No. 31
'late confessions'; a Burning Man report; 'memory is wet sand'; squeamishness; Frederick Wiseman; birth; 'rizz'; Marta Becket; book lists
Kia ora, hello,
Welcome back to the ol’ Interesting Times, and hello new subscribers.
Here, as usual, is the high and low of the information superhighway - I hope you find something to enjoy in amongst the internet rubble.
Happy Christmas to all who celebrate, and I’ll see you again in the Brave New World of 2024.
~Ellie
p.s. My apologies, to people who pay for Interesting Times, that there hasn’t been one for a couple of months - please don’t worry about your $$ - monthly payments were paused, and I’ve adjusted when yearly payments end, so you won’t be charged for newsletters that don’t exist. I hope that makes sense, and please email me if you have any questions.
Nightmare scenes, you couldn’t pay me, etc. ‘After the Orgy’: a report from Burning Man. ‘We were staying at Soft Landing, a camp with a tea-and-psychedelics theme that aimed to provide “a comfortable setting for visionary discussion and tea service amongst the mayhem of Black Rock City.” We ended up there because of my boyfriend’s co-worker, “Junction,” who had gone to Burning Man the previous year and discovered, outside of his default-world life as an executive of a web 3.0 company, a second life as a tea server.’
‘We aged, we decrepit, we ancients of the internet, we people over 30, hear my word and shudder, for the hour of our obsolescence is at hand. Oxford University Press has announced its word of the year for 2023. Beware, for the dread word of our doom and destruction is: “rizz.”
‘The Winklevoss twins — a.k.a. the Winklevii — became indelibly imprinted on the public imagination as characters in 2010’s The Social Network. "I'm six-five, 220, and there's two of me," said Armie Hammer, playing one of them (it didn't really matter which). The twins ended up getting a $65 million settlement over their claims to the Facebook idea, but it was clear enough they wanted a lot more than that: How the Winklevii’s Second Act Went Bad.’
Vanity Fair’s latest: ‘Bryan Johnson, the biohacker tech bro, has spoken at length about his twin pursuits of eternal life and a younger penis. Now, he’s denying his ex-girlfriend’s allegations, amid news of a settlement.’ (There’s very often a sordid feel to Vanity Fair’s articles, and this one is no exception.)
ALERT ! ! 🚨 ALERT ! ! 🚨
A few reflections on NZ’s new government. Don’t say you weren’t warned!
Tara Ward: ‘Want to guarantee your tax cut? Take up smoking.’
And here’s John Campbell, being as insightful and thoughtful as ever: ‘On [Luxon] went, triumphantly, as large and largely meaningless as a decommissioned lighthouse. He was winning election night word-bingo. He was Boris Johnson channelling a Reader’s Digest Winston Churchill. He was the talking mechanism from inside the flawless, plastic body of an action doll.
Making the country “so much better than it is”, Christopher Luxon said. Taking “New Zealand forward,” he said. Getting us “back on track”. Tides. Tracks. New.’
And there’s more! Chris Trotter on ‘Losing the Working Class.’
‘A strange interrogation of squeamishness among the unsqueamish.
Name: Andy
Profession: Sewage drainage and disposal, Dover.
Routine: Work Activities Filling pipes, reservoirs and septic tanks with water to disperse sewage; draining said water to clean area; disposing of waste.
Objects of Disgust: Bins
Comment “Can’t go near bins at all, hate them. Liquid waste, that’s fine. But not bins.”’
Growing up online: ‘I could be an avatar, a playlist, a chain of speech bubbles. I was pure invention.’ And more on the online life (this was interesting because I’m old and washed-up and what even is the TikTok, but I also think it’s good to know, even vaguely, what the young ones are up to): ‘This is the story of one house, where three […] creators live, eating noodles and working minimum-wage day jobs, while they try to figure out how to make it in a digital economy that is both harshly capitalist and glowing with potential.’
On memory: From Harper’s: ‘Memory is wet sand’ and ‘Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory.’ From the NYT, ‘Ghosts on the Glacier’: What unearthed photos from a day of tragedy on a mountain reveal and hide about what happened, ‘[a]nd what does the enduring mystery say about the relationship between facts and memory, certainty and imagination?’ And such a lovely piece from The Spinoff, ‘Auckland Museum curator Nina Finigan talks with local artist Bev Moon about her knitted versions of family recipes. […] “Our relationship to food is inherently tied to our memories – a smell of a particular thing cooking can transport us back in time in a split second.”’
