Hello again,
Another short missive this week because I am tied up with various things, and ill!!! I seem to be most prone to getting sick when I am busy. What a life, eh? Hopefully it passes soon.
There is a line from a Nicole Flattery essay on Gwendoline Riley (which I would very much recommend reading in full) that I have been turning around in my head since I read it:
Be wary of people who advertise their strength of feeling.
I truly love Flattery’s writing, both fiction and essays. (Here is a recent short story you should read too.) She has a talent for seeing past the ways we are supposed to understand people and situations, and not engaging with certain accepted truisms.
Writing like this can be brutal in its honesty, but hers is balanced by being extraordinarily entertaining. In terms of humour (I can’t read an essay or a story of hers without laughing multiple times) and style. There are so many of these brilliant lines that have stuck with me for months after reading. That quality is simply too rare in writing now. Bring back great sentences, I say.
Anyway, back to the line in question:
Be wary of people who advertise their strength of feeling.
In Flattery’s essay this line referred to the father depicted in Riley’s My Phantoms. He is oppressive, domineering and ludicrous; forcing those around him to serve as an audience for his bizarre, self aggrandising displays. He pays no heed to emotional cues, such as disinterest or boredom, from anyone, while often trumpeting his own heightened emotional register. He is crying, he was devastated!, and so on and so on.
That line got me thinking about the way in which strength of feeling is used as a commodity in our culture. Public tears (and the relaying of tears, whether or not they happened) have considerable currency, as does a certain fashion of narration. A style characterised by flamboyant descriptions of behaviour which don’t cohere with reality as I observe it.
There is a kind of person who is given to using words or phrases like “petrifying”, “I broke down”, “terrified”, “I couldn’t cope”, etc often. Or they seem to have regular interactions with another person who “went crazy”. They tell stories in which the bare facts of a fairly ordinary situation are transformed, with a few flourishes, into a crisis of monumental proportions: They move into a new flat, it turns out to be on a noisy street, and so they “can’t sleep and are basically homeless”.
They habitually find themselves in very unusual social situations. Being shouted at with no provocation, for example. Shouting is common in films and TV but extremely rare in real life. When someone suddenly becomes aggressive in a social situation, the way it tends to go is they stand up to make themselves seem imposing, or they start pointing at you, if you are both already standing. They might mock you or repeat something you didn’t say back to you, trying to solicit a reaction. But shouting is rare. Don’t believe me? Watch next time 😉.
I still remember clearly a post I saw on social media a few years ago. The author described a night when they stayed in an Airbnb, heard some noises outside, couldn’t call their parents, and so, in their terror, lay poised on the ground with a knife, sobbing, for the entire night.
I found it baffling. I remember thinking: What? Why on earth would you do that?
But my sense, after much consideration, is that they probably didn’t. Really do it, I mean. And instead elected to describe it as such so their escapades would sound as sympathetic as possible.
This is, I think, why I have long found overt pronouncements of emotional intensity to be unnerving. They leave me with the sense that I am being clumsily manipulated into an impression that I might not reach if left to my own devices. Similarly to if I was reading a novel and the author described a certain character as a “big scary man” rather than demonstrating this to be the case.
I guess I feel more than a little fed up of hearing a story and knowing exactly how I’m supposed to feel about it.
And then, there is the plainly contradictory quality of consistently advertised strength of feeling: An extreme is definitionally something which does not happen all the time. The gravity of an outburst or hysterics is diminished with regularity, or it should be.
To put it another way: If someone is often announcing that they were moved to tears by this or that painting, say, or whenever they see a play. Does that mean they feel the power of art more strongly, as a kind of blunt and unspecific force? Or that the professed tears mean something else?
Till next week xxx
Some Things I Liked Recently:
I re read Star by Yukio Mishima while ill. Here is one of my favourite lines:
She boasted of her flaws as if they were assets, but Kayo would never tell you being ugly made her safe.
I have LOVED this young designer, Talia Byre, since I saw her graduate collection a few years ago. She is doing very cool and interesting things with wool and colour especially. I picked up a red cardigan at her old stock sale recently. I think this is a great way to buy high quality new clothes, but you do have to sort of *lie in wait*.
A beautiful book of poems, bandit country by James Conor Patterson. I am not going to quote from it because this medium does not support sophisticated formal arrangements… but here is some of his work.
It chronicles growing up in Newry at the tail end of, and just after, the Troubles. There is a lot of gossip, teen drinking, rule breaking, and great tongue in cheek humour. My favourite right now is “on meeting an influence at a book signing”.
This essay by Amy Larocca on Edward Enninful’s recent memoir and, more broadly, the descent of the fashion magazine in the internet age.
Since its inception in 1892, Vogue – not only British, but American and French Vogue (or, as it was called for many years, ‘Paris Vogue’, because it could hardly speak to the sad and provincial rest of France), and all the subsequent Vogues, of which there are now 24 varieties – has been the standard-bearer for mainstream ideas about how to look and behave. The inaugural issue announced on its cover that ‘the definite object [of this enterprise] is the establishment of a dignified authentic journal of society, fashion and the ceremonial side of life.’ If anyone complained that this mission hadn’t evolve much over time, the criticism was easily ignored: fashion magazines were supposed to be aspirational, concerned not with reality but a dream.