I Only Want the Beginning

Changes

The Sunday Letter #30

Welcome to the 30th edition of the Sunday letter! In celebration of this milestone, I’ve given everything a slight redesign (though I’m so indecisive, so expect more changes to come).

Thanks again for being here and reading this letter every week. I’ve been increasingly frustrated lately by social media platforms whose usage feels like shouting into the void (looking at you, Instagram). Instead, Substack has been a welcome reprieve, quickly becoming my favourite app to scroll through when I want to read interesting, meaningful writing from friends and strangers alike.

The future of online writing (in my opinion) is in small, niche communities with like-minded folks. As someone who’s often felt like a literary outsider, Substack has felt like a great equalizer. Can’t wait to see where it goes from here, and can’t wait to keep checking in with y’all every week.

This week’s recommendations

Listening to Brittany Howard’s Short and Sweet as I write today: “I only want the beginning, we'll give each other all of our best and then time can do what it wants with it.”

I recently watched Shiva Baby (lovely) and Sicario (horrendous; rare Villeneuve L; of course it was written by Taylor Sheridan).

From The Baffler, the tradwife as pioneer burlesque: “She is willing to follow her husband wherever his career takes him, even if that means giving up her own; she is willing to support his passions, even if that means trading her pointe shoes for cowboy boots.”

Ann Friedman on moving beyond the “parent vs. childfree” binary: “It's rare for any two reproductive identities to be identical, even when the surface-level choice appears the same.”

Intelligencer asks whether cancel culture has finally grown up.

The New Yorker asks: are you the same person you used to be?

I loved Claudia Dey’s Daughter, and this recent Interview interview is reaffirming that love. Or, as Dey calls it, “the performance of love versus love itself.”

Eerie, eerie, eerie: her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?

Scenes from the end of the sexual revolution, from Intelligencer.

From NYTimes, why ‘girls’ rule the internet.

In Byline, everyone is microdosing fame and no one is famous. Conversely, we’re all lurkers now.

Kate Jones

on childbirth as a metaphor for creativity.

Watching: “I spent a sizable chunk of September watching movies at TIFF, lucky enough to catch a couple shiny names like Dream Scenario, The Beast and Aggro Dr1ft. The current that underlined my experience (both textually and meta-textually) was that of a self-conscious masculinity. On screen, Nicolas Cage waxes and wanes between ineffectual cuck and violent bull, George McKay recites Elliot Rodger like it is e.e cummings, Jordi Mollá submerges himself into a hot tub teeming with buxom strippers (but don’t worry, it's deeply ironic). The men that swarm the aisles around me may chuckle at the right time, but something tells me that it's at the wrong thing.

(I’m endlessly fascinated by this and will be posting meatier, fleshier thoughts about it on my substack very soon!)”

Reading: “I love how casually one can encounter ““experimentation”” in the blogosphere. I was reminded of this as I flickered through the endless tabs of K-Punk (and its iterations)—the late Mark Fisher’s ideational playground. In For Your Unpleasure Fisher lavishes over the power of the female goth, in schizoanalytic swarm1 he scathes the ‘scene’ and its simulacra, depressive diary scribbles fill the lines of Good For Nothing (he’s just like me fr). It is all good, for it is all unconstrained.”

Listening: “My YouTube is littered with recommendations of bizarro Nietzeschan mediations, promising to plug me into The Baddie Frequency, seduce me with The Sigma Mindset, munchausen me with Lucky Girl Syndrome. They promise to Affirm, to Manifest, to Reprogramme. Unfortunately, the promise is painless (it's all subliminal). I coldly click on Not Interested. No thanks! 

Instead, I obsessively listen to Please, Please, Please Let me Get What I Want by The Smiths, staring glassy eyed into the distance while it loops around its own misery, like if the ouroboros was a pathetic little worm. I am hoping, no I am pleading The Universe to let its walls down. I have no interest in impressing it through the power of my will, no offerings of kraft or macht come from this altar. Instead, I am wearing The Universe down with my bitch baby tantrum, until it gives up in exasperation— Here, take it!!!! Have at it! Chew down the goddamn pacifier! 

🐑I Am God’s Most Diligent Little Lamb🐑 💒I Am Property Manager of The Victim Complex💒 🤰I Am Everything I Privately Accuse My Mother of Being🤰🔥I Know How Joan of Arc Felt x2🔥

No one gets me like Morrissey. Life is going swimmingly :)”