Five Fine Things on a Thursday...

a regular segment in which I inflict my taste on you dear reader

1. Smelling! the roses a cliche but one of the good ones. On my street one of the fancier houses has the most amazing rose front-garden and the pink roses are absolutely pungent. Every time I walk past them I do genuinely stop to smell the roses. They smell like Turkish delight and to be honest they’re a bit much; they bring to mind Uncle Monty’s (Richard Griffith’s) monologue, from classic comedy Withnail and I, in which he expounds upon his preference for vegetables over flowers, asserting that flowers ‘are essentially tarts…prostitutes for the bees’. Well, these little overpowering tarts do improve my day while also acting as a little warning that autumn is coming, time is passing and by next month, or October at the latest, I won’t be able to enjoy their stink.

2. Reading! Talking of tarts I read Eve Babitz’s novella L.A. Woman last autumn but have been thinking of it again recently, probably because of the heat. As Good Reads says this is a story set to a backdrop of ‘pink sunsets’ and ‘palm trees’ and is focused on a young women gone wild in sixties Los Angeles, she is the original L.A. Woman of the Jim Morrison song, (and yes Babitz did sleep with Jim). The book is fast-paced, hedonistic, and not for everyone, but I loved it!

3. Exploring! Poeticious, a cool website that a student introduced me to. I usually stick to Poetry Foundation which is also very good but I like this (new to me) site, it’s a bit scrappier, it (often) matches up poems with some striking art and it feels a bit more serendipitous in the way the poems are laid out- you never know what, or who, you might come across!

4. Listening! to neo-outlaw country musician Sturgill Simpson’s song Mark Art Not Friends, a 2020 release and certainly one with a sentiment that aligned with COVID. It’s long, weird, poignant and brilliant. Note: it doesn’t matter if you are not typically a country music fan, he’s terribly avant-garde.

5. Watching! Delaney Rowe on Instagram (or TikTok, if you’re young). I realise recommending an IG account might not seem very highbrow but watching several of her few minute skits in a row is better than a lot of recent full-length films out there IMO, Rowe offers an ingenious skewering of Hollywood and Indie film and TV tropes alike. The Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Insufferable Indie Lead and various iterations of powerful women as written by men on film are amongst my favourites.

Thank you for reading, as always, and if you like this newsletter then please do forward it along to a like-minded friend, or even a not like-minded enemy!

I appreciate it and please do feel free to tell me your own current obsessions, stimulants and cultural, or indeed natural, interests below. Like it says ‘Leave a comment’….

Love,

Emma x o x o