Interesting Times No. 16
A Royal tat; David Sedaris/his father; photographs; white collar crime; Sapphic cinema; the smile; Paula Rego; guns; the concept of personhood; art theft; unfortunate names; a Brooklyn character.
Hello! And welcome to new subscribers - thank you for signing up! I hope this week’s internet offering provides some thought-provoking content, some ridiculous content, and the somewhere in between. Happy reading.
And, as always, please share the newsletter with anyone you think might be interested, and a reminder that you can support the existence of this newsletter by buying me a coffee, if you feel moved to do so! Massive thanks to those who have donated - it means the world, which sounds slightly hyperbolic, but it really does!
JOURNALISM
A royal is tatted: ‘Punk Princess Eugenie Got A Badass Tattoo To Honor Hard-Rocking Grandmum. She’s cool.’ Plus, included in the same link, ‘Queen thanks god the fucken Jubbly is done.’
‘“Don't worry about parking the car,” says the art thief. “Anywhere near the museum is fine.”
Photographs: Peter Mitchell, whose ‘beautiful pictures [of Northern England] are drily drenched in history – social, economic and photographic.’ And: ‘A night porter’s wild, nocturnal odyssey through London’s hotels.’
‘“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” Life after white collar crime.’
‘Lou Sedaris [David Sedaris’ father] had always baffled his children. So when he died, at 98, where would they begin with his funeral?’
Short men, and desperate measures.
‘It’s puking and it’s leaking!’ A review of ‘the state of Sapphic cinema.’
‘The smile: a history. How our toothy modern smile was invented by a confluence of French dentistry and Parisian portrait-painting in the 1780s.’
‘We take the luxuries of at-home health testing for granted these days. You can roll out of bed, pee on a stick with a Q-tip up your nose while drooling into a vial and know within mere minutes if you are with child, have Covid, or are on MDMA.’ But things weren’t always this way: ‘We need to talk about how frogs used to be pregnancy tests.’
The Guardian Long Read: ‘“Wallets and eyeballs”: how eBay turned the internet into a marketplace.’
Being a professional baby-namer is a thing now. And: ‘A Series of Unfortunate Names. Some names are ruined forever by one bad apple. I have never met anyone called Adolf, although I did find a ‘George Hitler’ on LinkedIn. He lives in Ohio and works as a digital product manager for Victoria’s Secret.’
The relatively new diagnosis of PTSD: Soldiers, trauma and society.
‘The reality of prostitution is not complex. It is simple. […] Why is it that there is a subset of women who are thought to behave like nonhumans, who have no sense of personal boundaries, no anxiety reaction, no disgust response? I sometimes wonder whether, because prostitution is understood as alien behaviour, the prostituted have alien attributes assigned to them – a nonhuman propensity not to think, sense, feel and experience.’
Guns: ‘God has heard your thoughts and prayers and he thinks they are fucking bullshit.’
And, ‘Letter from Texas: Americans have a tendency to buy firearms as a bulwark against fears of a failing state, and 2020 felt like one long emergency.’ And, a scholar of the Bible’s New Testament tries to understand what gun-supporters mean when they talk about evil.
And, ‘Decade by decade, firearms have become deadlier—and tightened their grip on our collective imagination.’
The above painting is by Paula Rego, ‘the British-Portuguese painter [who] sought to challenge the structures of power and authority that affect women’s lives’ and who very recently died at age 87. Her work was described as ‘provocative, violent, magical’, and that of ‘a romantic surrealist with a satirist's cutting edge.’ In an interview last year she spoke to Beverley D'Silva ‘about rebellion, rage, pain – and her extraordinary life and work.’ And the Irish Museum of Modern Art produced a short film about Rego’s life and ‘highly personal and politicized’ art to accompany their 2020/21 retrospective exhibition of her work, Obedience and Defiance - I recommend it.
If she’s an artist whose work you know, I hope you enjoy revisiting it, and if she’s new to you, I hope you enjoy discovering her as much as I have over the past year or so.
‘A “person” is something of a legal fiction. Under U.S. law, a corporation can be a person. So can a ship. “So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a dissenting Supreme Court opinion in 1972. Pro-life activists have argued that embryos and fetuses are persons. In 2019, the Yurok tribe in Northern California decreed that the Klamath River is a person. Some forms of artificial intelligence might one day become persons.
