I’ve been dog sitting for the past week, hanging out in a beautiful apartment in Inwood and spending lots of time on the train going back and forth for various gigs. Amid the death of Reddit being reported everywhere to my Many Thoughts about reading Robert Gottlieb’s memoir, I had an overriding thought today: I miss blogging.

I really miss Livejournal, with its beautiful nested comments and privacy controls for individual posts. I never really took to Dreamwidth, its non-Russian successor-I mostly use it for Get Your Words Out! checkins. More than anything, I miss when I could just write a bunch of crap on the internet and not think of it as a sales tool, as promo, as content. I was reading through my old blog and there is some good writing there, but there is also a lot of junk, which is great. I spend a lot of time worrying about my Substack newsletter, A Faster No, and whether or not the content I’m putting out that week is engaging. I hardly get any comments, and I don’t know if that means I’m doing something wrong.

But with Steady As She Goes and this blog (to a lesser extent) just started out as me typing. My silly little blog, full of my silly little thoughts. And I thought why wait for Friday to post some silly thoughts about Asteroid City (which I saw yesterday) or the enduring beauties of Midsomer Murders. Or some of my favorite quote from Avid Reader. It’s my blog, dammit! And I’ll repopulate it if I want!

Avid Reader

It takes a special kind of dyed-in-the-wool nerd to arrange to receive The New York Times at summer camp, something Bob Gottlieb did in 1945. That’s how he learned about the bombing of Hiroshima. He was a member of three lending libraries (where you had three days to read the book before returning it to the drug store) and was obsessed with bestseller lists, making sure to read everything that hit it. Reading his memoir is like getting a blueprint of how to create the perfect editor: get them started reading early (in his case at four), have them read widely and voraciously, and then make them temperamentally unsuited to do anything else. It’s a brisk read, about 350 pages, and if you’re at all interested in the history of the publishing industry it’s a must-read.

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson is an incredibly memeable director. There’s a whole tiktok trend where people make videos lovingly (and not so lovingly) mimicking his signature style: characters in the center of the frame, small movements or adjustments of aesthetic objects (usually vintage-looking) and stylized, almost flat line delivery. Abby and I saw Asteroid City in theaters, which was a joy. I have really missed going to movies, and after looking over after each preview and saying “I want to see that” I have the feeling I’ll be in a lot of them this summer.

Asteroid City is a weird little pastel nesting box of a movie–a movie that is a play within a tv show about the making of that play. It’s in color and in black and white, in several different aspect ratios, and packed to the gills with every actor Wes Anderson could get on board. Abby and I had one disagreement after–she thinks that Bill Murray, currently embattled, was meant to play the Tom Hanks character, and I argue that Bill Murray couldn’t have played the role well. He’s just too weird. (That’s one thing we did agree on–more than anything else, Bill Murray sounds exhausting to be around, and thus his cancellation is society saying “Too much. Stop.”) Apart from the meta structure, the story is fairly straightforward; a widowed father (so recently widowed that he has not, at the start of the film, figured out how to tell his four children that their mother is dead) arrives in Asteroid City to participate in a science convention for teens. Also come to town are a group of schoolchildren and a Hollywood starlet whose daughter is in town for the same convention. During said convention, an alien appears, and the town is locked down.

Is it bad that I didn’t think of the Covid lockdowns watching Asteroid City? It was too pastel, too bright, too chatty; my memories of lockdown are colored by anxiety and interior lighting in contrast to the airy, flat color of Asteroid City’s fake southwestern vistas. (Shot in Spain, apparently. Spain via a different dimension.)

Twenty-four hours later and I’m not sure how I feel about Asteroid City. It was fun, it was funny in parts, it was very (unexpectedly) moving in others. It made me want to wear more long skirts. It didn’t have the elegant melancholy of The Grand Budapest Hotel, or the moving and complicated family dynamic of The Royal Tenenbaums. But there was something about it that has stayed with me, and I think I may be going to see it again.

It’s funny–I’ve turned away from writing this blog post several times because my attention span is shot. I got one of those screentime alerts on my phone earlier today–the number of hours I spend looking at it is shameful. I want to read more, write more, and do more, and the hours I spend on instagram and tiktok definitely aren’t worth it!

Reading: Witch King by Martha Wells (page 94/414)
Writing: working on the sequel to Marrying In (Marrying In 2: Electric Boogaloo)
Listening: “Don’t Recall” by KARD
Watching: Midsomer Murders S12E04 “The Glitch”