Shabbat
Reading List

Josh Lambert (contributor): I’m not proud of it, but I initially resisted picking up Elizabeth Graver’s Kantika, released in April, because it was giving off such try-hard vibes. Marketing postcards, publicity emails, and review copies started showing up on my desk and in my inbox about a year ago, none of them subtle about presenting this book as the Sephardic novel we have all been waiting for. As a professor of American Jewish literature, I’m often asked to recommend novels of Sephardic life in the US, and I knew I would be delighted to have another to add to that not-especially-long list. But the title (“song” in Ladino), the cover (tilework evoking the East), the blurbs (“a gripping story of twentieth-century Sephardic exile and reinvention”), the dedication (“in memory of my grandmother”), the epigraph (from a “Ladino proverb”), the archival family photos at the beginning of each chapter—it all left me feeling a bit exhausted, and made me worried that this “multigenerational saga” rooted in family history would be too straightforwardly made-to-order.

The book’s first chapters, set in Turkey, Spain, and Cuba, didn’t entirely allay those concerns. Though skillfully and movingly told, they did check all the boxes I was expecting. The novel really came to life for me in its last third, as it turned, unexpectedly, into the intimate story of a mother raising a disabled stepdaughter. This, too, is based on Graver’s family lore—her aunt Luna Leibowitz wrote charmingly about life with cerebral palsy for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel—but Graver takes us into the consciousness of a kid with a disability, and the stepmother who has to overcome prejudices to care for her, with such sharpness and insight that it made me want to recommend the book to everyone I know.

I also started out a little skeptical of Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, published in March. I’ve admired Novey’s fiction and essays before, but when I opened this novel up to find it was alternating between two voices, chapter to chapter, I got worried. (You can blame my annoyance with that structure, and whatever else is bothering you, on Jonathan Safran Foer.) And I didn’t feel especially eager to learn more about the estranged relations between Leah, a somewhat indistinct (and possibly autofictional) woman living in New York, and Jean, her sort-of-stepmother who “never left the town where she was born . . . in the Southern Allegheny Mountains.” As I kept reading, I found bits here and there that drew me in: Jean, who has just died when the novel begins and narrates much of it in flashbacks, was an outsider artist who spent her final years constructing large metal towers, taking inspiration from Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and Diane Arbus, as well as her Jewish family’s history in the scrap metal business. But other aspects of the story felt a bit pat—Jean, an idiosyncratic thinker living in a red state, befriended a neighbor kid and, guess what, there were some political and socioeconomic differences that may or may not have been overcome by an interpersonal bond.

I kept going, though, and when I reached the climactic scene, it bowled me over. It’s the chapter when Leah finally enters Jean’s house and sees the art she had been working on for all those years. It turns out that everything we’ve learned about Leah and Jean has been supplied so we have the complete context not just for how the art looks and why it was made, but also for all the emotions and history that Leah brings to bear when she encounters it, including the anxiety she feels when her son runs too quickly around it, ignoring her warnings. (That resonated; the one constant feature of my own museum visits over the past decade has been balancing my attempts to appreciate what I’m experiencing with my fear that one of my kids might bump into something and destroy it forever.) Reading this passage, I thought back to that moment at the beginning of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station when the narrator says that he “worried that [he] was incapable of having a profound experience of art.” Novey’s novel works overtime to remind us all, quite reassuringly, that we do have that capacity.

Cynthia Friedman (operations manager): Every few months, a friend of mine hosts a salon where she invites loved ones and their friends to share in-progress creative projects. The offerings have ranged widely since I started attending. People have presented many varieties of musical arrangements (acapella, guitar, electronic); poetry, family history, and cultural criticism; drawings and photography; and even a temperature quilt. At the last salon I attended, my friend Hallel gave a PowerPoint presentation on her then-forthcoming, now published, zine, Park Slop: A Walking Tour.

The title is a play on the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, known today for its upscale shops and the affluent young couples who frequent them, strollers in tow. The project commemorates the area’s past life as a hub for lesbian community and political organizing between the 1970s and early 2000s by chronicling notable or representative locations from that era, organized into ten themes. Hallel, an archivist by trade, provides information on the significance of each location (including small details, like the recipe for one restaurant’s mocktails) alongside a photograph of each site in its current state. The themes range from the concrete, like nightlife and parenthood, to the abstract, such as self-segregation and memory. Yet even in the more archetypical travel guide categories, the information is not always what one would expect. The section on parenthood features the Dykes & Tykes East Coast Lesbian Mothers Defense Fund and their community events in Prospect Park; the one on worship acknowledges the often fraught intersections between religious institutions and queer constituents—while also documenting examples of churches that hosted HIV support groups or organizing meetings. Only two of the ten profiled institutions remain active—Ginger’s Bar and the Lesbian Herstory Archives—while the rest of the featured buildings are now nondescript private residences or storefronts. The zine doesn’t aim to be exhaustive; as Hallel writes in the introduction, “It does not contain every possible address where dyke shit went down, which would be impossible to compile, especially given the historically private nature of lesbian social life. The goal is to catalog a critical mass of addresses that gives a sense of the lifeblood of Dyke Slope,” as it was affectionately called.

