Not to overwhelm with lists, but I’m not on an essay-writing clock right now and it’s the best way I can keep passing on things I love! Three recommendations:
- Jessica DeFino’s The Unpublishable would 1000% have made my list of model Substacks had I been lucky enough to discover it before writing that post. Something that’s become super important to me as I navigate my own Substack, is that writing about genre is often about masculinity. Fantasy and action and superheroes and horror and westerns often privelege a male point of view. So I’ve been really making an effort to circulate good feminism into my reading. The Unpublishable is about consumer beauty culture, and one of the major engines of beauty marketing is that upholding beauty standards is (sold as) fun!
- A legendary essay which the latest edition of The Unpublishable reminded me of: Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny. I need to give it a good reread, and also probably thumb through Blood Knife in general, so consider this me putting a pin in it.
- Not a recommendation per say, but I’m thinkin a lot about Ian McKellan on the set of The Hobbit. In case you didn’t know, he had what lots of publicaitons packaged as a “breakdown” on the almost completely greenscreened set. He’s been acting since 1958. Do you think anyone with a front seat to the increasing demand of publishers and the decreasing purchase of actors (and crew) would have responded any differently? Can we at least agree that using a greenscreen to film the interior of a house is a little much?