To celebrate my littlest’s spica cast coming off (oh to be able to bathe him, but no walking yet), we went to Giffords Circus this morning. I adore circuses—medium known fact about me is that I can ride, and own, a unicycle—and this is a gorgeous production: plenty of gasp out loud moments, but nothing too bold for tiny people. (Didn’t love the water pistol into the audience, ngl.)
I’m half way through Half-Life: The History Podcast with Welsh writer and poet Joe Dunthorne (to accompany his new book, Children of Radium) and it’s so well done. It’s a family memoir and deep-dive into the hidden history of Dunthorne’s great-grandfather, a Jewish refugee and chemist, who, unbeknown to any of his descendants—until Dunthorne ploughed through his 2,000 page memoir—helped create mustard gas in Nazi Germany. It is considered, candid and at times, quite droll. Curiously, Dunthorne sounds exactly like another top podcaster: Sweet Bobby’s Alexi Mostrous.
This piece on antimemetic language by Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker—on why bad ideas spread while good ones often resist replication—is so up my street. It is not a quick or an easy read, but it really drills down into why ideas that are not easily spreadable are the ideas “that cost something” and are the antidote to easily transmissible trash.
Proof that not everything need be re-named (memed?): Marie Kondo’s ‘spark joy’ method has morphed into the the poop rule. The viral decluttering method from lifestyle influencer Amanda Johnson tells you to imagine something you own covered in shit. If you like it enough to clean it, it’s a keeper. William Morris (of the ‘beautiful or useful’ rule) is turning in his grave.
Props to Business Insider for the title (‘Bride or Die’) on this shudder-inducing, very entertaining piece about the hen-do industrial complex. (Either this is an ‘only in America’ sitch, or I’m just lucky to have never been subjected to such insanity by any of my friends.) Writes Amanda Hoover of the rapidly growing category, ‘bachelorette decor’:
“There's the custom five-by-eight foot sign, the groom's head glued to popsicle sticks, the custom temporary tattoos, genitalia-shaped glitter confetti, and the matching T-shirts and tote bags commemorating Susie's "last toast on the coast!" if you're headed for Cape Cod, or her "last rodeo" in cowboy boots in Nashville before she "saddles up" for marriage.”
The best thing I’ve ‘consumed’ this week was Giant, at The Harold Pinter theatre. (I went to a matinee on my own and it was heaven being surrounded by white wine-supping 70-somethings.) Set over the course of a single afternoon, with just four characters and one single set, it is the story of Roald Dahl’s allegiance with Lebanon and Palestine and an anti-semitic book review he wrote in 1982. John Lithgow is shockingly good as Dahl: irascible, charming, childish, tender, vicious, generous, bigoted. As the furious yet composed sales director at his publishing house, Jessie Stone, puts it, he is “a broken boy in giant’s clothing”. It is impossible to distill into a paragraph, but it’s so fantastic it had a standing ovation, and I gather that this happens at every single performance. Do go if you are in London, and you have the means. It is fascinating and clever and so utterly prescient. I’m now hunting for a good Dahl biog to read.
I’m sure there have been a lot of painful changes at The Observer since Tortoise bought the Sunday paper off The Guardian, but one decision I’m delighted by is the expansion of Séamus O’Reilly’s column into a full back page. A lot of O’Reilly’s first person writing stems from the boggling fact that he was one of 11 kids raised single-handedly by his widowed father, in rural Ireland. (I really recommend his memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? which has many pleasing doublets of sad and funny, tender and absurd, etc.) Here, O’Reilly, now a father of two, writes about the novelty of having a babysitter.
As one of 11 kids, “my parents’ remarkable fecundity had provided us with a permanent conveyor belt of children turning roughly 15 each year, any of whom my father deemed acceptably senior”. For a young O’Reilly, babysitters, like “pocket money, trick or treating or having neighbours” were all “so exotic as to be American”. I’d read O’Reilly on paint drying. In fact, I hope he writes about that soon.
Patrick Radden Keefe for J Crew; Zadie Smith for Bottega Veneta. Are writers the new quiet luxury?
I’ve been reading intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien’s book ahead of interviewing her at Southbank tomorrow and in her further reading list, she recommends the below books for teaching kids about sex.
