Rasher Report #6: Now with a Soundtrack!
Every March and September, I start a new Spotify playlist to collect what I'm currently listening to. By the end of February, I have a solid set of songs to enjoy while I'm working. As much as I always think these playlists are eclectic in a way that only I could love, my friends seem to get a kick out of listening to them. Here's Fall 2022, which features my favorites from September 2022 through this week.
How to Read Like a Middle School Kid (Again)
Like a lot of grown-up gifted kids, I had to relearn how to read. It's a frequent complaint on social media: adults remember when they breezed through a dozen books a week but now struggle to finish a few in a year. The reasons for the change aren't mysterious. As precocious kids, our only job was school, and we were often so good at school that we could get our assigned work out of the way quickly and disappear back into a book. Now, most of us have jobs that require a full day's mental energy and attention, not to mention the after-hours labor of chores, errands, and (in many cases, although not mine) childcare. Most of us could read with a fluency way above grade level but weren't emotionally or intellectually ready for adult books, so we read a lot of age-appropriate books that didn't challenge us. At least for those of us born in the 20th century, technology offered far fewer alluring alternatives. Even in a household with cable TV and an America Online subscription, I had nothing near the distractions offered by my current smartphone full of games and podcasts, the myriad of streaming services and video apps I can access on five devices, or the vast trove of everything from detailed Wikipedia articles on science to niche pornography that the 2023 internet provides. All this stuff, and I have the hubris to think I might read a book?
But I love books. I love them for what's inside them, each a little world to immerse myself inside. I also love the physical experience of reading printed words and turning pages. This is not a slight against people who prefer audiobooks or e-books - one of the great things about 2023 is that there are enough ways to read a book to satisfy almost anyone - but I prefer doing my reading the old-fashioned way. Part of that is aesthetic, but there's an accessibility element as well; my ADHD comes packaged with some auditory processing difficulties that make audiobooks a challenge to focus on, and reading on a screen is rough on my eyes, especially since I have a job that involves a lot of screen staring. It's also easier for me to flip back through a physical book if my mind wanders and to consult notes, glossaries, and maps in books that have them. (Since I'm an avid reader of well-researched nonfiction, older literature, and epic fantasy, I read a lot of books that do.) Plus, they look pretty lined up on my shelves after I finish them.
During graduate school, I started obsessively organizing my books, which made it easier to do things like create course syllabi for teaching. I'd been working in the university library, where I mastered the Library of Congress catalog system; in a few bursts of hyperfocus, I sorted my personal library according to the LOC. About a year after that, realizing that my stack of unread books had grown to fill most of an Ikea bookshelf, I alphabetized them all by title, a deranged but effective strategy that I had first used to plan my reading for my Ph.D. exams. Well over a decade later, I still use these systems for my book collection, which has not grown smaller, thanks to an overly optimistic book buying hobby and an extreme reluctance to sell or give away books.
Finishing books is harder than buying them, and it's gotten harder over the years. In addition to increased adult responsibility, I have a pesky executive function disorder and a Ph.D. in English literature. After I finished graduate school, I found it especially hard to focus on reading. At first, I thought it was because I was stressed out, overwhelmed by a job I was unhappy in and by a series of major upheavals in my personal life. I read almost nothing for pleasure except for comic books for those few years. Short, easy, full of action and color, one dopamine hit after another.
The year of my career transition was dismal, but one of its brightest spots was realizing that now, I could read whatever I wanted, forever. No more course prep, no more papers to grade, no more digging through databases in search of a scan of the one 16th-century poem that would prove my point. I could finally read all the unread books I'd been amassing, since buying books and reading books are two related but distinct hobbies. But I couldn't remember where or how to start.
My unread books were still queued alphabetically, so I knew which book to read next. Nonetheless, it was too easy to give up on books that were difficult or just not what I was in the mood for. It's hard to get the dopamine flowing for an enjoyable but slow 800-page doorstop of a novel. I ended up abandoning a lot of books in the middle, wandering toward comics or the internet, feeling too guilty to start the next thing on the shelf. I liked these books and I wanted to finish them, but the ADHD kept beating my resolve.
