Last month, I had a euphoric city vacation with friends, where I spent my time laughing until my cheeks hurt and walking until my feet bled as opposed to reading and writing my brains out. And then went on a more remote trip with friends where my fear of losing data or back-ups of my life’s work was so significant that I left my computer at home, something which I haven’t done since high school. I still had a bit of work to do and stuff to figure out so I brought a notebook and wrote by hand all week, another thing I haven’t done since high school. You know my thing about typing; I even journal on my computer etc. etc. I packed my favorite muji pen and a notebook so gorgeous I had been saving it for years. I had files loaded onto my phone incase I needed to access something and for the rest wrote everything out by hand. The conclusion of this isn’t some trite realization that my thoughts blossomed via the handwritten word but I’ll say that I got more writing done than I thought I would.

But as we inch towards the middle of the month of august, I have finally picked up a novel I cannot put down, and that is Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney which is so gdamn fun and exactly the stuff I have been seeking out all summer. Late in June I read another of McInerney’s works, The Last of the Savages, which was just about the only other novel I enjoyed reading this summer. Brightness Falls really is more fun though, in that it is very Fitzgeraldian, set against the background of the ambition, money and power of New York in the 80s. There’s also marriage troubles, and a plot to take over the publishing house the protagonist works at. I’m almost done with it and will be handing my copy to friends (and adding it to my douchebag lit list).

McInerney is but of course a peer of Bret Easton Ellis, and I think the last two years of my literary explorations have been that of discovering novels from the 80s. Like every other insufferable teenager of my generation, I proclaimed the 60s as my decade of choice but now come to think, the 80s were pretty cool and complex!!!! That is to say, my algorithm seems to indicate that I am the only person enjoying the TV adaptation of The Shards. Is the book better? Of course, but I am still enjoying myself a lot and by now have cultivated the good sense of knowing what I can and cannot expect of Ryan Murphy, and visually I love the universe he recreates!!! The bedrooms and set design in general I find to die for and so illustrative of 80s spoiled brats. The actor playing Bret I find also great!

Another curious thing happened: this has been the summer I have once again been taken captive by trash television.

I have watched trash television since the wonderfully impactful and developmental age of 14 but acquired an intolerance to it the year or two, not being able to stand let alone feel entertained by women trivially shouting at each other. Nature heals and so does my appetite for reality television. I actually wrote an entire essay about The Secret Life of Mormon Wives, but decided to shelf it, at once for my own self-preservation and your opinion of me, but also because the updates and scandals relating to the cast have been rolling in all summer (and continue to) at a pace I couldn’t adequately chronicle. Whatever I wrote would have been rendered an incomplete, historical document by the time I hit post. I then had all these ethical qualms about my enjoyment of reality tv that I decided to simply unload my theories to my friends. I am free for now, but only until the next season drops.

I also finally got around to watching the Bonjour Tristesse remake, which I did not hate at all!!!! It is without a doubt different from the book I've loved for so long. It is a modern retelling though modernity isn’t being stuffed down your throat either. It’s just wistful and sweet and I won’t complain about movies like these being made! Plus, Chloe Sevigny is so good in it (and watching her this week on this new show The Five Star Weekend playing the opposite character just reinforces the thought that she is the coolest and can do absolutely everything).

As with every summer, I feel like something of an outsider because it seems everyone loves summer except me. I also celebrate my birthday in July, and the date threatens to almost take me out every year. To my surprise, my 27th birthday (a joyful day against subconscious attempts of mine to ruin for myself), I came out of it actually feeling younger than I’ve ever felt, which is saying a lot for someone who felt she was traversing a long and senile girlhood ages 19-22. Life gets so much better every year and I couldn’t be more grateful for all of it!! Still, I cannot sit still and am eager to fulfill all the promises I have made to myself and make something out these seeds hopefully not in soil for much longer!!! This august, like all the others, I feel ready to apply the lessons of a new age, like a New Years Day, or more amply perhaps, a september first. So I trundle along, restlessly, september almost in sight.

I ought to come clean and get my biases out of the way so that my summer reading philosophy makes sense: Summer might be my least favorite season! Actually, I know it is. I mostly feel alone in this sentiment, like a grinch of sorts, but it is just too hot for my enjoyment and the season never makes me feel like myself. I really come into myself in the fall, and summer is just sort of too long and melancholic. Blame the traditional school calendar, but summer always has me reconsidering the pillars of my life, anxiously awaiting developments that I know will only occur in the fall. Therefore, to prevent uneasily sitting through the season, I read books that alleviate this malaise!

Most people like summer but I still think that anyone could benefit from thoughtfully picking out the books for vacation, because it’s when people have the most time to read. In that sense, packing for books requires you to play it safe to a certain extent. I’d say pack stuff you’re likely to enjoy. I, for one, save the ‘hyped’ books for home. I don’t want to take the chance to read something I feel is overrated and be stuck with it on vacation.

One of my upcoming trips is a carry-on only situation, which makes the decision as to what books to pack harder. (Otherwise I would just fill my suitcase with extra options). Most people are mood readers and it’s not only hard to know what you’ll want to read on holiday but also how many books you might get through. You can drag through one, or you turn them out in a couple of long afternoons. It sucks finishing your last book with more days left, just as much as it sucks hating the book you packed and had high hopes for.

My case against the beach read is the following: Whatever is typically marketed as a ‘summer book’ or a ‘beach read’ I don’t actually take to be ideally read in the summer. I actually prefer to read these kinds of books in the dead of winter or on a rainy evening flight. This is because, to my core, I think I prefer reading in an opposite environment/ vibe/ setting/ season to the one I find myself in.

Reading in opposite, I think, creates more escape and the age old condition of wanting what you can’t have. Books about California are best read not in California (I like to read them in the cold European winter!), I don’t think reading A Moveble Feast while in Paris is a good idea either (I’ve done that, it’s cliché and I don’t find it actually makes for maximum enjoyment). It is so much dreamier to read A Moveble Feast imagining Paris than to be there. This theory of mine is not rooted in any concrete backed up reason beyond an overarching vibes-based preference which I think relates to my cynicism that the world falls short when put next to a great novel!

So what do I read on vacation?

I like to read classics, preferably the very long kind. I actually think it is myself favorite thing to do. Because it anchors my summer melancholy and aimlessness into a purpose, because a large book is always daunting, and takes a lot for someone to pick up when you’re actually busy during the year. (Conversely, reading lots of short books during periods of being busy does wonders for your reading confidence!).

Books like Anna Karenina, The Magic Mountain, East of Eden are fantastic options and so long that you likely get too distracted during the rest of the year to actually get around to it. With a long book, you can’t rush through it and I think it is nice to spend time with it and have it define some weeks of your life. (Note: East of Eden is getting the Netflix treatment by the end of the summer. Not sure what we can except though I urge anyone who hasn’t read it to at least read it before the show comes out!!)

I’ll add another special mention for gothic lit, or spooky stuff. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier to me is a perfect summer book. If you insist on reading something short, try The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. My favorite author to read in the summer is Edith Wharton. Her novels are just so decadent, the stakes are perfectly low, while the prose (and the slang of the era) is challenging enough to have you emerge wittier, armed with better vocabulary and the kind of descriptions of the weather to back up the way you feel about your life.

In general, I think summer is the perfect time to read whatever big book you keep meaning to get around to (cough cough Infinite Jest). (Last year I read Middlemarch, which was a good effort on my part though not an enjoyable process).

Another special mention for fans of The Secret History: The Little Friend by Donna Tartt is part southern gothic, part murder mystery and so gripping.

Next category: If you’re on a vacation, books set in a city. Again with the opposite setting.

There are so many ‘summer in the city’ novels, though I do have a preference for the New York novel. I just read Rona Jaff’s The Best Of Everything, which is sort of a hybrid between Sex and the City, Mad Men, and a little bit Valley of the Dolls.

I will settle for a Paris novel, too, and for that I love The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan, or The Inserperables by Simone de Beauvoir. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath counts as a ‘summer in the city’ novel as well as a classic, so to me it checks every box. If I were to descend into madness, you can be sure that it would be in summer.

Any douchebag lit, as defined last week, I find very satisfying to read by the beach. As well as anything reminiscent of back to school, think Elif Batman’s The Idiot and Either/ Or.

The Hollywood biography or tell-all memoir.

Embracing the omissions and exaggerations, suspending one’s critical thinking in favor of tragic or absurd glamour is my chosen form of comfort.

I just read The Party of The Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball by Deborah Davis and it was fun. But there are plenty more Hollywood books to choose from. I think you can’t go wrong with Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner. I’ve written about other biographies/ memoirs / diaries I’ve read and I think any would be a very fine vacation companion.

I will add that if you are on a friend vacation and are scared to get interrupted every couple of minutes, then reading a diary is ideal because you can dip in and out very easily. The Unabridged Diaries of Sylvia Plath, again checks all the boxes for me: it is very long, it is tragic, and the everyday cadence of it anchors you into a setting opposite of that of losing track of days during vacation.

I will dabble in Rivera literature because I grew up reading it in the summer. Think Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald or Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.

Do let me know your suggestions!

I’ve just gotten back from a trip with friends and once again have stuff to say. Namely, remarking upon the all too familiar sight of girls flying through books on vacation in a way that men just don’t. I have my own theories about why that is, though I’d like to focus on what would get these men to read more, namely a good list of books.

I have on a few occasions recommended book to boys/guys/men and over time it has become something of a list I pass on. Now, don’t come for this shameful instance of gender essentialism as the reason why I feel up to crafting such a preposterous list is because I have been known to have douchebag lit taste in books. I call it douchebag lit, well because this is HFB, and I guess the books I will be listing out produce a feeling of sympathy or closeness with characters that don’t deserve it, and personally make me feel silly for feeling touched in the first place.

Without even realising it, it turns out that I essentially only read books written by men until my early twenties, and while I’ve considerably branched out since, it has shaped my formative taste in literature and these boyish books are the ones I read for comfort. While I have very little patience for it in real life, it seems, I really have a knack for the male sensibility represented in literature. Is that what they call karma?

(Let me add a quick note for the opposite school of thought that I am also heavily invested in, that is it-girl lit and I could make an equally absurd list for it; think Colette, Eve Babitz, or Ottessa Moshfegh, from Lolita to Sula. But there are plenty of these on the internet already. I feel like I am digging myself into a hole but I think that attachment to a male character may be rooted in the opposite of what loving a female protagonist consists in! (Tbd for they/them!) Because even if a female protagonist is unlikable I still feel justified in liking her? idk!!!).

My personal preference for douchebag lit is the kind written in high modernism, the mid 20th century, but it is a tradition can be traced across centuries (think Lord Byron or Tristam Shandy!). The effects produced is feeling pulled by your heart strings, attachment to a character against all odds! Characters with an attitude of irreverence, sentimentality, passivity or rebellion. Though it ought to be noted that this list, existing at the crossroads of masterpiece and comfort-read, includes classics as well as titles that not only expand on and subvert trad-douchebag lit, it also takes the reader on a journey across genres, styles, and era for maximum enlightenment and education. The end goal being to emerge a better read individual, however a balance between mental/ emotional/ stylistic expansion and comfort must be struck in order to have a better chance at the reader actually getting through the list and deriving something from it.

So here is the list. Somewhat explained, completely based on my own taste, my arbitrary conception and shaky scholarship of douchebagery, but I also because I got good feedback on it and it got the intended readers in my life back into reading. Which is all that matters!

Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInery. Here’s where I would start. It’s short and fun! A New York novel about working at a literary magazine. Men love the 80s, don’t they?

Stoner by John Williams. This one’s a classic. A passive protagonist, but still douchey. Might hold up a mirror to some. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea but better to be well read then not.

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. I love love love Taffy and think she is the coolest (She writes all the best celebrity profiles and quite simply turns them into art). This book is one to bring on vacation and for the divorced men. Plot driven, with a great ending which I would argue subverts the douchebag novel and elevates it! After reading it, you can also watch the TV show, which is perhaps as good as the book.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. This is one of my favorite books. There’s little I love more than a campus novel and this one is both smart and soapy. I was shocked to find out that my friend didn’t swoon over the main character as much as I did so maybe it isn’t as universally appealing as I thought it was. Do let me know so we can settle this.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, the author probably most responsible for making a douchebag out of readers, me included. This one is short and life changing, cerebral, and of course, set in New York.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Including this because I’m feeling called to reread it. Fitzgerald’s first novel, youthful, idealistic, and full of entitlement just the way I like it :’).

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. Brats from LA on drugs told from the only person who ever could! His first breakout novel, Less Than Zero is also a good (and shorter) contender but I preferred The Shards. You do have to stick with it, though.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. All about how to raise boys! Very dense but so rewarding and also one that makes the douchebag novel better. You can also read its prequel of sorts, Leaving the Atocha Station.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. Doesn’t completely fit in with the rest of the lot but this is still one I would recommend to read, as it is expansive. It’s also an easy sell in an intimidating Fitzcarraldo edition: the story of phony millennials and their conditioned aesthetic choices.

Appropriate by Branden Jenkins Jacobs. This is a play and I think it is hard to get people to read plays but that’s because they haven’t read Branden Jenkins Jacobs yet, who must the most incredible and accomplished playwright at the moment. You can also read it in a sitting. There are plenty of awful characters in this and manages to be extremely funny while being so emotionally complicated and such an original work. Don’t read the synopsis, just go for it.

There are many more, some are left off because I cannot stomach them, others because I am ignorant! Let me know still, dear reader.

Feed Me’s Summer Novel Reading List. I love love love Emily Sundberg’s newsletter and I love the idea of crowdsourcing the perfect summer novel! Agreed with Tender is the Night. I reread it every couple of summers, along with Bonjour Tristesse, it’s just in my neighbourhood. Lonesome Dove has been coming up on my radar time and time again in the last few months and this may be my sign to pick it up. Then again, I still haven’t read Infintie Jest, and if I’m hanging myself to a 900+ page book, I guess Infinite Jest has to be it.

Olivia Rodrigo’s interview on Popcast. I love Popcast, and I find that in the age of podcasts/ video shows, they’re one of the few that actually ask real questions.

“Writing as Transformation” by Louise Glück for the New Yorker

“Algorithm Nation: Bookforum talks with film critic A. S. Hamrah” by Christian Lorentzen for Bookforum

“How Vincenzo Latronico Went From Construction Worker to Booker Nominee” for Cultured Mag.

Best for last: The Pulp Magazines Project is an online archive of pulp magazines from the 1930s. Browsing through is such a treat. I landed on the page dedicated to Love Story Magazine, a pulp dedicated to romance stories and serials. From what I gather, Love Story was a successful magazine, though even then, pulps largely retained marginal status as literary document. I was able to find an online archive of Love Story Magazine, though I wish someone would anthologies them!

Reading this in light of the current romance novel boom the publishing world is experiencing is interesting. I haven’t read very many contemporary romance novels, though I have respect before it (I’m quite interested in what 831 Stories is doing), and definitely read a lot of YA as a kid.

I love how the covers of Love Story reflect the fashion of the time, but even better are the ads!!!! I read some of the serials and some of them are truly nuts and others just cute. I found myself endlessly charmed by the old timey American names of the writers (Georgette Macmillan! Louise Carter Lee! Vivian Grey!) And the astrology section alone is worth taking a moment for, along with the corresponding astrology-specific advice column, where readers wrote in with their love related conundrums.

Happy weekend!

I wanted to share some recent thoughts about writing. Right before leaving to New York I got back into some sort of a writing flow, after weeks and weeks of feeling like everything I wrote was really boring and trite, which is embarrassing and a torturous process to try to write through. And then without being able to explain it, I sort of drifted out of that funk.

Last week, Ottessa Moshfegh posted a conversation with Josephine Sloyan, where together they chatted about what happens when you finish a project. The you’ll-know-it-when-you’re-done kind of feeling, and conversely, the process of writing and knowing you’re decidedly not done. I’ve had both these feelings, and you really can’t miss them. I liked Ottessa’s post because it got at the tension of feeling sure about one’s writing, as well as feeling bad about it, and how these states radically affect how you view your own work or progression, which is what I wanted to discuss this week.

Last fall I finished and handed in a project which I had been working on for over a year, and in the purgatory that was having the fate and future home of this project being decided, I took a short break. In the winter, I slowly began writing something else, if only to refrain from refreshing my emails all day long. I also had a new idea. Without it, I likely would have taken a bit of a longer break from writing something new. Starting this new project, I had about a blissful month where it poured out of me, which is easy because at the beginning you’re really just throwing shit at the wall, and telling yourself you’ll clean up some other time. And then came the moment to clean up and begin making actual decisions about this new plot from all I had amassed. Structural and directional decisions, stylistic ones, and so on. Then followed months of limited, yet succinct, moments of clarity in regards to what this new plot could be, but overwhelmingly I was feeling so gdamn tired, like everything I wrote was garbage, mostly because I couldn’t not get myself together for long enough blocks of work. My focus wandered nonstop and I did just about anything to get up from my computer (including signing up for a half-marathon, and properly training for it was the perfect excuse to feel justifiably exhausted). Now, anyone that writes knows that short moments of clarity are more than enough to sustain you, and it did. I also felt I needed to push through, precisely because I was making progress, albeit slow progress, much slower than writing my first thing.

