Once a month, I’m sharing a few things that have been living rent-free in my brain over the past few weeks.
A few random thoughts, a few Substack recommendations. A bit rough around the edges. That’s it.
Over time, I suspect you’ll get a pretty good idea of how my brain works. I’m so very sorry.
And I’d love to hear what’s been on your mind. Let’s compare notes in the comments!
Ok, let’s go!
In my head this month:
Things I’ve been thinking about:
Thoreau and his rather cushy lifestyle by Walden Pond.
Two of my favourite fictional characters share a name that isn’t even a name.
The unbearable trouble of trying to look like yourself.
Substack posts that caught my interest:
“… erotic fantasy painted by an evil Fabergé egg.” (Borderline Obsessing)
“His name remains virtually unknown, but his face is famous around the world.” (Paul Chiddicks)
“Because reading saves lives; and it saved mine.” (Samantha Everly)
Things I’ve been thinking about:
1. Thoreau and his rather cushy lifestyle by Walden Pond
Sometimes we all want to live in a cabin in the forest. I get it. So did Henry David Thoreau. In fact, I think he pulled it off quite nicely, and you can read all about it in Walden.
His cabin was a short walk from town. Handy. You could visit civilisation whenever you wanted, and Thoreau frequently did. Civilisation could also come to you. Thoreau’s friends often visited. Better yet, his mother and sisters brought homemade food. And, best of all, most of his laundry was taken care of elsewhere, probably through the family household, which employed domestic help.
So, yes. It annoys me a little when Thoreau’s two years by Walden Pond are celebrated online as some sort of hardcore, Stoic-adjacent wilderness survival experiment. It’s not Thoreau’s fault. He set up a rather cushy lifestyle in the countryside to live more deliberately and have plenty of time to think and write. Who can blame him? Well, you can blame him a little for outsourcing some of the less philosophical parts of everyday life while he got on with the thinking and reading. But still.
The problem is that I suspect quite a few people who celebrate his great experiment haven’t actually read the book. Thankfully, there’s an easy remedy. Just read the darned thing!
2. Two of my favourite fictional characters share a name that isn’t even a name
A villanelle is a highly structured, 19-line French poetic form with two recurring refrains and an intricate pattern of repetition. It has roots in the Italian villanella, a type of rustic song. This is the Wikipedia version. I’m not an expert in poetic forms. It isn’t traditionally a personal name. Or at least it wasn’t, until very recently.
Still, two of my favourite fictional characters are called Villanelle. And I suspect they're why a poetic form is now transgressing into namehood.
The first Villanelle I encountered was a cross-dressing Venetian woman with webbed feet in Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Passion (1987). The second one was the frighteningly fabulous assassin in the TV series Killing Eve, based on Luke Jennings’ novel Codename Villanelle (2017).
I find it fascinating how much these two gloriously subversive characters share. They both use disguises to do their jobs. Their identities are fluid. Their passions become obsessions. They do not care about the rules. And yet they are both called Villanelle, a word traditionally associated with one of poetry’s most strictly regulated forms.
Come to think of it, Jodie Comer would be absolutely perfect as Winterson’s Villanelle, too. She’s already nailed the assassin. Someone should give her a pair of webbed feet and send her straight off to Venice.
Is it a coincidence? I don’t know. I can see Winterson picking the name from the poetic form. Did Luke Jennings do the same, or did he pick up The Passion and fall in love with the Venetian Villanelle as I did? In Codename Villanelle, our favourite assassin names herself after a perfume, but that doesn’t say anything about how Jennings chose it.
Maybe I should ask Luke Jennings. He’s on Substack and seems like a very nice, approachable guy. I’ll let you know how it goes.
3. The unbearable trouble of trying to look like yourself
I have a fairly public day job. It requires an annual press photo shoot. I dread it. Not the photographer. She’s great. She makes the whole ordeal feel surprisingly nice. She gives you snacks and lets you choose whatever music you want to listen to. She understands that a lot of makeup is not my thing. Way back when, she managed the Swedish pop band Army of Lovers (Woop!). And, most importantly, she’s a great photographer.
