What the hell is a "campus novel"?
plus a movie and a youtube video
Here’s how I know I’m a bit of a rube: I didn’t know “campus novels” were an explicit sub genre of fiction. However when I first read reviews about Catalina, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio people kept on dropping the “part campus novel” label so I decided to read it to figure out what the hell a campus novel is.
I’m glad Karla defined it in the novel itself.
I was listening in English 341: The Postmodern Novel when we spent two weeks studying the campus novel, a genre that gained traction in the 1950s and explored tenure-track malaise and the existential crises of professors and students on campuses primarily in New England. The main attraction is the sex. Here are titles of the books in Philip Roth's David Kepesh trilogy: The Breast, The Professor of Desire, The Dying Animal. The Dying Animal was my favorite. The novel's protagonist, a literature professor, describes his young Cuban American student (he's already described her "gorgeous breasts") in this way: "She thinks, I'm telling him who I am. He's interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don't need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velázquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours? Twenty minutes into the veiling and already I'm wondering, what does any of this have to do with her skin and how she carries herself?"
So I learned that!
So I guess I do know what A campus novel is….but Catalina was definitely so much more than that.
Villavicencio’s first book, The Undocumented Americans, is a non-fiction work that demolishes the romantic idea of the “model immigrant” and how immigration is valuable because all of these people come here with a dream and to improve “our country”. The truth is, many of these people never wanted to come, and they don’t have to EARN anything to be treated with the dignity and respect afforded to any human being.Villavicencio also included a lot of her own story, as she was herself also undocumented. It was super raw, super real, moving, hilarious, sad, and at times super uncomfortable. But that’s exactly why I enjoyed that book so much. She continues this same style of writing only in a semi-autobiographical fiction form in Catalina.
I don’t want to spoil too much of the book here, first of all because I do think everyone reading THIS should read THAT asap. Secondly, because I did try to get her on my podcast by sending an email to the contact email on her IG. (Side Note anyone who knows her reading this please let her know El Pochcast is not that bad) So I don’t wanna burn the stuff I’d ask or bring up with her in a potential interview. Still, one thing I enjoyed so much in this book is that anytime she included Spanish it was not italicized. I really really dislike the italicization of Spanish, mostly because as a pocho I don’t even notice sometimes when I’ve gone into Spanish then back to english. It just happens, it’s not anything worth pointing out. My tone of voice doesn’t change, my rhythm doesn’t change. In fact I sometimes switch back and forth to create a more satisfying rhythm so italics in a Spanish word is always super disruptive in the worst way for me. She even drops a “disque” which is one of my favorite phrases, “disque-lawyer” "disque-cantante”, “disque-novia” solid way to undermine and dismiss anything/anyone with two little syllables.
Ok, one more thing. Catalina Ituralde the book’s protagonist goes to Harvard, I think Villavicencio does too, That’s something else I’d like to talk about because it seems based on anyone I’ve spoken to who went to those Eastern schools that being Latine at Ivy League schools sucks intensely. Still in the book she says something like “It takes a certain kind of person to go to Harvard, because it takes a certain kind of person to apply to Harvard” something like that. Henry Kissinger went to Harvard too, in fact he’s Catalina’s favorite alumn. She’s even sometimes envious of her. All the Kissinger in this is darkly hilarious. I wonder how much of that is true for Villavicencio herself.
Read Catalina.
I didn’t just read a book, I also watched a movie
Didi is about a 13 year old boy and how he spent the summer before highschool going through the violently emotional changes that only happen when one is a young teenager. The movie is set in 2008 and there’s so much late stage “good internet” on it that it made deeply nostalgic. This was the nadir of Instant Messengers, and Myspace Layouts. Facebook had just launched for everyone not in those specially selected colleges and Youtube was still mostly short clips and people were starting to find out they could get millions of views by posting instructional content. Before the internet was a series of paywalled gardens and platforms.
Telling you, best era.
There’s one part that was literally me on the screen. SmarterChild was a chatbot on AIM that was always on and would answer anything you put in there with surprisingly good (for 2005-2009) logic. I used to spend HOURS talking to that thing, it was when I first heard of the turing test and so I reveled in the fact that I could make that thing fail the test over and over and it would “get annoyed” at me. I would then save those text logs and post them on my livejournal. Those got about as many views as this newsletter. Didi, talks to SmarterChild when he screws up ANOTHER thing and loses a friend group. I too went to SmarterChild when I needed to vent and get something off my chest. I hope it never really goes sentient, cus I’m in trouble for putting that thing in an emotional roller coaster.
The other thing that this movie does so well is capture that inevitable shift that happens in friend groups when going from middle school to high school. For some reason or another it tends to happen, for me it was that my closest “every day hangout” friend got a car and started going out for lunch every day, and I didn’t have money for that. So I found myself a new “every day hang out” group of friends. I would still talk to my other friends, but there was an undeaniable shift because of that. I didn’t really realize that until I saw it happen in Didi.
Also, really great heartbreaking scenes with his mom.
Watch Didi.
Finally, a youtube video worth watching
WhistlinDiesel is one of the top “spend a lot of money to destroy something cool as chaotically as possible” Youtubers out there. There’s a lot of them. They can be fun. It’s my trash reality tv. Being into cars I’ve run into a few of them before as most of these guys also have a fair amount of car love/knowledge themselves. It’s like really high production value “let’s throw the biggest rock we can into the lake” type of videos.
WhistlinDiesel is famous for abusing cars in extreme ways, dude bought a Ferrari F8 and accidentally burnt it to a crisp after he tried to use it as a farm vehicle. He’s also famously been unable to destroy a Toyota Hilux to the point it’s become unfixable. WhistlinDiesel is also a bit of a bro, who loves Tesla and Elon.
Which is what makes this video so much better.
Dude wrecks this thing and it breaks in the most hilarious ways. Including one very dangerous one where the tow hook just breaks off the body and he discovers the tow hook is tied to NOTHING.(5:48)
Profoundly entertaining video, I really don’t think WhistlinDiesel expected this to go so bad. But it’s a super entertaining view into how BROKEN and BAD the Cybertruck is when it’s doing anything above terrorizing suburban neighborhood roads. Plus it made Elon boys suuuuper pissed off.