Feldman's Faves: August 18, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

First and foremost, given this forum, It would just be wrong for me to not mention what took place last Wednesday at 7 p.m – given it shattered all PODCAST records. Although I normally do not listen to the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, New Heights, this episode was one for the ages (and I was with my Swiftie daughter at the time so…). If you don’t know what I’m taking about, you may be living under a rock…… The Life of a Showgirl is dropping on October 3. She’s back!

Just a reminder that our students are basically done their training and eager to get cracking on your files. So please do what you can to get them involved.

Finally, a HUGE congratulations to Megan and Michael and the birth of Claire. She is absolutely adorable.

No theme this week – just topics of interest.

AUDITION By: Katie Kitamura – The Booker Prize Long List for 2025 was recently announced and so I decided to dive in with Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition. This novel is one of the most original and head scratching books I have read in a long time. In addition to using unusual sentence structure and grammar (think run on sentences and comma splices) in a very effective manner, the story itself is two stories in one that don’t quite align and so there is a feeling of unease and uncertainty throughout. But I think that’s the point. There is more left out than included in the story and it is up to the reader to try to figure it out. And of course the ending does not resolve the tension so you find yourself thinking a lot once done. I really appreciated that experience here. As one reviewer notes, “There is an eeriness to great acting. Studied movements take on life; a living other emerges. Bad acting achieves no such uncanniness. Excessively self-conscious, the failing actor never dissolves into their role. We watch them watching themselves act. Although we rarely see her on stage, the actor narrating Audition, Katie Kitamura’s unnerving, desperately tense fifth novel, never stops watching herself perform. Even passing, offhand phrases seem to fray under the strain of an unsustainable self-awareness. “You might think that people wondered how we did it,” she says, describing the comfortable Manhattan lifestyle she shares with her husband. The perspectives are tortuous, unmanageable. Who is this “you” that might imagine their way into the opinions of unseen others? As the novel progresses, these gazes are experienced as social roles both longed for and resisted. “How many times had I been told how much it meant to some person or another, seeing someone who looked like me on stage or on screen,” she says, one of many moments in the novel in which ethnicity is both present and absent at once: acknowledged, but never explicitly named.

The novel’s opening pages establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hyper-vigilant. Narrowing her gaze to the terrain of the body, she invests even the solicitations of a waiter with portentous significance: “He inclined his head and held the door open, and because of that small courtesy – an invitation or injunction to enter – I went inside.” Waiting at the table is a young man, Xavier, self-assured and faintly discomfiting. The meeting is edgy and awkward, rendered in a tapestry of small gestures. Initially, we wonder if we are being subjected to the prose equivalent of bad acting: a surfeit of fussy movement, signifying nothing – an impression heightened by the stumbling gait of the narrator’s run-on sentences. But admirers of Kitamura’s previous novel, Intimacies, will recall the taut discipline of that book’s prose, and trust that, here, the language has been loosened by design. Sure enough, when the churn of movement and syntax is disrupted – appropriately, by the smallest of gestures – a deeper existential dread emerges. Xavier sits back, exhales. The narrator, with a sense of shock, recognizes the movement as her own, “lifted from my films, my stage performances, and copied without shame. A piece of me, on the body of a stranger.” Xavier has studied her, she believes, then performed her back to herself. Later, Xavier repeats the movement, and a further layer of meaning is added. It is, we learn, a gesture the narrator has disowned, a tic she fell back on “when I did not know how to work my way out of a scene, when I was uncertain of what was happening with a character at a particular moment”. Xavier’s appropriated mannerism lays bare the artifice of the narrator’s performance, trapping her in her own self-consciousness. In doing so, it exposes in turn the artifice of her narration – of the very act of narration. The tissue of internal coherence has been rent. Reality, fragile both in terms of the narrator’s psyche and the novel’s self-reflective structure, cannot hold.

Audition is a novel of mirrored halves, angled towards an absent centre. In the first, Xavier tells the narrator that he believes himself to be her abandoned son – something she makes clear is impossible. In the second, he is her son, or, at least, he is willingly performing that role. In the first half, the narrator recalls with sadness her affairs, after a miscarriage. In the second, it is her husband who has strayed. It’s not so much a question of which is real; this is a novel about the suspension of disbelief necessary for life to be tolerable at all. Key to these coexisting realities is a mysterious central scene in the play the actor is to perform – the “black box” that changes the audience’s entire understanding of the character. In the novel’s first half, she is rehearsing it, and struggling. In the second, she has mastered it – the play is an unqualified success. This scene is never described. Instead, the narrator details what she finds within it: a realm of “infinite contingency”, “wholly private”, in which, briefly, she is able to locate a “single, unified self”. Critically, this enigmatic scene may not contain any meaning of its own. Much like the overused gesture appropriated by Xavier, it is revealed to be little more than a creative device, a strategy deployed in the face of uncertainty. Discussing it during a rehearsal, the narrator realizes that the playwright has “no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play … the scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder”. That the narrator finds such freedom, such self-coherence, such sense in this scene only after she has discovered inside it no such sense or meaning is key to this novel’s deeply radical thesis. It is into the unwritten, into meaning’s absence, that we are free to project meaning of our own. By Audition’s end we are in the darkest black box of all: the catastrophe that results when the self’s illusory nature is laid bare. Just as the mirage of a character arises from the coherence of an actor’s gestures, so from the false coherence of the self-arises the mirage we mistake for a world. When the self is unmasked as empty, the world it has projected collapses, and we see ourselves for what we are: actors on a bare stage, performing scenes without meaning, for an audience who were never there. Most novels shrink from the vertiginous depths of this absence; to accept it is to allow to disintegrate the basic precepts of the novelistic form: stability of character, dependability of meaning, linearity of event. Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition nonetheless thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life.” Booker Prize season is just starting but I do think that Audition has a good chance here. But as I read others I will get back to you on my thoughts there. Here’s a good review from the NYT - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/books/review/katie-kitamura-audition.html

How I Built This with Guy Raz - Crumbl: Jason McGowan – CRUMBL is universally acknowledged to be, without dobut, the most unhealthy food in America today. It is also among the most popular products on the market. In our TiklTok era Jason McGowan and his team at CRUMBL have figured out a way to make the weekly announcement of cookies a must see and be a part of event. From very humble begiinings to the takeover of America the story of how CRUMBL was built is really interesting and worth hearing. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Crumbl may be a cookie business – but Jason McGowan turned it into a fast-growing restaurant chain by building it like a tech startup. He and co-founder Sawyer Hemsley meticulously A/B tested the recipe, launched a delivery app early on, and went viral with weekly drops of wild new flavors like bubblegum and Almost Everything Bagel. In just eight years, Crumbl has opened over 1,000 stores, and has dominated the cookie conversation on social media, with more TikTok followers than Starbucks, Domino’s, and Taco Bell combined.” : https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?i=1000720278948

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon