Sontag, Chinese fox lore, Katharine Hepburn
Plus: a surprise dropping tomorrow...
I’m on vacation! (Being a sentient LLC is hard work!) If all is going according to plan, I should be somewhere in Lake Como drinking a spritz and reading Intermezzo right now. Papa pia!
Like three years ago, I bought a giant book of Susan Sontag’s essays and finally waded in last weekend at the park. This shit took TIME TO CHEW, I will be so for real right now, but “On Style” thrilled me with the way Sontag talks about the purpose of art, describing “aesthetic experience” as “the nourishment of consciousness.” Isn’t that gorgeous? I want to force this essay, or at least the following lines, down the gullet of every Silicon Valley loser who thinks we can divorce art from human consciousness and actually believes AI art is going to be anything but retinal spam.
A work of art is a kind of showing or recording or witnessing which gives palpable form to consciousness; its object is to make something singular explicit … morality, unlike art, is ultimately justified by its utility: that it makes, or is supposed to make, life more humane and livable for us all. But consciousness—what used to be called, rather tendentiously, the faculty of contemplation—can be, and is, wider and more various than action. It has its nourishment, art and speculative thought, activities which can be described either as self-justifying or in no need of justification. What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize. This act of comprehension accompanied by voluptuousness is the only valid end, and sole sufficient justification, of a work of art.
I mean, just imagine explaining artistic “voluptuousness” to a bluecheck rn…….
My other reading recommendation is Sally Wen Mao’s short story collection, Ninetails, which came out at the end of May. After all the stuff with my novel last year, I kind of got burned out on ~Asian diaspora literature~ because that had been such a huge awesome intense focal point of my life/personal growth for many years, and to be very glib about it, I got to a point where I was like mmm yes the ancestors absolutely suffered and so have we, but ok what else?
Sally’s book pulled me out of this grumpy little mood with her wildly imaginative tales of speculative fiction that mix ancient fox lore with modern conditions of Feeling Crazy; there’s also a novella about Angel Island that is as fun and spooky as it is dutiful to the usually over-homeworky history lesson at hand. You can read one of the short stories, “Fig Queen” (one of my faves) on LitHub, but I also adored “A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality” (very Emerald Fennelly) (laudatory) and “The Girl with Flies Coming Out of Her Eyes.” This line—can you so tell Sally is a poet at heart?:
Another day you saw your mother trying to revive the tulips that had just died in the garden, without success, and you burst into flies.
Not in Italy but wish you were hehe?????? I’ve recommended this before, but the 1955 film Summertime (<- wow I think that’s a link to the full movie on YouTube lol), starring Katharine Hepburn and her finest mid-Atlantic accent, is dreamy and tragic and stuffed with piazza scenes. It also contains one of the best uses of Scarf as Narrative Storytelling in cinematic history.
TikTok Corner:
You don’t need to know Spanish at all in order to understand this completely
My new favorite TikTok account, which you could generously categorize under “art history”
Local man is overcome by his first listen of Chapell Roan, good for him
Finally: Tomorrow, I’m launching a new project within the Deez Links Media world. It’s not Hate Read Season 2 (yet). It’s a monthly podcast that’s also a book club that’s also an interview series……. You gotta be a paid sub though 😘
Ask Roulette is back! Come with a question you want to ask a stranger, silly or serious, and see what happens. The long-running comedy and conversation series is back at Caveat NYC on Thursday, June 27th. Hosted by Jody Avirgan with special guests Avery Trufelman, Dan Rosen, and more.
Have your cake — and eat this one, too. Sweet City is a NYC-based, dessert-focused newsletter written by Mahira Rivers, an ex-Michelin inspector and a New York Times-published restaurant critic. Subscribe for a weekly mix of bakery and restaurant dessert menu reviews, pastry roundups & guides, and posts about dessert culture in NYC. Past newsletters include an epic layer cake quest! Kawaii desserts (aka girl desserts)! The most over-slept-on, under-hyped bakery breakfast sandwich in New York City!
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