OLIVIA
Read: As soon as I began high school, I started resisting the urge to read any sci-fi or fantasy. There wasn’t a good reason for this but I’m assuming it stemmed from the misguided urge to read what I thought everyone around me was reading, even though, in truth, I don’t think my friends in high school were reading that much? Anyways, now after years of being so invested in science fiction stories (in T.V., film, audiodrama), I’m giving in and sort of following a reading list from my best friend, who is pretty deep in the genre. This month was Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Martha Wells’ All Systems Red, the start of Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Next up is Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain. Will you ever catch me writing about another plotless book again? (Yes, but I’m predicting not in our wrap-up for September, either).
Saw: I am cheating here, but since I’m telling you off the jump, I’m giving myself a pass: technically I watched these in the first few days of September. But my August, a month which stretched out forever, featured a stay at Deaf camp where I was reading and swimming and signing in silence, and when I got back from camp I didn’t feel like exposing myself to sound at all. So in “August,” I watched a play-through of Alien: Isolation (a game too scary for me to face alone), and then I finally returned to a theatre to watch Alien: Romulus. I’m not sure I recommend that specific linked play-through, because the player doesn’t click through every contextual message that you discover on board the craft, but that’s what I get for being a baby. Probably I should divulge here that I have Ripley fan-art hanging in my apartment, and that I will stand by a beloved franchise well after it’s been gouged of all life, but I loved Alien: Romulus. Can (SPOILER) David Jonsson’s Andy just be the protagonist of the next instalment?
I didn’t listen to anything in August or “August,” so I’ll also extend this section to mention a trip to Zine Dream. Visits to artists I already loved were a given (Karen Thürler, Lis Xu, April Malig) but I also got to see Sleeping Well Collective’s work for the first time in-person. Maybe this is redundant but honestly every time I see a zine I’m blown away by the talent/creativity/beauty that exists in the world.
CASON
Read: This August I read My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman, which hits the shelves later this month. I’ve never read Gladman’s sci-fi, which she’s produced in spades, but Calamities, her essay collection about the process of writing an essay, remains one of the most dog-eared books in my possession. Gladman isn’t huge on plot or character development; instead, she focuses on the playfulness of language above all else. In My Lesbian Novel, she writes the story of a budding romance between a forgetful architect and a mysterious artist, interjecting the narrative with her own reflections to create an experimental mediation on love, lust, and the creative process. I can’t recommend it enough.
Saw: This month I watched America’s Sweethearts, a Netflix docu-series about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Did you know that a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader makes about the same per year as a Chick-Fil-A employee? Or that during meet-and-greet photos, fans are made to hold a football when posing with the squad so they don’t get too handsy? A mix between Cheer and Drop Dead Gorgeous, America’s Sweethearts somehow manages to be both bleak and occasionally uplifting.
Listened: This was a pop music summer: Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, the rise of Chappel Roan. For me, the peak of this pop explosion is Diet Pepsi, the major-label debut single from TikTok star Addison Rae. At first I didn’t like it, but after one million listens, I’m officially hooked. Is Addison Rae the most spectacular vocalist of her generation? No. Have I developed a condition that requires me to listen to this song at least once an hour or else I die? Absolutely.
JOSH
Read: Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, explores the limits of American imagination and influence. When an American operative (code named “Sadie”) infiltrates a group of French radicals, how much influence can she really exert? Is it possible the radicals are a step ahead of her the whole time? Typical-Kushner, the book delves into art, Italian cinema, and the evolutionary split between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, and the legacy of those histories.
I also loved Dear Dickhead by Virginia Despentes, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. It’s a series of emails between an embittered writer, recently MeToo’d, and an actress beyond her prime. Initially they’re at each other’s throats, but what unravels is a shared quest for sobriety, rehabilitation, and healing. Take it from a guy who, this year, drastically changed his relationship to alcohol — Despentes doesn’t pull punches. Reading this was therapy.
Saw: At the CNE I watched Elvis Stojko perform in a skating and acrobatics show. I tried to explain to my daughter that, in my house growing up, the two most famous people were Celine Dion and Elvis Stojko.
Listened: I spent the last week in a cabin in the Ottawa Valley, where it’s a tradition in my young family to play radio bingo. Get this: two separate radio stations host games at 7pm on consecutive weeknights (MYFM on Wednesdays, and Valley Heritage Radio on Thursdays). Is this just a valley thing? Can we bring this bit of valley to the city, please?
MAX
Read: The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner which has the most prototypical self-help book cover, pink font, X-many millions sold, a subtitle that reads: “A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships”. For me to wholeheartedly buy into a self-help book, there often needs to be a hoity-toity literary connection, usually more than one, actually. The first one: how often bell hooks cites the book in All About Love. The second: Harriet Lerner is Ben Lerner's mother, and the basis of the most important character in The Topeka School. Maybe the one thing that sticks out to me from the book, lesson-wise, is how my anger can be used for my own growth. It's very easy to want to direct it outwards and to feel the base desire to change someone else, to change the person who I think is fucking in the wrong. But Lerner suggests that, when I feel anger, I can note it, sit with it, and learn to go on to act in ways I more prefer, ways that line up with my values, when something unjust happens.
Saw: Went to a screening of Lee Daniels's The Paperboy at The Revue. Part of me thinks this is a movie that deserves a full house and was disappointed that there wasn’t. Another part of me thought, yeah this size crowd makes sense because, depending on your sense of humor and your tolerance for brutality, it is not for everyone. Sure, there’s the scene where Nicole Kidman pisses on Zac Efron after he's stung by jellyfish, the marketing Trojan Horse to get people in the seats. But once that gets you to pay admission, you’re probably going to push through all the off-kilter Southern Gothic, violence, and racial trauma. It’s 1969 when convict-groupie Charlotte (Nicole Kidman) enlists three journalists (played by David Oyelowo, Matthew McConaughey and Zac Efron) to free her imprisoned murderer crush, Hilary Van Wetter (John Cusack, playing maybe the greasiest killer ever on film). A sweaty sexual movie that is never sexy, except for one beautiful scene where Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron, in his tightie whities, dance together in the rain.
Listened: I've required all the feel-good streaming from Bon Appetit’s “On the Line” videos to the very pleasant and conflict-free The Queen's Gambit. Most importantly, a run of NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, especially the ones by Tems and Maxwell both of them soulful and beautiful, both putting front and center how nervous they are for this particular venue. Tems, either in her prime or just coming into her prime, voice sounding just as rich as it does on albums I play on repeat in the store. Maxwell now the elder statesman, his falsetto feeling the limits of age and yet still finding ways to sound like he was when he was twenty on Urban Hang Suite. Older but sexier than ever. Just like me.
BULLETIN BOARD
If you haven’t already, go and read our Jess’s interview with Nuzhat Abbas of trace press, which publishes books that illuminate contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, displacement, migration, life, labour, love, and resistance:
“At trace, we would like the texts we publish to support more embodied and particular feeling, more thought, more specific questions, more careful connecting and conversing across language, time, place and history, and practices of reading that are attentive to wounds, grief, resistance, and the complications and possibilities of collective suture.”