1: plague water, egyptian lion tamers, sarah leonard
a newsletter about staying in from rahel aima
I’ve long wanted to do a newsletter called 🅽🅸🅶🅷🆃🅻🅸🅵🅴 that is about not going to parties, brewing herbal infusions, skincare ritualling your way out of depression. Plus links to excellent things, in the vein of my erstwhile ɯαɾɱ αɳԃ ɯҽιɾԃ letter. This pandemic feels like the right time.
In the early 2010s I had just graduated, was briefly, regrettably enamoured with the Brooklyn lit scene, and used to devour Paris Review’s Culture Diaries. For the next little while—however long this thing lasts—I’m asking some of my favourite people to keep quarantine culture diaries. You can find the first one, from Sarah Leonard, below.
I’m enjoying being inside, but I can’t stop reading, inhaling stats and opinions and tearjerkers, the kind that put you on the precipice of a panic attack. My fitbit tells me to breathe and slow down my heartrate, in what feels like a very stranger aunty kind of bossiness. Perhaps I just need to read warmer and weirder and more fascinating, more joyful things? And perhaps you do too.
spiky boi
On medical illustration and designing the iconic spiky boi coronavirus image. In Turkey, an old basket-through-window delivery tradition returns. A podcast about plague in the Ottoman world. How the pandemic is reviving an ancient 1000-year old Japanese cheese. Celebrating Nowruz with poetry banner drops in Tehran. Why zebrafish give themselves fevers. Foreigns with the BCG scar, rejoice! Rajesh Babu the man behind the helmet.
drinking & snackchat
PLAGUE WATER and other 19th century cocktails featuring things like ambergris, pennyroyal. Cooking with Gogol (the whole series is great). The story of Armenian immigration to America through a cucumber. A Belgian sourdough librarian (!) visits the Yukon. While you were studying the sourdough the Xbox creator has been baking ancient Egyptian bread using 4000 year old yeast. Cane. And, Samin Nosrat has a new podcast Home Cooking, and it’s delightful, if bean heavy.
My favourite meal right now is a baked potato, topped with whatever grateable cheese and little florets of frozen broccoli, microwaved after midnight. I think it’s reading all those Enid Blyton books when I was little: late night feasts of things like hard-boiled eggs and tinned sardines in tomato sauce and tongue sandwiches and sausages and bread and butter and pork pies—and I’m a lifelong vegetarian, mind you—all washed down with lashings of ginger beer. But I’m also running out of ideas. What are you making, cooking from? I’d love to know.
big cat content
In honour of Tiger King, but also chunky cats. Egypt’s female lion tamers. The obsessive search for the Tasmanian Tiger. Sri Lanka’s fishing cats. China’s fat tigers (state media says it’s just their winter bodies). Dressed to kill: the history of leopard print. Using Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume to catch a maneating tiger in India. The strange and dangerous world of America’s Big Cat people
☞\( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞ yeehaw
An oral history of Myspace music. Roberta Williams of Sierra, the world’s first computer graphic designer. How a tiny endangered species put a man in prison. The raisin situation. Fandom and love in the time of Britney. The mortician and the murderer. Coming into bloom.
quarantine culture diaries: sarah leonard
monday
I’ve been finding solace in music that captures melancholy and danciness both. Something that helps you grieve, but not collapse completely? Ballboy is a Scottish band that Rahel introduced me to in college and still feels like a warm hug. I think their best track is “You Can’t Spend Your Whole Life Hanging Around with Arseholes,” but other greats include “Avant Garde Music,” “A Europewide Search for Love,” “Disney's Ice Parade,” and “I Don't Have Time To Stand Here With You Fighting About The Size Of My Dick.”
I’ve also been listening to the new Christine and the Queens record a lot. I love love love this video. The new-ish La Roux is a bit this vibe too. (This shit will get stuck in your head.)
Rewatched Citizenfour, which I’ve assigned to my NYU class.
