Reading, Watching, Listening 8/9/2024
A few words about the body
A bit of an odd week. The kind where you start three different newsletter updates, only to be left with three different drafts sitting unfinished. Nothing particularly good or bad, personally speaking. The world is chaos, of course, but that’s not new. I’ve got an appointment with a my hepatologist, who’s keeping an eye on some elevated liver enzymes and determining whether a biopsy is a good idea at this stage. My numbers seem okay, though, so I’m not actually worried about it, though that doesn’t stop some anxiety creeping in. People with chronic conditions likely know the drill. You live with it.
I’ve been reading a novel this week, which I plan to share more about with you in the very near future. It’s a book about history, among other things, but one particularly visceral passage had me thinking about the body, my body, my relationship to it. Not in terms of image (though body image issues are hardly foreign to me), but the actual biological mechanics of the flesh. The strangeness of it. How very Cronenbergian of me. Since my initial cancer diagnosis, almost a year-and-a-half ago now, I’ve been quite consumed with the weirdness of “the body.” I think often of PET scan I went through, the radioactive tracer streaming through my system, appearing as bright colour on the doctor’s computerized images. She pointed at various spots that looked like little more than blobs. The lymph nodes, she said, drawing my attention some alien part of me, were not reacting to the dye. My spleen, bright as a bulb, is where most of the cancer was. It all appeared as visual gobbledygook to my untrained eye, and it occurred to me how little I understood about my own body.
The spleen is gone now. It was biopsied to identify the specific kind of leukaemia I’ve got (thankfully, though currently not curable, it’s slow growing and treatable over a pretty long term). There was a point, early on in this adventure, when I tried to read a lot about the various kinds of cancer, how they actually work. I got pretty deep before realizing I didn’t actually understand most of what I was reading, and that in the end it didn’t much matter anyway. I’ve got the gist, and I’ve got doctors to guide me through treatment, and that’s really all I need to know. I’ve got cells that are trying to kill me. Why? Who the fuck knows. The actual workings of the body? That can remain a mystery. But it’s all pretty fucking weird.
I didn’t publish anything else this week, but I’ll be back next week, and will also begin trying to publish on Sundays—a good day for reading—rather than stuff everything into the Monday-to-Friday rush. In the meantime, here’s some stuff you should check out:
The Oral History of the Garden State Soundtrack, by Matthew Jacobs, was published over at The Ringer late last month, but somehow I missed it. I had a vested interest in this one, as I had pitched The Ringer on the very same idea, only to learn they were already working on it, and had received the same pitch from at least a few others. That makes sense to me. The Garden State soundtrack was a big fucking deal, and whatever one might think of the movie, or even the use of music in it, the album itself is just one of the best collections of songs assembled for a film. I still listen to it regularly, transporting myself back to high school and all that indie music of the time. I’m happy to report the piece itself does a great job looking at how the soundtrack came together, and its legacy.
In the Dark: Season 3 is finally here, and I’ve listened to the first three episodes. It is, as usual with Madeleine Baran’s true crime reporting, a cut above. The first season of the show was about a killer who wasn’t caught, until just before the podcast started airing. The second season was about a man who was tried multiple times for murders he did not commit, remaining in jail at the hands of a corrupt prosecutor. He’s since been freed. This third season is about one of the worst massacres by Americans in Iraq, in Haditha, and the way the military justice system failed to achieve any justice at all. It is a harrowing listen so far, but also a remarkable product of investigative journalism. Nobody else in the audio game is working at Baran and her team’s level, and if you haven’t listened to any of In the Dark, you’ve three incredible seasons to catch up on.
Tenet. I watched Tenet again. I’ve already said my piece about Tenet over at Defector, but I’m slowly coming around to the idea that it may be Christopher Nolan’s best work, or at the very least his most defining work. Tenet is Nolan putting it all on the floor. It’s every idea he’s ever had about storytelling, genre, visual construction, effects, editing, the very temporal form of cinema itself. And somehow buried under that, if you really allow yourself to explore the film’s crevasses, you find it’s also every emotional tenet he’s ever tried to express, hence the name. It’s a film about the moral necessity of action and of inaction to preserve the things we care about, and the moral weight of our choices in either direction. It’s about a driving belief in the things we can hold with our hands, a belief in reality, and a belief in people. The whole film is a temporal pincer, in which nobody who knows about the mission and the algorithm can escape alive, for fear that knowledge of it would leak into the future or the past. And the biggest choice the Protagonist makes, there at the end of the movie, is to let Kat and her son escape the pincer. She gets to go forward, with all her knowledge, the Protagonist trusting in her and by extension humanity.