TLDS September Culture Klatsch
Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.
David Swanson: It’s the last Sunday of the month, so it’s time to talk culture. The last time we spoke you mentioned rereading Jane Eyre. Are you still on that kick?
Talia Lavin: Unbelievably so. I'm watching all the color film adaptations, too (with all respect to Orson Welles, his Rochester has the worst English accent I've ever heard). The prosaic reason is I'm horny. But it's also a really fascinating book. And deeply problematic and literally generated the madwoman in the attic trope. And racist and lightly antisemitic. But so sexy.
DS: Poor Bertha.
TL: So far my favorite Jane is Mia Wasikowska from 2011 and my favorite Rochester is William Hurt from 1996, but I still have the various mini series to explore. My mental health isn't great right now and that sweet Brontë prose is a very nice escape. What are you up to culture-wise?
DS: This week I’ve been reading a lot of New York history—specifically stuff about political corruption. There’s so much of it! And so much of it was worse than the stuff that Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with. Not to downplay his corruption. But it’s a topic I got really into when I was immersed in the Village Voice archives.
TL: Say more! Anything juicy?
DS: Tammany Hall is the primary through-line for most of this history, but some of the post-Tammany stuff in the seventies and eighties is pretty shocking. No one talks about Donald Manes these days, but his story was bananas. He was the Queens borough president, and was caught up in a major corruption scandal. He faked his own kidnapping, was hospitalized, and then when he got out, he took his own life. I think it inspired the pilot episode of Law & Order. Usually the municipal corruption is strictly local, but Adams seems to have gone international. What was the joke you tweeted?
TL: “Corrupt New York politicians used to give out turkeys. Now they are in the pay of Turkey.” We used to be a society, David. Why is New York addicted to shitty mayors??
DS: It goes a lot deeper than the mayor’s office, but one thing I’ll say is that New York’s mayors are like Tolstoy’s unhappy families: they’re all shitty in their own ways. For instance, I don’t know that Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg, or DiBlasio were corrupt. They were just overwhelmed, fascistic, autocratic, ineffectual, etc. Each shitty in his own way. Luckily, we’ll have a new, better mayor soon. I hope.
TL: I'm not sure. Adams might barricade himself in Gracie Mansion
DS: There have been a few that fled overseas. Or tried to, anyway.
TL: Who?!
DS: Well, Boss Tweed, but he wasn’t mayor, he just controlled the city. He hightailed it to Spain, and was discovered there working as seaman. I believe both Jimmy Walker and William O’Dwyer took off in the midst of corruption scandals. Maybe I’ll do one of those archival deep dives. There’s some fascinating stuff that feels very relevant to the current news cycle. Speaking of which, weren’t you texting J.D. Vance recently?
TL: Yeah this is way more interesting than anything I've been doing. Including lamely prank texting J.D. Vance about eels. I've been a little depressed I guess. What a shock. I actually like autumn I'm just very mentally ill.
DS: In my experience with mental illness, late winter/early spring is the season of mania, late summer/early fall is depression. But I otherwise love autumn too. The temperature is great, I love the leaves turning, and as a sports fan, this time of year is like the holidays. Maybe you’ve got a little pre-publication anxiety. Or are you just excited?
TL: I just want it to happen already!!!!! I've been involved with this book for three years. Waiting for months, trying to drum up interest. Election dread commingled with dread that this will be a second book flop. Anyway, I found this quote from Jane Eyre romantic.
“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat-your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive.”
Of course, he is explaining why he hates his wife—it's not because she's mad, it's because she was a slut first! And a drunkard. The slut mortality rate in nineteenth century novels is 100%. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina etc.
DS: Hester Prynne. Fantine. I’m trying to think of an exception.
TL: There were probably some in the penny dreadfuls. But yeah lots of “Death By Sex” situations. Many such cases. It's a bit grim to be living in a time when a lot of politicians want to return to that moral milieu.
DS: That’s why we need things like romantic novels and sports and television to distract us. And if you’re look for a television distraction, both Slow Horses and Industry have me addicted at the moment.
TL: Don’t sleep on TV's most fiendish and beautiful TV quiz show, Only Connect, which is so nerdy its title is literally an E.M. Forster quote. It's a lateral thinking quiz and it's the best.
