Bits #65
things to read, watch, listen to, chew over
Happy Monday! A short(er than usual), FREE culture download today, because I spent my weekend recording for an audio project, and I feel like one of those dehydrated pieces of fruit, but less tasty. I’m DESPERATE to talk about Louis Theroux’s manosphere doc, which I watched without taking a single breath and with my eyes on sticks, but I don’t have enough gas in the tank to do it justice - hold the line caller, I’ll do so next week.
If you have the means, please do upgrade to a paid subscription. For accessibility reasons, I will always make sure at least 50% of Books+Bits is free, but given that I spend half my working week tip tapping away on this silly little blog of mine, paid subs are always gratefully received!
God bless Emily Ash Powell for this immaculate reminder.
I remember reading both interviews at the time of publication (The Sunday Times Mag’s A Life in the Day slot is a forever favourite of mine) and snorting with laughter each time, for very different reasons.
Best line in Tom Hollander’s:
“If my girlfriend is there we hold each other in different positions. If she isn’t I wrap my arms around the pillow and continue listening to the bad news.”
Best line in Orlando Bloom’s:
“I spend a lot of my time dreaming about roles for myself and others - for minorities and women. I’m trying to be a voice for everybody.”
Another interview that tickled me this weekend: a Q&A with author Sarah Perry in The Guardian mag. Some of my favourite answers:
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I’m monstrously judgmental. It’s like talking to the pope.
What is your most unappealing habit?
I still have a habit of wiping my nose on my sleeve.
Have you ever said ‘I love you’ and not meant it?
All the time.
An interesting (and encouraging) piece by Rebecca Solnit on why despite the ‘failure’ of #MeToo, the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the Epstein revelations, the women’s movement is not dead. Absolutely worth reading in its entirety (bolding, mine.)
“There have, for example, been countless obituary writers proclaiming that #MeToo is over or failed, and I’m not sure what that is based on - the assumption that all sexual abuse should have ended and, if not, feminism of the #MeToo subcategory did not succeed? Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.”
Enormous fall-out last week from this interview in Interview magazine (never not confusing) with a bunch of young hot finance bros, with the vg title: The Finest Boys in Finance. The interviews themselves aren’t particularly interesting (they work 50 hours a week, they wear sleeveless jackets) but apparently it violated an inviolable Goldman Sachs code: NO PRESS. Nevertheless, this video made me laugh. I really don’t understand how I found it, incidentally, because I haven’t been on Instagram for about 2 months, and I don’t have TikTok. The zeitgeist will always find me!!!
Two words I learned from an old video with my verbivore pin-up, Susie Dent: apracity (the warmth of the sun on your back on a winter’s day) and confelicity (taking joy in someone else’s good fortune; the opposite of schadenfreude, basically.) Expect to see both of them on here - apracity quite niche, but I’ll do my best - soon.
Speaking of words, lots of old favourites (japes, scads, fetid) in ‘Stay Classy’, a hideous and hideously good piece by Andrew O’Hagan on Prince Andrew for The LRB. I’m not sure I’d have sought it out, but The LRB sent it out via their newsletter and I was immediately locked in, thanks to O’Hagan’s spry writing.
“With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power.”
Read if you can bear.
I wasn’t massively into Vladimir as a book, but I thought the TV adaptation was just brilliant. Rachel Weisz is perfect as our unnamed unreliable narrator, and so is John Slattery, actually, even though he’s like Hugh Grant (or like Hugh Grant was before he freaked me out forever with Heretic) and plays the same role ad infinitum. What really makes it sing, is Weisz’s very Fleabag use of the fourth wall - which so rarely works, but absolutely does here.
Vladimir is a deliciously twisty amorality drama, about a university professor (Slattery) who has been struck off for sleeping with his students, and his wife, who doesn’t really care - they had an open marriage, she sees the students as grown women with agency - but is being told she has to care, in order to keep her job, which annoys her more than her husband’s actual affairs. They have a very nice life and an extremely nice house and a very irritating daughter and everything was just fine until this semester.