The project is thoroughly researched and, in classic zine fashion, wonderfully DIY. Channeling the commitment to accessibility of those who inspired the project, the whole thing is available for pay-what-you-wish download (you can enter $0 for a free copy). If you’re interested in queer history, Brooklyn history, or the practice of remembering layers of the past beneath the streets we traverse now, you’ll learn a lot.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Many years ago, when I was reading and loving Henry Petoski’s great history of my favorite writing implement, the pencil, my then-girlfriend saw the book, shook her head, and said, “Only you, Mitch. Only you.” The brilliance of Petoski’s study is in its careful attention to all that has gone into creating the pencil as we know it, both technically and historically. Who thinks about the fact that just the right wood and lead material had to be found to give us a usable object, or knows that Eberhard Faber pencils—with their yellow body and black band around the eraser bracket—were modeled on the German flag? The things we take for granted around us make for some of the most interesting books.

A great recent example of such a work is Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise, which has gotten me enthused about—and pontificating on—a subject we seldom think of as having world-historical significance: parking. While all drivers have worried about finding a spot, most rarely consider the social inequity involved in turning our streets over to the storage of other people’s personal property. This surrender of the commons is bad enough, but as Grabar definitively proves, it’s far from the worst aspect of our focus on parking our cars. In his compelling account, which leans heavily on Donald Shoup’s classic The High Cost of Free Parking, the central ill of parking is that city codes have long required the provision of absurd numbers of spots for every house, apartment building, store, and office complex. These minimums vastly increase the amount of space required for any new commercial building or private dwelling. In many cases, this adds so much to the price of a construction project that it’s never completed—or if it is, the cost is ultimately added onto rents and sales prices. Our fixation on parking has fueled the housing shortage and thus the homelessness crisis.

The numbers show that there is way too much parking in America. New York has three million spaces; Philadelphia, 2.2 million (3.7 spots for every household); the Bay Area, 15 million, which is 2.4 for each car and, Grabar writes, “enough to wrap a parking lane around the planet twice and still have some left over.” The idea that there aren’t enough available spots because we can’t find one where and when we want is the equivalent of Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe bringing a snowball into the Senate as proof that global warming is a myth. To bring his data and analysis to life, Grabar tells—and tells well—numerous stories of business and housing disasters caused by parking requirements. We also learn about fiascos like the time the city of Chicago sold its parking meters to a private firm; then-Mayor Richard Daley claimed the move would result in a two billion dollar windfall, but it drained the city’s coffers instead.

When those of you in New York see cars parked in unmetered spots, you should think of this insight from Grabar: If every spot had a meter, then the revenue produced from making people pay for the storage of their property would enable free mass transit. Not a bad idea.

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): If you’re looking for an exercise in poor taste executed to deranged perfection, consider The Ruling Class, the 1972 film British playwright Peter Barnes adapted from his play by the same name. It’s the story of Jack Gurney, 14th Earl of Gurney—his upper-class family’s last, best hope in hanging onto its estate, social standing, and political power after the 13th earl accidentally takes his own life in an act of unintended (perhaps autoerotic) self-asphyxiation. The trouble is that this earl, a paranoid schizophrenic who believes himself to be Jesus Christ, has been living in an institution for some time. Facing a continuity crisis, his family decides to let him loose upon the world, leaving us to watch him preach, determinedly, a gospel of love, love, and love, as per the times.

Much of the plot revolves around the extended Gurney clan’s attempts to dissuade Jack of his delusions (in a particularly inconvenient turn, he at one point disavows his previous claim to be the messiah, deciding instead that he is actually Jack the Ripper) and pair him off with his uncle’s mistress in hopes of having him produce a more acceptable heir. Suffice it to say, the family finds Jack’s charismatic mania and belief in the “power of love” to be formidable obstacles, throwing a wrench or two into their devious little scheme. Does Jack know he’s being used? Does he really think he’s God? Two-thirds of the way into the film, I thought I had an answer. (Writing this now, it occurs to me it all sounds like the plot of a vintage Eddie Murphy film or perhaps a vehicle for Adam Sandler.) But the final 20 minutes plunges you into a nightmare that suggests the poorly-bred rabble—those who, in Jack’s words after he’s undergone something of a “class re-education” regimen—are “sapping the foundations of . . . society with their adultery and fornication! The barbarians . . . waiting outside with chaos, anarchy, homosexuality, and worse”—can and must be contained by force if necessary, and perhaps even when not entirely necessary.

