The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Boyles (for fiction), Harrimans (for essays), or Parkers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Boyle, Harriman, or Parker indicates a generally positive review.

I’m aware that every time I climb out of the backlog-hole I immediately stop publishing for a week. Sorry about that. Soon it will be summer and I will be released from my job!

🌱 Fiction

“Travesty” by Lillian Fishman. One Boyle. adult, admission, advantage. Troubling in ways both productive and… less productive. I understand why writing yet another story about a predatory man would pigeonhole this narrative in a way Fishman is determined to avoid; by imagining a predatory nonbinary professor who uses the language of poststructuralism to intellectualize her misbehavior, Fishman is better able to explore the questions of self-determination that roil her fascinating and flawed protagonist, a hyperintelligent jaded Columbia undergrad who I imagine listening to Red Scare and hanging out at Kiki’s, or wherever the remnants of that scene have ended up. (As long as Metrograph can pack a house for the 5:30pm showing of Claire’s Knee, the dream of Dimes Square is not dead.) The story can feel a bit like “anti-woke teen learns her lesson” – an after-school special brought to you by Jeremy O. Harris – but it’s charming. Unfortunately, that same nonbinary professor device, while crucial to the piece, also totally undermines it, turning it – probably inadvertently – to a right-wing wet dream: The professors are using poststructuralism to turn your children genderqueer and then sexually exploiting them! That the story still works – marginally – is a credit to Fishman’s psychologically astute prose; still, it’s hard not to end up with a bad taste in your mouth. The academy has bigger problems – here’s hoping this story doesn’t end up looking like the last gasp of a certain era, when professors had enough power to be able to abuse it.

🌱 Weekend Essay

“My Brain Finally Broke” by Jia Tolentino. One Harriman. unreal, unbearable, unassisted. On the one hand, this is essentially just a long and somewhat overwrought description of burnout; on the other hand, Tolentino makes it fun. I’m not sure I sense our collective delusion gradually increasing; for me, the wheels jumped the tracks circa “They did say targeting close associates” (e.g. Trump part one) and they’ve been rolling ever since. Detachment isn’t all that drawn out. Maybe the consequences of that detachment are clearer now, though; if your morals feel entirely theoretical, it’s much easier for the fascists to convince you to devalue them. Too much of this essay is a list of bizarre bad things seen while scrolling, and more time could be spent discussing the many theoreticians that early-diagnosed the condition Tolentino is writing about. The first step toward fixing your brain might be realizing that you’re not the only person in the world with a brain; communing with other intellects can remind us what is really real. On the other hand, when I fed this paragraph to ChatGPT it told me to “make [the] closing note either more concrete or more poetic.” Now that’s insight, baby!

🌱 Random Pick

“The Craft” by Melanie Thernstrom. (October 18, 1999). One Parker. published, popular, prepubescent. Naomi Fry recently covered Jay McIrney’s profile of a nineteen-year-old Chloë Sevigny, but that’s certainly not the record for youngest recipient. This, though, could be; vampire-fantasy novelist Atwater-Rhodes is only fifteen here. I’m thankful that Thernstrom neither trivializes nor overstates Atwater-Rhodes’ accomplishment, and this is mostly a very humane profile, one that keeps from giggling at its teenage witch, er, wiccan. Atwater-Rhodes ended up a nonbinary High School English teacher (hey!) who’s still posting novel chapters on Patreon. Like many a nerd, she was ahead of her time; this story gives a glimpse of a future where vampire-romance-obsessed teenagers could be sated by the monoculture. But there’s something far more pure about Atwater-Rhodes’ devotion and quiet self-actualization than any number of Mormon wives with public lives. It’s nice to get a profile of someone too weird to cultivate regular celebrity, and it’s good to see that, despite what her dad predicted, Atwater-Rhodes didn’t grow out of her genre. Maybe the pen is mightier than the eye of newt.

🌱 Something Extra

Time to assess my Pulitzer prognostication! I was right on James for fiction, though I’m amused that the judges clearly hoped for something more unexpected to win, while also allowing for the fact that they liked James and they knew that was probably what the board would pick.

In Drama, my prediction The Ally was a finalist – yay – along with Oh Mary – very fun! – but the winner was Purpose, which I’m seeing in two weeks. I’m a Jacobs-Jenkins fan, so I’ll probably dig it.

I didn’t guess any other winners, but I did manage a couple more finalists: David Greenberg’s John Lewis book in Biography and Lucy Sante’s book in Memoir. Mosab Abu Toha, who I guessed would win for his poetry, won instead for his Commentary articles for the magazine.

Interestingly, most of what the magazine won this year was published online-only, which meant I didn’t even cover it: Along with Toha’s commentary pieces and Season 3 of the investigative podcast In The Dark, some photos of Syria by Moises Saman won; other photos of similar subject matter, and obviously taken on the same trip, were paired with Jon Lee Anderson’s piece on injustices there.

I assembled a batch of links that includes pretty much all the major coverage of the Pulitzer arts-and-letters winners in the magazine, but this edition is already in overtime so I’m saving it till the next Special. Shouldn’t be long – knock on wood.

Catching up on theater awards:

The Lortel awards mostly went to stuff I didn’t like or didn’t see, the exception being Sarin Monae West’s thunderous performance in Medea: Re-Versed. Good for them.

The Drama League winners will probably end up being the Tony winners (Oh Mary / Eureka Day / Maybe Happy Ending / Sunset Blvd), to which I say yay, yay, yay, and boooooo, respectively. Vanya also co-won for Play Revival, the only off-Broadway thing honored, although at those prices calling it “off” should be called off. Scherzinger won Best Performance, horrifyingly; her beating Audra would be exactly the kind of travesty every major award is good for every once in a while. (Or hey, maybe Boop beats both!) At least the directing awards went to the new-show winners; crossing my fingers Jamie Lloyd isn’t rewarded for his nihilistically shallow style or that sub-SNL street-cam gimmick everyone loves so much.

The New York Drama Critics Circle, whose awards are both voted on by the most truly expert batch of people and decided in the most statistically reasonable way, but who, probably sensibly, give out extremely few awards, presented no real surprises: Purpose, narrowly; Maybe Happy Ending, easily. They did expand a bit this year, giving out a solo performance award and an ensemble award; these went to Vanya and Liberation. Probably and certainly well-deserved, respectively, and cheers to the dire Hills of California not quite managing to sneak in there.

Sunday Song: