As with January I spent most of February reading Middlemarch. Finally though, that is done and expunged from my life and now I am quietly enjoying a 1,500 page omnibus edition of The Books of Magic, a comic book I used to read as a teenager. I already talked about Middlemarch and all it's associated material in this newsletter so I won't go on about it again but I feel like I read about 7 novels worth of Middlemarch material in February, and then about 600 pages of this damn comic. I have a pile of novellas sitting on my bookshelf which I am going to HOE INTO as soon as I am done.
I read something online about how annual reading challenges (like, read 50 books a year or whatever) discourage people from reading long books and push them towards the middle ground and it's like... if you read a long book, you can just balance it out with a short book later? Or two even... Like do you not trust people enough to find any kind of balance? People are dumb! I think this guy was probably shilling for something, this was dying days of Twitter after all.
Online I didn't fare much better, I really was focussed on Middlemarch, plus I had various family members visiting for most of the month, etc, etc, why is this so late, etc, sorry to my 30 subscribers lol.
Patricia Lockwood wrote this elegy (I think I'm using that correctly) for a poet, in the LRB. I don't know Molly Brodak’s work but this is Lockwood at her absolute best, when she prismatically focuses the light of humanity into a single beam of a person, talking about them but also about us, and about her, writes about someone she knows and makes it feel like we do too, sorry this has devolved into a Patricia Lockwood fan newsletter (except to Tara, you are welcome) but she really is so good. My partner's family were staying in our room, we were on couch, I couldn't sleep, it was 4am, I read this hanging over one end of the foldout, I could feel the blood pooling in my head.
If you, like me, are wondering why the whole internet is crumbling into a big pile of useless garbage, you might be interested in The People who Ruined the Internet. I remain ambivalent about its demise.
Bradley Cooper made this film called Maestro about Leonard Bernstein that I don't think anyone saw, but 1) just a reminder about Radical Chic: The Party at Lenny's, one of the better articles I've ever read; and 2) I read this thing in Pajiba about how Bradley Cooper is the Caroline Calloway of the A-List. I HAVE TO DISAGREE, I think the parallel is all wrong. The article also mentions Elizabeth Holmes (if you haven't watched The Dropout you simply must must must, it's so good), and she seems like a better analogy to me, someone who wants all of the glory without having to do any of the work. Other than the slightly misplaced equivalence for the sake of what I think is a clickbaity headline, it's a good read, especially if you despise Bradley Cooper as much as I do.
I can't remember the context but I was recently looking for a comfort watch, I had a bag of Doritos open on the coffee table and I was very likely very hungover, and I couldn't settle on anything so in the end I did what I often do - watched the Dinner Party episode of The Office (US). I'm sure everyone already has, but if you haven't, check out the oral history of the making of the episode here.
That's it from me! I had a whole true crime thing ready but it will have to wait until next month (how is it a week away?).
xoxox I'm really good at Frogger
I feel like I could search for Patricia Lockwood content myself but it's just easier to get it from you.