I attribute the stagnation and dread to a few things, 1) struggling to free up my mental real estate and fully commit myself to something new when my first thing still hadn’t (hasnt!) seen the light of day yet!!!! And 2) knowing too much about my own process, again, in light of my first project. I know everything that went into the multiple cycles of drafting. How much I wrote, cut and rewrote, and the idea that whatever I was writing right now would likely not make it to the final version felt exhausting and made getting to work so much harder.

But that’s the trick, you need to write a lot, even if it’s bad, test out dynamics between characters and put them in situations that likely won’t make it into the final draft, but that often clears up stuff and provides a backbone for your storyline. (Ottessa mentions this, overwriting backstory only to take it out afterwards, for it to become invisible yet still shape the entire book, and how cutting passages trains you to stay open to other possibilities). Writing a lot makes you encounter problems, inconsistencies, come up with an idea and develop it for thousands of words across your entire manuscript, only to think of an even better idea and have to replace it, find a different direction for a character and so on. The thought of that is daunting because it does require accepting aimlessness, being open to changing and deleting stuff you feel good about for the possibility of something better or bolder, not knowing where you’ll end up or how long it will take. And then there’s the district feeling Ottessa mentions, when you’re done.

But even before you’re done, it is just so much easier to wrap your head around doing all this work when you’re in a good flow and feeling good about where your work is headed. This seems obvious, and it is, but the flow can be so fickle and when it’s gone you have no idea when it’ll be back or how long it’ll be back for.

I will say that I was particularly driven all of last year, and I think that also has to do with the fact that I was making a pointed effort at cultivating attention (inspiration?) in everyday life and in my readings, and that focus dwindled away from me when I submitted my work in the fall. (In fact, the reason why I picked up my substack again was precisely an effort at cataloguing thoughts and forcing myself to be more present in my cultural consumption). Life happens and smartphones are addictive. Plus, I happen to be incredibly procedural (bordering on tyrannical) about my routine, which means that daydreams and aimless thoughts are the first thing to go out of the window when I take my eye off the ball. And the way this shows up in my writing is that my not being present makes early drafting and world building so much harder. Feeling good about my writing comes with the side effect of being porous to the world, and personally shows up in all forms of detestable forms of moodiness and hyper-sensitivity. On the other hand, when I’m on top of my shit (and behaviour!), I find my writing trite, and again, overly procedural. (Perhaps a moment better suited for editing?).

But then again, I find it is the strangest things that can unblock you. For a while, there was an element of an early draft that felt incomplete and not totally fleshed out, and my editor told me this and I agreed, but I felt really blocked on it and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. It actually took another person telling me the same thing but saying it in a different way for it to click for me. The other person had simply expressed the same concern but put it in a way that extracted its right expression out of me. Typically, as soon as something like this clicks it almost always feels like it obviously needed to be this way and not any other way, like it was right under your nose. And yet, this kind of tiny victory can be such a gust of wind to your sails.

I also spend a lot of time thinking about the perspective of the writer over his own work, how sometimes it can be impossible to see it for what it is (whether that is pacing or revelatory aspects of plot). Though sometimes, all it takes is to give your draft to read to someone else, for it to zoom out in your mind, gain an entirely new dimension, making you see your work for how unconvincing/embarrassing/ improbable/ unfinished it is !!!! Or for all the typos to jump out at you even though you read over it a million times without seeing them!! Truly humbling, and in my experience nothing makes you run to back to your desk faster. Ottessa discusses a version of this, in regards to reading recently written/unfinished dialog and how embarrassing that can be. When it feels fabricated or insincere. Ottessa describes writing melodrama and how there is a fine line between accomplishing that or having it sound like a soap opera. Though personally, I think I would be convinced by anything she wrote.

That is quite enough for now! I have completely lost sight of anything I was getting at and hope you’ll let me blame the travel!

Until next time xxx

I landed here a couple of days ago, in the middle of graduation season, and the weather followed suit. It was 30 degrees today! I ran the Brooklyn Half marathon on Saturday, but of course did not want to stress myself out about it so much that I wouldn’t do all the other stuff I would usually do on a visit here. If correctly planned out, the jet-lag from Europe can allow one to pack three days in one, and this is exactly what have been doing since arriving: walking up early, crossing town multiple times over, takeout coffee in hand, going to museums, catching up with friends, and walking over 20,000 steps before even running my half. (You’ll likely hear about the BK half some other time!).

Since landing I’ve been seeing so many girls riding the subway and walking 3rd Avenue in their cap and gowns, and it has really brought me back to my own NYU graduation, which, I cannot believe happened four!!! years!! ago!!! I maintain that this is one of the best weeks to be in the city and maybe that’s because I remember the week of my own graduation as one of the best weeks of my life!!! It was a week of bittersweet endings and scary beginnings, gratitude, urgency and euphoria, walking through the greenwich village in my cap and gown, being congratulated by strangers in that specific American way that is both naive and earnestly thrilled :’).

I was ready to be done with school by the time I was a college senior, that was until graduation week arrived and felt completely overwhelmed by joy and love for my school and these incredibly formative years of my life (it would only take a few months for me to want to go back and apply for grad school!). I distinctly remember sitting in Bobst, the NYU library, knowing it was the last time I’d be there (under these circumstances, at least) and began feeling intensely nostalgic for a moment that was fleeting right through me, which was also the last moment of quiet I remember from that week. Until suddenly everything felt urgent, taking finals and handing in assignments like a check list, packing up my apartment, and saying goodbye to friends all while juggling the excitement my family flying in and our plans for the week. By the time they arrived, I moved out of my apartment and into my mother’s hotel room, taking with me my dog and my many suitcases.

Now, I was one of the blessed students that were NYU class of ’22, which mean that Taylor Swift was the speaker at the university-wide ceremony. I can’t even express the enormity of this, other than to say that there couldn’t have been a better, more sentimentality charged speaker to send me out into the world.

If you are at all interested in the Taylor of it all, and how the speech figures into her career, you have come to the right place. I won’t make this exhaustive because I have the tendency to lose people when I go all ‘swifty’ on them. But since it happened at MY graduation, let me go ahead, why don’t you?

First, we ought to establish the meaning and traditions of what is known as ‘easter-egging’ in the swifty-verse, because ‘easter eggs’ have gotten a bad rep for being intentional coded messages sent by Taylor to the fans in a marketing type of way, but like any respected academic field, some practices and terminology evolve. ‘Easter-eggs’ used to point to the way in which Taylor communicated with fans, way before the hugeness of her success, when that kind of back and forth with fans was more manageable and wouldn’t snowball into full-blown conspiracy theories (for instance, Taylor use to capitalise letters throughout lyric booklets inside her album in a way that spelled out the names of her ex-boyfriends, though this tradition has died with her understandable desire for more privacy! All that is to say, Taylor once encouraged the detective fan behaviour). However, there exists a subtler type of easter-egging, one that I find to be far more interesting. The easter-egging I’m interested in, is simply a natural by-product of Taylor being a vulnerable storyteller. Meaning, that sentiments she expresses in songs often only make sense with time. For instance, via repeated motifs and metaphors, making the subject or muse of a song traceable throughout her discography. Ideally, one interacts with all this information and the muses like with characters in a story, but other times it feeds the intense parasocial relationship that swifties are so known for. So, before I humiliate myself, just know this is coming from a place of love and interest in the craft and evolution of Taylor’s career and storytelling!

When I think of this speech, Taylor giving us advice and sending us on our way out into the real world, I can’t help but think about where she was headed, too. In the speech, she tells us, “Today, you leave New York University and then go out into the world searching what’s next, and so will I.”

Intriguing??? I hadn’t thought twice about this when I first heard it, but it is clear with the couple of years of Taylor-mania that followed that she knew she would have a lot on her plate in the months to come, and likely a lot she would have to give up in return.

Again, the gift of hindsight shows that this graduation speech actually came at a fascinating point in Taylor’s career: on the heels of Folklore and Evermore, Taylor had amassed the most creditability she ever had! And knowing what we know about the work that would come later (three albums and two break ups later), her speech demonstrates that she was on the precipice of some sort of reinvention. Not to mention that her rerecording project, which was also earning her a lot of goodwill among the public and music industry, likely fostered a lot of reflection when it came to her past writing and the evolution of her career. This, I can only imagine, then probably led to further introspection about where she was headed, both in her personal and professional life.

In the months that would follow, Taylor would release her cryptic album, Midnights, dump her longterm boyfriend, date an old flame that, as it turns out, was one of the most significant muses in Taylor’s body of work (more significant that we knew at the time), all while embarking on her biggest tour yet, release The Tortured Poets Department in the middle of the same tour (an album which makes the old flame narrative really click), and meet her future husband.

But back to May 2022. In her speech, Taylor actually weaves in some lyrics from the yet unreleased album, Midnights. Knowing the album now, I think one of the most interesting songs that relate to this moment, to this imminent reinvention hinted at in Yankee Stadium, is the closing track “Dear Reader.”

It ought to be said that Midnights, in general, is an album where Taylor had so much to say, but couldn’t say it yet, she hadn’t dumped the bf yet and unleashed the trickle down chain of events that this would produce. But on “Dear Reader” she wants us to know she’s was about to change everything about her life, from her love life to the way she engages with fame, but all of that will only click later, when Matty Healy starts showing up to the Eras tour and she!!! while!!! on!!! stage!! mouths I love you to him and say this song is about you during the instrumental of “cardigan.” This was nuts!!!!!

In “Dear Reader,” she says,

Dear reader / Burn all the files, desert all your past lives / And if you don’t recognize yourself / That means you did it right

In the song, she is gearing up to burn her life to the ground and start over, a theme also treated on the song “Midnight Rain.” Most jarring, is the next line,

Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart

Later,

So I wander through these nights / I prefer hiding in plain sight

Which is what she’s always done, hiding in plain sight, writing her darkest thoughts for the whole world to listen to. The media may pick up things here and there, usually her easy jabs at ex-boyfriends, but Taylor had been writing about this unfinished business love-affair for YEARS and it went unnoticed! She is always hiding in plain sight, and this precisely is best thing about being a swifty: close-reading is rewarded and endlessly satisfying. Again, not in an invasive way, but in the same way one reads a novel. There are connective dots and through lines, and Taylor’s entire artistic project is documenting matters of the heart and being unafraid of embarrassment and vulnerability if it furthers the art.

Later she encourages the ‘dear reader,’ to find another “guiding light,” hinting there are things we don’t know, that we don’t have the full picture, and that,

You wouldn’t take my word for it / If you knew who was talking

:o

You can watch the full speech here. She is simply endlessly charismatic and the speech is otherwise full of wonderful advice. I’ll never forget being there!!!!!!!

Before I warn you off for spoilers (there is a twist I’ll be discussing below and I’m not entirely convinced by it), I’ll begin by saying this was page-turner!! I really enjoyed reading it, and would recommend anyone take this on vacation this summer and pass it around to friends to discuss. It is original, provocative, and there are a lot of great comedic moments.

The novel is told from the perspective of our anti-hero, Natalie Heller Mills. Natalie is a character with truly terrible thoughts, six kids, and no penchant whatsoever for motherhood. She is strong-willed and knows what kind of a life she wants, and in light of her useless husband, knows she will have to go out there and make it happen for herself. I was hooked, and it took no time for me to start rooting for her and her fraudulent pesticide-filled ranch!!!!! Still, with such an ambitious premise, I’m not sure if the ending delivered its promises, or reached its full potential, which is what I’ll be discussing below.

Structurally, the narrative goes back and forth between Natalie’s life, beginning as a Harvard freshmen, and then swings back and forth to the 1855 pioneer world she seemingly has been transported to, until both narrative collapse into some sort of explanation.

Already in college, Natalie may keep to herself, but she knows what kind of femininity she disapproves of, and is sick of being “waterboarded with modernity.” She begins a rivalry with her progressive roommate Reeva, which she will continue to nurture like an obsession long out of college. It is also in college that she meets her future husband, Caleb. In fact, it doesn’t take too long for him to become her husband. They marry while still in college (I think during freshmen year?), and Natalie drops out shortly thereafter, once she’s pregnant with her first child. It also doesn’t take her long to realise that Caleb is an idiot and completely unambitious. But Caleb comes from money and his father is a famous politician, who is looking to run for President (this is one of my favorite plotlines). Caleb has no ambitions or desire to work, the only thing that gets him excited is the idea of living on a farm, and living off its produce, as he increasingly starts consulting conspiracy theory forums in the MAHA & manosphere realm. And so, influencing arises out the need for Natalie to take matters into her own hands.

And as it happens, Natalie quickly becomes an online symbol of the ideal housewife on manosphere blogs that Caleb consults, and on the other end of the spectrum, rage-bait for progressive women, AKA, the Angry Women. You keep reading as tension builds up, the hypocrisy of Natalie’s life against a carefully curated pastoral projection of what a real American family should be. In the background: modern kitchen appliances, nannies, and an in-house producer helping her film her content. Supposed organic vegetable are being grown in the garden by her cowboy/MAHA-pilled husband, but he fails to properly grow these vegetables, so Natalie has them secretly sprayed with pesticides by the immigrant workers, and it is her Brooklynite in-house producer (whom Natalie has always been suspicious of) who begins asking questions and poking her nose around (which is all I’ll say).

Ironically, it is Natalie’s husband Caleb, who wishes he could play with the kids all day and not work. While Natalie barely looks at her children and runs the entire operation at home through which the family lives.

He was good at playing with babies. He never grew bored or irritated with Clementine. He found her endlessly entertaining. In fact, that was the problem, wasn’t it? He had no desire to do anything else. My husband wanted too little from his life. And me? I wanted too much. Suddenly it was so obvious: Caleb should’ve been born a woman, and I should have been born a man. A sad sickness turned in my stomach. We were equally broken in that way.

Now, about the twist: In the 1855 version of the world, Natalie is forced to live the traditional lifestyle she was previously only staging for her online presence, and those parts of the text have the virtue of being short chapters, but they’re also strange and I wasn’t sure where we were being led. Still, what I thought would happen is that the ending would relate to some sort of political situation Natalie would find herself in the middle of, with her father-in-law becoming President or something of the sort, and she being instrumental in serving a political message through her lifestyle.

We learn in the last few pages that Natalie has not actually gone back to 1855. Instead, she suffered a mental breakdown when her public life has unravelled into scandal after her producer goes on television to give a tell-all interview about her experience working for Natalie. What had appeared to be a return in time, was actually the collapsing of Natalie’s sanity.

This twist has significant implications when it comes to the ultimate meaning of the novel: Natalie’s breakdown does not further the systemic critique of women living in a patriarchal society, complicity and what it means to benefit from a system that actually traps you.

What the twist does, is leave us with Natalie’s battle with mental health, which ends tragically by the way. The novel ends up saying something about women crumbling under pressure, chipping away at the satire that had been previously building up so strongly, lessening its critique of gender roles, the regressive ideals that sustained Natalie’s seemingly perfect lifestyle, religion, power, hypocrisy, influencer capitalism, in favour of making this a narrative about a woman having a mental breakdown. Don’t get me wrong, a woman having a breakdown is the premise of some of my favorite books of all time, though I’m not sure it serves the hugeness of Yesteryear’s ambitions.

Of course, Natalie is collateral damage to the cultural norms she helped shaped and propagate (while the men relatively remain unscathed, this could also a point of discussion), but this precisely is an interesting point of tension. The emphasis placed on her breakdown makes her seem as though she played less of a role in the system and was a victim of it, which I think is, for one, less interesting, but also maybe not the entire truth, considering what we know about Natalie. An alternate ending relating to something larger than her psyche would have perhaps made for a deeper exploration of profit and complicity, because I maintain that she is not a clueless character. Even at the start, when Natalie doesn’t know what she’s getting into when marrying Caleb, she learns fast. Natalie is pulling a lot of the strings, is extremely self-aware and knows how to read a room! I wanted to believe that the MAHA/ purity / manosphere implications were more than just timely entertainment and would actually contribute something larger to the ending.

A part of me wished Natalie would have somehow gotten back at the men in her life, her husband and her father-in-law, tanked both their political careers and spread her empire of cookware or whatever, some sort of chilling Ripley-esque ending, where Natalie gets everything she wants. But even for the reader hoping for Natalie’s downfall, I don’t think this isn’t a satisfying ending either: Throughout the novel, Natalie’s nastiness is fun to read, and suddenly the twist does not make it fun anymore. She’s having a mental breakdown and actually abusing her children (as opposed to ignoring them!), which makes it such that by the end you can’t even rejoice in her downfall because the situation is sad and sort of jarring.

Ultimately, I found the ending might have been a bit rushed, which is also why I think it underdelivered in terms of what I think it was trying to achieve.

I still think Yesteryear is incredibly original and worth reading!!! It has also been so cool to see the reception of this book. Anytime a novel is huge, it’s good for publishing. Caro Claire Burke has also shared how she spent all of her twenties being rejected by publishers, working on two entire novels before selling this one, which is refreshing to hear, and makes me all the more thrilled for her and what she’ll write next.

Over the next few weeks I’m planning on reading Lázár by Nelio Biedermann, and Swing Time by Zadie Smith, in case anyone wants to read along!

