Monday, 30 June 2025

Reading List: June.

Non-Fiction: 
 
Fergus Fleming: Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole. 
Stefan Zweig: Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers.
 
Fiction: 
 
Stephen King: Never Flinch. 
Caitlin Starling: The Starving Saints.
Mac Crane: A Sharp Endless Need.
Ocean Vuong: The Emperor of Gladness.
V.E. Schwab: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.
Marie Rutkoski: Ordinary Love.  
S.A. Cosby: King of Ashes. 
Shoshana von Blanckensee: Girls Girls Girls.  
 
Films: 
 
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922, F.W. Murnau).
The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor, George W. Hill).
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926, Lotte Reiniger, Carl Koch).
La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer).
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024, Rungano Nyoni).
The Wedding Banquet (2025, Andrew Ahn). 
Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler). 
 
Shows: 
 
Dept. Q, Season One.
The Better Sister, Season One.
Bay of Fires, Season Two. 
Hal and Harper, Season One.  
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season One, Two. 
 
Other: 
 
Japanese Breakfast live @ Sydney Opera House. 

Saturday, 21 June 2025

Favourite Books I've Read This Year (in progress)

Non-Fiction: 

Manisha Sinha: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.
Wright Thompson: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.
Richard Flanagan: Question 7.

Fiction: 

Colson Whitehead: The Nickel Boys.
Mac Crane: A Sharp Endless Need.
Marie Rutkoski: Ordinary Love.
Ocean Vuong: The Emperor of Gladness.  
Trang Thanh Tran: They Bloom at Night.
Emily Tesh: The Incandescent.
Katherine Arden: The Warm Hands of Ghosts. 
Liz Moore: The God of the Woods. 
Liz Moore: The Unseen World. 

I read The Nickel Boys just before watching this year's cinematic adaptation by RaMell Ross, which will be somewhere on the top of my favourite films this year: this is a beautiful, painful book about two boys caught up in the horrors of a fictionalised version of the Florida's Dozier School for Boys, the same setting as 2023's The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. The transit from the gentleness, pride and support that Elwood Curtis experiences growing up under the tender care of his grandmother into the system of abuse and violence at the "school" he ends up in through no fault of his own is jarring - his inability to realise that the rules he has internalised all his life about fairness and equity do not apply here, his focus on truth and justice, doom him, as much as his friend Turner tries to guide him. 

Trang Thanh Tran's follow-up to She is a Haunting, this year's They Bloom at Night, is set in a fishing community on the Gulf of Mexico, where a mysterious algae has literally transformed life after a Hurricane. There is a sense that the world has already ended there in some way, that the cataclysm is in the past and the remaining inhabitants are slowly coming to terms with it: Noon, daughter of a shrimper, tries to solve mysterious disappearances in the town with the help of the corrupt harbourmaster's daughter Covey, but also begins realising that she herself has been transforming into something not entirely human anymore ("a story about a monster learning to love herself") - and the story is very much about the question of what is monstrous, in a world where truly monstrous acts are being committed by people because they fear what they do not understand. 

I came to Liz Moore's fiction after starting to watch the adaptation of Long Bright River, starring Amanda Seyfried. The two novels I picked up are The God of the Woods and The Unseen World, and the range between them is truly amazing. The first one is the story of two disappearances in a manor and summer camp - one in the past, the other in 1975. The lost children are siblings, son and daughter to the rich family that employs most of the people in this part of the Adirondacks, and in revealing the details of the investigation and the people connected to it, Moore tells a story about class (specifically the relationship between the blue collar workers and the rich who depend on their labour, in spite of their claims of "self-reliance", literally the name they've chosen for their estate) and misogyny, focusing on women struggling to be heard and to have agency over their lives. 

The Unseen World is a marvel that reminded me of the best of Richard Powers' fiction: the story of a single father raising a daughter, Ada, by himself. Ada grows up surrounded by her father's colleague at a computer research institute in the 1980s - her father is heading a team that is building an early version of artificial intelligence called ELIXIR. It's an unconventional education that centres curiosity that prepares her poorly for transferring to a regular school later on, where she struggles to understand the societal rules of teenage cliques. When her father begins exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's, Ada realises that he has kept secrets from her, and she begins a journey to try and find out who he really is. I'm excited that both of these books have been picked up to be turned into television shows. 