Despite all of this, I find it very hard to look like myself in pictures. Not only that, you need to look like yourself in many different ways. There need to be stern pictures. Friendly ones. Authoritative yet relaxed ones. You get the picture.
This takes hours. Not as many as people once spent sitting for painted portraits, but still. You would think that having had a face all my life would make this fairly straightforward, but oh no. To look normal, you need to lean forward, push out your chin and pull back your shoulders. It sounds weird, but it works.
Next year, I’ll have something in common with all those kings and queens in old paintings, though. They often included dogs in their portraits to symbolise loyalty, faithfulness and status. In short, they wanted to look good. In every sense. And a dog will do that for you. When we wrapped up, the photographer suggested that I bring Henry (best dog ever and editor-in-chief of this very newsletter) with me next year. Did I mention she’s a great photographer?
Substack posts that caught my interest:
1. “… erotic fantasy painted by an evil Fabergé egg.”
I’ve never been particularly interested in star ratings, but I absolutely love good cultural commentary. Especially if it makes you laugh out loud in places where that is frowned upon. Borderline Obsessing watched Bram Stoker’s Dracula and delivered the most delicious piece of writing about it.
As a little bonus, it reminded me of a review of the film that I read well over twenty years ago. It contained a line I’ve treasured dearly ever since: “Keanu Reeves is so dry and wooden they could have used him to stake Dracula.” Very true.
That said, I absolutely love the movie. Every gloriously ridiculous minute of it. And I love, love, LOVE Annie Lennox’s Love Song for a Vampire, which they had the audacity to hide away in the end credits. I consider that the worst crime of the entire film. And that’s saying something, given the amount of impaling going on.
Read: “Bram Stoker’s Dracula Is Weirder Than You Remember.”
2. “His name remains virtually unknown, but his face is famous around the world.”
Have you seen the picture of the newspaper seller with an Evening News poster telling people about the Titanic disaster? I think you have. I remember it from when I was a kid. My mother was in a book club, so a new book arrived in the post every month. It was the mid-1980s, so when Bob Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel found the Titanic, of course we got a book about it. It had a picture of the newspaper boy, and it fascinated me.
I never knew his name or what life held for him, though. Now I know his name was Ned Parfett. He was fifteen years old in 1912, with no idea that another catastrophe was just around the corner: the Great War. Paul Chiddicks has written a wonderful post about Ned, his parents, sisters and brothers. It’s such a great read and a beautiful example of how you can breathe life back into someone long gone.
Read: “The Boy Behind the Titanic Picture.”
3. “Because reading saves lives; and it saved mine.”
I’m not a fan of self-help, and I love Frankenstein, so when I came across this title, it really spoke to me: “You don’t need another self help strategy. You just need Frankenstein.” Ah, seldom have truer words been written. In this case, by Samantha Everly.
Whatever life has thrown at me – doubt, pain, confusion, happiness, you name it – I have found a book, a film or some music to take care of me. Nothing has had my back so consistently throughout my life as culture in all its wonderful forms. Read Samantha’s post, if you want to know what I mean. She puts it beautifully.
And I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Sometimes, when I can’t find my way through a situation or a question, I even assemble a little jury of works of art to help me. I put my problem or conundrum in the middle, then find books, films, music, paintings or other cultural works that approach it from different angles. They don’t have to agree. In fact, it’s better if they don’t. I just want them to say something about it.
Then I immerse myself in their different perspectives for a couple of weeks. So far, I’ve always emerged on the other side with a much better understanding of what I think and how I want to approach things.
Hmm... I really should write more about that sometime. I’ll add it to my ever-growing list of things I want to chat with you about.
Read: “You don’t need another self help strategy. You just need Frankenstein.”
One last thought...
The more I learn about culture, the more I realise how much I don’t know. Which is excellent news. It means that you and I are unlikely to run out of things to talk about anytime soon.
You’ve just read Troberg’s Tendencies, my monthly dip into what’s been living rent-free in my brain. A few thoughts, a few recommendations. A bit rough around the edges. That’s it. What has your brain been up to? Do tell in the comments.
Peckish for more?
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