Interesting Times No. 24
Old menus; the sensitive plant; on cringing; Nan Goldin; Club Freud; book burners; Michael Imperioli; 'evaporated people'; ageing bodies; archive moles; Nebraska Man
Hello dear readers,
It’s 2023 (the future has arrived) and it’s also time for the latest installment of I.T. I hope you find some things to enjoy.
I’m going away for a while, to see my brother and his family, so the next newsletter will be in late March. Until then, take care all,
~Ellie
‘Why do we find stuff cringe? The psychological investigation the world has been waiting for.’
Seventy years of Ikea catalogues offer an insight into the passage of time, into corporate diktats about what the masses should want to have and should possibly feel ashamed not to have, into design and attempting to both mould and reflect the attitudes and desires of the time, and trying to predict what people will actually spend their money on, and isn’t all of that a bit interesting? I think so. Anyway, here’s the Ikea catalogue through the years, from ‘the 1950s when Ingvar Kamprad wrote most of the texts himself, via the poppy, somewhat radical 1970s and all the way into the scaled-down 2000s.’ (My dream is to own all editions of the Argos catalogue, but I looked on eBay and it seems I’m not the only one. ($$))
And slightly related, in terms of marking the passage of time, people’s tastes [not a pun; all puns are banned] and also chefs’ experimentations, here’s a ‘collection of menus [held] at the New York Public Library [that] continues to inspire a new generation of researchers, chefs, and restaurant fans.’
‘“Traitor” Alan Cumming Shoves His OBE Medal Right Back Into King Charles' Fat Wet Hands.’
‘Is this by Rothko or a robot? We ask the experts to tell the difference between human and AI art.’
‘I hate my ageing body. Why do I look at myself with disgust?’ Excellent advice from advice columnist/psychotherapist Philippa Perry - my god, she’s a wise creature - although I do have to disagree with her on one point: if I stood in front of the mirror, naked, as she suggests, and said aloud, “I am the epitome of woman. All women should look like me”, I think I’d feel like a foolish liar.
More advice column content: ‘The “Since You Asked” column, written by Cary Tennis, ran on Salon from 2001 to 2013; the entire archive can be viewed here.’ I liked him - his advice was quite wacky, a bit (to quote part of the overly quoted Mary Oliver poem )’What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life’ - esque, and yet that didn’t put me off. He seemed to truly see the fundamental value and richness of every human life; there was no judgement; he was insightful and wise - all of this meant he answered people’s questions beautifully. Get involved!
‘The Curious Case of Nebraska Man: A fossil tooth, a splashy debate, and a strange chapter in America’s long history of science denialism.’
‘Beyond dependency: The battles of Nan Goldin. As nominations pour in for Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Daisy Woodward speaks to the film’s director about shame, bravery, and Goldin’s life in activism.’
Particularly interesting for anyone who’s read Empire of Pain, about the OxyContin crisis in the US and the billionaire Sackler family’s role in it. Goldin became addicted to OxyContin, and has since been a fierce and determined force in the fight to have the Sackler name removed from the many institutions they donated to.
‘Irish Hunk Stays Winning’: your Paul Mescal update.
‘Imagine the school first, because the school is where it all happens. Nebulous and insular, like most secondary schools, everything that has, could and can occur, occurs right here. Challney (Chawl-nee) High School for Girls is a short walk from the motorway, Junction 11 on the M1. A wrong turn at the roundabout will spit you out into Marsh Road, a popular London-commuting neighbourhood and violent mugging hotspot. You pass, instead, council houses, like mine, laid with gingerbread bricks. Then, a greasy chippy that is almost certainly a drug-trafficking front: In Defence Of Mean Girls.’
Andrew O’Hagan on the Prince Harry book: ‘Standing before his mother’s flag-draped coffin, the photogenic young stoic asked himself a question. ‘Is Mummy a patriot? What does Mummy really think of Britain? Has anyone bothered to ask her? When will I be able to ask her myself?’ We have waited for a royal person who could ask such questions. He tells us he cares ‘less than nothing’ for his ancestors. Even he wouldn’t say so, but he has a republican’s heart. He’s still trying to prove himself before the world, wielding the wooden sword, being patriotic, sticking up for the queen and his ‘Mother Country’, but the truths unfurled in his book can only reveal the spurious nature of these things. The royal family’s complicity with the press is not temporary and it is not accidental; it means there can be no family, only pairs, or individuals, coiled around courtiers. To think of it as a family is to ignore the poison that courses through the whole thing.’
‘The two-hundred-year search for botanical memory: The Sensitive Plant.’
‘When school children in Lyon, France, returned to classes this fall, they had a critical decision to make: are they a vegetarian Jeune Pousse, or an omnivorous Petit Bouchon?’
Wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich on fitness culture, and its ‘curiously self-punishing rites.’
Fancy candles. ‘Rather than existing to be burned, these waxy whatnots adopt a variety of curvaceous sculptural forms, displayed proudly in homes as objets d’art.’
Peak New York! ‘Club Freud: An evening with Parapraxis, a new glossy mag for the new psychoanalysis crowd.’
A piece from 1994. ‘Clip-On Tie: The Diary of a New York Art Museum Security Guard.’
