Weekend Reads
GOOD SHABBOS, GOOD PEOPLE!
A Master of Djinn, by P. Djéli Clark
The literary gods are laughing at me. After my one true love last year, Gideon the Ninth, had the words “necromancer lesbians” splashed across its promos and then featured no such lesbians, every fantasy novel I pick up now has secret lesbians in it. Case in point: this very fun 1910’s Cairo steampunky tale with female agents in magical government departments.
God, Brad Pitt Is So Good at This, by Angelica Jade Bastién in Vulture
I have a lot of respect for Ms. Bastién’s writing, but I do feel that her ideas in this article could have been pushed further. Yes, celebrity is performance art. Yes, the stars who embrace their celebrity have a better chance of being immortalized. But why do we need to be lied to in order to buy into it? Why do we need to believe that actors are not acting when they’re offscreen, that they’re not putting in effort, that they don’t really care one way or the other, in order to grant them that status?
Nonetheless, this article did bring to my attention the 2005 W Magazine spread of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie by Steven Klein, in what Bastién brilliantly calls a “suburban-themed photo shoot of curdled domestic bliss.” It simultaneously feels like a vintage film, a retrospective and a harbinger of doom all in one.
John Mulaney and the Great Celebrity-Sympathy Overcorrection, by Lili Loofbourow for Slate
Should we talk more about celebrity? Let’s talk more about celebrity.
“What’s clear is that we’re confused about what it’s appropriate to feel or say about a famous person in crisis. That, in and of itself, is pretty new. We haven’t had much trouble with that before, and it speaks to how our social theories of celebrity have changed …
If people liked paparazzi shots, it was because they were refreshingly unpolished, unlike the snazzier photos PR teams placed in magazines like Us Weekly or People. The contrast established that stars weren’t just like us: They were liars, constantly presenting a polished veneer to the public.”
I’ve been quoting Lili Loofbourow since my undergrad thesis on Inglourious Basterds. Any time I see she has something to say about current culture, I sit up and listen. She’s like a contemporary philosopher whose sentences I don’t need to read six times to comprehend. In this article, she gives me permission to accept that my basest instincts to talk lashon hara about people can be relegated to specific celebrities who intentionally place themselves in that position.
On Chicken Tenders, by Helen Rosner for Guernica, back in 2015
“It takes more than one generation to develop the intricate root system of nostalgia that anchors the ballpark pastoral of hot dogs or nachos, the picket-fence vignette of fried bologna sandwiches, or the dusty-road Americana of a burger and an ice-cold Coke. Chicken tenders have no history, they have no metatext, they have no terroir.”
I looked it up because ’tis the season for gift guides and Helen Rosner’s foodie gift guides from the past two years (soon to be joined by a third) are just delectable! They tell a story – about her, about me, about the products … ugh. Just great. And all her bio says is that she won the James Beard award for writing, so here, enjoy this ode to chicken tenders.
I Made My Boyfriend A Cake, in Wigleaf
I have a flash story out! In a dream publication! It has a curse word in it!
