End of the Month: April
It's Canadian Independent Bookstore Day (73% as cool as Record Store Day)!
JESS
Read: I ripped through Wrong is Not My Name by Erica Cardwell while sitting in a plastic chair, waiting for an appointment in the driveway of a walk-in dermatologist's office/home (?). Still trying to wrap my head around that experience (clearly not even sure how to language it!) but Wrong is Not My Name was the perfect “waiting room” companion. Memoir meets criticism in this study of how art, much like grief, transforms how we see the world. Love this moment: "No one writes grief books for Black girls, no one could predict that an obsession with images and their reflections in my life as a potential grief practice would also make me scared of myself. Soon I recognized my face again. Lips full, resting under doe eyes."
Listened: The album Flux by Love Spirals Downwards has a strong spring vibe. I also love Lejos de Ti and Run Your Mouth – recently released singles from The Marías’ forthcoming album, Submarine. And Syreeta’s self-titled debut album, produced by Stevie Wonder, healed me this month. I love her voice.
Watched: Wim Wender’s Perfect Days (2023) was lovely and renewed my appreciation for our regulars, specifically those who float in often but quietly. I pick up hints through our brief exchanges and their picks but for the most part, their reading lives are a mystery. These mystery stacks and hushed encounters -- the questions and inspiration they generate -- are as much a part of my routine as it is a part of theirs. Unexpected but deeply cherished reciprocity.
JOSH
Read: Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr (a Métis writer based in Edmonton) is about land defenders who reintroduce bison into Edmonton city parks. It alternates POVs between two Metis cousins. There’s a real noir-crime feel to this novel, the crime scenes being farms, trailers, truck stops, and dark suburban garages. But the book’s work is to attack cheap racism and to critique the colonial status quo. Where are all the Alberta expats? This book’s for you.
I also read James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Huckleberry Finn. This book is incredible. You’d be mistaken to think you’re simply jumping back into a classic – the antebellum South is no comfortable place, satire or not – but Everett makes you feel immediately safe in his hands. Huge importance is placed on language. In the early pages James leads a class of children on how to speak to white people. Also, throughout the novel white people are mocked in a way that’s intended to satisfy. They’re made to be predictable, stupid, and insecure. At its best, the novel begs the questions of guilt, insecurity, and shame white people welcome upon themselves.
Listened: Keeping with the Alberta theme of what I’ve read, I’ve been listening to Women & Patrick Flegel’s latest project Cindy Lee. The brand new Diamond Jubilee is incredible.
My audiobook pick is Ada Limon’s The Hurting Kind. The author reads this one, and the poems are so accessible (even to be listened to). If it’s nature you like, flowers and birds, this book has that rare life-changing potential.
Watched: I’ve been taking a deep dive into Alfred Hitchcock. The best of the bunch is Rope (1948) in which, essentially, Frasier & Niles (but super in love with each other) kill Bulldog Briscoe for the art of it and then try to keep it concealed from their father Marty Crane. But the most magnetic performance I watched was Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), in which she plays a syphalitic drunk, philanderer, and daughter of a convicted Nazi who gets entrapped by the US government and pimped out to her father’s Nazi friends. It’s amazing that in 1946 Hitchcock chose to portray the American officials as morally bankrupt. Ahead of its time?
MAX
Read: Tessa Hulls’s graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, combines journalistic rigor and a naive, raw drawing style, which makes for an awe-inspiring and almost overwhelming read. Tessa grew up with her half-Chinese/half-white mother and her psychologically broken grandmother, both immigrants from China. That pain, the flooding of fear and anxiety and paranoia that each woman asks and burdens her daughter to soothe? Tessa’s way of working with all this is spending ten years on an illustrated memoir, taking her mom back to China, revisiting together the sites of the reprogramming and gaslighting her grandmother experienced at the hands of Mao’s government, and reflecting on how that impacted them all. Phew. Tessa, this is the way you chose to work with your stuff? I can’t even fathom how you did this.
