I was asked to speak on what it means to come unto Christ. I asked for the topic a couple months ago but the chaos of late means I didn’t get it written until this week. I suspect it’s a little long so I’ll likely have to do some editing on the fly. But hey—what‘s all we can do, again?

.

Often, we interpret the invitation to “come unto Christ” as a direction to “be like Christ.” But so much of what Christ did, we cannot do. And even if we could, he already did it for us. Consider what Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane: In some way untethered to human time, he stepped out of his own life and experienced each of ours. Not so he could judge us but so he could understand us and comfort us and atone for us. Somehow, that evening, he lived my life and your life and everyone’s life, then came back to his own, prepared to do his impossible task.

None of us can do that. Nor do we need to. Christ did it for us.

So what do we need to do? How do we come unto Christ?

Let’s dance through the scriptures for a moment.

Amaleki, the final writer in the Small Plates, tells us that we “should come unto Christ…and partake of his salvation, and the power of his redemption. Yea, come unto him, and offer your whole souls as an offering unto him…and, as the Lord liveth, ye will be saved.”

I like this idea that coming unto Christ is kinda the same thing as being saved.

Moroni, the final writer in the Book of Mormon, tells us to come “unto Christ, and be perfected in him…and love God with all [our] might, mind and strength, [because] then [will] his grace [be] sufficient… [and we] may be perfect in Christ.”

That being-perfect thing reminds me of Jesus’s commandment, the crazy one, that we be perfect. That’s a heavy instruction. I started this talk by saying Jesus does things we can’t be expected to do and now he himself tells us to be perfect? Coming unto Christ means being perfect first??

No. No, no, no.

That is not what Moroni said. We come unto Christ. Then we’re perfected in him. Because his grace will be sufficient to make us perfect.

Okay. We’re getting somewhere.

Now, here in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the most famous bonmot on grace has to be Nephi’s: “We labor diligently…to persuade our children…to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for”—here it comes—“we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.”

Now, most of my life I’ve tended to think this means that we’re saved by grace after getting ourselves as close to perfect as possible

Is that correct?

Well, let’s continue our dance across the scriptures.

Our first stop is Anti-Nephi-Lehi, the brother of Lamoni and the inheritor of their father the king’s responsibilities.

The Lamanites have split into two groups. Anti-Nephi-Lehi leads those who have been converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Those who have not been converted are filled with rage at what they see as a betrayal of their traditions and they have taken up weapons and are marching forward to destroy these converts.

Anti-Nephi-Lehi is their king. His people are filled with faith. But they fear for their lives. And the lives of their families and friends.

What would you say?

This is what Anti-Nephi-Lehi said:

“I thank my God, my beloved people, that our great God has in goodness sent these our brethren…to preach unto us…. And…I thank my great God that he has given us a portion of his Spirit to soften our hearts…. And I also thank my God, yea, my great God, that he hath granted unto us that we might repent of these things, and also that he hath forgiven us…and taken away the guilt from our hearts, through the merits of his Son….

“Now behold, my brethren, since it has been all that we could do—”

Let me interrupt Anti-Nephi-Lehi here to point out that we were just wondering what it means that “it is by grace…we are saved, after all we can do” and now this good man is about to tell us exactly what “all we can do” is. Let’s let him do it.

“Now behold,” he was saying, “it has been all that we could do…to repent of…our sins…and to get God to take them away from our hearts…it was all we could do to repent sufficiently before God that he would take away our stain—

“[And now]…my best beloved…since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more….

“The great God has had mercy on us, and made these things known unto us…because he loves our souls…. In his mercy he doth visit us by his angels, that the plan of salvation might be made known unto us as well as unto future generations. Oh, how merciful is our God!”

In this moment, the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi attain a sort of perfection unique in the Book of Mormon. They lay down their evil tools, their swords and their cimeters, and rather than staining those tools with the blood of their fellow children of God, they allow themselves to be slain. This is a remarkable choice. No one else in the Book of Mormon has such courage. And their courage changes the hearts of their enemies. Their courage brings many of those enemies, too, unto Christ.

So. According to Anti-Nephi-Lehi, what is “all we can do”? We can repent.

That doesn’t seem like much.

That doesn’t seem like very far on the road to perfection.

But remember what Moroni said: it’s by coming unto Christ that, in him, we are perfected. All we can do is repent—and then we are saved by his grace.

Paul taught that “We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.” And the truth of Christ is that he was born, he lived, he died, and he lived again—all for us.

Ammon was one of the missionaries who brought so many Lamanites, including Anti-Nephi-Lehi, to Christ. Reflecting on that great labor, he said, “Let us glory…in the Lord.

“Yea, we will rejoice, for our joy is full…we will praise our God forever…. Who can glory too much in the Lord?... Who can say too much of his great power, and of his mercy…?

“Who could have supposed that our God would have been so merciful as to have snatched us from our awful, sinful, and polluted state?

“[But] he that repents and exercises faith, and brings forth good works, and prays continually without ceasing—unto such…it shall be given…to bring thousands of souls to repentance, even as it has been given unto us to bring these our brethren to repentance.”

In Lehi’s dream, when he saw the Tree of Life, his first thought was to share it. So it was with Ammon and his fellow missionaries. So it was with Lamoni and his fellow Lamanite converts.

Joseph Smith tells us that missionary work “should…be attended to with great earnestness.” Even when we feel like our actions are small and insignificant, we should not “count them as small things; for there is much which [lies in the future]…which depends upon these [small] things.

“You know,” Brother Joseph said, “a very large ship is benefited very much by a very small helm in the time of a storm, by being kept workways with the wind and the waves. Therefore…let us cheerfully do all things [all things!] that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.”

Our little things are little. But they are enough.

With Christ, they are enough.

Jesus teaches us that if we “have not faith, hope, and charity, [we] can do nothing.”

So we come unto Christ by repentance—it’s the only thing we can do. He gives us faith, hope, and charity. And then—we can do things. Which only means little, small things. All we can do.

Last month, on the way to my uncle’s funeral in Idaho, my parents, sister, and I went to church in Beaver, Utah. There were two youth speakers who talked about girls camp, then the first adult speaker opened with this observation:

No one will remember this talk.

No one will remember any talk they hear.

My mother and father and sister later insisted they remember lots and lots of sacrament-meeting talks. Maybe they do. I kinda doubt it, but maybe.

Regardless, giving a talk? It’s a pretty small thing. I’m taking up ten minutes of your time. Probably you will have forgotten this talk before Sunday School’s over. But, today, it’s what I can do. That and repent, I suppose.

Jesus taught we can do nothing without faith, hope, and charity.

Not even repent?

Paul explained that even if we have “the gift of prophecy, and [understand] all mysteries, and [have] all knowledge,” without “charity, [we are] nothing.” Yes, he said, “faith, hope, charity,” all great, “but the greatest…is charity.”

Jesus is clear that he always has his arms open to us. The only thing keeping us from his grasp is our own selves. Which is all sin is: Rejecting Christ’s grace. And this is all repentance is: Accepting Christ’s grace. Repentance is accepting as real the relationship we have with Jesus Christ—the relationship he never stops believing in.

Perhaps that is why the greatest of these is charity. Because if all we can do is repent, and if all repentance is is accepting the Savior’s love, then perhaps all we can do is have charity for ourselves. Perhaps that is all repentance is: Learning to love ourselves. Just as Christ does.

My most profound spiritual experiences have been about just that—recognizing that I am loved.

I was at the end of my mission, sitting on an airplane. It was too late to do anything better than I had already done. I worried that I hadn’t been as good a missionary as I should have been.

Then the Lord told me to stop comparing myself to other people. He had called me to be a missionary. And I, me, as myself, had been a missionary. It may have been a small thing, but it was enough. And I repented. I chose to love myself and my service. I accepted myself as Christ accepted me.

This is all any of us is asked to do.

Think about your current responsibilities—family, calling, whatever. What you do may not be large in the scope of world history. But “a very large ship is benefited very much by a very small helm….being kept workways with the wind and the waves. Therefore…let us cheerfully do all things [all things!] that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.”

Our little things are little. Our small things are small. But they are enough.

All we can do is enough.

And all we can do is repent.

And all repentance is is allowing Christ to love us—to feel his charity for us.

We can do that.

We can do that.

We can allow our Savior to love us.

We can have charity, as he does, for ourselves.

From there, we can learn to feel charity for all.

“By small and simple things are great things brought to pass”—including the salvation and perfection, of our own souls.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Man alive. Reading Moby Dick is really slowing my ability to finish other books. I am enjoying it, but tell you what—I’ll be glad when it’s done.

Kind of blown away I’ve been building this set since May. Get reading, Theric!

Incidentally, my essay on Napoleon Dynamite just helped launch Waypoints, a new pop-culture site. Check it out!

☞

035) Okchundang Candy by Jung-soon Go and translated by Airin Park, finished May 22

Why are there so few picture books for adults?

My guess is economics. Adults don’t reread like kids do and so the dollars spent on a picture book divided by the number of minutes spent with it just doesn’t make sense.

This book is much longer than a kids picture book (the library put it in Juvenile Graphic Novels) and might appeal to kids, but even with its juvenile p-o-v (sorta; it’s an unseen adult remembering) I feel that this story about her grandparents’ love and how it navigated lung cancer and widowhood is inherently adult.

It’s a lovely and moving book.

(Yes it’s a library book and yes this is 2026 but it didn’t feel like cheating because I’m not the one who checked it out and it didn’t take that long to read.)

one sit before and one sit after dinner

☞

036) The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card, finished May 27

I actually picked up this book with the intention to get rid of it. I’m a fan of Card’s and I do want to finish reading all his early work but this last YA novel didn’t hold much interest. Out of respect, I decided to read the first couple paragraphs, however, and here we are.

In the afterword, Card says he’s been developing this world and its magic system since 1977. And no question this is one of my favorite magic systems I’ve ever read. He also, in the afterword, says that he finished this novel by cranking out a chapter a day and getting it to his publisher after the deadline. This may show.

I don’t like a lot of of things about this book. It seems to be trying to fit in aberrant sex with the subtlety of a 14yrold writing sex for the first time. It’s weird and gross and off. It doesn’t work. And all the characters under the age of twenty-five talk like . . . well, not like humans circa 2010, I can tell you that. It’s crazy because writing about precocious kids is Card’s wheelhouse and these kids aren’t real.

But the plot and story are excellent. I’m tempted to read more of the series simply because those aspects are so strong. But that’s exactly what one could get from a Wikipedia summary. But as the characters age, they should become more realistic. But, having read a lot of Card, I think I already know how a lot of their characters will develop and related to each other as time goes on.

So in the end, a bit of a mixed bag. I would say I wish he had more time to refine the novel (I feel he could have), but I’m told he recently said in an interview that, since the death of his son, he hasn’t been able to tell if his work is good. So maybe not.

(It’s a biographical detail imbued with pathos, regardless of this book’s quality.)

I understand why people like this novel but in the end, I think it gets a soft thumbs down from me. There are many better Card books. Save this for when you’re hungry for second-tier work.

One other quick observation: this book is unfilmable. A new kind of narrative artform demands invention before this book can be adapted to something involving actors. Something deeper and more internal than “virtual reality”; something that can affect your proprioception the way films affect your retina.

perhaps a month

☞

037) Bad Kitty Goes on Vacation by Nick Bruel, finished June 1

The Bad Kitty books are great. But me, a fuddyduddy, does not prefer them colorized.

a june first

☞

038) Backward by Ben Abbott, finished June 10

Read or performed, Ben’s work is great. This is his final thesis for his MFA and it’s terrific. A man relives each day of his life in backwards order then relives them once again—once more forward. I love playing with time. Some of my favorites of life being scrambled include one of the stories in Hyperion and the novels Replay and The Time Traveler’s Wife, but Ben’s found something new and it’s wonderful.

It’s a one-man show and I’d love to know how it turned out. It seems like a real challenge for any actor and I’d love to see how it all turned out.

Wonderfully, following the play (because this is a thesis), Ben takes us through the writing process. And I maybe loved that as much as the play (although only the play made me cry). The perfect thing to read, really, before I disappear for a week to rewrite Honeymoon in Copper (this is then world premier of the title—feel special!). Some of the holes in the novel are coming into focus and Ben has pushed me to nail them down. Exciting times!

The play’s nominated for an AML Award and you can read it yourself by clicking the title above. I certainly recomment it.

one long sit

☞

039) Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout, finished June 12

This is my second Nero Wolfe novel, though I’ve collected maybe half a dozen since the first.

The structure of this novel was quite different from Fer-de-Lance which made me happy. This was a big more what I expected the first time but, since it wasn’t last time, now it wasn’t this time. The reveal wasn’t until the penultimate chapter in a gather-them-all-in-one-room scene and since Archie’s our p-o-v character, I really had no idea what was about to go down. Fun. Less interesting as a mystery, perhaps, as the previous volume, but good.

What was more interesting was how Stout explored racism and misogyny. I know!

Amazingly, this novel not only gets Wolfe out of his apartment but clear down to West Virginia where we encounter some plainfaced Southern racism. Archie’s a bit disgusted by it but not because he isn’t also racist (though he may dislike d***s more than n*****s) but because it’s crass how these white Southerners act. Show some dignity, you crackers.

Anyway, Nero Wolfe does treat the black characters with respect. Partially that’s to his own ends, but also, one senses that he means it. That his more worldwide past has led him to a place where he knows better—genuinely knows better—than to judge a man by the color of his skin. He means it.

Yet Nero Wolfe is, simultaneously, the worst misogynist of them all. I suspect his decision to live a life undistracted by such things as romance and wiles was only possible by developing an antipathy for women. Mere disinterest was impossible. Hatred was the only path to safety and he took it.

Mind, most of what I’m saying here is my analysis—it’s subtext. But I think I’m right. And it’s a richer book for it.

This isn’t to say the book as aged brilliantly. But I think it has aged acceptably.

couple weeks at most

☞

040) Pickles by Brian Crane, finished July 7
041) Pickles, Too by Brian Crane, finished July 7

Brian Crane is an old friend of my in-laws. We’re visiting them now and they have his first two collections, signed, and I picked them up. Good stuff.

two days

☞

042) Lost & Found by Shaun Tan, finished July 13
043) The Arrival by Shaun Tan, finished July 13

Lady Steed insisted she had no idea who Shaun Tan was which seemed insane to me. Who can read The Arrival and ever forget it? But I put some of his books on hold at the library and they came and I couldn’t let the opportunity go by without re/reading some myself.

Lost & Found is a collection of three earlier works. They’re concerned with some of the same things as The Arrival but they all rely on words which keeps the reader a bit more grounded. The Arrival has words only in an inaccessible tongue. This is part of what makes it perhaps the greatest exploration of the immigrant experience. You the reader will feel as lost and confused as our immigrant protagonist. At the same time, you’ll gender a renewed appreciation for the greatness of nations that welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of other teeming shores, the homeless, the tempest-tost. That act of welcoming such peoples may be the best way to define a nation’s greatness.

The Arrival‘s very much in the tradition of the one-image-a-page artists of a century ago, but his artistry has more options available to it. For instance, pacing, as when he spends a single spread with 60 individually drawn images of clouds, or a spread of 24 images of one plant’s entire life cycle to show the passage of time. Truly a masterpiece by a master artist.

I would love someday to go to a Shaun Tan retrospective at a museum (are you listening SFMOMA, Cartoon Art Museum?) and just stand in front of his art at the size he made it and just take it all in.

one evening

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

.

Okay. To qualify for this list, it had to genuinely terrify me at some point. This does mean that some excellent movies classified, say, on Letterboxd as “horror” (Godzilla Minus One, Frankenstein, Presence, Sinners, Mad God, A Ghost Story) were left off my list, while some I, at least, don’t think of as “horror” got more serious consideration (mother!, Pan’s Labyrinth), although in the end, I wanted a horror movie not just a great moment ala Lovecraft’s definition.

And few genres are as subjective as horror. Your mileage will certainly vary.

Special honorable mention to LAIKA’s ouevre because they are amazing and scary and I love them, even if I didn’t include them. I fear I may have a bias against “kids” movies when considering horror. But LAIKA’s films are amazing and should make anyone’s short list. Watch for Wildwood this fall.

When we get to my top five, I’ll tell you right now that the top three required no internal debate. The last two really had to battle it out among some other great movies, so let me chronologically shout out now my honorable mentions which, on a different day, may well have made the list (1 = review on thutopia; 2 = review on thubstack):

Barbarian (2022) — Probably may favorite basement in all of film. Plus, it’s like three great movies in 108 minutes. Best bargain in this entire write-up. (1,2)

Bubba Ho-tep (2002) — Who better to fight a mummy than a couple old guys stored away in a retirement home? (1)

Get Out (2017) — Truly a masterpiece. Works as both comedy and horror. Gives students the power to see and analyze film at a higher level. (1,1,1,1,2)

The Host (2006) — My favorite big-monster horror movie of the century. A more manageable size than, say, Godzilla. But since it can hide, isn’t that kinda scarier?

Let the Right One In (2008) — Lot of little-kid monsters in movies but this is the best of the century so far, imo. (1)

No One Will Save You (2023) — Maybe the only grey-aliens movie I like. I love that it chose to use no dialogue in the entire film. Should have been a star-making turn for its lead, but I guess people didn’t see it in Obsession numbers. (1,2)

A Quiet Place (2018) — I think we could get broad agreement that this movie did more for broadening the soundscape of horror than any other movie in living memory? (1,2)

The VVitch (2015) — One of the most frightening trailers I’ve seen. I grant that my first watch didn’t work as well as I wanted, but now, as I understand Eggers’s overall project better, the movie has grown in my estimation. Excited to watch it again someday! (1)

And now for our Top Five!

I’d kind of hoped I would end up with a little less mainstream a list but I won’t apologize for being a populist for once in my life. I stand by all these movies even though I’ve only seen each of them once. They’ve stuck with me in and still make me think and that’s really all that we want from a horro flick, n’est-ce pas?

5—10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) [1]

This film balances (and often improves on) elements from films like Night of the Living Dead, Silence of the Lambs, Saw, and other classics, but it’s reorganized them into something new. It even makes bold with answering its primary question in the final scene (maybe a requirement of the sereis?) and I’m still not sure if that was a good decision or not, but I’m always happy when movies take risks. Plus, this is a three-hander and two of those hands are Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman. That would be enough to sell me on any movie in any genre.

4—Midsommar (2019) [1]

Every once in a while, a horror movie will come out that will attract even Lady Steed and she’ll end up watching it with me and sometimes—Midsommar might be the purest example of this—she will regret it and (so far, at least) never cease to regret it. Midsommar spends so much of its time in bright sunshine that it seems impossible that it could be genuinely terrifying. How can a film scare us without endless shadows and spooky trees for things to hide behind? Ends up, the scariest stuff is inside those smiling faces.

3—Cabin in the Woods (2011) [1]

It has some genuinely scary parts up top but as it spins, first into meta and parody, then into lovecraftian cosmic horror, it’s a bit less successful at “scary” but it’s so intelligent and such fun I can’t hold that against it. Watching men in suits discuss how best to murder the young is the banality-of-evil recast as entertainment, and no less for it. Unquestionably the funniest movie on this list.

2—The Ring (2002)

This is the first scary movie Lady Steed and I watched together that has never quite left her. It’s funny, because when we watch movies I’m the one who’s jumping and yelling, but they don’t haunt me the way they haunt her. And we didn’t even have kids then! Needless to say, we’ve never talked ourselves into watching the Japanese original. But Gore Verbinski’s version is him at his his image-making best. I don’t think even Jack Sparrow beats his girl crawling out of tv. We all remember that, no matter when or how we first saw it. And even though the movie is trapped in early-oughts green and blue.

1—It Follows (2014) [1]

The End of Oak Street is my post anticipated movie this summer and it’s entirely because It Follows is the greatest horror movie of this century (and because his follow up [1,2] is such a perfectly Lynchian conspiracy mindfold). David Robert Mitchell has earned my trust. And it all began with It Follows, a film that captures nightmare logic (slowly everyone disappears but yourself / you can’t trust your own eyes / the sense of relentless unstoppable persuit) but places it in a world that feels actual and lived. Maika Monroe’s performance is perfect. (And, to be clear, she’s not the reason Long Legs [1,2] failed.) But if It Follows can’t make you look over your shoulder or stare at some face a little too long, wow. Lucky you. Because I’m getting nervous looking at you not being nervous at all. What are you??? And why are you standing dead center along my landscape’s point of convergence?

=========

previous Top Five X of 2001–2025: RomCom [1,2]

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Luckily, I’ve know this guy a long time and I’m familiar with the manifestations of his schizophrenia, or two elements of our conversation could possibly have been interpreted as offensive.

===

You look different. Are you a vampire now? Or maybe you stopped being a vampire?

===

[On having learned he may be a father, thanks to an incident in 2001 he does not remember.]

But I really think I’m still a virgin. But that could be, right? It makes me think of people like Donald Trump and you. Do you think there are men who’ve gotten married and had children but are still virgins?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

One year, the NBC comedy Community did a Claymation-esque Christmas special. The conceit was this: Christmas was broken for Abed (he used to spend it with his mom and she blew him off to be with her new family) and he was lost, trying to figure out what Christmas was all about.

In the end, this batch of outwardly cynical but inwardly loving friends decide that the meaning of Christmas is that it has a meaning. And as long as you believe that, it doesn’t have to be the same for everyone.

No one else’s meaning of Christmas needs to define your own.

That might be a helpful way to think about Independence Day in 2026.

As a Bicentenniel Baby, I’ve been looking forward to this July 4 my entire life. And…it’s been kinda ruined by a corrupt president who makes everything about him. Which sucks.

But I am an American. And July 4th means something to me and no one can take that away. And no one can take it from you either.

This is our holiday.

And patriotism is whatever we say it is.

Now with most of the country locked down by a deadly wave (even Philadelphia with the first parade I kinda wanted to go to since I was like ten!), you probably need to stay inside and crank the AC anyway. (I won’t tell you our temps by the Bay. You’re better off not knowing.) So why not watch a movie?

Movies are a great way to celebrate America. We make them, we watch them, we love them.

Here are some suggestions based on my own tastes and nostalgias.

But before I start, I should note that loving Americans is not quite the same thing as loving America. I decided to stay away from movies that only do the former in favor of ones that take a stab at revealing the latter. In part, that’s because America is a concept and so loving something like the First Amendment or the idea that all men are created equal is de facto being American and loving America.

Speaking of the First Amendment, you can’t hate on movies about those Great Americans, journalists—especially when they’re taking on the Federal Government. That’s patriotism, friends. And this is a grand tradition, but I suppose if you can only pick one (and you haven’t seen this before), it must be All the President’s Men.

But I don’t mean to imply that our government is the enemy of the people. That’s nonsense. Individuals can be awful (like Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) or excellent (like James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) or dumb schmucks doing their best (like Dave in Dave), but goverment is an excellent source of patriots. I’d kinda like to (finally) watch Lincoln this weekend, myself.

Some movies call America to repentence, which is a deeply patriotic duty. Casablanca does this (and, bonus, is one of the greatest films ever made), but it’s most patriotic moment is French. But it’ll make you cry. So maybe save that for Bastille Day, later this month?

Uniquely American genres are a good source of American ideals. High Noon is about the individual standing up for right even when they must stand alone. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is about how we use stories to create a better America. Neither is simple, clean, rah-rah patriotism. But it is patriotism.

Capitalism is America’s greatest blessing and curse, and movies can find ways to make you grapple with capitalism’s sins while still making you feel proud to be an American. Movies as different as The Solid Gold Cadillac and Annie have done that for me.

But ambivalence is an important part of being a thoughtfully patriotic American. The Mountain of the Lord captures this from my own tradition—we see both the Utah War when America once again tried to destroy the Mormons, and the Mormons delightful celebration of the Centenniel. Being a good American means grapping with contrary ideas. The Founders are our best evidence of that.

But this never goes away. I only recently learned the name of this movie (haven’t seen it since I was a kid and never knew how to locate it but it’s The One And Only, Genuine, Original Family Band), but its portrayal of how people feel when they put their all into an election only to lose has never left me. And now I know that feeling well.

I don’t want to dismiss big (often) dumb actioneers. These work for lots of people and they work on me too, when they have enough honest moments. So there is nothing wrong with watching Captain America: The First Avenger or Independence Day. Heck yeah.

Lots of movies are at their most American when they’re about immigrants. No one loves this country like someone who chose it. Maybe try An American Pickle? Most people haven’t.

Although I knew even as a kid that it’s final naturalization ceremony is manipulative and sentimental and kinda terrible, I have to recommend Short Circuit II, even though I’m shying away from anything AI these days. The scene where Johnny 5 reads all those books still gets me, and its unabashedly earnest equivalence between being human and being American makes me feel something even if I’m annoyed at it afterwards.

But the number one movie I want to recommend to you this holiday weekend is Born Yesterday.

As I wrote when I first saw it, only earlier this year, it’s a “a romcom for you and America. And you need that right now.”

I stand by that.

Watch this ditz learn to read and then discover America all on her own. It’ll make you want to sing Independence carols with your fellow citizens across America.

Don’t miss it.

And share with me your recs! I can use more!

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

'

ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Honestly, it does feel sixteen years old. But not in a bad way. It holds up but, for instance, the soundscape can’t speak to an audience of 17yrolds the same way it speaks to people who grew up with a great intimacy with certain digital ephemera.

Interestingly, one of my seniors said in her writeup that the sound it part of what makes the movie “timeless” which either means I’m very wrong or she doesn’t know what timeless means.

Readings: 1, 2.

ELSEWHERE
our dvd
until it froze on Susie’s face
then a series of pirate sites
until we found one that worked

Citizen Kane (1941)

It was great to watch this movie on a higher resolution. It really is amazing, visually. Why don’t more movies embrace depth like this. One student couldn’t believe it was old because it still feels creative here, now, in 2026. I love to look at it.

But I still can’t get behind it as being in the conversation for the greatest film of all time. I can’t even be persuaded it’s better than Casablanca. I mean. Come on.

But I also want to praise Welles the actor / the makeup team. He ages so much in this film and it holds up great.

Readings: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd
(this particular one,
criterion collection,
found unopened in a free pile)

Stray Dog (1949)

Watching this right after Citizen Kane I’m struck by how both Kurosawa and Welles are into depth. I feel like movies hardly ever use the frame’s potential depth as well as these two movies do. I’d like to see more of this.

I also love the protagonist’s connection to the gun used in the crimes and how and why that motivates him. That’s an emotional and philosophical element frankly not available to an American cop movie.

But Kurosawa’s visual sense is the true highlight here. He was good at this already. (This is the earliest of his film’s I’ve seen.)

Readings: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Vertigo (1958)

The break between class periods happend as Scottie was catatonic in the hospital. And that made me realize: Vertigo is kinda two movies. Movie one, The Mystery of Madeleine. Then the intermission in the hospital. Then movie two: Judy’s Secret. The begin kinda the same. They end kinda the same. And that symmetry is part of what makes this such an astonishing experience.

Some loved it, some were disturbed by it, some were left confused. But everyone had an experience.

Readings: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd
but it froze
so we watched some of it
on the same pirate site
we’d finished Citizen Kane on
but then we finished back on the dvd

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

There’s nothing like finishing an ancient movie with a bunch of 17 and 18yrolds and seeing their delirious smiling faces and happy reactions to the bundle of joy we just wrapped up.

May Singin’ in the Rain offer its pleasures to centuries of future filmwatchers.

Readings: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
Kanopy

Memento (2000)

Fun to rewatch this, first time in over twenty years.

I didn’t really remember where it was going, but still, the ending wasn’t quite as satisfying. Maybe too much Nolan in the interim?

I bet this is movie is the best when you watch it immediately after watching it.

I probably won’t do that this time.

Readings: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
YouTube

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

For the last movie of the year, classes had the opportunity of voting to finish up with a terrible movie so we could discuss what went wrong. Two classes took me up on that. (No readings for the bad movies.)

This is, indeed, terrible. But it does have a handful of cool elements that could be something in a better movie. But the lousy sound mix, laggard editing, and general stupidity keeps the priest’s costume or the painting from working. Not that I’m surprised. I head that MST3K held off on doing Manos because they didn’t think they could successfully make it entertaining. I’ll bet they did just fine, but I’m not ready to watch it again. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Indeed, if I offer bad movies again next year, I may need to swap the watched ones out.... We’ll see how I feel next May.


HOME
library dvd

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Huh.

I...don’t think I liked it.

I appreciated all the Raymond Chandler stuff. It had some funny bits. But it didn’t allow us to really like any of the characters. And it wants to be a comedy but the violence didn’t work with that. And it seems like Shane Black is to Jeffrey Katzenberg if sexy ladies’ nipples are to animated action sequences.

Also, it’s very 2005 in that they’re addicted to weird color-correction choices. You might think things are yellow because it’s a flashback. Or you might think yellow’s tied to a time of day. Or to an emotion. And you might be right. Or you just might be a human seeking a pattern because that’s what humans do.

Anyway. Are people still watching this movie in 2026?


ELSEWHERE
Internet Archive

Nukie (1987)

I think I last saw this circa 1991. It was so bad. My family is still making fun of it. Its awfulness binds us together.

I made it available as an awful film and the students in one class voted it in.

It’s still terrible.

And people worked so, so hard on it. Those alien suits were complex. They went to Africa. They had a helicopter. And they somehow got Glynis Johns. Glynis Johns! She was in Mary Poppins! “Send in the Clowns” was written for her! How did they get Glynis Johns???

You can see all the stuff they’re ripping off (most notably E.T. and The Gods Must Be Crazy) but they don’t understand what made their source material work in the first place. For instance, Nukie and the kid go flying before Nukie’s resurrection. That doesn’t work.

Anyway. It’s terrible. But it’s terrible in the way that forced us to regularly laugh in amazement.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

It never gets old.


ELSEWHERE
Prime Vodeo

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Research watch.

Though it didn’t take me long to remember why plan had been to take the dvd with me on Amtrak. The wifi...’s not great.

It was interesting watching the last half of the movie with the video twenty seconds ahead of the audio.


HOME
our dvd

Rubin and Ed (1991)

Somehow I haven’t seen this (probably) in over twenty years. Which is insane. That’s so long that the film was basically a reminder of all the things Lady Steed and I used to quote to each other. Maybe now we’ll bring them back. With the help of sons two and three who watched it with us.

(Son One never saw it because Lady Steed kept saying they weren’t old enough. Guess now he never will be.)

Besides being one of the most quotable movies I know and hella weird (unless compared to other Trent Harris movies), it’s one of the hottest movies ever made, up there with Do the Right Thing and Stray Dog.

Honestly, I don’t love it as unabashedly as I once did, but I have nothing bad to say about it. Let’s all express our gratitude for Trent Harris and the band of nutjobs he assembled to bring this world to life.


HOME
our dvd

Toy Story (1995)

Seriously, how is this so good? I mean, I know “Luxo, Jr.” was a decade earlier and that, for a “computer company,” Pixar always cared a great deal about story, but it’s still a remarkable achievement. It’s such a good movie.

Incidentally, here are a couple great things I recently read about Toy Story. The first is about toy teleology and the second on how they learned to create people immediately following Toy Story.


HOME
our dvd

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Joan Cusack is a national treasure.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I have a review of this reviewer’s book published on the same page. It’s a review-swap thing which is a cool idea. Although I misread the instructions and thought you had to give every book five stars. I was, like, what is this, Uber? But I went along with it. Who knows what stars mean anyway.

Really, the engine(idling is just a cool place to read and publish (see my “Were my band to play the Roadhouse” and “Glitter sifts from sky, sifts hell from beauty or beauty“) and I recommend checking them out.

This is the review:

Reading Thubrina, a bag of procedural tricks subtitled “Theric Jepson rewrites Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend,” is choosing to gaze into the uncanny valley: is this language poetry, or something else? Jepson’s tongue-in-cheek romp through the lexicon of Carpenter’s 2025 hit record comprises one 2,600 word story, 12 poems, 15 “oldtimey black-and-white-life-of-Jesus illustrations” (Jepson defines and explains this choice in the foreword: “Like Sabrina, Jesus was a carpenter”), and what might be considered the main draw of this book: a 16 page appendix with a detailed account of the methods used to generate each text.

Jepson’s command of procedural techniques is impressive. There are Dada games such as n+7 and v+7, in which every noun or verb of a text is replaced with the entry seven places ahead on a dictionary page. By applying the n+7 technique to the lyrics for “Sugar Talking,” Jepson offers readers phrases such as “Boy Scout, do you win a probabilism?” and “Yeah, your paralinguistics mean shiver to me.” There is a google translate algorithm (detailed in the appendix using 4 pages of arrow diagrams) which transforms the lyrics for “Manchild,” resulting in a sequence of uncanny lines: “The boy / Why do you always come to me? / The nest of my life. / Don’t you feel sorry for the innocent woman? / I never heard that be careful / Half of the brain was destroyed.” The book’s most imposing read is a short story designed to include every word from an alphabetized list of words from the original lyrics to “My Man on Willpower.” The text is a leviathan abecedarian of strange contortions, as in a fit of confused dialogue that accommodates four instances of “don’t” as they appear in sequence from the list.

Alongside such impersonal procedures, Jepson rounds out the collection with a number of poems that retain a subjective impulse. The crafting procedures of traditional forms result in one sonnet (using the lyrics of “Such a Funny Way”) and one villanelle (using the lyrics of “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night”). Jepson also transforms lyrics using subjective semantics, such as “first deleting three words from every line, then [letting] it marinate in forgetfulness before returning to add three new words per line” (using the lyrics of “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”), as well as sonics, such as the poem which “attempt[s] to replace every word while keeping the meter intact” (using the lyrics of “Nobody’s Son”). The subjective encounter with language is also prioritized by Jepson’s choice to avoid listening to the album; according to the appendix, “he definitely will as soon as this book’s for sale.”

How does such an oddball, experimental work fare in the world of starred reviews? The readers most likely to award Jepson’s book a 4- or 5-star rating are those eager fellow travelers into language’s uncanny valley, in the tradition of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, hoping to discern not only what animates the poem, but also what delineates it from inert text. Any unprepared readers—wayward Sabrina Carpenter fans, perhaps, or simply those expecting a more traditional poetics—are likely to award a 1-star rating. This review splits the difference to award 3 stars.

You can buy Thubrina many places, including Bookshop and Barnes & Noble. You can use your library card to access it through Hoopla.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Every so once in a while, a student will collect things I say in class then gift me that list at the end of the year. It’s one of my favorite gifts.

(Arthur was not a real person.)

1. Embrace the religion of rewrites

2. You shouldn’t JUST drink urine, to be clear

3. Let’s set things on fire! Not really

4. Don’t let your table walk away from you

5. I do remember it but my memory is false

6. Bomb threats! Oh, my favorite

7. If you are going to call in a bomb threat to cancel a test, my advice to you is to call in a few fake ones to throw them off

8. Good job everybody, you signed your name twice

9. Have you guys beaten a lot of poems in your days?

10. Why is this not alive?

11. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with looking up guns on your school computer

12. Oh no! Is one of you kidnapped?

13. I’ll just suffer

14. The world is filled with printers, you can figure it out

15. I believe in feeding you MIND grapes

16. Your sentences hoped out of the car on the highway and hitch-hiked to albuquerque

17. Their lives all suck equally so they have equal opportunity?

18. I blame school for this

19. Before you know it you have a house full of words and no one wants to visit you because it smells like cat piss.

20. I think I might be broken

21. Tell us about feet

22. Baby’s gonna baby and there’s nothing you can do about it

23. I regret to tell you, that in this world, there is racism

24. You don’t exist, we already established that.

25. Do not write a poem for your mothers funeral in triple rhyme

26. I guess you guys have never thought about Christmas before

27. We should all know when William the Conqueror, Conquered

28. Even the bad babies are still babies

29. They typer typed what the typer chose to type

30. It’s the way you kill a baby, legally

31. Just because you are attracted to dead things, L***a, doesn’t mean you have to kill people

32. I don’t think he’s going to grow up to kill people, I just think he’s just going to commit a lot of white-collar crime and get away with it.

33. My goal is truth and justice, you guys!

34. He was a playwright, which isn’t as bad as being an actor, which isn’t as bad as being a prostitute, but they are all in that sucky section of society

35. Mathematically, at least one of you is probably gonna be dead by the time you are 30, but I can safely say that it won’t be because you caught fire and burned to death in the kitchen.

36. I can safely say that none of you will catch fire and burn to death in the kitchen at any point in your life.

37. Fairies love humans, but they love them in the same way that you love a peanut butter sandwich

38. It’s good to know that that yard will soon have no more plants

39. Americans live on the cusp of just enough sleep, so if you take away an hour, we just die. Let that be a lesson to us all

40. Can’t have too many twins in a comedy. That’s for sure

41. Dick jokes are eternal

42. The best part about smoking is the cigar boxes

43. Some people are less electromagnetic than other

44. Maybe this is how they graduate high school. They turn into a tree. A cathedral

45. I think Arthur has developed a cocaine problem

46. I did not know one mouth could home so much white bubbly goop

47. It smells like someone has opened a dispensary in one of the bathrooms

48. Wow, democracy has failed us again

49. Maybe that’s why you’ve been acting out, Being raised by a couple of desiccated old corpses

50. If I wanted you to die, I wouldn’t have said anything

51. And then I rolled into the other lane of traffic

52. But that doesn’t mean YOU will, you might do terribly

53. Everyone is raising their hands in my peripheral vision, and having nothing to say! I feel very gaslit

54. The past is a foreign country, as they say

55. You can fail, but you can’t embrace failure

56. Everything is far away until its here, and then its closer

57. Get your mind greasy again

58. I could stab you quite happily, D*****k

59. MIT is famously contagious

60. Thats what phones are for, unfortunately

61. Dish soap in my gas can

62. You ever bring home a half dead squirrel?

63. The rest of you can repent and do better next time

64. Its my job to corrupt you with wisdom

65. What is the fun in being attracted to something NORMAL

66. You guys are cursed

67. That’s academia baby. You are going to love college

68. Then you’ve never gone grocery shopping with me in my 20s

69. Shut up G**n!

    Share

    Leave a comment

    Subscribe now

Two projects I am working on are currently fundraising.

First, I was accepted to the Mormon Lit Lab’s Book Mentoring Program. I’ve finished my new novel’s rough draft since then and finally found its title:

Honeymoon in Copper

It’s new to this world and I can see that phrase lending itself to some dandy covers.

You can read the pitch on the fundraising page.

I’m tapping into MLL’s funds THIS WEEKEND as I travel to San Diego to hole up in a friend’s backyard cabin to rewrite rewrite rewrite for almost a fullweek of 15-hour days. I’m excited. And MLL is covering my gas which, in 2026, makes a huge difference. I’m so grateful. And you can help lil writers like me pull off our projects by suporting the Lit Lab. It’s a good thing to do! I’ve done it myself!

Second, this Kickstarter won’t actually launch until September, but you can ask to be notified when it goes live.

It was one of the more fun prompts I’d seen so I had to write something. Someone named Glen must die. Gotta use the phrase Crystal Palace. Well, you can’t say Crystal Palace to a Kern County boy like me without visions of Buck Owens coming to mind.

I don’t want to say more about that one now, but I will share the story’s official playlist:

Anyway! If you click the notify button now, you can read one of the stories—a comic necromancer piece (what else?).

And if you’re poor,

Share

this post with all your rich friends. That’s what they’re for, right?

This is the month where, depending on which classes I’m teaching, the number of movies watched might explode. This is one of those years where explosion occurs. Fun times.

But I already wrote an interview to May because I was pissed off at Beau Travail. (This was written before the entire post thereon.) So let me just say that I love sharing great movies with students and tricking them into learning a new vocabulary and rhetoric, forever changing the way they experience film, mwuhahahahah, et cetera.

Onto that other introduction:

.

I was thinking about Beau Travail later the night we watched it and I realized that the movie it reminds me most from the other movies of May is Anaconda (2025). Granted Claire Denis is more interested in vaguely homoerotic exercise routines than giant snakes but what she and her team share with the characters played by Jack Black and Paul Rudd is a belief in themes. But I think the Anaconda characters actually feel a responsibility to decide what those are. In my opinion, Beau Travail refuses to say. It’ll give us images and words and silly coincidence, but they mean nothing. There’s no reason why the woman selling the rug should be the woman who nurses Sentain. And the film has no idea why it made that so. It just assumed we’d notice and create meaning out of nothing. That pisses me off.

So yes, I’m saying the crappy movie made by the schmucks in Anaconda is at least a more honest film than Beau Travail. And I’d rather watch it than Beau Travail again.

That’s my hottest take in a while but I stand by it.

ELSEWHERE
link+ dvd

Flight of the Navigator (1986)

This might be, to me, the single most important movie of my childhood. I saw it many, many times. Had it memorized. Generally called it my favorite movie, etc.

But I probably haven’t seen it since the early Nineties. Certainly not since I became a parent. Not because I didn’t want to. I was so excited to show it to my kids. But before I acted, my parents showed it to them first off our old VHS tape. It happened one, two, three times. And they liked it but they never felt a pressing need to watch it again. And if they did want to watch it again, they’d rather watch it with Gramma and Pappa because that’s where they saw it the first time.

This was a real (if unintentional) robbery.

I’d gone through mourning, acceptance, but now another opportunity has arisen with our surprise #4. But I hadn’t realized it until YouTube recommended some videos by a guy I’d never heard of before including a long one about the effects in Flight of the Navigator. I watched it and she joined me and I got my library to obtain a dvd from Fremont and now, here we are on Amtrak, and we’ve watched the movie.

First, I loved it. I was a little nervous it would have turned terribly in the last thirty-plus years, but no. It’s fun. And the family stuff is emotionally beyond what I’m guessing I experienced as a kid. Or at least different. Because, you know, I’m the parent now.

But she liked it too. I had to laugh at a couple things so she could too, but we had fun. It could have become a family tradition.

But you never know just how these things will play out.

Addendum one: Disney’s marketing department should be ashamed.

Addendum two: Is just me or does the lead look an awful lot like Mary Elizabeth Winstead? Is that why I lommed onto her instantly? she looked like an old friend?


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Free Solo (2018)

Second movie in a row that would have been so much bigger on a giant screen

We were just in Yosemite, but even when you’re right next to it, the sheer size of El Capitan is hard to grasp. It’s a rock. There’s nothing to compare it to, to get a sense of perspective. It’s impossibly enormous.

Anyway, the 9yrold left Yosemite wanting to watch Free Solo, a film child one was given on dvd in high school but which we’ve never watched.

He missed out. It’s awesome.

Some people are just not like the rest of us. I’m glad they exist...but I’m also glad they’re not me.


ELSEWHERE
link+ dvd

Silent Running (1972)

This is a hard movie to say much intelligible about after first watch. It’s a number of stories running one after another, but the primary story is something very Poe: guilt leading to madness. But added to that are elements of proto-metal, The Last Unicorn, 2001, Star Wars–predicting droids, both classically utopian and classically dystopian Golden-Age-of-science-fiction tropes, Greenpeace, American consumerism, and more. It’s chock-full.

And I’m not quite sure what I think of it yet.

But I betcha I’ll have a strong opinion if you ask me three years from now.


HOME
link+ dvd

Defending Your Life (1991)

My buddy Myke wanted to see this for his birthday so his older cousin drove us to Lancaster to see it. I’m pretty sure we liked it, but she gave us a kindly lecture about some of the moral questions raised, which I remember better than the movie. (But I do remember a few parts from the movie and they’re still good.)

It was fun to watch with Lady Steed. She felt like the parallels to Eternity were exact, almost too much so, but she liked it a lot (and she loved Eternity). It was fun to watch with her. We laughed a lot and her mind was bubbling with commentary which spilled out over the credits.

Wildly, I’ve only seen two of Albert Brooks’s features (the other) and I remain convinced he’s someone whose work I’ll love. Currently, this is my favorite. But I suspect there’s something even better in his backlist.


ELSEWHERE
Delta Studio

Anaconda (2025)

Funny. Jumpy. Friend-filled.

Exactly what was promised.

And it set up the small amount of fanservice so even those of us who’ve never seen an Anaconda ovie can be happy when it happens.


THEATER
Century Cinemark Hilltop 16

The Sheep Detectives (2006)

First, I loved it. It’s so much more layered and intelligent than it had to be; perhaps that’s how it aquired this cast.

I just looked up the director and he has a deep, deep animation background which must be part of why the cg sheep work so well. I think the only real animal in the entire movie was the chicken—which was smart. That way we weren’t being thrown in and out of the movie as the leads became different things.

(Two puppeteers were credited; not sure what they did.)

But, again, this is a smart movie. And not just in the Detective Story sort of way. It’s a fine mystery but the real power of the film is in its emotional intelligence. A wide variety of emtions appear from a wide variety of locations intertwining in complex and true ways. Bravo.


HOME
link+ dvd

Beau Travail (1999)

Imagine that the apes at the beginning of 2001 occasionally get to vacation in Twin Peaks‘ Red Room. Only boring.


ELSEWHERE
Kanopy

Parasite (2019)

This is my third watch and I may be experiencing diminishingreturns. I still think it’s a beautifully constructed film and a thrill to watch but I’m not as shaken by it’s ideas. It feels a bit more style than substance on this watch.

That said, this is the first time I’ve shared it with students and it worked well on them, though they all took issue with the New York Times saying it’s the best picture of the century so far. They found that nonsensical, like it though they did.

I’m impressed by how ready kids are to talk about movies as movies these days. They’re more educated. I suspect it’s because of all the children of Every Frame a Painting giving them the eye and the vocabulary?

This is what we read in class: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our bluray

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Grand Budapest is growing in my estimation. Quite possibly simply because I’ve seen it more times. There’s surely correlation between height on this list and how many times I’ve seen it.

Anyway, first time watching this one with students. I included only non-Rushmore options this time (for reasons)and one class is watching this and one class will watch Fantastic Mr. Fox next month.

Anyway, I’m delighted to announce the class loved it. They admired the aethetics and thought it was funny. If you can do both, you’re well on your way to being a Wes fan. Fun stuff.

This is what we read in class: 1 and 2, 3.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

The Sixth Sense (1999)

I love how I had all three of my first experiences this time. Time one, scary jumpy movie. Time two, moving meditation on marriage. Time three, portrait of a parent/child relationship. Now, having seen it...six times? I can revisit all three of those experiences in a single viewing. I was weeping in the back of the room as Cole and is mother talked in the car.

Speaking of meaningless coincidences, the two women connected by this film made two of my favorite comedies—one the year before and one the year after.

This is what we read in class: 1, 2 and 3.


THEATER
Century Cinemark Hilltop 16

In the Grey (2026)

This movie suffered by being preceded by a trailer for the rerelease of Ocean’s Eleven, the coolest heist movie of all time. This movie is a cool heist-adjacent movie but . . . not as cool as Ocean’s Eleven.

But the character work isn’t quite as good either. Jake Gyllenhall and Henry Cavill do a descent George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but the rest of the crew are just big muscles with beards (or not) and accents of some sort. They don’t have backstories other than an implication that Mom had earned their loyalty somehow. This is only implied because we know she got them out of prison Jake and Henry out of prison once and . . . that’s their entire backstory, too.

Also, spoiler alert (this sounds like the set up of the movie but its depth is the spoiler), I’d like to cheer on bad guys who ruin bigger badguys. But even trillionaires ruling the world remain abstract in this movie while our protags killing dozens of guys for money is very much on the screen.

So it was cool and I enjoyed the film but it fell short of its goals.

(Incidentally, I just checked and somehow the only Guy Ritchie movie I’ve seen before is Snatch? That’s wild.)


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

I love this movie so much. A bonafide masterpiece. I’m a little surprised it hasn’t cracked Sight and Sound yet. Maybe in 2032.

Anyway, someone said to me yesterday, I’m unsure why, that I just love scenes where people on transportation stare out windows. but maybe it’s true. the train scene in Spirited Away is one of my favorite scenes of all time. And Bill on the bus, looking out the window as it rains, is probably my favorite sequence in this movie.

So yeah: guilty as charged.

What we read in class: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
Kanopy

L’age d’or (1930)

The thing that surprises me on this revisit is how it’s both more conventional than I remembered (there are storylike elements! that score!) and even weirder.

My new definition of surrealism is “a sequence of dirty jokes.”

Incidentally, this year’s students weren’t as outraged as last year’s.

What we read in class: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Dumbo (1941)

This might be the first time kids have voted in Dumbo, not sure. Definitely need to find new readings.

A lot of the artistic choices will be perfected in Disney’s next movie (Bambi), but as a whole this is a charming and beautiful movie. Dali (writer of L’age d’or) said Disney was the greatest surrealist and you can see that here.

The ethnic stuff doesn’t play like it did in 1941 but sometimes I don’t even know how it plays. I think you’d get 75 different opinions from 100 different people. Some of it (setting up the tents) is beautiful, and some of it (the conductor) feels like it shouldn’t be offensive but is, and some of it (the crows) feels like it should be offensive but isn’t quite. Or maybe I’m getting those backwards. Anyway.

What we read: 1, 2.


THEATER
Century Cinemark Hilltop 16

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

I liked the movie enough I wasn’t worried about watching it again with her 9yrold (she really wanted to go back and take a friend), but I liked it so much more than I expected this second time.

The mystery isn’t such an amazing mechanism that I wished to watch it unspool again (ala a Knives Out Movie), which wasgood because it didn’t hold that much interest in the second viewing. But once the plot is rolling and the emphasis returns to the characters, the movie is brilliant. The emotional depths impress me. And some things I wouldn’t let a lesser movie get away with, such as the, mm, two religious scenes, are executed well here—perfectly in the second incidence. It’s really an impressive piece of work.


HOME
Peacock

Asteroid City (2023)

My wife asked if there was something we should be watching on Peacock. I’d kinda forgotten we had Peacock. Then she went to bed. But it recommended Asteroid City to me and I hit play. I watched it in pieces over the next three or four days, sometimes joined by others. (It’s kind of the perfect film to watch this way both because it’s broken into bitesize pieces and because it’s as comfortable as beloved music.)

Anyway, I love this movie. I don’t claim to understand it, but since the (a) main character doesn’t understand it either, I don’t see why that should get in my way. Many are the beautiful and wonderful and true things in this world that I do not understand. Let this movie be one.

HOME
our dvd

The Princess Bride (1987)

If it were coming out in six months I might have a few notes but as an established classic? No notes.

Interesting to me that the most emotionally resonant parts this watch were between grandfather and grandson. I was in eager anticipation the entire film for the payoff that is that final line.

I’m overdue to reread the book....


ELSEWHERE
Pluto TV

The Kid (1921)

Pluto kept skipping the scene where the Orphanage takes the kid away which lessened the impact of the reunion. So we found it on YouTube later to watch that scene. The YouTube version had much better image but the music for the scene was so, so wrong.

Anyway, The Kid‘s great, but in my opinion it’s lesser Chaplin. I like City Lights and Modern Times much better.

What we read: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Bambi (1942)

I never fail to be amazed by Bambi. It’s brilliant. And I’m still noticing new details. The girl who chooses Thumper? She’s eating blossoms when she sees him. Soulmates!

And I don’t know that there has been a greater apocalypse set to film than the fire as seen from the island. Awesome in the worst way possible.

We read these: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Duck Soup (1933)

I mean:

The Marx Brothers are funny.

(In book news, I finally just purchased Harpo Speaks and picked up The Groucho Letters for free.)

The bad news is it’s senior ditch day. Having only two people each for The Kid and Bambi was a bummer but even though my single student this class liked it, watching Duck Soup alone with your teacher is definitially tragic.

The readings: 1, 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

It might be a flawless movie. Talking it over with students I realize that every bit that might seem off or hokey to one person could well be someone else’s favorite part. Because every piece of the movie works. Even if it doesn’t hit you exactly right this time.

The credits are short but just long enough to hide the tears from my face. Maybe I shouldn’t do that. But I was such a wreck, you don’t have to be an emotional genius to notice I had been crying. Maybe high-school seniors are just too polite to point it out.

We read 1 and 2.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Spirited Away (2001)

Another perfect film. The class voted overwhelmingly to watch the dub which marks a serious cultural shift over the last, say, seven years.

My big thought was that our daughter’s just the right age to see this now (Chihiro reminded me a lot of, the way her body moves); Miyazaki said he made it for 10yrold girls (see reading 1) and she just about it. I’m taking the dvd home tonight. Expect it to be on one of these lists again some time this summer.

We read 1 and 2.

ELSEWHERE
our dvd

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

It’s such a different experience for me to watch movies this time of year. Watching three movies a day (or, more accurately most of the time, three halves of movies one day followed the second halves of those same movies) leads to noticing similarities and questions that otherwise would be invisible. So many connections between O Brother and Its a Wonderful Life, for instance, surely more similarities in props and framing than between O Brother and Sullivan’s.

And then I forget and I get to rediscover them again in the future.

Watching (and rewatching) movies is fun!

The readings were two excerpts from here.

HOME
Kanopy

High-Rise (2015)

Hard to believe this movie got made. It can’t have been cheap but I don’t know how they expected it to make money. It has a level of (violent) sex and violence that would be difficult to pull in big money regardless of how perfectly it turned out.

And it did turn out pretty well. It’s packed full with beautiful shots and fascinating scenes. Some great lines (are they from the Ballard novel?) like:

“I’m an orthodontist, not a homosexual.”

“Like all poor people, she’s obsessed with money.”

“You’re forgetting one thing. This is my party. You are my guests. I shall decide if someone is to be lobotomized.”

(There are more.)

The lowest part of the movie is the final moment when the radio tells us what it was all supposed to mean (as if the movie had been too subtle) and some absurd cg bubbles that, you better believe it, pop.

I did like the remade 70s music (expecially that second version of ABBA’s “SOS”).

Anyway, it’s the story of a highrise; the rich live at the top, the poor at the bottom. Society crumbles. The film (which is not subtle) gives you some hints where things are going before they go there when our main character goes to a top-floor party and everyone’s dressed like aristocrats two weeks before Bastille Day and they mock Tom Hiddleston’s very nice (contemporary) suit like mean girls in the cafeteria.

It’s all downhill from there.

I honestly don’t know after one viewing if the thing holds together or not. Certainly this review does not. But it’s intriguing and I do want to know what else the director and writer have done. I see I’ve seen one of his (Free Fire) and one of hers (also Free Fire).

Free Fire came out a year later. It was less ambitious and more successful. If there’s a lesson there, I don’t like it.

(ps: unusually large number of cool posters for this one)

THEATER
Century Cinemark Hilltop 16

Obsession (2026)

Okay. I have a LOT I want to say. And I’m just going to spew it in no particular order. Beware spoilers.

First, Inde Navarrette is now a star. I’ll have to learn how to say her name. She looks like what you’d need to cross with Anya Taylor-Joy to get Jenna Ortega. Also, she needs an Oscar nomination for this role. Let’s all remember that through the rest of the year. In one scene she does something to her face that makes her look like a cross between Mia Goth in Pearl and Donny Wahlberg in Sixth Sense and it is terrifying. She does things with her face and body that make you blink in astonishment—or would, if you could look away.

And props to young Curry Barker who is clearly very, very good at this. He makes some “wrong” choices in this film and they all work. Making actors go longer with an expression or an action than they should. Holding longer. That final act of almost-violence in the movie? I knew it was a possibility. Then I decided he wasn’t going for it. Then he started to go for it, but obviously he wouldn’t. But then...obviously he was going for it. And then he didn’t. I haven’t been this yanked around since toys I loved were about to get incinerated back in 2010.

The sound is great. Solid music choices. Great use of volume, both high and low and sudden contrasts. The mourning dove cue was perfect. We’re trained to recognize a key sound when it occurs offscreen and we don’t need to by told what happened or why or what’s next.

The film’s a little like Get Out with the sins of The Stepford Wives brought back into primary focus. It’s found a new and fun way to play with a monkey’s paw. It turns a solid side joke into solid commentary on the banality of evil. It’s hella fun to watch but leaves you with lots to be sad about afterward. The lighting: incredible. It 100% proves my thesis that horror and comedy are the same game. The writing is sharp, both the dialogue and Nikki’s novel. And it’s just the right length. Lady Steed said if it had lasted five more minutes she would’ve had to walk out. (She dug it but it was a lot gorier than she’d been prepared for. Whatever she heard on NPR that made her suggest the movie did not mention its blood.)

Incidentally, I wasn’t interested in this movie when it opened. I hadn’t seen a trailer. The poster seemed pretty pedestrial. But people kept talking about it online. My students apropos of nothing were asking me if I’d seen it because they wanted to talk about it. And tonight, the theater? Full and engaged.

This thing’ll have legs. Go see it on a big screen with big sound. You got time. Time’s all you got.

(ps: the final words in the credits inform us that this film is not to be used to train a.i. first, i’m here for that. put it on all of ‘em from here on out. second, what if this movie is an a.i. metaphor? what if that?)

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

What is your approach to teaching writing? What skills do you try to emphasize?

Much of my teaching (including teacher writing) is based on the theory that if I honestly like what we’re doing, it’ll be easier for me to sell that to students. So I try to shape my curricula around things I think are fun and interesting and worth my time. I don’t believe in lying to students and telling something is fun or interesting or important when it isn’t. But it’s my job to make that true.

With that in mind, I don’t get hung up on easily defined “skills” like many of my colleagues. English teachers have all the acronyms and jargon for how to create a thesis or order claim and evidence. That stuff matters of course, but if kids will read and write they’ll get better. So the most important thing is to get them doing it.

All that really matters to be is clarity. Clarity comes first. When you’re motivated to be clear, you’ll discover the importance of a thesis and the relationship between claim and evidence.

Constant writing gives students the chance to apply their discoveries and to keep moving forward.

The two most important means I have to teach writing are

1) Grading on the projector, letting everyone see me modeling reading and understanding (and failing to understand) alongside realtime suggestions on how to make the next draft more clear

2) When students come see me at lunch for one-on-one discussions of their writings. Wish I could require this.

Have you taught classes other than AP Lit? How do they differ from AP Lit?

Yes. I’ve taught ninth graders (both advanced, not advanced, and combined), tenth graders (all three again), eleventh grade not-advanced, twelfth grade not-advanced, AP Lang, and a remedial course called Read 180. Also, I’ve twice taught PE. Not credentialed to teach PE.

The primary difference between AP Lit and the others is that AP Lit usually has a higher percentage of students ready for my predilections: making students read more and write more while simultaneously making them ask their own questions. Also, in terms of classtime, I prefer students to do most of the talking. That’s easier to pull off when students have self-selected for a collegiate experience.

Does the formal and standardized structure from CollegeBoard help with teaching? Hurt?

I pay very little attention to what CollegeBoard says and does. I do think the test is motivating for many students and it never hurts to have one more motivation, but otherwise I don’t care that much what they say.

Their trainings are, on average, the best trainings I’ve been to. But that’s because it’s actual AP Lit teachers teaching them. Learning from them is what’s useful. The worst parts are all the worried questions new AP teachers ask about making CollegeBoard happy. That’s not a great use of our time.

In class, we had freewrite “Essais”. What made you do these, and how do you think they contribute to student writing learning?

Part of my inspiration was John Warner who writes unusually good stuff on teaching writing.

First, I screwed up and left off a book. So I’m putting it in where it should have gone, then getting back on track and ending with, wai...

I used to have college freshmen come back and say thanks, AP Lit prepared me for college, etc etc. But themn they would add that the one thing they hadn’t been prepared for was how much writing they would have to do. I’d told them but it still came as a shock.

So I decided to add more writing. At first, I was adding more AP tests. I figured I’d add a few more each semester until my students broke.

But—

I broke first. It was too much grading!

Then I moved to doing one or two AP-style essays every week but only grading a few, selected at random.

This was great in many ways. Most students got amazing at writing AP essays.

But ten to twenty percent did not. Instead, they got trapped in a loop writing the same crap over and over.

“Practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes permanent.”

And getting their bad essays cemented into the only way they could write was a disservice.

I had to reimagine things.

Which is how I ended up with essais.

This way, we write every week still, but it’s not always AP stuff.

Other times it’s this charming random stuff.

And here’s what I discovered:

EVERYONE gets better now.

“Essay” comes for the French word for try and when everyone gets full points just for writing for forty minutes, the stress of “doing it right” floats away. And that freedom to try a whole bunch of random stuff without the stress of some punitive rubric hanging over you allows everyone to just try random stuff. And all that random stuff provides lots of new tools and means to solve problems with writing. The essais might feel like silly fun (because they are) but they make students much better writers.

If you think back to being two, ALL learning was play.

Keeping learning play is one of the best things any human can do for themselves.

But school isn’t very friendly to that attitude.

If I can get people to play with words, then they’ll be better writers, even when they have to writer Very Serious Garbage for some annoying required course.

IIs there value in the in-class timed essays outside of AP test prep?

I think so. Being able to execute any task with skill in a limited amount of time is better than only being able to execute a task with skill when you have endless time.

Someday, every one of my students will have half an hour max to write a do-or-die email to their boss explaining something or asking for something or to mitigate something. Being able to crank out a reasonable, understandable, elegant argument in that timeframe may be thanks to AP Lit, whether they realize it or not.

Ta da!

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

We watched Beau Travail last night and I was able to dismiss it on Letterboxd with a jokey two-sentence review, but now twenty-four hours have passed and I’ve gone from not liking it to being personally offended by and absolutely outraged at this stupid movie.

I watched it for our film group but then I missed most of our meeting for a zoom call I had to take and thus wasn’t able to get my rant out. I’m afraid it will fester inside me unless I let it out.

Probably, I could let the sins of Beau Travail slide except it’s apparently the seventh greatest movie ever made.

So I’m obviously wrong about it’s lack of merit, but I’ve seen 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, and 12, and I can assure you that they are all vastly superior and much more worthy of inclusion.

But again: I’m wrong!

So let’s start talking about all the things I hate about Beau Travail, shall we?

First, the film is ugly. It’s shot poorly. It sometimes thinks it’s found an interesting framing, say, when the legionnaires are lying on the ground like a bunch of posed corpses, but it’s actually not interesting. When one of the leads is lying near-dead encrusted with salt in the middle of the desert? Don’t know how you mess up a shot like that but it had no visual interest to it. And no emotional content either.

Some graphic designer was able to take that shot and make it look much better for this poster, but in the movie it was lifeless and boring.

But part of the reason that scene lacked viv is probably because the scene should not have been in the movie. The film sets up a number of rules for itself in the first act. This is something all art that passes through time must do—movies, plays, novels, etc. You set up the rules and then you follow the rules. Otherwise, you break the work and it falls to pieces.

(People keep asking me as I gripe, “Don’t lots of movies break their rules?” No. Not good ones. They may surprise us. They may even seem to be breaking a rule. But always the seeming violation was set up from the beginning.

This movie not only didn’t set it up from the beginning, it insists this scene is against the rules as it’s happening.

Hhhhh.

Look: one of the potentially interesting things Beau Travail attempts is almost entirely eschewing dialogue. It’s largely wordless but much of the words we do get come from our on, single, narrating character. The film is insistent from go that we are experiencing the world of the French Legion through his point-of-view. This is the loudest, most shouted and most insistent rule the film establishes. We are in this man’s p-o-v. That’s it. So when we’re suddenly with someone else (having just been told in narration that our p-o-v never saw him again), watching him lost in the desert, I’m screaming p-o-v violation!!! at the screen. Then, mid-aside, the film again insists through narration that our p-o-v doesn’t know what happened. Then back to the aside. So…what’s happening here?

Breaking its established rules is the entire thingamathing for Beau Travail’s last act. Let’s consider the nonsensical coincidence. There was one, earlier, outside-the-point-of-view scene with a woman selling a rug. It’s out of nowhere and completely disconnected to the Legion and then it’s suddenly over. What was it—a bit of worldbuilding? To what end?

Well, I’ll tell you to what end. When the dying salt-encrusted legionnaire is rescued by some locals, the woman on the bus who gives him water is, you’ll never guess, the woman who was selling a rug.

Why?

Seriously, why?

This coincidence adds nothing. It’s clearly there so the audience will assign meaning to it, but there is no meaning to be assigned. The movie’s asking us to do more work for it than it has earned. It’s a cheap, high-school version of Ambiguity! Cleverness! Art! It’s the shape of a thing but not the thing itself. It’s an empty space and an absolute waste of your time. Don’t bother pouring any meaning into it.

Then there’s the famous dance scene that ends the film. I suspect its presence was inspired by the Red Room of Twin Peaks—but adding it because the Red Room was cool and not because it has anything to do with the film was a mistake.

And yes, yes, yes: I know the reasons that scene’s supposed to be great. And I’m glad some people find it so moving. But, hear me out, maybe it sucks?

You can say he’s dead and now his soul is free; you can say he’s finally cut lose from his jealousies and is thus able to reside in his own body; you can say that post–court martial he is reclaiming his own identity. You can say whatever you want. But once again, the movie is lying to us. Whatever the reason he’s finally cutting loose, his wild flailings are the movements of someone deeply trained in the artistic expression of the body. He moves like a dancer or a gymnast. (The actor trained in circus arts.) It’s not the character we’ve seen throughout the movie. That man doesn’t move that way. Until, suddenly, he does. Apparently because someone thought it would look cool. That’s an insufficient reason.

Also, maybe it wasn’t in 1999, but the choice of song today plays like an accidental punchline.

(Let’s set aside Beau Travail for a momnt to consider the differences between “Peluca” and Napoleon Dynamite. Both shoots filmed an extended dance with Jon Heder’s character. It’s not part of “Peluca” because it had nothing to do with the movie. They filmed it only for their own amusement. They did not put it in the movie. But that dance was set up to be a key part of Napoleon Dynamite and so, when it arrives, it works. Both movies are truthful. Unlike, say, Beau Travail.)

Just want to pause and tell you I’m feeling better already. I haven’t hit on all the things that piss me off about Beau Travail but I’ve made some progress. I feel like I should mention that Beau Travail is only 93 minutes but it bored me vastly more than much longer movies where “nothing happens” like The Tree of Life or Amour or Stalker—movies I love.

This isn’t me being a philistine. It’s me being honest with you and saying I see very little in this movie to praise. The physicality of the men is impressive. The salty antelope skull is cool. Umm…..surely there was at least one more thing I liked?

Regardless, as a whole Beau Travail is terrible. I know I’m wrong. I don’t care. I’ll go on being wrong. It’s ugly and dull, pointless and dishonest.

Oh! I really liked when it used music from Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd opera! That music was easily my favorite part of the movie and I only wish they’d used more of it. (It was the use of Britten, by the way, that made me compare the legionnaires to the apes that open 2001.)

But there’s probably a better way to listen to Benjamin Britten than watching Beau Travail. I encourage you to find it.

(If it must be a movie, may I recommend Moonrise Kingdom?)

Leave a comment

On our trip to Montana, I brought three books. The first I started and finished en route. The second I started en route and finished flying home. Of the third I read the next four chapters while BARTing home. But that doesn’t mean Moby Dick will be showing up here any time soon. I’m still only on page 162.

Long book, that Moby Dick. But I have finished these:

☞

030) Saints Volume 3: Boldly, Nobly, and Independent, 1893–1955, finished April 11

I loved this book, the first of Saints that I’ve read through (slightly embarrassing as I have a number of friends who’ve worked on them). First, I recognize this is something of a trendy book in that it believes history isn’t just Great Man but examples of all the other people as well, “smaller” people doing “smaller” things. The thing is: I think that is great. We need to know what’s happening in Cincinnati and Berlin as much as we do inner Salt Lake sanctums. Otherwise, it’s not a history of the Church.

Anyway, I’ve already cited it in talks and even more in conversation. I liked getting to be friends with people now dead. That’s one of my favorite things. Love it.

Plus, it’s written in a cheery accessible way (without avoiding necessary darkness) and in bitesize pieces which make it perfect for pulling out during a solo breakfast or while waiting for someone to finish their shower. Which is largely how I read it.

Plus, knowing the amount of work that the team put into capturing things with accuracy—every quotation is a quotation, every sunny day was sunny in just that way—while making everything feel as natural as a Judy Blume novel, is just an astonishing accomplishment of both scholarship and artistry.

(Also, hilariously (but thought-provokingly), share this fun fact at your next writing group, they built the books using savethecat as a model.)

almost four years

☞

031) Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks by Andy Burns, finished April 11

Six years ago I read the Pop Classics on Calvin & Hobbes which remains one of the finest (and most pleasurable) works of criticism in my experience. This volume on Twin Peaks doesn’t reach that level—it’s more praise and fun facts—but absolutely worth the time I spent reading it. Plus, it’s persuaded me to seek out other things (eg, the Psych episode that has over 700 Twin Peaks references which was delightful).

They’ve released a lot more since I last checked (Jurassic Park! Clueless! Labyrinth!) and, as there are now more I want to read, Imahafta.

But, also, it makes me want to finish my Napoleon Dynamite pitch. Someone needs to write that book and here I am, right here, available. (Soon as I finish this novel....)

perhaps a month

☞

032) After 1903—What? by Robert Benchley, finished April 15

I love Benchley’s short videos which is why the last time I read one of his books, I made a vaguely Benchleyesque video in response:

More recently, when I interrupted my Benchley reading for Dave Barry‘s memoir, I was delighted to learn that Dave Barry counts Benchley as one of his heroes and continues to reread him to this day. I felt in good company.

And a Benchley collection really is the ideal bedside companion. He’s a charming host, sometimes very funny, pleasantly old-fashioned, and the essays are all very short. I assume they were written for newspaper syndication but the book never says.

Speaking of, what the heck does After 1903—What? mean, anyway? The collection came out in 1938. So 1903 was 35 years earlier. Robert Benchley was born in 1889 so he turned 14 in 1903 and 50 in 1938. This does not help me any. I suspect it was a funny title in 1938, but why? Why???

Here’s my copy:

Here’s another version:

Neither of these covers makes the title any clearer to me.

You’re welcome to read it yourself and explain the thing to me.

Or you can watch an actually entertaining video from the man himself:

could be less than one year or maybe it was two

☞

033) Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing by Jacob Goldstein, finished May 4

Loved it. Goldstein is a Planet Money reporter and the book shares that smart but accessible vibe. It covers everything from about four thousand years ago to 2020 and it opened my eyes to a lot of things I thought I understood and things I did not understand and even things I already understood. It’s a swift journey through posibility, which is the real thing. Things need not be the way they are. We know that because they haven’t been that way long. They haven’t been any way long.

Solid work of popular nonfiction. Recommended.

one or two or three weeks

☞

034) Montana 1948 by Larry Watson, finished May 6

We have five essentially new ex-library copies of this novel. Some teacher had got them purchased then couldn’t have used them more than a time or two. Then they sat for a decade or more before being tossed.

I grabbed five because “Montana.” The Big O was considering Missoula for school and I thought maybe reading this together could be a fun family activity. Currently we’re flying to Missoula for O’s graduation so obviously that didn’t happen. But Lady Steed grabbed two of them for us to read on the trip then give to O and his girlfriend when we finished.

Well, it’s probably best we didn’t read this with a 12yrold even thought that’s the age of the protagonist. Some of the blurbs compare this to To Kill a Mockingbird and part of the reason is the integrity of the father figure but it’s also because of the darkness that fuels the novel’s plot.

So why has this 1993 novel not had the lasting power of TKAM? They are similar in theme and quality. Its darkness might be slightly too clear for most high-school teachers. And it’s probably slightly too short. But the biggest reason might be the title. Montana 1948 is fine, I guess, but it had little evocative power compared to, say, To Kill a Mockingbird. No competition.

I was looking in the text for a better title for the novel. I found options, but it’s too late now.

It is a good book, though. I wonder if it will grow in my estimation as time passes.

[Spoiler: between handwriting this review on May 6 and typing it May 13, it already has.]

from sfo to slc

☞

035) Clever Girl: Jurassic Park by Hannah McGregor, finished May 11

A lot of “populist” queer writing shares a rhetorical problem: it makes no space for people who don’t already agree with whatever is being said. (Sometimes it even makes enemies our of allies for good measure.) Unless you’re already fully converted, you’re a damn fool and there is not enough time in the world to explain things for you.

This sort of anger is understandable—plenty of queer people fairly feel the world feels this way about them, but this stance not only fails to gain converts, it can’t even attain an audience.

Which isn’t to say Hannah McGregor isn’t angry. In her acknowledgements she calls Clever Girl an angry book. But her writing here is also sad and open and funny and deeply personably. Even if you came into Clever Girl convinced she’s wrong about averything, you’ll leave the book feeling friendly toward her and understanding why she feels the way she does, how she came to feel that way, and probably sympathetic to her argument.

(It occurs to me that one of Clever Girl‘s themes—the depth of time—might partly explain how she’s able to provide this context even to those who might start off assuming she’s batty.)

Which argument is excellent, by the way. No just her exegesis of Jurassic Park, but every part of reality which it comes into contact with.

This is the most personal of the three Pop Classics I’ve read, but that deep personal connection is the engine that runs the intellectual vehicle that is Clever Girl.

Good stuff.

(recommended companion readings: my favorite thing is monsters one and two)

one week

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

ELSEWHERE
Hoopla

Strawberry Mansion (2021)

First, I like how Birney isn’t afraid to connect his movie through reusing props or even characters which making no attempt to suggest this is some sort of shared universe.

Second, I love how deleriously weird it is and yet students don’t hate it. I’m bummed we finished right at the bell. I should have intentionally started it twenty minutes late so conversation could pick right up as the movie ends, but I trust it’ll go well tomorrow. People were mostly saying good things as they left the classroom.

Also, so nice to have some pink after starting the day with 12 Monkeys and Children of Men. This might even have a happy ending! Maybe!


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

12 Monkeys (1995)

I don’t know why I’m not a bigger Terry Gilliam fan. Feels like his aesthetic should appeal more to me. I’m almost a hundred pages into Gilliam on Gilliam right now! But I don’t love any of his movies. It’s kind of a bummer.

But I did like 12 Monkeys on this rewatch. I’ve seen La Jetée several times since watching 12 Monkeys the first time circa 2003 and so this time I didn’t really need to figure out what was going on. Or so I thought. I did not pick up on the identity of that woman in the final scene even though the subtitles identified her as Astrophysicist. Thank goodness I have students around to explain things to me.

Anyway, I like that there’s this ambiguity about his sanity but the movie never really takes that seriously. We have empathy for poor confused James Cole but we largely only believe he’s confused because the movie insists on it. There’s nothing in the storytelling that makes us doubt him.

It gets into the tragedy of time travel’s inherent, paradoxical nature while being a fun mid-to-low-budget star vehicle.


ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Children of Men (2006)

Arguably the most acclaimed dystopian movie I haven’t yet seen. A mid-apocalyptic film. No baby’s been born, anywhere in the world, for over eighteen years. What governments are left are autocratic nightmares, rounding up refugees and doing nothing good with them.

And then: hope.

I don’t watch a lot of war films so keep that in mind when I say this film gave me more sense of death is entirely out of my hands and anyone could die before this scene is over than just about anything else I’ve seen. But this time, the baby!

It’s beautifully shot. The famous long shots aren’t showy in context. The accidental bloodsplatter works great but I’m happy it was an accident.

Look forward to someday watching it again and glad I own the novel!


ELSEWHERE
YouTube

The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys (1996)

This is a terrific verite making-of. It’s fascinating to watch Terry Gilliam at work.

The title of this doc comes from one scene with a hamster in the background which, if you’re like me, you probably have not noticed, which brought production to a near halt until they could get the darn thing to work.

You wonder if Terry Gilliam would be happier if he’d stuck with animation and put together a Don Herztfeldt–style career.

But then he gets a happy ending—his movie opens at number one in every country it opens in. But can he be happy? Doesn’t seem like it....

There’s probably a lesson in here for us. Maybe it’s on this tshirt his editor wears.


HOME
Peacock

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

First time watching this since 1998 in a Bakersfield theater where I also saw As Good as It Gets (the new Bond film was sold out; I suspect I liked what I saw better than I would have 007; anyway, otherwise I wouldn’t have ended the night a Greg Kinnear fan). I really liked it. Lightning enlightening the Red Sea remains one of the most awe-inspiring movies I’ve ever had in a movie theater.

But I haven’t seen it since then and remembered very little about it. For instance, it’s a musical! I didn’t know that! Even as it went on, the only music I recognized was the priests’ playing-with-the-big-boys-now number and the final flourish before it cuts to credits.

It’s a beautiful film, still. Some of the cg doesn’t slide in perfectly smoothly, but the mix of 2d animation with clear computer elements (I know: it’s all cg, actually) largely looks great. Whoever animated Moses’s face is a terrific actor. Whoever animated Rameses’ face is an expert at transformation. Zipporah’s face always seems a little out of time, however. But Miriam and Aaron are great!

It really is a slimmed-down and modern-friendly adaptation, but it’s still seems daring for the time and hard to imagine existing today. I think this is the last great Bible epic? Unless you include Passion of the Christ has there even been one to achieved broad popularity since 1998? I’m not doing any research, but I can’t think of one....

In the end, it’s quite good. And I think my favorite cinematic Moses. It’s a well structured film and it gave me meaningful feelings. A fine thing for Holy Saturday.


THEATER
Grand Lake Theatre

Project Hail Mary (2026)

Happy to say I really liked this. I don’t knowy why people were complaining about act three (just that they were) but I would be willing to agree the pacing was a tad off. Lady Steed thought the ending had a tad too much Hollywood cheer. I’m fine with it although, on reflection, perhaps Ryan Gosling should have looked older.

For some reason, my review of the book was in the top two or three most popular posts on Thubstack for years. Why? I don’t know.

Al my complaints about the book are still true but so is all my praise. I enjoyed the book a lot and the things that bugged me about it I don’t remember (or didn’t until just reviewing my review). The movie loses a lot of the fun intellectual-puzzle aspects of the novel, but it’s still just a lot of fun. Sonthree cried a lot, I cried a little, we all laughed a lot. Ryan Gosling’s a movie star. Not everyone can star in Cast Away. Even with a costar that can emote better than Wilson.

(It was fun to listen to the audience react to Rocky.)

Anyway, he probably won’t but I hope he gets awards considerato in at the end of the year. And I can’t wait to see what Lord Miller does next.


HOME
library dvd

The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

A charming and lovely film. And so different from The Green Knight. Same writer/director—nice to know there are still eclectics in the world.

Great cast and a simple story about taking joy where you find joy. Takes all types, I suppose.

I liked the moment where the brakelights flushed Sissy Spacek’s face. It’s the little things, you know?

(Also, the special features were so great. I challenge everyone to make their cut scenes so beautiful. Sad I cannot also log “Everything Else We Shot” and “Prison Cats” on Letterboxd so I could then praise them in more detail.)


HOME
our dvd

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

Here are some things this movie does that movies just don’t do anymore and it’s a shame.

1. Make liberal use of charming and hilarious old ladies. The world is filled with aged actresses who can light up the screen. Why aren’t we still doing this?

2. Innocent romance. The first kiss between Luthor and Alma is so sweet and pure and simple that I count it among my favorite movie kisses. (Even though Don Knotts is 42 and Joan Stapley is 24.) (It’s a shame Don Knotts wasn’t being asked to make movies like this in his twenties.) (His first credit came at age thirty.) This is sufficient romance for a kids movie, thank you.

3. Goofy scores in kiddy horror comedies.

4. Nutsy mysteries that don’t care what Cinema Sins says, the just offer a fun excuse for jump and gags.

5. No-apology silliness.

Where this level of dumb fun in 2026?

We watched this because the 9yrold wanted to watch something and I sent her into the dvds to find something under 100 minutes. Then there was a bit of a narrowing-down process but we arrived here and we had a great time.

Although the 18yrold refused to join us. Being scarred by this movie is a treasured memory for him.


HOME
our dvd
(don’t ask me where they all come from)
(I don’t know)

A Few Good Men (1992)

A couple things haven’t aged well (the score, the credits) and I’m not totally convinced the movie would enjoy its current reputation if it appeared today, but it’s still pretty great. Such a cast and who doesn’t love an explosive conclusion to a courtroom drama? That’s what we crave! Even if it’s not in the courtroom proper (eg 12 Angry Men), we gotta have that moment. And this one is, I’ll grant, particularly earned. And the explosion is particularly explosive. And the risk Tom Cruise’s character is taking makes the whole thing particularly fraught.

You know what? I think I’ve talked myself into it. It’s better than just pretty great.


HOME
our dvd

The Fighting Preacher (2019)

Objectively, this isn’t a great movie. But it features comic scenes that are perfectly executed. It has moving scenes that are very effective. It has bits of dialogue and character work that are excellent. And in between those are shots and blocking and other choices that are so obvious as to be inadvertently funny, and egregious fan service. (Only instead of, I don’t know, Spider-Man, it’s Gordon Hinckley. That sort of thing.)

In other words, it’s a very T.C. Christensen movie. I end up really liking it, even though my better judgment has written a long list of reasons not to.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Saturday at 8:43am Pacific, I finished the first draft of my new (as-yet-untitled) novel. This is exciting, because the novel begins today, no earlier than 6:30pm Mountain (probably more like 9pm Mountain).