But can an elephant be a person?’ This is an excerpt from a piece I included in a previous newsletter about ‘a case being brought by an animal rights group [arguing that an elephant called] Happy should be released from the [Bronx] zoo. The Nonhuman Rights Project argued that Happy is an autonomous, cognitively complex elephant worthy of the right reserved in law for “a person”.’
Just this week ‘New York’s top court has ruled that Happy […] cannot legally be considered a person in a closely watched case that tested the boundaries of applying human rights to animals.’
And a piece of very important journalism: ‘Should you microwave your wine in winter? A Spinoff investigation.’
DAILY MAIL HEADLINE OF THE WEEK:
‘No wonder the post is always late! Posties get steamy as shocked onlooker catches them in the act in their Royal Mail Van.’
Not much to say, apart from who cares, no one sends mail anymore, so they probably had nothing else to do (joking), and much more horrifying was the byline which said ‘an onlooker filmed them.’ Having said that, I did used to live next to a park whose carpark seemed to be a known place to do sex in cars, and when walking past them with my children, going to the playground, it was admittedly off putting. But I didn’t film them, for god’s sake. The filming, to me, is the greater offense here.
BOOKS
From 2015 - An interview with a character: “A lot of young people can’t handle this type of store. They want everything to look like a supermarket, like Barnes & Noble. Very neat. Some young people come in and they say, “Do you have a computer?” I’m like, “No, do you want to buy a computer?” John Scioli, Brooklyn's Most Eccentric Book Seller, Explains Why He's Cashing Out.’
‘The Difficulty of Being a Perfect Asian American. A book and a documentary examine how Asian Americans internalize the myth of the model minority.’
Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote the excellent, Say Nothing, about The Troubles, and the also excellent, Empire of Pain, about the philanthropic Sackler family’s role in the USA’s opioid crisis, has a new collection of essays out: Rogues, which ‘brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."‘ Get your copy today ! !
‘John Waters has been called many things: the Prince of Puke, the People’s Pervert, the Pope of Trash. But, above all, he’s a storyteller. For nearly 60 years he’s offered a uniquely subversive form of social commentary by bulldozing through contemporary notions of American “good taste”.’
New paperbacks: ft. Olivia Laing, Sarah Perry, Amia Srinivasin, Gwendoline Riley and more. A very comprehensive (possibly endless? I genuinely kept on scrolling, and it never ended) list of new non-fiction: ft. Margo Jefferson, Elena Ferrante, Fintan O’Toole and more.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Music for Torching by A.M Homes: ‘Flash-frozen in the anxious culture of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine have two boys and a beautiful home, yet they find themselves thoroughly, inexplicably stuck. Obsessed with "making things good again," they spin the quiet terrors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens out of control, doing and saying all the things we dare not, throwing into full relief the chasm between our public and private selves.’ Also very funny. High recommend.
Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski: A collection of essays by the acerbic, and interrogating Diski, who wrote for the LRB until her death in 2016. ‘From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated and mordantly funny.’
The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate: ‘It is 1913 - a breath away from the Great War - and Edwardian England is about to vanish into history. An assorted group of men and women gather at Sir Randolph Nettleby's estate for a shooting party. Opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter, they are an era's dazzlingly obtuse and brilliantly decorative finale. A quiet, elegant meditation on class frustration and the transience of human concern.’
PODCASTS
My new favourite podcast; funny, honest, insightful, and such a good time - finally, a books podcast that’s entertaining! (Damian Barr’s Literary Salon is as well, to be fair): It’s Not a Book Club Podcast. ‘Despite the name, this really is a book club. The podcast unpacks the themes of various books in a real, raw and entertaining way with occasional special guest authors. It is hosted by three south Londoners: Reuben, Zach and Kehinde. They have covered Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, Sula by Toni Morrison, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Skinhead by Nick Knight, to name just a few.’ Get involved!
Four very short podcasts (each under 10 minutes) examining Schadenfreude, and Nostalgia, and Disgust, and Compassion. These are part of the award winning podcast series from the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, University of London.
‘Murderville, an investigative podcast hosted by senior Intercept reporters Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith, examines the systemic failures that lead to wrongful convictions. In Season One, Murderville, Georgia, Smith and Segura uncover what happens when law enforcement authorities lock up their first suspect, leaving another man free to kill.’ (Scroll down to the bottom of the linked page for the beginning of Season One.)
If you’ve enjoyed this week’s Interesting Times, and have a few spare coins, you can support the newsletter (me) by buying me a coffee!
See you next time!
Ellie