Culture diet
What I've been reading and watching lately.
This newsletter was inspired by Jason Kottke’s occasional “media diet” posts, in which he shares what he’s been “reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing” over a given period of time.
My scope is more limited than Kottke’s — I don’t play video games, for example — but I still thought it might be fun to talk about some books, movies, and cultural experiences that have enriched my life lately.
Books
No “beach reads.” No fiction at all. (I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I do, however, return once a year to the audio versions1 of Kate Atkinson’s magnificent Life After Life2 and A God in Ruins3. And I’ll happily read whatever Mick Herron serves up next.)
The Bloodied Nightgown, by Joan Acocella. Essays on a wide range of cultural topics, from Dracula stories (that’s the title chapter) to Grimms’ fairy tales to Graham Greene, Andy Warhol, and Natalia Ginzburg. Acocella, who died in January at 78, was perhaps best known, at least to me, as the New Yorker’s dance critic, but there are no dance essays here. Maybe in a forthcoming collection? In the meantime, this book is a terrific reminder of Acocella’s sharp eye, keen wit, and engaging prose style.
A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing, by Hilary Mantel. The author of the Wolf Hall trilogy — works of fiction I did read, and admired greatly — was also a prolific critic and essayist. This posthumous collection (Mantel died in 2022) brings together her film reviews, lectures, and essays. Mantel is especially perceptive on royalty — she did, after all, publish novels about the Tudors and the French Revolution — and her comparisons of Princess Diana and Marie Antoinette are clear-eyed and poignant. Also revealing: her essays about her life as a member of the working-class Irish diaspora in England. I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by an all-star cast that includes the English actor Ben Miles, the Irish writer Anne Enright, and the Welsh novelist Sarah Waters. A total treat.
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, by Becca Rothfeld. I was new to Rothfeld, who is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post; I picked up her debut collection after reading some enthusiastic reviews. I found it uneven but generally stimulating. I especially enjoyed Rothfeld’s takedowns of the minimalism and “mindfulness” fads.
Reading now: Mother Tongue, by Jenni Nuttall, a British scholar of medieval literature. This book, aimed at a general audience, explores “the surprising history of women’s words” from Anglo-Saxon up to about the year 1800. A sample sentence should give you the flavor: “English takes a while to find the words to describe the breast all the way from torso to nip, like a toddler learning how to stack cups into a tower.”
I’m also listening to Claire Dederer’s new essay collection, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which asks how, in an era in which all biographies are transparent, we can separate “the maker from the made.” Dederer’s subjects include Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, and J.K. Rowling; Dederer herself narrates the audiobook, and I’m sort of regretting not seeking out the print version instead, because her mispronunciation of “coup de grâce” — it is not “koo de grah” — temporarily derailed me.
Movies
State and Main. Speaking of “monsters,” I believe we’re supposed to be canceling David Mamet now (see this Tablet essay), but I’m ignoring those demands. I watched his 2000 movie for the third or maybe fourth time and delighted in it all over again. What a cast: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alec Baldwin, Charles Durning, Patti LuPone, William H. Macy, David Paymer, Julia Stiles. And that Mamet dialogue! (“You like kids?” “Never saw the point of ’em.” “Me neither.”) I caught it this time on the Criterion Channel, which offers this synopsis: “When a big-budget Hollywood movie crew arrives in a quaint Vermont village — sowing a bumper crop of corruption, vanity, and greed — money will change hands, careers will be jeopardized, and love will bloom all before the cameras begin to roll.”
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. Not just the best Estonian documentary about women and saunas released in 2023, but one of the most haunting films I’ve seen all year. Directed by Anna Hints, it follows a group of women as they tend their sauna, hack through ice to create a cold plunge, and talk about their lives. That’s it, and that’s plenty. Southeastern Estonia’s smoke saunas, by the way, are recognized by Unesco as cultural treasures. Rent it on Prime.
MoviePass, MovieCrash. Remember MoviePass, the too-good-to-be-true all-you-can-watch-for-ten-dollars subscription? It launched in 2011, had a spectacular rise, then lost $150 million in 2017, declared bankruptcy, and abruptly closed in 2019. The documentary, directed by Muta’Ali and streaming on Max, tells the story you may not know: that MoviePass was founded by two Black executives, Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt, who were eventually forced out when an analytics company bought the company and installed its own smooth-talking CEO as chairman. (That fellow is now under investigation for securities fraud.) The good news: In 2023 Spikes regained control and revived the company under a new pricing model; this week, the new MoviePass announced it had received an equity investment from a division of Comcast.
Tuesday. It’s hard to talk about this debut feature from Croatian-born, London-based director Daina O. Pusić without straining credulity, but hear me out. Lola Petticrew plays a dying teenager, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays her in-denial mother, and Death (Arinzé Kene) is a talking macaw that morphs from gigantic to tiny. It shouldn’t work, but it does, spectacularly. (And I say that as someone who is generally allergic to fantasy.) The eerie, uncategorizable soundtrack is a bonus. In theaters. Read Nell Minow’s review.
Operas
San Francisco Opera is finishing its season with two extraordinary productions. I’d seen The Magic Flute multiple times, but never like this: reimagined — by a British performance company, 1927, about whose name I’ll have more to say soon — as a black-and-white silent movie with Surrealist animation and a touch of Edward Gorey–esque zaniness. Watch the trailer. Performances through June 30. In a far more serious yet equally inventive vein, the new opera Innocence, from the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, takes on a tough subject — the aftermath of a mass school shooting — with a multilingual cast of singers and actors and the most ingenious and effective set I’ve seen in a long time. Watch the trailers. The American premiere closes tonight; coming to the Metropolitan Opera for the 2025–26 season.
*
Over to you. What are your book, movie, and theater recommendations? Maybe you can even persuade me to read a novel.
The Life After Life audiobook is read by the golden-voiced and splendidly named Fenella Woolgar. A God in Ruins is read by Alex Jennings. And both are available, free, on the Libby public-library app.
There was a BBC series based on Life After Life, but I haven’t seen it. Any good?
I had to laugh at The Times of London’s terse summary: “Better than most fiction you’ll read this year.” Or any year!
Not enough time to think about what novels I would recommend. My tastes are childish and lazy: the intellectual equivalent of eating doughnuts for breakfast. I would like to note that the American mispronunciation of coup de grace seems almost universal (among people that care even enough to try). I distinctly remember being told in my youth what the phrase meant, and that it was not "koop dee grace" but "koo dee grah," because French words all ended like that.
Good to know that State & Main is worth a watch! I love David Mamet, even if I am a brain-dead liberal (to use his words). I rewatched Oleanna a month or so ago and enjoyed it quite a bit.