Peter O’Toole as Jack Gurney is alternately terrifying, heart-breaking, and hilarious; you, the viewer, are never quite prepared for his explosive histrionics, and neither seem to be his colleagues on screen. Hysteria aside, O’Toole clearly grasps that the only way to land the laughs (and the shocked gasps) is to play it straight. His inflections and overladen gestures lampoon the classic British stage acting tradition—his own background, really—and his relish for language and rhythm, not to mention his pure delight in hidden meanings and reversals, charmed me, but they may test your patience.

Like O’Toole’s performance, the movie has a lot going on—again, for some, perhaps too much: the breathtaking poetry of the language, rapid-fire exchanges loaded with Wildean subtext (One exchange: Jack’s Uncle: “We’re just talking about you and the subject of marriage. We think you should take a wife. Jack: “Who from?”), a Communist butler who DGAF anymore, short, inexplicable song-and-dance numbers, almost Expressionistic camera work that utilizes high angles and dizzying pans to capture the sinister decadence of the Gurney home, and extreme closeups to inspect the pasty contours of their well-bred faces.

Peter Medak, the director, never misses an opportunity to skewer the landed aristocracy and its ossified, hypocritical sense of piety. There’s an anarchic quality to the movie that recalls Monty Python: a politics less of ”down with the Tories, up with Labour” and more “we are a ridiculous people, are we not?” The movie seems to want to seize a certain political and cultural moment: postwar, pre-Thatcher Britain, which saw a generation coming of age, questioning the old ways and the relevance of the upper class. But it does so without ever deluding itself about the entrenched nature of British aristocracy and the absurdity of its traditions and apparent values. The film has haunted me since seeing it. A fine outcome, in my view—top marks.

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Last weekend, I took my colleague Mitch Abidor’s advice and went to see The Mother and the Whore, French director Jean Eustache’s close study of the last days of the 1968 generation’s idealism, with a group of friends. We didn’t know quite what we were getting ourselves into: It was only after purchasing tickets that we realized the film is an eye-popping three hours and forty minutes. But as Mitch writes, The Mother and the Whore is a work of “genius”—one that, while challenging to complete in a single sitting, was still enrapturing enough to prevent me from leaving the theater once between 6 and 10 pm.

The film is meandering and fairly plotless, following the emotional rhythms of jobless dandy Alexandre’s affair with a young nurse, Veronika, and the disastrous impact it has on his relationship with his live-in girlfriend and sponsor, Marie. The film takes a pointedly conservative stance on the freedoms (personal, professional, sexual) afforded to women as feminism gained political ground, with Alexandre declaring to another jobless (male) friend early in the runtime that you can’t tell the difference between a bourgeoise and a working girl, a nurse and a socialite—all women are the same now! Indeed, a reactionary undercurrent runs through the film’s drama, but I couldn’t help but empathize with Alexandre, who believes wholeheartedly in what ’68 could have been—and still, full of awe, recalls sitting in cafés among the working people the general strike sought to lift up—only to return, again and again, to the fact that all of the political grandstanding of the time has failed to deliver on its promises. (One of the most memorable back-and-forths of the film unfolds when Alexandre and the aforementioned jobless friend spot Sartre in the corner of Les Deux Magots, the intellectual watering hole of the day. They whisper to Veronika, with palpable glee, that he’s a total drunkard and a fake, claiming that he brings his own barrel to stand atop when he talks to working men.)

Alexandre is preoccupied with frauds, dupes, and liars—and implicitly, authenticity. In one of his monologues, he wishes that he could be like the men in cafés who sit around repeating the words of others. Later in the same scene, he abruptly turns on his radio to tune into “the Sunrise Preacher,” a booming Catholic priest who declares on his early morning show that contemporary society is full of lazy and licentious people, and that we should all take to an honest, traditional life. Alexandre tells Veronika that he loves the preacher, whose apparently authentic shtick never bores him.

Where the film was previously at least somewhat subtle, it takes an explicit turn in the final forty minutes, as it hones in on the supposed antidote to society’s collapsed social and sexual standards and total lack of political possibility: the traditional family. In an aching, minutes-long close-up, Veronika sobs, essentially, about how much it sucks to be poly and how the only way to live a truly decent life is to become a wife. This emotional marathon of a film ends with a proposal. For all of the film’s artistic transgression—and its truly funny, eccentric side characters whose lives lead nowhere—I was taken by the finality of its dramatic resolution. One more reaction, perhaps, against the current of its day: all those indeterminate New Wave fade-outs from a generation before.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Umberto Eco – A Library of the World, a new documentary that opens today at New York’s Film Forum, begins with Eco—the Italian novelist and semiotician who died in 2016—walking through his personal library, with its 1200 rare books and 30,000 contemporary works. The camera tracks his motion through the collection, showing us the volumes all neatly aligned on their shelves. There before me was the image of heaven.

For the film’s 80 minutes, my wife and I were as enchanted as if we were watching . . . well, I don’t know what would compare to this. Throughout the film, director Davide Ferrario intercuts scenes of magnificent libraries from around the world—some stately, with old-fashioned wooden shelves and card catalogs, others more modern and austere in their beauty. By the end, I realized that a documentary showing nothing but books on shelves would almost be enough for me.

