Welcome to the first edition of The Scumbler! Your number one source of Eliza news.
If you followed me here from my old newsletter, I’m thrilled to see you again. I’m bad at technology, so I’m concerned this is going to get stuck in everyone’s spam folder. It’ll be fine.
The Scumbler is an evolution of that previous newsletter, which I created years ago as a way of keeping my fans (my parents) up to date on my published work. For a while during Covid lockdown it became a useful outlet for my surplus of feelings, and I started sending out cartoons and essays on a weekly basis. Then that pace started to feel overwhelming, so I slowed down again. Now I’m ready to dial it up a smidge.
I feel two ways about relaunching my newsletter.
The first is that I find it embarrassing when people start a newsletter (or blog, YouTube channel, etc.) with a big mission statement about what they will accomplish with it. Embarrassing only because I know how easily these things fall apart. One of my favorite comfort movies is Nora Ephron’s 2009 masterpiece Julie & Julia, in which Julie’s inaugural blog post goes like this:
[Amy Adams voiceover]
The Julie/Julia project. The book: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, first edition, 1961, by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and, of course, Julia Child, the woman who taught America to cook and to eat. It’s 40 years later, and no one can touch her. The challenge? 365 days, 524 recipes. The contender? Julie Powell: government employee by day, renegade foodie by night. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cat’s well being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment. How far it will go, no one can say…
I mean, thank god it worked out. Whenever I see something like that in the wild, I think: don’t tell people your plans! Let it unfurl if it’s meant to be! Keep expectations low.
My second and more enlightened view is that at this point in the self-publishing revolution, we should all understand that newsletters and blogs ebb and flow like the tides. They are made by real people, individuals with responsibilities, jobs, and lives as complicated and ever-changing as our own. A newsletter going dormant doesn’t signal failure. It probably just means that person had to reassess their time and priorities. Maybe they had a kid, took up woodworking, or fell down a manhole.
The sum of these feelings is that I don’t really want to detail my intentions for The Scumbler, but I’m going to do it anyway. You can expect a newsletter about once a month, more if I feel so moved. I’ll be sending out my articles and thinky little ditties as usual, but I’m also aiming to publish some essays that are a bit more ambitious. (I have interviews lined up.) The content will, as always, center around the shit I like: movies and TV, clothes, the color red, Dakota Johnson’s home and chaotic-evil energy, applesauce, etc.
As for the name, a big thank you to everyone who voted in last week’s poll! There was basically an equal split between people who liked The Scumbler and people who thought my own name should be in the title. I went with The Scumbler because it was always my favorite. Alex came up with it one night, and it made me laugh really hard.
In painting, “scumbling” refers to dipping a dry brush in paint and sweeping it across a canvas to create a patchy, transparent effect. The Scumbler is fun to say out loud, and it sounds like a dodgy periodical published by someone who likes to glance off a lot of different topics in a superficial but invigorating way.
The Business Pages
I have a story in the most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine! If you get it in print, please mail me a copy because it’s impossible to find in the wild. (Just kidding. A local friend has agreed to surrender his copy.)
It’s a “Letter of Recommendation,” my recommendation being a stultifying posture correction video that was uploaded to YouTube 7 years ago and has become a cult object in the unintentional ASMR world, with millions of views and a comments section that’s updated on a near-daily basis. I’m constantly looking for ways to de-stimulate myself, and this wonderfully boring video is a great shortcut.
(I do realize that going on the internet isn’t a great way of turning down the volume in my brain. Reading a book is always the better answer. But sometimes you want to veg out.)
Scorsese Corner
In advance of Killers of the Flower Moon, Alex has curated a Martin Scorsese retrospective for me, since I’d never seen any of his movies due to my prejudice against “boy cinema.” This summer we will be covering Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, After Hours, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Silence. (And possibly a bonus Irishman.)
We’ve now watched Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. It turns out I was wrong to have dismissed acclaimed American film director Martin Scorsese! I loved Taxi Driver — the way the streetlights reflect off the wet pavement alone — and enjoyed The King of Comedy even though I spent much of it hiding my face in my shirt.
What I have to say is that Taxi Driver, and The King of Comedy to a lesser degree, is an accurate depiction of the perils of dating men in your 20s. I’m not saying I’ve dated a Travis Bickle specifically, but hasn’t everyone kind of dated a Travis Bickle? By that I mean someone who is charming in an odd way, who has a lurking undertow about them, but because you don’t know precisely what their weirdness is or how deep it runs, and because they’re interesting and you’ve got time, you decide to go out with them. I love the way Cybil Shepherd, as Betsy, seems to be running this calculation in her head when Bickle shows up at the campaign office where she works and asks her to get coffee with him. Of course, his red flags quickly become apparent, and off she runs.
Stay tuned for more Scorsese updates in the coming months. In the meantime, thank you for reading! If you think someone in your life would enjoy The Scumbler, please feel free to pass it along. I’m trying to build a publishing empire here.
Love,
Eliza