217. READ. LOOK. THINK.
A rapid reduction in fossil fuels, essential to avoid climate breakdown, would have minimal financial impact on the vast majority of people ❣️ Plus: 'non-being', filler ep, a water bottle, Threads.
READ.
'I feel I’ve done everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot more family dinners.' Alice Munro
'Though it was later forgotten, it always stood for one of her quietest and arguably most important periods, between her first attempts at writing and those fleeting experiments which determined the novels that came afterward.' Virginia Woolf's forgotten diary.
'the quality of detective fiction is unmistakable in her work. A plot is afoot. A crime has been committed; a burglary, a con, a murder. Someone is going to be accused. (The biographer, with the unpublished letters, in the footnote …) [...] In these scenes, [Janet] Malcolm is always both the all-seeing Poirot, and his lead suspect. (The journalist, with the tape recorder, at Chez Panisse …)’
'The truth is that it’s extremely hard, extremely painful, to feel things, and so the failure to access feelings, to actually get somewhere near them, is one of my subjects. Some people don’t want to go there. Fair enough; I have a lot of respect for that position. This idea that we all have to go there is rather punitive.' Deborah Levy
'But I was definitely weary of London’s claustrophobic literary world, or at least the role I had been assigned within it: multicultural (aging) wunderkind.' Zadie Smith
She laughed grimly. “I’m afraid I’ve written something that needs to be read twice.” (Through this Lorrie Moore profile I found this short story which... took my breath away?!)
'My work is very much interested in how we come to know other people because I have no idea how it’s supposed to work. I think, through writing, I come to what feel like really secure answers. And then everyday lived experience confounds them.' Brandon Taylor
'That is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand—“non-being.” Every day includes much more non-being than being. . . . As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being.' / filler episode.
I loved Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key; I read it on Kindle (see below) but I will buy a paperback I love it so much. A miracle of structure, exquisite detailed scenes, revealing, authoritative.
The first episode of new podcast takes us inside Helen Garner's house...
LOOK.
I’ve been enjoying Hijack with Idris Elba on Apple+ (that’s the dad inside me). Also weirdly thrilled by Deadloch (‘a feminist noir comedy set against a bucolic [Tasmanian] backdrop with a rising body count’)??? If I keep enjoying comedies I will soon have think of myself as a comedy person???
THINK.
Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray Are Separating.
'... a premise so widely shared that it enables a coalition between fascists and liberals to become possible: Children are their parents’ property, and as such, parents have the right to know, if not decide, everything about who their children might be.'
'The desire for safety exceeds the love that any parent can provide her children. No wonder they seek it from their teachers.'
'Excluding anyone on the basis of biological difference demonstrates a spectacular failure of empathy; worse, it reduces women to their reproductive systems, which is surely something we should be trying to move on from.'
A rapid reduction in fossil fuels, essential to avoid devastating climate breakdown, would have minimal financial impact on the vast majority of people, new research has shown.
"Finally," Kean said, "we were able to get in there and see that, thank goodness, the trees were saved." 🥲
I’m on Threads! (And Instagram.)
Jess X