The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three KATs (for fiction), Anunobys (for essays), or Brunsons (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one KAT, Anunoby, or Brunson indicates a generally positive review.

This is not a repost. Last week’s was also labeled September 7 but it shouldn’t have been, it should have been August 31. We resent the error.

🏀 Fiction

“Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub” by Helen Simpson. No KATs. I appreciate that Simpson brought something very different from the magazine’s usual – an extremely brief, observational short story about two aging British friends; it’s also, in a sidelong way, a story about global warming, and how heat will make our lives harder. But I think that trying to approach this both literally (lots of talk about pacemakers) and metaphorically (a culminating random explosion; lots of mundane-impending-doom imagery) weakens the effect. The elevated, perhaps deliberately stilted dialogue is interesting, though I’m not sure what it’s aiming for, or whether it’s a Simpson signature. (I haven’t read anything else by her.) The title promises delight and absurdity, but I mostly get arrhythmia.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“Cinema Lessons from a Trash-Movie Auteur” by Becca Rothfeld. One Anunoby. As something of a bad movie maniac myself, I unfortunately think Rothfeld is trying so hard to taxonomize bad movies – a frequent folly – and draw broad conclusions about an extremely heterogeneous fan community, that she gets lost in explanations. Perhaps the appeal of Breen’s films, their sui generis madness, has something in common with the appeal of a solid knockoff; they’re both covered in fingerprints of authenticity. Still, I think that’s a decent descriptor of cult film in general; and trash is too much of a value descriptor to include Breen’s films, which are far closer to outsider art. There is also something phenomenal about pure failure on film; Rothfeld dismisses Marvel movies as bad “because they resemble other movies”, but there is a world of difference between the eerie, perfectly calibrated flatness of Infinity War and the disjointed pratfall of “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”. That even an immense marshaling of resources can’t help some movies from failing in their attempt to seem like other movies sparks a pleasure all its own. And while watching bad movies in a big group is fun, there are uniquely masochistic pleasures, which can’t be accounted for by Rothfeld’s calculus, to watching Superbabies alone in your room.

When this sticks more closely to Breen’s character and his work, it’s generally excellent, and Rothfeld’s writing is funny enough to buoy her iffy argument. Martha Harbison on the Today in Tabs Discord nailed it: “Rothfeld is trying to smuggle a profile of Breen (which I would read the hell out of and an outlet with a budget and a track record of good profiles should absolutely commission that) into an essay about schlocky films that's really about vanity projects in particular. Maybe writing about the particular joys of vanity films is like staring too long into an eclipse, and both Rothfeld and her editor quickly realized this? God knows I'd rather read about Hard Ticket to Hawaii (the entire Andy Sidaris oeuvre, honestly) and Society than another turgid thinkpiece about Wiseau.” Novelty is a close relative of pleasure, and everything bad is new again.

🏀 Random Pick

“July 21” (Letter from Prague) by Joseph Wechsberg. (August 6, 1949). One Brunson. At the very, very start of Communist Czechoslovakia, Wechsberg is already fairly clear-eyed about the “fundamentally new way of life” that is still only emerging. The resistance is disorganized and the hypocrisy of authoritarianism is basically its point. I just finished reading Benjamin Nathan’s book on Soviet dissidents, where he writes about the ‘lip-service state’; Wechsberg is circling similar ideas already here, with the idea of Party members “who stand unobserved behind trees, waiting to see which way the wind will blow”. Probably only nerds need to read Wechsberg’s early report; everyone should read the Caleb Crain blog linked above (and again here) for a gloss with the benefit of hindsight.

🏀 Something Extra

I got a job!!! 8th graders in Manhattan Chinatown aren’t gonna know what hit them.

Sunday Song: