Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Aug. 13-19

An update on the fire escape tomatoes, Desperately Seeking Susan, Mattie Lubchansky's Boys Weekend, orange egg yolks, and more!!!!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary by Fran Hoepfner, who is me. This feature is currently only for paid subscribers. Consider an upgrade, or just hang tight til Wednesday. Thank you for reading!

Vibe check

Are you all finished talking about the nose yet? It is a perfect weather day at the time of writing (Saturday afternoon), and the internet keeps going in and out. Maybe that’s for the best. I’m not sure why the internet never seems to work well for longer than a month, but this is the time of year where that matters least.

This week I did a lot of socializing: dinners, drinks, sitting outside as the humidity blew away. I took a painting class on Thursday night, an exercise in drawing from receipts. The idea of having to paint everything I buy during the week seems like a way to minimize both purchasing and painting, so I guess I will have to keep doing both. I joked that doing bad paintings were saving my life, but they do lend what running used to: a practice I am bad enough at to keep my interest.

I am trying to maintain a deliberate (fiction) writing practice — the type of thing that gets harder and harder when the school year begins. My teaching work is less grading intensive than it used to be, but I find that plot generation and giving feedback occupy a similar part of the brain. The new work is sloppy and funny, the dream. I realized over the course of doing some cursory edits of what I’ve done already that it had been mid-November in the piece for more than three months. Wishful thinking, maybe.

The week in fire escape tomatoes