DS: I’m just waiting for The Bachelor ripoff, Viewer, I Married Him. E.M. Forster makes me think of A Room With A View, which makes me think of Dame Maggie Smith. Rest in peace.
TL: ”Only Connect” is a quote from that novel! Oh wait no it's from Howards End:
“She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”
DS: He wrote a lot of books that made lovely movies that my lovely mother adores.
TL: Merchant Ivory forever. Also, it was written in 1910, so Helena Bonham Carter's character in Howards End gets extramaritally pregnant but doesn't die.
DS: Helena Bonham Carter has a face from the past. Perfect for costume dramas.
TL: Isn't it funny how some people have "modern faces" and others look like they could be chilling in 1860? You have a modern face, I think, despite being related to half the thanes of Scotland.
DS: Thanks? I’ve been thinking a lot about period-appropriate faces. Recently I was watching Mary Queen of Scots, with Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth I, and they have faces from two different eras. Saoirse looks right, but Margot—brilliant actor though she is—has a 21st century face. Chappell Roan, on the other hand, looks like she should be painted by a Renaissance master.
TL: That glorious hair! Titian would be in raptures.
DS: I just hope she gets the rest she needs. She’s been under a lot of pressure, and deserves a break.
TL: I don't think she did anything wrong. People are just focusing their ambient dread at anything above the parapet.
DS: That glorious red hair makes for an awfully bright target. But hey, swords gals gotta stick together, right?
TL: Yeah. We do. And she made plate armor cool again so I feel very defensive of her. And Moo Deng, another queen people are gawping at too aggressively, as SNL pointed out last night.
DS: Plate armor has never not been cool. Although I’m more of a mail man, myself. A mailman. I would love a chainmail hoody. Seems a lot more comfy than plate armor.
TL: Yeah but consider this: chicks look really hot in full plate armor. Most of the soldiers wore like toughened leather anyway. It was just the knights in fancy metals. Speaking of knights and depression: A Knight's Tale is delightful and medievalists, weirdly, all love it. It's a sports movie! And it made me very happy to watch.
DS: I just rewatched it last week. Its history is dubious, but it’s a lot of fun. I may have said this before, but there’s been a dearth of High Medieval popular culture. Lots of dark ages, and lots of Tudors and Renaissance, but not enough in between. A Knight’s Tale is an exception.
TL: Medievalists like it because it doesn't have Sad Plague Filter on it. People had fun and sex in the Middle Ages!
DS: That’s why The Adventure of Robin Hood is the best. No one had more fun or more sex than Errol Flynn.
TL: In A Knight’s Tale, Paul Bettany's Geoffrey Chaucer is so charming I can even forgive him for spreading blood libel.
DS: Bettany has a versatile face that can work in the past or present. Shannyn Sossamon on the other hand: 21st Century Face.
TL: I think I have peasant face. Shtetl face. I could be a minor Isaac Babel character who dies tragically. When I'm out of my Eyre rut and back to the Russian Civil War I'm going to reread Red Cavalry. One of the best books of all time.
DS: Does that qualify as research for your historical novel? Also, I don’t know if I have a shtetl face, but I did play Tevye in junior high.
TL: Everything is research! But especially reading fiction from the time period. And you don't have shtetl face. You have "appearing in a Nick Hornby novel adaptation" face.
DS: Yeah. Record store face. That tracks. When I lived in Nepal, my friends all said I looked like Leonardo DiCaprio, which I assure you I absolutely did not. But I was a blond American, and this was over two decades ago. Incidentally, I don’t know if you’ve been following the news out of Nepal, but I really hope they’re all safe with the floods. And I hope everyone is safe in North Carolina and Tennessee floods. And in the European floods. There are entirely too many floods. Too much of everything. Too much muchness.
TL: We're fiddling while Rome floods, aren't we? Still, there has to be some joy, somewhere. Otherwise where do you get strength for the struggle?
DS: Reading about the people in the past who overcame their struggles. That’s why I find reading history so comforting. Humanity has been through some shit. But now we can have oranges every day!
TL: As I wrote in the last column, "We live now in a bountiful and perilous world—daily oranges and floods."