Tuesday, 17 June 2025

Links: 17/06/25

Politics: 

I spent the last week reading Stefan Zweig's posthumously published autobiography The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, in German). It's a tragic book in the sense that the author writes about his deep affection for a world that no longer exist - the Habsburg Vienna of his early years - and from a position of indefinite exile in Brazil with no prospect of ever returning to his home. Zweig died in Petrópolis in 1942. What struck me about the book is how Zweig reckons, as a self-declared non-political artist who is driven by reverence for great masters of the arts, many of whom he name-drops in the book (and has long-standing friendships with), with the radical changes in the world after WW1. Zweig approaches this not as a politically engaged person or activist, but as a (culturally and socially - there are sequences in the 20s that find him horrified at the prospect of women cutting their hair short and men becoming more feminine, and a very bourgeois - he's only in his thirties at this point! - outrage at queerness) conservative, widely read and highly respective establishment artist who realises bit by bit what is happening and how dangerous it is becoming - for the most part perched in Salzburg (there isn't much reflection on Austria's homegrown Dollfuß/Schuschnigg authoritarianism that made the ground so fertile for the Nazi takeover) and watching what is occurring across the border in Bavaria. The two avenues we have now, in 2025, to diagnose the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, is comparisons with the past (not available to Zweig) and keeping track of the things that would have been unthinkable and out-of-the-ordinary but have now become normal (from Zweig's perspective: the deliberate cruelty of the new laws, the deliberate use of bureaucracy to terrorise people, his shunning by society). As much as I found parts of the book frustrating, especially his rose-coloured view of a past from the perspective of someone extremely privileged and not really considering how other classes or people in other parts of the empire may have experiences the same years, I've found it useful as a document for reference. 
The great In Bed With the Right podcast has been running a series of episodes that tracks the Nazi regime month-by-month through 1933 as those months are passing in 2025 with the same goal of focusing on how quickly the concept of "normal" radically changed and how it affected people. It's been in my mind while watching the videos and reading the reports about the protests against the escalating Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Los Angeles, which are targeting regular people who are going to work, daycare centres, or attending church services. The decision to go over the Governor of California's head to federalise the California National Guard (a federal judge's order to overturn this has been blocked by the US appeals court), which hasn't happened since Lyndon Johnson sent troops to protect civil rights protestors in Alabama, feels like a test case to see how far the judiciary has been undermined and how willing the country is to tolerate a militarisation of the streets (Trump also deployed active-duty Marines to LA). The disproportional response has highlighted the level of violence deployed by police against peaceful protestors and journalists
In Minnesota, a politically motivated gunman disguised as a police officer killed Democratic former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and attempted to assassinate another Democratic lawmaker, John Hoffman. 
 
 
Pop Culture: 
 
I've been re-watching all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over the first half of 2025, which has been my first full revisiting of the show since I originally watched it when it came out, and it still stands out as the most ambitious show to ever come out of the Star Trek universe. It's almost prophetic in its recasting of Starfleet and the Federation as a less idealistic construct than before (or since) - here, there's a secret organisation within that is willing to commit genocide against an opponent (it is almost prophetic as a show that ended before 9/11 happened but shows the length that a threatened institution will go to in the face of an enemy that can't be clearly identified), and so many episodes of the show focus on the shades of grey within a resistance movement against a brutal military occupation (and then there's episodes like Far Beyond the Stars, which stand out as some of the best television ever made). I've followed it up by catching up with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which goes the opposite direction: it's a love letter to the original show, the idea of scientific research and beauty (sometimes horror) of diversity in these new frontiers, telling mostly self-contained stories (that frequently feel like they are, or are based on, short stories), with so much love and sense of humour and an unapologetic moral compass (one episode is essentially dedicated to the idea of asylum - the grace of an organisation that can grant it and provide safety, and the moral imperative to do so when asked). The cast is amazing throughout, but I think there's something particularly magical in Ethan Peck taking up such a beloved character and making him his own. I didn't expect to love it as much as I do but it functions like a balm without feeling like it ignores the world that has created it. It's strange to have this duality of Andor's second and final season, which feels like the most relevant season of television for this particular moment, and Strange New Worlds, a hopeful portrait of a different future that seems so impossible to reach now. 

Sunday, 8 June 2025

Saturday, 31 May 2025

Reading List: May.

Non-Fiction: 
 
Kristen Kish: Accidentally on Purpose. 
Diana Preston: A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole.
Anthony Brandt: The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage.
Brian Murphy with Toula Vlahou: Adrift: A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Man Who Lived to Tell about It. 
Padraic X. Scanlan: Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine.
 
Fiction: 
 
Tanya Huff: Direct Descendant. 
Ling Ling Huang: Immaculate Conception.
Emily Tesh: The Incandescent.
 
Shows: 
 
Near or Far, Season One.
No Good Deed, Season One.
 
Films
 
Tolkien (2019, Dome Karukoski).
Crimson Tide (1995, Tony Scott). 
Casino (1995, Martin Scorsese).
The Friend (2024, Scott McGehee, David Siegel).
Speak No Evil (2024, James Watkins).
The Monkey (2025, Osgood Perkins).
Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town (2017, Christian Papierniak). 