When I started the original short-story version of this tale in fall 2024, it was set in April/May 2025. The goal was to get it into the world before the events occurred.

But it never was a short story, so I’ve spent the last year expanding it into a novel that begins April 28, 2026 and ends Monday May 4, 2026. It had to be then (now) because the protagonists needed to graduate from BYU and get married before things start, as you can see from the first page of my MS:

Temples are closed on Sundays and Mondays. Can’t get them married then. And we need a couple days of action before the weekend hits. Tuesday, April 28 it is.

Pre-dating is standard operating procedure with me. Byuck takes place in the 2000–2001 school year. I started writing it in 1999 and finished the first draft in 2004. Just Julie’s Fine takes place fall 2005. I started in in 2004 and finished its first draft in 2012.

I guess I want my books to take place the exact same moment their first readers read them? If so, I haven’t pulled it off yet. And it would take a miracle for this book to appear even next year. Tuesday’s out of the question.

Anyway, at least I got the rough done before the novel starts this time. I’m feeling good about that. I’m undecided if I should dig into the rewrite immediately or follow Stephen King’s advice and sticking it in a drawer until I’ve written something else. We’ll see.

To celebrate draft one though, I wanted to share a bit of how the short story became a novel.

First, it always was a novel. It was apparent from go that I was trying to cram way too much into 6,000 words (ultimately almost 12,000, notwithstanding my efforts at brevity). But still—how did that grow into this?

(Incidentally, mystery novels should generally land between 70,000 and 90,000 words and I was aiming for the upper count. Nailed it!)

How did I get to 89,035 words? Well, of course, I filled in the parts that had gotten short shrit before. But another part of it was simply taking what surrounded me and shoving it into the novel. Here are some examples.

I probably stole more ideas from this book than I remember. I would already own my own copy of this (remember: I loved it) if Lady Steed wasn’t so freaked out by the cover. And, if I did, I could then thumb through its pages and see what else there is to admit to, but here’s one thing I definitely took from Chuck:

He said add a dog.

I added a dog.

I was at Stuff, gosh, two or three months ago? As per usual, alongside the LPs and tiki crafts and midcentury political buttons and funky furniture, there were piles and piles and piles of Playboys. On the top of one of these piles was an issue that didn’t look much like the other issues. For one thing, it didn’t star a buxom beauty on the cover. If I remember right, there was one of these but she was small and up in the corner of her issue’s orange-brown cover that otherwise was just a list of authors interviewed within. Ray Bradbury. Joyce Carol Oates. I think Normal Mailer and Joseph Heller were on there. Dozens of names.

I didn’t think much about it at the time—it was just one more Playboy in an antique consignment shop—but I kept thinking about the issue. And thus the issue came to play an important role in an extended flash back I intended to write. I wasn’t worried about being able to learn more about this issue when the time came because, as I believe I mentioned, there are endless Playboys in Stuff and this one had a particularly unsexy cover. It would still be there whenever I got around to returning.

Well, I didn’t get around to returning until I was ready to insert it into the plot. First, I did some looking around online but couldn’t learn the details I needed. In fact, I couldn’t even prove the issue existed. So I went back to Stuff and went through every single pile of Playboys without success. I took a deep breath and asked the proprietor and he was like, uhhhh, do you have any idea how many Playboys we have in this place? I took his point and went home sad (albeit with my wife’s birthday present in tow) (which I should mention is neither LP nor tiki nor politics nor furnishing nor Playboy) (and only cost me three dollars) (plus tax).

Anyway, back the internet. Searching and searching and searching. Playboy is a hugely popular brand and you can find anything you want. Except evidence that this orange-brown (special?) issue I saw with my own eyes exists in this timeline.

The issue was, gulp, out of the novel.

Yes, I could make up details, but that’s cheating. So now the two interviews I needed would have to come from individual issues. Wikipedia helped me out here, and luckily the interviews I wanted did exist and I did find them online. But now I had to rethink how the scene would play out. In the end, the differences weren’t that great and Playboy diehards will have fewer reasons to send me angry correspondance.

I didn’t read East of Eden recently (it’s been over five years), but I keep trying to capture its multigenerational epicness in shorter form. Now in the form of a mid-novel digression. I’m not sure what first gave me the idea but it may have been

Carla Kelly’s amazing novel about Utah coal mining or

a fascinating little article I read from a free magazine we picked up at Smith & Edwards last summer about prostition among said miners. (Ends up, I could’ve pushed the prostitution angle much longer than I did!) Both of those certainly had influece on my creation of Copper, Utah. But while they provided suggestions for the early years of my mini-multigenerational-epic, what would bring it into the present day?

An early assist was given by Murderland. This gave me information about the end of the first era and it provided context for the decades preceding now. Stuff from Murderland fit in nicely with the already extant history of Copper and provided help building out the nature of the place—a place that now had a suitable number of red herrings.

But the middle years were still missing.

Red Harvest is incredible. Maybe my favorite hardboiled noir. The Continental Op is cold and dangerous but moral in his own strange way. But that much is true of all the noirs I’ve been reading of late. What Red Harvest did separate from the rest is provide a template for Copper during the same era the Continental Op. Copper isn’t identical to Personville but aspects of the Continental Op’s discoveries absolutely influenced the way the mini-epic plays out.

If the book were being published this month, I would have got some things slightly wrong. Nothing fatal, but man—the price of gas matters here!

In December, on our way back from the Charles M. Schulz Museum, we stopped to see the holiday lights at the Marin County Civic Center. And, as it ends up, visit a churro truck. And, as it ends up, enjoy rooms filled with the work of local photographers.

Straight into the novel.

Around the same time as the Playboy crisis (and possibly engaged in because I was avoiding the Playboy crisis), I decided to name a character who had not yet made her appearance (and would be appearing just moments before the Playboys). I looked around here and there for options. Nothing felt right. What about naming her after a Norse goddess? Maybe.

This page convinced me that both Freya and Skadi were deserving namesakes. But would this character prove more a “goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and at the same time, war and death” or a “goddess of winter, mountains, and hunting”?

I liked the name Freya better and it definitely would work for the little I knew about the character. But Skaði was more precisely accurate. Given the, like, two tiny traits I knew about her.

In the end, the name made a huge difference. I altered the name to Scandy (it may change again, but she will remain Skaði’s namesake regardless) and with this new name, she because someone quite different than I had imagined. Ho boy, but did things get interesting with a Scandy in the house. Don’t know how similar a Freya-based high-school girl would have turned out. And now we’ll never know.

Anyway. You pick things up. You set them down. Some of them work their way into the story. Some become vital.

And the same thing will keep happening in the rewrite process. Who knows what silly YouTube video will result in a completely new scene.

But I made it. Draft one done.

On we go.

700 words at a time.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

I have a few of these posts in various stages of incomplete (or dishabille, if you prefer). Each of them give different reasons for the project. As I work on them, I don’t know which will be posted first, so I’m letting their competing raisons d’être stand.

Anyway. Romcoms. Hard to talk about romcoms of this century coming, as they do, immediately after one of the great romcom eras: the 1990s. I also made my definition so strict that it became difficult to make it all the way to five:

‣ No kids in the romance roles. Ergo, no Moonrise Kingdom.

‣ Must have a happy, get-together-at-end ending of some sort for characters who were of primary importance throughout the movie. Ergo, no (500) Days of Summer, no Once I Was Engaged, no Love & Friendship.

‣ The rom must be the primary relationship of the movie. Ergo, no About a Boy, no Damsels in Distress.

‣ The rom must be the movie’s primary plot engine. Ergo, no Hundreds of Beavers, no The Muppets.

‣ The movie cannot be sold more as drama than comedy. Ergo, many 20th-century Jane Austen period-adaptations are out, no Anomalisa.

‣ I need to think of it as a romcom—other people thinking so is not enough—even if they are clearly correct. Ergo, no Fall Guy, no Eternity.

‣ Cannot be sullied by Rob Schneider. Ergo, no 50 First Dates.

Although I consider the romcom one of my favorite genres, I really haven’t watched that many of this new centuries’ entries. As I’ve worked on the list, I’ve discovered that I generally have low expectations for romcoms, even though many romcoms count among my very favorite movies of any sort.

Compared to some of the other lists I’m working on, my romcom longlist (fifteen movies) seems to have less issue with recency bias:

I thought it might have the opposite problem because the two movies that are absolutely inarguable came out in 2003 and 2004, but this looks fairly measured over time.

(Note, these charts might not match what follows. For instance, I decided Love & Friendship didn’t qualify—I think after I made the charts.)

One thing about romcoms is that they tend to be particularly rewatchable. But of the fifteen on the longlist, only six have I seen more than once (*), and some of those perhaps entirely because I sometimes show them to students (†). Because they haven’t been rewatched, I’m not sure I’m correct in my opinions. I’m relying on what I wrote at the time for some of them and hope I will agree with myself when given the chance.

In the end, I picked the movies because 1) I love them, 2) they are tippity-top rom, 3) they are tippidy-top com, 4) the rom and the com meld together in that wonderful way peculiar to the best romcoms, 5) I’m up for watching them again right now.

Which, if I were getting paid for this sort of thing, I definitely would have done first.

My top five, in order of topness:

Intolerable Cruelty (2003)* (thutopia)

I do not understand how many people—even fans of the Coen brothers—dismiss this movie which, for my money, is both one of their best films and the best romcom of the twenty-first century so far. The Coens’ trademark cynicism is not a sign that they hate of humanity, but that their cleareyed form of love insists on honesty and wit. Yes, these people are deeply flawed, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve love. We’re all flawed. But nobody needs berry spoons.

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)*

We watched this movie so many times when it was new. And I still think that the central relationship is one of the best examples of friends that could be more. When I saw it, I wanted this team to adapt Byuck to film. Friends, confusion, hurt feelings, growing up, happy ending. Watch this movie, then count your beloved’s smiles.

Molli and Max in the Future (2023) (letterboxd, thubstack, thutopia)

This is the newest entry on the list and I am in love with it and I really really really need Lady Steed to sit down and watch it with me. Because of Molli’s brief pass through an alien sex cult (nothing explicit, just awkward) I haven’t wanted to watch it with the kids, but my wife needs to see this and have it be one of her favorites too. What is love if not sharing romcoms?

Stranger than Fiction (2006)*† (thutopia, thutopia)

This is the weirdest movie on this list by which I mean the romcom elements make up the smallest percentage of the whole—certainly less than half. It’s an existential nightmare and a commentary on art and a couple other things with a romcom. But to hit up an ‘80s classic, “Hey! Hello in there! Hey, what’s so important? What you got here that’s worth living for?” (“Truuuue looooove.…”) That’s something Stranger than Fiction believes as well.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) (thutopia, thutopia)

It was hard to make the fifth choice, but I went with the one I most want to rewatch at this moment. Even though I had mixed feelings about it back in 2014, I did dig it. I don’t even think the couple pictured is my favorite couple from the movie. But if you concentrate meetcute and mix it with tiny overcomeable tragedies and then bake to perfection, you get Crazy, Stupid, Love. Whatever its failings, when that’s what you want, this movie’s got it.

Leave a comment

Honorable Mentions

Elemental (2023) (thubstack, thutopia)

Emma. (2020)*† (thubstack, thutopia, thubstack, thutopia)

Long Shot (2019) (thutopia)

The One I Love (2014) (thutopia)

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

The Holiday (2006) (thutopia)

Pride & Prejudice (2003)* (thutopia)

Share

Subscribe now

I don’t often write about television. A nonexhaustive search at the archives suggests I’ve only ever written about (chronologically) Planet Earth, Pushing Daisies, 30 Rock (in a post that has since fallen victim to entropy), Dexter, and, the only two recent enough to also appear on Thubstack, She-Hulk and Wednesday.

So the fact that I’m taking time to do this? Please take that as evidence that I feel strongly about this show, one way or another.

Let me start by admitting I don’t watch a lot of tv. And even tv I like, I often abandon. To stick with the Amazon ecosystem for a moment, I watched the first two seasons of The Boys and all but the last episode of the first season of Invincible—and I liked them both—but I just reached a moment when I was done. And that was it. I’ve never been tempted to pick them back up.

TV’s just a bigger commitment than I’m willing to make. And unless it’s something Lady Steed and I want to watch together, I probably won’t.

And then there’s the fact that it’s difficult to advertize to me. Even things I want to hear about, I often don’t because I’ve set up my life to be nearly ad-free. I’m quite happy with my ad-free life, even though the movies I’ve missed because I don’t see ads are...voluminous.

Plus, even if an ad were to make its way to me, I probably won’t pay attention to it or remember it. I think I may have seen a little square or something on Amazon with SCARPETTA in big red allcaps, but beyond recognizing it was a Prime Video offering, I’m not sure I even noticed. Even with me actively noticing Nicole Kidman for a few decades now. (Probably since my friend made me watch Far and Away and certainly since she was in Batman Forever [in fact, one moment with her and maybe Jim Carrey’s laugh might be all I remember about that movie now].)

So what caught my attention this time? Criticism. I was driving home from somewhere and David Bianculli’s Fresh Air review of Scarpetta was riveting, compelling, fascinating, and kept me in the car a couple minutes after arrival to reach the end of his observations, which ended: “I realize this whole series structure sounds complicated, and it is. But it’s rewarding, too. I’ve seen all eight episodes, and the plots and the characters really hold up.... There’s a lot to applaud here and a lot to absorb. And the way Prime Video is streaming it, you can gobble it up as fast as you can to help keep things straight, just like a good novel—or two good novels.”

Okay, David. I’m convinced.