Somewhat related to last month’s said frenzy: When everyone started buying vintage issues of George magazine on Ebay, information reached me that George was not actually all that it is being cooked up to be. Much less compared to Spy magazine, which should be having the revival George is having right now! Now, my understanding is that George played it lousily safe because of JFK Jr.’s refusal to burn political bridges. (For instance, George did not report on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal). Meanwhile, I knew of Spy because of Graydon Carter’s memoir, but was not much more familiar with it. I was delighted to find out that Spy’s archives are available online, and I had a fab weekend scrolling through this witty and ruthless time capsule.

Zendaya & Robert Pattinson on Finding Their Partners: “You Know The Second You Meet Them” from the New York Times “Modern Love” column, which is always a fun listen!

“Does ‘The Drama’ Know Zendaya Is Black?” Now, this is not to be listened to if you haven’t seen the movie yet, but I must say it is the best piece of criticism on ‘The Drama’ I have come across. In the podcast, Wesely Morris (who is one of the most fantastic culture critics out there), discusses the ways in which ‘The Drama’ tiptoes around race in a way that does a massive disservice to the film, and actually goes on to racialise the film anyway, all while leaving the audience wondering about the film"‘s self-awareness. I enjoyed ‘The Drama’ but also found that much of the film’s premise was left unsettled, and Morris rightly points out how the film does not go nearly deep enough to take ownership of these questions, starting with the fact that Zendaya’s Blackness isn’t a function of the plot. From the depicted interracial relationship between Zendaya’s character and Robert Pattinson’s (as well as between their two friends), to the flashbacks of the younger version of Zendaya’s character, ‘The Drama’ treats as sub-text what should be the main text, and that is ultimately such a missed opportunity!!!

There’s also a good point made about how Zendaya could be given more substance in her recent movie roles, that they haven’t been nearly as good as what she’s done on Euphoria (‘Challengers’ was used as another example to illustrate this, and I think I agree!).

“You Don’t Need To Know Everything: Great artists tell us their cultural blind spots” by Douglas Greenwood for i-D’s substack. I rather like what i-D is doing on this platform!

“How I Became a Filmmaker” by Lena Dunham for The New Yorker, published ahead of the release of her memoir, Famesick. You, dear reader, already know all about this.

I also thought it was cool how Lena Dunham basically did the bulk of her press tour on Substack! This is a fun one she did with i-D.

“Truman Capote The Art of Fiction No. 17” for The Paris Review. Had never read this one! A great discussion on writing style and the craft of storytelling.

Saved the best for last: “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels” by Jonathan Franzen for Harper’s published in 1996.

This is a long one, but endlessly rewarding if you are at all interested in the state of the novel. This is also a very iconic literary essay. In it, Franzen dissects the state of the novel in 1996, which is a topic that truly never ceases to come up in the literary world, though I’d say Franzen’s treatment of it remains highly relevant to our present cultural landscape and media consumption. I will be heavily quoting from it, just in case you don’t click on the link, even though I urge you to!

The novel was once “the preeminent medium of instruction,” and in this essay Frazen considers the place of novels (particularly the social novel) in the age of television, technological innovation and distraction. This is Franzen’s case for novels — reading them as well as writing them. Though at no point is he deluding himself about a previously thriving literary landscape, even though the stakes have changed: “Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture and landscape painting, television has killed the novel of social reportage.”

In other words, television becoming an undeniable part of our cultural literacy has peeled away from the amount of readers that writers could previously count on: “The educated single New Yorker who in 1945 read twenty-five novels in a year today [1996] has time for maybe five.”

He goes on to write about reading tastes and habits in the United States,

The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless, had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover, and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen King.These are honorable writers, but no one doubts it was the size of their contracts that won them covers. The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority, and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it.

Anthony Lane, in a pair of recent essays in The New Yorker, has demonstrated that while most of the novels on the contemporary bestseller list are vapid, predictable, and badly written, the best-sellers of fifty years ago were also vapid, predictable, and badly written. Lane’s essays usefully destroy the notion of a golden pre-television age when the American masses had their noses stuck in literary masterworks; he makes it clear that this country’s popular tastes have gotten no worse in half a century. What has changed is the economics of book publishing.

Franzen correctly identifies the ways in which technological innovation begins reducing cultural moments to surface level matters, which changes the appetite for literature, and presumably alters the way novelists approach the social novel. To ignore this phenomena is “to court nostalgia,” on the other hand, to engage with it “is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine…”

The big, obvious reason that the social novel has become so scarce is that modern technologies do a better job of social instruction. Television, radio, and photographs are vivid, instantaneous media. Print journalism, too, in the wake of In Cold Blood, has become a viable creative alternative to the novel. Because they command large audiences, TV and magazines can afford to gather vast quantities of information quickly.

And this, he says, has led us to “living under the tyranny of the literal.” Which is just a great sentence to write. He also goes on to write about the dwindling social currency of having read a new book. That it isn’t as it once was. Now, social currency is to see the latest movie. (Which is debatable depending on circles, but also not untrue).

Below, three quotes that made me gasp,

By 1993 I was as depressed as the inner city of fiction. I had begun to make unhelpful calculations, multiplying the number of books I’d read in the previous year by the number of years I might reasonably be expected to live, and perceiving in the three-digit product not so much an intimation of mortality as a measure of the incompatibility of the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life. All of a sudden it seemed as if the friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized tor having stopped.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

What distinguishes the novel from more visual entertainments is the interior collaboration of writer and reader in building and peopling an imagined world.

But then again, Franzen recognises how maybe a changing landscape (away from the mainstream) may just better represent the demographic of actual readers, who don’t see themselves represented by the authors his father sees on the front page of Time.

To the extent that the American novel still has cultural authority—an appeal beyond the academy, a presence in household conversations—it’s largely the work of women. Knowledgeable booksellers estimate that 70 percent of all fiction is bought by women, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that in recent years so many crossover novels, the good books that find an audience, have been written by women (…) The current flourishing of novels by women and cultural minorities may in part represent a movement, in the face of a hyperkinetic televised reality, to anchor fiction in the only ground that doesn’t shift every six months: the author’s membership in a tribe. If nothing else, the new cultural diversity of fiction shows the chauvinism of judging the vitality of American letters by the fortunes of the traditional social novel. It’s often argued, in fact, that the country’s literary culture is healthier for having disconnected from mainstream culture; that a universal “American” culture was little more than an instrument for the perpetuation of a white, male, heterosexual elite, and that its decline is the just desert of an exhausted tradition.

Franzen then goes on to quote the linguist and anthropologist, Shirley Brice Heath, in trying to pin down what reading serious literature brings to people [It ought to be said that for Franzen, ‘serious literature’ is not actually meant in an elitist/ undemocratic way, it is simply used to contrast the mind numbing media consumption that has largely come to replace literature for most people].

[Heath] has bothered to study empirically what nobody else has, what reading brings to people “reading serious literature impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them. And, in so dealing, they come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life. Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive—my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.

And that’s the quote I’ll leave you with!

:’)

Last week, I got around to reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. It may be his shortest novel to date, though it is endlessly rewarding, and as perceptive and thoughtful as it is refreshing.

In this book, parenting, being parented, writing and our continuous identity formation are unexpectedly though effectively weaved into one another. Transcription is divided into three conversations, and the main cast of characters exist in a triangle that realise themselves in these respective dialogues. We have a nameless narrator; his mentor, Thomas; and Thomas’ son, Max, who was also the narrator’s classmate at university.

The narrator is our usual and beloved Lerner stand in. In fact, I really felt that the short story we discussed over the winter, “The Ferry,” exists in the universe of Transcription (and perhaps set the stage for this very novel); voices, technology as the extension of one’s interiority, parenting daughters and all. What is so great about Lerner’s work is that, if you enjoy one of his books, chances are you’ll enjoy the rest of his work too, and reading them in the order of publication is even more satisfying, if only just to witness the arc of a writing career and how life’s milestones can add to a body of work. [I am specifically thinking about how Lerner’s earlier novels dealt with boyhood and coming of age in the 90s, the influence of parents and psychoanalysis, becoming a poet, and how now the experience of becoming a parent has made its way into his work quite seamlessly, revealing a new type of anxiety and porousness in his work]. While some novelists create a whole new universe for every new book, with Lerner it feels as though each book (and perhaps short stories in between) builds onto one another in a manner that rewards his reader.

In Transcription, our narrator exists under the mentorship of the character of Thomas, his former professor at Brown, a world-renowned and respected intellectual, whom he will interview for a magazine, and considering Thomas’ old age, this will likely be his last interview.

From the get-go the narrator, in Lerner fashion, is cerebral and porous to the world. Being back at his old campus, fills him with memories and floods him with intrusive thoughts. There are hints of a breakdown that occurred while he was in college which Thomas had helped him through (“I reported two kinds of auditory hallucinations, although doctors reassured me that it was a good sign my “reality testing” as intact—that I knew I wasn’t hearing what I heard.”). The way he seems to deal with being back at his old campus is to want to check in on his daughter. Because indeed, he is just as addicted to his phone as the rest of us are,

I retrieved my phone from the table, did some tapping and swiping, the way Eva used to pretend to send text messages from one of her wooden blocks or magnet tiles. When I’d stopped and saved the nonexistent file, I slipped the phone into my pocket.

Of course, the entire premise of the book was told to the world ahead of its release, therefore, it is not a spoiler to say that right before the interview with Thomas, the narrator accidentally drops his phone into his undrained sink, leaving him without a device to record the interview.

What follows are three conversations making up the divide of the book. The first conversation being that with Thomas, which the narrator is too embarrassed to tell him he cannot record, so pretends to. (“Yes, but are you recording? (…) otherwise we react ourselves and it grows unnatural” /“But here we are talking (…) So we begin, OK?”). The second conversation takes place at a conference in Madrid honoring Thomas after his passing; and the third one with Max, Thomas’ son with whom the narrator shares the parallels of having daughters displaying anxiety in a post-pandemic world, and that Thomas was a father to both; biological to Max, spiritual to the narrator.

Now, I wasn’t immediately convinced by the premise of dropping one’s phone in the bathroom sink as a plot device, (having no other means to record the interview, not even anyone around to lend him a phone??). It just seemed a little fabricated, but what followed exceeded my expectation, as the book is about so much more than that!!! In fact, Lerner uniquely utilises technology as a motif that adds to the clutter and layers of life, webs of communication that we rely on and how they amplify the stakes of our interiority, relations, and parenting.

Without a phone, the real world takes on a surreal dimension and reveals narrator’s anxiety and dependence even more so. He feels jittery, in withdrawal, reaching for a phantom phone in his pocket, urgently wanting to reach his daughter, Eva, if only out of habit and distracting him from the interview. Of course, his phone addiction and clumsiness is what got him in this position in the first place. What he has to do next is reconstruct the interview from memory, as a pure transcription is off the table.

When the second part begins, the narrator has just given a lecture at a symposium in Madrid honouring the late Thomas, whereby he self-deprecatingly tells the story of the day he interviewed his mentor. That the narrator reconstructed the interview from memory, Thomas’ last interview, his peers take to be extremely offensive, and in their minds, puts the entire ethics of the interview into question. A peer tells him,

“You, well, you more or less confessed that you falsified a big part of what many of us thought of as his last, I don’t know, testament. A deepfake.”

This is baffling to the narrator, and I would say, he is right to believe Thomas wouldn’t have cared. After all, during the interview, when the narrator had wanted to clarify something, Thomas had answered, “It is maybe silly to be so literal now? It is late for the literal, no? We practice literature, not law.” This remark is also interesting and in hindsight telling of his rapport with his son, because we later learn that Max is a lawyer.

Now, expect a lot of quoting from the third part, because there are so many brilliant passages and Lerner takes this book into an unexpected direction!

“The last time my father was in this house, it was full of candy.”

So begins Max, telling the narrator about his daughter, Emmie and her refusal to eat. This conversation seems to be the flip side of the first. Here, Max recounts how his father’s visit came in the middle of Emmie’s struggles with ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder). Max’s handling of his daughter’s struggles holds up a mirror of sorts at the complex relationship he has with his father, how it informs his own parenting. We understand all the ways that Max’s relationship with Thomas was, as Max puts it, “a nightmarish form of what others so loved about him.” At the same time, the narrator barely speaks in this part, it might as well be a monologue, and the lack of interference of the narrator speaks volumes! The narrator has sort of become the custodian of Thomas’ intellectual legacy (amidst some controversy among his peer), but here he finds himself in front of Thomas’ actual son. And again, we have to take the parallels and difference between Max and the narrator as meaningful. Most likely, Thomas was a very different father figure to both, and the narrator is learning this at the same time as the reader.

Max’s discussion about his daughter’s struggles and use of screens, all while being unsure about the effectiveness of his progressive parenting, feels vulnerable and sincere, and is framed in a manner that feels very of the moment, and again not in the least bit trite. There are some incredibly tender moments, but equally very funny.

“You go in with a problem ‘My daughter won’t eat’ they ask you some questions, then they give you a diagnosis that repeats what you said with more technical-sounding language, as if this process of translation constitutes a gain in knowledge. And then there is a second translation, an epistemological sleight of hand, the magical contraction of the diagnosis into an acronym. “My daughter won’t eat” becomes ARFID. The acronym is like a code, moves the alpha toward the numerical; numbers are objective, right, suddenly it’s science! No matter that ARFID denotes the same mystery, is just an envelope for ignorance; ARFID just means: we have no physiological explanation but it doesn’t yet seem to involve the body-image issues we associate with anorexia or bulimia.”

“Needless to say we sought advice. (This was before we were working with Saro.) The advice was: back off, no child ever starves herself to death. The advice was: intervene immediately, get her on growth hormones, these are crucial years. The advice was: if she wants junk food, let her have it, go to McDonald’s twice a day. The advice was: you must form healthy lifelong habits now, avoid the hormones and chemicals in junk, that’s more important than her weight. The advice was: she’s a happy kid, don’t make this bigger than it is, no therapy, do not pathologize. The advice was: this must be displaced anxiety or trauma, she must be suffering, something must have happened at school, get her in therapy now. We had no sense of what she might be ‘express-ing,’ if anything, with her eating or not eating; we asked Emmie every imaginable question, but asking questions seemed to make it worse, more pressure. And I can’t emphasize this enough: she was a smart, social, generally happy kid who played all day, slept well, had only the normal seasonal illnesses. And while she was always a bit smaller than the other kids, you wouldn’t have thought: There is something wrong with this girl.”

Max and his wife have no sense of what Emmie was “expressing” through her refusal to eat. Is this the result of a traumatic event or future anxiety of the world we live in? There is something about a school friend who left her for another friend and climate anxiety. The professional advice is to let go of all rules, right as Thomas visits!

“He told us that this was more of an art than a science, that every kid was different and we were going to have to experiment, and that we were going to have to have faith (not a word I expected to hear): faith that things might change, that a little difference might eventually make a big difference. You don’t need me to tell you, Saro said, that one of the most difficult things about kids and eating is that the more the child feels focused on, the harder it is for her to try new things, to find a different relationship to food. That’s the paradox. So in a situation like this, one of the things I want to start with is a radical reset. And after a couple more conversations, and a call to the pediatrician to confirm she had a normal A1C, we decided to embark on our Willy Wonka experiment.”

“And into the house full of sugar my father came, his first visit to Los Angeles in five years, the first visit Emmie could remember; we typically saw him in Providence or Berlin; he hated L.A., it was like the entire state of California—about which he knew basically nothing—was some kind of cultural insult directed at him. He wanted to see where Brecht, Adorno, Mann, and other expats had lived; that was the extent of his interest.”

I love the descriptions of Emmie deconstructing foods and asking for screen time. The audacity of children!

“What was cause, what was effect? Anxiety is worse when you’re hungry, and she must have been hungry all the time, even if she didn’t think so, but it’s harder to eat if you’re upset. We would ask her every morning what she’d want for dinner, every evening what she’d want for lunch and breakfast the next day. We’d write it all down on a little dry-erase board, as someone had suggested. She’d always request foods as if she genuinely craved them: bagels, pizza, sushi. I’d go get the best bagel (Belle’s), make really good pizza (I bought a pizza stone), drop a shameful amount of money on ikura—and then watch her not eat those things, just kind of slowly deconstruct them. It was like some kind of horrible performance art: I’d cut half a bagel in half again and she’d eat less than half of that. She’d scrape the cheese off the pizza and fold and unfold her slice and then take one bite. Excruciating origami. She would balance a single salmon egg on the end of her chopstick, spend fifteen minutes ingesting the little orange, gemlike spheres one by one—what is that, twenty calories? Then she’d ask if she could have a lollipop and I would say no way. OK, then can I have screen time?”

And throughout this process, Max goes back and forth on what is right,

“You’re such a moron, all this time you just needed to be a father, make a rule, a law, you’ve become one of these ridiculous progressive parents who can’t take a position, you were ruined by going to Brown, you’ve been listening to all these similarly spineless people who make their kids delicate by treating them over-delicately.”

All again, rather hilariously, while Thomas visits!

“That first night Adelle had roasted salmon for us on a cedar plank, prepared Spargel on the side, and Emmie, sitting beside my father at the table, was dining on a bowl of Lucky Charms. He was baffled; he kept trying not to stare; he managed to restrict himself to effusively praising Adelle’s cooking, but when he suggested that she ‘really must try’ the fish, I interrupted: ‘Emmie can eat whatever she wants.’

