Normal Books for Mammals: 2020 Year’s Best

December 30, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

Nonfiction top 10: 10. Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, eds. Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 – 1980. “A 2003 article describes the Goree Girls, a country-western ensemble made up of inmates at a Texas women’s prison, performing at the Texas Prison Rodeo for an audience of male convicts—grifters, cattle rustlers, murderers—as well as free visitors: ‘It was like something out of a dime novel,’ the warden’s daughter said. And she was... Read more

Chekhov’s Fursuit: My Year in Movies

December 30, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

2020 was a year when I watched many movies and loved few. Here are the exceptions. I enjoyed a Marvel movie well enough, because it was about losers in love and included public humiliation through lobster-eating. I watched two movies about the discovery of an underwater monster, with parallel events and character backstories; of the two I preferred the indie Sea Fever to the more mainstream Underwater, but the Underwater monster was a real thrill, I have to admit. Sea... Read more

I Used to Live Here: 2020 Revisits, In Retrospect

December 28, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

For a few years I’ve been doing this thing where I assign themes to each week, going in roughly chronological order through my life and praying a decade of the day’s rosary for that theme (for the people associated with that time in my life, etc). I also try to match up some of what I’m reading and watching with the theme, with part of the pleasure, of course, coming from stretching the idea of “fitting the theme.” This whole... Read more

Alms to Oblivion: My decade in writing

December 16, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

Which I’m doing a year late, apparently, because I didn’t bother before. Anyway this is my attempt to assess what I’ve written since 2010. This list is only articles, not blog posts, but if you’d like a couple shots of my weirder writing I still enjoy Famous Authors’ Texts from Last Night and that post where I got sort of galumphingly poetic about figure skating. Oh, and actually, this post about the mysticism of Story of O. Top 10 Articles... Read more

Parting Glances: I watch “Summer of ’85”

December 8, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

Okay, I will first say that I developed a Theory about this movie, a theory which captivated me and which may be entirely projection. I’ve seen no other movies by Francois Ozon (and in fact confused him with Xavier Dolan until ten seconds ago). I came to this thing knowing only that it was a gay ’80s possibly thriller, aka two and possibly three things I definitely want. As it closed I thought I had watched a farewell to a... Read more

Looking for Mr. Goodboris: Short movie reviews

December 8, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

Lured: Lucille Ball stars as a dance-hall girl turned undercover detective! A serial killer is stalking the women of London via the personals ads… and one of the suspects is none other than the great Boris Karloff! This movie is pure pleasure. I’d never seen Ball in anything before and she’s a gem. She’s brassy and funny, able to swirl a gown or filch a gun with equal aplomb. Karloff is of course oozily frightening. There’s some of the era’s... Read more

From the Cradle to the Tree

November 30, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

A very quick post about Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. I am not the audience for this movie–a meditation on loss, nature and our part in it, the guilts of childhood (ok this one I’m the audience for), with a lot of breathy abstract voiceovers and actors I don’t much care for. I often found myself trying to consider that the imagery might be “not for me” rather than, you know, trite. Malick teases the Tushnet viewer with hints about... Read more

Do You Die?: Two book notes

November 9, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

Last week my time travel rosary ticked over into 2012, The Year I Quit Drinking. In honor of the event I revisited a novel I read in my last days of drinkin, Michelle Huneven’s Blame, and also finally dove into Cat Marnell’s memoir, How to Murder Your Life. In tone of voice they couldn’t be more different. Blame is serious and kind of stodgy; Murder is dizzy, glitzy, and damaged. Sample sentence from Blame: “That life, she thought, that beautiful... Read more

Discomfort Watch

November 2, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

Back in the last years of what they call “my drinking career” there were a few movies I returned to obsessively. There was Withnail & I, whose appeal to the late-stage alcoholic is obvious. (We demand a Disney princess with d.t.s!) But there were also two other movies where I didn’t quite understand why I was so drawn to them. I didn’t own Shattered Glass or watch it a million times, but I did watch it at least twice in... Read more

Spooky Tales for Catholics: An America Magazine Roundup

October 30, 2020 By Eve Tushnet

strongly endorse Dracula although I wonder if the note about his likely former religious affiliation is #orthodoxerasure… also I recommended this: Middle Passage By Charles Johnson This is a slender, ferocious book: an adventure tale of mutiny on a slave ship, and a deeply theological meditation on the nature of division and communion. Johnson, a black American Buddhist, sends his freedman hero to Africa to escape a forced marriage, only to discover that his ship’s intended cargo is human beings.... Read more