Just finished Assembly by Natasha Brown. A sharp, slim, piercing novel narrated by a young Black British woman, working in finance, preparing to attend a garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate. Here’s an evening work scene, from the opening:
After the Digestif, He Gets Going
She understood the anger of a man who himself understood in his flesh and bones and blood and skin that he was meant to be at the head of a great, hulking giant upon whom the sun never set. Because it was night, now, and he was drunk. He felt very small, perhaps only a mouth. A lip or a tooth or a rough, inflamed bud on a dry white tongue slick with phlegm at the back, near the throat. The throat of a man with a sagging gut and thinning hair cropped so short. So , when that mouth opened up and coughed its vitriol at her, making some at the table a little uncomfortable, she understood the source of its anger, despite being the target. She waited for the buzz of her phone to excuse her and — in the meantime — quietly, politely, she understood him.
From the author’s terrific memoir “All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art”:
There is a rootlessness to the very wealthy in the twenty-first century, a floating ease in both place and time that is mirrored, or perhaps emboldened, by a certain kind of space. Oases devoid of responsibility or obligation allow one an escape from reality that is almost womb-like in its comfort. In the Connaught Bar, if you can bag a table (it was named ‘Best Bar in the World’ by a panel of so-called experts in 2020, the year in which, as I recall it, everyone had to stay home in order to get a load on), you will be surrounded by an international array of players united by one thing only: money.
“The Zone of Interest” was an astonishing film. How it shows what it chooses to show; the sounds we hear of what it chooses not to show — it’s just an incredible work of art made with deep sensitivity by everyone involved. If you’ve already seen it, I recommend this Vanity Fair interview with writer/director Jonathan Glazer and director of photography Łukasz Żal. It’s streaming on MAX. Plan to rewatch soon.
Toni Morrison, in a 1975 lecture, quoted by Ketanji Brown Jackson in her new memoir, “Lovely One”, which I’m reading now:
The function, the very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped property so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
What pure pleasure this book was to read: The Vanity Fair Dairies: 1983 - 1992 by Tina Brown. I love on-the-job memoirs/journals, especially anything rooted in the editorial world. The entries are zippy, yet considered — a decade of moments jotted down after whirlwind days. Brown’s a sharp observer and summarizer, and a deft workplace strategist.
A few passages, all from the mid-1980s:
I went for a drink at the Algonquin with Wallace Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker’s son, who I have been told wants to write.
Continuing a 23-year tradition of rounding up cultural highlights from the past 12 months, here’s a recap for 2023:
15 Books I Especially Loved This Year An Additional Batch I Enjoyed (That first hard-to-ID book is “Pentagram: Living By Design," which I had to scramble to procure before it sold out. The brown one in the middle column is “Scaling People”, a terrific book about team- and company-building. The full list of what I read in 2023 is here.
I feel behind not having heard of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which charts the rise, fall, and settling-in adoption of emerging technologies. One of the hosts of the “People vs. Algorithms” podcast referred to it in a recent conversation about ChatGPT. Seems apt. We might be getting closer to the trough of disillusionment.
“A Tweet Before Dying”: Paul Ford, perceptive and funny and deep yet again, writing in Wired. Here he is on stepping away from his social stream to dive into curious PDFs unearthed from decades past:
But the seeking is important, too; people should explore, not simply feed.
I just finished Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), and every few pages or so, I thought to myself: it’s rare I’m taking in prose this rhythmically perfect, this deeply intelligent. From “Peril” (2008):
How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us.
Packer’s recent cover story for The Atlantic — “Elegy for the American Century” — is an exceptional piece of longform reporting and vivid narration. Excerpted from his new book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Really enjoyed this substantive recent conversation on Krista Tippett’s “On Being” podcast. At one point, Tippett quotes Cole’s Blind Spot, one of my favorite books from the last few years: “To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?” She tells Cole, “I find that useful language.” The ruminative Cole responds:
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
Hadn’t seen this Camus quote before. (It appropriately closed a new profile on Sam Mendes in TNY.)
From "The Secret Life of Time," published in The New Yorker:
Years ago, long before I had children or was even married, a friend with children said, “The thing about having kids is that after a while you forget what it was like before you had them.” The idea was shocking. Busy enough with my own life, I couldn’t envisage a future self whose comings and goings were circumscribed, apparently happily, by the wants and needs of people half my size.
The official flag for The Refugee Nation, a team of ten refugees currently competing in the Rio Olympics, draws its colour scheme and design from lifejackets. Designed by Syrian artist and refugee Yara Said, the flag is a vivid orange with a single black stripe.
Learn more about this beautiful effort.
From Michael Auping’s Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando:
The idea of a center is an interesting one, and one that is more of a Western concept. Roland Barthes made a comment on visiting Japan that it is a country that doesn’t seem to have a center; great depth, but no center. I think I carry that aspect of Japan with me. For me, the center of a building is always the person who is in it, experiencing the space from within it themselves.
Having just finished book three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (I enjoyed the first two more, though this volume’s still captivating), I was eager to listen to both part one and part two of the author’s interviews on Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm.”
It’s great listening. These insights from Silverblatt — which followed his comment that Knausgaard clearly knows his “great literature” — rang especially true for me:
What’s daring about My Struggle is that you’re willing to put the difficulty of the literature of the century — Joyce on — aside, to recapture the human.
Enjoyed this piece, especially Ashton’s quoting of composer George Ligeti's secretary, writing to a requester of some kind:
He is creative and, because of this, totally overworked. Therefore, the very reason you wish to study his creative process is also the reason why he (unfortunately) does not have time to help you in this study. He would also like to add that he cannot answer your letter personally because he is trying desperately to finish a Violin Concerto which will be premiered in the Fall.
Interesting historical perspective from Chrystia Freeland, writing in the Times:
The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society.
A member of the Wallace-L listserv posted this Pascal quote this morning, commenting (insightfully) on how it brings to mind many statements DFW made about reading and indeed love:
When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours.
Great new addition to YouTube: William Gass reads from The Tunnel and discusses literature and philosophy. Recorded at The Village Voice Bookshop in Paris, February 6, 2007 (by Villagevoice75).
