Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Nov. 19-Dec. 2

NYAD is in all-caps for some reason, I started reading Spare (why), and home for the holidays

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 for the actual content diary portion. That writing is usually short, informal, and funny, with recommendations and quick reviews. 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!

Home for the holidays

We drove from New York to Chicago to New York all last week. I had wanted to write the Sunday Dispatch, but my ability to “write from car” dwindles with age and at the time I started writing, I had really only seen Nyad — sorry, I mean NYAD, because this inexplicably has a TÁR-esque title — a movie that made me so mad that it felt unfair to hinge a whole dispatch on how much I didn’t like it. The truth was that the Thanksgiving week was otherwise wonderful — busy, and then calm, and then busy again. As always, I saw too few friends and just the right amount of family.

the bean is on house arrest

I hadn’t been home for Thanksgiving since 2018. When I was in grad school, the semester ended the week after — around December 8th, or something — and after that first year, it didn’t make sense to go home for it. In 2019, I celebrated with the poets: we all made a whole mess of things and ate together at my old Jersey City apartment. And then there was the pandemic, where even up until the week before, I was like, “well, maybe if I rent a car and drive to Chicago…” and then the year after I was in Boise on an artist’s residency and then last year we saw Phil’s family. So it had been a minute, to say the least. It is easy to think about home being not that far — especially when I mostly fly there and back in a quick two-hour jaunt. By car, it all felt very far. Pennsylvania was an eternity.

I’d done it once before, by myself, when I moved out to New Jersey in the summer of 2018. I don’t really know why I drove that route, other than to guarantee the safety of my houseplants, of which only one remains, and my LEGO, which is intact. That drive five years ago was almost, like, religiously lonely. I saw friends each night of the leg, but the memories of being in the car are gone, zipped away. This year, we spent the first leg of the journey driving what felt like directly into the sun.

my new watch from mitsuwa.. do you love it