a list for the weekend
Just a few things I thought you might enjoy.
It’s been a little while since I’ve put together one of these lists for you.
For one thing, when I started doing it a few years ago there weren’t many others, and now it seems that everyone on
is curating them, and my continuing with it felt redundant. (In truth, I’ve been so gobsmacked by some of the others that I just wasn’t sure if I’d have anything useful to add.) For another thing: I’m in full-throttle pre-publication mode for Permission, and also just finished teaching what was supposed to be a month-long, 3-hour-a-week online memoir workshop but ended up being about 20 hours per week all told, so: stretched thin as a rubberband. Add to that eldercare, an ancient dog with dementia, various health annoyances, a news cycle that can be all-consuming…and that’s enough to make anyone overwrought.This does not mean that I’m not always thinking about the things I’d like to share with you, so much so that I regularly make lists which inevitably get stuck inside books I’m reading, only to be lost. So I’m going to try at least to be a bit more regular about this, beginning with today and starting here:
I’ve always known this about myself: when I fall in love with someone’s work, I tend to disappear down a rabbit hole. I want to read everything they’ve ever written, watch every movie they’ve ever directed or made or appeared in (I’m living on Planet Sally Wainwright right now), listen to every piece of music they’ve ever created, and get lost in every one of their podcasts. This is absolutely true of the work of Olivia Laing.
Some months back, I ordered the UK edition of Laing’s brilliant The Garden Against Time because I couldn’t wait for the American edition to come out. (It has since, and was recently the subject of an excellent front page review by A.O. Scott on the front of the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere). When I was an acquisitions editor, I might have once called a book like this uncategorizable: it is not a practical/how-to guide, nor is there a particular emotional transcendence that occurs. Instead, as Scott says, it is an inquiry into the idea of a garden. Scott goes on to say that Laing is a natural hybridizer… who belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience.
The result of my reading Laing’s words was to do a deep dive, and after The Garden Against Time, I read their brilliant The Trip to Echo Springs, a rumination on writers and drinking as seen through the stories of six male writers (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cheever, Berryman, Williams, Carver); the connective tissue, however subtly threaded, is Laing’s own experience of having grown up with an alcoholic. Speaking to The Irish Times, Laing says about their books They’re philosophical investigations into areas of human experience like alcoholism, like loneliness, like the body. And those questions aren’t abstract for me. They’re deeply personal.
Laing goes on: I started to write about alcoholism, because I’d had childhood experience of living with an alcoholic [their mother’s partner]. I started writing about loneliness because I was intensely lonely. But I’m really not interested in writing a memoir that just says, ‘This is my experience’. I try and find a cast of characters [usually artists, thinkers and scientists] that have experienced the same sort of distress or disorder or trauma. I want to make these beautiful maps of strange and difficult places that I think are overlooked.
Laing’s work has returned me to some of my own narrative obsessions: Derek Jarman’s My Garden’s Boundaries are the Horizon (gifted to me last year by my friend
) which led to my reading Jarman’s Pharmacopoeia, then Laing’s essay in The Guardian about women writers and alcohol, and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. Unclear though it may be to some, the overlap between the need to have one’s hands in soil, and issues of alcohol — this is the center of a Venn diagram for me — feels somehow symmetrical.I came upon this lovely Nowness film the other day, featuring Laing speaking about the home they share with poet Ian Patterson. Enjoy.
Every once in a while, I come across a recipe that I end up making a lot; it becomes a keeper, and although Susan and I have a massive binder containing all of the dishes we’ve loved over the years, this particular recipe is so phenomenal that we make it twice in one week, so it’s probably never going to even make it into the binder. This is exactly what happened when we made Clare de Boer’s Grilled Chicken Thighs and Corn with Lime-Basil Butter. I first fell in love with Clare’s food at King in New York so I knew that anything from her kitchen would be remarkable. At the end of June, Susan took me out for my birthday to Clare’s Hudson Valley restaurant, Stissing House, and I fell in love with her food all over again.
We first made Clare’s Grilled Chicken Thighs and Corn with Lime-Basil Butter when our favorite local farm’s first corn came in a few weeks ago. Roasting corn on the grill admittedly has never been my favorite way of preparing it — it tends (I think) to be dry unless it’s slathered in cheese, as in Mexican Elote — but this recipe has changed my mind forever. It’s true: if you put chicken thighs (skinless and boneless in this case) into a bath of garlic, olive oil, salt, and lime juice for twenty-four hours, it’s bound to be good. If you prepare lime-basil butter that you then fold into freshly charred warm sweet corn that you’ve removed from the cob and then top it with the marinated chicken which you have grilled and also charred in spots, it’s bound to be breathtaking. Which this dish is. Make it, please.
I am an avowed podcast nerd. Once I love one, I love it forever (unless something goes way off the rails), and there have been some great ones that I find myself returning to again and again: Krista Tippett and Katherine May (and Marie Howe, John O’Donohue, Mary Oliver, Nick Cave, and Ross Gay), Fearne Cotton and Suranne Jones, Julia Louis Dreyfus and Anne Lamott, Rich Roll and Suleika Jouad, Debbie Millman and Maira Kalman, Debbie Millman’s Pride Podcast with Carrie Brownstein, Megan Rapinoe, Lucy Sante, Kara Swisher, and Kirsten Vangsness, Ruth Rogers and Griffin Dunne. My favorite this week was Sam Baker’s The Shift, and her brilliant conversation with Zandra Rhodes (and Miriam Margolyes, Miranda July, and Bee Wilson). Sam’s newsletter has been a longtime favorite as well: I always await its arrival.
I’ll just sit here on the couch eating bon-bons.
Everyone seems to be chattering about this: On August 6th, the New York Times published an article titled The Orgasm Gap Isn’t Going Away for Straight Women. Lots to chat about here, if one is inclined (which I haven’t been until now because I blush very easily, but fuck it: I’m 61 and have been involved with both men and women so I speak from experience, although the former was so long ago that Ellen hadn’t even come out yet). Applause and brava to all you lovely straight ladies exclaiming What gap? But the research drawn from a sample of 24,000 (!) single Americans between the ages of 18 and 100 found that across all ages, men of all sexual orientations reported higher orgasm rates during sex — from 70-85 percent — compared with 46 to 58 percent for women. Lesbian and bisexual women between ages 35 and 49 reported higher orgasm rates than their heterosexual counterparts.
Oh, okay.
I refer interested readers back to this April 2024 article explaining in the clearest possible terms WHY this is the case without the need for a 24,000 person sample and the involvement of Kinsey. To not put too fine a point on it, we lesbians tend to know exactly where things are and how to get from A to Z without a big Sturm und Drang, and with a fair amount of accuracy. Usually. So let’s not overcomplicate things.
Until next time: have a great weekend, and please - make the chicken, listen to the podcasts, spend some time in a garden. I’ll leave the rest of it to you.
xE.
That is such a lovely photo of you
I love Olivia Laing’s work, and new rabbit holes for me to disappear down here too, thank you. Have you read Crudo?