Listened: So I got this diary format that I learned from Lynda Barry. What you do is you draw a four-section grid on a notebook page. In the first section, in three minutes write seven things you did the previous day; next section, three minutes for seven things you saw. In the third section, thirty seconds for something overheard; lastly, thirty seconds for a a question about the day. On the opposite page, draw a scene from the day for three minutes and then, for five minutes, free-write about the day. I’ve been doing this for coming on six years, and if I hadn’t, I’m not sure if I wouldn’t have dissociated away all my memories from the pandemic.
What’s this have to do with what I listened to in April? Well, I shifted it so that I now have to capture seven things, not just one, that I heard the previous day. Surprisingly challenging. That means, these last few weeks, more eavesdropping and less podcasts and Outkast and Sade when I’m buying remix items at McDonald’s (“Dimitri Long is cooling his heels in Vietnam.”) or nursing my cortado at Full Stop (“Don’t steal my umbrella, I’m not British.”) or, say, cashing out a youngster at some neighborhood bookstore (“How many dollars is this?”).
Watched: The Crows Theatre staging of Dana H., recommended to me by my good friend Mike and dearly departing Junction bookseller Thom (details below). It is a punishing, indelible sixty minutes, actress Jordan Baker lip-synching a hospice chaplain’s description of the six months she spent kidnapped, terrorized, and abused by a former patient. It’s part Krapp’s Last Tape by Beckett, a physical person on stage responding to recorded audio. It’s part Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder in the way it reduces the distance between consumer of true crime and the lived emotional, spiritual, and physical suffering they’re consuming. The play was written by Lucas Hnath and the voice and experience of Dana H. is his mother’s, Dana Higginbotham. While Tessa is at the centre of Feeding Ghosts, Hnath is only present when Dana says she’d never mentioned to him what she’d been through. Different powerful and creative ways to hold the pain of forebears.
OLIVIA
Watched: At the tail-end of April, I went to a wonderful afternoon screening of Daisies (1966) — Google tells me this is a “Czechoslovakian arthouse surrealist experimental psychological comedy,” and I loved it. Slovenly and beautiful, I texted my little sister right after leaving the theatre that she needs to find a way to watch it. I’ve been quite sensitive to noise as my deafness grows, and there were stretches of this film where I wanted to crawl out of my skin, but that’s definitely part of it. There’s one line of dialogue I keep returning to, repeated with slight variation: If I was a hard worker, I would be happy. I was a hard worker, wasn’t I? I’m happy.
I also really dedicated myself to the Duras retrospective at the lightbox. My favourite screening was my first (Destroy, She Said), but they all provided me with a lot to stew over. Particularly on the superimposing of one story over another – an image projected as a previous moment is described in dialogue, a shot of France visually as Athens is recounted in the text, happy memories recalled over a winter shore. I’m grateful for Duras’s hatred of the destruction of the imagination and for her editor Dominique Auvray’s presence and words (at her first post-screening discussion, she immediately remarked how terrible both the restoration and translated captions were – I love her – and that she wished the captions just produced their own story in English instead of muddying down and ruining the original French text. Once again, I love her).
A last, straggling thought: I feed off my coworkers’ superior taste like a culture vampire, and went to Contours’ screening of How to Steal a Million with my Queen/Forest Hill colleague Charlotte (aforementioned by dear Thom in last month’s wrap-up) and I LOVE MOVIES. You’re welcome for this insight!!
Listened: Everything in my April has overlapped. I walked around listening to the Between the Covers episode on Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other – a title lots of us have been anticipating – and have gotten stuck on Danielle Dutton discussing writing on one moment where then a previous one, or even a dream, is recalled, so that these two moments are experienced simultaneously. Okokokok
Read: Cookie Mueller’s Garden of Ashes, Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood (after seeing Dialogue Book Club treasure it, which I follow thoroughly but am not a part of strictly, since I don’t read the titles at the right time), JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (after seeing it last year on my tattoo artist’s side table), Rainbow Rowell’s forthcoming Slow Dance (anyone looking for a cozy-cute story should read Attachments), and now, of course, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other.