‘In his work, institutions develop a soul, even an unconscious.’ Frederick Wiseman, now age 94, and still making his observational, meditative, engrossing, very long documentaries is the subject of a piece in The New Yorker, where he discusses his latest film, Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, a four hr long examination of a ‘great French restaurant.’ Wiseman’s seemingly insatiable desire to see behind the facade of institutions big and small, to observe people in their day to day, to observe how the gears grind fast and slow, and why, and to find out how both the lauded and the unsung go about their business is a joyous thing to witness. May he live, and make documentaries, forever!
‘One man’s lifelong dedication to decoration: On an unassuming terraced street in Cambridge is one of the finest examples of Arts and Crafts domestic décor, on a modest scale that William Morris would have been proud of.’ The David Parr House.
‘More Than a Natural Function: The politics of birth.’ (I think there was a childbirth article in the last newsletter - apologies for so much birth.)
‘How do you survive unfazed? You must live in a “strongly coiled, pearly shell”, and it must grow with you, chamber by chamber. Each new chamber is bigger than the last, and you move into it, sealing off the chamber behind you.
That is how to live, until you die. In his poem about the nautilus, Oliver Wendell Holmes put it like this: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul … Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, / Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, / Till thou at length art free”. A beautiful little piece on the nautilus.
On superstition: ‘Most superstitious adages lay dormant in the mind. In my family, they were offered up as insights or soft guidelines, never truly enforced. […] A saying goes in Bangla: eat in even mouthfuls otherwise you’ll drown in the Ganges. Astonishingly, this is one I’ve somewhat internalised, despite the glaring facts that I can swim and have never seen the Ganges. Don’t eat off a chipped plate. If you drop your hairbrush in the middle of brushing your hair, expect guests.’
‘Pies and politics, hockey sticks and police — eight hours on a Friday night at a Karangahape Rd dairy.’
‘2023 in Review: What were we obsessed with, invested in and plagued by in 2023? Hazlitt’s writers reflect on the issues, big and small.’
“My talents are my children, and they deserve to be used.” - Marta Becket
Bringing me absolute joy at this time of year are all the various ‘Best of’ book lists - always filled with new, interesting (and sometimes obscure, depending on the list) books I’d never have otherwise discovered. Here are a few:
A Year in Reading: Joanna Biggs.
Lit Hub: The 38 Best Books We Read in 2023.
The Aotearoa books of the year for 2023, from The Spinoff.
The Guardian has decided to go with a gazillion sub-genres this year e.g. Best translated novels; Best food books; Best poetry; Best of politics. Browse them all here.
Granta invited contributors and friends of the magazine to reflect on what they read in 2023.
New York Magazine: The Best Books of 2023.
And finally, my favourite list - Faber staff talk about their books of the year, and what they’ll be reading this Christmas.
On not being able to sleep: ‘Plagued by insomnia for 20 years, in her book Sleepless, Marie Darrieussecq turns her attention to the causes, implications, and consequences of sleeplessness: a nocturnal suffering that culminates at 4 a.m. and then defines the next day. “Insomniac mornings are dead mornings,” she observes. Prevented from falling asleep by her dread of exhaustion the next day, Darrieussecq, a leading voice in contemporary French literature, turns to hypnosis, psychoanalysis, alcohol, pills, and meditation. Her entrapment within this spiraling anguish prompts her inspired, ingenious search across literature, geopolitical history, psychoanalysis, and her own experience to better understand where insomnia comes from and what it might mean.’
For Nina Stibbe fans, here’s a review of her latest, Went to London, Took the Dog. I’m part way through listening to it (Stibbe narrates, and has a very soothing voice) and it’s everything one would expect from a book of hers: droll, observational, and of course funny, funny, funny. I wish I could be friends with her. (I once sent her a fan-girl message on IG (why?! what a dweeb) and she very kindly replied and said I’d made her day, which was almost definitely a lie, but a sweet one.)
Writing and the ‘neutered rhetoric of brand management.’
‘We live in confessional times, and the self-exposure bug eventually comes for us all, the steeliest of non-disclosers, no less. We age and turn inward, we become garrulous and spill. Even I, who once fled the first-person singular like a bad smell, now talk about myself endlessly in print, opening every essay or review with some “revealing” anecdote or slightly abashed confession, striving for the perfect degree of manicured self-deprecation and helpless charm. Needless to say, the more forthcoming you appear, the more calculated the agenda, not always consciously. Which brings me to Janet Malcolm’s posthumously published collection of autobiographical fragments, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory’ and her ‘late confessions.’