Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, June 16-July 13 (!!!)

Here's everything we haven't talked about for a month

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

One whole month to catch up on

I’m back from my residency in the Adirondacks which was a beautiful, thrilling, and productive ride that culminated in me getting mono and going home early. You can read about all that here, if you want, or you can just look at some gorgeous vistas in the below post.

franhoepfner

A post shared by @franhoepfner

Anyway! That’s all old news. I’ve spent the last week and a half since getting home sleeping and reading and watching Twin Peaks and starting Elden Ring. — but more on all that in a second. I’m thankfully through the worst of the throat infection relating to mono which means I can eat solid food against rather than soups and/or noodle soups. You don’t really realize how awesome chewing is until suddenly you can’t swallow anything that isn’t wet or slimy (sorry to phrase it like that). Are crunchy foods back in the mix yet? you might be asking. Well, not really. But hopefully soon. I’m now in the phase of this where I wake up every single day with a migraine and/or headache, which is awesome. My days are otherwise spent writing and sleeping. I’m lucky, as I wrote earlier in the week, that I mostly work from home and can move from desk to couch to bed with relative ease. I miss working out and hanging out, but those will come back with time.

Some good news: my first zucchini from my zucchini plant. It was only the size of my thumb and fell off the plant before it could reach its full grown zucchini status, but we’re still counting this as a win. I cut it into two pieces and Phil and I each had some: I can confirm now that it tasted like zucchini.

Other notes:

• I wrote about Mia Goth’s insane voice for Vulture. I won’t be seeing MaXXXine!

• I have nothing to say about the NYT best 100 books of the century so far list other than it seems just about as random as when that publication did the best films of the century so far in 2017. I guess I love “queering” list-making by not doing it in years that end in five or ten, but whatever. The Sight & Sound list nonsense was way more fun and educational. I have written about this before but can’t remember where or when, but the way to discover new great books is not by reading lists and by instead asking your friends with like-minded or respectable taste, or asking a local librarian whose job it is to know these things.

• I loved this long interview with Lena Dunham in The New Yorker almost as much as I loved Susan Orlean in conversation with Nicolas Cage.

Anyway! I’ve watched a lot! I’ve read a lot! Let’s get into it.