Syllabus #100

 Wow look at this milestone.  100 of these weekly roundups of culture I've been either enjoying with gusto or giving the stink-eye.  Did anybody think I'd make it this far?  I didn't, which shows how much I still have to learn about myself despite the decade + of navel gazing I've been doing in this space.  We know I become obsessive with routines.  I hit day 760 of Duolingo this morning, and I'm into year 4 of doing yoga every single day.  Why should this one be any different?

Sometimes successful bloggers do a giveaway for their readers when they hit a major milestone.  So, Mom, when you guys come out to visit in a couple weeks, dinner's on me.

So what have we (the royal we, including the ghost of Prince Philip) consumed this week, culturally speaking?

Can we call this culture?  Or just a pitstop on our way to the nadir of humanity?  This sexy sea monster movie sounds like the Human Centipede of our time.  "Our time" being the roaring twenties, because I just realized Human Centipede came out 12 years ago.  We've been living with the horror of an unbroken chain of ass-to-mouth-to-ass-to-mouth-to-ass humanity for over a decade.  They should do a reboot where the middle of the centipede gets Covid and loses his sense of taste and smell and is just like 'I'm good with that.'

I actually loved high school, or at least I have very fond memories of it now, but you could not pay me any amount of money to go back to that period of my life, especially not with social media in play.  Some of these cliques of today sound wild.  Which one would you be in?  Not gonna lie, I kinda wanna hang out with the stonks kids, but I feel like I'd be one of the militant social justice kids who has good intentions but is utterly incapable of a nuanced viewpoint.

I can't wait to watch the Hemingway documentary, but it's such a time commitment!  Yes, the pause button exists for a reason, but (see above) once I commit to something it's hard not to keep powering through it.

  

Analog Reading:

Still dog-paddling through A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders.  It's wonderful but I'm taking it in short strokes because he has a lot of valuable insight about the craft of shorty story writing and I'm trying to learn, here, y'all.

Reading Big Time, a short story collection by Jen Spyra, a former writer on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  It's funny and dark but reading it in parallel with Saunders' academic distillation of what makes an exemplary short story and what mistakes can drag the form down, I'm feeling more critical of these stories than I might otherwise.  All of these stories would be enjoyable to read in isolation in say, a New Yorker, but reading them consecutively reveals them to be pretty formulaic.  However, the story Monster Goo is a parody of a Goosebumps story taken to its furthest, darkest logical conclusions and I was cackling out loud.