221. READ. LOOK. THINK.
ICE QUEEN, half an hour of complete silence, nice writing music, only vibes, light the dark months
Brought home a little keepsake of the Nicole Eisenman: What Happened at Whitechapel Gallery this week — loved. ('How is it that she works and produces greatness and supports her children and is friends with her ex-wife and sees her mother once a week and goes on vacation with her girlfriend and reads and thinks and participates in civic life and responds to all her messages and helps raise funds for a hundred causes and relaxes...' Great profile.)
READ.
‘After speaking for several hours, [Lydia] Davis asked for half an hour of complete silence…’
Another Lisa Owens story in the Stinging Fly: Ice Queen. I was so lucky to read this in draft, but in the published version there’s a little ‘About’ section at the bottom where the author gives some background to the work: ‘If a central anxiety of puberty is, ‘am I wanted?’ the school disco offers sometimes unforgiving answers.’ 💔
‘Maybe it’s just because I don’t like being told what things mean, but to me, the most generous thing an artist can do—regardless of medium—is to create a distinctive space, a kind of ego-less garden in which a visitor finds her own way.’
No plot, only vibes.
Video of Helen Garner in conv with Merve Emre.
LOOK.
Rosie Kellett lives in a sharehouse in Hackney Wick and went wildly viral for talking about how everyone who lives there cooks for each other and how they run their household. You can see it all in her reels. It does seem really lovely, especially in Tory Britain where having a home, a nourishing meal, a community and time to enjoy it feels for many like an increasingly… impossible… dream…
‘And it’s a simple mathematical fact that if you cop new s**t compulsively — letting the e-comm packages flood in, tearing them open, and flicking yourself up in a new jawn whose libidinal payoff quickly evanesces, at which point it’s on to the next one — you are spending too much time treadmilling unswaggily in the State of Shopping…’
'She Pioneered Internet Fame, He Helped Draft a Constitution. Now They’re in Love.'
How to light the dark months.
Nice lamp (although I ended up getting this good cheap one from IKEA).
Last edition I put the wrong link in for the weird toy my children loved at circus school and would make a good present. It was meant to be this!
Putting together this newsletter listening to Nico Muhly’s soundtrack for a David Hockney exhibition. Nice writing music.
THERE IS ENOUGH IF WE SHARE
THERE IS ENOUGH IF WE SHARE
THINK.
‘The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.’
(From this piece I found Eleanor Stern’s ‘TikTok reading list,’ a great collection of pieces and work, potentially better than this newsletter? I’ll leave that for you to judge!)
The moral case for no longer engaging with Elon Musk’s X.
'We have had exponential growth in the sex positivity movement, but gender equality has not caught up.'
The ‘simple fix’ to help anxious kids.
Jess
X
PS. VOTE YES.