Things I Learned This Week

Guns, Gardam, Savion Glover, and Magdalena Bay

What’s going on, everybody? TGIF, right? Welcome to the shitshow, friends. Before I distract you with all the fun and interesting things I learned this week…

Want a three-step road to help keep disgruntled white men from murdering people in cold blood in front of children and the world? Limit access to guns in America. You can do that by getting involved and joining groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, which lobby for new gun laws and education. If you are an introvert and want something more performative and less action-oriented, buy some Melt the Guns merch from Carson Ellis and Books are Magic. (All proceeds go to Everytown.) The next, don’t allow your government to cut federal funding for mental health services and grants for behavioral health. Vote. Call. March. Whatever you have to do. And lastly, stop eating up all this bullshit propaganda that rich white men and their corporations create to convince us that we are against each other. You can do it by refusing to participate. Don’t watch the rhetoric online. Don’t click it for likes. Read the news from multiple sources, including those not in the US. We are all different and have different opinions, and the way to bridge that gap is not by listening to people who literally make a living by inciting us to fight. Listen to each other. We are not the enemies. Deep down, we all want the same things. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of fucking happiness. Go talk to your neighbor.

OK, now the fun stuff. My British novels of manners class. Last night, one of my fellow cohort members mentioned Googling what a “novel of manners” was, suggesting perhaps that maybe she should have looked that up before signing up for the class. According to my AI friend over at Google, a “novel of manners is a sub-genre of the realist novel that focuses on the social behaviors, conversations, customs, and values of a specific social group within a particular time period.” Like Pym, whose novel Excellent Women we read last week, this week’s read is God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam (who just died in April at 97!) from 1978, about an eight-year-old girl in her seaside home during one summer as she navigates coming of age, religious tensions, and adult complexities. I’ve only started, but I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

My husband reminded me of the 2000 Spike Lee film Bamboozled the other night. Such a great movie! It’s been years since I thought about it, and I immediately connected the dots on how similar the theme is to that of the 2023 film American Fiction, based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett. The film’s plot revolves around a frustrated Black TV writer who proposes a blackface minstrel show in protest. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, it’s a similar version of the story involving a frustrated novelist who publishes an exaggerated, satirical, and stereotypical novel about the Black experience under a fake name and hits publishing gold. That’s all well and good, but I really wanted to talk about one of the stars of Bamboozled, Savion Glover, whom I haven’t thought about in a hot second. If you were a child of the '80s and '90s, you were in love with him. I saw him on Broadway in Jelly’s Last Jam with Gregory Hines when I first moved to New York, and was blown away seeing him dance live. He’s still choreographing and teaching tap, which, at this point, must be a dying art form. Though my 20-year-old son just discovered Singing in the Rain, so there’s that!

My secret dream as an amateur potter is to a) get good enough in my forms that I can start to paint stuff on them and b) make sculptures of animals. Anyone who is good at ceramics that take on animal (including human) forms is my hero. Beatrice Wood, a member of New York’s Dada group, died in 1998. She lived to be 105 and attributed her longevity to “art books, chocolate, and young men.” She was lovers with Duchamp and was part of a menage-a-trois with Henri-Pierre Roché that inspired Truffaut’s fabulous 1960s film, Jules et Jim. But enough about her sex life, man, could this gal make some shit with clay. I love her scenes of women doing womanly things. Sitting on benches with cats (Not Married). Standing naked on men (Career Women). Dreaming of dancing (The Virgin’s Dream). These primitive creations riffed on femininity, marriage, and the human condition in a maudlin yet playful way.

A fellow cohort member turned me onto the alt-pop duo Magdalena Bay. Even though the album is a year old, it's been a fun day listening to it for the first time. Check out Vampire in the Corner.

Quote of the week?

“If guns don’t kill people, why do we give people guns when they go to war? Why not just send the people?” — Ozzy Osbourne

‘Til Tuesday kids.

Burgin

(An MFA grad student at 50+… follow along and read my story here.)