Recovery

I watched a lot of things!

I’m now on the other side of my full recovery window. And, in three days, I’ll be under anesthesia again for another, somewhat urgent and entirely unrelated surgery.

I feel mostly confident that this procedure, which is to remove a lump in my breast that has been growing rapidly for the past two months, is going to go just fine, with a benign result on the other side of it. The other thing I’m feeling strongly is embarrassed that my body is being so much right now, that I’m once again in a position of need.

As a distraction, here’s a list of some of the things I watched while I was healing from my last surgery. 💛

Tilda Swinton in Orlando

• Masters of the Air: I’m game for just about anything set in the WW2 era (an interest I inherited from my grandpa — his took the form of an antique gun collection and mine is more media-based), a lot of it is bad, but this is not. Especially interesting for anyone who loved Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins!

• Fool Me Once: I kept a list of what I read and watched during my recovery time, and when I saw this on my list, I could not remember a single thing about it.

• The New Look: While watching this, I kept thinking of a French series that followed a broad cast of characters through their village’s experience of being occupied by the Germans during WW2. That show was 7 seasons long and landed in the uncomfortable truth that even people who are on the “right side” of resistance can get it very, very wrong.
  

  

  This photo of Meryl Streep in The Hours led to a deep dive on the Bloomsbury Group

• The Hours: A rewatch, mostly because the last time I saw it was in high school, before I’d even read Virginia Woolf, and also because Pinterest recently fed me Meryl Streep’s character as my “celebrity vibe” and I wanted a refresher.

• Life in Squares: The Hours led me to rewatch this mini-series about Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The first time I watched it, I was furious (in a tellingly deep part of myself) at the way Bell gave Grant so much of herself and got so little in return. That subjugation of her needs and desires for crumbs still pissed me off during the rewatch. I found this book on ebay so I could spend more time in the rooms that the Bloomsbury Group made lovely — especially at Charleston House.

• Orlando: I then rewatched Orlando, which I wrote about in one of my first papers at grad school, and the feedback I got from Richard Howard on this paper still makes me proud: This is a much more originally written response than any other I have received this term, and properly reasoned as well. My thanks for many reasons.

  

  Naomi Watts in The Feud

• The Feud: I started this, but am still only about 4 episodes in. Mostly it just made me want to read more Capote, and also do Google deep dives on Babe Paley and C.Z. Guest.

• Anatomy of a Fall: Was brilliant and I saw much of myself in it: the artistic shortcomings rooted in fear, the challenge of being partnered with someone more prolific than you, the resentment that can build when you feel so burdened by the mundanities of day-to-day life with children that you have no energy to give to your art.

• The Society of Snow: Two things — one, I couldn’t believe this movie just kept going, crisis after crisis, it did not seem like more disaster could be possible. Two, watching felt a lot like watching North Face, which I first saw about ten years ago and remember worrying for my husband and my sons and any young man who so values testing their limits to such extremes.

• Maestro: It took me a few separate watch sessions to finish this. I wanted to feel more about it — Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts were a major access point to composers like Shostakovich for me in my early 20s — but mostly I felt meh and annoyed at yet another woman putting her needs second to those of a man.

• Past Lives: Wept at the end of it, at the loss of possibility and complete closure on a life that might have been — a theme that has been hitting me hard this past year.

• Beyond the Visible: I gave Sebastian a subscription to The Criterion Channel for Christmas with this idea that we’d watch a lot of arty films together during the time I was recovering from surgery, but that didn’t really happen. This documentary about Hilma af Klint is the only thing I’ve watched on the channel and I (again 😊) felt frustrated with a man, in this case Rudolf Steiner, who created the education model my children have been in their whole lives. He’s a man who is often revered as a sort of renaissance saint, but who was deeply human and flawed — in more ways than this, in which he dismissed and discouraged Hilma from showing her work publicly.

• All of Us Strangers: Another that made me weep (this time in a movie theater). I wasn’t entirely sure what was real or true at the end of it, but it was a beautiful embodiment of the concept of reparenting our inner child to heal and move past childhood wounds.

• Carrington: More Bloomsbury, this time about players I wasn’t familiar with: Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey. Another on the theme of women who love men who cannot give them what they want in return (but benefit greatly from their devotion).

• One Day: Went deep on this one, because I’ve been hearing for years that it’s

  Pandora Sykes
  favorite. Read the novel, watched the 2010 film and the recent Netflix series. I preferred the Netflix series to the film (felt truer to the scope of the book), but really liked Anne Hathaway’s Emma, which I accept is an unpopular opinion.

• The Heart of Me: I was looking for more Bloomsbury and this was recommended somewhere on the internet. It was not good, nor did it have anything to do with the Bloomsbury group besides being set in the same era. Great cast, stupidly put together film.

Here’s looking forward to the sunny, energizing days ahead, when the world outdoors is bigger than the world on the screen.

Xx Chelsea