‘Barbara Sears Rockefeller was born to a coal miner and later married Winthrop, the grandson of one of America’s most famous billionaires, though they divorced less than two years into their marriage. Eventually she would receive $5.5 million as settlement—at the time, an astonishingly high record set for such proceedings—but in the interim between the separation and the settlement she pawned her engagement ring, which was reportedly worth $30,000, and lived off of that. She apparently liked to ask, when someone quoted her a price too high, “Who do you think I am? A Rockefeller?”’ On how ‘divorce makes the billionaire class proliferate even faster.’
‘“You Have to Learn to Listen”: How a Doctor Cares for Boston’s Homeless.’
‘I took a bath while color set in my hair. In the bath, I thought about a life lived inside a net of insults and how it’s not a fit subject because all lives are lived inside the insult of having to end.’ […] ‘A Wrinkle in Time: Laurie Stone contemplates how we navigate stealth insults, especially as we age.’
‘The Medieval Belly Fat Diet. Want to be called beautiful by a twelfth-century writer? Eat sweets and be rich.’
‘“Didn’t enjoy, too much water.” - Marie-Roy Isidor Lawrence on the Bering Sea. The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews.’
This article definitely veers into cheesy territory, but I had to include it because Google reviews are a highlight of life - they offer yet another fascinating insight into our fellow humans. Did you know the Nile (river) has 4.4 stars?
This is perfection, from start to finish. ‘Buongiorno and grazie to Michael Imperioli, who has shown us his extremely Old World Italian home and, in doing so, gifted us a college tuition’s worth of knowledge on art, literature, and Christopher Moltisanti. Yes, the Imperioli Architectural Digest home tour is here, and it is surprisingly … familiar?’
BRITISH GOOP OF THE MONTH:
‘The extraordinary despatches sent these past few weeks by author Hanif Kureishi from his hospital bed in Rome are like some kind of new literature, reading like a series of calls to 111, or a man in a hurry to record his famous last words - he had a fall on January 6, [actually on Boxing Day, for pedants] woke up in a pool of blood, has had spinal surgery and cannot move his arms or legs, and is dictating his thoughts and memories to his son Carlo, who publishes them on the Twitter machine: "How Easy it is to Nearly Die," ran a tweet on January 15, with 1.2 million impressions.
It's like nothing else being published. It's like a perfect freedom to say whatever the hell he wants about anyone or anything, because what's the worst that can happen to someone who has already experienced the worst that can happen? In our age of memoir, of personal stories, of Knausgård and Grimshaw, Kureishi's amazing confessions form the best writing in the English-speaking world right now and are avidly looked forward to as a saga in progress.
Horror as literary entertainment. Yeah, kind of, but there is a bit more at stake than just a good read. This is someone's life. This is someone's agony. But even a health crisis as sudden and severe as Kureishi's reveals him as the writer he always was. Kureishi has form in mining his life for literature.’ - Steve Braunias.
I’ve been reading Kureishi’s reports on his Substack, not Twitter - subscribe here for everything described above.
‘Patricia Grace, the great navigator.’
‘Here’s one thing I really love about the writer Jenny Diski: she’s funny. In a time in which the syrupy sanctimony of politics and culture forces its participants to gin up some ridiculous proof — Natalie Portman in her exhaustingly pointless Oscar cape — that they, they, care the most about things, reading the British-born Diski is like taking the coldest shower to cleanse yourself of all the sap.’ On why ‘we should all read more Jenny Diski.’ Could not agree more! Read her today!
‘Rosemary Tonks achieved success among the bohemian literati of Swinging London—then spent the rest of her life destroying the evidence of her career. On ‘the writer who burned her own books’. Reminds me a tiny bit of when Jeanette Winterson burnt hers, albeit for a different reason.
‘The Artist Whose Book Covers Distilled the Nineteen-Eighties. The covers that Lorraine Louie designed for the Vintage Contemporaries series were surreal, stylish, and like nothing else on the market.’
The books, they just keep on coming. ‘14 books to get the year started with.’ And some more.
‘There are myriad reasons why some books fall out of print while others remain in the spotlight. Genius, it rather depressingly turns out, is no guarantee of longevity, nor is one-time notoriety.’ On ‘archive moles: […] a growing band of people digging through library stacks and second-hand bookshops in search of lost classics.’ (Also includes a great-sounding reading list of reissues.)
‘Just a Little Fever’, a short story by Sheila Heti.
‘Moral hypocrisy: Why are our celebrities so nice?’ The Stories of Our Times podcast asks if we’re ‘living in a world where there is pressure on those in the public eye to exude virtue above all else? Where has this sensibility come from and is it leading to a blandness in our arts and culture?’
The Evaporated: Gone with the Gods. ‘What if someone close to you just … vanished one day? That happens to tens of thousands of families a year in Japan, and it happened to Jake Adelstein, too, back in 2018 — when his accountant disappeared, just before tax day. Adelstein, the author of Tokyo Vice, and co-host Shoko Plambeck go in search of that missing accountant, and take us on a journey into the fascinating and bizarre world of Japan’s johatsu, or “evaporated” people.’