Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) dir. Céline Sciamma The Florida Project (2017) dir. Sean Baker The Farewell (2019) dir. Lulu Wang Moonlight (2016) dir. Barry Jenkins Little Women (2019) dir. Greta Gerwig God’s Own Country (2017) dir. Francis Lee In the Mood for Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai
Short and sweet, focused on Ruth’s origin as wife of Booz in the lineage that leads to King David. The next book is called 1 Kings so it feels like they’ll finally get to the fireworks factory.
This takes me back about a decade or more to wanting to be a cool and interesting writer with cool and interesting friends. The way these characters live their lives feels so chaotic and carefree, as I tried to be for a hot second.
There are moments where a character might wonder if they should just go home, and I’m like, yes, go home and get outta this situation full of uncertainty and risk, but then I should know better, shouldn’t I? This pairs well with my recent Mitski obsession.
There’s a voice here I hadn’t read for a long time because I was terrified to go back there. I used to ask some people I’d meet (digitally communicate with), “are you real?” Since those mixed up days (are they any different now?), I’ve cut myself off from most communication with most people. Instead, I found a place in reading fiction. All sorts, high-minded lit to comfy-as-a-couch science fiction or horror.
I received the communication from them, these made-up people in made-up scenarios. They didn’t need anything from me. I, naturally, began tracking all these fictional works in lists, because how else would I remember that one story about the time a young woman named Belle Starr held a man at gunpoint and which offered no resolution? That’s been the way of it for going on a decade.
Then I read this collection of short stories, and I couldn’t immediately file it away and move on. I was confident I was reading fiction in the first few stories, clearly satire yeah? But then it starts to get more real, too personal to be made-up. Perhaps drawn from the author’s real life but rearranged to protect the innocent, you know. The momentum then builds as more and more of real life seeps in including some of my own that I try to keep at bay.
London and Los Angeles, police and Grenfell, identity derived from parents and their parents and their parents. It’s a jam. So some fiction and some nonfiction? How have I never run into this before? I researched the author’s work. Some fiction, some nonfiction. Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other. This and that and all of it. I guess some writing just does that to you.
Two Liam Neeson snoozy thrillers in as many months and I wonder who’s clamoring to see these in theaters. This was the better take on an aging assassin thanks to the rest of the cast. A more generous analysis might be, “Under this reading, Neeson’s action movies are about the order whiteness and wealth has imposed on the world, the male sense of entitlement to that order, and the violence lurking beneath it, aimed at anyone who tries to disrupt it.”
Pardon me while I think about how much I love Outer Wilds.
Short and sweet, focused on Ruth’s origin as wife of Booz in the lineage that leads to King David. The next book is called 1 Kings so it feels like they’ll finally get to the fireworks factory.
This takes me back about a decade or more to wanting to be a cool and interesting writer with cool and interesting friends. The way these characters live their lives feels so chaotic and carefree, as I tried to be for a hot second.
There are moments where a character might wonder if they should just go home, and I’m like, yes, go home and get outta this situation full of uncertainty and risk, but then I should know better, shouldn’t I? This pairs well with my recent Mitski obsession.
There’s a voice here I hadn’t read for a long time because I was terrified to go back there. I used to ask some people I’d meet (digitally communicate with), “are you real?” Since those mixed up days (are they any different now?), I’ve cut myself off from most communication with most people. Instead, I found a place in reading fiction. All sorts, high-minded lit to comfy-as-a-couch science fiction or horror.
I received the communication from them, these made-up people in made-up scenarios. They didn’t need anything from me. I, naturally, began tracking all these fictional works in lists, because how else would I remember that one story about the time a young woman named Belle Starr held a man at gunpoint and which offered no resolution? That’s been the way of it for going on a decade.
Then I read this collection of short stories, and I couldn’t immediately file it away and move on. I was confident I was reading fiction in the first few stories, clearly satire yeah? But then it starts to get more real, too personal to be made-up. Perhaps drawn from the author’s real life but rearranged to protect the innocent, you know. The momentum then builds as more and more of real life seeps in including some of my own that I try to keep at bay.
London and Los Angeles, police and Grenfell, identity derived from parents and their parents and their parents. It’s a jam. So some fiction and some nonfiction? How have I never run into this before? I researched the author’s work. Some fiction, some nonfiction. Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other. This and that and all of it. I guess some writing just does that to you.
Two Liam Neeson snoozy thrillers in as many months and I wonder who’s clamoring to see these in theaters. This was the better take on an aging assassin thanks to the rest of the cast. A more generous analysis might be, “Under this reading, Neeson’s action movies are about the order whiteness and wealth has imposed on the world, the male sense of entitlement to that order, and the violence lurking beneath it, aimed at anyone who tries to disrupt it.”
