Welcome to Season 8

Hello again. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I’m going to try writing weeknotes, vaguely inspired by Buttondown’s recent return to weeknotes and Gina Trapani’s Note to Self.

In other words, welcome to season 8 😃

I haven’t really been feeling like newslettering this year. I haven’t really been feeling like writing at all, in months. I’ve spent most of the year hard at work on a literary novel (a melodrama about a woman founding a startup, natch), but after three (!) full drafts, I was still unhappy with it.

So I’ve put that novel back into the refrigerator. Not the freezer, mind you, and definitely not the trash bin. Unlike most of my previous manuscripts, there’s a solid chance I return to that novel and those characters someday, even if the form it takes is completely different.

Part of the problem is that I watched the entirety of Twin Peaks: The Return on a flight to Europe. I have a lot of thoughts about the third season of Twin Peaks…

… which I may cover in more detail another time, but more relevantly to this reflection, I appreciated how simply weird and idiosyncratic it was. Lynch and Frost were well aware of the conventions of “prestige TV” — indeed, they created many of them in the first two season of Twin Peaks! — and simply didn’t care to follow them. In fact, they didn’t care to follow the conventions of Western storytelling at all. Instead they wrote a story where one of the major characters has turned into a giant talking tea kettle for no explainable reason. He just is. Keep up.

And, after picking up the pieces of my brain from the floor, I realized I really appreciate those unconventional, hard-to-explain narratives. So why was I working on a melodrama with obvious comp titles and Big Book Club Themes™️ and a plot that made me wince slightly every time someone asked me what I was working on? Why wasn’t I working on a story like my weird haunted hotel novella, my only work I’ve truly loved?

So anyway, that rain of inspiration fell on the seed of an idea (“what if Stephen King’s It but during the pandemic”) and now I’m deep into a first draft of a horror novel.

And I don’t really care if it makes sense or if I publish it or even if I finish it, really. This novel is just for me.

The other part of the problem is that it turns out it’s hard to keep up a writing practice when you’re spending four months traveling every other week and moving at the same time. By the end of summer I was completely burnt out on writing and simply took a few weeks off from any kind of “productivity.” Unfortunately, the newsletter was caught up in that as well.

I’m hoping this light, breezy weeknotes format might help me restart. No need to edit deeply, no need to find “good topics” for a newsletter, just a deadline every Sunday and a week’s worth of experiences to reflect on.

I just came off seeing three (!) movies in a single day, which might be a new record. That included Paul Thomas Anderson’s new One Battle After Another at the AMC Metreon and back-to-back showings of Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and the most baffling film I’ve ever seen, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, at the Roxie.

I have thoughts on all these films, but that’s what Letterboxd reviews are for 😉 But one reflection is a comment Sherry made: it’s really not so hard to watch three movies in a single day when the movies are, y’know, actually good, or at least interesting.

One of the highlights of One Battle After Another is Jonny Greenwood’s score.

Jonny is one of the main members of Radiohead, and I like his solo work almost as much as his work with Radiohead. However, they’ve become slightly controversial lately — as this Pitchfork review of the Hail to the Thief live recordings explains, they’ve never really condemned the genocide in Gaza, leading to an awkward standoff between Thom Yorke and a heckler in Melbourne.

What makes this situation particularly complicated, though, is that Greenwood isn’t just any old Western musician — he’s married to an Israeli woman and clearly has many Israeli friends. That’s not to excuse the actions (or lack thereof) of the band — but it is perhaps understandable why he and his bandmates would be hesitant to say too much. And I’m not sure I can, entirely, blame them. I don’t feel that silence is violence.

We’ll see if I can keep up this weeknotes format next week. In the meantime, happy Mid-Autumn Festival and go have a mooncake.