Junk Journal Week 17

After I watched Ripley on Netflix last week I became interested in the film noir festival now on the Criterion Channel. I watched and enjoyed five pictures in the series.

Peacemaker is a miniseries on Max about a fairly minor character from the picture Suicide Squad. Objectively speaking, he is not a pleasant person, but I did find the show entertaining.

Of the reading goals I set for myself for 2024, reading one short story collection per week has been my most consistent accomplishment. This past week I read a collection from Amy Hempel. James Wood said the following about her in the New Yorker:

Hempel is an experimental writer, in the way that Grace Paley was an experimental writer. Like Paley, who has clearly been an influence, she is easy to read and sometimes harder to comprehend. Her sentences are not complex, but the speed of their connection to one another is a little breathtaking. You need to slow down in order to go as quickly as Hempel is travelling. Like Paley, she is a natural storyteller who is also very interested in the artifice of storytelling—in the ways that stories deform or hide the truth, in what can and can’t be disclosed on the page. She is a self-reflexive writer who, miraculously, doesn’t seem self-conscious.

O’Brien’s Pete Rose biography managed to articulate both everything I adored about the baseball player when I was a kid as well as his complete lack of moral virtue that I find abhorrent as an adult.

What have you been reading or watching? Please share in the comments!