giornata, 4/3/25
I haven't watched a movie in almost a month
Giornata is my Thursday weekly media diary, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week. Usually, this is my paid subscriber benefit, but this one is free!
metacognition
Letterboxd (cursed app) has a feature (if you pay a yearly fee) where it tells you the longest streak you’ve ever had for watching movies. Mine is 359 weeks, which is close to seven years, which is just about as long as I’ve had the Letterboxd app. I put almost no effort into keeping this streak—I’ve had many distracting life events happen in those years, obviously, and never had to try very hard to watch a movie once a week.
But I haven’t watched a movie since March 8! Not only have I broken the streak, I’ve gone into a drought. I’m also pleasantly and basically fine with this, which is better than what I was worried would happen, which is a goofy sense of shame of falling behind on something that should be a leisure hobby.
I mostly see anxiety about the “numbers” of art consumption around reading. The attitude of most of my online film friends when you go weeks without seeing a movie is that you’ve broken a bad habit. I don’t really experience the nerves or shame around reading less, so tenuous my grasp on “enjoying reading” still feels after law school destroyed my ability to follow the plot of a novel, learned by only reading romance novels for a fully year in 2021. Any reading is more than I was doing for years!
And I try to apathetic to “tracking” my reading, though I’m more vigilant about movies. I still ostensibly have a Goodreads, which is the last Amazon product that I have any buy-in with. One goal of the weekly media diary here is to stop writing things on Goodreads, which I have done, though I still log-on every once and awhile to mark “reading” or “have read.” I also like how old the website feels, a polarizing take amongst users. The whole internet is crumbing around us and Goodreads looks the same as it did when I first made an account. I’ll take website that looks 20 years old over a website that I can tell was made in 2025 any day.
Anyway, I’m much more likely to give up any sort of tracking than I am to move to Storygraph, given that website’s all-in attitude toward Generative AI. And digital tracking may be destroying parts of my brain and soul that I’d prefer to nurture.
Movies I was less sure how I’d react when I realized my streak would break. Amanda Mull had a piece recently in Bloomberg News about the process of event mementos becoming totally digital. The act of rifling through a box of memories is a lost art, not for lack of buy-in, but for a lack of paper. I am a paper hoarder, quite literally. My best friend once made a collage out of a magazine to decorate my door with that had an epigram that read “wait, don’t throw away that piece of paper.” I think it also featured a picture of Kate Hudson.
One reason I haven’t seen any movies recently is that I moved in March, so I’ve also been confronted with the boxes and boxes of paper that I keep. They don’t get added to as much as they used to, so many of these memories are from college and immediately after, though I do have a Playbill from every Philadelphia Orchestra performance I’ve seen. The paper of my life I’m very willing to display and use up, stick it on a wall or hand it to someone else, or cut it up to put in a collage. So it isn’t quite as rarified as a keepsake box, but undoubtably, I will be keeping the piece of paper.
Mull suggests the loss of the ability to keep physical mementos is an outsourcing of the memory process to our phones. With no rifling through papers, what would trigger the sense memory of going to that museum or seeing that ballgame? Something maybe, but not in the context of “let me review the things that I’ve done” process that starts when you open a box of paper objects. When ticket stubs exist only next to promotion emails for sales or work emails, who would ever rifle through them?
Digital tracking feels like a parallel process. I’m not sure of a worse mundane feeling than when someone asks me what I’ve seen or read recently and I think to myself “if only there was a way to check my Letterboxd or Goodreads right now in this conversation, I would have a good answer.” But I do like the aspect of public processing the things that I’ve read or seen. I think that calcifies the emotional memory and allows me to revisit my own thoughts, a little shoebox of scraps of a thought.
I don’t have a grand conclusion here. Just in the three weeks since I’ve watched a movie, I experienced no anxiety about having not watched a movie. And recognized the low-grade nerves of outsourcing my memory of art that I enjoyed that’s maybe been with me for my seven-year streak of logging my watching.
Things I’ve been doing instead of watching movies
The Pitt: I’m The Pitt-pilled. I had planned on saving this season until it was totally aired, but I saw enough photos of Noah Wyle with a stethoscope and got convinced. I grew up sporadically watching ER when I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime, and thus have imprinted on Noah Wyle’s calming presence in emergency situations. Everyone on the show is my best friend and I love them and want nothing bad to ever happen to them, which makes the show a very difficult, but rewarding watch.
Please forward any Robby/Collins fancams you have enjoyed. I have certainly already seen all of the Dr. Mel ones.
Honeytrap (Aster Glenn Gray, 2020) and The Phoenix Bride (Natasha Siegel, 2024): I’m grouping this romances together in part because they are Reformed Rakes last and next episodes (Honeytrap out now, The Phoenix Bride, forthcoming!), but also because they both have endings unlike anything I’ve ever read in romance, while also both totally qualifying (to me) as happily-ever-afters. The expansive HEA seems to have become my discourse hill to die on, but for a genre that touts itself as open and transformative, the restriction here drives me crazy. I think an HEA can be many, many things if an author is interested in doing the work to make the reader believe that those circumstances are the emotionally satisfying, romantic ending for the reader.
I also think that not every reader has to agree that every ending is an HEA, but that a single dissenting voice should not disqualify a romance that swings big at something new. One other book that feels expansive in a similar genre imagination way is The Ruin of Evangeline Jones by Julia Bennet, which we also have an episode on!
Honeytrap relies on time jumps, so the HEA comes when the characters are much, much older than most romance leads and The Phoenix Bride creatively has a couple “end up” together in a way that doesn’t have characters shirking historical boundaries that would prevent their relationship, in a way that feels much more honest, but to me, equally, or more, hopeful than a Pollyanna-view where system that reject or restrict a relationship suddenly comes around.
L’amore ai tempi del colera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, trans. C. M. Valentinetti): I’m continuing to read Love in the Time of Cholera in Italian. I’m supplementing by listening to the audiobook in English a chapter ahead, so I have a sense of what happens before I slowly read in Italian and also I have a digital copy of the book in Spanish to compare the original language with the translation.
What it really makes me want to read is my favorite Garcia Marquez book, his short story collection Strange Pilgrims, which are linked by the theme of South American expats in Europe, including some stories set in Italy.
Translating Myself and Others (Jhumpa Lahiri, 2022): A reread that I am revisiting in anticipation of this month’s non-romance, romance which will be about taking Italian classes as an adult!
“For decades, ever since I immersed myself in the language, ever since I fell in love with it, I’ve struggled to open a series of doors. Each one leads me to another. The more I confront them, the more I pass through them, the more others appear, needing to be opened, to be overcome. This is how the study of a foreign language—an asymptotic trajectory—proceeds.” Jhumpa Lahiri, in “Why Italian?” from Translating Myself and Others.
“FUFN (Fuck You For Now)” by JADE: I almost never listen to music the week it comes out, so this song is a few weeks old now, but single-handedly powered me through my move. I’m always rooting for the Little Mix girls, but JADE is our most interesting pop girl, visually and acoustically, by a mile. I keep telling my sister it feels like when The Fame Monster came out, something not just good, but something exciting—I just want enough eyes and ears on her to get an American tour.