this week in links

[sea_changed]

A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions

I recently called a senior editor at a New York publishing company to discuss the experience of working with Mallory. “My God,” the editor said, with a laugh. “I knew I’d get this call. I didn’t know if it would be you or the F.B.I.”

A bizarre account of an editor and author who spent years spinning lies about himself in order to gain and maintain success. You begin reading with a sort of car crash-watching voyeuristic pleasure, though at some point that was replaced for me with only a vague ill feeling. I found it very much worth reading, however: I had the thought at one point that I wouldn't be at all surprised that the story itself was a sort of tromp l'oeil piece that was itself a fiction, which is to say it's both very well-told and high in mindfuckery.

If it sounds like a place made up in a lazy, trashy novel set in the English countryside, it’s almost definitely a real English village.

I found this Twitter thread again, and can only beg you to read it; I have to stop after every third or forth one and just wheeze for a while.

Pavlova’s Shoes, Nijinsky’s Diary, and Other Dance Treasures From the Public Library

Much here is great, but it's really the titular shoes that I'm linking this for: they're both lovely and fascinating (the stitching!).

Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!

I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.

Though I'm always a bit leery of the "man of his time" argument--there were a non-zero number of unprejudiced people people at any given time in the past, not least of all the people the prejudice was against--the author of this article makes several prescient points that I had already been thinking about a lot recently. The most significant is, I think, the phone parable, which is something I grapple with a lot when looking at the past. There are so many things I find abhorrent about people's behavior and what there were willing to turn a blind eye to in order to live their own lives in comfort, but I'm also painfully aware that if a historian in the future happens to turn their gaze to my life and my choices, they certainly wouldn't find me blameless of comparable avoidances (at the very least, though likely active behaviors as well, much as I try to avoid them). I think realizing this, at least for me, has both increased my historical empathy--though certainly not erased my ability to hold historical figures accountable for their actions, or inactions--and forced me to re-evaluate and begin to try and change the way I live my life in the present.

And on that heavy note, let me present to you all a Very Fine Dress:



It's not so much a dress as a confection, really, which is how I prefer my French gowns.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

I found this Twitter thread again, and can only beg you to read it; I have to stop after every third or forth one and just wheeze for a while.

I love TheMERL so very much.

[sea_changed]

Whoever does their social media is genius.

[rachelmanija]

I know someone who met the liar dude! Sadly it was in a context where she was mostly speaking with someone else, so she couldn't remember if he'd lied to her or not. I'm guessing he did not tell her about any of his fake deadly illnesses because she'd have probably remembered that.

[sea_changed]

God, that's wild. So many people seem to know him/know of him, and the fact that he did this so successfully for so many years is somewhat terrifying.

[felinejumper]

That MERL thread is *perfect*.

More seriously, I really like that Morton article & to your point about historical empathy:
I think realizing this, at least for me, has both increased my historical empathy--though certainly not erased my ability to hold historical figures accountable for their actions, or inactions--and forced me to re-evaluate and begin to try and change the way I live my life in the present.
I both really like that phrasing of "historical empathy". I think for me historical empathy has necessarily also increased my present-day empathy for both self & others in a way directly contradictory to, uh, *waves vaguely* call out culture; or said differently, increased my ability/desire to think about people as complex actors with good and bad traits. Anyway, it was a good article to read + I also enjoyed your brief musings on it, thank you!

[sea_changed]

"I think for me historical empathy has necessarily also increased my present-day empathy for both self & others"--I agree with this entirely. I think, at its best, history allows us to understand the humanity of people in the past and through that understand the humanity of all people, period, past and present. History as a great humanist exercise, basically, is what I'm all about.