November 25, 2022 Diaries Shopping Diary By Adrienne Raphel Camille à la ville paper dolls. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0. September 14 I am in my mobile mall, which is my phone’s WiFi hotspot on the NJ Transit. Paynter Jacket Co. is this British couple, Becky and Huw, who make chore jackets in micro-batches. When you purchase a jacket, you also buy its journey, from sourcing the cloth to cutting the pattern to meeting with Sergio, who serges the jackets together in Portugal. I already have their perfect chore jacket from a micro-micro-batch, a Japanese tiger-print patchwork. The latest is a Carpenter Jacket, so, not a chore jacket at all. So different! I dither between Elizabeth and Linden about the wash – “vintage” as though I’ve owned it for generations versus “dark rich,” stiff and authentic. 195 pounds sterling plus 30 pounds sterling for shipping is GBP 225, USD 260 and change, says the internet’s calculator. It will arrive in November so I get to have it twice, now in anticipation, and when it arrives. At Princeton Junction, I get on the Dinky to Princeton University ($3 one-way). I go directly to Wawa to get a coffee (free, all September, for “teachers”). Read More
November 22, 2022 First Person The Last Furriers By Ann Manov Still from unreleased film courtesy Ann Manov. One of Werner Herzog’s lesser films is about fur trappers in Siberia: big men who sled for eleven months of the year in pursuit of sables, the small and silky martens that live east of the Urals, burrowing in riverbanks and dense woods, emerging at dusk and at dawn. Russian sable—barguzin—is one of the most expensive furs in the world. The trappers make their skis by bending birch with their own hands, the same way trappers have for a thousand years. They see their wives for only a few weeks a year. They seem to have no inner life, neither anxieties nor aspirations: no relationships besides those with their dogs, no goals beyond survival. “They live off the land and are self-reliant, truly free,” Herzog tells us: “No rules, no taxes, no government, no laws, no bureaucracy, no phones, no radio, equipped only with their individual values and standard of conduct.” The film is called Happy People. *** There was a year in which I tried very hard to make a film about the decline of the fur industry in New York City and Connecticut, and all I ended up with was a fox’s foot, a holographic poster for vodka, and a hard drive full of footage that, had I ever finished the film, would have been strung together as an incoherent montage of fragmented memories. Read More
November 21, 2022 In Memoriam Remembering Rebecca By Mary Gaitskill Rebecca Godfrey photographed by Brigitte Lacombe, NYC, 2002. I met Rebecca Godfrey in New York City in the spring of 1999. In my memory our meeting has something to do with her first book, a novel titled The Torn Skirt; perhaps she wanted to hand me a galley, or perhaps she’d already sent me one and I’d read it; I’m not sure. What I remember for certain was how surprised and intrigued I was by her, almost on sight. She had a wonderful face of unusual dimensions, a beautiful face, but with something better than beauty, visible especially in large eyes that were somehow ardent and reserved simultaneously. It was raining and I remember her looking up at me (she was quite small) from under her umbrella in a shy, expectant way that made me feel shy and expectant too. The quiet restaurant we had planned on was closed and so we walked around for some blocks looking for just the right place—which turned out to be a bubble tea shop where we were the only customers. We talked about writing and music; she spoke (matter-of-factly, as I recall) of working on a second book. But more than anything we said, I remember her presence, the pleasure with which she dipped her long spoon into the fluted glass for more sweet tapioca bubbles, the directness of her gaze, the way she listened intently and spoke softly. She was thirty-two years old but she had an aura of impossible youth. Her presence was not exactly big. It was enchanting; I’m thinking of the words Nabokov used to describe a character in the story “Spring in Fialta”: “something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable. Read More
November 20, 2022 On Sports Kickoff: The World Cup By Jonathan Wilson Qatar Airways. Wikimedia Commons, LIcensed under CC0 4.0. The World Cup kicks off today in Qatar. To many people the entire extravaganza is one giant laundromat, a sports-wash of global proportions, designed to rinse clean the dirty laundry accumulated during the gulf state’s decade-long preparation for the event. An estimated six thousand five hundred migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were reportedly killed during the stadiums’ construction in the last ten years. To memorialize them, the Danish team will wear subdued colors and hold black in reserve as its third strip. Yet despite Qatar’s grim politics and dubious human rights record, particularly with regard to LGBTQ rights for both residents and visitors (criticism vigorously rejected by Qatar’s rulers as “slander”), FIFA projects that five billion of us on this dying planet will feel compelled to watch. Read More
November 18, 2022 Correspondence Hello, World! Part Five: Two Squares By Sheila Heti Illustration by Na Kim. Read parts one, two, three, and four of “Hello, World!” After June came July, and then came August. I lay in bed on those hot, still nights, sparks flying from the phone, the resolution bright and breaking. What do you think reality is? Can you tell me the story of when Alice meets God? Read More
November 17, 2022 Arts & Culture At the Joan Didion Estate Sale By Sophie Haigney Joan Didion with her stingray corvette, Julian Wasser. Courtesy of Stair Galleries. In November, writers began making little pilgrimages from New York City to Hudson to see Joan Didion’s things. In fact, thousands of people came to Stair Galleries, an auction house on the main drag of a town filled with antiques stores, farm-to-table restaurants, coffee shops, and stores that all seemed to be selling only five items of clothing. I made my own journey by early-morning train. Didion died this past December at eighty-seven, and a selection of her furnishings, art, books, and other things was being auctioned at an estate sale, with proceeds going to Parkinson’s research and the Sacramento Historical Society; prior to the sale, a small exhibition was open to the public, titled “An American Icon: Property from the Collection of Joan Didion.” The word icon is fitting and perhaps inadvertently implies the way some people become like relics in life and especially in death. Didion certainly became one, via the mythology and imagery that became attached to her—who hasn’t seen that photo of her posed on the white Corvette, or in the black turtleneck, and marveled at her ineffable cool? (Both photographs were for sale.) She came, through her work but more so through her persona, to symbolize something, or a whole set of different and sometimes contradictory somethings, about being a writer, a woman, and a person of certain class at a certain time in America. And now here were her actual relics, the things that outlasted her, which might serve as little metonymies for whatever it was we tried to read into her. Read More