Like a lot of people, I had my epiphanies during the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I realized that, as far back as I could remember, I had always been reading multiple books at once. As a child, I had the books I read for pleasure and the ones I was assigned for school; sometimes, I'd be reading one book at home and keep another stashed in my desk for when I finished my math assignments with 15 minutes to spare. In high school, in addition to challenging Honors English homework and whatever I was reading at home, I spent many afternoons reading the gayest things I could find in the school library for the 45 minutes between the end of the final class period and the departure of my school bus. College brought multiple literature courses at once, not to mention that I had the kind of friend groups where we shoved books in each other's hands with a "Read this now, it'll change your life." And then there was grad school, where the State of Connecticut literally paid me to consume hundreds of pages a day, not only of literature and criticism, but of student papers for the writing courses I was teaching.
For my entire life, all my reading had been multitasking. No wonder I couldn't keep myself focused on one book at a time now.
It was time to create a system - a way to artificially force myself to multitask. I tested a few different approaches and wound up with a rotation of 3 books at a time: one work of fiction published before I was born, one published after I was born, and one work of nonfiction from any time period. I divide each book into digestible chunks: about 100 pages for newer fiction, about 50 for older fiction, somewhere in between for nonfiction. When I finish each chunk, I rotate books. When I finish a book, I grab the next one from the same category and move it from the Shelf of the Eternally Unread to the pile on my nightstand.
Sometimes, there's a fourth book in the rotation, which I mentally refer to as a "special project." For much of last year, that special project was barreling through the entirety of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries. Now, I'm reading the collected Grant Morrison run of Doom Patrol. Special projects rotate with the others, which means I can prioritize them without abandoning all the other books I'm reading.
For a while, I just let the system work and didn't worry about why it was working, beyond the fact that I was recreating the way I'd learned to read as a student. The more I think about it now, though, the more my solution is tied to my ADHD. Every time I finish a 50- to 100-page chunk of a book, I get a dopamine hit of accomplishment, which soothes my novelty-seeking brain. It also motivates me to start the next section of the next book in my rotation, which feels new again because I got to set it aside for a minute. I'm playing a game with my wonky executive function, and most of the time, I'm winning. I'm reading more books, enjoying them more, and actually finishing almost all of them. More and more, books feel like a source of comfort and escape again, like they did when I was a kid. I love having that feeling back.
The Great Batman Bake-Off
My lovely wife and I went through a Batman revival phase that culminated in choosing our favorite screen adaptations of each Batman character. Ami's opinions and words are her own, although she has allowed me to proofread.
The Batmobile
The Contenders: There is a whole website dedicated to the evolution of Bruce Wayne’s best friend, his car. It’s a gadget-laden black roadster in the ‘60s Batman TV series, a cool bat-finned black sedan on Filmation’s Batman/Superman Adventure Hour, and a blue party convertible on Superfriends. The Tim Burton films transform it into a low-slung ‘80s sports car, and The Animated Series takes the concept further, flattening it into a stylized spaceship-like vehicle with slatted grills and a jet engine. The Joel Schumacher movies turn it into an overdesigned, rounded racecar, and early aughts animated versions like The Batman react to that excess, making the car look souped-up but more realistic. In the Dark Knight trilogy and the Lego Batman movies, it looks like something out of Mad Max, and in the DC Extended Universe, it’s a straight-up tank.
Sarah: So many of these Batmobiles were cool at the time, but now they look dated at best, and like concept art for a Six Flags roller coaster at worst. I wasn’t expecting to hate most Batmobiles this much. The ‘60s roadster is iconic, and I still pretend my Mazda is the Burton Batmobile when I’m zooming down Lower Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. But the Batmobile from the animated The Batman looks like a well-engineered automobile as well as a souped-up gadget machine, and it’s the Batmobile I’d be most willing to try and parallel park.