I started watching it a couple weeks later on April 1st and finished April 22nd, which is a fast watch of eight episodes for me.

Before I start talking about what I did and did not like, let’s talk about how the show works.

As hinted at by David Bianculli, the show is based on two novels in Patricia Cornwall’s 29-book (so far) Scarpetta series. One from the early years, the ’90s, when Kay Scarpetta is just starting out as a chief medical officer, and one from the recent past, when she has three decades of storied excellence behind her. I’ve seen Cornwall’s name on many a massmarket paperback, but I’d never been tempted to pick one up. Although I’ve been making an effort to read more mysteries and thrillers of late, I have a natural antipathy to The Biggest Names Out There.

Because there are two time periods (primarily two, but there are flashbacks to even more) the characters are played by (at least) two different actors. For instance, ’90s Nicole Kidman is played by Rosy McEwen (in what must be a star-making turn) and ’90s Bobby Cannavale (most recently seen in Only Murders in the Building—which I really like and have not written about) is played by his son, Jake Cannavale. This is great. Nicole Kidman is beautiful but she doesn’t look 29 or however old she’s supposed to be in the other timeline. And letting two excellent actors work on the same character lets the audience triangulate the “actual person” in a way that feels somehow deeper than what even the most excellent actor can do on their own. As an acting showcase, Scarpetta shines. And the way the two plots work together to create levels of dramatic irony and offer different surprises than either plot would on its own is also impressive—especially considering this script is based on previously existing properties that go back thirty-seven years.

Which is a chance to offer props to Cornwall. Clearly, she is a master planner.

But now let’s get to why I almost quit watching the show during and after each of the first three or four episodes.

The show is largely about cracking serial-killer cases, one in each timeline, that seem like they might be related. The show has very few qualms about showing us violent, sexually grotesque murders. We see women suffering awfully, tied up, stabbed, you name it. It does have a few boundaries it won’t cross but they are indeed few. It’s unpleasant stuff.

But Dr. Kay Scarpetta is dedicated to treating the dead with respect. She treats corpses with dignity and demands of herself, on their behalf, to discover and tell the truth about the dead for the dead—and for those who love them.

This is noble and fine, but the camera does not share this dedication. The camera in Scarpetta is much more like the serial killers than our hero. The number of times a mid-autopsy corpse is positioned so her nipple is just visible in the corner of the sceen is dispicable. I find it fascinating how perverse and cruel the camera is in this show. Scarpetta desires to make her space one of dignity for the dead. The camera can’t stop gazing at them as if their corpses are starlets in a Russ Meyer picture.

But they’re not like Russ Meyer’s girls because they are dead. And since the camera has decided it won’t show us certain elements of living intercourse, it subsitutes with penetration of the dead. Scalpels cut into the flesh, gloved hands dig around in severed necks, fingers push inside bullet holes. Frankly, it’s gross. Recounting it for you, I’m amazed I kept going. Because, no joke, it’s...just really gross. It feels like violation after violation that can only be justified because, listen up, this is Prestige Television.

The only thing that brought me back in those early episodes was the excellent character work and, later on, questions of plot and identity that became too compelling to ignore.

And this is where I’m throwing out a spoiler warning because now I’m going to start talking about important things that resolve (or do not) towards the end of the series. If you want to continue, resume after the image. Otherwise, feel free to skip down to comment-leaving.

Leave a comment

did you know “scarpetta“ means mopping up the sauce on your plate with bread?
so appropriate!

As you might guess from what I’ve already said, these questions of who did what and how does who feel about whom wouldn’t matter if we weren’t so invested in the characters. Kay and her sister Dorothy are fighting with a constantness I find wild, but they also have moments of deep connection. In both timelines. Their relationships with their husbands are complex and messy, and we’re not sure, not consistently, how much we’re rooting for either marriage to survive. Kay’s niece / Dorothy’s daughter, whom they co-raised (messily), is a precocious child then a suffering widow, who can’t quite find her footing.

These things matter. Should Lucy be spending so much time with an AI version of her dead wife? Do our feelings change when we learn the dead wife invented the tech but did not approve of it and made Lucy promise never to use it? Does Pete actually love Kay more than his wife, Dorothy? What are his responsibilities to his boss versus his wife? does the longer length of the former relationship alter that math? Is Kay’s husband a sociopath who uses his job as an FBI profiler to get men to confess to his murders? And hey—who killed the AI wife? Is Lucy safe with the grief counselor with a grudge against the family? Is that possible danger part of why she’s there? Who in the world is Kay looking at in shock as her blood-spattered face stares off-camera in the final shot of the season?

Yes, the show ends on a cliffhanger. An excellent one. But still. Cliffhangers....

These questions work better because all these people are total messes. The heroes are screwed up in deep and painful ways. But this isn’t really a matter of engrained cynicism. Kay’s a mess but she genuinely is on a mission to serve the dead in righteousness. Ben really is a sociopath attracted to serial murder but he’s also doing a good job not murdering women. (It’s a higher bar for some people than others.) Pete probably could love Kay but he’s mostly a gentleman. Even if he is a cop about to face consequences (for the first time) after beating a suspect.

All people are a mix of good and bad. You have to see both to tell the truth about them. And, in melodrama (even with good lighting and acting, this is still melodrama), the good and the bad need to be n-times greater.

That’s what Scarpetta offers.

For all my reservations, in the end, I think I loved it.

(I wonder if the second season will arrive quickly enough for me to return?)

Subscribe now

Share

The events of the novel I’m currently writing begin the evening of April 28, 2026. If you’re good at calendars, you may recognize that date as next Tuesday.

What I have left to write:

• two embedded short stories

• the climax

• the closing scenes

The good news is:

• the first embedded short story is completely outlined and parts of the end are written

• the climax and closing scenes exist in draft form, but they have to be rewritten to officially count as part of the completed first draft

That second short story is in a maybe 300-word shape when it should be between five and ten thousand words and I don’t really know what it’s about yet. Thus, I anticipate it being the biggest remaining hurdle to a complete first draft.

My time is not entirely free between now and the evening of April 28 but I think I might be able to finish that first draft before the novel begins, Tuesday evening.

I’m gonna go for it.

Wish me luck.

ps: the post that will arrive here tomorrow was written and scheduled yesterday before I saw the cosmic necessity of this firstdrafting plan

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I found this poem folded up in a book published in 2018 written on a piece of paper from a teacher training that’s dated 2018–2019. So I suspect we date this work of art to some meeting at which I was bored right around that time. It also had notes for some unrealized variation on my dystopian-literature assignments, which I will include as a bonus after the poem To illustrate this post, I went to Pexels and typed in three key words from the poem and chose from the first page of results.

“Reflection’s the Heart of Induction”
   At least, I hear, that’s what they say
But applying the art of deduction
   I think it could also be hay

If hay were the heart of induction
   Then horses could teach—yes! it’s true!
We’ll feed them; they’ll begin instruction
   And our state scores will go through the roof.

Leave a comment

dytopian angles

language
sex
love
reproduction
thought
association
communication
technology
choice
distraction
violence

Share

Subscribe now

April 14th, Draft2Digital sent out an email to those who use their services when publishing books. I first learned of them in 2024 when I was asked to make an account by Lintusen Press when they published my story “The Hunger of Ghosts” in their anthology Ghostly.

I was impressed. Draft2Digital made it easy for a small press to split revenue with its authors. This is why, in 2025, when it came time to see what happens if Irreantum packages a special bonus issue more like a book than a magazine, I decided to use Draft2Digital’s services. The result was Eternities of Cats which, I’m happy to hint, is receiving awards consideration (details to follow as they become public).

Later in 2025, I decided to print use Draft2Digital to make my silly little art project Thubrina.

(FYI, Substack decided some months ago to take away the ability to adjust how large images appear in a post. THAT is the explanation here.)

Anyway, a week ago, as mentioned above, Draft2Digital sent an email out to its users. My comments italicized within brackets.

Dear Eric W,

For the first time in our history, we’re introducing account activation and maintenance fees. For many existing Draft2Digital authors, especially those with regularly selling books, these fees do not affect you.

Here’s how they’ll work...

Activation Fee for New Accounts

If you already have a D2D account (if you’re reading this, you probably do), the activation fee doesn’t apply to you. New accounts will include a one-time fee of $20 (USD). This activation fee, combined with our verification tools and human reviewers, will help us maintain a secure, high-integrity publishing environment.

Like many platforms, we’ve seen a significant increase in automated and low-quality account creation in recent years. This onslaught from automated content farms threatens reader trust in indie titles and risks indies being associated with low-quality “slop.” A modest activation fee can make a real difference and allow our team to stay focused on supporting genuine authors like you.

[This ties in nicely with something I was reading in The Atlantic yesterday (guest link will expire in one week); a slight barrier to entry (eg, having to apply for a card to use a public restroom) can keep out nearly all bad actors. And, as you know if you’ve spent much time looking for things on Amazon lately, is a real problem in the media landscape. Most of what AI has managed to offer us so more is crap—but in volume! This is absolutely a problem Direct2Digital should be focusing on. I think I feel that a $20 entrance fee is reasonable. I hope they’ve done research on what is large enough to keep out sloppers but low enough to keep their goal of democratizing publication feasible. But, as we’ll see more clearly below, I have questions.]

Annual Maintenance Fee

An annual maintenance fee of $12 (USD) will apply to accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after D2D’s commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12-month period. If you earn $100 or more from your book sales over 12 months, you will not be charged this fee.

[I have three books (as far as I know) that have passed through Draft2Digital on their way to market. One is from a small, indie Canadian publisher; one is from a 26yrold literary journal serving a niche audience; one is a weird little ziney thing that would not exist otherwise. All three were human-centered project. And I don’t think it will shock anyone to learn that in the approximately nineteen months that I’ve been connected with Draft2Digital, I have not made $100.

[Now, Draft2Digital is not a charity. And perhaps it’s fair to call me a “hobbyist.” But what I most certainly am not is peddling AI slop. All three projects have been deeply human and, imo, have done intesting work that deserves space in the marketplace of (human) ideas. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the email.]

Draft2Digital is primarily supported by earning commissions on book sales. For accounts that earn less revenue, a small annual fee helps offset a portion of the steadily rising costs we pay to maintain those accounts, including compliance, security, and infrastructure upkeep.

[The reason I expressed minor skepticism about the the $20 is the reason I’m deeply skeptical of the $12. But I appreciate Draft2Digital giving us their second reason.

[Reason one: Keep out slop.

[Reason two: Make the little guy pay for his lack of hustle.

[In short, I think their research (which I do assume existed) that landed on $12 had nothing to do with keeping slop out. The $12 is chosen to be as minimal as possible in order to keep those who don’t make $100/annum into subscribers. Because that’s what Draft2Digital is about to become: a subscription service. If you want to believe in yourself as a “writer,” pay for the privelege.

[I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Draft2Digital is turning into a traditional pay-to-play vanity press. They’re no longer a disrupter; they’re a vanity press. They’ve found a new way to do this but it’s the same old scam.

[On the other hand, having a bunch of people putting up unedited rough drafts because it makes them feel writerly is not something they should have to subsidize.]

Maintenance fees will start going into effect in 30 days, on May 14, 2026, and will be based on your account anniversary date. We’ll always notify you in advance.

[Which I think means I have to move Eternities of Cats and Thubrina off their services. Which is a shame. I like knowing you can get the books from your library, for instance. For all its imperfections, Draft2Digital really is (was) the best way for the little guy to publish small-audience work that I knew.]

The Bottom Line

Our goal is to keep D2D a place where authors can publish with confidence. [This is a good goal. But it’s also a tad disengenuous. Because the nature (and especially the details) of their solution says either that ain’t true or “authors” is a category that only includes people who sell $100 per year. Which, I grant you, is not a huge number. But in this world it excludes everyone who isn’t bigtime hustling. Make it your job or go away, is the message they’re sending—loud and clear.] That means continuing to invest in our tools, maintaining strong relationships with retailers, and protecting the legitimacy of indie authors and the trust that readers place in indie books. [Again: true. Especially with retailers, keeping slop out will be a success or failure tied to the Draft2Digital name. And rejecting people who sell in small numbers won’t hurt them with retailers either. But relationships with authors? That’ll take a real hit. It’ll make more people give up before they get to that $100/ann threshhold; it’ll keep more niche writers away from their more niche readers. A book written by one and sold to three lesbian Pakistani autistic Airbnb landlords might be doing as good as it can. That had worth.

[I understood Draft2Digital’s raison d’être to be this sort of big-tent, people-matter, democracy-actually-means-δῆμος desire. And maybe they’re losing money like crazy and charging the writers is their only way to survive. Or maybe they’ve moved on to thinking more about quarterly reports than those they serve.

[Maybe the ethics of publishing are changing.

[I suppose corporations can levy regressive taxes all they want. Because, in the end, this is a business, not a democracy. Regardless of good intentions, if we don’t make them money, screw us. That’s capitalism, baby.]

If you have questions, additional details can be found on your Account Status page, or you can read our updated terms of service. You can also reach out to our support team via our contact us form at any time.

[If you’re wondering, no, I haven’t done this. I’m undecided if I should. I’m not mad, as they say, just disappointed.

[Draft2Digital acquired their main competitor in this space, Smashwords, in 2022. I suppose this is what happens when consolidation happens in a space. The people get squeezed.

[Who among us can be surprised that the good guys are compromising their morals in order to make more money? Because there are other ways to solve these problems besides charging your customers.

[Even a really well written and reasonable email does not change that fact.]

We appreciate your trust in D2D [Mm.], and we remain committed to developing and protecting opportunities for indies to reach readers. [I grade you 10% on developing and 70% on protecting. But remember: I allow rewrites.]

Sincerely,

Kris Austin

CEO of Draft2Digital

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share