Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, May 26-June 1

I only watched one movie but I did beat Animal Well

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!

Stop and Airdrop the roses

Last weekend I petsat for Tristan and Claire, which included a leisurely twelve minute walk to and from our apartments a couple of times a day. I almost always wound up passing this rose bush in someone’s front stoop area, which I thought was totally astounding every time, something that is probably impossible to tell based on my extremely bad photo of it. Later in the week I went to the plant shop to get the ZZ plant that Frank and Haley got us as a housewarming gift repotted — it’d recently become kind of huge after I moved it into a room with less light, who’d have thought — and the woman working on repotting kept telling me I’d done such a good job with the ZZ plant, which was making me laugh because I guess I had, but it’d also proven very easy and low maintenance, a real “water when it looks like it needs water.”¹ I’m willing to concede that I took very good care of the ZZ plant, but not in a way where it will ever be as beautiful as this random rose bush that I saw every single day, multiple times a day, for a long weekend.

Lots of good reading this week! Friend of the magazine Brendan is here in LARB writing about Bonello’s The Beast, the movie I most want to rewatch this year when not “celebrating” the annual day of repentance by not eating or having caffeine. For all my distaste for that film, I can’t help but read every single thing that comes across my way about and Brendan’s piece is especially clarifying and contextual about all that movie’s joys and frustrations. And then friend of the magazine Nicholas Russell is in Conjunctions with a new piece of fiction.

BDM

wrote about Anne Elliott and Persuasion for the Paris Review, and how fictional characters do not age but we do. My biggest — or I guess, most notable — realization of this occurred when I reread The Great Gatsby at 29 and realized it’s just a book about hanging out with 23 year olds when you are nearly 30. Alex Ross (future friend of the magazine…? I can only hope) wrote about Yuja Wang, a figure about whom I can never read enough, and I love that he calls her a “fashionista.” I also really loved this John Phipps piece about a copy of Hamlet that has been passed down between Hamlets — especially about Kenneth Branagh withholding it from David Tennant to go and give it to what he feels is his successor, Tom Hiddleston. Will Tom Hiddleston ever be free of Marvel? Does he want to be? Of all the people who squandered their first act talent on that cinematic universe, he feels like the most notable one.