Chloe Cullen's Blog, page 2

How to write a New York bucket list

When “The West Village Girl” essay made its rounds, calling out the monotony of white twenty-something women climbing the influencer-adjacent ladder, it laughed at these women who sought friends in a specific circle in a specific subset of the city:

After they snapped a selfie, I observed one of them, in the course of a minute, check a group chat, swipe through a dozen Instagram Stories, clock in to her Hinge account (no new messages), then throw a few heart reacts into yet another group chat. W...

Lesson 7: A beginner's guide to Marcel Proust & SWANN'S WAY

You quickly collate the facts of Proust’s life into a sterile skeleton of bullet points:

He’s born in July of 1871. (A year like a ripple in pond. Does that number mean a thing? Does it mean anything when attributed to a bookmark in the chronology of our man-made history? No, not to you.)

His father is a French Catholic doctor, well regarded. His mother comes from a wealthy Jewish family.

He spent his childhood summers in the towns Illiers and Auteuil, which become the launchpad for his fictiona...

The Digest: Two fools, one engagement

In her burned-in-my-brain special Get On Your Knees, Jacqueline Novak uses her teenage sex life to catapult into philosophic ponderings on the charade of presentation.

When a friend’s older sister’s friend, who names herself “The Blowjob Queen,” offers advice to the group, Novak recoils at her lack of self-awareness. Novak lives in a bifurcated state with conflicting generative and critical egos:

I fear that if I’m confident, I may turn into what I think of as The Two Fools. Okay, so if I like my...

Why do I hate literary time travel?

Julia Child can still serve.

In her French Chef episode on French omelets, the camera’s mealy exposure zooms in on the eggs. They are a gelatinous mound of doubtful doneness. In thirty seconds, the butter in the pan froths, Julia whisks the eggs with a fork (resulting in a teeth clench on my side of the camera), and voilà—French omelet. Supper is served. Supper may also be undercooked.

Black-and-white 1960s cameras are the worst public relations that ever happened to eggs. Why watch this grainy vi...

6.4 Can you choose your own ending for Anna Karenina?

A Shakespeare professor I remember fondly for her red hair and black tattoo of a printing press symbol taught me that playwrights must create their plays. The writer has "wrought" the play, forged from a page into a collaborative form.

She took us to examine rare books, turning the large crackling pages with pencils or small wooden rods to avoid damaging the aged paper. We observed the difference between a folio, a huge publication with long and full sheets, and a quarto, the same page size folde...

Corporations make us sick, according to corporate TV studios

With the runaway hit THE PITT, Dr. Robby (a perfectly worn Noah Wyle) leads new doctors and residents through a 12-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room.

The season operates on a real-time schedule, meaning each episodic hour follows an hour on the shift. By episode seven, titled “1:00 P.M.,” the audience enters the shift’s seventh hour alongside the nurses, residents, and doctors. A Midwestern resident befriends a patient’s pregnant wife before learning the patient, burnt from a trailer acci...

6.3 Is Tolstoy’s "Anna Karenina" sexist?

Last weekend, on a whim, I rewatched Annie Hall. I watched it for the first time with my dad, who wrote a college paper about the film in a liberal arts class. He discussed the character evolutions of Alfy and Annie shown through their wardrobe, the shift from menswear to pristine white.

At the time, I hadn’t known much about Woody Allen’s allegations from his stepdaughter, Dylan Farrow, and his marriage to Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. This was the first time I watched a Woody A...

The Digest: Happy fourth anniversary to this newsletter

I run loads of laundry and clean Q’s apartment on Tuesdays and Fridays, and last Tuesday, I carried my laptop in my bag. The bag is too heavy. It tweaks my shoulders. It reminds me I’m near (...at) an age for back pain. Or, worse, an age where I talk about back pain.

My novel-in-progress, Dream Big, Inc., had neared the 300-page mark. I’ve never written 300 pages of anything before.

Seeing my excessive word count makes me feel like Adam Scott in Severance …

…but when I finally have to read these th...

Welcome to self-taught, a syllabus project for a girl who loves to research

Looking for a place to get started? Here are my favorite pieces from the four years of operating this newsletter, listed earliest to most recent.

I’m a girl who loves comedy and family sagas, low-brow romance thrills and 19th century literary classics. Any given weekend, I’m usually at someone else’s wedding. I’m an author of a book of essays (Perf), and I’m writing a novel.

I’m mildly paranoid about being on time to whatever life event is coming down the road, hence an obsession with recreation...

My Top 10 Auto-Pilot Albums

I’m an obsessive listener. If I like an album, often with a moody guitar and melancholic lyrics, I will play it a few days in a row. When I’m not listening, the songs are stuck in my head. Then I try to push it on someone else. Songs sent over text, then follow-ups requesting their opinion, only if it aligns with mine. Many a car ride have been monopolized by my insistence on listening to my current favorite album, a hazardous game when the sad-girl genre I frequent has the potential to make mos...