Isaac Fellman's avatar

Isaac Fellman

@isaac-fellman.bsky.social

276 followers 83 following 138 posts

Writer and archivist. THE TWO DOCTORS GÓRSKI (Fall '22), DEAD COLLECTIONS (Spring '22), THE BREATH OF THE SUN ('18, Lambda winner). NOTES FROM A REGICIDE upcoming in '25. He/him. 🏳️‍⚧️ Rep Kate McKean. .

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

it's a special year when Father's Day coincides with Bloomsday, so let's take time to remember Leopold Bloom: unconvincing father, tender but practical mourner, erudite conversationalist, devoted ass man, the Don Draper of cultural Jews, and loving husband to a wife whose kinkshaming turns him on.

0 replies 1 reposts 4 likes

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

June's avatar June @theworldsgreatestwriter.com
[ View ]

Okay I'll also hop on here when I've written something obviously. I wrote about "I Saw the TV Glow" and relatability, and how that relates to how the film grounds itself (or fails to) in its various ambiguities www.patreon.com/posts/if-the...

0 replies 8 reposts 18 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

six years of studying French in my teens and two years of the owl app, and I still can't speak the language, but I can at least make out key bits of Drag Race France. It helps that everyone says duolingo-ass sentences like "I am the queen of lip-synch in Lyon; the battle's going to begin!"

1 replies 0 reposts 10 likes

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

violet allen's avatar violet allen @blipstress.bsky.social
[ View ]

i don't like how the various discourses on "trashy" vs. "literary" novels kind of ignore that many "literary" books are extremely lurid and wild and many "trashy" books are boring as shit.

1 replies 5 reposts 27 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

1) lolol devastatingly real 2) it'll absolutely be your shit, when you do get to it!

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

Both of these *in the past twenty-four hours*, and without a shred of self-awareness until this moment

0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

Bewildered by the entertainment I'm choosing in my forties, such as "harrowing chamber opera about gun violence and community trauma" and "three-hour podcast episode about the Ford Pinto."

1 replies 0 reposts 10 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

this is one of those little UK things that I honestly could never have imagined. Cake in the bag!

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

Local friends, please consider seeing Innocence at the SF Opera! Heed the content warnings for sure -- it is intense -- but the reason I sit through so many mediocre classical shows is in the hope that something transcendent will happen, and this show is it.

www.sfopera.com/operas/innoc...

0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

It's a movie that absolutely has an afterlife in your psyche -- I still feel it like an afterimage searing my retinas.

0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

isaacs-law.ghost.io/we-saw-the-t... Wrote about Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow, which! Brr! Oof! Agh! Dammit! Special thanks to Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose great Patreon review moved me to see the film and continues to influence my thinking about its portrayal of fandom's hall of mirrors.

2 replies 3 reposts 10 likes

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

chris blue himself's avatar chris blue himself @chrisrd19.bsky.social
[ View ]

Finished Dead Collections by @isaac-fellman.bsky.social today, after practically sprinting through the second half in one long coffee shop reading marathon. It's an excellent book about grief, love, work, identity, fandom, change, and lots of vampire sex. Highly recommend.

1 replies 1 reposts 7 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

met my spouse there, so no regrets, but man, it was a journey before we did

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

This friend's book doesn't need my help, but big marketing campaigns never court the *contrarian* dollar, so. This is a wiry, subtly rancid, brilliant novel about what happens when you'll ruin your life for a sliver of empire -- and it's a love story, for all that. www.amazon.com/Ministry-Tim...

0 replies 4 reposts 8 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

you share this impulse with every single archivist

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

We were always being exposed to this in the eighties, albeit in a much sanitized version -- I had no idea of its origins in minstrelsy??

1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

oh yeah, most of them. My reactions to music have always been really strong, and I feel like a full-body horror at music that strikes me as "smug" or where I'm for some reason the lyrics also explain a dance I have to do, which of course are common tropes in children's music

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

Happy book birthday to June, whose LOVE/AGGRESSION is a gorgeous piece of architecture with rich, witty, unpredictable character work. It's about two trans girl frenemies who see the same world in different genres (one of them lives in a Hollywood satire, one in magical realism). Go get it!

1 replies 5 reposts 9 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

naming some knights for a book, here's the lowdown

0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

I stopped watching Drag Race after season 8 because I couldn't extricate myself from the kayfabe and kept going to bed angry at people with names like Dyamond Dryll. Eight years later and with the class consciousness to get mad at RuPaul instead, I've been watching it with my spouse every night. So:

0 replies 2 reposts 4 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

I've actually been a little scared to rewatch Wings of Desire because it was SO overwhelmingly moving the first time. I predict that it will still be absolutely fantastic

1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

My first Isaac's Law in like six months. It's been an intense time, you guys; I got married, I had a series of minor but earthshaking health issues, I stared my sense of doom in the face. Now we're posting again and it feels okay.

0 replies 0 reposts 11 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

I'm sick, and my spouse asked how I feel, and I said "no energy, no brain, completely acephalous," which is how you know that the real effort is not *talking* like this, it's pretending that I don't

0 replies 0 reposts 16 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

on friday the crowd was sparse -- they had moved us from little roxie to big at the last minute -- but the dolls who were there were vibrating and hollering and just the best crowd you could hope for at a cult movie

0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

when TMBG sang "memo to myself/do the dumb things I gotta do/touch the puppet head," they were of course speaking of the inevitable feverish course of the mini-challenges on drag race

1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

mattie lubchansky's avatar mattie lubchansky @lubchansky.bsky.social
[ View ]

concerned this might be some sort of ploy to ensnare trans people in a big net

14 replies 196 reposts 1078 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

I was interviewed for an episode of the Vorthos Cast podcast about the Magic story -- we talked about noir, gender, collaborating with 30 years' worth of strangers, and the ways you tell on yourself with every word you write. I loved talking to these folks!

soundcloud.com/user-3456430...

0 replies 2 reposts 6 likes

Reposted by Isaac Fellman

June's avatar June @theworldsgreatestwriter.com
[ View ]

I've seen a lot of trans people who obsess and ruminate over the time lost because they didn't transition young and suffered instead. At a fundamental level I think this is a desire for fairness in the world, and you have to let it go because there is none. Some people die at 20, some are born at 60

5 replies 22 reposts 154 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

Blue's psychologically gripping graphic novel ADVERSARY is now out! An "Isaac Fellman" blurbed it this way: "A swift poem of love and violence, a one-two punch – you won’t know what hit you.[...]Delliquanti has been a cartoonist to watch for a long time, but they’ve become one you *have* to watch."

2 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

It was fascinating to judge for the Tournament of Books -- Calvin and I were just talking about how it's simultaneously a dead serious literary prize and a useful joke about them, since it exists to highlight the impossibility/arbitrariness of deciding which of two very different books is "better."

0 replies 0 reposts 10 likes

Isaac Fellman's avatar Isaac Fellman @isaac-fellman.bsky.social
[ View ]

For the Tournament of Books, I judged Emma Cline's The Guest vs. Paz Pardo's The Shamshine Blind, both of which ended up being right in my noir/hardboiled wheelhouse. It was an exciting match to write, and I hope you enjoy! www.tournamentofbooks.com/2024/the-gue...

0 replies 1 reposts 7 likes