However, Umberto Eco is a loving meditation not just on the book as object, but also on its title subject, who is featured through pieces of interviews, TV appearances, and talks from over the course of his celebrated career. It is Eco’s account of his own library that makes sense of his eclectic collection, which boasts sections on alchemy, esotericism, and the 17th-century German polymath Athanasius Kircher. His main interest, we learn, was in false ideas and those who think them up. His library thus omits Galileo, who was right, but includes Ptolemy, who developed an entire theory of the universe that held together perfectly, yet was absolutely wrong. That, for Eco, is far more interesting than a worldview that conforms to reality. Much like Borges, whom he often invokes in the film, Eco was also attracted to the odd and obscure. Who among us has heard of the French work Le Chef d’oeuvre d’un inconnu (The Masterpiece of an Unknown Man, not to be confused with Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece”)? In Eco’s library you can find this fascinating, pseudonymous 18th-century work, which opens with a two-page popular ditty—carefully transcribed, along with its music—before unfolding into 300 pages of analysis of this simple love song. Who needs Pale Fire?

Films like this, in praise of an individual subject, are almost always disappointing in their exaggerated claims, or suffer from the nullity of the things the subject says. (I’m thinking in particular of every film about Leonard Cohen, in which a second’s reflection on his supposed profundities reveals that everything he utters is hollow and meaningless.) But Eco’s words here never fail to please: Every phrase that comes out of his mouth is aphoristic, yet never pretentious or ponderous. How can we argue when, for instance, he declares that hate, rather than love, is the great universal sentiment? (Love, he explains, is directed at a person and craves exclusivity, while we can expend hatred on anyone and everyone.) All of his quotes are the priceless gems of a writer and thinker who was truly alive, a condition he equated with “being intellectually curious.” The joy of thought can sometimes make you tingle; Umberto Eco – A Library of the World inspires frissons of delight from beginning to end.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): After the recent season finale of Yellowjackets and series conclusion of Succession, I went in search of some new high production value drama to fill the void and happened upon From, a much-less-covered series currently streaming on MGM+. (If, like me, you didn’t know that was even a thing, you can get a seven-day free trial, or find the first season on Amazon Prime.) Despite its wildly inconsistent performances and consistently mediocre writing, the show masterfully produces an atmosphere of dread I’ve found absorbing and irresistible. From follows the population of an unnamed American town whose residents have gradually and mysteriously arrived from across the country—and are unable to escape. Continuing along the road that brought them there only leads them right back to the town in an inexplicable loop. To make matters worse, the area is plagued by nocturnal monsters who eviscerate anyone outside after dark. Kept at bay by talismans hung in all the buildings, the creatures, which assume human form until they attack, prowl outside windows and try to trick the townspeople into letting them in. (Warning for those with weak stomachs: When they succeed, the camera does not hide the gory results.)

This compelling but simple nightmare premise is just the beginning. As perplexing as its impossible-to-Google and so far unexplained title, From piles on layer after layer of mystery, from a supernatural force inciting intracommunal violence to trees capable of teleporting objects or people. The show, which concludes its second season next week, is much more interested in generating questions than answering them, prompting comparisons to Lost and fear among viewers that there will never be satisfactory explanations. (The shows share producers as well as one star, Harold Perrineau, who is excellent as the town’s self-appointed sheriff and de facto mayor.) It’s a fair concern, especially as the second season has lost some of the momentum of the first. But personally, I don’t really mind if the puzzles simply continue to accrue. Just keep the spooky vibes coming.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): It’s been a huge month in UFOs. Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the team that brought military videos of UFOs to the front page of The New York Times in 2017, broke a story on June 5th in The Debrief about former intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower with top secret clearance named David Grusch who claims that covert programs within the Pentagon “possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin,” “based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.” (!!!!!!!!) It is well worth reading this long article all the way through. (Kean says it was initially going to be in The Washington Post, but their vetting process was taking too long for Grusch, who was already facing threats and reprisals for his whistleblowing.) Grusch, backed up by a number of high level intelligence officials (some of whom speak on record in the piece), claims that these covert programs lack the proper oversight and are illegally keeping this knowledge from Congress. Another intelligence official with top secret clearance—whose work is so secretive he literally works under an alias at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC)—said: “The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone.” “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.” (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

At this point, Grusch has provided hundreds of pages of testimony during a Congressional inquiry devoted to investigating the claims he made in Kean and Blumenthal’s article. In an interview on the Ezra Klein show earlier this week, Kean said that as a result of this testimony, Congress has access to details that Grusch could not release to the press because of national security concerns. Kean and Klein speculated about whether we might get this yet-to-be shared information as this investigation works its way through Congress, whose staffers are a bit more “leaky” than those at the Pentagon. The entire interview with Kean is also worth a full listen: Klein is intrigued but skeptical and asks Kean thoughtful questions. If all of this is really true, how have these programs been able to keep everything under wraps for so long? Why would the Pentagon sign off on Grusch revealing this information? Do the people who approved the publicity think the revelations are false? Do they even have full knowledge of the programs within their own purview? Indeed, this last question is key to their discussion, and what it suggests about the nature and structure of the intelligence apparatus is serious conspiratorial deep state shit right out of X-Files.

