A few things of note

NYT publishings! Online seminar on 11/2! MFA faculty! New book deal!

Hello friends!

I am making a little pit stop in your inbox with a few announcements and things that might be of interest to you, and also some well wishes. Mostly I hope you are doing okay. Everything feels uphill, and I hope you’re doing what you can with what you have, and that you are finding comfort and beauty in the midst of it all.

So, some stuff:

• It has been a very busy summer and fall at work, and I have been thinking about many things and writing about them, too. Here is a sampling: I got in front of the camera to talk about why “Jaws” would never get greenlit today. I wrote about That Salary Figure in “Materialists,” the context collapse of 21st century movies, how to watch a Hitchcock movie and “The Rehearsal,” the best show on TV. I reviewed wild movies about the moment (“Superman” and “Eddington”) and documentaries about international politics that play like too-close-to-the-bone horror films (“Apocalypse in the Tropics” and “My Undesirable Friends”). I reviewed some terrible movies. I wrote about cinema heroes like Robert Redford and Diane Keaton. I snuck over to the Book Review to review Jen Hatmaker’s new memoir. And I went to Las Vegas for the premiere of “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere, which was really weird.

• I wrote a whole lot more than that, and you can find it all here. (Also we send out a movies newsletter, which is a good way to get stuff in your inbox.)

• Alert! On Sunday, November 2, at 8pm EST, I’ll be doing a two-hour online seminar with Five Things I’ve Learned about what makes a review great. This is a slimmed-down version of the longer eight-week workshop I sometimes teach with the Center for Fiction (which in turn is a slimmed-down version of the senior-level semester-long criticism capstone I used to teach). If you register, you can attend live and/or have access to the playback; please do!

• Some time this summer, I announced that I’ll be joining the faculty of the newly reconstituted low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Whitworth University for the next year, as the first-year creative nonfiction mentor. This used to be the Seattle Pacific University program, but they dropped it for … honestly I have no idea why, but in any case, I graduated from this program in 2013, so I can vouch. Low-residency means you have five residencies (out in eastern Washington, at least for now) of roughly a week over two years, and the rest of the work is done in correspondence from your home with your mentors. It is, I can testify, very doable in “real life.” The application deadline for the first cohort is November 1 (to begin in the late January residency), so get on that.

• I also announced another book deal! I’m thrilled to be back with Liveright for my next book, which is currently titled “Afterglow: Undone by Beauty in an Anti-Wonder World.” My overt pitch is basically that technocrats want to make us into little predictable atomized profit units and we resist by engaging with big scary communal art. In my head I am just expanding on a bit of Wendell Berry’s poetry that has not stopped running through my head for the past few years: “As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind, / lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go.” It’s going to be fun.

• And of course, if you haven’t checked it out, don’t forget that I wrote a book about Joan Didion that is actually about Hollywood and American political culture! People keep emailing me to tell me that they like it. You can buy it and read it on paper, or as an ebook, or you can listen to the audiobook, which I narrated. They’re all at the retailer of your choice. (But please shop independent, or go to the library!)

Holler if you have a question!