Julia Neugarten's Blog

This blogpost is just to promote my writing elsewhere.

My review of The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games was just published in Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. You can read it here.

It was a pleasure to work with the review editor of Participations to make this review the best it could be, and of course it was an immense joy to read and analyze a brilliant scholarly work like The Dark Fantastic. If you’re at all interested in media studies, popular culture studies and the way these fields relate to critical race theory, go read the book.

My article “The Whistle Stop Café and Luke’s Diner: The Village Café as Utopian Space for Women in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and Gilmore Girls” is out now!

It was a lovely experience to work with the brilliant editorial staff of the Digital Literature Review to make this article the best it could be. The article began as a paper for the course Just Food: The American Literatures of Food and Social Justice, which I took as an elective in my research MA Literary Studies last year. I am very happy with the end result; please give it a read!

In case you need a little more encouragement, here is the abstract:

This paper compares the Whistle Stop Café in Fanny Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café to Luke’s Diner in the pilot episode of the TV show Gilmore Girls (2000). I argue that the two cafes are similar in that both offer up a utopian space where women can be themselves, enact their desires and speak their minds without fear of judgement or violence. Through a comparison of the two, I also show the ways in which gendered power dynamics have changed over time: while the Whistle Stop Café provides a refuge from male violence, Luke’s Diner functions as a space in which women can exert their own agency through speech, thus keeping the threat of male violence at bay. My analysis shows that the culinary space of the café or diner contains traditionally feminine elements through its association with food and cooking as well as traditionally masculine elements through its presence in the public sphere.

2020 wasn’t a good year for a lot of reasons that I don’t need to tell you about because you already know them if you haven’t been living under a rock. But for reading, 2020 was an excellent year. After all, many people, myself included, had little else to do. If you’re interested in hearing about my reading habits over the last year, or if you want some tips on things to read, read on!

As a conversation starter, here is the list of books I read in 2020:

Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets – J.K. Rowling (re-read)Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban – – J.K. Rowling (re-read)The Lover’s Dictionary – David LevithanHarry Potter & The Goblet of Fire – J.K. Rowling (re-read)Richard III – William ShakespeareEating Animals – Jonathan Safran FoerHarry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix – J.K. Rowling (re-read)Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe – Fannie FlaggHarry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling (re-read)Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows – J.K. Rowling (re-read)My Year of Meats – Ruth OzekiDelicious Foods – James HannahamWar & Peace – Leo TolstoyThe Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieThe Bookshop on the Shore – Jenny ColganThe Girl of Ink & Stars – Kiran Milwood HargraveThe Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan KunderaThe Martian – Andy WeirThe Graduate – Charles WebbThe BuJo Method – Ryder CarrollShopgirl – Steve MartinThe Santaland Diaries – David SedarisHunger Makes Me A Modern Girl – Carrie BrownsteinEleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail HoneymanA Wild Swan – Michael CunninghamAn American Marriage – Tayari JonesThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel SparkPaaz – Myrthe van der MeerA Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’EngleAn Inspector Calls – J.B. PriestleyPyjamadagen – Marc van der HolstDe Boekhandel – Boudewijn BüchA Ladder to the Sky – John BoyneExtremely Loud & Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran FoerBroer – Esther GerritsenPale Fire – Vladimir NabokovThe Vet’s Daughter – Barbara ComynsA Perfectly Good Family – Lionel ShriverTuesdays With Morrie – Mitch AlbomThe Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Other Stories – Washington IrvingThe Ocean At The End of the Lane – Neil GaimanBetween The World & Me – Ta-Nehisi CoatesThe Midnight Library – Matt HaigMore Than A Woman – Caitlin MoranIncidents – Roland BarthesThe Guilty Feminist – Deborah Frances-WhiteThe Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (re-read)The Testaments – Margaret AtwoodThe Penelopiad – Margaret AtwoodMuch Ado About Nothing – William Shakespeare (re-read)Romeo & Juliet – William Shakespear (re-read)The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Suzanne CollinsThe Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games – Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Before COVID-19 drove all academic education online, I took a wonderful course on food studies with the incredible Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black and read four books about food and the way food is represented in literature: Eating Animals, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, My Year of Meats and Delicious Foods. All of these were fascinating books, but most of all I would recommend reading them together and looking at the different ways they represent food and relate food to markers of social identity.

Then education moved online. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I had been assigned War & Peace as part of a course on history and literature. I will be honest here: I would never, ever, in my life, have finished War & Peace if I had not been stuck in lockdown, but I am happy that I did finish it. My copy was 1.350 pages and it took me only five weeks to read it (okay, now I’m just bragging). It felt like a very drawn-out, somewhat less witty Jane Austen novel written by a grumpy historian. Overall, that’s a positive in my book, and the classes on the novel were also very educational and illuminating.

As a palate cleanser after War and Peace, I read The Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It was about as brilliant as I expected. I am still saving Half Of A Yellow Sun for the perfect moment.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine deserves a special mention for being lovely and entertaining.

Then I went through a phase of reading feminist books (Atwood, Frances-White, Moran) which is always great.

I also read a number of books by African-American authors this year. Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage was absolutely brilliant and emotional. It is perhaps my favorite novel that I read this year. My reading experience of An American Marriage also helped shape my intense reading experience of Between the World and Me. As cherry on the cake, I read The Dark Fantastic towards the end of the year. This is an academic book and it is absolutely the best non-fiction book I read this year. It changed the way I think about what literary and cultural criticism is and should be and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Looking for more books to read? You can find what I read in previous years here:

Read in 2016

Read in 2017 & 2018

Read in 2019

Hey everyone! Remember when I said I was going to be blogging more often? Well, here I am, shamelessly asking for your help.

Over the last five months or so, I’ve been doing a research internship at the Huygens ING. The research project I am working on is about the expression of affect in book reviews. As part of that research project, I’ve been working on this survey about emotion in online book reviews. If you have some time, it’d be great if you could fill it out and share it!

Click here to do the survey

If you’re interested in our findings, leave a comment to let me know and I’ll keep you posted.

Hey everyone!

As part of a research internship at the Huygens Institute of Dutch Literature and Culture I've compiled this questionnaire about emotion in online book reviews. If you have some time, it'd be great if you could fill it out and share it!

https://bookresponse.huygens.knaw.nl/...

If you’ve been following this blog for a while., you know that I set myself a yearly goal of reading 52 books: one book a week. In 2019, I did not achieve that goal. In fact, I missed by a single book (sniff). Here’s a list of all the books I did read in 2019:

March

1. De Verwarde Cavia – Paulien Cornelisse

2. Language Change: Progress or Decay? – Jean Aitchison

3. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace  (this book is to blame for me reading so few books between last summer and now.)

4. All The Dirty Parts – Daniel Handler

5. Taal Voor De Leuk – Paulien Cornelisse

April

6. Notes on a Nervous Planet – Matt Haig

7. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (re-read)

8. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? – Mindy Kaling

9. Yes Please – Amy Poehler

10. A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare (re-read)

11. Macbeth – William Shakespeare (re-read)

May

12. The Town In Bloom – Dodie Smith

13. Crampton Hodnet – Barbara Pym

14. Manhood and Masculine Identity in William Shakespeare’s the Tragedy of  Macbeth – Maria L. Howell

15. Moranifesto – Caitlin Moran

16. The Vesuvius Club – Mark Gatiss

June

17. Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

18.  Why Not Me? – Mindy Kaling

19. Less – Andrew Sean Greer

20. The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

July

21. The Golden Compass – Philip Pullman

August

22. The Subtle Knife – Philip Pullman

23. The Amber Spyglass – Philip Pullman

24.  The Girl On The Fridge – Etgar Keret

25. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton

26.  Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austen (re-read)

27. The Stone Gods – Jeanette Winterson

September

28. Suddenly, A Knock On The Door – Etgar Keret

29. Zero K – Don Delillo

30. Ja, Maar… Omdenken – Bertold Gunster

October

31. Wayward Son – Rainbow Rowell

32. Oroonoko: The Royal Slave – Aprah Behn

33. Erec & Enide – Chretien de Troyes

November

34. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

35. The 101 Dalmatians – Dodie Smith

36.  13 Ways of Looking At A Fat Girl – Mona Awad

37. Bunny – Mona Awad

38. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller – Italo Calvino

39. Courage Calls To Courage Everywhere – Jeanette Winterson

40. The Cockroach – Ian McEwan

41. The Art Of Asking Your Boss For A Raise – Georges Perec

December

42.  Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (re-read)