I love listening to Kean on this; she’s such a great representative for the rational UFO community. She never tries to undermine the legitimacy of Klein’s questions; she says straightforwardly what she does and doesn’t know—more often the latter. But what she does know is that these are real intelligence officials with high levels of clearance involved in super secretive programs dedicated to UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena, the new “respectable” term for UFOS). “Maybe after it’s investigated it’ll come to light that none of it is true,” she tells Klein, but she wants that investigation.

Before you make a decision about what you believe, listen to Kean’s interview with Klein. Something is happening. Everyone publicly affiliated with these programs has finished their work convinced of that. It’s time to put away the idea that UFOs are just for kooks and listen to the experts.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When Jean Eustache’s film The Mother and the Whore was released in 1973, it immediately became a defining work of post-1968 French and international cinema. In its sexual frankness, its unflinching portrayals of its main characters, and its refusal of high moral or political values, it set a new aesthetic template. But despite its acclaim and influence, it has been difficult to find and is seldom screened, due to problems with distribution and rights ownership. Now, in honor of its 50th anniversary, and thanks to the indispensable Janus Films, The Mother and the Whore has been restored and is headlining a Eustache retrospective at Lincoln Center, featuring the small corpus he left behind when he died by suicide in 1981.

The Mother and the Whore, which opens today and will be screened dozens of times between now and July 13th, is painfully autobiographical, based in part on Eustache’s relationship with actress Françoise Lebrun, who appears in the film as a promiscuous nurse named Veronika (the titular “whore”). French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud stars as Alexandre, who mooches off his lover Marie (the “mother”), played by Bernadette Lafont, another major New Wave figure. It is a very Parisian film, with Alexandre spending much of his time in the famed café Les Deux Magots reading Proust—which, he explains, he treats like a job—while friends recount cynical tales of stealing wheelchairs. It is precisely because the film avoids the political militancy of its time that it has aged so well: On this viewing, at least my tenth, I was still stunned by its genius.

While The Mother and the Whore is singularly revelatory, the other films in the retrospective fill out the picture of Eustache and his world. He was a child of small-town France (what’s known as “La France profonde”), and most of his works are accounts of life there. Numéro Zéro presents nothing but the filmmaker’s beloved grandmother, who partially raised him, telling her life story, a tale of sorrow and misery that mirrors France’s. Eustache made two versions of the documentary The Virgin of Pessac—one in 1968, the other in 1979—which are set in one of the towns he grew up in near Bordeaux and document an annual contest to name the “most virtuous” young woman. Viewed together, the films form a kind of history of France as it existed before, during, and after May ’68, and a look at the persistence of tradition. Eustache’s final major film, My Little Loves, is also set in Pessac, as well as his childhood town of Narbonne, and recounts his childhood discovery of desire, disappointment, and the love of cinema. The retrospective’s other offerings include two medium-length films being shown together, Robinson’s Place and Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, which most plainly exhibit the cynical view of women and sexual relations that we can glimpse throughout Eustache’s oeuvre.

Eustache retrospectives are a rare occurrence—Lincoln Center last had one about 20 years ago—so this is an event not to be missed. Now that his films are in the hands of Janus Films, we can hope they will soon finally be available for home viewing and in cinemas across the country.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): In the introduction to Getting Lost, a collection of diaries documenting a love affair she had in 1989, the French novelist Annie Ernaux writes that she chose to publish her journals when she returned to the diaries years later and found that they captured “something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.” The resulting book, translated into English for the first time last year by Allison L. Strayer, records the writer’s single-minded obsession with a mysterious Russian diplomat named S. That S., as the diaries describe him, is not particularly compelling, nor deep, nor charming is unimportant; what matters is the effect he has on Ernaux: that she longs for him at every moment of every day, lives only for the ring of the phone, her mood dictated only by his presence or absence.

It’s not always easy to stare this total monomania directly in the face. Ernaux reproduces the text of her diaries without any annotation, the desire unadulterated by hindsight, and the force of this passion is almost illegible to anyone not in its grasp. Even Ernaux herself eventually loses the ability to inhabit the diaries’ state in mind, as she notes in the introduction: Visiting Russia a decade later, she “no longer cared whether [S.] was alive or dead.” In the diaries, she’s aware this will eventually happen, and that it will both restore her sanity and result in a loss of feeling and perspective. That’s why it’s so important to record an emotional experience as it comes to pass. To “see things with more distance,” as she writes in the diary, will be to “become incapable of writing what I’m writing here, of being attentive to these shifts of feeling inside people . . . provoked by passion, desire, and jealousy.” Indeed, for Ernaux, the affair was its own artistic pursuit. Though she writes that her absorption in it drained her interest in the writerly achievements and publishing industry gossip that preoccupy her colleagues, the experience seems to bring her closer to the act of writing; “I have lived out this passion in the same way I write, with the same commitment.”