Ami: Batmobiles tend to fall into one of three categories. They’re either Awesome Sportscar, Cartoony Fantasy Car… or tank. There are no tanks that are anywhere close to being in my consideration. One thing that Batman shouldn’t be doing is destroying a big chunk of housing while he’s running from the police. I’m looking at you, Batman Begins. That leaves my favorite Awesome Sportscar: The 1962 Adam West Batmobile, and my favorite Fantasy Car, the Batmobile from the first Tim Burton movie. As much as I love West’s Batmobile, for being fun, cool, and downright practical, I have to give it to the First Time Burton Batmobile. It was crazy, it was stylish, and it was packed to the teeth with fun gadgets and surprises. Whenever I think of the Batmobile, that’s the version that always pops first into my brain.
Mr. Freeze/Victor Fries
The Contenders: Mr. Freeze was portrayed by no fewer than three great character actors on the ‘60s Batman: George Sanders, Otto Preminger, and Eli Wallach. He appeared frequently throughout the DC Animated Universe, almost always voiced by Michael Ansara. He also showed up in most other animated series, either as a recurring character or a notable one-off: The Batman (Clancy Brown), The Brave and the Bold (John DiMaggio), Young Justice (Keith Szarabajka), Justice League Action (Peter Stormare), Batman Unlimited: Mechs vs. Mutants (Oded Fehr), and Harley Quinn (Alfred Molina). He’s a recurring character on Gotham, played by Nathan Darrow. In Batman & Robin, he’s played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, although some of us enjoy imagining the universe where Patrick Stewart got the role instead.
Sarah: For the most part, there are two ways to play Mr. Freeze: as a campy wannabe Bond villain with a comedy German/Austrian accent, or as a tragic figure driven to crime to find a cure for his cryogenically frozen, terminally ill wife. In the former category, Preminger and Wallach set an unmatched standard for “And then, Batman, you will DIE” antics, with Wallach taking the shtick one step farther toward perfection. In the Serious Backstory division, Ansara and Molina are the strongest contenders, and the Batverse’s best evidence that Gotham’s crime problem could be solved with a hefty donation to medical research and higher education from the Wayne Foundation. Since I can’t decide between Wallach and Molina, I’m going to solve my impasse with a left-field choice: Clancy Brown, the only performer to make Freeze a genuinely terrifying villain, while incorporating the best elements of both of the standard approaches.
Ami: I’m going to give this to Michael Ansara. Not only did the Batman the Animated Series version of this character come up with the modern origin for Victor, which defined him from that point onward, his voice is just so... dang… cool.
Some More of My Favorite Movies
At the height of pandemic boredom in late 2020, I made a list of my 124 favorite movies and started watching them all in alphabetical order. Here are my reflections on two more films from that list.
The Cutting Edge is the greatest figure skating movie of all time, but that's damning it with faint praise. It's not a brilliant work of art, but nobody asked it to be. Visually and sonically, you can tell it's celebrated its 30th birthday, and Moira Kelly's overacting can be heard from space. But in less superficial ways, it's improved with age. The ex-coach that seemed smarmy in 1992 now calls to mind patterns of abusive coaching; the bar scene where Doug admits to his hometown friends that he's become a figure skater simmers with the threat of homophobic violence. It's Much Ado About Nothing on ice, and it's the feisty sparring between the two leads that makes you want them to both fall in love and win the gold medal.
Dead Poets Society made me want to be an English teacher when I was 10, and now it makes me almost miss being an English teacher. The actors playing the students were actual teenagers at the time, which gives this an air of realism; it also makes for a few rough performances, although Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke are both extraordinary. Robin Williams is the runaway hero of this, of course, with a restraint and room for silence that transformed his career. It's an overwhelmingly white, male movie, and it feels like it keeps shouting "no homo." There's also a stalkery "romantic" subplot that can be fast-forwarded through. The most remarkable thing, perhaps, is that it holds up as a film about education: most of Keating's pedagogical approaches resemble research-supported best practices. It even gets the Shakespeare right.
And Another Thing
Song of the Week: For a variety of reasons, The Kinks' classic "Waterloo Sunset" has been running through my head all week.
I don't have anything novel to add to the conversation about how The New York Times is fixating on transgender children to the point where it's making things worse for all of us, so instead I will direct you to this excellent Popula article that lays out the problem.
And a cat photo!
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