Let It Marinate

Or: Trust Your Inner Vintner

Dame Sophie’s Cultural Nibbles

If I didn’t open with the latest Barbie trailer, who even would I be? I wasn’t a doll kid growing up and even if I had been, Barbies were dolls non grata in my family, so The Barbie Movie is the most invested in Barbie culture I’ve ever been in my life. The memes it’s spawned are chef’s kiss! And as I write this, The Daily Beast’s Obsessed newsletter has just arrived and suggests that this is the last great meme. I hope that’s not true, and am very appreciative of the round-up Kevin Fallon’s piece provides. By all means, dear Dames Nationals, please send me other delightful iterations that you find in the wild. My favorites so far feature Formula 1 drivers (see: 2 Girls 1 Formula | Motorsport.com | Mercedes F1 team – so official!). I’m so tickled that this film even exists, and the meme fodder it’s generating is just the cherry on the sundae of my week.

Hugely influential record executive and professional good ear haver Seymour Stein died this week. If you love music but don’t obsessively read liner notes, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that he signed The Ramones (on a tip from his wife, who saw them at CBGB and urged him to check them out), Madonna, Talking Heads, and The Replacements, and that his label, Sire Records, was the US distributor for the Smiths, Depeche Mode, and Madness, among many others. Some highlights worth sharing:

• His obituary in the NYT (a gift link!) is both illuminating and entertaining

• Stein was a co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and appeared twice on the good & great podcast, Who Cares About The Rock Hall? Hosts Joe Kwaczala and Kristen Studdard are re-airing those episodes in his honor. 

• Belle and Sebastian’s song, in which Stein plays the titular role, is lovely, and earned a bit of notoriety in High Fidelity as the “sad bastard” song Barry literally throws across the room to make way for his obnoxious, yet perfect deployment of “Walkin’ on Sunshine”. (I’m also very fond of this solo performance by the song’s writer, Stevie Jackson) 

A trailer for political thriller/domestic drama The Diplomat dropped this week, and it looks very promising. Keri Russell merging her appallingly underrated comedy chops and international relations-related acting expertise from her six seasons on The Americans? In a show created by Deborah Cahn, who’s got a real knack for screwball comedy-style quippy dialogue in a high political stakes context and complicated, messy female protagonists, thanks to years of experience writing and producing shows like The West Wing, Homeland, and Grey’s Anatomy? Yes, please! The series drops on Netflix on April 20. 

And finally, here are some notebooks and reminder thingies that I’m enjoying using and am even finding materially helpful in my day-to-day worklife and life-life.

• This weekly dashboard: if I don’t write down my tasks, preferably organized by theme and/or urgency, I will not remember to do them. This tool helps me plan things out in advance, and the number of sheets available makes it easy for me to use each sheet for two days in particularly busy weeks. I use the ring-bound version linked above, which I slightly prefer to the tear-off pad version, because I like to be able to refer back to past weeks’ dashboards. 

• Ink + Volt has also brought the Logical Prime notebook into my life. The name makes me think it’s a Transformer of some kind, an office supply cousin of Optimus Prime, maybe? The paper is lightweight and smooth, but substantive – no bleed-through with pen ink for me so far. It’s available in a variety of cover colors and page set-ups, in several international sizes. I bought two in B5 after consulting this helpful chart that explains A & B sizes. 

• Write Notepads & Co’s Pocket Ledger is so handy that I recently bought three. I keep one on the coffee table to jot down what shows & movies I’m watching (easier to update than a spreadsheet!) and one in my purse for Harriet The Spy moments, whenever they may strike. The key to the purse ledger is remembering that I have it, something I can’t guarantee my brain will do, but you gotta start somewhere!

You know this isn’t my handwriting, because it’s legible to others (my 7th grade Language Arts teacher used to grade our essays on content, mechanics, and handwriting. That last grade always went pretty poorly for me, but she was also the first teacher to tell me I had a distinctive writing voice and that I should hone it, so all’s well that ends well. Thanks, Mrs. Lyons!)

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Dame Margaret on Respecting Your Cultural Seasons

There are lots of reasons we must sometimes put books on ice.

I have a long list of cultural items with which I have not yet engaged but with which I somehow know in my bones I will eventually become obsessed. There are authors, musicians, directors, performers etc. that I can just feel vibrating on my frequency before I’ve ever consumed with their work, or ones that have been recommended to me by someone whose taste I trust right down to the ground, whose work I nevertheless delay in consuming. It’s never because I doubt the enjoyment in store for me, although some have occasionally let me down (I really thought I was going to love About Time but it actually made me very angry). No— I delay my consumption because I want to begin at a moment when I can really savor it. It’s as if I’m building a pop culture hope chest for myself— I do not have world enough and time for Barbara Pym today, but someday? The timing will be just right, and I’ll pick up one of her books, and she’ll suddenly become my entire personality.

This has recently happened to me with the Phyllis Rose book Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. I’ve been aware of this book since I was 19, when I would have begun hearing about it in the 19th century literature classes that made up the backbone of my BA in English. As the title suggests, it’s a close look at five Victorian marriages, four of which are absolutely disastrous, examining them as a means of deciphering what marriage represented, both to the Victorians and to ourselves. Rose is an exceptional writer and researcher. She both manages to find the very juiciest plums in all her subjects’ writing and to connect these revealing tidbits with beautifully worded and highly insightful commentary. Every three pages, I feel like I’m finding paragraphs I need to photograph and send to friends, whether they be direct quotes from the Rose’s subjects (like Thomas Carlyle referring to London socialists as “friends of the species" who, despite their lofty goals for humanity writ large, have homes which are always “little Hells of improvidence, discord, unreason”), or a witticism of Rose’s own invention (like saying, of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Victorian marriage 3/5: “He invented a role for her which she both liked in theory (she liked the idea of equality) and in practice (she liked the feel of mastery).”) TELL ME those quotes aren’t SOLID GOLD. Haley Mlotek lays out its quality perfectly in her letter of recommendation from 2018.

Despite this newfound obsession, the reason I raise the subject is to highlight the fact that my secondhand copy of this book has sat on my book shelf for at least seven years before I ever cracked the spine. I knew I would love it. As Haley mentions in her essay, Nora Ephron liked to read it once every 4-5 years. Of course it would be perfect. But I think my patience was an act of care, not of neglect. Art is never just about the innate quality of the object beheld. Its impact is the result of a conversation between the art and the audience, even when the audience is your single solitary self. So consider my portion of this newsletter an impassioned plea not only to add Parallel Lives to your TBR pile, but also to wait until your hand simply itches for it to begin reading, no matter how many years of seeming neglect this process entails. There is a season for everything and art is no different. Free yourself from The Discourse and let yourself practice intuitive cultural consumption. You’re going to be so much happier for it, I promise.

[Brief moment of editorial squee from Dame Sophie, who is so thrilled that Dame Margaret has become a Parallel Lives devotée!!! Like a good cup of tea or coffee, these things have to steep to achieve full flavorfulness and potency!]

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And that’s all from us this week, folks! We hope that those of you celebrating major, spring-based religious or cultural holidays have the loveliest imaginable version of whichever you observe.

XOXO/Dames Margaret & Sophie