No. 29
Internet cafes; a fake Rothschild; birth/midwives/history; 'What is Lifestyle?'; fake illnesses; Gen-X; Vanessa Winship; 'an age of moralists'
Hello, welcome,
The newsletter seems a bit serious this month - I haven’t read much that was silly or light apart from a few ridiculous Daily Mail articles about some nonsense I’ve already forgotten, and they don’t count anyway. Although I have been watching the entertaining and very silly Celebs Go Dating on UK Channel 4 - best escapist TV I’ve found in ages.
Also, forgive me, from now on I’ll only be including podcasts if I find something really good. I just don’t think there are many amazing (new) ones out there - but I’ll keep my ears alert for the next Apology Line or S-Town.
Enjoy the art, enjoy the reading!
~Ellie
Hahaha, so good. ‘How the Booksellers of Paris are Preparing for Next Summer’s Olympics: “With a diving suit and helmet,” said Yannick Poirier, the owner of Tschann bookstore on the boulevard Montparnasse, where he has worked for thirty-five years, “and with dark glasses, earplugs, and a plan for survival and retreat to the countryside. I hate sport. That’s personal, but I hate sport, and I have a horror of circus games, and, how to put this. You are American? So you know Jean Baudrillard. For us he was a friend, Jean Baudrillard. So he has The Consumer Society, like Debord has The Society of the Spectacle, and all that sticks to us like shit. No, frankly, the Olympic Games—for me they leave me neither hot nor cold. They leave me totally indifferent.”’
‘In their disappearance, internet cafes took with them a sense of community, and signaled the end of a simpler time. “What was lost is the gathering space for in-person gathering and hanging out — the communal sharing of food, sharing a dream, being together in the same space,” Gomez said. Of course, not all the cafes are gone. Around the world, a few hang on — out of a sense of duty, inertia, or simply because there’s still money to be made. Rest of World set out to document these spaces before they vanished. These are some of the world’s last internet cafes.’
Oooh, I would’ve paid [some] money to observe this fascinating sounding gathering of egos! ‘The Look Book Goes to East Hampton Library’s Authors Night: Thousands came to the annual fundraiser to meet everyone from Misty Copeland to Robert Caro.’ […] What brings you here today? I’m one of the authors. This is my second book on decorating, The Elegant Life, so I was signing books. I probably sold out because I had been on the cover of the Southampton, East Hampton, and Sag Harbor newspapers. You must be tired. I mean it was a little hot. Everybody kept coming up to me and saying, “Oh my God, aren’t you hot?” But I was raised that if a gentleman wears a jacket out of the house, he does not take it off. So yeah, I was hot, but too bad. I’m not on the front lines of war here.’
‘Kyle Deschanel, the Rothschild Who Wasn’t: It was almost as if he had conjured his entire existence out of thin air.’
‘The feuding twin sisters who popularized the American advice column.’
And the latest, excellent Hera Lindsay Bird advice column feat. a parent worried about their 17 year old daughter who’s revealed herself to be a libertarian. (Kids will rebel however they possibly can/need to, is my opinion on this.)
Werner Herzog: ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.’
‘A social history of stimulants. Who Deserves Amphetamines?’
Birth, the body, history: ‘Desperate Midwives.’
‘Barbenheimer [sorry, I’d hoped not to go there] and the end of the American century: One of them is the best film of the last ten years; the other is just another product. But the story they both tell is of a world where the distinction no longer makes a difference.’
A preoccupation with the idea of America is certainly not unique - the US looms so large in the culture, for all of us really, that it often feels inescapable. My brother went to study in NYC years ago and never left. He’s now settled there, with a wife and children. His being there must be part of my own fascination with America - what is this place that is now home to my dear brother? But I also think that living in NZ, a place so small that one can never feel properly invisible, also plays a part. The desire to set off, driving for days, not knowing where you’ll end up and what you’ll find, is surely in so many of us, and the physical and cultural vastness of America seems to be where the imagination takes so many people when thinking of escape, adventure and discovering the unknown. Anyway, that’s my long and perhaps too personal intro to these photographs of the USA by the British photographer, Vanessa Winship, which especially appealed because she isn’t American, and so brings an outsider’s view to that beautiful, complex, infuriating country. ‘For British photographers with serious ambitions, the idea of photographing in America is at once an alluring and forbidding prospect. Especially for Winship’s generation who came under the formative influence of post-war American photography as it gradually found its way into Britain through books and occasional exhibitions during the 1970s and 80s, the American social landscape was most intimately known through photographic images, and through the iconic works that had sought to define the great sweep of a national culture while exposing its troubled psyche.’
On illness, and fake illnesses: ‘The Bad Patient.’
‘I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable.
