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.
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.
As you walk in you will be greeted by a server in a school-uniform grey dress, black-patent-leather-belted primly at the waist. You’ll note the way piped music seeps into the room like an odorless gas, and the way the lighting, which manages somehow to maintain a crime scene luster whatever the weather outside, pools between the tables and chairs and glances off the glass table tops and brass fittings and the painted silver paneling. Think air travel in the 1960s with a touch of netherworld glamour. You’ve seen it in a movie. Have you got a reservation? We’re rather full tonight.
The guests are ensconced in cashmere and softly shrugging leather; crisp, dark denim in stark juxtaposition to the falsetto glint of diamonds and the low-energy glow of rose gold. Their torpor is somehow moribund, Bourne of the ennui that will always affect those for whom any kind of satisfaction is gratuitously imminent. The room shimmers non-Don status – the financial equivalent of diplomatic immunity — and they talk of elsewhere, always elsewhere, as if the present moment were fraught with some kind of difficulty.
“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. I loved his creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes. He’s like a small, anxious hippo, so full of quotable insights. “America has no memory,” he explained. “Nothing LEADS to anything in New York.”
Had a terrific drink tonight with Tom Wolfe, who is tall and thin like a candle in his white suit, with a dryness suddenly illuminated by shafts of pure malice.
A drink with Martin, who is passing through, made me realize how much I miss Englishness. I had a sudden pang for Oxford days when we lay in the little single bed in my St. Anne’s room in the Woodstock Road, doting on Larkin’s sentences in “The Whitsun Weddings.” I thought of London spread out in the sun / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. My ideal place to live would be Transatlantica, an island that combined English irony, country lanes in summer, the National Theatre, and a real pot of tea they never seem to be able to make here, with American openness, lack of class barriers, willingness to give away money to good causes, and the view of Manhattan from the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center. I miss the pleasing streak of delinquency in the English character.
The change of the seasons from brutal cold to sudden heat made me think of the sweet decorum of our London patio in the spring, the rhododendron bushes drowsy with raindrops. I long for the English countryside in ways I never did when I lived there. I suddenly see the great country houses that gave us so much irreverent copy at Tatler as a rich national resource, custodians of passing time. Here, time is to be spent, like money; time is to be killed, time is to be forgotten. Everything is a race against time. Trying to beat it is the pressure at your throat. I dream of London’s manageable scale, its compactness, its conversation. America is too big, too rich, too driven. America needs editing.
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.)
TV
Especially grateful for “Succession” (a perfect close), “Patriot” (committed to its singular vision), “Reservation Dogs” (often profound and goofy within the same shot), and “Slow Horses.” Enjoyed “Jury Duty,” “Fleishman Is in Trouble," and “Vienna Blood.” “The Diplomat” was fun in parts.
Movies
Each year it’s a fresh bummer to have seen so few new movies, considering how many my wife and I used to see pre-kids. In terms of what I saw: I loved every minute of “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” and also really liked “The Banshees of Inisherein” and “A Quiet Passion.” Two good docs: “Beckham,” “Navalny.” “The Killer” was well-made, but I wondered why I was spending time on that subject. Enjoyed rewatching “Tár” and “After Yang” and “Karate Kid” (Leo screening). Couldn’t get excited about “Mission: Impossible,” except for that last extended escape-the-train scene. Wish I liked more: “Asteroid City." “Air" was entertaining, but didn’t quite seem like a full movie.
Music
Enjoyed new albums from Joanna Sternberg, Youth Lagoon, boygenius, Mitski, Killer Mike, and Veeze (a discovery for me).
Podcasts
New-to-me this year: “Heavyweight” (so late to this; now cancelled : / ), “The CITY Voice,” “After Hours,” “The Power of Teamwork” (it was fun to have pitched this to Adobe; congrats to my former colleagues on S2) and “Dissect”’s deep dive into Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.”
Visual Art
Not a lot of museum-going this year (or travel, which often leads to it). But it’s always such a pleasure to see my wife Tamara open a show at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Pictured: Opening night at “Faye HeavyShield: Confluences," with our kids vying for the spotlight.
A Song That Struck Me
In many of these year-end posts I include an especially memorable songwriter discovery (Weyes Blood, Haley Heynderickx). This year in his Substack newsletter, Jeff Tweedy mentioned that the band keeps a Spotify playlist where they share music they’ve been enjoying. While streaming that mix in the background, a song called “Life According to Raechel” by Madison Cunningham stopped me cold. Many repeat listens that day, and days after. Here’s a solo version to share with you, followed by one with an ensemble:
Happy New Year, and best wishes for an enjoyable 2024.
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.
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. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves….
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorry into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
From Morrison’s 1998 Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address:
If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine….
We are already live-chosen by ourselves. Humans, and as far as we know there are no others. We are the moral inhabitants of the galaxy. Why trash that magnificent obligation after working so hard in the womb to assume it? You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.
Lastly, here is the oft-quoted passage from Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature:
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
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:
Well, thank you. I find it very fortifying as an idea, to think about what is not evident, what’s not apparent. I have a real struggle, especially when I’m writing for the Times. I have a very sympathetic, understanding, and encouraging editor, who lets me get away with all kinds of things, but I’m always trying to lower the volume of my essays. Very often, I’m trying to write and not say more than can justly be said. I want to reduce the number of sparks. I want to embed hesitation and lack of certainty in it.
“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.)
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. But that’s what happened. As I grew into the role of parent, I sometimes felt as if I were taking apart a ship and using the planks to build a ship for someone else. I was building a ship across time, out of my time.
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.
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. The challenge is in allowing each person to be the center, to be generous enough with the space to allow them to feel they are the center.
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. To make it human again, or to restore it to humanness. And in doing so, you risk being wildly misunderstood….
These works of great literature, in some way, speak to readers. And they speak from a world of genius. And I feel that in order to restore the possibility of originality, and even grandeur, you had to enter the zone of shame and the zone of ordinary life, which is banality. And you had to ask, Can great literature be made of such things? Am I willing to try to write six volumes of daily life, when all of us are feeling that our daily lives are disappointing and dissatisfying? Can the novel of Knausgaard restore our feelings of the importance of daily life?
I can’t think, personally, of anything more important. I’m very grateful when I read these books, because I feel like you’ve restored my interest in human beings. In going to the grocery. In feeding a child and making sure things are taken care of from one day to the next.
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. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.
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. And thus this benefit renders him pleasing to us, besides that such community of intellect as we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.
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).
