Bedbugs and Boomsticks
April was long, but we May’d it. Here’s the Potpourri.
To Be Clear
I have neither bedbugs nor boomsticks. I may have seen Bedknobs and Broomsticks as a child but I can’t remember it. I feint, I misdirect! But only with the feathered edge of language do I riposte.
Third of May
There isn’t always a song for the day, but on May 3 we get one of my favorites: “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” by Fleet Foxes, a fulminating psych-folk diptych that starts in shades of triumph but progresses into stormy weather. It contains some of my favorite lines:
Life unfolds in pools of gold / I am only owed this shape if I make a line to hold / To be held within oneself is deathlike, oh I know.
Gravity
It’s the force adhering us to the ground, but there’s also an emotional gravity to things. Life can be a thrown boomerang, an escaped balloon. But to all things their ordained trajectories, which the physicists can measure but are up to the poets to divinate.
Five
I’ve decided that five topic blurbs is the perfect amount for each dollop of Marzipan Potpourri. In the sense that this is defined purely by my aesthetic sense, it is both arbitrary and deeply justified.
Dederergo Sum
After recommendations from two trusted sources (who also happen to be Potpourrians; thanks!), I’ve been surging forward with Claire Dederer’s audiobook for Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Dederer’s observations about wrangling with the art of famous monsters, and her recollections of being a film critic as a young woman in 1990s Seattle, are a treasure trove.
As she navigates through the world of male critics who think objectivity is possible because their own subjectivity has been enshrined as gospel, she comes to this hard-won and freeing realization: “My subjectivity is the crucial component of my experience as a critic.”
As a person who writes about film, my background and experience are very different from Dederer’s, but I’ve ultimately come to same conclusion. We can’t separate the art from the artist anymore than we can separate the art from ourselves.
—Dara Khan