231. READ. LOOK. THINK.
The last rave, the family home, I will trouble you no further. What kind of mother? Black magic, fever dream, a storage solution I should have bought.
READ.
'I sensed that, by choosing to be an observer rather than a participant, I was failing a moral test.' The Last Rave by Emily Witt (I have to read her book when it comes out.)
‘I always kind of thought that the person who wrote that show, which seems to provoke people, should be the same person who comes to the interview. And I was too young to really have developed the skill set to sort of keep one thought in the work and the other in the world.’
‘What kind of mother? What kind of person? What kind of woman? etc. Well, any kind of mother. Any kind of person. Any kind of woman. She made a choice and justified it to herself through any number of inversions or self-delusions, who can say. But is this really so shocking? People do this every day. My own family did this. I saw it play out first hand. People are capable of justifying anything. Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person.’ Brandon Taylor on Alice Munro’s response (or lack of response) to her partner’s abuse of her daughter.
‘There is something inhibiting about the family home; people cannot be people in it. And there must, where two people who live in books are concerned, be a simple, petty, and perfect resentment at work: knowing the way things actually happened, they are robbed of the pleasure of reading one another.’ Patricia Lockwood on A.S. Byatt.
Mendez on the LRB podcast reading his essay (in his beautiful voice) about becoming an audiobook narrator.
“Friends,” I said, several hours later, “I must thank you for helping me to understand more clearly the limitations of my knowledge, of my qualifications to live. I will trouble you no further.” Darkly satirical short story by Elif Batuman!
‘As we made our way back along General Holmes Drive, I resolved to be more careful with whom I shared my A material.’ My friend James has been making me laugh with his writing since 2009.
LOOK.
Really sad to share this because I’ve only recently invested in a less expensive, less nice, non-ideal solution, but this would be lovely for storing children’s picturebooks and those big A4 books about the Titanic etc that children love.
Beautiful flat near Brick Lane.
Hackney’s iconic Middleton Road Dog Hedge was in The New York Times.
This is a very good recipe for something you can put in the oven, forget about and then enjoy: Anna Jones’s traybake lemon dal.
I loved this piece in the FT about the fantasy home in Sliding Doors: ‘But mostly Sliding Doors unfolds in breezy ignorance. The film does not concern itself with self-conscious representations of class differences among Londoners, which have become an almost inevitable part of similar films in the past decade. This could feel like an oversight, but to me it is actually a more accurate description of city living: the truth is that we all move to the capital with aspirations of access, of understanding the city’s secret codes, a sense of effortless belonging.’
‘When I decided to start selling cut flowers I considered looking for a field, but there’s not many of them in [London] Zone 2. Then I realised there’s already land around me that is unused and unloved - front gardens. I asked my neighbour if we could have a reciprocal agreement - I take care of her front garden (cut grass, prune etc) and in return I grow cut flowers to sell. And that’s how it started…’
THINK.
‘“When an inner situation is not made conscious,”wrote Jung in Aion (1951), “it happens outside, as fate.” An example is the worker who constantly distracts herself with social media. The interruption is a form of self-sabotage, but it also expresses a need for connection and validation that she has repressed as invalid, and which emerges with redoubled force in those procrastinatory habits.’
‘… slop is only slop when you remember what real food looks like and the anxiety we’re all feeling right now is that if our slop era lasts any longer we won’t anymore.’ More slop for the void.
‘I treat my phone as if it infused with black magic, as if it contains demonic forces which leap out and destroy any life force that comes near it. I act this way because it is literally true.’
‘Intellectually, I had always known that this was my undoing: the sweaty, white-knuckled lack of chill.’
Fever dream: finally an end to fourteen years of Tory rule. (This is the real life background to the world of my new novel.)
‘We can remind ourselves that a more just society is possible, if only because a few of the necessary conditions have at various moments actually existed upon this Earth, and in the not-so-distant past. With this in mind, I have begun thinking of the circumstances of my youth not as a fairytale or as an impossible fantasy, but as a real-life thing that did happen and might happen again, under the direction of a Labour party committed to the radical principles upon which it was founded.’
If you grew up with money, stop being weird about it.
My book announcement in The Bookseller (click through on IG for more details. I will be doing my copy edit next week — everything is moving very fast! Consider Yourself Kissed will be out in Australia in April, UK in May and US in June 2025.)
I’m also back on Twitter or X @dailydoseofjess, but at a total loss where to begin. I’m devastated Elon removed Likes because they were so helpful in finding good stuff. The ads are now utterly deranged.
Jess
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