193. READ. LOOK. THINK.
A box of books, reading like a prosecutor, two novels that made me cry, very good news about car mirrors, Anne's Prelude, dream work, the climate vasectomy.
This email newsletter will be arriving in Australians’ inboxes on a public holiday. I love my home country so much that even hearing seagulls on the BBC tennis coverage makes me homesick! But January 26 is not a date to celebrate. Solidarity with First Nations people today and always.
Hi friends,
My novel A Great Hope will be out in less than a month! Here’s what it’s about and where you can pre-order it. This week I packed my notes and drafts away in the attic… intense.
READ.
'I knew nothing about my therapist’s life, and yet she performed a similar role in mine that queer books did—her short hair and her kind face, her soft butchness, were all a promise that I, too, could be a happy and kind adult lesbian, professionally fulfilled, unshocked or dismayed at the sort of melancholies that I suffered at fifteen. That box of her books felt like a profound and precious gift from the universe, an omen of the most auspicious kind.'
Brandon Taylor on reading like a prosecutor: ‘…a form of paranoid reading in which the reader approaches a text from the defensive supposition that the author is out to deceive and beguile and misdirect. You look for holes in the author’s defense through which the poorly disguised light of biography shines.’
Sheila Heti’s alphabetised diaries.
An incredible birth story in The New Yorker (everything turns out okay, if that helps you to read it)
Assembled some IKEA listening to the audiobook of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.
Emily messaged the thread we have with Meaghan saying I had to read My Death by Lisa Tuttle: ‘'it’s about a 50ish novelist in Scotland who sets out to write a biography of a 90 yr old Virago green paperback cult classic author... but there's a twist.' So I read it in an afternoon and: [sorry I can’t find the mind blown emoji on my laptop].
Instagram reunited me with a classmate from my primary school in Carlton North — I still remember Alice Robinson so clearly! She has published two novels and I just finished The Glad Shout - I spent the last few pages properly crying.
Speaking of properly crying, soon Monica Ali’s Love Marriage will come out. I remember Brick Lane legit did me in whenever I read that… I even made my mother read it.
LOOK.
On Instagram: @caffs_not_cafes. | @thisisrosiehealey. | Alice Neel's hallway.
I snootily thought I didn't like the sound of Yellowjackets (the tv show) but it's so good.
Incredibly relieved to read this re car mirrors:
(This is your skin on stress.)
THINK.
THE WHITE REVIEW
What do you think about the reclamation of the sexy witch stereotype from within feminism? How do you understand it?
SILVIA FEDERICI
I don’t like it. Scores of movies now centre on the theme of the witch – promoting again the idea that women are demonic beings, with destructive powers they cannot control, and this at a time when violence against women is growing worldwide. I think that’s very dangerous. There is a lot of identification with the witches but there is no struggle. There is only commercialisation.
‘The good news is that there are no bad kids. The bad news is that there are plenty of bad parents.’ Ariel Levy on Janet Lansbury (who functioned as my own personal chill pill/guiding star).
“It’s all an act, but it’s not a lie.”
‘But the love your wife is showing you? Wow! That is a different sort of love altogether. That isn’t passive, that is love as a verb, that is love as an action, that is the sort of steady, committed, available, consistent kindness that, had you experienced it as a toddler, I don’t think you’d be in this situation now.’
'(Anne still has her Prelude, which David has rewired over the years, along with a few other vibrators that they use regularly.)'
'Hating bodies is a form of self-hatred and leads to hatred of others, human and (non-human) animal. Hating what you yourself are is already pointless and makes for unhappiness. But it is worse still when we know that projective disgust is almost certain to follow. Body-haters are bound to find some surrogate for the animal, the bodily, in themselves, whether it be a racial group, a gender or sexual group, or the aging, who come in for a tremendous amount of body-hatred all over the world.'
Why everyone in Hollywood is doing dream work.
‘We realize that we are flying into the unknown, that the more we learn the more we realize we don’t know, that gender is a concatenation of physical, mental, emotional, and cultural factors we will never master, because no one does.’
The climate vasectomy.
‘For a sizeable element of the Tory party, sovereignty has assumed an almost theological quality.’
'It was a deliberate strategy. Prorogue parliament – not because you want to shut down democratic debate, but because you want to ensure the other side can’t talk about anything else. Send them mad and you will get what you want in the end, because they will be unable to think straight.' (David Runciman reviews Dominic Cummings' substack, which Dominic Cummings would have to pay me £10 to read.)
A discourse analysis of the use of the word respect by the main advocates in the High Court and Supreme Court hearings of R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the ‘Brexit case’).
'Lethal aid.'
Jess
X