Other: 

Thursday, 29 May 2025

The Handmaid's Tale - Table of Contents

Season One: 

Offred
Birth Day
Late
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
Faithful
A Woman's Place
The Other Side
Jezebels
The Bridge
Night

Season Two: 

June
Unwomen
Baggage
Other Women
Seeds
First Blood
After
Women's Work
Smart Power
The Last Ritual
Holly
Postpartum
The Word

Season Three: 

Night
Mary and Martha
Useful
Bless the Child
Unknown Caller
Household
Under His Eye
Unfit
Heroic
Liars
Sacrifice
Mayday

Season Four: 

Pigs
Nightshade
The Crossing
Milk
Chicago
Vows
Home
Testimony
Progress

Season Five: 

 
Season Six: 
 

The Handmaid’s Tale - We are both alive to see this. Together.

The Handmaid's Tale: 6x10 The Handmaid's Tale.
 

June: Boston is free. The Gilead occupation is over. We won. Here at least. Boston is America again. Praise fucking be. 

We have lived through six seasons of violence and brutality against women, witnessed the cruel deaths of so many of them, seen characters escape only to be returned to even worse situations. The Handmaid’s Tale, which is both a beginning and an end at the same time, makes the deliberate decision to spend an entire episode on the hope of a new start, never leaving the bounds of recaptured American territory, deliberately leaving the space and time for reflection, breathing, regathering. It’s not the end of the fight – Mayday and the US forces are intent to fight Gilead state-by-state, a process that sounds like it could take a long time, and Gilead is reorganising now that the Boston High Commanders are all dead, promoting people from Western states (which means that Hannah's family will be moving from far away Colorado to much closer Washington D.C.) to take over leadership. All of this is for the future though, not for The Handmaid’s Tale, which has now ended with the beginning of the storytelling of what happened. This has always been June’s story, but now it will be June’s story as told by June, left for future generations to read – as her mother says, for the people who are still incessantly looking for their lost loved ones and need hope, and as Luke says, as tribute to those who loved her along the way and were lost in the struggle. Margaret Atwood transported June’s manuscript so far into the future that it was read by archaeologists who had to piece together the to them frequently culturally ineligible pieces to make sense of the past, but June’s story here is about the close future, where a warning about what happened in Gilead is salient and relevant, where a new future must be built with the full awareness of what exactly happened to allow the past to occur. It’s fitting because that is precisely the function that this show has fulfilled over the last few years, as the distance between what the show depicts and what reality is becoming has narrowed. 

What I love about this finale, and maybe didn’t expect because The Handmaid’s Tale has been so incessantly brutal, is that the entirety of it is about the women who surround June. Serena’s whole arc of trying to change Gilead from the inside, her incomplete journey to realising how wrong Gilead was from conception, has now ended for good. She is a refugee now, stateless, as disempowered as she ever has been. Before she goes on a bus to a UN refugee camp with Noah, she talks to June. She gives her the opportunity to grieve Nick, which June refuses (“He led a violent and dishonest life”), but Serena reminds her that if he had the opportunity, he would have chosen her and Holly. June tells Serena that she it is enough to be Noah’s mother, that she should focus on that, be that, instead of trying to reach for more, and these words land with her once she is alone with Noah on the cot in the camp – that this can maybe be enough for her. Serena also finally fully takes responsibility for what she has done to June without attempting to shift the blame or argue that her own suffering has cancelled out what she has done, and it is delivered with enough genuine intention that June, for the first time, accepts it and forgives Serena – and maybe that forgiveness ultimately means more to Serena than the power she has been trying to attain. In the end, Serena is left with a bed, chair and table – and maybe that is enough to sustain her and Noah, in its eerie echo of how June begins her own story, with Offred in her chamber that contains the same things, just enough to forge a new path to freedom. 

June goes home to her old neighbourhood, looking into the storefront of what used to be an ice cream parlour, the same one she bonded with Emily over all those years ago when they first met. And then the most impossible thing happens – Emily is right there, another survivor, somehow back at the end of the beginning. June takes something away from all of her interactions in the episode, but among them, this one is more magical than even Janine’s survival and return is. Emily, who went back to Gilead, should have died, but here she is, telling her own story of survival in a household as a Martha, with a Commander who became a friend, with a tentative sustained connection to her wife and child and the prospect of rebuilding those bonds. She says that her family was the reason for why she was fighting, and the same is true for June, with Hannah still somewhere in Gilead. Emily went back because she found it impossible to return to a regular life in Canada, even when she reunited with her family, and later in the episode, when June makes up her mind to return to the fight not just for Hannah but for all the other children, there are echoes of Emily’s resolute decision in her. As long as Gilead continues to exist, they won’t be safe wherever they are. Gilead isn’t just a regime, a state, it’s an ideology that spreads like the plague (remember what happened in Canada), and can therefore reach wherever it infects the minds of others. June and Emily’s reunion is so impossible that, as Emily says, they might as well adjust their concept of the impossible and believe in what can happen in the future. As they walk along, Guardians are strung up on the walls that used to hold the victims of Gilead. 

