Hope everyone had a smooth week. I took off a couple days so fewer links this week!
Also, not a link exactly, but if you like people talking about writing and mildly like Taylor Swift’s music, can recommend the Taylor Swift Disney+ thing, which was fairly interesting and endearingly but sort of funnily features Aaron Dessner sitting quietly in the dark between Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift outside his studio. The highlight is Taylor Swift rattling off the structure of a kind of Country song where there’s a three-act structure of a man, then a woman, then they met, then — twist — actually I, the singer, have a part in this story. (The worst example of this kind of narrative momentum is “Riding with Private Malone,” in which someone rips off a widow for her late husband’s ‘66 Corvette, which he then totals, and the ghost has to save him.)
Links
Here’s a crazy story from the late Cokie Roberts, about Congress knocking up a bunch of ladies in 1820, the best part of which is the “Ha ha ha!” at the end of the transcript.
“It’s something that time forgot, I feel like, the place, and me in it.” New York mag does these small-business stories in every issue, and the last one on a chess store in Manhattan is really elegant.
Love reading about the logistics involved in this vaccine situation, but the New Yorker sent a photographer to take very dramatic photos of a glass substitute that’s being used to make vials.
If you missed this news about Warner basically cutting their losses, giving up on theatrical releases next year, and concurrently putting all their big movies on HBO Max in 2021, that’s happening. While obviously better than nothing and convenient, it’s not great news for the big studios or especially movie theaters (though I guess everyone will see how the vaccine spring goes). I kind of do think this time next year will look extremely lively, with an untold emphasis on in-person holiday parties, venues where people congregate, probably some style-/culture-reverb to that end, and possibly investment money getting freed up toward that end. But it’s sort of unclear what happens to movie theaters and a lot of restaurants end up in the interim.
Light book commentary
Balloons and confetti fell on my apartment Wednesday when I finished War and Peace (although technically I kind of skimmed the last, 30-page essay, since the essays mostly operate on the same two beats: “Why did it happen this way?” and “It had to happen this way,” like, thanks). It’s excellent, but I will say, it is also a little messy in the way of, really, almost a long-running TV show: Napoleon’s a character, then he’s not; the eldest Rostov child is basically never mentioned again after like 1807 in a book that continues onto 1820 explicitly about her family; it reads like Tolstoy was setting up a divorce plot, and then at some point decided he wasn’t, and killed off a character to get out of it; there are both long essays and essentially short stories wedged into an otherwise fairly cohesive plot about a handful of families; the book — in the non-essay zone — ends with a sort of unexpected portrait of two marriages (one where the parties understand each other totally and act sort of crazy, and one where the parties don’t really get each other but act sanely).
But, essays aside, it all really opens into a long series of perfect moments or descriptions: It really is incredible — like textbook definition of incredible — the way Tolstoy could write a sad, lonely woman and her outwardly aloof, inwardly sincere brother or their unwell father or another family’s goofy, warm patriarch to the degree of total distinction, but where the character also endures and seems accurate and recognizable to the reader 150 years later. The best of the short stories, for instance, is the horror story of the Bolkonskys’ servant riding into town and the noises changing over a period of 24 hours as the French attack on a nearby city advances, until the town itself is being destroyed by shelling. The second best is a still-accurate satire of the eldest Rostov daughter and her husband trying hard to please fashionable people at a dinner party. To the TV metaphor, Emily Vanderwerff also mentioned this in a piece from earlier this year:
As I read, I felt like I could trace the way Tolstoy’s writing in War and Peace went on to influence film and television, especially in the way that Tolstoy writes from one character’s point of view until they meet a different major character, then hands off the narrative. The book feels, for all the world, like a Steadicam in a flashy movie with lots of long takes, following one actor for a while before it follows another. And it was all written decades before the invention of cinema.
Without getting into the plot too much — since the plot of War and Peace is actually pretty opaque to the average reader and, who knows, you might want to read it — I had a favorite character by far, and my favorite character dies. Like the other major ones, the plot filters through this character’s consciousness, and follows their disappointments and resolutions. Though they ultimately die, obviously, this death is first reported in passing to another character, and I will say that reading (what turns out to be a false) report was — somehow — one of the most upsetting things I experienced all year. I had to put the book down, because I was so disappointed I would just be dropped from that character’s consciousness, and that this part of the story had ended in this life-like way.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.