Beloved acquaintances,
What’s going on? I have no idea, obviously, but if you do, please don’t hesitate to send me an email with a dot point summary because I would love to know.
I’ve been doing a lot of work on my second novel over the last couple of weeks. I know this seems a bit pre-emptive, given my first novel doesn’t even come out until October, but once it’s in the hands of The People I assure you the hoi polloi will be BANGING DOWN MY DOOR like a VILLAGE OF OLD TIMEY BIGOTS who think they have finally identified the LOCAL WITCH—only they (probably) won’t want to drown me and/or set me on fire, they’ll simply be demanding MORE BOOK. As such, I have been trying to write MORE BOOK, which was going pretty well until last week when I was like, hmmm, this book, is this the MORE BOOK that I want to write? And unfortunately, the answer was GIRL, NO. It is not the more book.
Unfortunately, the result of this inconvenient epiphany is that I now have to toss out the 15,000 words I had written on the existing project and start a whole new thing from scratch. So, um, long story short, don’t expect any announcements about book 2 any time soon.
TV
I Will Surviv…or
At the moment I am completely obsessed with Australian Survivor, a surprising new interest for me. Previously, I was always put off by the sporty vibes and the horrible aesthetic, and although the look of the show still hurts my eyes, this year I have realised that I can simply fast-forward through the physical stuff and just wallow in the STRATEGY, the BETRAYALS, the GLEEFUL MANIPULATION. The show has a kind of wicked, joyful energy which is hard to resist. I mean, this moment was so good!
For me, ‘I don’t think God likes Paige’ was instantly up there with these other highlights from the canon of Australian reality TV:
Me, when someone looks like they’re shaping up to take the carpark I’m waiting for outside Woolworths
Also me, whenever I eat a pie
As a side note, it’s not Australian, but I can’t talk about great moments in reality TV without mentioning the sublimely absurd moment from season one of Love is Blind when Jessica casually let her golden retriever drink red wine from her wine glass while her horrified fiancee looked on:
‘I don’t want you to think I’m a drinker—I can stop any time I want to. Only I don’t want to.’ - Sugar Kane from Some Like it Hot, and also this dog
Feel free to let me know in the comments if I have missed any important historical moments here.
Something I’ve been particularly enjoying about Survivor is that because the contestants are essentially obligated to scheme and strategise if they want to win, most of the time it genuinely doesn’t seem personal—even when they’re blithely throwing their closest allies under the bus. This sets it a bit apart from a lot of reality TV shows in the sense that nobody is being completely emotionally destroyed for our entertainment. I mean, obviously, a part of me cannot get enough of watching people being emotionally destroyed for my entertainment, but it’s not necessarily the part of myself of which I am most proud.
However, one thing that has really bothered me about Survivor is the racial dynamic, where several of the white contestants kept labelling the Asian-Australian contestants as shifty, or sneaky, or silver-tongued—usually for doing all the same things the white contestants were also doing—and then voting them off! Pretty depressing stuff. The show itself doesn’t ever seem to directly address or challenge the underlying racism at work, but if you are interested, I recommend listening to some of Survivor’s Asian-Australian contestants discussing these issues on this recent podcast.
Earth Cunk
Another show I’ve been enjoying is Cunk on Earth, on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, it involves a fictional documentary maker, Philomena Cunk, taking us through world history by interviewing esteemed academics and asking them questions like this:
I love her. I want to be her!!!!!
Books
Would you believe I read a book recently, in translation. My book group—which has been going for about 17 years, and which used to be mainly a drinking and smoking club, and which now seems to be a dog admiration club, because we are old now and one of our members has a very good looking dog—I’m talking a Vogue Italia dog, a couture dog, the kind of dog who never has to buy her own drinks—anyway, my book group recently discussed Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which is about a woman in Korea becoming a vegetarian and basically losing her mind. In the novel, after she stops eating meat, her brother-in-law also loses his mind with horniness for her—and to be honest this very much reflects my own experience of vegetarianism. I have been eschewing meat for 27 years now and people think it’s for ethical reasons but the real reason I do it is to increase my (already very powerful) sex appeal.
It’s a pretty odd book, the kind of book where you’re never quite sure what, exactly, is going on. I found it perplexing but enjoyable, quite a compulsive read, while some other people in my book group thought it was rubbish, and pronounced it clumsy and stupid. Who can say which of us is right?
(It’s my newsletter, so I can say: it’s probably not me!!)
Other things
Australia’s Last Top Model
I had some author headshots taken recently by a lovely local photographer (Karin Locke), who managed to get some pretty good shots despite my extreme struggle to relax in front of the camera. At one point she asked me if I knew how to smize and I—a person who has watched almost every season of America’s Next Top Model, some of Britain’s Next Top Model, and quite a lot of the champagne television that is New Zealand’s Next Top Model—was like, I’ve got this, and smized like my life depended on it.
‘Um…you just look…confused,’ Karin said, apologetically.
Still waiting to hear from Elite Model Management.
I’m Not Watching The Whale
So this week Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for being in The Whale, which, as a POV (Person of Volume), I have mixed feelings about. The Brendan Fraser comeback is a nice story, but The Whale itself sounds so awful. I haven’t seen it, but happily, Lindy West watched it on behalf the rest of us and has written the recap of all recaps. It is very funny, and also spells out extremely clearly why the whole concept of The Whale is so fucked up:
I know nobody gives a fuck about fat people, but since this is my platform I’m going to say it one more time as clearly as I can: It is really bad—arguably immoral—for a dominant-group person to make a piece of art about a marginalized person that reinforces (revels in!!!) harmful stereotypes and stigmas about that marginalized group (starring a dominant-group person in makeup and prosthetics, no less). Even if there are individual people in the world who fulfill some of those stereotypes! It doesn’t matter! Of course marginalizations aren’t 1:1 comparable, so I want to be careful about false equivalencies, but try to imagine this movie with a different marginalized group as its target. That might be more recognizably horrifying for you, if you’re struggling to understand fat people’s anger about The Whale!
On an entirely unrelated note about a person famous for being very thin, I will leave you with this excellent video of Jane Fonda being generally iconic:
‘She’s kidding! She’s kidding!'
Until next time,
Eleanor xoxo
Comments