201. READ. LOOK. THINK.
Go deep, being four people, a life unwitnessed, Nigel Slater's garden, #hotgirlswithIBS, Unicorn Syndrome, a disordered relationship to time.
How many extreme crimes including murders would you commit to spend one (1) week alone in this attic.
Hello friends,
I hope this arrives at a good time for you. I have not included anything about abortion rights but of course that doesn't mean we're not all thinking about it.
READ.
‘The artist seeks the new, the fresh, the countercultural; she historically leans left. Today, those countercultural values have become more or less mainstream, as corporations and Democratic centrists scramble to catch the latest wave of ethics launched on progressive Twitter. How should a novel be in an environment where the left has effectively won the culture wars, or at least cultural power, even as, materially and policy-wise, the country glides frictionlessly ever further to the right? How does the artist push against the expectations of the mainstream cultural left and the absolute insanity of the countercultural right at once?'
'Is a life unwitnessed just as full and rich a life? You don’t know.' Sharlene Teo
'Sometimes it hurts to think about, but then I just write another book, masturbate, cry, complain on Twitter, write another book.'
'I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.'
The writer must be four people.
'You know, some reviewers really slammed the middle section of What Belongs to You and said, Oh, this is just boring Freudianism. And I was like, well, if what you mean by Freudianism is just the idea that our parents have big impacts on our lives, like—I guess I’m guilty.' Garth Greenwell
'...what I really needed was to go deep again. And to do that is to abandon my children. It seriously is.'
More Elif Batuman! On Literary Friction and Writers & Company.
Alan Hollinghurst reads ‘September 1, 1939.’
I've been reading about time. (I’m better at posting the books I’m reading to my Instagram/Stories than I am about posting them here, I have a very seamless link-saving system but you can’t save a book to Instapaper).
LOOK.
@tablescapeluvr makes me want to have a party although I vowed no more, not even for children.
A deep dive on Nigel Slater’s garden and Lucinda Chambers' house.
A dressing from Dept. of Salad that begins ’20 cloves of garlic, peeled and trimmed’.
Adam Liaw on umami.
I really want a stack of these aluminium trays used at Koya-Ko.
THINK.
Very long, good (scary) podcast episode on the state of the American Right.
'Everything has gone': a world-first study looks at what happens when MPs lose their seats.
If I get canceled, let them eat me alive.
'I can’t help but think that the walking-on-eggshells battle for pronouns is turning my gender into a human-resources-approved corporate product, more neutered than neutral, and, maybe above all else, profoundly unromantic.'
‘Unicorn Syndrome’: a psychic infection endemic in societies, beset by moral confusion, whose citizens are raised on a diet of self-help and self-marketing. Symptoms include a deep need to be recognised as uniquely interesting, a concomitant phobia of being lumped with the ‘normies’, a compulsion to excavate every wound, secret or point of difference and use it as a USP, and an attitude of moral exceptionalism that encourages a focus on the ways in which we feel injured by power while ignoring the extent to which we may be executors of it.
The dry bible of the psychiatry world — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM — has become a surprise bestseller amid surging popular interest in mental health.
Trauma leaves biological traces in children but 'offspring are not always passive recipients of their parents' scars. Just as a parent was able to survive trauma by means of biological adaptations, offspring can sometimes adapt to the biological impact of their parents' trauma.'
Mary Gaitskill: the internet is beating the crap out of us.
'...for a certain class of person—let’s call them the smartphone-bound, reasonably-but-not-terminally online people—the amount they spend engaged with the recent past has increased considerably, to the point that some are enclosed in this online world and develop a disordered relationship to time.'
What can UK, US and other progressives learn from the Australian election? Anthony Albanese, the Greens and 'Teal' (climate) Independents deftly defused the “authoritarian dynamic”: the activation of underlying predispositions to authoritarianism through the creation or manipulation of normative threat.
If you're in Australian winter and looking for a novel people have flatteringly called 'never boring', I do recommend my book A Great Hope. Get it at Readings. Booktopia. Dymocks. Amazon, etc. Or, of course, from your local bookshop (stop, thinking about Australian bookshops makes me homesick).
Jess xx