Subway fashion report
Plus: putting a whole foot inside your mouth
In high summer there are only two places where people sit still long enough to furnish people-watching opportunities: the subway and the beach. Of these, the subway is easily the better for fashion trendspotting, since the social convention of wearing clothes on public transportation abides. What I’ve noticed this summer is:
•Opaque toenail polish for the ladies in white, coral, or powder blue. Not opalescent or jellylike but matte and thick as house paint.
•Shirts and dresses with vertical stripes!
•Delicate wire-rimmed glasses of the type worn by Freud acolytes in 1909.
•Dad Socks. This is the only one I can fully endorse. Dad socks are unflattering but frank. They’ve got nothing to hide; they are the opposite of those dishonest little “no-show socks” that feel like wearing a yarmulke on your foot…
BOTTOMFEEDERS
It cannot be true and yet it is true: The sex of a sea turtle hatchling is determined by the temperature of the sand. Warm sand produces females; cool sand produces males. This sounds like a "fact" I devised in a dream but it comes from the venerable Woods Hole Science Aquarium, established in 1874 and therefore the oldest marine aquarium in the nation.
I was there on a rainy day when the entire town was seeking indoor activity, so the tiny aquarium—which is owned by the federal government and free to enter—was packed.
At one of the tanks I stood mesmerized by a hideous fish that resembled a pancake. It was brown and unbelievably flat. An elderly man ambled up and stared at the sentient pancake with me.
"What is the name of this one?" the man asked. "The sign is too small."
I looked at the sign.
"It's a...hogchoker.”
”Ah,” he said. And then, in a tone dry enough to burn down California: "Beautiful name.”
HEALTH CARD
The Goncourt brothers wrote that "sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate." Couldn’t disagree more. The number of observations I’ve had in the past week equals less than ten and one of those was that Margot Robbie has the sort of teeth more accurately referred to as “chompers.”
I am still—not so much under the weather as beyond the reach of earthly concerns such as weather. I can’t tell whether the symptoms are psychosomatic or somatic or just psycho. They are real enough that I took a Covid test—negative—but mercurial enough that a friend immediately diagnosed the condition as "full-blown neurasthenia."
After I've finished a day’s work, which takes 8000% longer than it should, all of my energy goes toward sitting in the bath and browsing auction sites for petit-bourgeois trinkets that I'll never buy: a Limoges box in the shape of a champagne bucket, Fitz & Floyd scallop plates, Majolica pineapple jugs…
Items that have actually helped:
•This Elmore Leonard novel (which Quentin Tarantino adapted into Jackie Brown, my favorite of his films).
•Pre-code movies like the below, Gold Diggers of 1933, which Mark Greif recommended for its rampant cynicism and prominent use of Ginger Rogers and which I love for its vertiginous oscillation between despair, exuberance and erotic combustion (just like me).
•Ian Penman on Chuck Berry, for Harper’s. A masterpiece.
CROSS THE INTERVENING CHASM
A line from Peter Schjeldahl's introduction to an old collection of his columns that my uncle published in 1994:
My formula of fairness to work that displeases me is to ask, "What would I like about this if I liked it?"
Now that's how you "reframe" reality! I'd extend the possibilities of the move beyond art and into bad music, disagreeable people, rat-strewn subway stations, dental ordeals—anything that nauseates you.
Schjeldahl’s point is that most works of art have fans, or at least people for whom they serve a purpose, and if you can conjecture yourself into one such individual for a moment it can yield Interesting Data without diluting your critical instincts.
Rereading Schjeldahl always reminds me of Harold Bloom writing about Walter Pater:
Difficult to define, this sort of critic possesses one salient characteristic. His value inheres neither in his accuracy at the direct interpretation of meaning in texts nor in his judgments of relative eminence of works and authors. Rather, he gives us a vision of art through his own unique sensibility, and so his own writings obscure the supposed distinction between criticism and creation.
YOU’LL READ IT AND YOU’LL LIKE IT, WORM
A cherished idea I have is to open a bookstore where the books are arranged not by genre but from best to worst. Initially the arrangement would follow my personal taste but after a month I'd permit (beg) a random person to rearrange the inventory according to their own, and another person the month after, and so on. It would be the most and least optimized shopping experience of all time.
Naturally, the browsing reactions of visitors would be fascinating to witness. How many shoppers would bypass the "best" section and head straight to "worst," which is what I would do? How many would furtively reorder a beloved book as an act of vigilante justice? ("The hell is Ronald Firbank doing all the way down here, he should be ten shelves up, this is insane, I'll just wait until that chick at the register isn't looking and move him up where he belongs...")
DON’T KNOCK IT…
Alice had a baby two weeks ago. During my last visit she recommended putting one of the baby’s entire feet in my mouth. “It’s really satisfying,” she said. And she’s right, it is. “When else can you fit an entire human foot in your mouth?” she said, marveling, while the foot was in my mouth. “…And a human foot that has never touched earth?”
SWEET VLAD O’ MINE
I’m writing about Nabokov and found a great quote from an ancient Newsweek interview (not online) where he defines humor as the "loss of balance—and appreciation of losing it.” Parfait!
DEPARTMENT OF SMALL PLEASURES
Obsessively filling every single trench of a waffle with butter:
Farewell, friends. Thank you for reading these squibs.