Later, they discover the only time Emmie eats, freely and transfixedly, is in front of a screen. The consumption of ASMR videos puts her in a trance where she begins to eat again, suggesting Emmie’s screens as literally mind altering. In Harper’s review of Transcription, Hannah Gold notes how “Literacy changed human consciousness, a transformation that is recapitulated with each child who learns to read and write. Emmie’s story suggests that something similar is happening with our devices and the content they promote.”

“It wasn’t Octonauts anymore. She was watching these ‘unboxing’ videos on YouTube. Do you know what those are? It is a video of somebody opening a package, taking out the merchandise. Emmie loved watching the unboxing of ‘squishies’ in particular little foam toys, often shaped like food, cupcakes with googly eyes or whatever, that you can squeeze. So in these videos, somebody — Emmie preferred women — just takes the toys out of the packaging, plays with the things a little. Everything is heavily miked; the titles of the videos often include ‘ASMR’: the clips are full of the sounds of plastic wrap crinkling, paper rustling, and the gasps and infantile gurgles of excitement from the unboxer, who taps on everything with her long pink nails. And these things are viewed millions, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of times; there must be some very rich people who accumulated their wealth by removing plastic ponies or whatever from a box while giggling and cooing and smacking their lips.”

“My instinct, of course, was to shut it down, to say, You’re not watching this garbage, but that wasn’t really in the spirit of the experiment, of deregulation, and it’s not like it was porn. Except it was like porn—I asked Emmie, as I made myself eat my cheese puffs, what she liked about these videos, and she said without missing a beat, ‘It’s satisfying.’ Does Eva also use that word?”

“All the time.”

“I would never have described anything as satisfying at that age. And she seemed to mean the satisfaction of a kind of physical need: while she was watching a flattened image on a screen, all those mouth sounds and little taps and crinkles provoked a low-level somatic response, scratched a kind of itch. It’s like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffed shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear. Which really is like pornography, maybe it is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer, addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead? Regardless, you have to picture me sitting on the couch, seeing myself though my father’s eyes: ‘My son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a tablet with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!”

In typical grandparent & grandchild rapport, Emmie and Thomas adore each other, though Max’s strained relationship to Thomas takes over, but the funniest part in the entire book is when Thomas compares his granddaughter to Kafka’s Hunger Artist. Though, naturally, this doesn’t go over well with Max.

“But there was no point, none, in telling him about her struggles. Just as there was no point, there had never been any point, in telling him about my own personal problems, ups or downs. Because all you got back was some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references (many of which were probably fictional).”

“Once only once did I tell him about my concern with Emmie’s eating, and before the word ‘Hungerkünstler was fully out of his mouth, before he could quote his beloved Kafka at me, or launch into some discourse about the history of pre-Christian asceticism, I snapped at him in German: This is not fucking theater, Dad, this isn’t art or literature, Emmie isn’t a character in a fiction, she’s my fucking daughter. ‘Of course, he responded calmly, ‘and all will be well! I simply never mentioned it again.”

The title, Transcription, can be pulled in many philosophical or literal directions. We see how transcription goes beyond making a copy, sometimes it changes form and leaves us wondering to what extent we can merely attribute our voices to ourselves. There are of course the writing analogies corresponding to the initial premise of the book, an interview to transcribe. But then, all three conversations transcribe past events, they may defend them, untangle or rehash them.

There is also the transcription of reality through generations, parenting and mortality. Transcription that gets expressed through sameness in the family sphere; what is passed down in literal terms or culturally, behaviourally. Or conversely, when behaviour isn’t passed down, when you can’t make sense of a family member. Max who can’t make sense of Emmie’s eating, and Thomas who can’t make sense of his son’s parenting. On the other hand, Thomas perceives his granddaughter’s starvation as engaging in performance art rooted in precisely his preferred school of thought! Similarly, the narrator will carry on Thomas’ intellectually legacy. Indeed, parenting and being parented (both literally or spiritually) is just another instance of transcribing the queues we’ve gotten or are trying to avoid (with, of course, varying levels of consciousness or unconsciousness!). What is left over perhaps, is the dimension of children and anxiety about the future.

Most significantly, Lerner get at the transcription of reality through screens. I noticed an overarching chiasmus of sorts, that of an interview transcribed from memory, and a novel recording the influence of screens. Both options don’t feel ideal but the result is an incredibly sincere and refreshing work of fiction!

I have been all over the place this week, but in a good way. Maybe it’s because the last few books I read have not especially done it for me. Maybe it is coming out of winter and finding my brain chemistry heal in the fleeting bliss that comes right before summer, before the heat overstays its welcome and I begin cursing it! Or maybe it is the new moon in Aries, or that we finally all get to collectively judge the creative choices made on Euphoria once more. Who knows???? This week I’ve been hopping between David Foster Wallace, Lena Dunham and more. It was also the week of going to my first book fair as a writer, to my first half marathon as a runner (my practice race ahead of the BK half in a couple of weeks!!). There’s also a new Olivia Rodrigo music video out, and I finally watched The Drama!!

That is to say that I’ve been so eager and all over the place that I couldn’t muster up a sole topic for the week because, as you can see, it was frantic all over. But then I remembered that there was a time when a core tenet of this newsletter was diaristic word vomit, and I’ve spared you much of that lately, but consider this week’s edition momentary return to form, an homage to scattered states of mind, voracious cultural consumption that feels urgent but of course isn’t, but oh well!!!!

Last week, I committed myself to re-reading one of my favourite books, The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides, precisely because the last few books I had read had been a little intenso, I felt like I needed to go back to something cozy. I would urge anyone to read The Marriage Plot because it is just so wonderful, clever and sweet. Just the right amount of pretentious but reads like watching a TV show. So, I was enjoying myself, rereading the Eugenides, when on Monday I got the Audible push notification that Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick, was out. I remember pre-saving it months ago ahead of said half-marathon (I can’t do music when I run). So, of course, I began listening to it immediately, as well as consuming every aspect of her press tour (it’s been extensive). What a treat it’s been to have Lena in my ears, telling me all the nitty gritty about being a young and utterly lost creative person in their twenties!!!! My favorite thing about the memoir is how Lena keeps saying how young she was at 26. As a 26 year old myself, this means the world to me, because I go through periods of feeling so gdamn senile and set in stone.

That is to say, I was perfectly contempt and thinking of writing about The Marriage Plot and The Drama, considering the implications of the literal ‘marriage plot’ in both works. However, my home is never beating the post office allegations, which meant I ended up committing myself to reading another work of non-fiction when more books arrived in the mail early last week. (In general I don’t do well with juggling two works of fiction, but non-fiction I can pile on.). I began reading David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a five-day biography of sorts, made up of Rolling Stone magazine profiles during which the author follows David Foster Wallace on his Infinite Jest book tour. Wow wow wow, was I blown away. The conversations between Lispky and DFW are colloquial yet filled with boundless wisdom. Lipsky asks DFW about his early career, his struggles with depression and addressed various rumours about him and his drug use. They shoot the shit about movies, television, and writer friends of theirs, and I love it as a cultural time-capsule of sorts. Because, indeed, in the book, DFW is in the throes of press and doing his very best to manage this. He has a sense that there’s hype around Infinite Jest, but he can’t see it for what it is. [This may seem far fetched, and it most definitely is, but since I read this the same week I’ve been wolfing down the Lena Durham memoir, I can’t help but make one parallel relating to the position of the artist when you release your art into the world: In Famesick, Lena talks about the moment Girls came out, how Judd Apatow told her that you only know the real impact of a work years later (which we have been getting a sense of in recent years with Girls), on a similar note, the Lipsky book is interesting because it does put DFW in that tricky position, asking him to make sense of something which he is not too interested in making sense of — DFW is particularly concerned with how this promotion will affect his future writing, and the self consciousness that wasn’t there before all this attention — all while remaining so incredibly modest (while at the same time trusting his hard work), and generous with his answers. Throughout, DFW expresses his desire to not be seduced by the kind of attention that actually doesn’t do anything for his personhood, temperament, much less his writing.] The hindsight afforded to the reader makes this all the more stirring, (1) reading DFW’s impressions with the knowledge of Infinite Jest’s success and sustained impact, and (2) reading this against the backdrop of DFW’s suicide. In the afterword, Lipsky writes, “Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning. It has an event gravity: Eventually, every memory and impression gets tugged in its direction.” A movie was made of the Lipsky book called The End of the Tour, which apparently holds up, so I will be watching it.

Note: I have yet to actually read Infinite Jest, though my ignorance hasn’t impacted my enjoyment of reading the Lipsky profile-book (isn’t that typical of ignorant people??). To be fair, I’ve been meaning to read it since last fall but it is just such a mammoth of a book that each time I looked at it, I couldn’t bring myself to crack it open. Worst of all, filled with good intention and all, I’ve actually traveled with Infinite Jest back and worth a handful of times!!! I actually ordered Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself because it was recommended on one of my favorite culture & politic podcast, Diabolic Lies, by one of the co-hosts, Caro Claire Burke, who just came out with one of the most anticipated novels of the year, Yesteryear. [I really recommend listening to the episode dedicated to Caro’s book, because I found myself really inspired by the discussion around her trajectory and getting her book published. And just in general, both hosts are so incredibly intelligent and well-spoken.]

And guess what??? I received the copy of Yesteryear just as I also received the new Ben Lerner novel, Transcription. Which is the spirit in which I am writing to you, that of fabricated urgency and cultural gluttony. I read a lot and I also read fast — however sometimes, when I am really excited about a book, I basically swallow it whole and blackout (this, for instance, happened to me with the two last Sally Rooney novels). And sometimes I read a new book with so much enthusiasm that I don’t actually know if I actually like it or if I am just the most gullible fangirl that has ever lived. I really don’t want this to happen with Transcription or Yesteryear, but I just get so excited about feeling a part of an anticipated release!!! I find life is never quite as good as when we gather in discussion around new releases in literature, TV or film! So maybe I'll come back on here to discuss the oldest type of plots, marriage plots, but for now I’ll try to settle down as the week folds into the next and read the Ben Lerner all while carefreely dipping in and out of my beloved reread of The Marriage Plot, and then take on Yesteryear.

Until next time!

Written between the late 1970s and early 80s, Leonid Tsypkin, a doctor born to Russian-Jewish parents in 1926, sadly never lived to see his book published. In fact, Tsypkin passed away merely seven days after his son was able to place Summer in Baden-Baden in a Russian-émigré weekly in the United-States. Tsypkin and his wife had on a few occasion attempted to apply for exit-visas, though they never successfully left their country. Which precisely adds to what makes this work unique: Summer in Baden-Baden is a retelling motivated by the love of literature, the love of Dostoevsky, but it is largely an imaginary journey, as Tsypkin was never able to go beyond the Russian sites of Dostoevsky’s life.

Indeed, the premise of this book lies in the trip that the narrator (presumably Tsypkin himself) takes to the available sites of Dostoevsky’s life and novels, namely the ones in Russia. The story begins with the book Tsypkin reads on the train from Moscow to Leningrad. The book he reads, are the diaries of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, which is made up of recollections of she and her husband leaving Saint Petersburg for Baden Baden in 1867.

Part-autobiography, part-historical fiction, Summer in Baden-Baden is a genre bending double narrative. Sontag refers to it as “para-fiction.” In it, Tsypkin layers his own train journey along that of the Dostoevskys. Though Sontag heavily praises the book in her introduction, I would say the work almost veers towards fan-fiction. Which isn’t necessarily bad, after all, I have also traveled in order to visit the homes of literary figures I admire, and hold the knowledge of my visit along side my own biographical situation at the time. I didn’t write a book about it, but surely a newsletter or two…

Sontag compares this work to J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, apparently also a Dostoevsky fantasy (I haven’t read it!). Although Sontag makes sure to state how Tsypkin wanted, above all, for all the factual elements in the book to be in line. The result is perhaps an honourable attempt at verisimilitude, a researched, well-intentioned exercise in day dreaming.

Sontag goes on to write,

The account of the Dostoyevskys’ travels - for they will be mostly abroad in Tsypkin’s novel, and not only in Baden-Baden - has been scrupulously researched. The passages where the narrator - Tsypkin - describes his own doings are wholly autobiographical. Since imagination and fact are easily contrasted, we tend to draw genre lessons from this, and segregate invented stories (fiction) from real-life narratives (chronicle and autobiography). That’s one convention - ours. In Japanese literature, the so-called ‘I-novel’ (shishosetsu), a narrative that is essentially autobiographical but contains invented episodes, is a dominant novel form.

As someone who studied literary theory, the genre implications of this work are certainly interesting but I kept wondering if that was enough for me. And in this context, I’m not such a stickler about facts, and I think I’d still rather read fiction. Stylistically, Tsypkin also does something annoying, I suppose because of the interweaving narrative business of it: not only are there no chapter breaks, the run-on sentences border on never-ending, and you’re lucky if there’s a chapter break per page. Again, I understand the desire effect of interweaving narratives, but it did not do it for me. This is where Sontag’s praise does the book a disservice, because reading it actually made me want to put this down and read Dostoevsky instead.

Funnily enough, Sontag calls this work “crash course on all the great themes of Russian literature,” which gets me to the part that initially drew me to this work. Again, I really went into this book thinking it was a work of fiction, and the title had tickled me, because there is actually nothing more Russian than visiting a thermal spa in Germany in the 19th century. (read hyperbolic). Baden-Baden was one of the oldest and most famous spa towns, where people came not only for the benefits of mineral springs, but also to see and be seen, and to gamble. Dostoevsky was just one of many Russians who bathed and gambled in Baden-Baden, but perhaps the most famous.

The history of resort economies is rather fascinating, and their boom is but of course tied up with gambling, but also railroad travel! Trains made journeys to these resorts more accessible, and as such these resorts began expanding and accommodating more people (to the great dismay of aristocrats now having to rub elbows with people on trains!). What’s more, the growing restrictions on gambling in Europe (notably in France around 1837) simply made people flock to other places in Europe such as Germany, Austria, the town of Spa in Belgium (which gives its name to the activity!), Monaco, and so on! And the reason why it is so Russian, is because Russian aristocrats fled to these spas to escape their frigid winter. [A little side note to wrap this tiny history up with a bow: because of this, Monaco and the French Riviera was largely considered a winter destination, it is only in the first half of the 20th century that Americans began coming in the summer (rather off-peak!), and made it a summer destination. I am specifically thinking, once again about the Murphys.]

Dostoevsky remains one of the most famous gamblers and that fact is something of a main thread in the book. In fact, Dostoevsky’s novella The Gambler was written precisely because he had amassed such huge debts which he was so desperate to cover that he took an advance from his publisher that would force him to produce a book within a few weeks of the contract being signed. In turn, The Gambler is set in a spa town in Germany and centres an eccentric Russian!

In Summer in Baden-Baden, you get glimpses into Fedya and Anna’s relationship, and while individually their portraits are complex and convincing, together, descriptions of their relationship struck me as idealistic or melodramatic (not that Anna had it easy…). As for ‘plot,’ Fedya gambles all day, while Anna wanders around all alone. Fedya loses everything at the roulette table, begs his wife for her last coin, then proceeds to sell her engagement ring, and then her clothing, to cover his debts.

More interestingly, the story situates Dostoevsky by what he was writing and the manuscripts he was handing in. However, Dostoevsky doesn’t come across very well, rather bigoted and reckless. In fact, another layer of this work ought to be acknowledged, that of Tsypkin being Jewish, trying to wrestle with Dostoevsky’s rampant anti-semitism, though, as you would expect, there isn’t a clear solution to reconciling it.

Dan Jacobson writes in LRB, in response to what he considers Sontag’s “sweeping assertion that,”

‘loving Dostoevsky means loving literature’ – as if ‘love’ and ‘literature’ might jointly serve as a quasi-sacramental agency capable of lifting readers (Jewish or gentile) out of the predicament into which a writer like Dostoevsky hurls them. It would be more plausible to say directly that to love Dostoevsky is to hate him too; and that such an impossible concatenation of feeling is an appropriately Dostoevskian response to the man and his work. He is hateful because of the malignity of his xenophobia (of which his anti-semitism is the most toxic instance); because of his hysterically reactionary views; because of the combination of perfunctoriness and verbosity which marks so much of his work; because of his prurient fixations on ‘fallen’ women; even, for that matter, because of the visions of Christ-like forgiveness, reconciliation and redemptive suffering he can sometimes be seen labouring too hard to produce. Yet there it is: in all this, out of it, through it, there emerges a host of piercingly dramatic scenes, insights that turn compellingly from individual motivation to shifts in historical consciousness, passages of unsurpassed pathos and (not least, and too often forgotten where Dostoevsky is concerned) hilarious comedy – grotesque, deadpan, slapstick or kindly, as the mood takes him.

I would be inclined to agree with the love/hate sentiment Jacobson describes, though this is a hell of an undertaking from Tsypkin’s perspective, and I did not get the impression that Tsypkin was evaluating Dostoevsky and his views so much from a critical perspective (if only because of the fantasia-like quality of the work and the overflowing prose). Rather, Dostoevsky’s anti-semitism perhaps appears as something Tsypkin could not ignore, and in the narrative set up, that of reading on the train, it comes up, jumps out at him from the page and forces him to consider the writer he so admires against his own identity.

