THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO GO OUT A LONG TIME AGO SORRY
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comedy corner
My very funny friend Miller and I (along with our cameraman Stephen who turned into an incredible director by accident) put together a goofy three-minute video to be screened at the illustrious Tootsie’s Video Vault amateur film festival last month. It was a really great event with some fucking fantastic videos that had me simply thrilled at the amount of comedic talent in the city and the world.
Because of this, we were in literal shock when our video won the judges’ award for the best video in our category. Not even in, like, a humble way, but everyone’s work was so incredible that even being in the mix didn’t cross our minds. Not to totally flex on you, but one of the judges co-created How I Met Your Mother, soooo yeahhhh I’m cutting all of you so I can hang out with Carter Bays. Sorry! (he was actually really nice.)
Check it out here!
reads
Lots to report on! This was supposed to go out, like, at the beginning of the month, but Substack and/or Spectrum wifi betrayed me and two of my reviews as well as a diatribe on the Netflix reality dating show Perfect Match (see below) did not save and I got mad and quit but then I realized that I must be tenacious if I wish to pursue a career as the world’s most successful literary substacker. I have even more books to write about, so you’ll get the rest of my thoughts in a separate newsletter that will hopefully be released before the end of the year (kidding. I hope).
Hooray! A return to romance! I liked Happy Place and thought it was a very sweetly written romance with a lot of depth, but it was just missing something. The characters weren’t as fun or unique or desirable as Henry’s usual fare, and a friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers again isn’t really my cup of tea trope-wise.
But I am happy to report that Funny Story has earned itself a place in the pantheons of Henry’s literary canon. This trope is excellent — two people unceremoniously dumped by their exes so the exes can be together get together as a semi-fake revenge plot but obviously wanna BANG!!. The main characters are sweet, entertaining, and buzzing with chemistry. Our leading man, Miles, is very sexy indeed (I’m not at all biased on the whole long hair and tattoos thing. Not at all) and I think everything presented between them just a lot of fun and pretty relatable and very satisfying — the best revenge you could possibly wield against someone is being happy.
I wish that there was a little more buildup between Daphne and Miles or even just a little fluff around their origin story. For example, it would have been really entertaining to see a couple of flashbacks of how they felt the first time they met each other while they were still with their respective partners. That always helps shape the story for me and increase the emotional heft and my own investment in the pair. As a result, the the final conflict didn’t feel totally earned, though the ending was deeply satisfying.
But, look, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out and am even happier to continue to tote EH as the finest pure rom com novelist of our generation. 4.2/5 stars.
The Rachel Incident has been at the top of my TBR stack (pretty much everything on my bookshelf at this point) since my old pal Deirdre sent it to me as a birthday gift at the beginning of the year and the description promised a ridiculous love affair and friendship between Irish college students and their professor.
And I liked it! It was a lot of fun and certainly lived up to the hype as far as the wacky plot goes. Rachel and James’s relationship is really lovely — we all have those friendships that feel meant to be from the minute you meet. Think of your best friend freshman year of college who you, like, commit to living with in an off-campus house senior year about three years beforehand. The two characters are joyful and flawed and full of drama and I found their connection to be the most fleshed out and touching aspect of the novel.
I was also genuinely surprised at the turns the novel took — it’s not a thriller in the slightest, it’s obviously a rom-com, but things certainly do not go the way I anticipated. I particularly enjoyed the twist in the romantic premise. I thought the general structure worked well to support this; the nonlinear narrative always kept me guessing. The B-plots and supporting characters are also strong. Like any good Irish novel, the evolution of the social and political systems alongside the characters and their own lives is also paramount. I was impressed, for example, by the inclusion of the Repeal movement and its personal impact on the characters alongside the changing attitude towards queerness in the country.
Although the relationships between characters were strong, I do think the book was at its weakest when it came to their individual characterizations. James is supposed to be a charming, messy human, an enigma, but also a dear friend, and while that’s displayed in his relationship with Rachel, he’s never quite given his time to shine as a unique character in his own right, if that makes sense. Quite frankly, the same goes for Rachel, who’s a nuanced and great narrative voice with a lot of interesting things to say, but never totally distinguishes herself and her interests aside from her responses to the novel’s events. Does that make sense? I don’t know. I need to go back to writing reviews 30 seconds after putting books down so I can keep track of my more incoherent thoughts.
The book also weirdly felt kind of short — I think there’s many more interesting plot points that could have been teased out that wouldn’t have felt out of place and would have really increased my investment in the existing relationships. Deirdre said she wasn’t a fan of the ending; I didn’t mind it, but I think that’s because the novel left me wanting more throughout, so I considered the ending to be fitting for what we got.
