“I love you,” Topper says over lunch in the garden. “Do you know why?” He looks up from The New Yorker. I feel some force field ripple between us.“You’re making a girl flush.” He sits up straighter. “I need you to know,” he says, fixing me with that intense gaze. “It’s your insistence on beingContinue reading “Chapter 60: Where Do You Come From?”
Author Archives: My World of Interiors
Arthur Jafa
Essay · Art & Ideas The Question He Has Been Asking for Thirty Years Arthur Jafa has organised his entire artistic life around a single question: how do you make a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music? The question sounds like a problem of aesthetics. It is, in fact, aContinue reading “Arthur Jafa”
Chapter 59: I Sing the Body Electric
Topper arrives for a week in the California sunshine, having taken time off from the Senator’s office. I run into his arms at the airport; he laughs and holds me close. “Let me have a proper look at you,” he says. We dance our way out of the terminal toward the car. “Is this new?”Continue reading “Chapter 59: I Sing the Body Electric “
The Human Condition According to Shakespeare
By Bergotte The series has moved, so far, through poets who held clear philosophical positions: Homer’s unflinching mortality, Ovid’s philosophy of change, Dante’s architecture of love. William Shakespeare holds no clear philosophical position. He holds all of them. He is the writer who most completely refused the consolation of a settled view, who gave theContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Shakespeare”
Chapter 58: Night-Blooming Jasmine
I am discovering that having a job isn’t something I actually enjoy. “I adore Mr Woolf, I really do,” I tell Cary over breakfast one morning at his house. “But it’s all the… actual labouring…” I sigh. Betsy gives me a look that says spoiled. “If you want to go places, you have to putContinue reading “Chapter 58: Night-Blooming Jasmine”
The Secret History
Essay · Literature & Ideas Beauty Will Save Us, or It Will Destroy Us First Donna Tartt published The Secret History in 1991, at twenty-eight, and it arrived as something the literary culture had not quite seen before: a novel that was simultaneously a page-turner and a meditation on moral philosophy, that took seriously bothContinue reading “The Secret History”
Chapter 57 : Indian Summer
We are in Newport in September. With no urgent business anywhere else, we’ve stayed on until the very end of summer. Jack wants Topper to come work for him in the Senate. “Do you want to?” I ask as we sit down to dinner on our first night back. “I told him I’d think aboutContinue reading “Chapter 57 : Indian Summer”
The Beatles
Essay · Music & Ideas Four Men and the Thing They Were Saying The Beatles did not set out to have a message. They set out to make girls scream, to get out of Liverpool, to be bigger than Elvis, and they achieved all three with a speed and a completeness that left them, byContinue reading “The Beatles”
Chapter 56: Graceland Revisited
At the last minute, I decide to go home for my birthday. I tell Topper I miss Miss Mary, which is true enough. He says he understands. “I think you should go alone,” he says. “I think you need quality time down there, and not have to entertain me.” He’s standing by the desk, facingContinue reading “Chapter 56: Graceland Revisited”
Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There
She has been a clown, a centrefold, a society matron, a fairy-tale victim, a film noir ingénue, a Renaissance duchess, a party guest, a disaster. She has never, in fifty years of making photographs, been herself. This is not evasion. It is the most radical position in contemporary art. By Bergotte There is no portraitContinue reading “Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There”
My World of Interiors 