In the end, the premise of this book seems to rest on the author’s love for Dostoevsky’s literature as opposed to the person he was. And yet, if that is true, I still wonder what exactly motivated a retelling of this moment in Dostoevsky’s life when we can just read Dostoevsky (The Gambler?). I for one, have not read The Gambler, and the joke is on me, I guess, because I read the retelling. I’m not convinced Summer in Baden-Baden is an essential read, but perhaps I would have liked it more if I hadn’t gotten so excited about the charming title and Susan Sontag’s stellar introduction. Now that I have merely whelmed you, dear reader, I suppose you can safely go read this, expectations managed and all.

The world Jaeggy writes is comforting to the lonely soul. In fact, solitude is what she writes best and she does so with an aesthetically economical but opulent prose, writing isolated protagonists, most often ontologically (as well as literally) orphaned. The sense of being haunted by futility is at the centre of Jaeggy’s works, though I would that this novella deals with the underbelly of solitude, to a different degree than the other novellas of her’s that I’ve read, namely, Sweet Days of Discipline and Proleterka. I really love the latter two, and would be inclined to say that I prefer them to The Water Statues, since this one is particularly obscure and I suspect needs more time to digest (Jaeggy’s works are all a little mysterious, but I find Sweet Days and Proleterka particularly touching and personally impactful, and while they are more linear, they remain works to re-read). While the other two works look back onto the melancholy of childhood, this one deals with how one inhabits the world when drowning in grief. How the world, with its seasons, keeps moving. How, effectively, death happens, but time moves on, both too quickly and not fast enough. Jaggy’s writing is detached yet it inspects every surface, nook, and angle, and the more I went back to re-read passages of The Water Statues, the more I emerged confused.

As Sheila Heti, writing about Jaeggy for the New Yorker, aptly put it,

Literary concessions—narrative clarity and catharsis, techniques as simple as moving a character from room to room—are an inheritance, a dutiful part of learning to please the reader. They seem, at least for Jaeggy, the aesthetic equivalent of a family obligation—tedious, and entirely for others.

Indeed, The Water Statues is made up of sets of vignettes, shifting between dramatic dialog and slices of omniscient narration by different character. Structurally, there are shifts in time, focus, narration, and point of view. The text is non-linear, and the closest thing we get to a protagonist is Beeklam, a collector of statues living in Amsterdam, in his flooded basement. We meet Beeklam as an adult, though with the understanding that he has lost his mother at a young age, and later finding out that his father remains at a distance. Here, here is, introduced to us,

Sometimes one meets people who look distracted, they don’t seem to care about anything; they don’t look at people passing by, not at the men or at the women; they walk along in a dream, their pockets empty, their gaze empty of thought, yet they are the most passionate people on earth: collectors. Beeklam was one of them. He lived in the basement of his large house which was filled with statues, most of them commemorative effigies —a lapidary presence stretching practically all the way down to the sea. Because his basement, like the sewers, went down to the water. It was a relief to Beeklam to know that any gap or crack would give a sense of the movement of waves: of a submerged world he believed to be populated by other statues with feet (if they still had them) tied to stones; and whose knuckles of stone knocked on his walls. No one shooed him away when he rested his head on the wall and waited —perhaps for the statues of water to return, or to summon him. The child now wished to live as though he’d drowned. But he heard rising up from the sewers the rustling sleep of serpents. No one shooed him away because he was quite alone. He’d abandoned his newly widowed father to go and “buy statues,” he said, and it was as if he were joking. From early childhood, he’d been drawn to figurative imitations of grief and stillness; from childhood he’d been a collector, museums were in him; statues were his playthings, a privilege of all who are born lost and start out from where they end. The child looked at them: he inspected eyelids and napes, drawn into their definitive dimensions of seriousness, some molded by artists of renown, others by unknown workshops. He had a name for each: Rosalind, Diane, Magdalena, Thelma, Gertrud. Those statues with their often amiable faces disclosed the things that dwell in things themselves, vitreous things.

Descriptions of chipped eyelids may be the only thing pointing to Beeklam’s statues being inanimate, as they have come to replace his human interactions. Description, metaphors and contrasts are beautifully sketched and strung together. Beeklam’s statues are blank canvases of sorts, upon which Beeklam attributes meaning and projects his grief onto, they are metaphors he extends upon with the damp, flooded setting of his basement.

In a passage, Beeklam whispers to himself: “Water is a burnt body.” Interestingly, the novella is dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann, who was a great friend of Jaeggy’s. Bachmann tragically passed away in a fire, falling asleep smoking a cigarette. The dedication is something of a key to begin interpreting the sense of grief Jaeggy is writing, leaving us with innumerable possible avenues, beginning with water as an opposition element to fire. Water as sorrow and melancholy, flooding us drop by drop, coating the basements of our interiority.

Grief is also tied up with time. Because of Beeklam’s time spent in his basement, his sense of time and daily rhythm is distorted.

I’ve spent a great deal of time in these basements, not that I was weary of the sun, of the open air: I was simply losing control of the hours and of life, so to speak; I was renouncing the rigid definitions of daily life that allow one to succumb to natural heat or to simply depend on the sun and the elements.

The passage of time is unbearable to the person mourning,

It seemed to him that the death rattle of eternity resounded between sundown and the night; for the first time he felt buoyed, for the first time he felt as though something was lasting too long—the solar ring had not yet vanished. It’s so easy to admire it, it’s the last fantasy nature indulges in, it’s all color, on fire. Yes, the sun is disintegrating, a squalid pretender to the glory of that Void denied to any who might mention its name or cling to it. It was as though it were saying, “True life is beyond words.”

Equally so, the use of time as a way of writing grief extends to the cyclicality of nature. Throughout the novella, despite the nonlinear narrative and time-jumps, it seems to always be spring. It is either a spring that has not yet materialized, or it is a fleeting one. Reading this during a particularly wet and temperamental spring (where I am!) made this especially fitting. The spring described, through damp flowers, sticky resin, stones and snails, is never static but always unfolding, in renewal.

Grief, it seems, makes it unbearable to sit by and watch nature unfold (“intransigent reality of landscape that nothing could alleviate”). Other times, nature displays similar battles and the necessity of showing up (“Pale ruins of greenery, clay, and frayed flowers live out a life of strife, after shouted invocations to spring”). In that sense, Beeklam’s statues emerge as something oppositional to nature and the demands of social life. Beeklam says,

I had become too accustomed to all that is durable, absent; to the visual traits of marble and stone figures; and the life, or incarnation of life, in the past quarter of an hour, seemed to commemorate that interval, the empty space that hangs capriciously, like a rope endowed with reason, between two, not altogether convinced, people.

And glimpses into people’s warm living rooms contrast the waterlogged basement where the statues live,

He walked on, saw more decorated rooms, people sitting reading the newspaper; the windows of houses proved to him how very quiet the lives of others could be, how pleasant it is to be in an armchair and to hear the patter of rain on glass panes. He was once again persuaded that his life was passing, had passed, and this made him rejoice while admiring the efforts of his fellow creatures, of the Dutch population with their firmness regarding the radiant pinnacles of domestic comfort-such home-sweet-home settings made his heart sink, so much happiness he was happier living without.

Of human interaction, there is also the subplot of Beeklam’s servant, Victor, whose relationship with one another reminds me of Sweet Days of Discipline, where rapport is all too depend on power dynamics, and a mutual, uneasy, dependence of sorts. All Beeklam has, is his statues and Victor, and both are available to him because of his wealth. Beeklam says his rapport with Victor brings up a “vague homicidal passion that’s hard to corral into a less murderous sentiments” and just concludes that “communal life ends up draining the innocence that people who live alone possess.” Later, Victor describes his relationship with Beeklam as having gone “from fervent to lukewarm, and finally to something resembling a cautious balance. And, as in fairy tales, we have come back up from the basement, laden with the years, tranquil, unwearied, almost not alive.”

The second half of the novella rather abruptly drops a new set of protagonists: Katrin, an orphan, perhaps serving as Beeklam’s double of sorts. There’s also another widower, Kaspar, who may hold up a mirror at Beeklam’s father Reginald. Together this new set of characters reflect Beeklam and Reginald as orphans and widower, respectively. I wasn’t extremely convinced by this choice, but then this sense of orphanage came up and struck me as extremely Jaeggy-esque (and ever puzzling!), the idea that an orphan “always possesses what we might call a theological ability to live alone, an infallible instinct for classifying people as boring.” Specifically, this echoes one of Jaeggy’s other novellas, Proleterka, which deals with the protagonist looks back on a cruise taken with her estranged father,

Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. In a certain sense some people abandon affections, sentiments, as if they were things. With determination, without sorrow. They become strangers. Sometimes enemies. They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. . . . Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. Some children look after themselves. The heart, incorruptible crystal.

Indeed, Jaeggy’s lapidary solitude emerges once again as an endlessly pursuable theme, though just equally as abstruse.

The dedication to Bachman supposes an homage, made more convincing by the typically commemorative use of statues, though I resist that train of interpretation. Jaeggy’s fragmentary text uncannily reconstructs life with a cool, distant, yet precise detachment, displaying the hauntings of her set of characters. Solitude is clear, but there is a paradoxical, simultaneous overwhelm between needing solitude and it eating one up (or to continue the moisture analogy, festering solitude!) . There is also the overwhelm related to time, running out of it, and it’s seemingly (though deceitfully) endlessness. Needs and desires in periods of grief are unclear. Does it make Beeklam want more time? Less time? Less people and less interactions? Indeed, I have found that it is hard to know what exactly this book is getting at. In the end, the only thing clear to me is that solitude both gives and takes from us.

I began the month by reading “Bronze,” a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides, followed by the corresponding interview in The New Yorker.

“John Steinbeck on the Creative Spirit and the Meaning of Life” from The Marginalian, a newsletter/ website I’ve been reading for years which is filled with so much wisdom, and one of my favorite resources for inspiration!

“Introducing the Kim Sisters, America’s Original K-pop Superstars” by Margaret Heidenry for Vanity Fair. In a K-Pop world, I believe this is indispensable knowledge.

“Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?” By Michel Chaouli for The Yale Review. A fun read about the self-inflicted moral pressures of finishing a book!

“Behind the Essay: Aria Aber” for Back Matter (The Yale Review). I love these ‘Behind the Essay’ series, and this one discusses the tricky thing that is writing/fictionalising parties!

“Revisit 5 of the Late Legend Calvin Tomkins’s Most Essential Art-World Profiles” from Cultured. Or my favorite: this fantastic profile of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, arguably one of the best novels ever written; not to mention the Murphys, who are responsible for so much of the French Riviera’s cultural capital.

“Kafka’s Misdiagnosis” by Aaron Schuster for The Paris Review.

Jacques Lacan once called Hegel the “most sublime hysteric.” Kafka, the most sublime obsessional neurotic? The point is not to pathologize the author, to reduce him to his sickness, but to appreciate how literature can lift psychopathology to the level of a style—transforming it, to use the parlance of Kafka’s dog, into a field of “investigation.” This is not a matter of romanticizing mental illness but of exploring its dynamics and complexities, showing it to be not merely ailment and dysfunction but also a means for grappling with essential human problems, and for constituting different ways or even styles of being. Kafka raised neurosis to the level of a style. “There is a goal, but no way,” he writes in his notebooks. “What we call a way is hesitation.”

Queries by New York Magazine is my favorite newsletter perhaps ever. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to New York mag to access it (but you can do their fun quiz here!). In the newsletter, the copy chief of NY mag discusses grammar, style guides, conventions, rule following versus trends in journalism. In this week’s newsletter, editors discussed balancing neologism with the NY mag house style guidelines, and how to adapt to the culture’s ever evolving (and sometimes ridiculous) vocabulary. In this case, the sudden surge of the suffix -maxx was discussed (if you haven’t come across this intensifying suffix, consider yourself blessed), and how the staff writers are using it (aka, sparingly for ‘greater effect,’ an intensifier indicative of the era, but not using it so much, as the suffix will likely flame out into cringe and outdated territory before we know it). Led me down this rabbit hole. But this is me asking, dear subscriber, are there any other resources like this where I can read about copy editing, grammar and debates/ philosophies on evolving style conventions???

Until next week!

Lana writes aesthetically driven songs that bring up images of a mythological America with picket fences and Rockwell paintings, writing the fragility of life and denouncing the rot in beautiful things. Her discography takes one through New York, her hometown and that of the Beat poets; many Californias, from Hollywood, to Venice Beach, Long Beach, and far Californian deserts. California can be a holy land as much as a dangerous and excessive one. Lana also takes us through prairies, suburbs and country clubs, Hyannis Port and the Garden of Eden. Now, in light of her latest single, “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” we are going South, it seems.

To make things clear I will be referring to Lana Del Rey as a persona (not Lizzy Grant, the person!). This persona is smart, thoughtful, melancholic. She is a woman in a world of men, and does not necessarily fight it, embodying a wistful, vintage beauty queen. Crucially, Lana Del Rey is nothing if not a consistent persona. You can always expect old Hollywood glam, nostalgia, terrible men, the disillusionment of American ideals, longing and escape. The longing for a simpler time comes up as a recurring theme in her work. She either makes sense of her own troubles in terms of glamorous woman that came before her, or glamorises her own life / society’s lacks with a time before her’s. Though by and large, her various concerns across albums get repackaged by a version of Americana.

The abusive lovers are tied into dangerous stretches of American highway. Pepsi and Mountain Dew are extensions of her all Americanness. There’s also decay, self-destruction in relationships and self-esteem, gloom, symbols of heaven and death, and an overarching melancholic disposition leaving a dark undercurrent to her songs. I have found that the main thing with Lana is that we’re not always sure how serious she is being, or how satirical it’s meant to taken. Is it a critique or romanticisation of that American life? For one, Lana has faced criticism for romanticising abuse ever since she first came up in the era of glossy pop-feminism of the 2010s. The submissiveness depicted has been controversial throughout her career, and has partly, come to define her work — or at least her wistful, hazy lyrics heavy with nostalgia, hedonism and melodrama. It is a very tricky thing to discuss.

In “Ultraviolence” the line “he hit me and it felt like a kiss,” might have been a reference to lyrics for the 1960s girl group, the Crystals, but it offended many people. Like I said, this has been a reoccurring subject which she (questionably though memorably) addressed in an iconic blog post titled “Question for the culture”:

Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc - can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money - or whatever I want - without being crucified or saying I’m glamorizing abuse??????

I’m fed up with female writers and alt singers saying that I glamorize abuse when in reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all around the world.

The whole “when in reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities (…)” is incredibly funny to me, though I understand it is somewhat preposterous. Still, it is my sense that a lot of Lana’s work needs to be taken as provocation, like a satirical ditsy Marilyn type, that aims, as a philosophy, for a kind of tragic honesty, against the current of prescriptive advice about relationships and feminity. Also, if you look close enough, certain lyrics in her discography do leave breadcrumbs to her self-awareness.

For instance, one of my favorite songs by Lana, “Brooklyn Baby” is completely tongue and cheek.

Well, my boyfriend’s in a band / He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed / I’ve got feathers in my hair / I get down to Beat poetry / And my jazz collection’s rare / I can play most anything /I’m a Brooklyn baby”

Later she concludes,

Yeah, my boyfriend’s pretty cool / But he’s not as cool as me.

In the title track of Norman Fucking Rockwell, she sings,

Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news / You’re just a man, that’s what you do

Lana knows how bad or embarrassing her men are. She deconstructs them and reduce them to just that, helplessly. Other times she seems to take on the responsibility, framing herself as the ideal woman who can take all that on (more on that later). Men, like the United States, we cannot be sure if Lana is critiquing them or romanticising them! But let’s go back. In a couple of sentences we can trace the visual / cinematic/ atmospheric evolution of Lana’s records.

• In Born to Die (2012), the soundtrack to my pre-teen years, Lana channels the women of famous American men, channeling Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Pricilla Presley; and conjure imagery of hitchhiking, highways, dessert landscapes, and motels. In those years, she wore cut off jeans and an American flag around her shoulders, but has paired back this kind patriotism since 2016, though the American myth remains her dominant vehicle for storytelling and visuals.

• Ultraviolence (2014) came on the heels of Born to Die’s mainstream success. In this album, Lana begins her chronicles of California, and writes about New York as she leaves it behind, the place where her career began signing at open mics, and includes homages to beat poetry, a great inspiration of her’s.

• In Honeymoon (2015) the album’s imagery is softer and calls up 60s California, compared to her previously more striking, sharper midcentury looks. Overall lush and dreamy tones of florals and soft pastels. The whites are ethereal and cult-like.

• In Lust For Life (2017) the longing for a simpler times comes up. By contrasting Woodstock and Coachella, Lana is weighing past versus present, again idealising a time she did not know, but working out her feelings about her stardom and the reality of performing for commercial festivals.

• Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019) is widely considered her best album, and this is where I think she is sharpest as a culture commentator. The typical Lana-ism of bad guys remains (the song “Cinnamon Girl” is written in Born to Die tradition) but she gets a lot right about the moment she is writing in, chronicling larger (politically charged) diseases in the culture, the disappearance of a culture and beloved icons, all of this against the background of the duality of California. The record simultaneously signals the end of an era (somewhat clairvoyantly, this was written/ released in 2018/19) as well as a shift in Lana’s sound. Set in an apocalyptic California, the record has a saturated color palette with a more paired back musical production. In the song “The greatest,” she sings, “L.A. is in flames, it’s getting hot/ Kanye West is blond and gone/ “Life on Mars” ain’t just a song/ Oh, the live stream’s almost on.”