I’m also reading a lot of transcripts for podcasts and audiodramas – and am using this void to complain about how they’re all AI-generated and full of nonsense. I used to write notes for Deaf students from in-person + recorded lectures and am crossing my fingers for every huge media company to hire a bunch of transcript writers out of the good of their hearts (ha).
STEPH
Read: I’m halfway through Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s forthcoming Long Island Compromise (July 9). Very readable and perfectly witty. I was a fan of Fleishman Is in Trouble (and its subsequent television adaptation) and this follow-up does not disappoint. A great summer read with some actual meat on the bone. And yes, the television adaptation is already in development at Apple. Guess I gotta renew my subscription…
Listened: As a thirty-five year old baby, I am always on the hunt for the perfect piece of aural media to help me get to sleep at night. It can’t be too exciting or too boring, or God forbid, something I’ve listened to before. I’d been struggling to find such a thing recently, when Spotify uploaded a selection of free audiobooks. I couldn’t hit play on Kitchen Confidential, read by Bourdain himself, fast enough. Not a good sleep aid, but a welcomed salve nonetheless. I miss his voice, his point of view, and his sense of humour.
Watched: I was grinning from ear to ear when Seinfeld waltzed onto the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale. Watching curmudgeons curmudgeon each other is a rare gift. The only person powerful enough to have elevated this iconic duo to an exalted triumvirate is Fran Lebowitz, who was undoubtedly too busy having dinner somewhere in New York with her fancy friends, smoking fancy cigarettes, in her fancy Saville Row suits to join. Larry – it was prettaaay, prettaaay good while it lasted.
THOM
Read: Wellness by Nathan Hill is amazing. It’s such a sharp, funny, and damning satire of life and love under late capitalism. Sometimes it feels a bit broad, even absurd, and then I open Instagram and am reminded that Hill has his finger firmly on today’s overstimulated yet somehow still malaised pulse. Beyond the interpersonal drama of a marriage ‘at the bottom of the U-shaped-curve’ is a giddily-researched takedown of wellness culture and the lies we construct to make life liveable.
Listened: I am Taylor-pilled. You spend the first quiet hour of your morning after opening the bookshop you work at listening to Folklore and tell me she’s not got something alchemical going on. So, yes, I am currently writing this on a rainy Friday morning listening to The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology on the Sonos and willfully ignoring all the football metaphors. Taylor forever. Her potency is such that I can bear within me two truths: first, that it must be very hard to be famous, it must be very hard to be famous especially in relation to the world’s most famous woman, and it must be very hard to have your actions moralised by a chronically-online and predominantly-pre-teen audience; secondly, goddamn, if I ever catch you at the Black Dog, Joe… duel vibes! Foils up!
Watched: I was offered a last-minute ticket to see Les Miserables at the Princess of Wales Theatre, fifth-row from the stage. I am generally quite cynical about commercial musicals, especially touring ones (give Canadian actors jobs, @Mirvish!) where the job of an actor is less to create a role than to jump into a track, but there is just something about that score that is undeniable.
I also really enjoyed Alex Garland’s new film Civil War. I think the discourse is mistaking its lack of conjecture about today’s specific political climate for a lack of something to say about it. Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Cailee Spaeny are fantastic.
Final note: this was my last month at TYPE Junction! It has been a heavenly time recommending reads in person at the shop and on this newsletter. Thank you in particular to the team at the Junction (Josh, Jess, Max, Olivia, Steph – angels!) for including me as a teammate even when I was working only the odd shift every other week. Huge fan of them all.
BULLETIN BOARD:
It’s Canadian Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday April 27 and it’s the one year anniversary of The Juncture. Come pick up a specially-priced copy of Our Regulars favorite books. We’d also love to hear your feedback, what you want more of and what you might find meh, and use it to grow this here space.