little did i know

Just became aware today of the unhinged whimsy that are Hermes ties. There are 1000s of them on The Real Real, Poshmark, etc for less than $100 (occasionally more. New will set you back $240). Most are wider, 3-4 in. But (i also learned today) wide ties are back, or if you're not ready for that trend you could surely have a tailor narrow them.

This one really stuck out in my inbox today. Give it a read.

Firstly, I love Katy Hessel's The Great Women Artists podcast. In the art world where most are oozing cool, or trying to, Katy is not afraid to be eagar, thirsty, and excited AF about woman artists. Her exuberance is almost unnerving with zero pretension to be found. Listening to the artists themselves come on after her glowing summary of their career, they seem almost confused to be entering a conversation about art with someone both so knowledgeable and so excited (I'll admit I found her a little annoying at first, but I've come around!)

Listen I'm all for space exploration. I have a fucking moon landing tattoo. But we are (I'll be gracious and include "probably" here) never going to land a person on Mars. I am incapable of having a civil conversation about it. It is completely impractical. I will die on this hill.

After a loud verbal rampage recently someone sent me a long article reflecting, i assumed, a similar position titled Why Not Mars which I finally read today. And yes! Maciej Ceglowski's very well cited post does align with everything i've been screaming at people in bars (in a cute way I like to think) for the last several years. And also included something i hadn't even considered, the certain contamination from our presence and that would directly obstruct our trying to research Mars itself. Here are two brief excerpts that i would have exclamation pointed heavily in the margins had I read a physical copy:

"Ten years later, the Viking landers confirmed that Mars was a frozen, desiccated world bathed in sterilizing radiation, where any Earth creature that arrived unprotected would be dead before it hit the ground." Just a minor issue.

And on contamination:

"Humans who land on Mars will not be able to avoid introducing a large ecosystem of microbes to the area around the landing site. If any fugitives from the spacecraft make their way to a survivable niche on Mars, we may never be able to tell whether biotic signatures later found on the planet are traces of native life, or were left by escapees from our first Martian outhouse. Like careless investigators who didn’t wear gloves to a crime scene, we would risk permanently destroying the evidence we came to collect.

“No exploration without contamination” would be a good phrase to stencil in red letters above the airlock (ideally before welding it shut). Contamination risk is a real showstopper for Mars, one of those problems that gets worse the more carefully you look at it. It should put the planet off limits to human explorers until we’re either sure that there is no pathway from the spacecraft to a habitable Martian environment, or are confident for other reasons that the consequences don’t matter[51].

Even the astronaut corps recognizes that exploring Mars and keeping it pristine are irreconcilable activities, like trying to drill for oil in a cleanroom. The problem goes beyond practical questions like how to store 17 months of astronaut shit and gets to the crux of the matter: why is bringing a leaky, bacteria-filled terrarium to Mars step one[52] in our search for Martian life? What incredible ability do astronauts have that justifies taking this risk?

Skeptics point out that Earth microbes have already landed on Mars, both on robotic landers[53] and the occasional meteorite. But as we’ll see, the diverse microbiome that would travel with a human crew poses a qualitatively different threat[54], and would have a far better chance of getting settled on Mars, than the sad loners clinging to rovers like Curiosity."

I could go on and on. Earth and Mars are only close to each other every two years! And then it takes nine months to get there! We should absolutely be exploring space, but we should be exploring it with machines, and robots, there is no reason to send a human to Mars. Read his whole post. The more you look at it, the less practical it becomes.

Faggots by Larry Kramer (1978)

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2009)

Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the Dancefloor by Lisa Abascal (2020)

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)

Arriving Today by Christopher Mims (2021)

But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman (2016)

Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe (2022)

Red Notice by Bill Browder (2015)

How Should A Person Be? By Sheila Heti (2010)

Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin (1965)

Human Wishes Enemy Combatant by Edmund Caldwell (2011)

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (2019)

This is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth (2021)

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey (1997)

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (2009)

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (1937)

A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau (1954)

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt  (2011)

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019) (reread)

LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin (2021)

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano (2000)

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (2016)

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (2000)

Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)

The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell (1962)

They by Kay Dick (1977)

Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma (2022)

Status and Culture by W. David Marx (2022)

This was a big year for me both for quantity (nearly twice as many books as i read last year) but also for quality. So many standouts! And I'm learning I'm very here for experimental literature, please send me your weirdo recos.

