222. READ. LOOK. THINK.

Startling candour, a high state of paranoia and anxiety, how you'd treat a girlfriend (galleries, eggs), keep it platonic, when you don't know what to say

I’ve been writing 🙏🏼

READ.

The startling candour of Helen Garner. (The stuff about her avoiding people she knows!)

So much to love in this interview with Jeanette Winterson.

‘After a number of long conversations with Nunez on different days, it became clear to me precisely whom her narrators sound like: Nunez.’

Robot voice.

‘No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.’

The ghost novel.

A class story.

‘I feel in a high state of paranoia and anxiety. It does beg the question: Why do you make things if you don’t want those things to come out? What kind of psychological thing is that? I so enjoyed writing this book, and then I finished it and felt like everything’s great because I’ve finished it. It took about a month before I thought, “Oh, right. The second half of this experience is about to begin.” To me, it’s a peculiar mental state where the opposite of what you need to make the thing is what putting this thing out there involves. It’s the death of any artist, but you need to do it because otherwise nobody would read the books or listen to the music. So there’s no solution.’ Zadie Smith.

LIT girls.

A flavour of the new Nina Stibbe which, as I think I’ve already said, I love.

LOOK.

A young Neneh Cherry with her mother Monika 'Moki' Karlsson, a Swedish painter and textile artist, at home in the 1960s — @8hollandstreet.

Marmite butter onions.

Troye Sivan’s Melbourne home.

The dancing in Back on 74! (Especially 2 mins in.)

I had all the ingredients for this chocolate olive oil cake and it was nice.

Does this link work? The girls and I are watching The Matildas: The world at their feet on Disney Plus, a documentary about Australia’s women’s football team. It’s lovely to watch sports women excel, and to see (for eg) Sam Kerr scrambling what looks like seven eggs for her gf after training.

Tiny Paris kitchens.

THINK.

‘The majority of [Jezebel’s] commenters were very good. [...] But sometimes they were bad: sarcastic, mean, intellectually dishonest, and bullying toward one another. And sometimes they were horrible, behaving like a twisted Greek chorus trying to upstage the main performers.’

Against ‘as a mother.’

“I’m trying to treat myself like I'd treat my girlfriend,” Richard says, “taking myself on art gallery dates, gigs, getting coffees here and there – a standard thing you'd do in a couple with someone, except you’re on your own. It feels terrible and embarrassing in the beginning, but you will eventually get used to that.”

Gen Z adolescents want to more platonic relationships or friendships in movies and TV.

The world solved acid rain. We can also solve climate change.

For those who don’t know what to say when the world is burning.

Jess

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