older than her character on Girls, and I remember feeling both significantly older and more politicized than ‘the ladies.’ I scoffed my way through the pilot, unsure I could really watch a show about someone whose parents bank rolled her for two years after college. But I’m so glad I stayed with it because it became one of my absolute favorite shows. Dunham’s sensibility makes me emotional about artists because it’s clear she has something if not innate, then supernatural, of the daimon. Did she have her finger on the pulse of young millennials? Sure, but more magical than that, she had an ability to translate feelings into scenes in a way that makes clear that she moves through the world, like Anaïs Nin says, to live life twice. She is on the lookout, which is to say she is observant, and the best art comes from the auteurs who pay attention. Her memoir is testament to this too; the things she remembers and/or decides to highlight for us are poignant, little flashes of meaning-making from the banal, illuminations of the quiet parts in the extraordinary. (That Bruce Springsteen anecdote!) I often describe “One Man’s Trash”—one of my favorite episodes of Girls—as ‘literary’ and, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘cinemantic’ is a word I’d use to describe her book. None of this is to say that Dunham isn’t still a flawed figure (obviously/aren’t we all), nor that her powerful writing about fame, love, and medical trauma somehow redeems her of her mistakes of the past, but she did give us context, and that counts for something. I loved spending time with it, and I sure did watch that Adam Driver audition clip about a dozen times since.

WATCHING.

I’m still working through the three series with sex work themes that I wrote about last week—Beef, Euphoria, and Margo’s Got Money Trouble—and we didn’t watch any movies this week. Hilariously, the other series on rotation is Hacks, and they also had a sex work storyline in the last episode. It was, hands down, the best narrative yet: they make tons of jokes around the (male) sex worker introduced, but the joke is always on Ava, who is desperately trying to be a Good Ally. (And when the joke shifts to him, it has nothing to do with SW.)

I also realized I never wrote about DTF St. Louis, which I finished a couple weeks ago. I found it absolutely bizarre and loveable. David Harbour was a revelation and Jason Bateman’s go-to quiet-talk thing he does translated so beautifully to this romantic friendship love story. I did think to myself “I think the writers might hate women?” because I struggled a lot with the Linda Cardellini character, and I also did not like the reveal at the end (didn’t buy it!), but other than that, I had so much weird fun with the show. This is a good piece from Alex Schwartz on gender in the show. Did you watch it? Would love to know what you thought!

LISTENING.

I know this might surprise you, but I’ve been listening to….another twangy Americana album. Shocked, I’m sure! This is a brand-new-to-me band that I discovered through their song “Plains of Ohio” that truly sounds like how my heart feels on road trips through the flat cornfields I love so dear. The band is from Cincinnati, comprised of two long-time friends who describe their music as “music for introverted farmers.” It’s dreamy, it’s country, it’s earnest, and it’s going to be on rotation for front porch sittin’ all summer long.

JOY & ATTENTION.