210. READ. LOOK.THINK.
210. READ. LOOK.THINK.
Ex-wife's plates, almond moms, lost years, party favour from Thatcher's 70th, mid-life misery, revelatory autonomy, mood as snail trail.
READ.
His ex-wife’s plates.
'…writing is solitary from start to finish.' Annie Ernaux x Celine Sciamma
‘… if the books I loved so objectively were actually vehicles of patriarchal ideology, why wouldn’t the ideology of expansionism be in there, too?’
How do I make up for my lost years? (A wonderful advice column answer. Another one: You fat-shamed your beautiful girlfriend 💔)
‘While the characters in these novels have in some cases experienced profound loss, their listless narration renders pain an abstraction. For the most part, denuded realism sidesteps the challenge of depicting the effects of alienating forces on people who do not already live in artificial isolation—who exist at the nexus of various social, familial, and professional relationships. In other words, the kind of people most of us still are.’
‘ I don’t like to talk too much about feelings. I don’t deny them at all, but especially in books I think it can be very embarrassing. More than that, when you talk too much about feelings they disappear.’
‘It’s just too bad out there, and it feels too bad inside.’
LOOK.
— @theprophetpizza in her Opulent Tips.
Yes, I watched Tár! Loved. Obsessed. Tár pieces I enjoyed:
Tavi Gevinson: ‘It is sort of your job, as a performer, to have Main Character Syndrome, and after years in such an environment maybe the condition becomes permanently embedded.’
Susie Orbach: ‘For the generation of women who grew up 10 to 20 years after the second wave, who were influenced by feminist ideas without having been in consciousness-raising groups, the noble longings they had for their daughters and students meant they foisted ambition and support for being “great” and “going for it” on them, while inadvertently leaving out the cost of inner conflict and doubt and the scariness of taking up space.’
Zadie Smith (can’t even quote this, she’s so Tár-like, virtuosically slashing away).
I love the pictures of Naomi Fry’s apartment.
THINK.
Mid-life misery.
The universal woman.
The wife left, but they’re still together.
Giving people advice on transformational life choices may violate their right to ‘revelatory autonomy.’
‘Even parents who might find the idea of a gender-reveal party to be gauche most likely had a notion of the gender of their offspring to come while in utero. A fantasy quickly forms for most parents around this apparent fact. Names selected. Futures imagined. Gender is such a powerful structure, partly conscious but largely unconscious, shaping who we think anyone is in the world. It’s always there in advance, before a child is even born. For children, gender can be hard enough to figure out even if one colors within the lines of the gender assigned at birth. For trans kids, it’s a nightmare.’
‘… a mood is a snail trail from some other situation, a state that has lagged on.’
‘Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.’
No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. (Now what?!)
Jess
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