Bits #49
The usual mixed bag of things to read, watch, listen to, ogle, ponder
Happy Sunday! Might today be the day I finally switch over to my new iPhone, which has been setting on my desk for six months? Doubtful.
Flotsam from the week:
✢ I learned that there is a shade of red called sang de boeuf and I can’t stop whispering it to myself
✢ Dakota Fanning preaching the high/low method in Vanity Fair: “Put caviar on a McDonald’s chicken nugget, and it’s the greatest thing ever”
✢ Selfridges are selling an Ozempic Christmas bauble for £28. Can you hear that crack of doom
✢ Latest share from my meme-slang aggregator (husband):
✢ I spent an entire tube journey last week avoiding eye contact with this Labubu. Much has been written on the curious appeal of these creepy furballs, but it wasn’t until I got off the train that I realised what unnerved me so much: it is like looking in the mirror. I am the handbag, and my children are the gurning Labubus hanging off me.
Below ye olde paywall today: a trio of podcast recs; one of my favourite pieces of personal writing I’ve read on long-term relationships; an excellent newsletter I just learned about; on divorce without any closure; on refusing to dress like a serious writer; when therapy meets reality TV (and my subsequent TikTok rabbit hole); why I love Harris Dickinson; and a great description of a Sphynx cat.
Some fantastic writing prizes announced recently - aspiring novelists, get applying!
the Hilary Mantel Prize for Fiction for emerging writers of any age (prize is £7,500, representation at top agency AM Heath)
the BSME and Caitlin Moran Young Writers’ Prize for writers aged 18-25 (a cash bursary, mentoring from Moran)
the Royal Society of Literature Pioneer prize, started by RSL President Bernadine Evaristo (using her own money) for writers over 60 - its inaugural winner, Maureen Duffy, is 91. (prize £10,000)
My friend Henry sent me Spencer Kornhaber’s vg take on the decline of pop-culture, written a few months ago for The Atlantic. According to a recent YouGov poll, the music, movies, fashion, tv and sports of this decade are banal, lazy and lacking in innovation. Kornhaber, who describes himself as a natural cultural optimist, interviews a series of critics and famous ‘declinists’, including Ted Gioia and Dean Kissick, to see if he agrees that the 2020s really are pop-culture’s worst ever era. I won’t spoil it, but I will say that this paragraph really sums up my own opinion re: the prevailing doomsday mood.
“We all have the power to listen more curiously, look more closely, and treat the present with the same sense of generosity that we extend to the golden ages of the past.”
This kind of reparative reading (where you parse art for what it might offer us, not just what it fails at) reminds me of Ruby Tandoh’s take on FoodTok, where she implores us to acknowledge, alongside what one of Kornhaber’s interviewees Kieran Press-Reynolds calls max stimuli, the pleasures of this “synaptic, capricious” moment in our shared appetites.
Some gorgeous nostalgia/ book recs in the Comment section of this week’s letter on 40+ books for junior readers. Emerging as the firm favourite in both my own family and with other readers is Jacqueline Wilson - and I realised I’d never read an interview with her. I went noodling around and found a few rather moving ones, including this recent interview with Fiona Sturges for The Independent, where the author talks about how her parents extremely unhappy marriage, and her mother’s emotional neglect, prompted her to write over 100 books for children on every sort of social issue, stigma, and taboo.
“[My mother] never read a single book of mine, not even the one dedicated to her…. I did something that irritated her at visiting time [in her care home] and she yelled at me, ‘I never liked you. Never!’ A nurse came along and took me by the arm and said, ‘Please don’t take it to heart as she doesn’t mean it.’ And because I’m a people-pleaser I thanked her. But, of course, I knew she really did mean it.”
I didn’t plan to pick up Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book (the sub-genre of magical-motivational memoir/ self-help that also includes Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle doesn’t galvanize me in the same way that it does millions of other women) but I’ve been reading with great interest the critical response to All the Way to the River, which largely boils down to: what happens when a memoirist becomes a self-help guru? As Jessica Grose notes for The NYT, takeaways don’t always need to be signposted, and we don’t have to relate everything to ourselves to feel something. (Not me recommending Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy for the second week running. I’ve just seen he has a Substack - hurrah.) Or, in the words of Jia Tolentino:
“[T]he problem with this amnesiac perpetual becoming is more about the medium than the project. Within our real lives, we do have to always become ourselves. We do have to hope, at periodic intervals, that we’ve actually figured something out.”
It took me a while to realise that one of my favourite writers at The Atlantic, Amanda Mull, had moved to Bloomberg - with a small sigh, I signed up to yet another another paywall. This piece on the shallow origins of TikTok trends - which I’ve been thinking about since I saw a bar of Dubai chocolate at my local newsagent for £7 - has already justified it.
“At first, I thought this might just be another worrisome sign of aging: I no longer understand kids these days. But kids these days seem just as baffled as their elders by many of the things that they—and to a significant extent, we—are expected to latch on to. On social media, the confusion of teens and twentysomethings has become a meme unto itself, with users across platforms posting lists of trend nonsense: Labubu Dubai chocolate Sonny Angel matcha latte Love Island Crumbl cookie Pretty Little Baby moonbeam ice cream.”
What makes the consumer trends of now so different to those of previous decades (Mull cites Cabbage Patch Dolls, Beanie Babies and Stanley Cups; I’d throw in Pogs, Furbies, Sylvanians and Tamagotchis) is that there is no backstory - no reason (economic, cultural, social) that they should get so big.
“The current crop of baffling trends is arguably the first to have fully moved past this traditional mode of cultural origination, which requires that products have some relationship, however tenuous, to how people live and think about their real life, in order to achieve their mammoth scale.”
But lo! A note of optimism, alongside the inevitable truth that this is just yet another manifestation of what Ted Gioia (his second citation in this letter) calls dopamine culture.
“[T]he trends that have burned brightest lately do have at least one common factor: They’re material things that require people to go out into the real world to interact with them. The incentive structure of the social internet might seek to turn us all into isolated scrolling zombies who can’t disengage from its platforms, but there are still signs that most people want something at least a little tangible, even if they also want a Labubu.”
I know, I know, another paywall. But also - so good.
I’m being driven mad by Mr Bean, which my kids have recently discovered and which I’ve found, as an adult - despite loving it as a child - to be really incredibly weird: a mute, middle-aged man in a suit, stealing pencils during trigonometry exams. (Far be it for me to pathologise a character from the 90s, but are we just laughing at a man on the spectrum?) Baffled by its success as a sitcom for adults (I can see exactly why it appeals to children), I found this piece in LAD Bible, on how Mr Bean might in fact be… an alien. Remember the opener, where he is beamed down to Earth!? Either way, between the Rowan Atkinson series and the subsquent cartoon version, I emit a great sigh of relief every time they arrive back at the masterful, absurdist, Is It Cake?
I’ve found a new way to consume podcasts: I watch them. I’m not an auditory learner - I find my attention drifting when I listen to podcasts way more often than I do when reading books - but I realised this week how much I enjoy watching interviews, especially because my YouTube algorithm now delivers me ones I actually want to watch and would never think to look for (slash didn’t know they even existed) in the podcast app. The irony is that I’ve always been very opposed to video podcasts. (A podcast is not visual! was our riposte when people asked us why we did not film The High Low.) Anyway, here’s a handful of podcast interviews I enjoyed on, er, YouTube.
Bonnie Blue in conversation with Louise Perry for Chris Williamson’s podcast, Modern Wisdom. (I’ve never heard of Williamson, but he’s been Joe Rogan’d so he’s clearly pretty big).