Interesting Times No. 21
Agnes Denes; a disappeared town; Disneyland of death; Seattle icon; brutal critiques; why go out?; WhatsApp tyranny; hoarding; city of the mute; Nancy Drew; more Vivian Gornick, BOOKS!
Hello, welcome.
In homage to a great new book that’s just been released, The Story of Art Without Men, by Katy Hessel, all the art in this particular newsletter is by women. Sorry dudes! But 99% of the collection of paintings in the National Gallery in London is by men, so… And while that may be a depressing statistic to read, let us be uplifted by Katy Hessel’s enlightening and necessary book! Vive les femmes artistes!
Thank you for reading, and as always, if you’ve enjoyed the newsletter, have a spare five $, and the spirit moves you, you can buy me a virtual coffee here!
I hope you find some things to read and enjoy.
~ Ellie
p.s. I recommend opening the newsletter in your browser or the Substack app, as it’s much nicer there, and this newsletter is probably too long for email. Also, the app is now available for Android.
‘The Mystery of the Headless Goats in the Chattahoochee. Hundreds of decapitated goat carcasses have turned up in the river that runs through metro Atlanta. Are they evidence of animal sacrifice? Drug smuggling? Both?’
‘The Changing Face of Southern California: An expansive collection of postcards captures the evolving cultural landscape of Southern California—particularly greater Los Angeles—in the twentieth century.’
‘City of the Mute. To visit Drancy is to confront dark and unsettled questions of who is remembered, who is heard, who can speak, and why.’
Not really journalism, but I came across a collection of photographs by David Cook held at Waikato Museum, and mainly taken in the mid to late 1980s. They document the final days of Rotowaro, a small Waikato town, before ‘it is slowly removed from the map one building at a time’. Cook was commissioned to photograph the town for the documentary book ‘Rotowaro: The Last Days of the Waikato Coal Mining Town’ and the ‘Shifting Ground: Stories from Rotowaro’ exhibition.
I saw a sense of loss not only for the buildings, but also the lives lived in them, not able to be returned to; and the witnessing of a sudden, almost violent unanchoring from the earth; a literal vanishing of place. Six photos that stood out to me are here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. And the whole collection is here.
A glorious, funny, wise piece by Vivian Gornick: ‘Reflections on a life in feminism and psychoanalysis. […] The value of the analysis lay in that extraordinary devotion both Dr. F. and I had to our unyielding effort to make a dent in the defensive armor that inevitably surrounds the damaged self. In time I came to understand how penetrating was that damage, how respectful one needed to be of its shocking refusal to give up its territory. The repetitiousness itself came to assume a ceremonial character, the ceremoniousness in turn coming to feel metaphorical. If I myself could not easily part with everyday neurosis, how could I expect the culture to rid itself overnight of social convictions that had held sway for centuries? Drop by drop, indeed.’
‘In America, the summer of 2020 was revolutionary: noble goals were being pursued, but the ground was constantly shifting, and it was unwise to end up on the wrong side of the revolutionaries.’ This is the story of ‘The Guggenheim’s scapegoat.’
‘The Accents of Our Bodies: American language educator Max Kirch suggests that adopting the nonverbal habits of another culture gives one’s behavior a “foreign accent.”’
‘Chinese social media companies and users are locked in a never-ending battle between free speech and censorship: How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors.’
‘My Eight Deranged Days on the Gone Girl Cruise. By the time I found Gillian Flynn, I had lost my mind.’ (‘“We thought it was like: You’re gone, girl! Like it was a women’s travel thing,” a passenger told me.’) ! !
‘Will anyone buy my Liz Truss book?’
‘Forest Lawn is a cemetery in Glendale just north of LA. It has been described as a Disneyland of Death and a theme-park necropolis. It has been satirized by Evelyn Waugh, depicted by Aldous Huxley. Stars and moguls from Hollywood’s golden era are buried in its hilltop terraces. It created a new template for death culture in North America, and a business model for other cemeteries to follow.’
‘"My body is as if someone had drawn a vertical line separating the two halves. The right half seems to be twice the size of the left half." The Curious Case of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.’
‘A Florida man’s curious trade in Mongolian dinosaurs.’
A gaggle of poshos: ‘Charles III and Camilla have long surrounded themselves with a tight-knit social set. But who are the cream of the Carolean clique?’ [If there’s a better name in the world than Santa Sebag Montefiore, pls advise.]
Omg: ‘“Seattle icon”: dog who rode bus solo to the park dies aged 10.’
‘Why Go Out?’ A speech, which became an essay, by Sheila Heti. ‘At home, you can wear your pyjamas. No one is going to snub you or disappoint you. At Trampoline Hall, you could be snubbed, or disappointed. The scotch is not cheap. It is less depressing to think the same thoughts you thought yesterday, than to have the same conversation you had last week. Few of us will get laid. Why did we go out? My father never goes out. His emotional life is absolutely even keel. He is a deeply rational person. He doesn’t see the advantages.’
‘Although Groner is often told that he is rude, he is also an unlikely hero for […] WhatsApp group resistance: “I have so many people telling me that they wish they could get out of groups, but they’re afraid they’ll offend people if they leave.” Can we escape the tyranny of WhatsApp groups?’
I blame Instagram for this nonsense: ‘From sex rooms to cat cafes: The bizarre world of high-end marriage proposal planners.’
On the relevance of the (pictured above) Wheatfield - A Confrontation project today.
‘A Nigerian attempts therapy’, a piece by Ucheoma Onwutuebe.
The Driving Instructor to New York’s Teen Elite: “If these walls could talk in this car, oh my God.”’
