Interesting Times No. 5
Villa Charlotte Brontë; hospital art; in pursuit of gold; Maggi Hambling; on gossip; tivaevae; Mavis Gallant; pandemic insights; a petrified forest
Hello! Welcome to Interesting Times. I’m here to recommend content from across the World Wide Web that’s both new and old, highbrow (maybe?) and lowbrow, every fortnight. I hope you find things to enjoy.
JOURNALISM
Such commitment and dedication: “Lip syncs and facts: The Pacific doctors fighting [Covid vaccine] misinformation on TikTok”.
Sometimes, when pondering where life has taken me, I think about the Villa Charlotte Brontë that overlooks the Hudson river in New York, and wonder what I could’ve done differently so that I’d now be living there. “A Cliffside Co-op in the Bronx: Advertised when it was built as “the perfect home of 17 of the luckiest families in the United States,” the Villa Charlotte Brontë remains much as it was nearly a century ago: 17 units, no two alike, teetering over the Hudson.” Fascinating, enchanting! And, of course, filled with characters.
“Google Street View offers a surprisingly resonant visual document of the pandemic - it offers a reflection of the everyday social relations of pandemic life. It is insufficient in all the ways we might expect: lacking in narrative, devoid of intimacy, filtered through a screen. But its flatness reflects a feeling associated with 2020, and this is the record we have.”
Maggi Hambling, goddess:
“In 1511, the king of Spain gave his New World explorers an order: Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all costs get gold.” The past repeats in this 21st century story of “Gold mined in the jungles of Peru, [which] brought riches to three friends in Miami—but […] also carried ruin.”
“With dozens of felines turning up dead around London, a pair of pet detectives set out to prove it was the work of a serial killer.”
They’re the new kings of our world, aren’t they, these Silicon Valley men? They’re unelected by the people, and yet have the power to shift a society’s whole trajectory. “Peter Thiel’s Origin Story. His ideology dominates Silicon Valley. It began to form when he was an angry young man.”
“Shadow of a Doubt: ‘Living with Covid’ can mean lots of different things on paper; what it requires of us in reality is giving up the idea of closure in favor of a truer ambiguity.”
On gossip: “Alex Casey chats to Associate Professor Jennifer Frost, who has spent decades studying the function of gossip from Hedda Hopper to Donald Trump.”
“Court Sketcher: How do court sketch artists influence our sympathies? Society loves courtroom dramas – they allow the viewer to consume the uncertainty of someone else’s life as opposed to fixating on their own. […]The courtroom sketch is a key example of how the goings-on at trial are represented and disseminated.”
“Pacific Threads: An exhibition celebrating traditional and contemporary Cook Island tivaevae”, and related: “How Craft Has Empowered Women For Centuries”.
How interesting. Must visit immediately! “New Zealand's 180-million-year-old forest. Once part of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, Curio Bay is home to one of the few accessible petrified forests on the planet and a geological phenomenon of international significance.”
“Caring for someone with a mental illness forces you beyond all conventional measures of worth or meaning. What is crazy? […] crazy is one of the names for a life that falls outside value. […] We had to act a certain way in the hospitals, to show the doctors that B was not trash. I would put on the smooth neutral suit of sanity, which is smiling politely, listening carefully, and in all ways acting as bourgeois as possible. Those times when my mother forgot her armor, when she begged and cried, I saw how the doctors looked at her, as if she were the really crazy one.”
“The Haunting of Lake House: a night with the city's most prominent ghostbusters.”
“We’re interested in but afraid of the artificial.” On people’s fascination with botched plastic surgery.
“This riotous life.” On how there’s no pattern to mass extinction.
I feel indifferent about the SheWee, but honestly, the passion “self-described ‘SheWee Lady’ Judy-Anne Dentice” has for them is quite something!
A reader of this humble newsletter has requested more Daily Mail headline content. But I don’t respond to demands - I have full editorial control - so instead present the Daily Mail-o-matic, which gives a Daily Mail-esque headline every time you click refresh. It’s here.
My faves: ‘Has Teenage Sex Given the Church Diabetes’; ‘Has Feminism Given England Cancer?’; ‘Will the Human Rights Act Have Sex with Taxpayers' Money?’ ‘Is rip-off Britain stealing from Britain’s swans?’ SO GOOD.
(An actual Daily Mail headline will be included next time.)
BOOKS
“Dr Lana Lopesi is an author, art critic and Editor in Chief of the Pacific Arts Legacy Project. She is also Interim Director of The Pantograph Punch, and a Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at AUT. Her new book Bloody Woman has just been released. It is a collection of essays, and is a deeply personal exploration of her experience of being Samoan and a woman. Lopesi says writing the book was an attempt to break a silence, and feels "terrifying but right.” Here she is discussing her book with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ.
RECOMMENDED READING
I’ve just discovered the late Mavis Gallant’s short stories - what took me so long?! I often find short stories frustrating - there can be a sense of unfinished endings, but someone said, “great short stories are sometimes said to be as rich as novels” and that “Mavis Gallant’s are like encyclopedias—of her characters’ psyches and lives.” That’s the perfect description - her stories are so dense with meaning, wit, and observation that you never feel short-changed. Here’s an interesting interview with Gallant, from 2009 . And here’s a story of hers, written in 1994, and called ‘Florida’. (The story follows a short introduction by another writer.) High recommend!
“Profile: Renée, by Steve Braunias and Jane Ussher.” Braunias “continues [a] series of author profiles with a visit to Otaki to meet ‘a feminist lesbian with working-class ideals’”. As always, Braunias’ astute observation of people is on display - it’s a lovely interview. “At 90 – she was about to turn 91 – Renée, nee her married name of Renée Taylor until she reduced her name down to the bare and feminist essentials, has an agile mind and a ready laugh, and spoke with real candour about her strange and vivid life. Most of us stay within the range of things we want to say out loud. We confirm our own thoughts. There was a sense with Renée that she was surprising herself with some of the things she was saying, and feeling their shape, testing them out; it was likely the playwright within her, always alert to dialogue.”
PODCASTS
Help I Sexted My Boss: I can’t overstate how funny and delightful this podcast is. “William Hanson and Jordan North are unlikely best friends. William’s a posh etiquette expert, and Jordan’s an expert in all things common. Their worlds collide as they help you navigate the everyday problems of modern life”. It sounds gimmicky, but it’s really not. Basically people write in with dilemmas, William and Jordan answer them, and it’s excellent.
Waiting for the Van: “Scotland has the highest number of drug deaths in Europe. In September 2020, drug policy activist Peter Krykant decided he'd had enough. The former heroin addict, turned frontline campaigner, bought a minivan and kitted it out with sanitisers and needles, a supply of naloxone- the medication used to reverse an opioid overdose- and a defibrillator. Dani Garavelli follows […] Krykant as he attempts to challenge half a century of drug policy in the UK.”
See you next time!
-Ellie
Hi Ellie - great collections of recommended material. Thought you might like to check out a recent podcast series called Meet a Rare Book - others might enjoy it too - https://www.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/Pages/meet-a-rare-book.aspx