Fantasies of the dragon, assassination, and suburban type
Also I actually enjoyed a piece of video art at BK Museum…
The other day, a friend and I were considering this very tiny udon place in Crown Heights for dinner, and my friend expressed some wistfulness over still not having visited Japan. But her schedule was opening up, I reminded her. Maybe it was time? So we looked through my insane 10,000-word 2024 Japan doc, and I got such a rush of pleasure from reminiscing over that trip, and thought I’d re-up it here in case any of you are planning your 2026 travel soon…
The Drift’s stern evaluation of romantasy as a genre, courtesy of writer Daniel Yadin, is generating a lot of chatter for all the reasons you’d expect—it’s delicate work to critique anything this near and dear to a very female, very online audience. Yadin makes some good points about the requisite badass protagonist trope, the overall retrograde sexual politics (so no one writes about pegging a dragon, is what I’m learning??), and most interestingly, the “pantomime of action” and really, the lack of any “real” agency present in storylines that needs must end pretty tidily and happily.
This last part seemed most ripe to me as far as sociological tea leaves go; much is made of the escapist element of the genre, but Yadin articulates the exact appeal of it in a way that, I think, credits the typical reader with more existential complexity (real life agentic overload?) than someone whom many of us might think just wants to like, think about castles, etc. I’m a former fanfic writer, so you’d think this stuff would be my jam, but unfortunately every time I try it out, the overabundance of Norse/Welsh-ish names with far too many extraneous e’s and y’s nukes any personal desire to turn another page.
Elsewhere in pop culture, the success of romantasy writers and the religious-like following they command is quite the hot topic: in Pluribus, the protagonist is a misanthropic romantasy author who hates her own work; in last week’s episode of Law & Order: SVU, Jemima Kirke took a spin as a romantasy author who regards herself as a feminist hero in a very Amanda Palmer/Neil Gaiman-coded plot. Love them or hate them, the insinuation seems to be, but these women are scary powerful now.
Speaking of fantasy, I put off reading Sam Adler-Bell’s The Fantasy of Assassination Culture forever because I saw the One Battle After Another art and was like, eh yeah I’m good on Paul Thomas Anderson takes. But I’m glad I read it, because it was less about OBAA and more about the general American tradition of vigilante justice and our preferred meaning-making of random violence so that it feels “purifying,” redemptive, or at least justified.
Adler-Bell expands on an idea that Susan Sontag originally described re: the “American contradiction,” in that we are a nation of uptight obsessives who tote our hand sani in one hand and an AK-47 in the other:
Americans are obsessed by visions of doom and catastrophic violence, and we are temperamentally timorous, oversensitive, health-conscious, and fearful of death to the point of neurosis and unreality. We are a nation of end-times preachers, political militants, and holy warriors who consult longevity influencers, count calories, and go to the gym every day; we can’t decide whether to make the country Great Again via millenarian nationalism or make it Healthy Again by regulating food dyes …
Under ideal circumstances, this tension — between, shall we say, enmity and enema — suits American interests just fine. Within our borders, fretful self-absorption prevails: safety, security, hypochondria, and hygiene, racial and otherwise. Our repressed barbarity provides the psychic energy for American “dynamism,” that enviable attribute, by which is meant voracious acquisitiveness and frantic, death-fleeing work. Meanwhile, we export our uninhibited fantasies abroad, where the American taste for earth-shattering violence is given free rein.
This is a fascinating framework to me for thinking about the American psyche beyond the usual Puritanical/Judeo-Christian themes of work and morality; it also, as Sam points out, makes the whole Trump thing make perfect sense.
Also related to matters of fantasy: I read Erin Somers’ The Ten Year Affair and had pretty mixed feelings! The premise—that a young, married mother living upstate hits it off with a young, married father at a local baby group and then proceeds to have a (mostly) imagined affair with him in her mind over the ensuing decade—was enticing. However, the execution felt flat to me, as if the novel was more a reason to trot out all the usual archetypes we’re quite quite familiar with (upstate candle stores, overbearing pandemic moms, the New Yorkiness of oysters happy hour, hating one’s job in digital marketing) in a brisk lineup. The sex (even if it was just mindsex) was not convincingly hot to me. Oddly, I liked the latter third of the book more once it started winding to up to its thesis about the norm of cultivating a rich inner fantasy life as necessity out in suburbia/the ultra-domestic years. That’s an interesting idea; I just wish I didn’t have to read so much about an ex-Cobble Hill chief storytelling officer’s ironic tattoo to get there…
I got existential about my fertility window for the Julie Substack, Sex Happens, (where I also write the weekly round-up, if you want to know what I really thought of the Olivia Nuzzi textual music video…) and then also happened to read Kate Wagner’s essay about hypochondria and long covid for The Late Review on the same day. There were similar themes in terms of wanting total control over one’s body, of course, but Wagner’s essay actually made me think more so of the (already iconic) Daniel Kolitz gooning report in that it also goes down a particular rabbithole of the internet where people also feel alternately abandoned or isolated from gen pop for various reasons, and it’s so clear how thin the membrane is that separates “them” from us (i.e. one inexplicable illness; or perhaps one wrong turn down the algorithm).
Dean Kissick originally tweeted about how Kolitz’s piece situates the gooners’ main issue within the greater shared problem of Too Much Content; it made me think about how Wagner’s essay makes the long covid forum dwellers’ problems seem both niche and universal as well. Faced with the inability to trust or access perfectly tailored medical knowledge—but overwhelmed with access to fellow sufferers—conspiracy brain, which is just an attempt to connect the dots in some form, is but one scroll away.
And finally, I’m happy to report that the Monet and Venice show at the Brooklyn Museum is quite nice—the best paintings at the end are exhibited in a rotunda, very Musée de l’Orangerie-style, where the lighting is just so that the pearly brushstrokes really dazzle. I was mostly struck by the story of Monet and his second wife Alice (who had moved in with him and his first wife to raise their families together when Alice’s first husband, a patron of Monet’s, went bankrupt. Rumor has it that Monet may have fathered her youngest son??? Now THAT’s a 10 Year Affair situation). Once Monet and Alice finally married (after their first spouses passed), Alice got him to go to Venice to get out of a water lilies rut; it worked, and the works on display are either directly from or inspired by that trip. Alas, they planned to return to Venice — except Alice got sick and died a few years later, which means that all of Monet’s subsequent Venice paintings are either totems of grief or remembrances from that golden trip together. AHHHHHH.
anyway. Try not to go on peak weekend hours, and don’t bring a bag; I also recommend getting tickets online since they’re timed. I had to kill an hour on Saturday before getting in for my time slot, but on the plus side, I spent it discovering Christian Marclay’s “Doors” film montage, which is maybe the first video art I’ve enjoyed in recent memory. A feat of video and sound editing! I never thought so much about the inherent suspense of opening a door…
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