Interesting Times No. 22
Chagall's upstate cabin; 'deaditors'; Heidi Klum as worm; on class; giving gifts; the royal bees; prison newspapers; the LA Breakfast Club; caves; Hilma Wolitzer; the auteur novel
Hello, welcome. And hello to new subscribers! The time has come for more of the internet, if you can bear it.
I hope you find some things to enjoy.
~Ellie
p.s. you can buy me a virtual coffee here if the spirit moves you to do so.
p.p.s. are you watching The White Lotus S2? It is pretty close to GREAT ART, in my opinion. I mean, it’s not The Sopranos, obvs, but nothing ever will be, and that truth must be lived with.
p.p.p.s. Why/how was S5 of The Crown so terrible? Pretty much everyone was miscast, and it was just so dull. What happened to the grandeur, the campness, the entertainment of the other seasons? Husband has never watched it, cause he’s a The Crown snob, but I know others out there feel my pain.
‘“It certainly can’t be the lack of cream in the cappuccino that ruined their holiday,” he says. “There is something behind it, there is a frustration with their families, or probably the challenging years under the pandemic. This is why our job is to try to understand the real reasons and try to enter their world, their lives, and manage the most complicated egos.”’
The real-life manager of the hotel where The White Lotus S2 was filmed talks about dealing with the world’s elite irl.
‘Marc Chagall’s Teeny [NY] Upstate Cabin, Untouched Since 1970.’ And you can buy it for not very much money ! ! (Such an odd NY real estate thing is that it costs about seventy trillion dollars for a tiny apartment in Manhattan, but a little cottage upstate, say a 1 -2 hr drive from NYC, costs about NZ500K. Count me in, please.)
‘“Good morning, Ham!” exclaims Vetter.
“Good morning, Egg!” the group chants in response.
Nearly a century since its inception as a meeting place for businessmen to have breakfast after horseback riding along the trails of Griffith Park, the Los Angeles Breakfast Club is thriving despite its near-demise almost a decade ago, when only nine members remained. […] The group was formed in 1925 as a parody of the Masons and other brotherhood organizations. This means the morning is filled with codes, secret handshakes and hidden meanings. Its rituals include member initiations that involve sitting on a wooden horse blindfolded while placing one hand in a plate of runny eggs.’ Am always a bit suspicious of enforced ‘wackiness’, but this is a bit funny, and also interesting, if you happen to be interested in the LA Breakfast Club scene.
‘A History of the Modernist Villain’s Lair.’
‘A few months ago, a friend of the magazine showed us the letters of T. S. Eliot, which are some of the most boring things we have ever read, but what do a bunch of morons running a satirical magazine know? So, we asked Dr Michelle Alexis Taylor, an Eliot expert, what she thought on the matter: Do I Dare To Eat a Peach?’
“If we understand the worm, we understand life,” British biologist, Nobel Prize-winner and worm obsessive John Sulston once said. Last week, veteran model Heidi Klum came one step closer to solving the riddle of our collective existence when she shuffled onto a blue carpet at her annual Halloween party, legless and armless, limbs encased in a giant, meat-like tube. She had transformed into a lifesize worm.’
‘I Never Worried About Being Working Class Until I Went to Art School.’
‘‘These people invited us for dinner,’ Elaine explains to […] George […] on Seinfeld. ‘We have to bring something.’ But why, George asks? ‘I just don’t like the idea that, every time there’s a dinner invitation, there’s this annoying little chore that goes along with it,’ he complains. ‘The fabric of society is very complex, George,’ Jerry Seinfeld tells him.’ On gifts.
‘“I can help you with goblins.” I sent him a WhatsApp and the reply was almost instantaneous […] I told him I was interested in buying a goblin. He informed me it was a living thing and that there were certain ‘rules’ attached.’
‘An explanation of ghosts, 1805.’
More Britney: ‘The Curse of Kentwood: To understand what drove Jamie Spears to control his daughter’s life, you need to visit where he came from.’
‘Truth and Consequences: Documentaries and the Art of Manipulation.’
‘I’ve always been a fussy eater. Could an expert show me a life beyond the kids’ menu?’
‘A report that the royal beekeeper had informed Queen Elizabeth II’s bees of her death received some mockery, but it has been a tradition for centuries.’
‘Once, Peter Popoff was a magical, mystical man of God—a giant among '80s televangelists. And Lord, was he rich! But he was also an enormous fraud who was ruined in scandal. Ah, but here in America, time absolves all that. And if a fellow is clever enough, he can remake his kingdom and amass quite a fortune. For the Lord worketh in mysterious ways.’
‘Las Vegas is both stranger and more normal than you might imagine, and for some reason, people don’t think anyone lives there.’
‘The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed built a digital media empire in part by aggregating viral content from social media. A decade later, what’s next?’
‘“I found myself having a familiar reaction of appalled, scandalized, slightly embarrassing delight.” Public spectacles of female conflict have long enforced social codes about male and female behavior: The Real Housewives of 16th-Century Scotland.’