At the time it was my firm belief that generations did not exist, that they were simply a retroactive periodization that imposed narrative cohesion on history, one which had really no more legitimacy than such contested categories as “the Dark Ages” or “postmodernity.”’ Justin E. H. Smith writes about generations being labelled and grouped into one big mass, and the one it turns out he belongs to (Gen X) in this piece for Harper’s. ‘My Generation: Anthem for a forgotten cohort.’
‘What Is Lifestyle? Creation, consumption and curation.’
Goodness. ‘Academia has certain time-honoured rites of passage: defending your PhD, speaking at your first conference and going on strike.
But for Shakespeareans, there’s a special baptism of ire: being shouted at online by a middle-aged software developer from Washington, D.C. In the field, the joke goes that you’re not a true Shakespearean unless you’ve received dog’s abuse from Alan Tarica, a staunch ‘anti-Stratfordian’ convinced William Shakespeare didn’t write any Shakespeare. […] But Tarica is more compelling than most bores because he’s a terminally online troll. He combs Twitter and university faculty pages, launching obscene diatribes at students, scholars, journalists – anyone who mentions Shakespeare online – raving about his own brilliance and writing articles with titles like ‘Has Everyone Turned Off His or Her Brain?’’
All I’m going to say is these people give off quite robotic vibes, and do we want a world filled with robotic humans? ‘With global birth rates in free fall, Silicon Valley’s ‘pronatalists’ are aiming to halt the decline – by having as many babies as possible: Meet the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind.’
‘In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, that superlative novel about social mobility, the aspiring Pip is advised to “get hold of portable property”. Over the course of the novel, the reader learns that this phrase has a double meaning. Diamond brooches and wallets of cash are portable, but far more precious is the cultural wealth that Pip accrues as he climbs the social ladder. As Pip learns, mastering how to speak, dress and even eat in ways that are recognised as refined are the most valuable portable assets. To possess such cultural capital is to move seamlessly through the world with pockets full of invisible gold.’ On ‘Growing up as a fish out of water.’
‘A Sentimental Autobiography of a Holiday Home Built in the North of Sardinia in the 1960s.’
Such joyous, delightful photos. ‘An Elegy for the Jewish Retirees of Miami Beach.’
BRITISH GOOP OF THE MONTH:
Penguin Modern Classics is republishing (and publishing two for the first time) its Crime and Espionage series, with classic bottle green jackets (see above). ‘Curated by author and Penguin Press publishing director Simon Winder after being initially discontinued in the 1980s,’ Winder has this to say about the collection: ‘“These books are united by atmosphere, anxiety, a strong sense of time and place, and an often appalling ingenuity, both on behalf of the authors and their characters. They have also all aged very well, gaining an additional pleasure from shifts in manners, clothes, wisecracks, politics, murder weapons and potential alibis.
“The novels were designed to be entertainments, albeit sometimes of a very dark kind, and they all plumb extremes. Fear of fascism or communism, fear of the anonymous city or of a fetid swamp, fear of vast global conspiracies or of just one rather odd family member with a glint in his eye.”’ Excellent!
‘Who controls a writer’s work after they’ve written their final word?’ On posthumous publishing.
My very favourite thing! The ridiculous book blurb! ‘Just as the planet must spin on its axis, Literary Twitter [Literary X?] must go into meltdown roughly once a week. This week’s niche drama is over blurbs. Those snippets of reviews that appear plastered over book covers to convince you to buy the book. Now, I’m sure someone somewhere was once baited into buying a book because of a blurb, but I’m not wholly persuaded of that. And if that one person did indeed exist, they aren’t likely to do it again after this week’s revelations: ‘The Jordan Peterson saga proves book blurbs aren't worth the paper they're printed on.’
A little piece on why Irish writing is having its moment. ‘The narrative around modern Irish literature often omits that this is a nation with a long history of storytelling.’ And (coincidentally, honestly) an interesting piece on the Irish writer Maeve Brennan: ‘Brennan rarely wrote of her parents’ part in the struggle for an independent Ireland, but this early experience runs through her stories of marriage and home life.’
‘The feminist writer Moira Donegan recently mocked contemporary social media reflexes in a tweet about Oedipus: “Wow, unfollowing now. I was a fan of his work solving the riddle of the Sphinx. Did not know he killed his father and married his mother.” We are in an age of moralists; the standard question has become whether someone was virtuous, rather than whether they were interesting or useful or exhilarating. Some of this seems valuable for forming societies that are more inclusive and less abusive; some of it is reductive and beside the point.’ These are not new issues/thoughts in our culture, but Rebecca Solnit is refreshing and insightful on ideas about the ‘moral purity’ (or not) of writers who are now dead: ‘George Orwell in an age of moralists.’ Recommend!