Is Substack just listicles now?
Today, yes
Too depressed to write a real post but some things I’ve enjoyed recently include Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film The Secret Agent, W.S. Merwin’s translation of the 14-century narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Benjamín Labatut’s novel When We Cease to Understand the World and this interview about it, Mary Gaitskill’s story “Action, Illinois” (can’t find online to link), Madeline Cash’s forthcoming Lost Lambs, this convo between the psychoanalysts Jamieson Webster and Darian Leader, Mackenzie Thomas’s four-hour performance I Said What I Said, Moulin Rouge! (2001), this podcast about Vladimir Lenin, rereading It Is Daylight by Arda Collins for the sixteenth time, listening to the first few chapters of White Girls by Hilton Als while suffering an emotional break on a bus speeding through weighty snow, not leaving the apartment in order to finish About Ed by Robert Glück, leaving the apartment for lunch at 4:35 pm, Emily in Paris season six, Super Mario Galaxy, bell peppers, olive branches, listening to Charlie Parker and Mahler’s fifth and Santigold and the Stemeseder Lillinger Quartet and Lana Del Rey’s “The Next Best American Record” on repeat, learning that someone started a rumor that I’m related to Jojo Siwa, late-night caffeine consumption, this look by Jojo Siwa, this article about sports stadiums, texting people “i am going to kill myself,” continuing to live, indulging fewer predictions but no fewer fantasies, reddish and slightly-too-small sweaters, a juicy Italian sandwich, sending fan mail, aspartame, and clear spherical balloons containing cartoonish 3D daisies floating toward the ceiling.



Listicles + Recommendations + Affiliate links = Substack… like a magazine turned inside out, seams showing, shaken so the words fall out like loose change and what remains is the skeleton of capitalism!