Resurrecting Killed Darlings: “Write, Cut, Rewrite” at the Weston Library
Joan Didion needed a drink before she edited her writing. She admits as much to an audience packed into the New York Public Library one day in November 2011. “The drink loosens me up enough to actually mark up my work, you know”, she twangs as she gazes, unblushing, into the crowd. Dry humour is
Why I Wear Clown Makeup to Prep School
Val and I met on Tinder in January of 2021. I was at my lowest then—I mean, I was on Tinder in Massachusetts, home of MIT and Harvard students (shudder), crazed Patriots fans, and the Pilgrims. The city is still pretty puritan: no drinking till 21! Gasp! We value modesty, “neighborly concern,”
Going the Whole Hog: Rembrandt and the Art of Butchery
Below, there hang four flayed brutes. Some taut as if the paint was pulled thin like latex, others like heaps of wax. Each brings to mind the feverish glow of something coldly sweating, all seem to hug the gloam. Attributed to either Rembrandt or a nondescript ‘follower of Rembrandt’, the mass r
The First Last Words of Fyodor Dostoevsky
“ ‘It was just a minute before the execution,’ began the prince, readily, carried away by the recollection and evidently forgetting everything else in a moment, ‘just at the instant when he stepped off the ladder on to the scaffold. He happened to look in my direction: I saw his eyes and und
In conversation with: Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
“I write the thing I think is best, not the thing I think will please the most people.” When my friend gifted me a copy of Maggie Nelson’s bestseller The Argonauts for my birthday, I mentally placed it onto my ‘to read’ pile. It was a hot summer’s day, and frankly, I wasn’t quit
Painless Consequences: Cisgender Women’s Pain and Why We Ignore It
Women are born with pain built in—it’s our physical destiny … We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t … We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years … and then … the fucking menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world … then
The Unemotional Art of Ballet Schools
The way I talk about my time at ballet school has always been punctuated with an awkward laugh, or an unresponsive face to “oh god” as people try to react to what I have told them. I have never found it shocking, or horrifying, or abnormal in the slightest: it was all I knew from […]
Serious Offerings from the Folk Revival: The Wicker Man at Fifty
Two snails writhe over one another, watched by a lord in a kilt reciting lines from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. The local sweetshop sells cakes in the shape of naked women. A mother breastfeeds an infant in the ruins of a church—her outstretched palm cradles an egg. An empty rec
Venturing into the world of Arabian jazz: In conversation with Shirley Smart
On a Mad Hatter jazz night like no other, I was immersed into the eclectic sound world of cellist Shirley Smart. One of the UK’s most innovative cellists, in her reverberant embrace of strings, she weaves a symphony that transcends genres, seamlessly fusing the elegant precision of classical techn