43. Satin Island – Tom McCarthy

44. Grand Union – Zadie Smith

45. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov

46. Gmorning, Gnight! : Little Pep Talks For Me & You – Lin-Manuel Miranda & Jonny Sun

47. The Power – Naomi Alderman

48.  Lanny – Max Porter

49. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

50. De Ochtend Valt – Manon Uphoff

51. Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone – J.K. Rowling (re-read)

Now. You’d have to be really, really mean if you went around judging me for the fact that, while I did read all of these books (note how Infinite Jest is on the list, and Robinson Crusoe, arguably an even worse reading experience), I didn’t make the magical number of 52. As it turns out though, my inner critic is really really mean. On December 31st, when it became clear I had no hope of finishing The Chamber of Secrets before midnight, I felt wave of disappointment in myself.

But do you know why I became sure I wouldn’t be able to finish the book that night? Because I wanted to spend the final hours of 2019 playing games and eating snacks with my closest friends and loved ones. Looking back now, knowing some of what 2020 had in store for us, a reading challenge seems like an incredibly silly thing to worry about.

I think now that that’s true of many failures. Looking back you will probably think it silly that you beat yourself up because a. you no longer fit a certain dress, b. you had to ask your boss to extend your deadline, c. you couldn’t stick to the exercise regime you vowed to do, e. you didn’t get the grade you were aiming for even though you studied really hard, f. [insert your own personal failure here.]

I put off publishing this list of books for quite a while because it felt like a reminder of my failures. Now I think it’s a reminder not to be ridiculously hard on yourself. It’s also a reminder to think about what you deem truly important, and don’t worry about failure too much, especially if the failure is unrelated to the things in your life you decided are truly important.

This week I attended an evening of four one-act plays organized by Downstage Left, an Amsterdam-based international theatre company.  I had been specifically invited to review Pillow Talk, a short play written by Peter Tolan, directed by Ben Evans and performed by Charles Bird and Chris Grabski. Pillow Talk was delightful. Let me tell you why.

First of all, I am always impressed by well-executed brevity. If a play, book, film or other creative product manages to amuse, move or otherwise get its point across in a short amount of time, I think this is a sign of great creative talent, and more importantly, skill. Pillow Talk has a runtime of about 30 minutes, I’d say, and is a perfect example of what Hamlet said: “brevity is the soul of wit.”

Because Pillow Talk is very funny. It’s funny the way the familiar can be made funny if it is presented cleverly. The plot of the play is simple: two heterosexual men who are close friends are forced to share a bed. One of them is uncomfortable with this arrangement. The other one just wants to sleep. Anyone who knows anything about awkward slumber parties or toxic masculinity will understand how this plays out. The men bicker, of course, and passive-aggressively keep switching the nightlight on and off. Indeed, the hilarity of Pillow Talk lies in the fact that the whole thing is so utterly familiar and recognizable to its audience.

Stage props are minimal: it’s just two men in a tiny bed. Their close proximity adds to the humorous tension that is central to the play. It takes some excellent acting to make a play with such a limited setting, which could easily become static or dull to watch, so riveting. The two actors, Charles Bird and Chris Grabski, pull this off brilliantly.

Most importantly for me, Pillow Talk engages with a social issue close to my heart: it unpacks the complicated and sometimes ridiculous phenomenon of toxic masculinity. Pillow Talk asks, quite explicitly, exactly what it is that many men find so unnerving about physical and emotional intimacy, why they feel that way and what could be gained by examining those feelings. It also questions heteronormativity and the societal expectations we all have of male friendship.

If you get the chance, go and see Pillow Talk. It will be performed five times between 24-26th April at the CC Amstel theatre.  Booking opens soon.

[image error]

After seeing the review I did for Writer’s Block Magazine of their 2018 performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, the lovely people of the Queen’s English Theatre Company invited me to their new production: The 39 Steps, which was put together in a collaboration with West End actress Loveday Smith under the name QE2. They performed it tonight, and they will also perform it tomorrow, the 7th of December, at 15:00 and 20:00 and Sunday the 8th at 15:00 and 20:00, all in Amsterdam.