• The visuals of Chemtrails Over The Country Club (2021) has a suburbia feeling to it, 1950s pearls and shots reminiscent of Slim Aarons. It takes on themes of escapism, weighing the ordinary versus the extraordinary, the artificial versus mysticism. Lana’s music video character is older than her Born To Die era; reminding us that this is all her world and we are there to witness her move through it.

• The title track of Did you know there was a tunnel under ocean boulevard (2023) refers to an abandoned tunnel in Long Beach, California. Here, forgotten history parallels Lana’s musings on longevity as a female star. The record also considers loss in family and the complexity of her own life. The songwriting is incredibly wordy, soft but overflowing and cinematic!

Which gets us to Stove — at least what we have of it so far.

Lana has been teasing her next album since 2024, seemingly a country album, though Lana is nothing if not a contrarian and around the same time many other pop artists were dipping into country (or at least country-adjacent visuals), such as Beyonce, Sabrina Carpenter, Post Malone, and Chappell Roan, and it seems Lana felt the need to pivot when too many people were getting in to it… A messy, delayed rollout is typical of Lana and part of the magic! This upcoming record has been (publicly) renamed three times. My guess is because she is deeply involved, true to her vision and meticulous about how she adds to the world she has created.

The first iteration of the new album was supposed to be called Lasso; it was then renamed to The Right Person Will Stay (a bonkers name), and then renamed to Stove — which is where we’re currently at. (And as far as I know, there isn’t a date for album release as of now). Still the title evolution alone is a set of developments I cannot help but feel be incredibly entertained by.

The first single, “Henry, come on” came in April 2025, then “Bluebird” was released shortly thereafter, and “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” was just released this February.

“Henry, come on” actually gets at a central premise of Lana’s. In one of her earlier and biggest hits, “Young and Beautiful,” she sings, ‘Dear Lord, when I get to heaven, please let me take my man.’ In “Henry, come on” she expresses a similar sentiment: ‘But yesterday, I heard God say “You were born to be the one / To hold the hand of the man / Who flies too close to the sun,”’— that of the glory of men and being the right woman to support them.

Now, I was shell-shocked the first time I heard “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” but I have come around to it, and actually think it is very clever and layered! It makes me think (hope!) that this upcoming record may be her southern gothic album.

“White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” is breathy, sensual, and her ditsy vocals against the eerie instrumental is absolutely terrifying. The sound absolutely compliments the storytelling, which I think is brilliantly done. The song deals with married life, domesticity (which makes the name of the album Stove, clearer), and the mental illness of the narrator, who is the wife [Note: I really don’t think this is autobiographical. Instead, I think, since Lana is a married woman, I think she just naturally interrogates this phase in her life through the lens of the character and world of men she has constructed throughout her songwriting].

The reference to being “bad with an oven” very Plathian, and suggestive of danger, but the chorus (“Positively voodoo, everything that you do / Did you know exactly how magical you are? / Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, ‘I love you’ / Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter”) shows the woman being mystified by her man, and whimsically doing all the house chores, possibly against her psychological well-being, brushing off the warning signs of her mental fragility. There is also the suggestion of doubtful onlookers, and the sense that the woman hasn’t always been alright

Before I met him, wore a bow over three summers / Now it’s a ribbon ‘round my neck, and it’s cherry-colored / I’ve just been baking, waitin’ on a spirit hunter / I got a nicotine patch for the summer / Yeah, I’m a ghost, doesn’t mean I feel nothin’ / Put it on my ass, no tan lines summer/ I love my daddy, of course we’re still together / Everyone knows I had some trouble / But it’s been three summers /I know it’s strange to see me cooking / For my husband.

The line, “We’re a match, he’s just in my bone marrow,” is the one that struck me upon first listen, as it immediately situates her in the current climate. There’s something about bone marrow that instantly calls up specificity in gender roles and contemporary American public health politics — which is the genius of Lana and a prime example of her, as always, capturing the moment we are living in.

To put it in contemporary terms, this discussion is (sort-of-but-not-really) a variant on whether we ought to separate the art from the artist, how one ought to remember an artist in hindsight when we know too much about their politics. Only in this case, Arendt’s take is specifically rooted in aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. My grad school seminar about eighteenth century German aesthetics took away years of my life, but then it added decades to it when all the pieces finally clicked in my mind (entirely because of my wonderful professor). It ought to be said that reading aesthetics (and I suppose philosophy in general) does require one to put aside our modern day judgements and go with what is being said, at least momentarily, to understand it in the first place. (By which I mean: I’m not trying to offend anyone’s concept of art/politics/political art)!

At the moment of the profile’s publication, Bertold Brecht (BB) is no longer alive but famous, and widely remembered as a great poet and playwright, but his personal trajectory is also known. BB fled Germany in the thirties and went into exile in Denmark, Finland and then the United States. He moved to Switzerland in 1941 because of some unwanted attention from the House of Un-American Activities Committee for his ties to Communism. In 1949, he moved to East Berlin to run a theatre company.

In the profile, Arendt relies on Goethe’s wisdom, the idea that “it is the poet’s task to coin the words we live by.” The idea that more is permitted to poets than to regular people is at the heart of this profile. Meaning, how, we, the public, ought to treat/ judge poets, and what we can and cannot expect from them.

The chronic misbehavior of poets and artists has been a political, and sometimes a moral, problem since antiquity. In the following discussion of this case, I shall stick to the two assumptions I have mentioned. First, although in general Goethe was right and more is permitted to poets than to ordinary mortals, poets, too, can sin so gravely that they must bear their full load of guilt and responsibility. And, second, the only way to determine unequivocally how great their sins are is to listen to their poetry—which means, I assume, that the faculty of writing a good line is not entirely at the poet’s command but needs some help, that the faculty is granted him and that he can forfeit it.

Poets, Arendt writes, have historically not made the best citizens. She uses Ezra Pound as an example (I, until reading this piece, had no idea Pound was a fascist and anti-semite and the discussion on Pound, in my opinion, is not satisfactorily wrapped up). “To talk about poets is an uncomfortable task; poets are there to be quoted, not to be talked about,” Arendt goes on to write. In an ideal world, sure. But because poets are also flawed beings who can make mistakes and terrible decisions, sometimes we have to talk about them! Which brings us here. Where Arendt lands on her line of argument is still a little bit opaque to me; but I am struck at how contemporary this discussion is, but I also fear that today’s wider public wouldn’t have enough nuance to sit with this piece.

Again, what is important to keep in mind, is the philosophical tradition that Arendt is approaching BB from. The idea that poets should be treated specially is sweeping and intellectually idealistic, and whether you buy into this depends on whether you are sensitive to certain values of classical philosophy and antiquity, whereby poetry was considered a divine gift bestowed on few earthy beings.

“Brecht’s political biography,” Arendt writes, is “a kind of case history of the uncertain relationship between poetry and politics.” Throughout the piece she traces BB’s life and work with compassion and incredible precision, isolating events of where it started to go wrong, weaving philosophy and BB’s own conception of himself throughout. Arendt sets out the ideal conditions for being a poet, namely the way BB was until a certain point. Primarily, living with a certain level of remoteness from real life; for thoughts and contemplation to be unmotivated by the stuff of mere earthly beings! However, where BB went wrong is when his poetry became motivated by ideology. Importantly, Arendt’s discussion being philosophical, contemplative, rather fair and free of judgement, allows her to brilliantly identify and contextualise a lie in BB’s later work, a turning point of sorts, where, in a poem, he manipulates and misrepresents an aspect of history for his own cause (which we will get to).

There will be a lot of quoting ahead, because quite frankly, there is no use paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, you might as well read her words. But hopefully this reconstructs an incredibly layered situation, and you can then go read it for yourself with a little more ease!

Arendt begins by introducing her subject and leans on the way BB has framed his ability for poetry; namely luck (as opposed to hard work, curiosity, and so on). Accordingly, Arendt begins to intertwine his downfall with his conception of luck (eventually running out of it) with divine punishment, taking his ability to write great poetry away from him. Again, where it all went wrong was when BB gave up on his independent thought, when his poetry became politically motivated, his art was compromised, becoming a mouthpiece for the stalinists. The idea of BB’s luck running out began when he distanced himself from the nature his life and a poet, and began writing for ideology.

But we have to go back even further for it to make sense, how this could happen. Arendt begins by setting the stage for the world BB came of age in: BB was a part of the lost generation. But contrary to his peers, she argues BB took the challenges of his era into a different direction, displaying his unique position among his peers (which we can attribute to his character).

On the lost generation, Arendt writes,

They resented the fact that the world did not offer them shelter and the security to develop as individuals, and they began to produce their curious kind of literature, mostly novels in which nothing seems to be of interest but psychological deformation, social torture, personal frustration, and general disillusion. This is not nihilism; indeed, to call these authors nihilists would be to pay them an entirely undeserved compliment. They did not cut deep enough—they were too much concerned with themselves—to see the real issues; they remembered everything and forgot what mattered.

The quote above seems like a slight at modernist artists (making me feel incredibly silly in the process, as a great admirer of the lost generation). Indeed, Brecht was not like them! But it also led him to his downfall.

That Brecht never felt sorry for himself—hardly ever was even interested in himself—was one of his great virtues, but the virtue was rooted in something else, which was a gift and was, like all such gifts, part blessing and part curse. (…) Let us remember him with forbearance, if for no other reason than that he was so much more impressed by the catastrophes of the time in the world than by anything that concerned him. And let us not forget that success never turned his head. He knew that “wenn mein Glück aussetzt, bin ich verloren” (“when my luck leaves me, I’m lost”). And it was his pride to rely on his luck rather than on his gifts, to believe himself lucky rather than extraordinary. (…) This, then, was the man: gifted with a penetrating, non-theoretical, non-contemplative intelligence that went to the heart of the matter, silent and unwilling to show himself, remote and probably also shy, at any rate not much interested in himself but incredibly curious (indeed, “der wissensdurstige Brecht,” as he called himself in the “Solomon Song” of “The Threepenny Opera”), and, first and foremost, a poet—that is, someone who must say the unsayable, who must not remain silent on occasions when all are silent, and who must therefore be careful not to talk too much about things that all talk about.

The passages above describe BB as possessing the ideal, perhaps necessary conditions to be a real poet, at odds with his peers when the world most needs him to be. Arendt continues detailing his trajectory, paralleling it with the verses and plays he is writing. But, like anything, there was a downfall for his nature; namely his compassion, that which seemingly radicalised him; and made him fall for all the traps the poets ought not to.

What brought Brecht back to reality, and almost killed his poetry, was compassion. When hunger ruled, he rebelled along with those who were starving: “I am told: You eat and drink—be glad you do! But how can I eat and drink when I rob my food from the man who is hungry, and when my glass of water is needed by someone who is dying of thirst?” Compassion was doubtless the fiercest and most fundamental of Brecht’s passions, hence the one he was most anxious to hide and also was least successful in hiding; it shines through almost every play he wrote. (…) The leitmotiv was the fierce temptation to be good in a world and under circumstances that make goodness impossible and self-defeating. The dramatic conflict in Brecht’s plays is almost always the same: Those who, compelled by compassion, set out to change the world cannot afford to be good. Brecht discovered by instinct what the historians of revolution have persistently failed to see; namely, that the modern revolutionists from Robespierre to Lenin were driven by the passion of compassion (…) “The classics” (Marx, Engels, and Lenin, in Brecht’s coded language) “were the most compassionate of all men,” and what distinguished them from “ignorant people” was that they knew how to “transform” the emotion of compassion into the emotion of “anger.” They understood that “pity is what one does not deny those whom one refuses to help.” (The quotations are from an odd little book of aphorisms, written chiefly during the thirties and interesting for Brecht’s desperate attempts to come to terms with Stalin. Found among his papers after his death, it was edited by Uwe Johnson and published in 1965 under the title “Meti. Buch der Wendungen.”) (…) And this, of course, was where his troubles, and our troubles with him, began. He had scarcely joined the Communists before he found out that in order to change the bad world into a good world it was not enough “not to be good” but that you had to become bad yourself, that in order to exterminate meanness there should be no mean thing you were not ready to do.

Arendt goes on to quote the evidence of BB’s passionate compassion from lines of his plays, and quotes the doubts and contradictions that creep into his verses. But it is his work “Measure Taken” that demands our attention,

[W]hen the Party—in 1929, after Stalin, at the Sixteenth Party Congress, had announced the liquidation of the right and left Opposition—began to liquidate its own members, Brecht felt that what the Party needed right then was a defense of killing one’s own comrades and innocent people. In “Measure Taken” he shows how and for what reasons the innocent, the good, the humane, those who are outraged at injustice and come running to help are being killed.

Remember when I mentioned that there was a lie in BB’s work? Here it is.

The “classics” by which he stubbornly tried to take his bearings did not permit him to recognize what Hitler actually did. He began to lie, and wrote the wooden prose dialogue in “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich” that anticipates later so-called poems, which are journalese divided into verse lines. By 1935 or 1936, Hitler had liquidated hunger and unemployment; hence, for Brecht, schooled in the “classics,” there was no longer any pretext for not praising Hitler. In seeking one, he simply refused to recognize what was patent to everybody—that those really persecuted were not workers but Jews, that it was race, and not class, that counted. There was not a line in Marx, Engels, or Lenin that dealt with this, and the Communists denied it—it was nothing but a pretense of the ruling classes, they said—and Brecht, stolidly refusing to “look for himself,” fell into line. He wrote a few poems about conditions in Nazi Germany, all of these poems quite bad, a representative one being entitled “Burial of the Agitator in the Zinc Coffin.” It deals with the Nazi custom of shipping home in sealed coffins the remains of people beaten to death in concentration camps. Brecht’s agitator had suffered this fate because he had preached “eating your fill, a roof over your head, feeding your children;” in short, he was a madman, for no one went hungry in Germany at that time, and the Nazi slogan of the Volksgemeinschaft (folk community) was by no means mere propaganda. Who would have bothered to put him out of the way? The real horror, the only point to be made, was the way this man had died, that he had to be hidden in the zinc coffin. The zinc coffin was indeed important, but Brecht did not follow up the indication of the title; in his version, the agitator’s fate was hardly any worse than the fate that an opponent of any kind of capitalist government was likely to suffer. And this was a lie. What Brecht wanted to say was that there was a difference only in degree between countries under capitalist rule. And this was a double lie, for in capitalist countries opponents were not beaten to death and shipped home in sealed coffins, and Germany was not a capitalist country any longer, as the Messrs. Schacht and Thyssen were to learn, to their sorrow. And how about Brecht? He had escaped from a country where everybody could eat his fill, had a roof over his head, and could feed his children. This is how it was, and this he did not dare to face.

What Arendt also does quite brilliantly, is at once denouncing BB’s rewriting of history for the sake of his cause, and situating it in his downfall as a poet, as though it were punishment. Indeed, throughout the piece Arendt tells the reader at which point BB’s poetry is brilliant and at which point it is not. (Which is helpful, having not read any BB myselft…). She is too smart to affirm it to be causal (that being a bad person = bad art, sadly that’s not journalism…), but there is something satisfying about the fact that it just so happens that BB’s betrayal occurs in parallel with his luck running out (meaning his poetry becoming bad). A truly brilliant overlap of journalism, criticism, aesthetics and classical philosophy!

If your head is spinning, this is how Arendt makes sense of it all,

Brecht’s troubles had started when he became engagé (as we would say today, for the concept did not exist then), when he tried to do more than be a voice, which was how he began. A voice of what? Not of himself alone, but of the world and of everything that was real. Yet that was not enough. To be a voice of what he thought was reality had carried him away from the real; wasn’t he on the way to becoming what he liked least—one more solitary great poet in the German tradition, instead of what he wanted most to be, a bard of the people? And yet, when he went into the thick of things, his remoteness as a poet was what he carried, willy-nilly, into the newfound reality, his sharp and tricky intelligence notwithstanding. This remoteness from the real was revealed when he did not break with a party that killed his friends and allied itself with his worst enemy, and when, for the sake of the “classics,” he refused to see what was actually happening in his homeland—something that in his more prosaic moments he understood only too well.

