215. READ. LOOK. THINK.
Lucian Freud eggs in a Smythson box, who's the best boy, your mother's jailer, this collusion, the past collapses, LOs, $75!!!!!
Lucian Freud eggs in a Smythson box at Chatsworth in 2005, photograph by Francois Halard.
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‘As a child I nursed conflicting desires. I wanted substance but refused its means. Desired the presence of mind I needed in order to stand up to my father, but at the same time I wished that I could just rub myself out, dissolve away, whip on that cloak of invisibility. I badly wanted to engage with the world beyond my parent’s orbit, to override the bounds of their jurisdiction and break free. But even as I longed for contact with an outside that was bigger than the world they knew – bigger even than the planet – I withdrew inside the self’s innermost spaces and hid there.’ Marina Benjamin, ‘Personal Growth.’
‘I had generally attributed those female experiences to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the creation of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity.’ Rachel Cusk, ‘The Stuntman.’
‘It is tough to be your mother’s jailer. My mom gave me everything, and for this, received nothing that she wanted in return. This is a heavy inheritance.’
'Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother's fate.'
“It’s not just that the past collapses,” she said. “The present collapses, and any sense of good I ever did collapses. It feels like it’s a whole spinning universe that has its own velocity and, if I just stick my finger in it, it will take me—and I don’t know where I’ll end up.”
I have all the Woolf Diaries in their old tall pastel editions but look, new ones are coming out from Granta!
LOOK.
In love with Wilding Radio, a 24/7 nature livestream from deep in the wilds of Sussex. The head of the project was talking about it on Radio 4 Today (that’s how I heard about it) and she said, beyond all its other benefits and delights, people with insomnia might find it comforting.
No, I did not know this about lilacs.
I took my girls (now 8 and 9 and 3/4s) to see ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET at the movies and it was five stars from all of us.
Great Curbed piece on how much people’s fantasy lives would cost. (One multiple exclamation mark detail: two parents they spoke to spent $75 a month just on strawberries and blueberries for their children!!!)
THINK.
Her LOs (Limerent Objects) have always been women in positions of authority or mentorship. The attachments were never sexual in nature, but they were much more intense than the romantic “crushes” she developed on men. These experiences were not benign: they caused her a great deal of pain, anxiety, and disruption. There was “horrendous shame attached.”
“In your mind, you know, the military are very impressive, and the Cabinet Office is very impressive,” Easthope said. (The Cabinet Office is the nerve center of the British government, and leads the central government’s emergency planning.) “And suddenly it’s, like, a lady called Yvonne who can’t find her car keys.” (Great profile of disaster expert Lucy Easthope.) / I think I may have said this before, but I loved her memoir When the Dust Settles.
‘What people condescendingly refer to as “leftist infighting” is often critical and essential conflict between people who have drastically different values and addressing these issues can strengthen our communities.’
‘My patients, regardless of political affiliation, are incorporating the messages of social movements into the very structure of their being. New words make new thoughts and feelings possible. As a collective we appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions. To invert a truism, the political is personal.’
‘Arranging society so that people don’t feel they have enough time or money to make themselves a meal is a dystopian nightmare. Selling us cheap food that might harm us, but is framed as being helpful or healthy, is a dystopian nightmare.’
I donated to Just Stop Oil last week after seeing them get shouted at in front of St Paul’s.
Jess
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