It’s Friday again and there is so much to say and nothing to say. White supremacy is a malignant cancer. Men like to pretend they’re warriors. My 11-year-old saw an image circulating on social media of a guy in a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ shirt (like a fake summer camp, with the word ‘STAFF’ on the back), which prompted a very heavy conversation after dinner last night about hatred of our people and how and why it endures.
I woke up thinking about that conversation, thinking that the weight of it, the sadness I felt last night, had passed, but then I found myself reading online about Jewish resistance to the Holocaust and looking at images of young partisans.
Why? I guess I wanted to remember—and want him to know—that Jews have always resisted.
I’ve been glued to the news. I’m having trouble concentrating on much else. Feeling anxious, like most people, I assume. And enraged. I cope, as usual, by cooking and baking. I made pelmeni—mushroom and onion, and potato with homemade sauerkraut—sourdough bread, beet and ricotta hummus, pickled beets, this very good granola (with blueberries instead of sour cherries). Today I’m making bagels. I am calm while cooking and calm as soon as the dishes are done and the kitchen is clean. Otherwise, I am aware of the hum of anxiety, like bad fluorescent lighting in a basement office.
At night I watch old seasons of the Great British Baking Show with my boyfriend. I suggested we watch it together a few months ago, arguing that it’s a superior balm for unease. He said he was willing to try it but really didn’t think it would be his thing. Now we’ve watched four seasons or so and he is in so deep that he’s moved to pause the show multiple times per episode to opine animatedly about the texture of a tear-and-share bun, the vulgarity of brightly colored fondant, the colonialist and racist undertones of specific judging decisions, the success of a mille-feuille, the tendency of a particularly British joke towards simultaneous infantilization and eroticization, how revolting it is to hear Mary Berry call something “absolutely scrummy.” He went off when Sue Perkins (one half of Mel & Sue, the duo who punctuate the show with sometimes questionable comedy) leaned on and accidentally broke (his favorite contestant) Nadiya’s bowl-shaped biscuit in season 6. Unconscionable! She should be fired! I just smile. His commentary is as good a show as the show. We’ve talked about starting a podcast about the tent, the bakes, the imperialist, racist, and misogynist echoes. It would be called A Simple Biscuit.
The other night we watched an episode from Season 2 where (*spoiler alert*) Howard is sent home and we both got incredibly emotional. This led me to follow Howard on Instagram—he is much less followed than certain, more telegenic fair baking maidens, an injustice that must be redressed. (He’s @howard.middlebun.) There, I saw that he also occasionally teaches baking online through a company called Bake With a Legend, which offers in-person and online baking tutorials by Bake Off castoffs. Did I sign up for a Howard-led class on petit fours that takes place at 9:00am my time on a Saturday morning this month? I did, yes. Was I egged on by my once-Bake-Off-agnostic boyfriend? Yes I was. Am I answering my own questions? Yes. Sober, I can no longer blame such decisions on chemically lowered inhibitions or a surfeit of empathy brought on by marijuana, say. No, I parted with $47.46 in American dollars just for a chance to hear Howard’s live instructions for perfect sugar squares. Just to “feel something,” as the internet would say.
I'm reading the new Rachel Cusk novel, Second Place, which comes out from FSG in May, and which I received as a galley. I shrieked when I got it. I will never get over the fact that I’m a person who gets galleys in the mail now. Not enough writers talk about this. In a totally precarious, potentially doomed industry, it is one real, material perk. All I had to do was live as a wretchedly codependent depressive, endure a long, harrowing relationship with a drug addict, sell a book about it, and then write that book! And I get to read novels a bit early... Cool. Right? When I put it that way it's not that exciting, but I really do find it fun getting to read things early, even if being part of the buzz economy can also feel icky.
Back to Rachel Cusk though. Second Place about a woman in a second marriage to a steady, loving, somewhat aloof man (well, either aloof or an all-knowing, still-waters-run-deep type, or both), residing at their second home in the country, who becomes obsessed with a male painter and invites him to come have a retreat and paint at their home. The painter eventually accepts the invitation and upends her life in interesting ways. It’s a book about a woman of privilege, with freedom and time (perhaps too much) to ruminate about the minutiae of interpersonal encounters. It includes a withering running commentary about motherhood (a job the narrator does not seem to like very much; I’d love to convene a book group just to read about motherhood in Cusk). But, like everything she writes, it is a work of breathtaking psychological acuity. It’s pretty short, so I’m trying to savor it. It also seems to make reference to the pandemic, which is jarring to see (already?!) in a novel. Cusk doesn’t name the coronavirus, but some global happening has constrained all movement and affected everyone and everything. It lends the book an odd mood. The same mood we’re living in every day.
I tweeted a while back about two of my favorite types of books:
And I am over the moon to report that the new Cusk falls into this first category. I can’t say too much more without ruining it for others.
The book reminds me a bit of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. (I wonder if Cusk has read it, or watched the weird Amazon show, and I wonder what she’d make of the comparison.) An intellectual woman using an elusive intellectual man outside her marriage as a repository for her frustrated desires. That prompted me to pick up I Love Dick, which is truly a gift that keeps on giving, and flip through it.
This week I also read another book early: José Vadi's Inter State, which is coming from Softskull in fall 2021. It's a series of essays about California, told through the author’s personal and family history. He is a skateboarder, poet, playwright, erstwhile tech worker, the grandchild of Mexican farmworkers, and he writes beautifully about the contradictions of life in this state, acknowledging both how brutal it can be to survive here and the fact that he knows he’ll never leave.
I’m also still making my way through Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, which is largely about trauma, but is lyrical and manages to be darkly funny. Washuta is particularly incisive about the insidiousness of patriarchy and white supremacy, which is to say the book, sadly, is timely as ever.
*The title of this newsletter is the name of a Bikini Kill song. It goes, “Your world, not mine / Your world, not ours / Your world, not mine / Your world, not ours / I will resist with every inch and every breath / I’ll resist this psychic death.”
A few good things I read this week:
This fantastic Artforum piece by Jasmine Sanders on the aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual significance of mass-produced Black Romantic art in the 20th century
This NYT piece by Andrew Higgins about parallels between Trumpers and Russian nuttiness in Moscow in 1993
This Elemental piece by Kelli Maria Korducki about cold water swimming, which I think I need to try