OLIVIA
Read: Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative has been my first new read since emerging from my Murderbot cave. I burned through all seven books by Wells within a two week stint and wish I had seven more. I’ve been pitching this series, a bit frantically, to our other booksellers here as funny and smart and gutting. I love Murderbot, my media-loving cyber-organic construct, and will stay steadfast to my agenda of getting everyone else in my life to read its diaries. So far my total number of converts is three.
Listened: Walking loops around my apartment listening to Nilüfer Yanya’s album Method Actor lately. The immediate outside world feels so fraught – the city’s heat all September has really pressed down on me every second I’m on a sidewalk, perpetually anxious about how little care Toronto has for its pedestrians. Sometimes a visitor to the bookstore, in response to a query about their day, will start speaking on how much they need to get out of here and it’s hard to stop thinking about an escape for myself.
In podcast news, David Naimon and Tin House Books’ podcast Between the Covers has two episodes out this last week that I highly recommend: Isabella Hammad: Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative and Jewish Currents Live: Dionne Brand and Adania Shibli in Conversation.
In his conversation with Isabella Hammad, Naimon references a previous discussion between Hammad and Sally Rooney, where Rooney says, “Everything in me rebels against what I’m witnessing. And I think of everything I’ve written to you until now, about geopolitics, about public opinion in the west, and I think: how pointless! Some celebrity said something on Instagram, and I’m asking you whether this is cause for optimism, really? When every time I pick up my phone I’m seeing footage of destroyed neighbourhoods, grieving mothers, mass graves. It makes everything I have to say feel absurd and disgusting. In these moments I lose faith in language, in conversation, dialogue, everything.” Lately I have felt this complete loss of faith in language, as well as a deep contempt for those around me writing “in solidarity” with various concepts in a way that has felt abstract and divorced from action and reality. This contempt, I know, is also deserved contempt for myself and my own inadequate action in the last year.
Naimon’s raising of “this uneasiness around language and this questioning of what it means to be a novelist at all, [...] the power of language to do harm and to reiterate the world, not only the failure of language but also the ways language can fail by pretending to be more than it is,” leads to the following response from Hammad:
“I was in a conversation with a writer [in Gaza] called Mahmoud [Rashed], who’s been unable to leave, you may know about him, you’re nodding. He said lots of things, but he said, “It’s not enough to feel with us. You have to talk about us,” which I think when we prioritize that, when we return to this as the priority here, it’s okay to have all this unease and to talk about the difficulties of speaking, the compromises of inherent in speech, the lies we tell ourselves about the power of language and how that’s bound up within industry and particularly in this country, in the US, and balance that with actually the importance of continuing to speak. Those things exist at the same time and we can engage with that and talk more about that. But the most important thing is to keep talking about them. I find that helpful. It also humbles you a bit.” So, humbly, I reiterate my encouragement to listen to these two episodes.
JESS
Read: I am always reading, in fragments, treating books like oracles – flipping to a page to find words or concepts to hold onto throughout the day. The words that stuck with me this month, that I held onto like a horoscope, come from Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Building on the speech she delivered for the Edward Memorial Lecture in 2023, nine days before October 7, Hammad touches on Said’s work as a literary scholar and thinks through narrative turning points and epiphanies. I find comfort in the idea that historical turning points are not identifiable at the moment but in hindsight. When I feel disillusioned, I try to think about it that way. We are inside a turning point or, as Tibetan Buddhist philosophy might say, the bardo. I am having trouble with patience, waiting for things to shift radically, but this in-between space is necessary.
Saw: I was in heaven at The Paradise earlier this month thanks to the Contours screening of Losing Ground (dir. Kathleen Collins, 1982). Truly a perfect movie.
Listened: John Glacier, duendita, Body Meat (who I recently interviewed for The Creative Independent!), Rema, Mavi, and Poison Root by Alex G on repeat now that fall is in the air!
CASON
Read: This month I read Small Rain, the latest by Garth Greenwell. Set entirely in an Iowa hospital just months after the start of the pandemic, the novel follows a mid-career poet who has been afflicted by a mysterious and debilitating stomach pain. Greenwell is a master technician, capable of packing a string of beautiful run-ons into dense paragraphs that approximate the claustrophobic feeling of an ER waiting room. On a formal level, I adore Greenwell; I just wish he wasn’t so goddamn sincere. In between visits from various doctors, nurses, and specialists, Greenwell’s unnamed narrator reflects ad nauseam about the recent renovations of his newly purchased house and the health insurance bestowed upon him by his husband, a professor. All of this is fine, but when presented without humour or ironic distance, both Greenwell and his bourgeois protagonist read as hopelessly out of touch, especially in a country where housing and healthcare come at a premium.
Saw: Forgive me father, for I have TIFF’d. I decided to go all-in on the festival this year, buying up all the last-minute cheap seats I could find. I saw Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, based on the Boroughs’ book of the same name, which was pretty snoozy for a movie about a gay American expat in 1940s Mexico. I walked out of The Cut, a schlocky and needlessly violent thriller starring Orlando Bloom as a retired boxer attempting to reenter the ring (seeing Katy Perry at the premiere was the most worthwhile part of the screening). The festival redeemed itself with a Sunday night screening of Shepherds, directed by Sophie Deraspe, which follows a Quebecois copywriter as he quits his job and heads to the French Alps to herd a flock of sheep, a premise almost romantic enough to convince me to do the same.
