Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, YOUR TURN!
Fran Magazine takes a three day weekend
This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary usually 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!). Thank you for reading!
Your Sunday Dispatch
I unintentionally took this week off from the magazine, falling victim to a mountain of grading (only four weeks into the semester — yeesh) and mounting deadlines. Sadly, I haven’t seen or watched much of anything! I’ll be back this Wednesday with some thoughts on the first season of True Detective, but in the meantime, I’d love to know what you’re watching and reading and cooking and seeing live. Usually Sunday Dispatch posts are paywalled, but this one isn’t, so feel free to chime in and chat about whatever. It’s a free-for-all! And a rec list, truly, for me to peruse once I’m back in the swing of things.
Programming note: Don’t ask me about Madame Web! I won’t see it! I don’t care! “But she—!” No!
Maybe I can treat this comment section as a hole in the ground in which to whisper that I came around to appreciating The Bear in its second season, which I think still has Master of None disease, is too eager to impress and the big guest star episode stinks (although good use of Odenkirk as a sneering bully), but the finale made some choices I really respected. Can probably afford to be accommodating toward this show now that everyone is too famous to do more than another season tops.
Oh and I just got Enter Ghost from the library. I love it so far — just very strong on a technical level, with some of the best dialogue writing I’ve encountered in recent fiction.
Chris and I just watched the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which I swore up and down I had seen but halfway through realized maybe I had only seen clips of? He had somehow definitely never seen it! We loved it. It felt like the perfect cynical dirty tight movie to watch after nearly dying of the flu for a week (I had so much empathy for the mayor).
Oh, and I'm re-reading The Haunting of Hill House for the millionth time to teach it and that book just gets better and better. No one does the porous mind unstable narrator better than Shirley Jackson.