Bits #5
things to read, watch, listen to
Happy Friday! Solidarity with those whose children are doing a 48-year-long ‘staggered start’ at school. Ann Friedman’s 75 nice things to do for yourself (particularly ‘take fart walks’) is just the tonic.
Now that September is here, I thought I’d share a little Autumn event update should you want to see my wizened face irl:
I’m interviewing Katy Hessel about her smash-hit book on forgotten female artists The Story of Art Without Men at The Union Chapel on September 17th
I’ll be in conversation with poet Vanessa Kisuule who has written a brilliant new book about being a Michael Jackson fan Neverland: The Pleasures and Perils of Fandom, for the next instalment of Ref Reads at the Reformation store in Covent Garden on September 24th
I’m hosting a panel on reality TV for the Leeds International Festival of Ideas on October 6th, with panellists including my dream guy, Rylan, and Jazz from Traitors. I went to uni in Leeds and I haven’t been back in 15 years, so it’s going to be a trip
Last but not least, I’ll be talking to Kay Barron about her new book How to Wear Everything at The V&A (one of my fave places in London) on October 7th
For any All Fours fans craving more of the wild stuff, I recommend The Metal Bowl, a short story July published in 2017 and which I stumbled across recently. It’s got that corporeal eroticism that girds July’s writing and that same - forgive me for the inefficiency of my language here - “is this what life is, is this all of it, could I reach for something else” quality that I’ve come to associate with July’s work.
In The Metal Bowl, a woman married to an elegant man, with a preternaturally intelligent, well-adjusted child (again, very All Fours) reflects on an amateur porn video she made as a young woman, how it has come to inform her sexual relationship with herself, and the gaps between what her husband knows about her and what he does not. It is weird and tender and a little gross - with an ending that I guarantee will stay with you.
“Every person, no matter how plain, has one great erotic performance in her—the one in which she doesn’t know what she’s doing and is desperately trying to save her life. A second performance would be a copy of the first, which would require skills I didn’t have.”
And in the non-fiction realm, this essay by Terry Nguyen on the evolution of the personal essay and the girl blog boom, is so smart. (I loved Nguyen’s writing when she was at Vox, but only recently found her Substack.) I love writing personal essays - the process can be so clarifying and cleansing, like getting out a really big knot with a comb - but I retired them a few years ago when I realised that the flip side of the catharsis, when sharing very personal/painful information, is that you can never take it back. If only the internet retired content after a certain amount of years! (What a thought. Too big for today.)
“When the personal essay, “a form without a form,” became adapted for the blogosphere, the form became popularized for its casual approach to personal testimony. The number of people writing who had nothing interesting to say drastically increased… [R]eaders seem to care little about whether today’s writers have anything interesting or original to say, never mind the style or quality of their prose and argument. We read what’s popular, right (ideologically), or good (morally), and the righteous and the good are often conflated.”
If you like Haley Nahman’s Maybe Baby (speaking of personal writing, this letter on what to expect from babyworld is very sweet) you’ll like this.
Not a day goes by when I am not blown away by creative people doing incredible things. Today I learned about Living Paintings (@livingpaintingscharity on IG) a British non-profit which creates tactile books and audio experiences for blind and visually impaired children. Len carving a tactile book of Where The Wild Things Are is so wonderful. If you know of any children with sight loss, Living Paintings loan out their library of 10,000 braille and audio books for free.
How incredible is this? I hope the dresses gets adopted on a wide scale and she gets remunerated handsomely.
After my friend saw my unhinged phone cover (in my sister’s words: “that’s actually disgusting”) she introduced me the Ncage plug-in - and my god, I laughed till I cried. You download it onto your friend/ partner/ colleague’s computer (whoever you most like pranking) and it substitutes their image search results with pictures of Nicholas Cage. It is so silly - the Google equivalent of Rickrolling - and I love it.
I let out a great shriek of joy when I saw that the new season of Colin From Accounts had landed. Before I sat down to watch the delightful Aussie comedy in one sitting on Wednesday night, I felt the same pang of anxiety I’d had right before clicking play on the second season of Fleabag. What if it wasn’t as charming and weird and tender and funny as the first season? Is it even possible to make something that good, again?