I check my reflection in the mirror before heading out to see the boy at his hotel. I wear an off-the-shoulder black dress from Paris and a pink shawl. I look, in my own humble opinion, like a Vogue model, casual and elegant at the same time. Topper has gone to Palm Springs for theContinue reading “Chapter 61: Edge of Reality”
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Georges-Eugène Haussmann
Essay · Architecture & History The Man Who Demolished Paris to Save It Georges-Eugène Haussmann did not build Paris. He destroyed it, systematically and at enormous speed and with the full authority of an emperor behind him, and what he built in its place was something that had not previously existed: the modern city, withContinue reading “Georges-Eugène Haussmann”
Chapter 60: Where Do You Come From?
“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?”
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”
My World of Interiors 