It becomes clear over the course of the diaries that their intensity represents Ernaux’s desire not just for an unnamed man but for an organizing principle of life itself. To wait by the phone may be excruciating, but it’s still something to do and to live for. “How am I going to live without hope, without waiting?” she wonders as she anticipates S.’s departure. His imminent absence is described as death, emptiness, the abyss. Which means that his presence is a simple opportunity to “live for the sake of living,” to experience “pure life.”

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Last week, I dutifully schlepped up to Lincoln Center and white-knuckled it through Blue Jean, British director Georgia Oakley’s debut feature about the consumptive paranoia of Jean Newman, a lesbian gym teacher in Thatcher-era Newcastle. Maggie sets the stage in the film’s opening scenes, intoning on the radio about Section 28, a new prohibition on the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. Jean, freshly divorced from her ex-husband and a new fixture of the one-bar-town’s queer scene, finds herself overwhelmed and isolated by the prospect of losing her job if the thick layer of hairspray coating her boyish bob and her punk girlfriend draw too much attention.

I’m putting it a little facetiously. I was, truthfully, blown away by Blue Jean’s narrative delicacy, which treats plot points that could have landed as eye-rollingly familiar beats of a lesbian period drama with new emotional resonance. Much of that is a credit to Rosy McEwen’s performance as Jean, which, while stony-faced, is full of depth and intention. The film’s exploration of how ambient political stress damages people—and leads them to bad personal choices—lifts it out of the category of low-calorie representational fare.

Oakley, who also wrote the film, has mentioned that her research for the script included interviewing a handful of lesbian gym teachers who worked while Section 28 was in effect. This commitment to documenting the world these women created for themselves deserves credit for breathing new life into some tired genre tropes. (Lovers of the indie lesbian limited-release will recognize these: the more comfortably out partner who feels boxed in by her lover’s discomfort; the well-meaning co-workers who want to know why their closeted colleague just won’t come for the after-hours drink; the tacitly disapproving biological family who wish their daughter/sister/aunt would grow her hair back out; and a cameo for The Well of Loneliness, which made me groan).

But it is Jean’s distant, strained relationship with Lois, a student who is herself suspected of being queer, that represents the film’s real departure from a certain genre peer group. Jean, in effect, refuses to mentor Lois, and a climactic moment of betrayal between the two characters turns what could have been flat, easy fan service into the film’s raison d’être. Without revealing too much, Jean simply cannot meet the political and personal demands placed on her, and in operating from a place of self-preservation and gnawing anxiety, she fails to protect Lois. The scene precipitates a synthesis for Jean: in a short redemption arc that plays out less simply than it sounds, she attempts to make amends with her former student and the community members she’s alienated over the course of the film.

I was refreshed, though run emotionally ragged, by how Blue Jean refuses to be a canned coming out story or coming-of-age affair. As the film’s plodding, careful political aspirations came into view, I realized just how worth the schlep it was.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Mark Cousins’s The March on Rome is an impressive, detailed, and necessary analysis of the original fascism. Movies about Germany’s imitation and ultimate surpassing of Mussolini’s regime are many; films that look closely at Italian fascism’s rise and its legacy are far fewer. Cousins approaches the subject through a dissection of a 44-minute propaganda film from 1922, titled A Noi! (To Us!). This film, full of fakery and deception, is a depiction of the March on Rome of October 1922, in which the National Fascist Party took power. It’s of next to no interest cinematically, but Cousins sees its content and technique as perfect representations of the fascist ideology. Examining key scenes moment by moment, he demonstrates how shots portraying the supposedly huge masses of marching Neopolitan fascists were framed to make the crowds look larger. Cousins also reveals how shots that seem to show the Blackshirts’ entry into Rome are actually reenactments; their real arrival, which occurred under a downpour, would have been insufficiently heroic. Fascism was a fraud from its first moments.

The March on Rome covers much ground beyond the march itself: the backroom deals that allowed Mussolini to become head of the government, the ways he manipulated crowds, Italy’s wars and imperialist crimes in Africa, and the people’s eventual disgust with the regime they had so faithfully supported for over 20 years. But Cousins doesn’t only consider fascism in the past. Throughout the film we see buildings, statues, and plazas in Rome that still bear fascist symbols or slogans; it’s a tremendously effective way to show the ideology’s tenacious hold. Far less successful are the film’s final ten minutes, in which Cousins explores contemporary instances of what he considers fascism, from Hungary to Brazil to France to the United States. While this coda is totally superfluous, the rest of the film is required viewing.

