Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Jan. 14-20

Michael Clayton, silent film, Ablixa, my first Pynchon novel (#FransFirstPynchon), and a really good animal picture

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. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my career in culture writing full-time, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or Letterboxd (for free!). Thank you for reading!

Greetings from upstate

Good morning from the Catskill Mountains, where it has been single-digit temperatures for the last forty-eight hours. This is my first time up in the Catskills since the winter of 2021, a trip that we’d intended to be a kind of pre-Christmas getaway and wound up being a COVID-related isolation retreat.¹ I’m lucky enough to get a hearty six-week winter break from teaching, and it felt like a nice opportunity to go up into the mountains with pals ahead of starting up with a 9am class (help) on Tuesday. We’ve been eating and hanging out and playing Wingspan, a game my brother and his fiancée taught Phil and I over Thanksgiving. I really like that game, but it never won’t feel like Cones of Dunshire when you try to explain it to someone else.

I spent the first few weeks of the year being in a vicious, unhappy mood. Last Saturday, I had a mini-meltdown before going to bed for functionally no reason whatsoever (got a knot in my knitting) and decided to wake up with a new personality. It didn’t work as simply as that, but the past week has floated along with a softer kind of ease. I was able to take difficulties and inconveniences on the chin, otherwise shrugging off stuff that would have annoyed me to the point of threatening to have an aneurysm. I’m trying to do my best to take at least an hour away from my computer midday, rather than try to do all of my work as quickly as possible so I can “clock out” at three in the afternoon. I find taking that hour for “lunch” — of which 15 minutes or so actually consistent of eating lunch — has made the workweek go faster and nicer if I know I’ll have a break to read or practice piano or do some sketching. One of my many little hobbies! Why cultivate them in the first place if they go unpracticed.

I also got a nice second wind — first wind? — on some of the writing I’ve been putting off since November. It’s never easy to write full-time for work and then write part-time for creative pleasure, but it’s actually hardest during the school year. I don’t fault my students; teaching just requires a kind of individualized attention that I might otherwise put onto research of my own. With school starting up on Tuesday, I’m preparing to lose the wind I got on writing this past week, but sometimes the excitement is potent enough to maintain momentum. And sometimes it’s not! The thrill, I suppose, is not knowing which it is until I get there.