At the halfway point of the episode, June dreams of a present that is unlike the past before Gilead or Gilead itself: it’s a version of reality where Gilead never happened, where Janine never lost an eye, where all those friends she made along the way didn’t die horrible deaths. They are singing along to Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide, they are unburdened by the knowledge of what horrors Gilead has wrought. It’s an unreachable dream, but in its essence, it doesn’t deny what happened: it just paints a picture of what life should have been, what each of these women was robbed of. 


If I were more cynical, I would refute the impossible rescue of Janine, but instead it feels as if some kind of account is being righted: nobody has suffered more. If Janine did not end up free at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, hope would be lost. Someone wakes up June, who has fallen asleep exhausted on the streets, to take her to the new border with Gilead, where Eyes drag a body forward on the path, and then Naomi and Lydia step into the light. They have returned Janine, and even more incredibly, Charlotte. We won’t know what strings Lydia pulled, who was a minute away from being hanged, to deliver on her own promise to save her girl, but here she is, free and united with her daughter. June thanks Lydia, who returns to Gilead to continue the fight on the inside and on The Testaments: “Blessed is the woman who does not walk in stride with the wicked.” It has taken a long time for Lydia to realise that Gilead is brutalising these women, that she has sold herself to a wicked regime by doing its bidding, and it feels impossible to forgive her for her past actions, but there is value to changing your mind at the risk of your own life. 

Finally, after Luke has managed to restore power and opened Logan airport, Holly returns with baby Holly to reunite with her daughter. June, at this point, has already made up her mind. She has to return, “because Gilead doesn’t need to be beaten, it needs to be broken”. She is doing it to get Hannah back, but also for the children and grandchildren who won’t be safe until Gilead is gone. She has come to this decision completely independently of Luke, and this whole episode makes it clear that their paths have finally diverged, even if they may come back together in the future. Luke has found his place: he will continue his fight with Mayday, has found meaning in using his skills for the resistance, even if that means that June is walking a different path from him. They don’t even fight about this, both of them have made up their mind. Both Holly and Luke tell June to write her book as a record, to create something that can be passed on into the future. She returns to the burned out shell of the Waterford residence, where everything began, to the chamber she found an impossible escape from, to begin narrating her story. 

Random notes: 

I loved the episode, I thought it was a graceful an end as the show could have delivered, and yet I ask: what about Moira? It’s never been more glaringly obvious that this show stopped having ideas about what to do with her character a long time ago and then didn’t even make an effort in this final episode. By all rights, it should have been June and Moira at the end of all of this, especially with the theme of the episode being all of the women that June connected with. Justice for Moira! 

Serena: Congratulations on your victory. 
June: None of it would have happened without you. 
Serena: Yes. I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. 

Serena, the unnamed architect of Gilead, ended up being the one to deliver the greatest blow to the regime, helping to kill its elite which included her husband. She doesn’t know yet what the consequences will be, especially for herself, but it’s the least self-interested thing she has done, and I think it’s this decision that ultimately made it possible for June to forgive her. It’s also a lovely coda that June picks out a Boston Red Sox onesie for Noah that saves Serena in her new, severely resource-depleted life: June has been involved in every step of Noah’s life, has been more instrumental in his life and survival than anyone else. 

We love a good knitted hat!

I actually cheered when I realised that Alexis Bledel agreed to return for the final episode to give Emily a last chance to shine: I still think this would have been a better final season if she had remained on the show. 

There’s some great acting in this episode, but the very bittersweet moment of June seeing Janine united with Charlotte, while haunted with memories of Hannah, is a stand-out. She is so happy for her, and yet she is grieving that her own reunion is still far out of reach. 

I very recently realised that Mabel Li is going to be in The Testaments (maybe you can’t make The Handmaid’s Tale without Australian actors), so there’s a good chance that I’ll start writing about the show once it airs next year. 

What this episode reminded me of, in a weird way, is the series finale of the great The Expanse: where by all rights not everyone should have made it through alive, based on what had happened on the show previously and the books it was based on, and yet in the end, survival triumphed. It feels like such an impossibly positive ending for a show that was frequently almost unbearably bleak, and yet I'm glad that it happened this way, at this moment in time, where everything seems to be getting darker.