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Last weekend, after years of insistent recommendations from labor organizer friends and ahead of the annual Boston Dyke March, I decided to finally watch Pride. I had missed enough union movie nights over the years to have a vague idea of what the 2014 film was about: the true story of queer activists supporting the UK miners’ strike in the 1980s in a show of capital-s Solidarity.

Indeed, within minutes of the action starting, the film’s gay protagonist, Mark Ashton (based on a real-life activist by the same name), gives a speech that could be taught in Labor 101 classes to outline why solidarity matters. In conversation with his queer friends, Ashton notes that cops haven’t been harassing them lately—but it’s only because they’re too busy harassing miners. Solidarity, then, is not born of empathy for a completely separate cause, but a recognition that all struggles are connected. Fueled by this realization, Ashton spends nearly the entirety of the film’s run time convincing his fellow queer activists that the miners’ fight was also theirs (although his dedication to the cause might’ve been more believable had the movie not erased his communist credentials).

I admit I went into the film jaded. Years of labor organizing have made me suspicious of stories of solidarity, which can act as a kind of escapist fantasy—telling the weary organizer that even though she spends most days getting doors slammed in her face, there is light at the end of the tunnel. But if Pride is an escapist fantasy, it is an excellent one, really capturing the allure of unlikely alliances. There’s a quick montage of queer activists struggling to find miners who will accept their help, but after only a few slammed phone receivers, they find an open-minded miner who warmly invites them down to his Welsh village to thank them for their strike-fund donations. Once in Wales, the queer activists face some bigotry, but they quickly win many of the miners over with impassioned speeches, material resources, and sheer flamboyance (one burly miner quickly abandons his homophobic attitudes when he realizes that his gay comrades could teach him how to dance so he could win over the ladies).

This film is, of course, based on a true story, meaning that this alliance really did happen. But my inner cynic had to wonder, could have been so easy, and so tender, and so pure? Why did the miners not abandon their queer allies when it meant bad press for their strike? And why did gay people help miners so single-mindedly despite the near-constant homophobia? In the film, the characters seemed to make these decisions simply because solidarity is good, but few real people I’ve known work like that, and I wish the film dwelt on these dilemmas of solidarity rather than introducing them and then waving them away.

But ultimately, the film isn’t a documentary: it’s a feel good movement biopic, and on those terms, it succeeds. Even though I found the story unbelievable, I watched, longing to believe. I reveled in each victory, each conversation where miners and queer people connected on a personal level, each moment antagonists failed at breaking the alliance. I was moved by the triumphant ending and for a moment, pretended it were true: that the miners’ strike had actually ended in a way that merited soaring music, that pride parades had remained a scene of political struggle rather than becoming a corporate-funded equality theater, and that true solidarity was still possible.

Dahlia Krutkovich (JC fellow): Maybe you too were unsettled by the cloud of smoke that settled over the Northeast this week. In an effort to abate my despair over the climate emergency already consuming us, as well as the dull headache that came on after biking through the smog, I turned back to one of my favorite books by Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The novel follows Janina, an older Polish woman who lives on a rural, windswept plateau near the Czech border, as she investigates a series of beguiling murders, apparently committed by Mother Nature herself.

The novel is ultimately an eco-thriller, concerned with the rights of animals and the natural world. It’s a genre I don’t particularly care for, but what attracted me to Tokarczuk’s take on the form—and kept me engaged until the last page—is its narrator’s fascinating, singular voice. Janina lives in a closed, remote world, and her psychology mirrors the circumstances of her social life. She operates in her own epistemological universe, re-naming everyone she encounters, capitalizing nouns as it pleases her, and charting the stars according to her own astrological system. (One subplot follows her attempt to translate William Blake’s verse into Polish—an amusing metatextual puzzle for the English-language reader, who has to parse Lloyd-Jones’s translations of Janina’s Polish renderings.) Tokarczuk’s careful depiction of Janina’s consumptive solipsism—as well as her miserly worldview and righteous anger, which fuel the novel—is vividly on display in her reaction to her neighbor’s corpse, which she stumbles upon in one of the novel’s opening scenes:

As I looked at Big Foot’s poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I’d been afraid of this Person. I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless. Just a piece of matter, which some unimaginable processes had reduced to a fragile object, separated from everything else. It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does? The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.

Needless to say, the novel does not make for lighthearted escapism—much of the action is gruesome, disgusting, and difficult to read—but the alternate world reflected through Janina’s consciousness is deeply absorbing. I regret to report, however, that like many mystery novels, Tokarczuk’s narrative runs out of steam by the final act. But if you’re thinking about what it means to live on this earth as systems of exploitation—and even certain individuals—work to corrode our natural world, then this might be the tour de force you’re looking for.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): With the exception of a few versions of his most iconic piece, 4’33”, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a recording of a work by John Cage. He’s certainly absent from my modest vinyl collection—which would have been fine by him. The preeminent 20th-century avant-garde composer was famously hostile to recorded music, which he once said “destroys one’s need for real music” and “makes people think that they’re engaging in a musical activity when they’re actually not”; he even remarked that “it would be an act of charity . . . to smash [records] whenever they are discovered.” But why? In a conversation that appears in For the Birds, a collection of exchanges between Cage and the philosopher Daniel Charles, the latter reflects that “records, according to you, are nothing more than postcards . . . ”; Cage responds: “which ruin the landscape.”