HA! ‘56 dating red flags that should send you running’ - these are not of the ‘signs he may be a serial killer’ variety, more the ‘some behaviors are insights into a person’s deepest self and you must beware’ kind, along with ‘think long and hard about their seemingly innocuous traits, and whether you could endure them once the initial New Relationship Infatuation Energy has worn off’. e.g. ‘Has resting disappointed face: If they can’t conceal their dismay that perhaps you’re not quite what they had in mind, imagine that face in church, perspiring and impassive, grunting, “I do.” Or that face grimacing as you struggle to unload groceries from the car. That face creasing in disgust as they leave soup and paracetamol by your sickbed. That face lighting up as someone younger and hotter walks by.’
DAILY MAIL HEADLINE OF THE WEEK:
‘Woman, 20, who hit her boyfriend's ex in the head with a stiletto-shaped Carolina Herrera perfume bottle at King Charles' model village Poundbury avoids jail.’
Had to read it twice to understand what it’s actually saying; mentioned woman’s age, and also Royalty; mentioned perfume brand; is revenge-themed, plus ‘stiletto-shaped’ is very DM for reasons I can’t quite articulate. Missing cost of the perfume, and overall cost to build Poundbury, but essentially very good: 4/5.
Bad Reviews, edited by Aleksandra Mir and Tim Griffin. Although Bad Reviews, published by Retrospective Press, is not available to buy (a fascinating publishing move), I’m still including this here because the content included in the linked piece is interesting/cringe-inducing reading. It’s a collection of 150 artists’ ‘most brutal critiques’. Example: ‘“[P]aint-happy know-nothings brought up on hamburgers and porn, a talentless bloom of post-pop trailer trash.” Eeek!
‘In an interview, Maggie O’Farrell discusses how she resurrects women in her historical fiction: Re-writing the History Books.’
An atmospheric and ominous short story (and runner up to the 2022 Sargeson Prize) by Emily Perkins: The Warning.
Sally Rooney-mania peaked a couple of years ago, but this is a great piece written during its peak about why she inspired that zeitgeisty mania and what it might all mean.
‘I’m the same age as Sally Rooney. I’m a writer, too, with three abandoned novels to my name. As a deeply jealous person, I’ve found Rooney-mania a bitter pill to swallow over the past few years. The literary success of any of my contemporaries causes me pain, but this was unprecedented.
I put off reading her for a long time. But she became the zeitgeist! It was starting to affect my conversation at parties.’ ‘Conversations with Friends about Sally Rooney: An Epistolary Inquiry into the Zeitgeist, the Novels, the Publishers and Me.’
‘The Secret Syndicate behind Nancy Drew.’ I loved Nancy Drew so, so much as a child, and frankly don’t care if the books were written by robots or aliens [see article] - she was an adventurous gal, solving mysteries all on her own, even though she was 18 (or 16), depending on which books you read. Especially exciting was when she travelled: she went to the Florida Keys in The Clue of the Black Keys, which to a child from NZ sounded v fascinating (crocodiles, swamps etc), and then in The Spider Sapphire Mystery, Nancy went to Nairobi and then had to dash down to Mombasa. I could only begin to imagine these far away places, and they filled me with intrigue. (Fun fact: when working at the library, one of my proudest moments was introducing a seven or 8 year old girl to the original Nancy Drews - she’d been reading the very sub-par Nancy Drew Clue Crew series, and I felt the need to right a wrong. Anyway, a couple of weeks later, the girl came up to me, with a beaming little face, and said she loved the OG Nancys, they were so good, and asked me to order her some more. It was just delightful! (Another read on that story is the girl felt pressured by an interfering librarian and so just went along with it all to appease me. We’ll never know.))
RECOMMENDED READING
On the Run by Alice Goffman: ‘Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing stories reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing.’
Please Look After Mother by Kyung Sook Shin: ‘When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mother?’
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith by Richard Bradford: ‘In this new biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp, incisive style to one of the great and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith's bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.’ This has had pretty mixed reviews, but I’m kind of enjoying it just for the insight it gives into an, errr, very unusual mind.
The Unfolding by A. M. Homes: May We Be Forgiven, also by Homes, is one of my favourite books; she writes sparsely, insightfully, acerbically, which are all things I enjoy, so I’m v excited to read The Unfolding. ‘In a story that is as much about the dynamics within a family as it is about the desire for those in power to remain in power, Homes presciently unpacks a dangerous rift in American identity, prompting a reconsideration of the definition of truth, freedom and democracy—and exploring the explosive consequences of what happens when the same words mean such different things to people living together under one roof. From the writer who is always “razor sharp and furiously good” (Zadie Smith), a darkly comic political parable braided with a Bildungsroman that takes us inside the heart of a divided country.’
The Book of Other People edited by Zadie Smith: This collection of short stories ‘is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight “realism”-if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples.’
Death of an Artist: ‘Was the famous sculptor Carl Andre involved in the death of his up-and-coming artist wife Ana Mendieta? For over 35 years, accusations of murder shrouded one of the art world’s most storied couples.
They were a textbook case of opposites attract. Andre was famous, rich, white, and within the small coterie of the artworld, powerful. Mendieta was a Cuban refugee, a diminutive woman, working at the edge of the Avant Garde. Just months after their wedding, Andre called 911 saying they had a fight and Mendieta “went out the window” of their 34th floor apartment.Andre was charged with murder and the art world split in two. Host Helen Molesworth revisits Mendieta’s death and the trial that followed, and interrogates both the silence and the protest that have accompanied this story ever since.’
The LRB Podcast: Are you a hoarder? ‘Jon Day talks […] about the history and psychology of the accumulation of objects, from Anglo-Saxon treasure to the Collyer twins of Harlem, by way of Freud, Marie Kondo and Day’s own father. When does clutter become a hoard? Are we all digital hoarders now?’