My brilliant and wonderful roommate is being kicked out of the country (her supposedly progressive employer laid her off when her visa depended on the job), so we had dinner and then watched Army of Shadows about the French resistance. I’ve been on a big kick of watching films about partisan resistance to the Nazis, starting with Defiance and Uprising, both about Poland, which are both pretty good and v Hollywood (Daniel Craig’s hotness cannot be shaken by anything in case you were wondering). On the one hand, they’re inspiring—the history of resistance is one of normal people with inadequate information doing their best against something unspeakably terrifying. On the other hand, I’m drawn to them because they show a world in which rules and norms are revealed to be what they are: contingent, fragile agreements that can disintegrate at any time. You can see the same thing by looking at the prison system or global network of refugee camps on any day of the week, but these films show what happens when chaos descends on those who long thought they were exempt.
Anyway, Army of Shadows is a v good film about the French resistance, played out in noirish scenes of rendezvous and murder, everything in dark tones. It’s grim: people die with their faces bashed in by Vichy cops without anyone knowing what they contributed. Resistors murder beloved comrades who give up secrets to the police in moments of pain and fear. We’re planning on Nazi movie Mondays.
tuesday
For work breaks, I’ve been watching SNL sketches. Am I regressing?? Cecily Strong is really funny as Jeanine Pirro throwing a drink in Colin Jost’s face, it’s just true!!
A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros has a chapter about her stint on a Greek island when she was young, staying in a whitewashed house and writing. I thought it’d be nice to be transported to one of my favorite places on earth, but instead it felt awful. I don’t know when I’ll be able to visit my friends in Greece again.
7 Secrets of the Prolific: a very good book about procrastination!
I’ve been reading Romance in Marseille before bed. It’s fast-paced and delightful— you burn right through it. The NYT essay captures it well.
Sade has also been good evening music. Another warm hug. Please consider this important essay.
wednesday
Started watching Wolf Hall—I’ve always felt bad about not reading the Hilary Mantel book and was told that it’ll make more sense after getting the chronology of court intrigues from the series. Honestly, no TV series about Henry VIII will ever compare to The Tudors, which was like… Tudor porn with Jonathan Rhys Meyers? It was so trashy! Hard to compete with IMHO.
I’ve been listening to Desert Island Discs while cooking. It’s so perfect, and the archives are endless. My favorite may have been with Professor Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience. Other great ones include Marlon James, Thom Yorke, Mel C, firefighter Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, Mary Berry, Tracey Emin, and Nick Park the inventor of Wallace and Gromit. There was also an aristocratic aviator/toy inventor who could absolutely only exist in England.
Listened to Stop Making Sense specifically for “Life During Wartime”: “I got some groceries, some peanut butter, To last a couple of days.” Same.
thursday
Listened to a lot of Dead Kennedys. Every day I feel full of either sadness for the world or hate for the people who made it that way or both, and this really facilitates the hate (although the lovely surf guitar underneath “Moon Over Marin” is a good combination of both).
Here are three videos of people telling you life will be all right, sort of, even when you feel like shit: 1, 2, 3. Many people I know, including those who are politically dedicated to what they do, are having trouble working and hating themselves for it, which I’ve found does not make it easier to work.
friday
Uh, I read the first three chapters of Plato’s Republic. My friend set it as a project for us. Apparently in college I wrote next to this section “parody?”:
“Moreover, they mustn’t be lovers of laughter either, for whenever anyone indulges in violent laughter, a violent change of mood is likely to follow.”
“So I believe.”
Have you watched the video for MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” lately? Do yourself a favor.
saturday
Finished Wolf Hall. Kings are bad.
Was apparently feeling especially stressed about the end of the world today and have been playing music from when I was a teen. First Stankonia, and then Eve (who is now married to a British race car impresario and appears on Instagram to be living her best life!), and then some ungodly mix with a lot of Third Eye Blind. In writing this diary I’m realizing how much stress has caused me to revert to old music as to a security blanket. Hm.
Discussed Plato. Kings are bad!
sunday
I shaved my head! To prepare, I watched a lot of relevant videos: Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, Demi Moore in GI Jane, Natalie Portman sobbing her way through her buzzcut in V for Vendetta, Cate Blanchett in Heaven, Kristen Stewart just living life.
Now in a new music phase: Francis and the Lights as soothing music and JEFF the Brotherhood (specifically Castlestorm and other college-era stuff) as really loud growly music. They were on a small label called Electric Peace! with one of my favorite short-lived bands of all time (just listen to thiiiiiis and try not to thrash around).
Finished Romance in Marseille. I will not give away the ending.
featured creature: jewel caterpillar
The beautiful jewel caterpillar turns into this furry moth:
