When beauty becomes mandatory, it ceases to be about fun, about play. Dressing up, playing with gender roles, doing your braids badly in the mirror, and eating half your mother’s lipstick in an attempt to get it on your face: Do you remember when that used to be fun? And do you remember when the fun stopped? Like any game, the woman game stops being fun when you start playing to win, especially if you’ve got no choice: Win or be ridiculed, win or become invisible, dismissed — disturbed.

Laurie Penny, “Model Behavior”

Originally published in The New Inquiry No. 4: Beauty. Support The New Inquiry. Subscribe today.

I want to emphasize that what I really got out of this is a sense that nothing I was doing defended my interests very much. I was acting against my hopes. I couldn’t distance myself from the story I believed was true.

imp kerr: This, too, is for the best

Aaron Bady on the shortlist for the Caine Prize for African Writing

Sheila Heti interviewed by Emily Keeler

When I was in college, the hot new face belonged to an actress named Jennifer Aniston, who, at age 25, had found herself with the coveted Rachel haircut and a hit TV show. Thirteen years after my graduation, who do I see on magazine covers? A 43-year-old Jennifer Aniston. And a 39-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow, 36-year-old Kate Winslet, 42-year-old Jennifer Lopez, 42-year-old Tina Fey, and 36-year-old Reese Witherspoon—all of whom were big or rapidly on their way there when they, and I, were in our 20s. Add to that the 38-year-old Elizabeth Banks, 33-year-old Rachel McAdams, 32-year-old Zooey Deschanel, 33-year-old Kate Hudson, 38-year-old Heidi Klum, 37-year-old Christina Hendricks, and 36-year-old Angelina Jolie, and it gets harder and harder to believe that Hollywood truly does fetishize youth as much as we say it does. Yes, there will always be the 18-year-old Dakotas and 22-year-old Kristens, but we’re in an unprecedented age of mature women being construed as alluring in the mainstream press. Julianne Moore is 51. Want to know who else was 51? Rue McClanahan, when The Golden Girls first aired. 

The Beheld on what 36 looks like

What all this crying and loneliness in the Bee Gees’ music promises is that there is no consolation in denying it, and no point in trying to come up with arch ways of disguising it or revealing it, as if that would make sadness more tractable. 

Rob Horning on the Bee Gees

Have you seen the New Aesthetic? Everyone in the Twittersphere was talking about it. Depending on whom you ask, it was a “shareable concept,” (James Bridle) a “theory object,” (Bruce Sterling) and a “weird, hot, movement” (Ian Bogost). Or simply “things James Bridle posts to his Tumblr,” as Bogost quips — and to which we might add, “which got really popular really fast and I wish I knew what it actually was.” Bridle’s Tumblr became a SXSW talk in March 2012. And then a week later, Bruce Sterling wrote a 5,000-word opus on the New Aesthetic for Wired. As if to a younger sibling, praising and cautioning in equal measures, he contextualized the New Aesthetic as not just a Tumblred accumulation but the art movement 21st century creatives had desperately been waiting for. The essay was a flash point, prompting a flood of responses. What better empyrean spark than the convergence of SXSW and, as he describes himself on his Twitter bio, “one of the better known Bruce Sterlings”?
 

Rahel Aima, ”Desiring Machines”

When I spoke to Heti at her apartment in Toronto to talk about the novel, I couldn’t help but wonder if by including her friends in the book she was directing their fate, essaying to produce their lives.

SH: No, that never occurred to me. Because the book all took place right now, so there’s no future element. It’s just because it was difficult. It’s like if you’ve had a difficult thing in a relationship, you don’t go and bring it up all the time. It was a big enough thing in all of our lives that to talk about it would make it even bigger. I mean, Sholem was down in Austin, Texas, and a guy was like “Are you the Sholem in Sheila Heti’s book?” So that was kind of glamorous for him. But that was the only time we’ve talked about the book in the last year. The whole thing takes place in the past, and because I see such a difference between my friends and the characters I don’t think it’s about writing their fate. It’s just the characters based on them.

EMK: Do you get sick of answering that question?

SH: No, I think it’s a fair question, and even if I did try 100 percent to depict them as they are, still a person’s such a different thing from words in a book. You can’t really ever think that that’s a person.

Emily Keeler interviews Sheila Heti

Painting: Margaux Williamson, House for a Head, a portrait of Sheila Heti

Saying The Middle Stories are sad is like saying life is sad: true, but not true enough. It would be easy to categorize the storiesas depressive twee, the kind of book that goes to the Farmer’s Market because it doesn’t know what else to do. Instead, these bits are punctuated fragments of an unbounded hopelessness, without the reassuring container of conventional narrative. Their characters don’t have the narrowing traits that tell the reader, “Don’t worry, this is about someone else.” They’re stripped down for maximum impact. Heti’s expansive shorts recall Thomas Bernhard inThe Voice Imitator or Raymond Carver in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? more than David Foster Wallace in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or Eggers in How We Are Hungry. In Heti’s stories, there’s little consolation in life’s little victories; they’re merely the stitching of life’s mesh of voids and disappointments. There’s no morbid self-satisfaction in authorial artifice, only the unceasing approach of the unavoidable. When you wink into the abyss, Heti offers, it doesn’t wink back.

Intellectual distinction isn’t everything, it’s true. But things are amiss in other areas as well: sociability and trust, for example. “During the last third of the twentieth century,” according to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, “all forms of social capital fell off precipitously.” Tens of thousands of community groups – church social and charitable groups, union halls, civic clubs, bridge clubs, and yes, bowling leagues — disappeared; by Putnam’s estimate, one-third of our social infrastructure vanished in these years. Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent; card parties declined 50 percent; Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent. Over a five-year period in the 1990s, reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent — admittedly an odd, but probably not an insignificant, indicator of declining social capital.

George Scialabba, “How Bad Is It?”

Shines Like Gold, Triple Decker Weekly

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

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