shel

The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.


I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.


I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock


Website (RSS + Newsletter)
shelraphen.com/

apparently they are making movies of all the emily henry romance novels and i just don't see how those can be good without either heavy changes or just having a voiceover internal monologue a la sex in the city. most of what makes those books good is the internal monologue of the characters and what they're thinking about the world and their lives and their emotions. the best parts of beach read were january thinking to herself about whether adding up all the beauty in the world and all the ugliness and pain if the beauty would still even be visible anymore. a lot of what made book lovers good was nora's internal emotional experiences and seeing how her trauma colored how she saw everything and seeing inside her how the ice queen exterior was really a manifestation of feeling like everything was a constant struggle for survival, even after she clearly had already won that battle long ago and didn't need to be fighting anymore.

if you take out the literary elements of these books, what is left? Beach Read: The Movie will be two people living in lakehouses going on dates to carnivals and going line dancing and being cute together, and for some reason also interviewing survivors of a cult in a way that would feel completely disconnected from the plot without the internal reflections on it. There's entire characters who exclusively exist via text messages or descriptions in memories, but still feel very present without ever being "on screen" until the end, because they just matter that much to January. The movie would barely be about her learning how to grieve her father while living in his secret second home where he cheated on her mother who had cancer, because she doesn't actually talk about that very much with the other characters. Also omfg so much of her behavior would be even more bewildering and insufferable when she gets mad at people without that internal monologue where we see it's a manifestation of feeling like she never truly knew her father and so gets very angry any time she feels like someone isn't being completely transparent with her, like she doesn't "truly know" them. Also how many of the sex scenes are they cutting because there's a lot of sex scenes.

and Book Lovers: The Movie is... what... a montage of Nora working in a coffee shop and tripping in mud really frequently? Also a lot of very important chemistry that happens over work emails. The book is a parody inversion of Hallmark Movie tropes but without the internal monologue I think the movie will just be a Hallmark Movie. One positive improvement is that they'll definitely be cutting the scene where they have sex in a public library study room which made me so mad it was the sole reason it didn't get a five star rating on my storygraph.


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in reply to @shel's post:

reading this threw me for a loop because honestly I could list the Many reasons I have for my not actually extant (yet) powerpoint "Please Don't Crank It Or Fuck In The Library" but the most effective one on most of its target audience is very simple

  • Bro You Have No Idea How Gross That Place You're Eyeing Up Has Been Before
    **(Sincerely I Promise You You'd Think The Bathroom Would Be Worse
    ***[It Almost Never Is])

I'm grateful my library doesn't have study rooms so instead we just deal with people trying to look at porn and crank it in the middle of the fucking library with everyone else around