‘The wild frontier of animal welfare: Should humans try harder to protect even wild creatures from predators and disease? Should we care whether they live good lives? Some philosophers and scientists have an unorthodox answer.’
‘Medicine was once a humanistic endeavor, an art as well as a science. Today both doctors and patients fail to see that we are more than just our bodies: Great Expectations.’
American Prison Newspapers 1880-2020: pieces about issues affecting those who are imprisoned (What’s It Like to Be an Editor of a Prison Newspaper?; Can perpetrators of crime also be victims of crime?; The Harms of Being Subjugated and Doing the Subjugation; The Lives Beyond the Life Sentences), plus a vast digitized ‘collection of newspapers published in prisons by and for incarcerated people brings together hundreds of periodicals from across the United States.’
BRITISH GOOP OF THE WEEK:
Authors on books they love.
‘Skromnost’, an excerpt from Janet Malcolm’s final book. ‘But I want to talk more about skromnost, about my family’s practice of it and my nostalgia for it. Today we recycle the things we don’t want. During my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood there wasn’t much we didn’t want. It was a culture of conservation. And one of being satisfied with what came our way. The way we live now would have seemed unimaginably posh to middle-class people in the days of millionaires rather than billionaires. Campbell’s soup was not associated with Andy Warhol. We ate it. Casseroles of noodles and Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup were a kind of national dish to serve to company. Does anyone say ‘casserole’ anymore?’
The slightly unfortunate failure of formatting below came up underneath a book I was looking at online, and something about the way it flows, word after word of inventive (and not so) praise for the book made me laugh - a satirical paragraph on the ridiculousness of book blurbs revealed itself:
‘Whimsically devastating. Playful, humorous, serious, profoundly clever and profoundly affecting Guardian Remarkable. A brilliant novel: funny, serious, always surprising, always true The Times I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul Evening Standard A playfully serious or seriously playful novel full of wit and pleasure. Wonderful Observer Eccentric, adventurous, intoxicating, dazzling. This is a novel with serious ambitions that remains huge fun to read. The writing dances along Literary Review Poignant, empathetic, funny. A book full of kindness and compassion Time Out Fizzying, affectionate, sparkling. Smith presents her world view in words as fresh as lemons. A joyful read Herald A tour de force -- Lionel Shriver Financial Times A virtuoso piece of writing, both funny and gripping ... Smith is a writer with a rich array of conventional strengths Times Literary Supplement A must read Toronto NOW.’
A short story by Hilma Wolitzer, from her collection, ‘Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket’: The Great Escape.
'“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. She also wrote, with her husband, more than twenty screenplays in order to make money. The couple was hardly alone: from the early days of Hollywood, literary figures like Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Brecht took a swing at the pictures. More recent efforts have come from Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, and Martin Amis. There’s even a whole Coen brothers movie about serious writers slumming it in Tinseltown, replete with a William Faulkner stand-in. It’s an understandable trade-off, using commerce to fund art; sometimes Nobel Prize winners need day jobs too.
The motivations are less apparent when the situation is reversed. Actors like Ethan Hawke, Steve Martin, and Tom Hanks don’t need the money that materializes with the fiction they write. (Publishers might.) They must be looking for something more like prestige.’ On ‘The Year of the Auteur Novel.’
A few more book reccs.
‘As much of a stylist as St Aubyn, Bank tends to be dismissed because she’s writing about being single in New York. But this book is perfect. I wish more people would read ... The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank.’
(The ‘I wish more people would read …’ series from The Guardian in 2020 is a nice idea - people recommending books they wish had a wider audience. I’m a bit sad it only lasted for ten recommendations; all of them are here though, if you want some under-appreciated, but recommended books to add to your reading pile.)
Further to the book blurbs stuff above, *this* is perfection:
Cover Story: Seed Money. (New episodes every Tuesday.) ‘What can a billionaire get away with these days? A secret bat cave? A harem of women? An international spy operation? Stealing the soul of a small town in Montana? One Silicon Valley venture capitalist was accused of running a massive sex-trafficking operation by his best bro-friend. And we unravel the truth about both of them — their business, their breakup, their lies, and their embarrassing text messages. The story of a billionaire with a hero complex and the ex-spy who turned his life inside out. And us, the reporters, who got caught up in their macho drama.’
One Year. I quite like this podcast from Slate - its premise is ‘[t]he people and struggles that changed America—one year at a time. In each episode, host Josh Levin explores a story you may have forgotten, or one you’ve never heard of before. What were the moments that transformed politics, culture, science, religion, and more? And how does the nation’s past shape our present?’ The years covered so far are 1977, 1995, 1986 and 1942, with ten episodes dedicated to each year. It’s interesting, and particularly as it’s American, covers lots of things I’ve never heard of.
How DO you do it! Sensational curation as always, thank you for sharing! X