Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Mar. 31-uhh all of April so far (sorry)

It's been a minute!!! Vampire Weekend! Civil War! Taylor Swift! That's that me espresso!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary 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 Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Sprout check

The second day we were in London we went out to Greenwich to pop by their open-air market (which is where I wound up finding a second printing copy of Titus Groan — Mervyn May is coming soon!!!) and then walk up to the Greenwich Royal Conservatory. They’d roped off my favorite part of the park for some seemingly necessary landscape reconstruction, which is annoying, but then I said, “Wait I want to see if that one oak (?) tree is still there.” This is a kind of crazy person thing to say and I really didn’t have a firm grasp on where it was beyond a general directional of “uhhh, that way.” I walked like ten feet ahead for a while, trying to basset hound my way into finding a tree I hadn’t seen in a decade when lo and behold, there it was!!!

I’ve been playing catchup since I got back last Sunday, rushing to file and write all these things I said I wasn’t going to be working on while I was gone. I was pretty good about that, which made this week a bigger mess, but it all got done — 300 pages of grading and all. The biggest thing I have to share with you is my conversation with Alice Rohrwacher for the people’s website, The Cut! I did this interview the morning after getting back, bleary-eyed and so excited and nervous, and she was the best, warm and charming and curious and funny. I wish we could have talked for longer but I’m quite happy with what’s there. I hope you give it a read!

Beyond that, I’m behind on everything else: movies! reading! music! I’ll catch up eventually: that’s what the bad weather days are for. I’d like to watching Ripley and Sugar for the same reason (what the hell going on there). I owe you a reread diary of another YA book I read. There’s a lot of fun on the horizon!