giornata, 1/30/25
Giornata is my weekly media diary, coming out Thursdays, covering whatever I read, watched or listened to in the last week!
The Bob Newhart Show
Inspired by Love Story, I wanted to see more bourgeois, pedestrian 1970s styling, so I’ve started watching The Bob Newhart Show. I’ve surely seen a handful of episodes before since I was a big TV Land watcher as a child. I do love Bob Newhart’s stand up routines and his frequent appearances on The Dean Martin Show.
Newhart, as figure, works in the reactionary thread I saw in the “neutral” and hegemonic politics I saw calcified in Love Story, responding to 1960s activism. He’s all midwestern stammer and charm. He doesn’t curse, he wears a suit.
Mostly I’m obsessed with Suzanne Pleshette as Emily Hartley, Bob’s wife. Her little pixie cut, how horny she is for her round-faced, balding husband, and all her Gunne Sax style maxi dresses. But in one episode, Emily Hartley, who is a teacher, but kind of vaguely so far—I’ve seen her in one classroom, but her job appears to be part time—advocates for sex education in the fifth grade classrooms. What struck me about this was how blasé the show was about this side quest. It wasn’t even the theme of the episode! Bob has just gotten himself into a funk, so he takes himself to a hotel for a long weekend. Emily’s advocacy is just “what she gets up to!” And the show, based on the beats of the laugh track, believes Emily is in the right, compared to the conservative teacher who doesn’t want any educational materials shared with the children.
I see it all the time in romance discourse (particularly in and about historical set books) that we assume that the moment we are in is more progressive about sex than any other past moment. I hope most people realize this is not true—we are in and continuing to exist in what feels like a high watermark of censoring in my lifetime, particularly around material deemed obscene, which will always be a cudgel wielded against material both joyful and educational that does not fall in line with the ruling class.
This is all to say, you should read Sanjana’s new piece!!
Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
An upcoming Reformed Rakes episode with guest Bayley! I love when we read stuff that is a little outside the genre romance marker. This is a WWI book and we talked about why WWI and genre fiction romance seem mostly incompatible in a way that other traumatic periods of history do not. This episode will be out in February and it mostly reminded me of how good Benediction, (2021, dir. Terence Davies) is.
Courting Julia by Mary Balogh
A old Signet (1993) from Balogh. I was not particularly invested in the story here, though some of Balogh’s quirks and habits showed up, even in the most formulaic category style of writing. At a will reading, an unentailed property is passed from an Earl to his step-granddaughter, on the condition that she become engaged to one of five of her step-cousins within the month. Julia, the heroine, is a hoyden somehow without much personality beyond being a hoyden (running down hills, climbing up trees). The five cousins include the heir to the Earl’s title and property, a rake, the rake’s sad-sap brother, the heroine’s childhood best friend, and a painfully shy academic.
The heir makes it clear that he will not be participating in courting Julia because he finds her to be intolerable as a potential countess. Of course, he can’t stay away from her. But quite a lot of time is spent with the rake, who in earnest wants to marry Julia for her inheritance to pay off his debts and is actually attracted to her as well. The most interesting thing here is that Frederick, the rake, kidnaps Julia with the intent to rape and ruin her to force a marriage, though he abandons this plan while in the carriage with Julia.
Most interesting to me is that Balogh gives Frederick a happily ever after in the next book, Dancing with Clara. Balogh loves to redeem a villain, though I am most familiar with her doing so with female villains who are socially cruel to heroines. In fact, in the reader’s note to the two-in-one ebook volume of Dark Angel/Lord Carew’s Bride (1994/1995), Balogh says readers have asked her to redeem that villain, Lionel, but she writes “please note that the answer is still going to be no—I am not going to redeem him in a story of his own. Some villains are just too villainous!” Lionel is the fiancé of the heroine in Dark Angel, but he is secretly trying to break the engagement, so he seduces her cousin in order for the cousin to encourage the heroine to break the engagement herself, but then also abandons the cousin. Lionel is also an enemy of the hero. He seduced the hero’s stepmother, who lives in exile on the continent with the resulting child, though society believes that the hero seduced his stepmother.
In Lord Carew’s Bride, the cousin seduced by Lionel is now the heroine and she falls in love with Lionel’s cousin, who was injured in a horse race by Lionel when they were children. Both heroine and hero are manipulated and controlled by Lionel’s charm and power as he tries to set them against each other. Lionel is mostly just cruel for cruelty’s sake. Frederick’s arc might involve a worse act, Balogh clearly sees something interesting enough in his potential redemption. Also this kidnapper in one book to hero in the next predates Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas by a decade and everyone loves to forgive Sebastian St. Vincent for that bad act.
Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique”, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, at the Philadelphia Orchestra
I was listening to this a lot last week, in preparation for seeing it in person this week. Wonderful! The Philadelphia Orchestra is my favorite thing in the world. Notably, for the first time ever, I felt like I could follow the sonata form in the first movement of this symphony (exposition, development, recapitulation).
I also loved that everyone clapped at the end of the third movement, which is the allegro. It does sound like the end of something! Triumphant, happy, finite. The final movement, the despondent adagio, is more like a second movement. I can’t be fussy about people clapping between movements, mostly because I think they only do it because they are moved to by the music. Plus, why would Tchaikovsky stick a finale in the middle if not to move you to clap?
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A reread that absolutely destroyed me. I hadn’t thought about the plot of The Little Prince since I was 15 in French III in high school and remembered the cute illustrations more than anything.
In the book, a narrator, who has a good dose of whimsy and bitterness, becomes a pilot and then crashes in the Sahara desert. While he worried about his supplies running out, he meets The Little Prince. The Little Prince demands that the narrator draw him a sheep and keeps being dissatisfied with the proffered illustrations, until the narrator draws a crate and says there is a sheep inside the crate. This delights and satisfies the Little Prince.
Over the next week, the pilot tries to fix his plane, while the Little Prince tells him of his home planet and his adventures before crash landing on Earth himself. The Little Prince is a solemn figure, innocent, but worldly, and aware of the dangers of grown-ups too obsessed with power or money or following orders. Saint-Exupéry himself was a French pilot and author, but lived in exile in the United States after the Nazis banned his works under the Vichy Regime.
The Little Prince is probably one of the most tightly composed things I’ve ever read, working so well as a metaphor of the politics that Saint-Exupéry was witnessing and as a children’s book, albeit one that ends bittersweetly. The only thing I can think of that is as good as The Little Prince is A Matter of Life and Death, another World War II story about pilots and God and death.
NFC Championship Game, Commanders-Eagles, 23-55
“Go Birds.” “And with your spirit.”
Sally Rooney once said of Mo Salah “For me, watching Mohamed Salah play football is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small.”
That’s basically what I am currently experiencing getting to watch Saquon Barkley play for my city’s team. Watching someone do something unfathomable, at a level that maybe a handful of people have ever achieved does make me feel small, but in the most comforting way. The Eagles went to the Super Bowl the first year I lived in Philadelphia too, but the difference now is that I’ve lived here for a few years. I have friends who live here. I have places to watch games and people to talk about the games with on Monday mornings.
I am rooting for the Eagles for you and for Maestro
I can't recall one episode of The Bob Newhart show but I used to watch it often when I was younger - I was devoted to Nick at Night programming.
I have already said this but I love Freddy's book, Dancing With Clara, so so much! I think her choices were bold and empathetic. I don't feel similarly about Devil in Winter or St. Vincent's arc, but I am less invested in Kleypas so that's a me issue.