A Collection of Incidents

What if Sally Rooney were a little funnier?

If you, like I, consider the video for Freedom ‘90 by George Michael to be a foundational text, you may also enjoy The Super Models, a documentary on Apple TV. It’s a very important (to me) 4-part exploration of the lives and impact of four supermodels from the 80s and 90s in particular: Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and Naomi Campbell. I highly recommend watching so you too can ask yourself questions like:

• Are we not going to include any of the incredible clips of Naomi Campbell being fed up by everyone around her?

• Are we really glossing over Naomi’s hilarious and vitally important interview with frenemy Tyra Banks?

• Did we know that Linda Evangelista’s voice - the one that said she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 - sounded like THAT?

• Where are the other girls that sexually confused us from that era, like Claudia Schiffer? And Helena Christensen, who’s performance in the Wicked Game video allowed us to keep a close eye on Chris Isaak in front of our parents?

• Can you believe that we don’t even notice that there are male models in the Freedom video? That’s power.

It’s very good, and it makes you think about things like the art of photography, the magazine industry, female empowerment and beauty myths in a new and interesting ways.

I just got back from summer vacation, which we always take in the fall to avoid being around families with children, in Amsterdam and its Low Countries surroundings. So, I’ve had plenty of time to read while the airlines robbed me of precious time as I was invariably delayed. Some were duds, alas, but here are some of the books I really enjoyed.

THE LIBRARY IS OPEN

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style

by Paul Rudnick (2023)

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I pick up a lot of queer books throughout the year. If a book has a queer thread to it, it’ll most likely be thrown upon my TBR whether or not I intend to get to it or not. Not every queer book delivers the same sense of urgency for me to pick it up, but sometimes when one is available at the library I’ll check it out just because I know I’ll at least get something gay out of it. This was one of those - I’ll get to it when I get to it, maybe. I’ve read this author’s last book, which I thought was fine but had the bad luck of pairing queer royals and commoners in a post-Royal Blue world. And, besides, sometimes it pays dividends to go into a book with low expectations.

But dear reader, I could not have predicted how much I’d love this book, regardless of any of the context above. It’s a sweeping new look at gay history, it’s actually chuckle out loud funny, and it was moving enough to make me tear up a little at the end. Our hero, a feeble, funny Jewish kid lands at Yale in the 1970s where he immediately and deeply falls in love with the titular Farrell Covington, a stylish, blond patrician hunk who happens to be the scion of a conservative Christian family, from the Great Plains, who gives him great pains. Their love is eventually discovered, and the family plots to tear the soulmates apart. We follow the boys over decades as their personal history unfolds and gay history blossoms all around them.

Farrell is a character who helps guide us through Old Hollywood, Broadway, Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, and more. The relationship is heartfelt but never saccharine, and the dialogue pops between them. It’s a refreshingly non-standard take on gay history. And, in a world where gay characters are written with puritanical tenderqueer and allied readers in mind, these guys have some pretty wild sex! I loved this book so much; I can’t believe I hesitated reading it. I’ll be able to say at the end of the year that one its best books was hiding in plain sight on my TBR pile the whole time.

Read it if you like: gay history, old Hollywood but not that Ryan Murphy show, decades-long love sagas, Frasier, non-celibate gay leads

The Rachel Incident

by Caroline O’Donaghue (2023)

In the halcyon days of Twitter before Apartheid Clyde took over, it was thrilling when an author would follow you. A celebrity, if you squint hard enough through nerdy thick lenses. You may have heard that things have gone significantly downhill since then, and loads of folks have jumped ship to places that are better for their mental health. One of those people who used to follow me and then left the platform was Caroline O’Donoghue, and good for her! Though, it’s a shame she’s not still there like I am so I could tag her in a post about how absolutely wonderful The Rachel Incident is.

We’re in Cork, Ireland in the 2000s as the recession is, to put it mildly, really adversely impacting the Emerald Isle. Rachel’s world is flipped turned upside down as she becomes enamored of a closeted gay man who works as a bookseller with her. She’s so taken with him and the possibilities of life in his orbit that she moves in with him, and they begin a life together as Best Friends. Both of their lives are thrown off course when they invite Rachel’s hunky (and married!) English professor, on whom she deeply has a crush, to do a reading of his history book at the bookstore where they work. The book follows Rachel over the next decade as the effects of that night ripple over everyone in their emotional vicinity.

This is a wonderful example of a book that digs deep into the good, the sometimes not so good, and the ugly of the relationship between a straight woman and a gay man. O’Donoghue does an expert job of foregrounding the woman’s experience without ever making the gay man seem like an accessory to her life without any agency. In fact, it’s their deep connection that ends up being the most empowering and complicating factor in both of their young lives. We start the book with Rachel living abroad recounting her old days, and we wistfully look back to examine an intricate, page turner of a plot that will make an excellent adaptation someday sooner than later.

Read it if you like: Will and Grace but Irish, Sally Rooney but funny, tight friendships, the Irish abortion referendum, straight love interests you really end up rooting for.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher (2023)

As a fiction partisan, the basis by which I judge any non fiction selection is by asking if it could have been an article. This terrifying book, unfortunately for all of us, certainly deserves more than the long form article format. It’s packed with stories that will make you want to throw your phone out the window, but please finish reading this newsletter first. If you have a nebulous sense about why social media is bad for you, your mental health, and our democracy, this book wrap those feelings up in facts and inform you why it’s not merely abstract. It’s actually worse than you thought.

The subtitle kind of says it all. I don’t want to give away too much, not that this will come as a surprise, but it turns out that aiming to drive profit and engagement at all costs on public communication platforms is really bad for society. What drives profit is engagement, what drives engagement is emotion, and the emotions that are the strongest drivers of all are anger, hate, and outrage. Algorithms are built on our psychological frailties and tap into our weakest impulses. At best, this makes for a distracted work day. At worst, it results in terrorism and genocide.

So, why read this book when all of this seems pretty obvious, not to mention bleak? Fisher is an excellent storyteller and his sources - outsiders shunned by tech titans - are uniformly excellent. There’s also a hopeful tone in how we can turn the tide, even though we feel like this genie is already out of the bottle. There’s also a (kind of) companion podcast he’s frequently on called Offline that counsels on ways to be more, well, offline - or at least online in healthier ways. This book feels necessary and vital at this moment, but most importantly it never feels like a slog to read.

Read it if you like: true crime podcasts, making fun of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network, current events, existential dread but with an instruction manual to beat it

LIGHTNING ROUND

Maybe you’re looking for an excellent round-up of stories of the heroes fighting book bans nationwide?

I didn’t love her latest novel, but as long as I have shelves, I’ll always keep her mindblowing collection of short stories on it.

I simply cannot stop watching these people dance.

Until next time…happy reading!