Two Incredible Books About Massachusetts
One of them is the basis for a queer historical romance film with Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor!
This is a busy week, someone small has spring break and I’m doing the Interval Reading Series on Thursday at KGB Bar so I’m genuinely going to write about my enthusiasms at this moment.
Scituate Lighthouse my god I need to tell you about the legend embossed on the side of this building
The History of Sound, Ben Shattuck - Can I tell you? I don’t read short story collections much, especially current ones. I generally don’t like them, I find short stories to be a form that is somewhat out of fashion and for good reason, unless you are Lorrie Moore in 1984 and/or Mary Gaitskill. Give me a novel any day. And yet - Ben Shattuck writes beautiful, heartbreaking, well drawn short stories in this here book. There is an over-considered “hook” to the collection, stories link to each other in a way that references an old-timey New England tradition, but to be frank that didn’t stick with me much. What did was the sense of place and time and the way that our desires for love leave something behind, even through the years and the weather (always terrible).
The story that you should go and listen to right now if you are a secret audiobook head like me, is the title one as read by actor Chris Cooper, which made me cry. It’s a love story between two men who spend a summer in Maine collecting folk songs, and it builds and builds to a devastating finish. It is also going to be a movie this year starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, and while I attempted to go to a test screening last week, to be frank, the girls and gays had been lining up since 4 p.m., so I had no chance. If that palpable horniness bodes well for what will be a historical drama with beautiful music, well, I’m excited. Anyways the film debuts at Cannes next month, Mubi is putting it out this year, we’re all going to be really excited to see it in a theater when it comes out. Oscars for everyone, maybe?
Women and Children First, Alina Grabowski - Forgive me for the personal diversion, but this book had me from the first line. Grabowski grew up in Scituate, a place nearby my hometown, a place my family has some connection to (my parents first lived there, my mom taught at the local high school), and a town that I know well. I know its beauty, its quirks, the sort of people that live there and the kind of people that leave. I grew up south of Boston, in a town called Weymouth, which is the sort of formerly blue class fishing community-type place - part of the “Irish Riviera” - that these days is becoming more and more of a wealthy exurb of a city I can’t recognize. Abigail Adams, the wife of President John Adams, grew up there and George Jung, the dirtbag who brought cocaine into America (as seen in the Johnny Depp film Blow), also grew up there. Scituate is a town among familiar lines. The Irish Catholic culture of Boston has been its own cliche in art in recent times, probably because it’s a way to explore lower-class white people who seem “authentic,” but more often than not the results are cartoonish.
In Women and Children First, a chorus of ten women, all sharply written with distinct voices, circle around a terrible incident and a mysterious death at a party — the kind of plot that could be sold as a simple suspense/thriller novel, but in this writer’s hands it’s more complex than pulp. It’s empathetic and feeling and understands the steely subculture of people who grow up South of Boston, the Catholicism and the expectations and the way in which community can feel like chains but also a salve. If you’re not from Boston and you maybe went to school in Boston or think that people from Boston are mean (and truly, the 95 circle is full of self-identified “people from Boston”), this book will give you the background as to why they’re off putting. I know I am sometimes. It’s a harsh place in some ways. It’s a beautiful place in others. A lot of books are set in a fantasy New England of the mind (ala tv’s finest example, Gilmore Girls), but this book got it right, and for that, I really treasure it.
Funny enough, this book is on Sarah Jessica Parker’s imprint, off Zando. She got some shit for being a judge for this year’s Booker Prize, one of the book prizes that gives real money and real notoriety, and the shit in this case was just so transparently fake. She’s clearly a reader, and every time she’s papped filming And Just Like That…, she’s generally holding a book and they’re good! One thing I took away from my experience working at New York City Ballet is that Sarah Jessica Parker is a real artist’s artist who is serious about supporting the things she likes, you see it online and in pap shots with books. I saw how she’s been longtime involved, supportive, in love with the ballet — a refreshing perspective considering she could could be a diva, involved in something in name only. I mean, truly, why was Mikhail Baryshnikov in Sex and the City if not for SJP? She’s a real one, and made for a great New Yorker profile, too.
Also! I have a soft spot for the original Daredevil Netflix series, and it’s currently being revived on Disney Plus as Daredevil: Born Again, and while this gave us the heat that was/is Jon Bernthal as The Punisher, it also has Vincent D’Onforio doing a great performance as Kingpin, resembling a thumb, delivering every line in slow-motion with a screeching rasp, acting like a man who grabbed political power explicitly to enrich himself, the worst sort of politican and unfortunately New York births them and deals with them too much right now… it’s a weird performance that I adore in a show that is pretty much pulp. Superhero stuff is so often so dumb but the tortured Catholicism of Daredevil and his question of can I be a good person even if I am a do-gooder lawyer as well as a crazy vigilante who really loves beating up bad people so they’re pretty much in a coma, well, it resonates with a tiny mean part of me.
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