Listened: I’ve been listening to Baggy$$, a six-track EP by a trio of white kids from New York who call themselves Fcukers. I came of age during what is now known as “Indie Sleaze” (think Crystal Castles, Uffie, Hearts Revolution), so I’m always partial to club bangers that feature female vocals over chaotic synth. With music as fun and stupid as the name suggests, Fcukers is guaranteed to light any dancefloor on fire.
JOSH
Read: I took a dive into ‘60s counterculture with Richard Farina (Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, 1966) and Williams Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959, and The Soft Machine, 1961), then swerved hard to the contemporary with Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. These things couldn’t be more different: Farina & Burroughs want to explain nothing and are mostly interested in cracking jokes; Rooney, on the other hand, wants to explain everything and has zero interest in jokes. To be sure though, Intermezzo is effective. She’s maybe not breaking the mold with this book, but she’s cracking it. In many regards, her best book. OK I’ll just come out and say: I love it.
Saw: Season 4 of Only Murders In The Building is its best so far. It’s a comfort that while seemingly all other shows are being hollowed out and deteriorating year by year, this one is an example of the opposite. I chalk it up to the unending brilliance and subversive nature of Steve Martin.
Listened: I was one of the lucky ones in the room when Pankaj Mishra accepted the Weston International Award at the ROM. Addressing 400+ people, he held Western media to account for normalising war and violence throughout the world, in what was the most dazzling oration I’ve ever heard. He elucidated a beautiful vision of intellectual multiculturalism, where we might be able to wrest our governments and institutions from the western/colonial/white group-think that is failing us.
And get this, the Globe & Mail (which traditionally published excerpts from the prize winner’s speeches) wasted no time in proving Mishra’s point by sending back a revised draft of his speech with all mentions of Gaza redacted. Mishra pulled the article and granted an interview to The Breach asserting his decision.
MAX
Read: Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Dilemmas by Deborah Luepnitz (the title alludes to the idea of porcupines wanting closeness for safety yet needing distance due to their quills, which, Schopenhauer says, is the human experience of navigating relationship). It's a collection of Luepnitz's psychotherapeutic case studies. There's the preteen daughter who stops her diabetes treatment out of fear of family conflict; there's the couple whose battle over a decision to have another child is deep cover for fears of death; there's the woman who Luepnitz works with for over a decade on a pro bono basis and, in a lot of ways, is her most challenging and most satisfying client. The book reconnected me with the psychoanalytic parts of my training and reminded me that people who come to my practice often have equal amounts of conscious motivation to change and hidden motivations to resist change and hold on to their ways. (And for Jess, one case has lots of allusions to Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid.)
Saw: I watched A Woman Under the Influence, directed by John Casavetes, starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. It's about a woman named Mabel who oscillates between free-spirited and unstable. When we meet her, she’s feeling isolated and raw and lost, so close to the edge and on the verge. Part of the power of the film is watching her husband Nick as he's observing his wife. He makes huge mistakes in how he relates to her and very much contributes to her breaking down. Such powerlessness and confusion and inadequacy as he goes way, way, way past his limit. I went to the screening with a close friend and I was thinking of him throughout the movie, particularly his own relationship with a partner who experienced mental health challenges. After the movie, as we walked west on Dundas, I asked him if he could relate to being in over his head and just not knowing what to do in his relationship. He said he did and he pointed out a moment in the movie where, after a violent interaction, Mabel asks Nick if he loves her, and he deflects and avoids answering before they both proceed to set up their bedroom to go to sleep for the evening. And my friend said, how going through that really can impact the love that you have for the other. I appreciated that because that's real, you know, that love can be stressed and bent by all that.
Listened: I asked one of my best friends, Pegah, for some Afrobeats recommendations. She’s a high school teacher, which is a straight line to young peoples' music. Here's verbatim what she sent me on Messenger:
Hey Maxi,
Hope you’re having a good week
Here are my fav Afro Beats artists
- Wizkid Made in Lagos album is a masterpiece
- Adekunle Gold
- Asake
- Omah lay
- Victony
- Davido He’s huge right now
Enjoooooy
Bulletin Board
Check out our Cason’s art over at Hearth Gallery. They’re exhibiting material from his performance, The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony: A Travelling Circus.
If you haven’t yet, check out our Josh’s interview with author Dan Werb where they discuss, among other things, how to talk to your kids about climate and disaster.
Max is now teaching Wing Chun Kung Fu Sundays at 11AM at the Fighting Arts Collective on College. Have you ever seen a book nerd teach kung fu? Want to?
Jess already mentioned it above, but won’t hurt: check out her interview with musician and artist Body Meat.
And if you’re wandering the Junction TYPE’s zine section, don’t sleep on the bowl of hand-knit bookmarks by store polymath, Olivia.