In the end, I had a lovely time reading this one, and though it fell a bit short in its emotional power, I’d recommend it as a happy and elevated summer read for all of us looking to revisit the amusement of our early twenties. Sad hot Irish girls are back and better than ever. 4.2/5 stars.
A Visit From the Goon Squad is another one that’s been on my list for a while. I’ve almost picked up The Candy House about twenty times from various bookstores because the cover is really cool-looking but luckily never did because I found out it’s a sequel to Goon Squad. Indecision doesn’t often pay off, but when it does, the satisfaction is deep.
I really enjoyed this one and certainly understand why it’s an award-winning novel. The format is ambitious; it’s a mix between a novel and a group of short stories told by characters increasingly tangentially related to one another, so it flows like a comprehensive tale, but jumps between various perspectives and tales. The narrative structures also vary in an interesting and organic way. I think every voice — and there are many! — is very distinct and the small bits we get from each character are deeply indicative of who they are, which is incredibly impressive.
While not each character and microcosm of the tale at large are created equal, of course, I was pretty absorbed in most of them. The flow didn’t feel disorganized or like too much despite the volume of narrative voices; the stories, while different, all feed into something bigger and tonally consistent, which I really appreciate.
I will admit that I felt cheated out of certain stories and I think a better job could have been done connecting some really interesting narrative threads. There are so many tantalizing little nibbles that I wish we’d followed a little further because the ones that do connect are really spectacular. I think this criticism also functions as a backhanded compliment, though, because it shows how many fascinating plot points are thrown in here that could have constituted a very cool novel on their own. In that vein, I also do think that whatever larger point the novel was making could have been a bit clearer; I was left feeling a bit lost at the end. I’m curious if The Candy House is formatted similarly or if it follows fewer threads/narrators.
Really good, very interesting, and gives me a justification to purchase the sequel add yet another book to my growing collection of unread books. I don’t even think I’ve hit 20 books read this year. I may not be a good bookfluencer, but I’m an honest one! 4.3/5 stars.
cain’s jawbone corner
Yeah, I bet you THOUGHT that I would give up on Cain’s Jawbone immediately. And you know what? I did. I quit easily. You hear that, bitches? I GAVE UP SO EASY! I folded it in entirely and didn’t think about the book for three months. But I’ve been revisiting this “fiendish literary mystery” over the past week or so and am finally understanding what literary mystery means: it’s literally just comprised of paraphrased quotes from different notable authors of the late 19th through early 20th century. So now I’m slowly but surely kind of getting somewhere-ish. I’m getting into lots of fun literary spirals via my incessant googling. For example, Robert Louis Stevenson was pretty hot (which, to be totally honest, I discovered when I saw one of his death masks in the Scotland writer’s museum last year) and also probably gay and maybe in a love affair with an American author! And on pride month! Love truly wins.
other media
documentaries
So I’ve never really been into true crime and I think most criticisms of it as an exploitative form of entertainment are very valid, but god damn it if I haven’t been sucked in by this fucking insane situation presented in The Jinx. I watched it for the first time a few months ago on a whim and, despite being about ten years late and already knowing some of the vague basics of what happened to Robert Durst, was floored and flummoxed and greatly entertained. I didn’t even know a second season was coming out mere months after I watched the original, but, serendipitously, that happened to be the case.
The second season is nowhere near as revolutionary as the first, and could have benefited from being a little more meta instead of covering a trial we all already know the results of in detail — evidence unearthed in the first season, after all, was directly responsible for getting Durst finally convicted on one of his many suspected murders. But I still enjoyed it!
TBH, the tea since watching has been even steamier than the doc itself. I’ve heard that the lead prosecutor on the case, who was also one of our main narrators in part two, John Lewin, went on a vacation to Durst’s widow’s Hamptons house a few months after the trial (he is also a maga bigot piece of shit according to his twitter). I have also learned that the director, Andrew Jarecki, is himself the son of a billionaire (currently being sued for sexual abuse + affiliation to Jeffery Epstein, oops!). We could have benefited from a little more self-awareness throughout — like, I have to believe that one of the key reasons Durst wanted Jarecki to interview him was because he thought maybe they were kindred spirits. Anyways, I live on r/thejinx and will watch part three with unfettered horror and glee.
reality tv, which I suppose is a kind of documentary
The first season of Perfect Match, Netflix’s response to shows like Bachelor in Paradise, was a triumph of the genre. It’s the only place to see contestants from Too Hot to Handle (they are batshit crazy) and Love is Blind (crazy in an entirely different way but not better) date. It’s where Kariselle from Sexy Beasts, the dating show where the contestants are all, and I cannot emphasize this enough, in fursuits, can get engaged to The Circle’s Joey Sasso, who romantically declares to Kariselle, who’s just come out to him as bisexual, that he loves her for who she is and she can bring home ANY woman she wants at ANY TIME, which, yes, is fetishizing, but also weirdly sweet when you watch it in a “they’re my problematic fav” way (their engagement ended immediately after the show did).
