Dave's media diet: bad dads, Moscow, prophets, mindless balls...and an experiment
Hi there! Hope your 2024 is off to a great start. Mine began with my first ever case of COVID, broken HVAC, busted water heater, sewage leak, and roof leak, all within a month. On the flip side, I'm surrounded by love and family and books and writing...and readers like you. ^_^
I'm finally able to get back to the ole D.Y.S.E.H.K. newsletter, so I figured I'd get things started again with a sampling of my recent media diet. I'd love to hear what you've been consuming, too! Remember, you can email me anytime. I think it'd be fun to include your media diet favorites in an upcoming issue.
Also, you'll notice I did a redesign (simpler, cleaner) and officially quit the mess that Substack has sadly become. I'm also considering doing Letterloop (see below) as an experiment, but I'm gonna need your feedback on that.
Aftersun
A woman remembers her bittersweet final childhood vacation spent with her father before losing him forever to addiction. I watched this masterpiece a while ago and I think of it often. Usually during moments when I realize how much my daughter loves me, how much she looks up to me, and how messed up it would be to somehow disappoint her or, worse, betray her trust. Her faith is terrifying, in the particular way only real love can be. I think about how, in loving her, what I'm really doing is building a shelter for her to later inhabit. We play music together, take art classes, talk story, and every time I think, what a colossal responsibility I have, to guide this girl of mine, but also to listen, and marvel at her instincts as she fumbles her way toward independence. It's a delicate balancing act. Transporting a sand painting without spilling a single grain. Terrifying—like,-terrifying—but also worth every baby step.
A Gentleman in Moscow
A man stripped of his nobility lives exiled in a posh Moscow hotel in the wake of the Russian communist revolution. Reading Amor Towles (huh, sounds like immor-tals) is like staring at a Dutch master or getting lost in one of those ornate country Limoges scenes. I'm a third of the way in, and I can confidently say this novel is no plot and all vibes. The one rule about writing a vibey book is that the prose better be damn good (because without a plot, prose is all you got) and fortunately Towles can freakin' write. I find myself sipping and savoring this book like I would a nice bottle of bourbon, little by little, slowly. My agent recommended this to me as an example of the unique escape that beauty can provide, and like always my agent is right. Damn you, agent!
Prophet Song
Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a dystopia about the slow, frog-boiling rise of fascism in an ordinary neighborhood. Basically my nightmares every time I see Trump's poll numbers. Fall of democracy aside, Lynch's writing is gorgeous, often reading more like poetry than prose. He's also brilliantly restrained—he could've easily fallen into cartoonish hyperbole (i.e. The Purge but make it literary), but he keeps things measured and frighteningly believable, only resorting to a single explicit scene so delicately rendered, and so respectful for its victims, that it absolutely broke my heart. A masterclass in less is more.
Bricks & Balls
Totally idiotic game by the dystopically-named company PeopleFun, Inc. where a single tap-and-shoot yields 30 deeply satisfying seconds of watching little balls bounce around and break bricks. I don't know why I love the sub-sub-sub-genre of idle bouncy-ball video games (including unforgettable classics like Peggle, Roundguard, and Holedown) or why I compulsively reach for them to induce myself into a braindead stupor. Maybe I was a bad Pachinko dad in a past life? Or maybe I just need a break from creative work, making decisions, or worrying about the future? Probably all those things, plus other crap hiding in my limbic system. This game is riddled with ads and annoying sound effects and bezerkergang-inducing dark patterns in its UI, but still. Just look at all those balls bouncing around.
lastly, an experiment: letterloop?
I'm kicking around this idea of sending y'all a newsletter in the form of a Letterloop, an interesting service where I pose a question ("What is your favorite color?") and you contribute answers simply by hitting reply to the email ("Blue. No, yellow!"), with no need to sign up for *yet another* app. The service is small and young enough that when I wrote to them, one of their founders actually wrote back and asked what I wanted to use Letterloop for. Anyway: wanna try it out together? Could be fun? Let me know!
Thanks for reading!
— dave
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| He’s also the co-founder (with wife Nicola Yoon) of the Random House imprint Joy Revolution, which publishes love stories starring people of color. |
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