For your stray attention this weekend…

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Hello,

Welcome to the first Sunday edition of Stray Attention! 

It will arrive every other week with a few suggestions for your reading and listening pleasure, based on what’s been capturing my stray attention lately. 

I’ve been getting into Sarah Wilson’s Wild podcast, and her newsletter, This Is Precious, is full of great things. This week, she quoted Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between bullshitting and lying: ‘Liars actively consider the truth when they conceal it… Bullshitters, on the other hand, completely disregard the truth.’ I wish that distinction didn’t feel so relevant to our current age. (I’m in Sarah’s latest podcast episode.)

A wonderful new diversion is Simon Carr’s substack, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is an closely-observed, week-by-week commentary on the Hieronymous Bosch painting of the same name. More of this sort of thing, please!

‘It’s the 1990s. You’re a young woman, and you’ve got something to say.’ Ah, the glorious nostalgia of this piece by Ashawnta Jackson on Riot Grrrrl and its zine culture (it did make me grateful for the internet, though).

Timothy Hampton explores the long history of being told to ‘cheer up’ - and wonders if it isn’t such a bad thing.

If you haven’t seen this online already, you might need to consider ditching your current friends and finding new ones, but Joni Mitchell’s joyful surprise performance at the Newport Folk Festival might just be the emotional release you need today.

Dr Larry Ward is always wonderful on the embodied trauma of race, and this interview on For The Wild is really worth a listen.

I’ve also been listening to Annie Macmanus’s Changes (the Lady Unchained and Grace Dent episodes are both incredible for different reasons), Eric Garcia sharing the history of eugenics on You’re Wrong About, and the audiobook of Sarah Krasnostein’s The Believer: encounters with love, death and faith, which is extraordinary and definitely worth your time - think Lisa Taddeo meets Jon Ronson. 

What do I do while I’m listening to all this stuff? Why, thank you for asking. I’ve been completing this Marvel jigsaw puzzle, after it was abandoned by Bert. When I got to the end, I realised there were four pieces missing, although one of them was stuck to the sole of my foot.

I also been lucky enough to read two excellent proofs - get your pre-orders in early! Cariad Lloyd’s You Are Not Alone is an ultra-readable, heartfelt exploration of what grief really feels like, out 19th January. Leah Hazard’s Womb, is an erudite, compassionate, feminist af biography of that most troublesome organ - out 2nd March 2023.

Right, I’m off to explore New York city… 

See you soon,

Katherine x

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