may's monthly musings

what I've been reading, watching, and listening to this month

Welcome to this month’s musings, where I share mini-essays, reading lists, what’s in my bookshop cart, and other ramblings.

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What I’ve been reading:

On Substack

• Jade’s essay about crafting your very own MFA degree

• Kate’s essay about what makes a classic

• Petya’s essay about mood readers vs. readers who plan

• Meredith’s essay about building your own internal safety spaces

Online

• This wonderful profile of Catherine O’Hara from 2019

• How Daniel Radcliffe outgrew Harry Potter from The Atlantic

• This fantastic essay about E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman

• This recipe for chocolate chipless cookies, which I never ever want to lose

In print

• This smart review of Taylor Swift’s latest album in the New Yorker

• The fantastic new profile of Miranda July in the New Yorker

• And The Age of Innocence, obviously

On my nightstand

• The Memory Police

• Cleopatra and Frankenstein

What I’ve been watching:

• That final James Bond movie with Daniel Craig (I cried like a damn baby)

• American Fiction - totally brilliant with lots of lovely surprises and my only sadness was that Tracee Ellis Ross didn’t get more screen time because her character was a giant heartbeat

• The Holdovers - absolutely adored it. It felt like a hug.

• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - I adore Pedro Pascal and Nic Cage, so I obviously loved this movie even though it was completely ridiculous.

• Finished: Baby Reindeer. So haunting. So infuriating.

• Rewatching: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel because my husband is finally into it and we finally made it through the devastating season 3 finale and are humming along in season 4.

What I’m listening to:

• Billie Eilish’s new album Hit Me Hard And Soft on repeat

  • I like this Guardian review, which describes Billie as “Linda Del Rey, but for green-haired feminist insomniacs.” Lol. Music critic Kitty Empire argues that many of these new songs end too early, and I felt similarly on my first listen: I wanted more more more, especially of “L’amour De Ma Vie.” But by the time my first 43 minute listen through was complete, I really appreciated the careful editing of the album and I think the kind of unexpected places that each song ends at works beautifully

• A very old and well-loved Sinatra record I found in a thrift store a couple weeks ago — there’s a beautiful version of Dream on it that I haven’t ever heard before

• “The Human Jazz,” a record and artist I know absolutely nothing about and bought purely on the impulse that the cover was awesome and the shop I got it at had an espresso bar and a DJ spinning jazz on a Sunday morning and it was a vibe

I have just one mini essay this week, and it’s a build on something I wrote about on Instagram over a year ago — about an artistic phenomenon called The Droste Effect.

ONE

The Droste Effect is the name for layers of meaning or representation — like a story that appears within another story, or an image that appears within image. I first wrote about it here on Substack in my essay on the 1987 Cher film, Moonstruck.

The original image that inspired the name: the Droste effect. Notice the packaging within the packaging. This packet of cocoa is illustrated on itself.

Broadly, the term refers to nested dolls of meaning; it’s mathematically infinite, which makes it mentally boggling and alluring and impossibly big. The Droste Effect gives us containers within containers; containers that are, in fact, their own containers. Dizzying, infinite, and simultaneously so limited; cascading with meaning that builds and yet locked in place.

It is also known by the name mise en abyme or “into the abyss.”

The play that takes place in the play, Hamlet, is an example of this “abyss” of The Droste Effect. The opera that all of New York observes together at the opening of The Age of Innocence is another: a scene within a scene within a scene (a scene in a novel, of a scene in an opera house, where there’s a scene on stage at the opera taking place).

And that brilliant Velazquez painting, as Michel Foucault reminds us in The Order of Things, is exemplary of the mise en abyme, as it features the painter himself mirrored on the left-hand side of the image, where he is presumably painting what we’re looking at (or is he painting us?). (And who’s in the mirror behind him? Or is that a portrait?) (And who’s in the doorway?)

The Droste Effect is an optical illusion that never corrects itself.

Las Meninas

I’ve spent a lot of time, over the last few years, thinking about how much I seek books and stories that break perspectives and patterns. That tease their own limitations. That lay bare the fallacies of our best fantasies. That place their narrator within the narrative, as a character and a teller, as within and somehow beyond, the framework of the story.

(I suppose part of me takes solace in the familiar, while simultaneously seeking whatever might unravel it. A kindred spirit I know calls this tendency in himself a brand of rebellion, a kind of willful deconstruction, which can often feel more like destruction.)

My hope is that I never get so entrenched in a singular way of thinking or feeling or believing that I sink down into a place without horizons; I want always to avoid those seductive places that shrink and steal perspective. A dazzling effect, a rabbit hole for ideas, can be so alluring. But it can also become a trench that, like a treadmill, offers the illusion of gained distance when you’re really running in place.

I want always to keep the windows open.

I wrote about some of my favorite frame-breaking works of art a while back — two interrupted girls, one from a book and one from the Vermeer painting, above. To be honest, it’s a connection I’ve been thinking about since my first year of college, when I read Girl, Interrupted and saw this Vermeer painting — because she writes about it at the end of her memoir-novel — for the first time.

(As a paid subscriber, you can access this archival piece here:)

girls interrupted & foucauldian frameworks

I think I keep coming back to these meta perspectives because they have more to teach me. Returning to them, time after time, is not returning to one place, or to the same place. It is not the same as rewatching the same episode of Gilmore Girls as a comfort on a Thursday night.

It is, rather, a way of re-entering the well-worn paths of my intellectual curiosities, and finding them made new by whatever in me has changed since our last meeting. Finding new footprint trails wandering off the well-worn track, seeing new perspectives I hadn’t noticed my first or second time there.

I think that all of this has something to do with why Foucault starts his book The Order of Things—a history of knowledge making, of how cultural knowledge is created—with an analysis of the dizzying mise en abyme in that Velasquez painting. He knows that one of the best ways to understand something is to look at it ‘til your eyes cross. Until its meaning appears in such a way, gives itself up, so that you can finally see it as the trench itself. So you can finally, for a millisecond, glimpse whatever might unmake it. Or unmake you.

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That’s all for this week

Except for a little confession: I can’t stop buying books, ever, but this month I can’t seem to go a few days without picking up something new. I made a Reel over on Instagram to share everything I’ve treated myself to (so far) this month. You can check it out here:

modernist_scholar

A post shared by @modernist_scholar

‘Til next time, happy reading!