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Catching Up: June 2-22

Catching Up: June 2-22
Benicio del Toro in Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme

Travel and some family obligations (a great birthday party for my daughter and taking the kids to their first Yankee game were highlights) kept me from writing these last couple of weeks, and it felt strange filling people's inboxes with an update like that so I neglected to inform anyone of my brief hiatus. I'm open to feedback on this, and if it would make things easier in any way for readers of this newsletter and blog I'll be happy to send an explanation in the future if I'm not going to make a weekly deadline. Sorry for any confusion.

Looking over the collection of items below, I can see that my interest in how stories are put together is growing. I dream of writing a novel someday, and while it feels overwhelming to consider, I'm hoping a lot of what I've taken in these past few weeks will ultimately help me complete that task someday. Then again, it's entirely possible that I'm once more distracting myself with the theory and details of a thing rather than actually doing the thing...

Books

  • Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod (started): After hearing Mod talk with Tim Ferris, I hunted down a copy of this and dove straight in. It's meditative and measured, beautifully written, and insightful, and I've started to ration my reading of it to maintain its sense of calm in my life.
  • The Shining, by Stephen King (finished): By time we hit the halfway mark of this, it's fully become a haunted house story and it really hits its stride. The moments of suspense/horror aren't those that make it into the movie version (particularly those damn hedge animals), and while the sense of foreboding generally gave way to action it maintained a sense of dread throughout. Holds up well.
  • Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball (read): Recommended by my buddy Andy, Ball gives very direct and opinionated instruction on how to understand the action of plays (and, thus, how to write them - or act in them or stage them...) It's not an approach I've taken before, and as I'm trying to learn more about how plot works it's been a helpful lens to apply. Short and not always so sweet, but eye-opening to me.
  • Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard by C.M. Kushins (started): I love Leonard's writing, and my book club has decided to tackle this for our next meeting. Peppered throughout with information about Leonard's philosophy on writing and full of details about how he put his stories together for both the page and the screen, I'm loving this so far. I'm not sure it would stand up well against the gaze of a non-fan, but happily that doesn't apply in my case.
  • The Wedding People by Alison Espach (finished): While I feel like the actual suicide plot was dropped rather quickly, I really enjoyed Espach's novel. Great dialogue and far more humor than I was expecting.

Music

  • Graceland by Paul Simon: I bought a copy of this on vinyl for my wife, and it's one of the Perfect Albums in my life. Instant beauty.
  • "Orange Juice" by Stanley Brinks and the Wave Pictures: I found this through a Bluesky post by Andy Miller, and I immediately loved it. I've seen someone else on that platform talk about Hall of Fame Patio albums, and this is exactly what I want to hear while sitting on the patio in the backyard with a beer in hand.

Perfectly up my alley

Articles and Episodes

"As with any good detective story, the reader cascades through a series of misapprehensions that snap away like trapdoors, prompting a delicious sense of free fall as one assumed reality yields to another. Finally, Emma and the reader arrive at the biggest surprise of all: the answer to a mystery we didn’t realize were trying to solve until the moment of discovery.
"The biography of today recoils from stuffing its subject into a straitjacket of interpretation, with all contradictions smoothly reconciled into a unified self. Instead we find an emphasis on the fragility and provisionality of identity, on performance, on motive being mysterious and many-tentacled."

I can't help but read every other biography in the shadow of The Power Broker, and I miss the sense that every chapter has a point to be made, an understanding that these events play an important part in understanding the subject rather than simply occurring at a point in time that comes after the previous chapter. Perhaps it's better that biographers have moved away from certainty and interpretation, but isn't that what differentiates a biography from an entry in the encylopedia?

  • "Hot n Early" Erasable Podcast Episode 226: One of the hosts is missing from this one, and thus we mostly get a straightforward look at the new Blackwings.
  • Brandon Sanderson interviewed by Tim Ferris and Promise, Payoff, and Plot from Sanderson's lectures on writing fantasy: I really liked Sanderson's take on writers as "gardeners" vs. "architects." The way he talked about plot structure and common beats led me to his lectures, which are fascinating (even if you don't care about fantasy). I love listening to people who have thought really deeply on a topic.

    In all the years I taught English, I only talked about plot structure (i.e., "storytelling") in terms of the five-act structure and occasionally a three-act structure. I wonder now if I was only giving access to half the picture at best. Ultimately, I taught kids how to find meaning together, and spending some more time on our expectations of stories might have really helped them both then and later on in their lives.
  • Geoff Dyer, The Art of Nonfiction No. 6 in The Paris Review: I love how Dyer confounds genre expectations, and here he is before the first question is even complete:
"Excuse me for interrupting, but—at the risk of sounding like some war criminal in the Hague who refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court in which he’s being tried—I have to object to the parameters of this interview ... Fiction, nonfiction—the two are bleeding into each other all the time."
  • "In the Age of the Algorithm Roots Music is Rising" by Carlo Rotella in The New York Times: Charlie Crockett, Billy Strings, and Chris Thile are the first three names dropped in this piece, and they're three of my favorites. Each are different from the others, but if you want an easy entry point, try "I Can Help."
  • Stick S01:E01-5: It's pretty overtly Ted Lasso plays golf, but Owen Wilson is kicking Owen Wilson charm and I've been enjoying it.

Movies

  • The Phoenician Scheme: I have loved Wes Anderson's films in the past, and I wonder if he's left me behind at this point in his work. As his movies have become still more refined/distilled/artificial, I've started to lose the sense of heart that used to be undeniably at their center. I'm not sure I really understood The Phoenician Scheme, to be clear, and I still don't know if we were meant to take the remorse of Benicio del Toro's Zsa Zsa Korda seriously. He's a direct descendant of Royal Tenenbaum, but in the intervening years it's as if the facade has overtaken the heartwood. Maybe this is just my own limitation, though, and I missed something important – I'm looking forward to watching it again.
  • A Complete Unknown: I'll still take Todd Haynes' I'm Not There as the more interesting take on Dylan, but I enjoyed this take far more than I thought I would. I'm not totally sure how I feel about how this film handles the idea that Dylan is constantly in flux and doesn't want to be tied down – he never says it himself, but plenty of other characters voice it for him in no uncertain terms – but I did like the tension between what he owed those who helped him upon his arrival in New York and what he wanted to become. The Seeger/Guthrie dichotomy was great in this regard and was somehow one of the more understated elements in the film.
  • Pee Wee's Big Adventure: A key movie of my childhood, shared with my kids who might have laughed only because they knew how much I loved it. (Bless them.) I think of this movie all the time.

Published by:

EP Campbell

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