This quip lends musician and scholar David Grubbs’s fascinating 2014 book Records Ruin the Landscape its title. The core of Grubbs’s project is to investigate Cage’s and his peers’ antipathy toward records, as well as the music that exceeded the confines of the medium, which emerged just as the heyday of certain experimental genres came into focus during the 1960s. As Grubbs explains in the introduction, “Cage’s opposition to the fixed form of the record . . . is the expression of a pioneer of works that are indeterminate as regards performance, works that on the basis of their design change significantly with each iteration,” and the various kinds of avant-garde music the book explores are likewise “predicated on being experienced in live performance.” Nevertheless, most of the artists considered here did—however begrudgingly—record their music. While these recordings rarely circulated at the time, their release in subsequent decades earned the works an audience well beyond those who originally heard them in person. Grubbs shows how Cage, his contempt notwithstanding, “created unprecedented types of recordings,” finding surprising ways to contest the medium’s constraints.

Grubbs, himself a record lover, is a generous yet critical guide to the ideas of the musicians he studies. He takes their provocations seriously, using them not only to illuminate experimental works that escape documentation, but also to defamiliarize the phenomenon of recorded music and raise probing questions about its very nature. At the same time, he complicates Cage and others’ antagonism toward the form into a more fruitful ambivalence, while highlighting the elitism and racism that has often undergirded avant-garde attitudes. (The latter comes to the fore in Grubbs’s discussions of Henry Flynt—a practitioner of “avant-garde hillbilly music” whose folk roots Cage considered unserious—and of “free improvisation,” which sought to “obscure its relation to jazz improvisation” through what scholar and composer George E. Lewis calls “a notion of spontaneity that excludes history or memory.”) Despite the heady material, Grubbs’s style is pleasantly chatty and digressive, though the book’s structure is sometimes distractingly haphazard; we wouldn’t have lost much if he’d cut the deflating final chapter on online archives, and I sometimes longed for more synthesis of the insights scattered throughout the text. Still, Records Ruin the Landscape is both an engaging inquiry and a vivid introduction to a wealth of interesting music—which, ironically, we must now access through the medium its practitioners largely disdained.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Last fall, the Library of America published Frederick Douglass: Speeches and Writings, an essential collection of works by the great fighter against slavery and oppression. Unlike his autobiographies, many of Douglass’s occasional writings and addresses have not been readily available, and certainly not in such a comprehensive form as this. Included in this collection, edited by Douglass’s biographer David W. Blight, are more than a hundred pieces of various types from across Douglass’s long and active life. These letters, articles, and speeches—as well as a novella—are filled with the anger, intelligence, and clarity that make him such a singular figure. Every page of this generous anthology, the single largest volume of his works ever assembled, still packs a punch. Most could have been written the day before yesterday—a reflection on both Douglass’s genius and the enduring legacy of our wretched nation’s criminal history.

As many of these pieces show, Douglass excelled at making his militant points through acerbic humor. In an 1841 speech given in Massachusetts on “American Prejudice and Southern Religion,” he spoke cuttingly of Northern racism and Christianity’s role in its perpetuation and wryly related this tale: “Another young lady fell into a trance—when she awoke, she declared she had been to Heaven; her friends were all anxious to know what and whom she had seen there; so she told the whole story. But there was one good old lady whose curiosity went beyond that of all the others—and she inquired of the girl that had the vision, if she saw any black folks in Heaven? After some hesitation, the reply was, ‘Oh! I didn’t go into the kitchen!’ Thus you see, my hearers, this prejudice goes even into the church of God.” His wit comes through, too, in an 1845 letter to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in which he describes the sorry state of American “democracy”: “Yes, they actually got up a mob—a real American, republican, democratic, Christian mob—and that, too, on the deck of a British steamer, and in sight of the beautiful high lands of Dungarvan! I declare, it is enough to make a slave ashamed of the country that enslaved him, to think of it.”

Douglass was also a master of sober reflection. In another letter to Garrison, composed the following year, Douglass writes beautifully on a subject that was dear to him: his and his people’s relationship to America: “And as to nation,” he writes, “I belong to none. I have no protection at home, or resting-place abroad. The land of my birth welcomes me to her shores only as a slave, and spurns with contempt the idea of treating me differently. So that I am an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth . . . If ever I had any patriotism, or any capacity for the feeling, it was whipt out of me long since by the lash of the American soul-drivers.”

As this truly majestic collection attests, Douglass is still a vital presence. Writers who take up these same subjects today can only aspire to write like him.