Things I’ve been…

READING:
The thing I read that has stuck with me the most this summer has been “Ghosts,
Cowboys,” the first story in (OSU MFA alum) Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut collection Battleborn. I admire it for its scope and structure, for the way it made me re-think how it’s possible to tell a story that spans a long period of time in a way that feels urgent and also reverberates. I also can’t express enough enthusiasm for my friend Joff Winterhart’s graphic novel Days of the Bagnold Summer, a story of a do-nothing summer, featuring affectionately wrought characters—one a single-mom librarian, the other her heavy metal-loving teenage son—that’s revealed in extraordinary funny/sad moments. And I’m still laughing about this multi-part hoot of a story by Simon Rich called “Sell Out” (from The New Yorker) that I read a few months ago.

WATCHING:
Over this past year I have finally been watching The Sopranos for the first time, start to finish. I now understand what every bit of fuss was about. While I didn’t necessarily like inhabiting that world of Jersey McMansions and strip joints and butcher shop back rooms, I felt so invested in the characters, even the ones (Janice, Meadow, A.J.) I detested. AND THAT FINAL EPISODE…I’m still reeling from it, mainly because I don’t have anyone else to discuss it with, everyone else having expressed their theories and close analyses and “oh my gosh”es back in2007. Currently, my husband and I are hooked on The Killing, which we watch even though we resent the constant barrage of red herrings and have started to doubt any new clues even as they’re being revealed. Also, as someone who dislikes heat and sunburns easily, in the summer it seems I want to spend as much time as possible in darkened rooms watching movies. My two favorites I’ve seen this summer are Bonnie and Clyde (so tragicomic!) and Springsteen and I (What’s not to love about a movie comprised of Springsteen fans trying to tell the camera what his music has meant to them?).

RESEARCHING:
Since I’m about to enter my thesis year, I spent a good chunk of time this summer doing research.  While books and online databases can give you a hell of a lot of information, there is nothing like going on location to a local library and pulling up forty-year old microfilm images of newspaper front pages, or sitting down in a historical society (surprise! historical societies are awesome!) next to a lifelong resident of anytown who can show you your grandparents’ yearbooks and help you look up your immigrant ancestors’ immigration records. This summer I also started digging through old shoeboxes, belonging to my mom and grandma, and became slightly obsessed with the amazing old photos I found. Like this one of my grandmother lounging in a garden. And this one of her in a mask. And this one of three unidentified poodles.

LISTENING TO:
I am deep in the midst of a phase where all I want to listen to are songs about
overcoming the daily grind of the working week, sung by jean jacket-clad
everymen who pause their “woo-oh-oh oh”s occasionally for guitar solos. So
that means I’ve been enjoying things like Eddie and the Hotrods, Billy Bragg,
The Replacements, Bill Fox, and The Mice, and that I’ve been listening to Bruce
Springsteen as if I’ve never heard him before. And Ted Leo. Always, Ted Leo.

Also on heavy rotation:

• Mikal Cronin’s album MCII (“Pop perfection” is a lame phrase, but this album is not. Every track is golden.)
• “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac (Not only does it have one of the funkiest rhythms known to music, but it was recorded with a whole marching band.)
• Nile Rodgers’s revelatory guitar on “Get Lucky” (The song of the summer of the century indeed!)
• Parquet Courts’s album Light Up Gold (There was nothing that got me moving around the kitchen and smacking my steering wheel more this year than this album.)
• Prince, “I Would Die 4 U” (I was at a summer wedding on an Ohio farm and we kicked up some dust clouds when this one came on.)
• Everything by The Bats (I recently blogged about the overdue experience of seeing The Bats play this summer; they—joy!—played a lot off Daddy’s Highway, easily one of my all-time favorite albums. It’s hard to pinpoint how exactly, but their generous melodies and understated choruses seem to have a way of speaking for me, and I’m ever grateful.)
• The So So Glos, “Son of an American” (Watching these guys play last night, I felt a peculiar pride watching my British husband launch himself into the mosh pit with abandon to this one.)
• Chris Bell, “You and Your Sister” (Shit, this one undoes me. It featured in the recent Big Star documentary Nothing Can Hurt Me and is the B-side of founding member Chris Bell’s only 7” single. Everything sounds richer coming out of movie theater speakers, but even from my normally tinny MacBook jobs, this aches in a heavenly sort of way.)