The phrase “it was a different time” is evoked enough times for you to realise that it’s being used as a sort of satirical hinge. While all this to-ing and fro-ing is going on about whether or not she is going to do a mea culpa by proxy, or admit she knew all along and didn’t really care, she develops a sexual obsession with a hot new literary professor named Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall. My friend found him unconvincing in the role, but I thought he was great: young and groovy on the surface, struggling with a depressed wife, a demanding toddler, loneliness and a tricky second novel, underneath. The ambiguous ending lends itself to a second season (crossing my fingers) but it’s also fitting for a book/ series that is all about the grey area. Proper prestige telly, 110% recommend.
I found this interview on Culture Study with Dr Nina Bandelj about the emotional over investment of modern parenting, completely fascinating, particularly the bit about how we value children, socially, has changed dramatically: once they served us; now we serve them. (Incidentally, if you are interested in the “neoliberal intensification” of parenting, as critic Jacqueline Rose puts it, then I strongly recommend Rose’s book, Mothers.)
“There’s a pervasive feeling that none of it is optional — and that being a “good parent” now means bending our time, money, identity, and sanity around our children, no matter the cost. What’s more, it often comes with a feeling that we should be doing even more than what we are already doing! But it hasn’t always been this way. If today parents labor for their children, only about a hundred years ago, children worked to substantially contribute to the welfare of the family. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer wrote a brilliant book about the changing social value of children and how, at the end of the 20th century, children went from being “economically useful” to becoming “emotionally priceless.” Cultural values changed, and labor laws enshrined them, so increasingly the emphasis on the vulnerable and fragile nature of children prevailed.”
I may have to re-consider my rapturous review of Love Story after reading Daryl Hannah’s devastating op-ed for The NYT. It turns out every single thing - bar none - that we’ve seen on Love Story in regards to Hannah, is false. I really can’t work out why, either. Of course there is always going to be some artistic license, but making up that Hannah gate-crashed Jackie O’s funeral and then compared the death of her boyfriend’s mother to the death of her dog, feels as bizarre as it is mean a detail to include.
“I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s. It’s appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show. These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct — and they are false…. I know that as an actress I will be in the public eye. I’ve endured a number of outrageous lies, crappy stories and unflattering characterizations before. I chose not to battle them but to focus on my work and respect my loved ones by keeping my private life private. But my silence should not be mistaken for agreement with lies.”
Speaking of Love Story, props to Massimo Dutti for this immaculately timed campaign/ homage to CBK. And while we are on her style, this piece for The Cut made me lol - those hairbands are AGONY! It’s the tiny damn teeth, boring into your skull. As a kid, I could never manage more than an hour in one.
I’ve said this before, but I very much use my children as a vicarious outlet through which to enjoy whoopie cushions, fart machines, fake cow pats, etc etc. (BUT NOT FART SPRAY. I am still haunted by some I bought on holiday aged 10. The smell - I’ve never got it out of my olfactory memory, it didn’t even smell like farts, it smelt like digested regurgitated festering ancient ruins.) My current favourites are a joke loo roll (the loo roll is real, it’s just covered in jokes) and my daughter’s daily joke calendar. I skip into her room each morning to see what joke the day has brung. (How is brung a word, it’s ridiculous.)
Another shout-out for How To Fail (I go through phases with podcasts and I’m deep in a HTF phase right now), and this delightful episode with Rosamund Pike. I interviewed Pike about 7 years ago for ELLE. She always gets referred to as an ‘ice queen’, or an ‘English Rose’, but I find neither to be accurate - she’s offbeat, droll, intellectual, deeply curious; but she also has a clarity and conviction to her which gives off the impression that she doesn’t suffer fools, or obsequity. (She doesn’t.)
I liked what she had to say about breaking off a big romantic love; that when it ends, as horrific and devastating as it is, “You think, I’m free, in a sense, and there are so many other templates of what life might look like”. (She’s now happily unmarried.) I particularly liked her response when host Elizabeth Day asked her if she ever felt cool. “I feel cool all the time!” She said that feeling cool, to her, is about independent thinking (her sons are called Solo and Atom) and feeling truly embodied as a person. A very galvanizing listen.
I do not watch the Oscars because I do not have 897 hours to spare, but I do like to peruse the fashion! Like is the wrong word, Timothée Chalamet’s suit - isn’t the point of bespoke tailoring that it fits? - will confuse me for the rest of this year, and I swear Getty Images exists just to do everyone dirty. But here are my faves.
tom hollander forever 🧡
Just dropping in to co-sign that whoopie cushions are ridiculously fun.