Dropping bare acknowledgements

Great way to begin a newsletter: with the back of books

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe here)

The danger of staying too detached from mainstream culture is that it seems newly creepy when you do reattach. Say you only watch full ads any more at the cinema (finger jabbing at a phantom skip button of its own accord like the haunted limb in a horror film) — you’re only the more weirded out by media grown abstruse while you were looking away. Like what’s it even for, this ad with a supernaturally smug young woman and man draping red balloons through an open-plan, open-mouthed office, the soundtrack a breathy acoustic cover of Ce Ce Peniston’s ‘Finally’? HSBC? Bodyform? Oh, it’s for an app for losing your savings on the stock market. Say you try avoid TV news like it’s lead poisoning, but the next thing you know you’re at your parents having to watch a professional journalist plus grown-up illustrate Covid deaths using the visual metaphor of a birthday cake.

To avoid such spiritual jolts I gave in a few of months ago to a bestseller that’d been haunting me from bookshop to bookshop. A few months later, still a novella-length away from its final and 900th page, I hauled myself to the first and last for a browse. This felt like safer procrastination anyway than checking my…