It’s why I’m very sad to report that this most recent season is a huge fucking bust. Netflix doesn’t know what it wants from us. Are we supposed to take this seriously as a love show or embrace as the goofy joy it is? The first season towed the line perfectly, giving us some genuinely entertaining drama while also never taking itself too seriously. This season, however, is just deeply, deeply unpleasant to watch for one key reason:
Harry Jowsey, Netflix’s resident bad boy playboy for some fucking reason absolutely alien to me because his botox and roid rage does NOT look good on him, is on the show, and he is one of the most vile humans to ever grace my television screen. He’s gross and weird, and not even in an entertaining coked-out Jax Taylor way where you know he was just designed by god to be on reality television — just gross and weird. He’s been a disgusting misogynist from day one with a penchant and deeply frightening skill for manipulating women. He spends the show running around and moping that women dare to “question him” based on his “past,” even though the past in question refers to him being a piece of shit to every woman he’s very publicly dated and cheated on. He’s literally in his ITMs talking about a new woman entering the house, Holly, and how he’s already “smashed” and another guy on the show, Stevan, previously “creampied” her. I was shocked, honey — and I don’t think it’s prudish to be absolutely disgusted by his graphic violation of her privacy. It’s genuinely difficult to watch someone so blatantly … awful and clearly sociopathic. And you know I watched Vanderpump Rules and The Valley with zero reservations and a child size tub of popcorn. There’s just something about Harry in this show that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
In that vein, his longest “match” on the show is Jess Vestal from the latest season of Love is Blind, a show that just keeps getting more and more painful and bad and boring (but one I will never quit), a young single mother with a talent for one-liners. Maybe she’s just with him for clout, but the way she sticks by Harry is shocking. I can’t even feel badly for her. In one absolutely horrendous scene, she confronts Melinda Melrose of Too Hot to Handle (and, now, Netflix hosting gig!) fame for allegedly kissing Harry (who is gaslighting Melinda, Jess, and everyone in the villa saying he didn’t do it despite more and more details coming out FROM HIM!! confirming that he definitely did do it) and not only is this a sad example of, as Melinda puts it, “women fighting over mediocre men,” it’s tinged with more than a trace level of racism and misogynoir. Jess calls Melinda out for not being “ladylike” and publicly humiliating her, which, sorry, you and Harry are doing to yourselves. The two talk it out later and I’m very impressed by how Melinda keeps her cool, but, yeah, it’s gross.
I’m far from the first person to talk about this, but it’s very, very important to address the maligned treatment of Black women on shows like these. In another example, Tolú, one of the show’s most entertaining participants, is paired up with Dom, who’s back despite literally winning the previous season, who is a Black man who could not make it more obvious that he’s not interested in Black women (the same goes for the rest of the cast, which just fucking sucks and reminds me why dating shows, a microcosm of our culture as a whole, are horrendous experiences for people of color, especially women, because they NEVER CAST MEN INTERESTED IN ANYONE WHO ISN’T WHITE-PASSING!!!!) I’d recommend the 2 Black Girls, 1 Rose podcast episodes for an excellent discussion of this topic more generally.
None of this is even to MENTION that the season’s sole queer storyline got completely cut out, a particularly ridiculous event after several conversations absolutely dripping with biphobia (man, dumb, wants girl, hot, to fuck other girl, also hot, in front of him, maybe he get involved??? Awooooga). And, look, I don’t watch reality TV expecting anything really aligned with my morals. But there’s something about this one that feels rotten to the core. Again, that’s coming from me, who will watch anything put in front of me like a cat watching complications of bird videos on youtube. And obviously I watched the whole thing, but I’m not happy about it! If the show is to continue, it’s going to have to go forth with reality stars who hate each other for being hot and stupid, not for being insane sexists and gaslighters.
This list contains links to funds for individual Palestinians and their families. Even if you can only donate small amounts to a few, or can only afford to share the links, you can make a massive difference in people’s lives. At the very least, it can help you feel a little less helpless if you feel just as disillusioned with the political process as I am (on a personal note of frustration, progressive pro-Palestine voice Jamaal Bowman, the only New York politician worth voting for, lost his seat to a Hilary Clinton-endorsed moderate this week, which only decreases my already devastatingly low interest in voting in the presidential election). Don’t stop speaking out. It’s not too late to start if you haven’t. Free Palestine.