This headline in the Guardian is technically inaccurate, but not exactly misleading: “I was swallowed by a hippo.”
Some trivia to fit this weekend’s theme: The word “mother” is an ultraconserved one, meaning it is about 15,000 years old. Speaking of Mum’s day, here is a lovely photo gallery of grandmothers around the world, and the meals they’ve made for their grandkids.
Last week I mentioned Jared Bland’s polemic on The Great Gatsby, and now other people are coming out of the woodwork to eviscerate Fitzgerald’s empty takedown of the American dream. Kathryn Schulz took the liberty of beautifully tearing the book to pieces for New York Magazine. Because of the Baz Lurhmann film, culture seems ready to basically overdose on Gatsby. At Moby Lives they’ve compiled a bunch of the novel’s early reviews, and at Flavorpill Geoff Mak wonders if Teju Cole’s Open City is poised to eventually hold the same New York Novel stature (though my favourite scenes from that one were outside of America, let alone NYC) as the jazz age classic. The New Yorker ran a slideshow of beautiful art deco advertisements, which, more than jazz, made me long for a prevalence of printed type treatments. And of course you could always travel to West Egg via Christopher Hitchens—here he was on the dream and America and all the rest of it in Vanity Fair.
If you enjoy reading in the bath, the brilliance of this eight-year-old child will be to your interest.
“To see the production of art measured in terms of hours kept and schedules obeyed reveals that artists are anxious and impatient, lazy but ambitious, repetitive, and often neurotic. Or just like the rest of us.” And just like the rest of us, some artists and journalists DGAF about Twitter verification. Proust had his two cups of coffee with milk, but Gary Shteyngart’s got a checkmark.
Some years ago I went shopping with a friend in late May. She bought a straw fedora and wore it out of the store. She looked beautiful under the brim as she confessed to feeling very conspicuous. “Of course,” I said, thinking myself matter of fact but actually being a tiny bit cruel, “that’s true of all women in hats.” As this beautiful meditation on women and fedoras makes clear: “A hat is an advertisement for a disguise.” But I still wish I’d said something kinder.
Actual punks Damian Abraham (of Fucked Up) and Sam Sutherland (author of Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk) review various celeb looks at the Met Gala, and it’s great.
Speak, Internet! is your weekend reading guide.
