Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Dec. 10-16

The last Sunday Dispatch of the year!!!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’m watching, reading, playing, and listening to. These posts will always begin with a quick personal blog before they’re paywalled. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my career in culture writing full-time, but readers — paid & not — are appreciated. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or Letterboxd (for free!). Thank you for reading!

School’s out

Thursday was the last day of the semester, so we sat around and ate dry Italian cookies and grapes and drank La Croix and talked about art and money and writing and grad school. I’ve not been so sad to say goodbye to a class since the fall of 2019 — my very first semester teaching. I’ve had other great classes with lots of great students, but there was a gentle, eager camaraderie to the group this semester. A lot of likeminded learners who were eager not only to hone and push the boundaries of their own work but also encourage and push each other. One of the things that’s been hardest to develop in the years since COVID is that kind of inner-class rapport, teaching students — especially in bigger programs where they don’t all know each other — how to develop trust in each other, if only for a short period of time. As college becomes more of an individualist game, those kind of community values are tougher to instill. Luckily, that was not the case this semester.

It was kind of a miserable week otherwise — the year continues to rage and punish in the way that it has raged and punished since, say, May — apart from a trip to the Met to see the new Degas-Manet exhibit with

Emma

. I remember seeing Degas, maybe, in solo exhibition (or maybe with Cassatt? one of my parents will know) as the Art Institute, and I also remember going to see a joint Monet-Manet exhibit when I was a kid. I always preferred Manet to Monet for reasons that are still impossible to describe. There’s something about Manet’s use of blue that’s always appealed to me: his seaside and nautical paintings are always so green. I love that. I also love this jaunty little guy. Going to the museum is always so fun, even when it’s crowded.