Where the hell has Helen Dewitt been all my life? How are so few of her books published?! (she claims to have a dozen ready to go and i need all of them).

Chuck Klosterman has really grown up since I last paid attention to him like 15 years ago. But What if We're Wrong? changed the way I look at the world. He looks at the present day from 1000 years in the future and comtemplates what we could be completely wrong about based on what we've been wrong about in the past. Some of the interviews I've listened to of his this year have really opened my mind to new ways of thinking. Will be doubling back on what I've missed from him in years past in 2023.

Fuccboi was a blast and all the literture snobs that hated it are just completely fucking wrong.

I found Human Wishes Enemy Combatant through a newsletter or something. How lucky we are that this was released again! Read if you want to experience someone completely destroying the structure of a novel.

Milkman is gorgeous. Read immediately.

Gentleman Overboard is another that was nearly lost to time and recently published again. A beautiful and haunting little story.

Read Faggots for a very fun and raunchy romp through the gay sex scene of the late 70s moments before the AIDs crisis. You won't be able to keep track of all the characters, but it doesn't really matter.

How Red Notice hasn't been made into a movie by Adam McKay is beyond me. Maybe it's coming. A great window into Russia's transition after the Soviet Union and also the mindset of modern Russians. Also lots of fascinating stock, money stuff.

Read Arriving Today and This is How they Tell Me the World Ends (about the supply chain and hacking/internet security respectively.) for a peak into our modern lives told by very good story tellers in ways that are far from boring.

I could go on and on about Fleishman is in Trouble (and have in person to so many). The story of two women trojan horsed through the tale of one very mid man. The series on Hulu is also good and an incredibly accurate representation of the book.

Status and Culture! I'm still reeling from this book. Marx is so direct when looking at how and why we like the things we like it almost makes you uncomfortable. i don't think i have ever underlined, astricked, exclamation pointed so much in the margins of a book.

The Golden Spur, They, Bliss Montage, Astragal, How Should A Person Be?, Laserwriter ii, Night Boat to Tangier, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead are all well worth reading also. Honestly, I was blown away by almost everything i read this year minus two big exceptions.

I hated The Buried Giant. Read it for a book club. I'm not a fantasy girl. I get what he was trying to do with the language, but i couldn't get into it, it felt like a bad translation. Which is really saying something for a book written in English. If he called her Princess one more time, I can't.

1Q84 I really wanted to love, (my first Murakami, somehow.). I really liked the first section, but it just didn't add up for me in the end and there were so many loose ends for such a long book.

I refer to this episode in conversations all the time. The incredible movies from the 90s and early 2000s were largely possible due to the fluke of more theaters suddenly being available to show movies in. A sloppy summary below, but the whole ep is worth a listen.

"Back then [the 19060s], studios and theaters had a business arrangement: if a theater had a certain movie, nobody else in the area could play it. Seeing a film was kind of like seeing a painting or a Broadway show. It lived at one particular location, and you had to go there. But in the early 1970s, this began to change. Studios realized there was enough demand to release movies in the suburbs and the city simultaneously. Meanwhile, theaters divided their one big auditorium into two, three, or four auditoriums to make room for more screens.

Over the next six years, the number of movie screens in the United States increased by fifty percent. But these new movie palaces didn’t just pull moviegoers to the screen; they pulled movies to the screen.

Jack Foley was a distributor at Columbia and he says the megaplex was a Trojan horse for slipping strange, subversive movies into unsuspecting suburbs across America. If the latest teen movie was sold out, kids might end up seeing something like Being John Malkovich.  And Being John Malkovich was not an outlier. The year it was released— 1999 —was a year that many people believe was one of the best movie years ever. Not only did all these great movies get made, but they were able to find an audience in Megaplexes across the country.

But this mini golden age of interesting, unusual, original films didn’t last all that long. The megaplex building craze had been so fast and furious that by the early 2000s there were way too many theaters. As the theater bubble began to pop, the creative one did too. For a while, booming DVD sales provided another revenue stream for oddball movies with a niche audience, but as DVDs disappeared later in the 2000s, the major studios leaned more and more on their big, franchise blockbusters.