Originally, of course, The Thirty-Nine Steps was a 1915 adventure novel by John Buchan. Then, famously, it was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935, and a number of other adaptations for the big and small screen followed, as well as a theatre adaptation first created by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon (can you imagine being named Nobby?) and then adapted by Patrick Barlow in 2005.

I did read the novel once upon a time, but I barely remember it. I also once saw the play performed in London’s West End while I was in high school, but that, too, has faded from memory. What I do remember, however, is the funny, energetic, innovative Oscar Wilde adaptation the Queen’s English Theatre Company (QETC) put on last year. So I was excited to see what they’d do with The 39 Steps, and I was not disappointed.

[image error]A photo I took during intermission

The 39 Steps is designed to be played by four actors, but the play features more than 100 different characters and takes about two hours. As you can imagine, this results in a whirlwind of fast-paced switches in character and wardrobe, smoothly yet amusingly acted out by the talented people of QE2.

The use of props and sound effects is equally clever. At times, actors and technicians interact to create an almost postmodern and highly amusing clash of form and content. While there are not many props and set pieces, this scarcity is played for laughs and the versatility of props is creatively exploited; a set of ladders can function as a mountain range, a bridge, a bed or a billboard, depending on the situation.

Audience members who are well-versed in the ouevre of Alfred Hitchcock will delight in the many subtle and not-so-subtle references to Hitchcock films this production has to offer. I myself counted almost a dozen, but there are undoubtedly many more that I missed.

For the first twenty minutes or so, I sat around wondering whether QE2’s adaptation of The 39 Steps would have a political message, like I think their production of The Importance of Being Earnest did last year. After that I was too swept away by the adventure and laughing too much to care. But I do think there is, at the very least, an opinion behind this play. By lightly parodying Englishness in the character of Richard Hannay and his concern for Great Britain’s national security, by contrasting his Englishness with the stereotypical Scottishness of the characters in the Highlands, the play parodies and therefore questions feelings of national belonging in a way that is especially poignant in the age of Brexit.

Actors Graham Garner and Loveday Smith in the roles of Richard Hannay and Annabella Schmidt

Although I caught myself, now and again, annoyed with the man-woman dynamic in the play, QE2 successfully overacts and exaggerates this dynamic. While, on the one hand, this allowed me to be swept away by the romantic subplot that every old-fashioned adventure needs, I could nonetheless sense that the old world being portrayed, a world where high-heeled women are ordered around by strange men they end up marrying, is indeed in the past. The production uses humour to carefully balance the era of John Buchan with our own. While faithfully reproducing the cultural moment of the 1910’s, the gentle parody enables the production to reflect on the disjunctions between then and now.

Overall, they put together a highly entertaining, thoughtful, balanced production of The 39 Steps that’s suitable for everyone age 8 upwards. I would highly recommend you take a few hours out of your weekend to go see this show. Tickets are still available here.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t exactly been active on this blog. There are two main reasons for this.

1.) For the past year, I have been the Website Manager for student magazine Writer’s Block, and I was doing essentially the same thing over there that I do over here: rant about things I’m passionate about. For that reason, this blog became very inactive. Over the coming weeks, I’ll do my best to get this blog going again, and I’ll post links to some of the articles I wrote for Writer’s Block so you can get a sense of what I’ve been doing, in case you’re still interested.

2.) I graduated both my bachelor’s programmes by writing 2 theses, so I was pretty busy writing. I might also share my theses here with you online, although I wasn’t exceptionally happy with at least one of them.

Getting this blog back on track, of course, is mostly about writing new content and sharing it with you, but it is also a little bit about updating it pages, so here we go.

I’m updating the books page to a 2019 edition, so here is a quick overview of what I read in 2018:

January

1. Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda – Becky Albertalli

2. Boy Meets Boy – David Levithan

3. The Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt

4. The Beatrice Letters – Lemony Snicket

5. Flowers For Algernon – Daniel Keyes

March

6. The Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri

7. You Talkin’ To Me? – Sam Leith

April

8.  Bartleby The Scrivener – Herman Melville

9. The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot

10. Waiting For Godot – Samuel Beckett

11. Foe – J.M. Coetzee

June

12. The Pale King – David Foster Wallace

Around this time I also began reading Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It is to blame for the fact that I read very few other books for the rest of the year and nothing at all in January and February of 2019.

