weekly digest #22
may 25-31, 2026: cherry, the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde, schmigadoon, sweet smell of success, chess, various delicious salads
It’s been a frustrating week. After a year of waiting, my application for disability was denied. Everyone says to expect this; you’ll get denied and have to appeal at least once. I had hoped anyway, against the odds, that I’d be one of the lucky few that got approved on the first try. I should have a strong case. I have years of documentation from a variety of specialists and clearly cannot work. I can barely write one of these blog posts over the course of a week. It doesn’t matter.
The process is designed to discourage you. They say no to everyone. There’s nothing personal about it.
It still feels like shit.
Oh well. On to the appeal.
reading
I started my week with Cherry, a semi-autobiographical novel1 by Nico Walker, written while he was in prison for bank robbery (published 2018). An aimless young man drops out of college and joins the army, where he finds none of the structure and meaning he’d hoped for. Upon returning to civilian life, he becomes addicted to heroin and, desperate to maintain his increasingly expensive habit, robs a series of banks. It’s a miserable book. The sections in Iraq are nasty – the soldiers are incompetent, bloodthirsty, and gleefully racist, carrying out pointless missions and huffing computer duster when they can’t smuggle drugs in from the states. Several months into his tour, the narrator observes, “People kept dying: in ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit.”
Walker is excellent at capturing the mundane despair of a life without direction, the stretches of nothingness almost as awful as the stark horrors that interrupt them, both in Iraq and in the underground world of opiate users and dealers in the US. The narrator’s actions never sharpen with purpose until he becomes physically dependent on heroin, and each day is a desperate scramble to scrape together some money and find someone who’s holding. The bank robberies have almost no action – he walks inside, hands over a note, and takes whatever he can get from the till: never more than a few thousand dollars. It hardly seems worth the risk – the money won’t last long. It’s just another in a string of meaningless events, impotent choices, desperate clawing for the things that will destroy you. Walker makes you feel what it’s like to live the way he used to; I’m very glad I don’t.
After a string of effectively unpleasant contemporary novels, I wanted a change of pace and went to my stockpile of public domain ebooks for something older. I read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (published 1886). This is one of those stories that’s so present in pop culture that it’s weird to read the original, which is inevitably not what you expect it to be. The novella’s not told from Jekyll’s perspective, as I had expected, but is almost entirely from the point of view of his friend and lawyer, Mr. Utterson. We witness Utterson’s horror of Mr. Hyde and his evil deeds, but Stevenson never reveals the majority of Hyde’s sins. We learn that he injures a passing child on the street and murders an acquaintance of Dr. Jekyll’s for no good reason; other evil acts are alluded to but never detailed. The actions themselves aren’t the point; it’s the uninhibited evil – the freeing of the self from any bounds of morality – that we’re meant to find horrifying. Jekyll is able to split himself into two beings because he is already divided between the good he wants to do and the sins he’s tempted by. The story feels a little quaint at times, but the tension between good and evil is a timeless one. It’s surprisingly short, too, at only 28,000 words – I actually wish it had been longer in order to learn more about both Jekyll and Hyde, who are both largely thought about and discussed by Mr. Utterson in absentia.
My library hold came in for Flashlight by Susan Choi (published 2025), which I started last night. Yay more depressing contemporary lit fic!!
watching
The Broadway production of Schmigadoon! doesn’t have a cast recording yet, but the show it’s based on is available to stream, and I was curious enough to get a 7-day free trial of Apple TV+ to check it out. It’s not great!! Schmigadoon! has reminded me how difficult it is to do parody well. The show is not only generally unfunny, it has nothing to say about the thing it’s parodying besides “musicals are kinda weird!” We all know that in real life people don’t break into song and dance – stating that this is unusual as it happens doesn’t make the moment funny or clever. And while the residents of Schmigadoon (the magical, musical town) are by necessity stock characters, our protagonists Mel and Josh don’t feel any more real. My biggest complaint, though, is that the dialogue is soooo bland! This is supposed to be a comedy – where are the jokes!? I can imagine that the stage version benefits from cutting the material from three hours to two and a half, and casting a male lead who can sing better than Keegan-Michael Key. (Weird that they replaced him with a white dude though…)
I also watched Sweet Smell of Success (1957), an excellent noir about a press agent who will do anything to stay in the good graces of a powerful gossip columnist. It’s a beautifully shot movie with a bleak plot and fantastic stylized dialogue. The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.
listening
Continuing my pre-Tonys listening, I’ve been playing the new Chess cast recording on repeat. My understanding, from reading the wiki page and a handful of reviews, is that this show’s book has always been a mess and the changes made for the revival have only made things worse. They weren’t even nominated for a Best Revival of a Musical Tony – embarrassing! Only three shows were nominated; it should have been a gimme. Still, Nicholas Christopher, Bryce Pinkham, and Hannah Cruz all got nominated for their performances, so I’m listening. And the music is awesome. Composed by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, it is wonderfully 80’s and over the top.
Another show without a cast recording yet, The Lost Boys has released a few singles. I listened to these and decided that that was enough anyway. None of the three released songs are interesting – they all sound like a dozen other mediocre, already-forgotten contemporary musicals. At this point I think I’m somehow rooting against all four of the shows nominated for Best New Musical. Whatever.
eating & drinking
Highlights this week were spring chicken salad, cauliflower salad with dates and pistachios, tortellini soup, chili crisp noodles, ginger peanut chicken with baby bok choy, coconut rice, honey roasted chickpea and avocado salad (tahini “ranch” is the best salad dressing in the world), coffee oreo ice cream, and ginger snaps.
making
I’m still knitting on the back panel of my scrappy sweater – I’ve started shaping the armholes. I didn’t make much progress since I spent most of my evening TV time locked in on Star Trek with my dad or talking shit about Schmigadoon! with my mom and was too focused to knit while watching.
shopping
We did it. We finally did it. A rug has been purchased. It’s beautiful and it was only $163 + shipping, a steal for a medium-large vintage wool rug. Shout out to paktraders, the ebay shop I’ve been watching for months. Love you guys and your reasonably priced vintage rugs!!
kitsch corner
I love the June page of my vintage cats calendar. I wish I was that cozy.
See you next week.
xoxo,
Franny 💋🥗
The author’s note at the beginning of the novel reads: “This book is a work of fiction./ These things didn’t ever happen./ These people didn’t ever exist.”
Good luck with the disability appeal. I'm so sorry this process is SO fucked.