And just in case this was all incredibly offensive to you, Arendt does clear up the notion of justice she began with, namely, the idea that what is permitted Jove cuts both ways,

From the beginning of these reflections, I have proposed that we grant poets a certain latitude, such as we would hardly be willing to grant each other in the ordinary course of events. I do not deny that this may offend many people’s sense of justice; in fact, if Brecht were still among us he would certainly be the first to protest violently against any such exception (…) However, the equality before the law whose standard we commonly adopt for moral judgments as well is no absolute. Every judgment is open to forgiveness, every act of judging can change into an act of forgiving; to judge and to forgive are but the two sides of the same coin. But the two sides follow different rules. The majesty of the law demands that we be equal—that only our acts count, and not the person who committed them. The act of forgiving, on the contrary, takes the person into account; no pardon pardons murder or theft but only the murderer or the thief. We always forgive somebody, never something, and this is the reason people think that only love can forgive. But, with or without love, we forgive for the sake of the person, and while justice demands that all be equal, mercy insists on inequality—an inequality implying that every man is, or should be, more than whatever he did or achieved. (…) The standard that rules in this domain of inequality is still contained in the old Roman saying “Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi” (“What is permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox”). But, for our consolation, this inequality works both ways. One of the signs that a poet is entitled to such privileges as I here claim for him is that there are certain things he cannot do and still remain who he was. It is the poet’s task to coin the words we live by, and surely no one is going to live by the words that Brecht wrote in praise of Stalin. The simple fact that he was capable of writing such unspeakably bad verse, worse by far than any fifth-rate scribbling versifier who was guilty of the same sins, shows that “quod licet bovi non licet Iovi” (“what is permitted to an ox is not permitted to Jove”). For whether or not you can praise tyranny in “fine-sounding voices,” it is true that mere intellectuals or literati are not punished for their sins by loss of talent. No god leaned over their cradle; no god will take his revenge. There are a great many things that are permitted to an ox but not to Jove; that is, not to those who are a bit like Jove—or, rather, are blessed by Apollo. Hence the bitterness of the old saying cuts both ways, and the example of “poor B.B.,” who never wasted a shred of pity on himself, may teach us how difficult it is to be a poet in this century or at any other time.

I know this is hardly the stuff of weekend literature, but regardless, I’m grateful if you’ve made it this far :’)

My self-explanatory categories are as follow: Top tier diva, Cult classic, It exists, and Electric chair. The books are listed out in loose thematic order, besides separating biographies / autobiographies / memoirs from diaries (I do have standards here at HFB).

I’ve included a couple lines of non-exhaustive summary, whether or not you should read it, and what the levels of delusion, sincerity, or urgency are. I’ve relied mostly on personal notes, memory (not having access to every copy, nor the energy to consult all), and the occasional emergency Goodreads verification. These are my opinions and they come from a place of moods and whims, and above all a love for reading, mythologizing, the stories we tell others & ourselves!

Lastly, there’s works of non-fiction that veer into memoir, but I’ve played it safe in my categorisation (not including auto-fiction à la Eve Babitz or Deborah Levy. After all, you know my thoughts on auto-fiction).

Biography / Auto-biography / Memoir

Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein

• One of the most impactful books I’ve read, likely because I read it when I was fifteen years old! My memory tells me that the movie Factory Girl (starring Sienna Miller as Edie) was also a masterpiece, but I know that is factually incorrect. But stay with me! Edie: American Girl is as filled with gossip as it is heartbreaking. The many perspectives and testimonies makes it a balanced account, and I do think you come out of it making your own opinion of Edie. Edie Sedgwick to me is like the Manson murders, everyone has a phase of obsession. The reals one do, at least. So this makes it a top tier diva. However….

As It Turns Out by Alice Sedgwick Wohl

• I wrote about this book when I first read it, and attended a reading at McNally Jackson. And let me tell you…electric chair. Written by Edie’s sister, Alice, this to me is an extremely bias and unbalanced account of her subject, that seems to exist for the sole purpose to belittle her legacy!

American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post by Nancy Rubin Stuart

• It exists! I hold fond memories of this book because I bought it on a very fun trip to Washington DC, while visiting Marjorie Merriweather Post’s home! Born in 1887 in Springfield, Illinois, Marjorie Merriweather Post was a cereal heiress, socialite and businesswoman who collected art and lived a glamorous life! Do you need to read this book? Not really! But if you ever find yourself in DC, you should go visit the Hillwood Estate!

Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld by William Middelton

• Biographies are tough and approved ones can be suspicious but this is a great one, primarily because Karl Lagerfeld did live an extraordinary life! Middelton is both rigorous and kind in documenting his Lagerfeld’s path from childhood to fashion designer, but also taking us through Lagerfeld’s humour, eccentricities, his philosophy on life, and his boundless passion for art and culture. It’s a cult classic for me!

Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood (not sure this counts?)

• This barely counts because I think this is actually a novel, but it tells the stories of Hemingway’s four wives. It is all about love triangles, not being able to change a man, and each wife not thinking they would suffer the same fate as his previous woman! Again, there likely is a fair bit of speculation and enhancements in the name of dramatisation BUT I knew nothing of Hemingway’s wives & dynamics before, and now I know a little bit! It was also a highly enjoyable read! This falls into, it exists, but better to have knowledge than to not have it, right?

Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner and Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis

• So, I’ve read 2 Liz & Dick biographies and I think this is the kind of thing where you might prefer the first one you read… in my case I preferred Furious Love. I will say that Erotic Vagrancy also happens to be much longer and, if I remember correctly, it goes into much more detail about people, films and specifics of the era that I simply did not know enough about to fully enjoy! Still, both are cult classics because it’s Liz & Dick.

Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

• This is almost a top tier diva, but it isn’t just because of how insufferable the subject in question is. Harry Crosby is a man who has largely remained in the footnotes of modernism. Beneath the Parisian artistic milieu and the excesses of the Lost Generation, traumas of WWI fester, and Crosby, founder of the publishing house Black Sun Press, spins out into opium haze, an obsession with solar symbolism, makes an enemy out of Edith Wharton, rubs shoulders with all the up-and-coming greats, engages in all around unbearable behavior and dies in a borderline sensationalist suicide pact. His wife rebrands from plain ‘Mary’ to elusive ‘Caresse’ (iconic). This book is exhausting and extremely camp!

Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly by Rivkin Joshua

• In the name of transparency, I will admit that I remember absolutely nothing about this book. I don’t even remember reading it. The evidence is in my Goodreads and I gave it three stars, which confirms the fact that I felt nothing, not even outrage. It exists, I guess?

Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim

• Staying in the art world! Now, this is autobiography territory. Didn’t learn too much about art, instead about what the Guggenheim name means and how it came to signal prestige in the art world. To enjoy this you must also enjoy reading about eccentric bohemian Americans traveling Europe, I was certainly was amused! Bonus point because this book has the good sense to be short! It exists?

Salinger by David Shields

• A pretty large biography of JD Salinger. My toxic trait is that I adore Salinger and wrote my graduate thesis about the Glass family. Do you need to read this? No. Even I only read this for research and there’s arguably a lot of better stuff about him out there, namely the stuff he actually wrote! It exists.

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

• Recency bias & and other biases may tell me to make this a top tier diva, and all of this is bias so I will! This is so good. Though similarly to the Salinger bio, I’d say go read actual writing by Didion and Babitz but then come back for this. It is a gift that Anolik researched and gave us the insight into their dynamic.

Trio: Oona Chaplin Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt: Portrait of An Intimate Friendship by Saroyan Aram

• This is exactly what the title says it is about and it is incredibly low stakes. I mean, there is absolutely no urgency about this book and sometimes the best thing about a book is that it would never be written today! Do people care that these women were friends? I didn’t until I started reading it. Oona (O’Oneil) Chaplin is one of my favourite socialites (I’d love to know yours), and there is a fun thematic overlap with the Salinger biography because she and Salinger dated! And then she married old Charlie Chaplin! Gasp! I’m going to put it in cult classic because no one else will.

Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favourite Kennedy Daughter by Barbara Leaming

• Also niche! An underrated Kennedy. It exists.

My Life So Far by Jane Fonda

• I LOVE JANE FONDA. She means everything to me and I think this is the most perfect autobiography ever written. She is just so resilient, so honest and forever young and forever the coolest. Top tier diva.

Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull

• A very imperfect autobiography. Perhaps the opposite of Jane Fonda. Sad because it comes across a little bitter, and an instance of maybe biography being written for the wrong reasons (I’m looking at you Alice Wohl Sedgwick). You still get a good amount of information about her early life and how she came up with the Stones! I don’t want to be mean and put electric chair so I’ll say it exists. But…

Life by Keith Richards

• is the GOAT. This is history! Irreverent and sensitive! Some incredible passages about the police trying to catch and ban the Rolling Stones for their drug use, and they got pretty close..! Top tier diva.

Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan

• I don’t remember much about this either but I gave this a four star rating! I went through this whole phase where I read musician biographies to signal that I wasn’t like other girls — and my failure to provide you with solid account of this book fills me with shame and is punishment enough for my teenaged phoniness! It exists?

From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley

• Now this one is very interesting. I am heavily invested in Elvis Presley and even visited Graceland as a pilgrimage of sorts. This was written by his daughter, Lisa Marie, before her death, and later completed by her own daughter, Riley Keough. What a life, honestly. There is quite a bit of delusion here, bless her. Mythologizing a father is natural to a certain extent but so immensely amplified when that father is Elvis Presley and died when you were nine years old. It really seems as though a part of Lisa Marie remained stuck as that nine year old, which may explain the plethora of questionable decisions made throughout her life (respectfully!). This is filled great anecdotes, my favourite is that she and her family lived on the top floor in Graceland, while tourists (like me!) toured the ground floor of the home. Cult classic!

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave.

• In interview format. This is heartbreaking and wise. I didn’t know much about Cave’s career and this touches on his life after loss. He expresses himself simply and lyrically about grief in a way that is incredibly profound. Cult classic.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

• The kind of book that you read because it is a classic. And it is, cult classic!

Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit

• Top tier diva. Solnit’s life as a writer and feminist in San Francisco. Made me want to be both and go to SF!

Just Kids; M Train; The Year of The Monkey by Patti Smith,

• What is there left to say? Everyone has read Just Kids but I think M Train was my favorite. It is so New York and filled with the most wonderful descriptions of eating toast and drinking black coffee. The Year of The Monkey has specific 2016 vibes to it, and while I’m obviously interested in Smith’s point of view, I was alive for that so it doesn’t quite do it as much as the others. Cult classics nonetheless.

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

• A cult classic for millennials. I don’t know if I’m a millennial, I don’t feel like one, but anyone older than me is, and anyone younger is Gen Z. This book was everywhere for a long time and was something of a bible for north London millennial party girls, an experience I do not relate to. Still, Alderton is A voice of A generation and I love to know that I exist in the same world as her and that get to read her thoughts.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

• The only Stephen King I’ve read and one of the best books about writing and the craft! Top tier diva!

When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter.

• Consumed this once via audiobook and sometimes that’s best for a biography. There are so many good stories and will do the trick of making you nostalgic for a bygone era of journalism. Cult classic, I ate it up!

The Years by Annie Ernaux

• I said I would exclude auto-fiction and all of Ernaux is essentially auto-fiction (don’t come for my sweeping generalisations, this is hyperbole for bfast!) However! The Years is a memoir! I read almost all of Ernaux (not voluntarily, it is not entirely my cup of tea (French lit generally isn’t)), I read it for university, and I will say reading this gives you the most complete bird’s eye view of her oeuvre! So for that, cult classic.

Childhood / Youth / Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

• Similarly to Nick Cave’s book, I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked it up. I simply figured I ought to read more translated literature, and boy oh boy. Likely would not have read it had I known the level of stress and heartbreak headed my way. Top tier diva.

Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles

• I unfortunately hated the experience of reading this. Really not for me. Give me Patti Smith. Electric chair.

Outofshapeworthlessloser: A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out by Gracie Gold.

• Gracie Gold was one of my favourite figure skaters growing up and reading this really broke my heart. Realising there’s not a lot of sports bios here. Don’t know how to rank this because this scratched the curiosity itch and answered the questions I had about her retirement. I still think the kind of trauma she lived through takes a bit longer to digest. Respectfully, it exists. I love her a lot!!

Wild West Village: Not a Memoir — Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1 by Lola Kirk

• This is fun but unurgent but specifically more fun if you care about adjacency to Jemima Kirk (since this was written by her little sister). Eccentric bohemian family growing in the west village in the 80s! If that sounds fun to you, you’ll like it. It exists.

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

• Thematic Girls continuation…I read this as a teen and there’s stuff in there I would not be able to erase for my mind if I had a brain transplant. For better or worse, I’m not sure. Do I reccomend this? Not really, it exists. Though I do think Lena’s memoir coming out this spring will be great!

Onto diaries…..

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol.1: 1931-1934 + The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol.2.: 1934-1939

• Nin’s world of desire and bohemia is fascinating and her writing lytical and engaging. So much underlining. Her world is boundless and her spirit is free! Top tier diva.

Journal of A Solitude by May Sarton

• Very underrated! A soothing read that is great if you’re in a slump! Cult classic!

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag + Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag

• Went down a Susan Sontag rabbit hole a few years ago and she was just so brilliant. The way she kept a notebook is aspirational, she found ideas everywhere, and was so intellectually rigorous and curious. Need to revisit. Cult classic.

Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937) by Harry Graf Kessler

• Count Harry Kessler was one of the most elegant men of the twentieth century! He traveled throughout Europe, and diligently wrote the world around him, giving us this extensive portrait of German and Europe between the world wars. He lets us in on the art, people, politics, and culture of his time and along with anecdotes about anyone that was anyone back then. So many cameos. If you read Middelton’s biography of Karl Lagerfeld, you’ll learn that Count Harry Kessler was a huge inspiration for Karl, in terms of lifestyle, culture, and intellect. This is by far the most ‘historical’ biography I’ve read and it is a commitment, but nonetheless, a top tier diva.

The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard edited by Peter Rhode.

• TOP TIER DIVA! I never shut up about this. It is what you would expect the Kafka diaries to be and so much more; Kierkegaard flies under the radar in that respect. Anxious, melodramatic, relatable and hilarious.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

• Speaking of, also fascinating! Intimate and intense! Reading a diary often means you are confronted with the writer expressing rage or cryptic despair and not knowing what they’re referring to, but the beauty of the writing here makes not knowing okay!! Cult classic!

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

• I waited a long time to read this, and finally did last summer. I don’t usually read diaries quickly, I typically take them alongside other reading and drag it out over a couple of months, but I read this one in less than two weeks. Could not put it down. I will not go on about how much I related to her because that would be alarming, but I will just say I really appreciated the way she documented her writing process, the highs and the lows. She was so hard on herself and it breaks my heart that she didn’t live to know her success. She had a sense of humour and was nasty in a way that makes me think we would have been friends! Top tier diva forever.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Malcolm Janet

• A parenthesis: this is technically criticism and not a biography. I suppose it is the biography of Sylvia Plath’s estate. But it is too good to leave out! It tackles the stakes and ambiguities of biography, legacy, the work that is left behind and what happens to it. This is absolutely brilliant and so so dense. Not a must read though so, cult classic.

The Journals of John Cheever

• I adore John Cheever, though I do not remember any fiction he has written beyond “The Swimmer” (top tier diva short story) because it all exists in the hazy world of 1950s American suburbia malaise (financial instability, alcoholism, and Cheever was also closeted homosexual (bisexual?)). That said, I really enjoyed his diaries. There is also an excellent essay written by his daughter in the Paris Review (“My Parents’ Marriage”). between it exists and cult classic, but would love to revisit someday!

Notes to John by Joan Didion

• People feel a lot of ways about this, primarily concerning the ethics of this being published in the first place. To me, it is just too good, and I am simply too grateful to read this to get on my high horse about it! This is not technically a diary but these are the notes which Joan meticulously kept from her sessions with her psychiatrist. Intense, I know. Invasive, yeah, I know. But it is so rich and truly moving to read Joan with her mask off. The notes are mostly taken from sessions discussing the parenting of her daughter Quintana, her growing pains and many struggles with alcoholism. Reading this, I had to continuously remind myself that these are mere notes and not an edited piece of writing! What? Who writes like this?? Respectfully, top tier diva.

Anything I missed and should read? xxxx

I, like everyone else, am watching Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette, which led me down the VF archives: “Secrets and Lies” by Edward Klein. I’ve heard, read and seen all that’s wrong with and factually ambiguous about the show, (my personal bone is with the writing and the occasional use of contemporary, very now, turn of phrases in dialog) but none of it actually matters to me because these have been such excellent hours of television!! I am obsessed with the Calvin Klein of it all, the interiors, Naomi Watts as Jackie O, and Grave Gummer as Caroline Kennedy. I have also never been a person than longed for the 90s, but this show has done it. I wonder, is this the show that makes me throw out all my Peter Pan collars and finally makes me dress like a gdamn adult???

“Why Some People Thrive on Four Hours of Sleep” by Shayla Love for The New Yorker. Very interesting! I’ll just come out and state my bias as a person with good sleep because that is the right & brave thing to do: I didn’t think “natural short sleepers” actually existed and now feel all tenderly towards them & all the loneliness it leads to (unless they’re optimising their time and getting a whole education out of it or learning a new language, in that case I’m envious). [This article is for my male friends, the ones who read me in spite of being interested in very little of my nonsense!!! Biohacking/sleep science and emotional states is where our interests overlap!!]

Being awake so much can be an isolating experience. “There are times when I look outside and there isn’t a light on in any of the houses in my whole subdivision,” Osmond said. Whereas I might be frustrated by running out of time before bed, a short sleeper has to make sure she doesn’t run out of constructive tasks. (“I think one of my brothers died because he could not keep his mind busy and started to drink,” Osmond had told me previously.) Despite all of her volunteering, tutoring, working, parenting, and hobbying, she is always searching for new interests. In 2021, when Iceland’s volcanoes started to erupt for the first time in hundreds of years, she read everything she could find on geology. Then she got bored and moved on.

“ECHO DELAY REVERB” at Palais de Tokyo by Andrew Pasquier for Spike Art. Wish I hadn’t missed this.

“Belle Burden Wrote a Viral “Modern Love” About Her Husband’s Betrayal. Now You Can Read the Book” by Belle Burden for Vanity Fair. An extract from Belle Burden’s divorce memoir. (Belle Burden is the grand daughter of Babe Paley). Not sure I will be reading the whole thing (maybe a good audio book to get me through my long runs?) But I’m really into the new Vanity Fair — this is exactly the kind of stuff I want to read on my phone while I eat lunch.

“Robert Pattinson and Zendaya Enter the Unknown” for Interview Magazine. Boy, are these two actors busy. I’m excited to watch The Drama and eventually The Odyssey!

“Bret Easton Ellis in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa” for November Mag. Went back down a Bret Easton Ellis rabbit hole, trying to figure out what I was dealing with while reading Lunar Park, which I don’t necessarily recommend as a book. I’d say read Less Than Zero (for the culture! It’s short!) and if you’re wanting more, read The Shards (which I love, & will soon be getting the Ryan Murphy treatment for a TV show).

“Mitski’s New Album Is a Dark Ode to Isolation” by Hanif Abdurraqib for the New Yorker. There’s a new Mitski album out and that’s a world stop moment to me.

“On Angst” by Jamieson Webster for The Paris Review. A little psychoanalysis. Dense but stay with it!

Maybe it is the time zone separating me from my life at home, maybe it is because every iteration of youth culture originates here before getting exported abroad! Maybe it is something of the two. California, and L.A. specifically, is wacky! It’s what I love about it. There is that Joan Didion quote (which I can’t seem to locate nor quote verbatim) that says something about Southern California’s lack of seasons being connected with not sensing the passage of time, and I often think of that in relation to the singularity of it as a place, existing in its own bubble of sorts, trailblazing subcultures of art, music, and fashion all while endlessly exporting forms of storytelling that touch the lives of people around the world.

L.A. is not a place I visited as a child, rather it is a place I discovered as a young adult, through the lens of friends and have little by little made my own, adding traditions and mandatory stops with each visit back. I do not take being on the other side of the world lightly, and with every trip back I feel a renewed sense of gratitude to be here and find new things to love about California. I was supposed to come a year ago, right when the L.A. fires devastated the city, which of course led me to postpone my trip. Now it’s been two years since I’ve been back, and I couldn’t be happier.

Being here means driving down the winding roads of Laurel Canyon, up and down the hills of Echo Park, or watching the billboards on sunset like a carousel from the passenger seat. There’s the greenery! Palm trees but also jacaranda, oaks, sycamore, willows or fig trees. The cool mornings and eating lunch in the sun. Dizzying choices of dietary toppings, add-ons or substations. Kindness; so many kinds of the them; the zany kind, the generous kind, the practical kind, the naïve kind, or the one that seems like a suggestion.

What else? LA means ordering cookies for dessert and bone broth for breakfast, and getting a signed copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (the third book of his I’ve read, and I don’t even mind that it’s getting a little repetitive — I can’t help but be inherently interested in what he has to say). I fist-bump strangers in my exercise class (I cannot stress how out of character this is) and overhear wild conversations in by the lockers. I marvel at how the intensity or intentionality of these conversations is not in the least bit deterred by the fact that it is seven in the morning. [I’m afraid we have been going to workout classes at seven in the morning — but hear me out, in light of the jet lag, by seven, I’ve already had at least two coffees, two hours to read, write, and watch the sunrise from bed. I hang onto this jet lag until the very end on my trip.] These conversations — which occur everywhere, not just at the workout studio we’ve been frequenting — are puzzling, occasionally disarmingly open and frank, and oh so often tied up in that that American naiveté that I can’t help but be charmed by. I am somehow always surprised, and tell myself I ought to pay as much attention at home. Interesting people must exist there too?

The fifteen minute walk to get breakfast does not deter us, though it does reveal us as foreigners. We are the only ones walking — bar some neighbourhood dog owners. We point out the various local community signs, the ones that encourage you to throw your trash away via a silly cartoon with a matching catchphrase that feels like getting a gold star. There are not that many trashcans, I notice this when I’ve been holding my empty coffee cup for a couple of blocks, again reminding me how no one walks. We come across various types of community signs like these throughout the week, as we explore different neighbourhoods. They foster the same communal sentiment though their font or phrasing, I notice, is more pointed at the flavour of the neighbourhood and its residents. These signs fill me with optimism. Other stuff makes me walk back said optimism, but this is not the time, nor place for that.

I check my phone far less while I’m here because, by the end of the morning, everyone I know has gone to bed. As the days go by, I have become negligent with communication and am somewhat purposely skipping the morning window to answer messages, thinking I’ll just do it tomorrow.

In Malibu, we watched the wind wrinkle the water ahead of a rainy day. A rainy day would come, indeed. It was basically biblical. Alerts went off on our phones and the general idea was to stay indoors. Protect your pets, read the alert. My pet was at home with my mother. Our friends predicted that everyone would lose their minds and drive under the rain like it was their first time driving ever. A week of not-so-great weather prediction turned into one bad morning of rain, during which we had a prolonged breakfast, read in bed and watched “Licorice Pizza.”

At dinner, I recognise Vice President Hal Wylie, from the Netflix show “The Diplomat,” and my boyfriend aptly lists out all the actual politicians I continuously fail to recognise back home. I wonder if I ought to rethink my priorities, but actually prefer it this way. At home, nearly everything goes over my head, but over here, my senses are tuned in.

I get back to my room only to find that the hotel has printed out letter writing paper for me with my name on it. I spend the next morning sitting in the lobby’s velvet sofas writing letters to friends, feeling as though I am a part of something bigger, or like I've infiltrated myself into a slice of history and the letters which my friends will receive stand as proof of that. I suspect the letters will reach them in a fortnight, long after I’ve gone.

Another evening. Sitting at the counter at Honor Bar, having a chicken sandwich, the man sitting to my left tells me that he ordered the fries because ours looked so good. Moments later, he tells me he’s anticipating a call and asks me to keep an eye on his things, pointing to his backpack on the floor. I make a half-attempt joke that I’ll guard his fries, too. He doesn’t laugh, instead shows me the background of his phone. Two or three children? His kids. His intensity catches me off-guard. I smile and my eyebrows softly motion inward and upward, in a way that hopefully conveys that I think they’re cute. He’s been away from them for three weeks, he tells me. I nod understandingly, though I’m not sure what to say. I feel too shy to ask why he hasn’t seen them. Is he on a work trip or does he have a really bad custody arrangement? His call never did come, though I ate my dinner anticipating a certain responsibility. We get the cheque and wish him a nice evening. My boyfriend, sitting at my right, couldn’t hear much. I relay what the man had said and add, perhaps speculatively, that he looked tired and a little bit sad, that I sort of wished I could have said more. But what? I didn’t want to overstep. He shrugs and suggests I could have asked how old the kids were and gone from there. That’s true, I tell him. Something to think about as I reluctantly journey on home.

Now, I was a mere observant of the online discourse that ensued the week Lost Lambs came out, the fervid reactions and questioning as to why Cash’s novel was suddenly everywhere and getting excellent reviews by all the relevant (& remaining) legacy media outlets. And while I hadn’t read it yet, I mostly shrugged at the noise, the commentary riddled in bad faith, and the men on the internet clutching their pearls who were calling this a coordinated media campaign. (Doesn’t everyone do promotion hoping for exactly this outcome?). I, for one, don’t actually have an issue with a big rollout or successful promotion if the book is actually good! Which this book is.

Lost Lambs exists in the holy trinity universe of Wes Anderson, Little Women and The Virgin Suicides. The story follows the Flynn family: the parents Catherine and Bud, and their three outrageous daughters, who are unwilling to volunteer at their local church, always talking back, and wonderfully dramatic. Abigail (17) is the eldest and described as being “unquestionably pretty enough to be a recurring character on a Christian soap opera.” Louise (15) is the ultimate middle child, and meets an internet boyfriend — who is surprisingly well-versed in homemade explosives — in a chatroom for middle children. Harper (12) is my favourite, she is the smartest, utterly without boundaries and “mythically bored,” so much so that she goes through her father’s work computer and finds that something doesn’t seem right. Because indeed, Lost Lambs is part family saga, part mystery! Bud, their father works for a company belonging to an evil tech billionaire, Paul Alabaster, who lives nearby, and it is Harper who unleashes the B-plot, reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut, onto us by correctly suspecting that something smells fishy.

The novel is set in a costal town, perhaps a fictional California, with an undeniable small town feeling, the kind where everyone goes to the same church and everyone is up everyone’s business. It is ultimately an exploration of suburban life under late capitalism, in a post-9/11 world, with hints of the disintegration of the American dream. Though the strength of the book, in my opinion, is that it does not take itself too seriously. The stakes are balanced in that the B-plot mystery is weighted equally against the Flynn girls’ hyperbolic disobedience. This is also aided by the sharp and witty prose, the screwball and deadpan humour, and the maximalist dialog!!!

Another thing I loved was the use of puns and inside jokes with the reader. For example, there is a whole bit about gnats that invade the town, and subsequently the word ‘gnat’ invades the page, too (‘gnaturally,’ ‘explagnation,’ ‘extermignation’) until the gnats are extermignated. The Miss Winkle character, we are told upon meeting her, always says “I’ll say!” without actually contributing anything of substance to the conversation. And when Miss Winkle does inevitably proclaim “I’ll say!” it produces a sense of closeness and trust with the narrator, that of being let in on Miss Winkle’s absurdity, like a friend whispering something petty in your ear at a party.

On the topic of Miss Winkle, the title of the novel refers to the Christian self-help group (the ‘Lost Lambs’ support group) run by Miss Winkle out of their local church, Our Lady of Suffering, which the father seeks out when he’s too depressed by the state of his marriage. Indeed, Catherine has cornered Bud into experimenting with an open marriage which doesn’t end up living up to what she’s been building up in her mind. Meanwhile, in an unlikely turn of events, Bud ends up having an affair with Miss Winkle. The title also reflects the arc of each family member, because indeed every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way! And the parent’s marriage problems trickles down to the children, and gets expressed through each child’s flavour of rebellion, displaying what gets absorbed in a family unit from an individual crisis, how it becomes everyone else’s business and ultimately snowballs into a full blown family crisis. In the end, this family’s happiness is touching and quite like everyone else’s, even in the parent’s wacky marriage resolution and patchwork outcome. Sitting in a “fast-casual Italian restaurant,” narrated by the neighbour kid’s bewilderment we can see this.

They were—was he hearing correctly? —laughing. Not fighting or looking at their phones or sitting in stony silence but laughing. Laughing and eating and drawing on the paper tablecloth with dull crayons. The dad fed the church lady a bite of a lobster roll. The contractor stroked the mother’s hair. And the girls-they were each alert and engaged. Prodding one another playfully. Talking about how the youngest had just gotten her first period gross—and how the eldest would travel, then be applying to a nearby college for the spring semester. How unique her college essay was. There was love. Myles felt a wave of emotion he was ill-equipped to identify, would not be able to for years to come, until after a stint in therapy decreed by a post-college girlfriend. Something the therapist would call by a foreign name that would translate to homesick, but homesick for somewhere he’d never been. This moment of joy and communion transcended the Flynns’ obvious domestic flaws like grace transcended denomination. Was it delusion? Hysteria? Whatever made this family freaks seemed to be making them very something…very something indeed. Something where something had no business being. Like how people who almost freeze to death report feeling warm. That was what it was: warmth. It was positively tropical in the Flynn booth.

Until next week xxx

The moon has but of course been an enduring source of fascination and artistic inspiration; we find it in ancient Egyptian iconography, in paintings by Da Vinci and Jan van Eyck, as well as during the Enlightenment. Its representation can symbolise anything from worship and mysticism, to romantic and lyrical aspiration, to knowledge of science and nature, or the unreachable! Celestial representations reflect our human fascination with the moon, and has been interpreted across artistic genres, aesthetic movements and historical periods. Though I am partial the surrealistic representations of the moon by Magritte, Dali, Carrington or Varo; the “paper moon,” (or also referred to “man in the moon” portraits) has been something of a fixation of mine. Paper moon portraits utilised the celestial motif as something of a prop. In my research I found out that it was a popular photographic set up at traveling fairs or carnivals in the United States between the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In these paper moons, individuals would pose in a crescent moon against a whimsical starry backdrop. This set up is not dissimilar to the kind of cardboard cutouts that people stuck their heads through at fairs or amusement parks alike, though something about the paper moon struck me as a touching and an oddly specific fad across a handful of decades, only to then disappear rather suddenly. In the process of my research, my various feeds have become invaded with even more paper moon portraits, to such a degree that I have in some way become witness to the sheer volume and variation of these portraits. Yes, dear reader, there are far more spectacular representations of the moon. Not to mention that the real thing reveals itself to us each night. I’ve just wondered what about this specific period made so many people queue up to take portraits in a paper moon only to have that form entirely disappear. After all, it would still take a few decades for man to walk on the moon and for the cultural aesthetic of 1960s Space Age (another beloved aesthetic movement) to take the world by storm.

But that’s the thing about fads! They come and go, and this particular variant on invoking the moon reflects our natural willingness to attribute meaning to it against our knowledge and better judgement! Paper moons are particularly charming to me because there is a delusional quality to it, that of associating ourselves with it by posing alongside it, as though we weren’t minisicule and not subject to its strange (but I contend very real) influence! Sadly, there isn’t too much information out there about paper moons beyond archival portraits of families and individuals, though we can deduce a lot from the course of history, and the “paper moon” fad actually falls in line with the postcard craze of the early 20th century.

Postcards actually have a fascinating history and are a not negligible part of American visual culture, despite not being considered ‘high art.’ Aside from being a means of communication, postcards captured people, towns and their architecture, events and celebrations, as well as documenting pastimes, attitudes, sentiments, and sources of pride, reflecting the taste and fashions of a time and place.

During the heyday of the postcard craze people bought them for the simple pleasure of owning them. They preserved the cards carefully in albums or posted them to friends and relatives, with the expectation of receiving many in return. In essence, postcards served as an inexpensive form of entertainment in almost every American home, just as radio and television were in later eras. Visitors often viewed with delight the heavily padded postcard albums adorning parlors, living rooms, and sun porches. Postcards were so ubiquitous that a person could not visit any sizable town, without seeing them in almost every store window – either for sale, or for the sheer delight of sharing a view. In turn, postcard publishers endeavored not only to sell cards embracing a variety of subjects, but also tried to provide for the public a postcard of charm and originality, often superbly colored and even embossed.

WWI effectively ended the golden age of postcards because Germany had previously dominated postcard printing, as they produced the best quality of colours and printing — which Americans could for some reason not replicate. When the US couldn’t go through German suppliers and the quality of their beloved postcards dropped, it weakened the postcard business and people lost interest! The demise of the postcard craze and paper moon booths are likely also tied to the release of mass market cameras, the Kodak brownie in 1900. But I will spare you the Benjaminian implications of this.

The 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet (the most famous comet which appears roughly every 76 years) was quite the cultural phenomenon and caused a lot of panic. A lot of newspapers reported that the passing of the comet was dangerous and toxic, so much so that it could kill all life on earth. People began selling anti-comet pills, gas masks, and comet-protecting umbrellas. Other archival newspapers describe the comet’s sighting as “the opportunity of a lifetime” and chronicle sightings of the people on their knees for days, praying to “save the world from the comet!” or “harbouring the insane delusion that the tail of Halley’s comet would suffocate him.”

Despite the scientific insights of the time, I supposed one cannot blame the people of 1901 for letting their imagination run wild at the mystery of outer space. Let us not forget that the mystery of the moon is at the core of this; people were at once terrified of what they didn’t know, all while projecting their wishes and dreams onto the moon! It is then not surprising that there was widespread cultural investment in the vague mystery and romance of the moon. The romance of the moon was the object of many songs by Tin Pan Alley songs, such as “Shine On, Harvest Moon” (1908), “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (1909), and “I’ll Sit Right on the Moon and Keep My Eyes on You” (1912).

These musical trends continue well into the 40s and 50s with songs like “Fly me to the Moon,” “Blue Moon” (written in the 30s but with a resurgence in 40s!), and one of my favourites “How High the Moon.” The moon, in a general and overarching manner is invoked with a certain naïveté in moments of yearning, usually pertaining to matters of the heart, and it is framed as an object of blame or having the ability to exercise influence over our personal outcome.

In the end, the paper moon portrait immortalised individual’s imaginary celestial travels. The lunar motifs of the 1920s still included papers moons, but these took on a more playful and escape-like quality, in line with the flappers and fashion of the time, rather than its previously dreamy and yearning dimension. The decline of the paper moon is perhaps most effectively illustrated by the Harold Arlen song “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” Written in 1932, the song references the prop quality of the moon (You say it’s only a paper moon/ Sailing over a cardboard sea; Yes, its only a canvas sky/Hanging over a muslin tree) and with it I cannot help but connect the song’s sobering quality to the realities of the Great Depression, and the dawn of WWII.

Though history and technological advancement would accelerate the demise of these portraits, celestial reverie has of course not gone anywhere. Instead, these have been continuously repackaged in a manner more suited to the era’s needs.

Hope you delighted in the portraits as much as I did!