July

13. Sex op z’n Duits – Linda Duits

14. Missing Kissinger – Etgar Keret

December

15. My Purple-Scented Novel – Ian McEwan

That’s it. Just 15 books.

Another part of updating the blog is that I’m reviewing the pages I have. The ‘Film’ page is going to be deleted, as I hardly ever watch films anymore, and so is the ‘Music’ page, since I now use a scrapbook to keep track of the live shows I see.

Here are the some elements from those pages that I want to keep, preserved for posterity:

Films seen in 2016

Live Shows of 2016

All-Time Favourite Films



The Princess BrideThe Breakfast ClubAlmost FamousStranger Than FictionRuby SparksThe Perks Of Being A WallflowerA Few Good MenThe Big LebowskiToy StoryAn Officer And A GentlemanPride10 Things I Hate About YouFight Club



My playlists can be found HERE on 8Tracks



Some of my favourite music



Elvis CostelloHamilton! and show tunes in generalDavid BowieBruce SpringsteenBelle & SebastianThe Magnetic FieldsJens LekmanTaylor SwiftThe Arctic MonkeysThe SmithsElton JohnBilly BraggThe ClashThe DexysFountains Of Wayne

I’m also giving up on challenges, except for the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge and the Goodreads Challenge 2019, which I will keep track of under the ‘Books’ page.

Challenges of 2017

Goodreads Challenge 2016

Feminism Reading Challenge 2016

LGBTQIA Reading Challenge 2016

That was all the admin for now, more content coming soon!

You’re seeing your favorite band. You’re hearing your favorite song. You’re attending the best concert that has even taken place on the face of the earth. A woman in front of you takes out her phone. You think she might want to capture this beautiful moment, but no: she’s checking her email.

Unfortunately, such incidents are becoming more and more common. I am here today to convince you to leave your phone at home the next time you attend a concert.

I am not unlike the woman I just described, checking her email at Paradiso; I am just as eager to stay on top of things as everyone else: I have my smartphone glued to my hand too, half the time. I understand the need to be accessible 24/7, to be in the loop. I experience it too.

But there is another side to this situation. There is a force at work here which is not individual, but collective, not “in the know”, but mindful, not anxious but relaxed. A concert offers an opportunity for repose, and I think you should take it. Here’s why.

You’re not alone at a concert. You purchased a ticket and thereby entered into a contract. Like any contract, this comes with certain rights as well as certain duties: you have the right to be there and the right to enjoy yourself and the right to hear the music you paid to hear. But you also have the duty to make sure your fellow audience members enjoy these same rights. Your rights are limited only by the rights of those around you. Once you enter the Paradiso’s hallowed halls, you and your fellow audience members are jointly responsible for making the show a success; this responsibility does not lie solely with the performers. A wise man once said: ask not what your concert can do for you, ask what you can do for your concert.

By taking out your phone, you are polluting the experience of your fellow audience members. The light given off by the screen will distract them, and if, God forbid, you raise your phone to record the performance, you are also obstructing their view.

I understand that your enjoyment might translate into a desire to capture that feeling, that moment or that song on the small screen forever. I am sorry to tell you that this cannot be done. I am sorry to tell you that time passes. Things fade away. And, above all: technology has not yet advanced far enough to capture the true feeling of seeing the best concert you have ever seen unfold before your eyes. I don’t think it ever will. So instead of focussing on your battery percentage or the lighting of your photo or the amount of likes it will earn you on Instagram, you might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

Perhaps you took out your phone because you were not attending the best concert of your life. Perhaps you took it out because you were bored. Perhaps you took it out because of an emergency, in which case you should leave the concert and go see your grandma in the hospital right away. In all other cases, I beg of you to muster up some semblance of respect for the performers working their ass off on the stage, and for the people around you who might, at this very moment, be enjoying the best concert of their lives.

If you cannot take out your phone at a concert, what can you do? How can you come to terms with the passing of time and the fading of memories? There’s only one way, really: enjoy it while it lasts. Listen to the beautiful notes, feel the beat in your bones and belt along to your favorite verses.  I know I will.

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