Wednesday reading
I’ve just started reading Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, about the midcentury writer, because the movie Shirley (which I saw at Sundance) is coming out in June. And it’s really good. It’s all I want to read right now. I’m very glad a holiday weekend is coming up.
Tamar Adler, whose book An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace is one of my top food books of all time, wrote about sourdough starter for anxious and frugal people:
Even after I destroyed the clod of dough it produced, Emma’s starter remained in my refrigerator, a half-full Mason jar that I was supposed to regularly feed. If I didn’t feed the starter, it would die. If I did feed it, it would reproduce, forever. And whenever it grew, I would have to throw some away. You know how when you garden, you’re supposed to “thin” seedlings once they’ve sprouted, so they don’t crowd each other out and gobble up each other’s resources? You pluck out the weakest sprouts—tiny baby plants, their too-heavy heads bobbing on floss-like stems. I can’t even bear to be outside while my husband does this thinning. I can’t even know it’s happening.
A former student, Fen Inman, wrote about Cafe Sabarsky (which is inside New York’s Neue Gallery, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and theme restaurants:
The two tweed-clad Upper East Side women perched picking at a strudel at the Sabarsky clearly felt that they fit. They were practically flush with a serene satisfaction at how well they fit—to the point where one made a point of letting me, a complete stranger, know that she had fit just as well in another place just like this one. I’ve seen people do this in many places —demonstrate, to themselves and to anyone watching, how at home they are. And I’ve seen them do the opposite. Were one of these prim, cosmopolitan dâmes somehow cajoled into a trip to Frontierland, she would without a doubt spend over half her stay lamenting the tackiness of the same over-scaled faux-foliage decor that sends other people into transports of delight, because she felt out of place. Frontierland is not her imaginary world the way the nineteenth-century Landständischer Saal might be. Why is this?
My friend Rachel Syme wrote at the New Yorker about Betsey Johnson’s new memoir and talked to Betsey herself:
In 1977, she launched her own label with a business partner, a fashion sales rep and former model named Chantal Bacon. Johnson gave Bacon half the company up front. “I wanted someone to work as hard as I worked,” she told me. A year later, she opened her first namesake store, on Thompson Street, in Soho. “There was the downtown girl who would buy my clothes,” Johnson said. “There was a customer that just grew between the cement.” At first, Johnson and Bacon funnelled any profits into expanding the brand to other cities. “We’d go to places like Boston, on Newbury Street, sit outside, have a cup of coffee, and just check out if there were any girls who we think might wear my clothes,” she said. In New York, when they would scout new store locations, in their Fiorucci spike heels, Johnson said, “The police used to think we were hookers.”
And finally, it’s frightening but good to read: Adrienne LaFrance’s story on why QAnon (that bizarre pro-Trump Internet monster conspiracy theory) is becoming a religion:
The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.
Trust the plan. Enjoy the show. Nothing can stop what is coming.