What is a dandy to do?

On late capitalism, unboxing videos, The Sound of Music and Jonathan Franzen

Hello my fellow productive economic units!*

How are you all today? Enjoying late capitalism? Personally, I have some doubts about it. I mean, it is, relatively speaking, providing me with a pretty good life, but sometimes I feel like I’m one of the citizens of the Capitol in the Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ dystopian YA trilogy in which people of the ruling social group dress up like idiot dandies and party all day and all night while outside the Capitol people live lives of grinding poverty and oppression. As a middle class white person in Australia whose current job involves sitting around all day trying to decide what kind of hijinks my non-existent characters can get up to in order to entertain my as-yet-mostly-non-existent readers, I am afraid that I have 100% become one of the idiot dandies. I don’t feel entirely good about it, but what is a dandy to do? A dandy is not good at overthrowing the social order and restructuring our entire economic system! A dandy is very clumsy and cannot be trusted with a bayonet!

Me, storming the barricades

Anyway, this dandy deals with her cognitive dissonance by donating to Oxfam, writing cross letters and signing a lot of online petitions. You do what you can, I guess?

*Yes, thanks, I am aware that describing myself a as a ‘productive economic unit’ might be a bit of a stretch given that I am currently self-employed and not visibly producing much other than this free fortnightly newsletter, but on the other hand if you count dumb jokes as part of the GDP then I am surely one of the nation’s most valuable assets.

Book news

In kind of exciting news, last week I finally laid hands on my actual book!

Frankenstein and his monster

I posted this photo on Instagram, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do a ‘here’s my new book!’ unboxing video. Apologies to my fellow authors, but I just think the genre is a little tired. We writers need to start mixing it up a little by injecting some variety or suspense—like, instead of the box always being full of our newly published books, it might be fun if it were sometimes full of rats, or dildos, or Gwynneth Paltrow’s head.

This is the kind of dramatic tension I’m looking for

Keep ‘em guessing, you know?

In other book news, my audiobook publisher, Wavesound, sent me a couple of auditions over the weekend in which the actors read out a particularly nutty part of my book. It was kind strange but also thrilling to hear these words of mine read out and interpreted by other people. I found myself laughing at the jokes as though I had never heard them before (NB laughing at your own jokes is just basic self-care, I highly recommend it) and the actors did a brilliant job making sense of my ridiculous dialogue—it made me wish I had an actor on hand at all times to dub over my real-life dialogue, to imbue all the nonsense that comes outta my mouth with meaning and significance. Anyway, it was all very exciting and I can’t wait to hear the final thing!

Television

Oh, Vanderpump Rules, will you ever release me? How many hours have I spent in your cocaine-dusted, vodka-damp, adultery-scented arms these last months? Every night, my partner and I put our kids to bed, then settle in on the couch to begin our real work: observing a pack of fame-hungry Californians in their natural habitat in order to decide once and for all which of these terrible people should be finally crowned The Worst Person Alive (although admittedly I can’t really take this competition completely seriously now that Jax Taylor is no longer on the show). We are nearing the end of our journey—we have begun season 10—and soon will be free of VDPR’s python-like stranglehold on our evenings. I am both dreading and looking forward to the day when it is all over, when the heady haze of LA smog lifts and and our real lives can come back into focus—ie, when we can catch up on all the other shows that are sitting in the waiting room, tapping their toes impatiently, demanding to be watched. First on my list are Deadloch and Only Murders in the Building, but please let me know if there have been any other amazing (or amazingly bad) recent shows that I should rush out and watch immediately.

One other thing we did manage to watch recently was The Sound of Music. Interestingly, although I must have seen this movie at least four or five times before, this time I noticed a whole new side to it that I never previously clocked. Basically, even though it presents as wholesome family entertainment about a troupe of singing children standing up to the Nazis, turns out The Sound of Music is also…a festival of kink.

Exhibit A: the main character is a horny nun

When you love twirling and making out with your domineering older boss even more than you love Jesus #nunproblems

Exhibit B: Captain Von Trapp’s whole vibe

This is also how I introduce myself to new employees/sex partners

Exhibit C: Captain Von Trapp and this riding crop:

He and the Baroness were definitely using this for purposes unrelated to horse sports

Exhibit D: This whole scene about being 16 and requiring someone older and wiser to tell you what to do

It’s not even barely legal

Exhibit E: This sexy puppet

The guy who designed this is now living in a basement and making love to an AI sex robot

Look, I’m not saying that the movie needs to be shown on the Adults Only channel or banned in Qatar, but I am saying that, underneath ‘raindrops on roses’ and ‘whiskers on kittens’, someone at 20th Century Fox definitely wrote ‘leather night at the BDSM club’ on their list of favourite things.

Books

On the recommendation of Gina Perry (whose debut novel, My Father The Whale, I recently read and loved: a tender and nuanced story about a young girl’s complicated relationship with her father), I just listened to the audiobook of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I have read The Corrections twice before—once when it came out, and once a few years later when I was in San Francisco for a few months with nothing to do and I had enormous amounts of time on my hands. I was crazy about the book in my twenties, just completely in love, and I was a little hesitant about re-reading it now. I worried that it might not read as well in this post-me-too era, and I think my memory of it was a little coloured by the anti-Franzen sentiment that has been swimming around the internet since 2010 (Vox has a good summary of the various dramas associated with him here).

Here is Jonathan Franzen getting into some biffo with Michael Chabon on The Simpsons. Can you imagine this happening on Australian TV? Because I really want to see Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas doing a joint guest appearance on Neighbours

I am relieved to report that I am still crazy about it. His writing is so funny and wise, so emotionally generous. He is terribly loving towards his extremely flawed characters. The novel focuses on the Lambert family: two elderly midwesterners, Alfred and Enid, and their three grown-up children, Chip, Gary and Denise, all of whom emerge as intensely specific and recognisable people. They are all pretty fucked up, and I found myself vacillating between wanting to slap them and wanting to give them a consoling hug. The book is sometimes longwinded and digressive, but for me the writing is so good that I don’t care. It’s not particularly flashy, or poetic, but it has perfect rhythm and incredible emotional clarity, and it gives you a profound sense of what it’s like to be the characters he’s writing about. It’s rare to read something that feels so honest, so alive, and so revealing of human nature.

It’s true that some of his writing about women and feminism does seem a little off—and yet it’s also true that he writes great, memorable female characters, and I don’t get the sense that he hates women or just isn’t interested in them as people. Anyway, if the internet blather has convinced you he is just a self-aggrandising misogynist, I would recommend reading him anyway and making up your own mind.

Other things

Some other things I have enjoyed recently inlude:

• This piece in KYD critiquing the fetishisation of sadness in ‘Sad Girl’ books and music. I’m not wholly convinced that the Sad Girl era is on the way out, but I thought it made some good points and I was relieved as I was reading it that my own book is not really a Sad Girl Novel (it’s more of a Drunk Mom Novel).

• Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writing fiction, which notably include ‘be a sadist’ (ie, make awful things happen to your characters).

• Whatever this is.

Until next time,

Eleanor xx