it's friday the 13th

Devon Aoki is holding a gun to my head while smoking a cigarette and demanding I write about A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor. As I’m really bad at saying no, and my life is on the line, I acquiesced.*

Before getting into the novel, we need to take a second to talk about Elizabeth Mavor. This author is famous for writing about women who transcend societal roles. Her best-known work is a biography on the cross-dressing Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. The duo left their families and moved to Wales where they lived together and did whatever they wanted. Sounds great and kind of helps to explain how the novel in question ends.

A Green Equinox is a novel of its time as the characters hail from Britain’s upper-middle class. We’ve got our protagonist Hero and her lover Hugh. Both of them are obsessed with the past. Their dour constitutions are contrasted with Hugh’s wifey, Belle. She is involved in the community, a do-gooder, and is a bit of a philistine, which is a mean thing to say but that’s how her husband describes her! The fourth character in this novel is the matriarch Kate Shafto whose zest for life and skill at everything she does emasculates her whiney son.

Spanning six months, the novel quickly whisks our protagonist from one paramour to another. Amidst the romantic chaos she also experiences some community-led activism, a car crash, a drowning, and even a plague. Things move fast and Mavor does not suffocate the reader with specifics though the ornate prose might just bog you down.

Within this world, a tight-knit English community in flux, at odds with the summer heat and an outbreak of typhoid, our characters might be having affairs but really their trysts are an opportunity for them to ruminate on gender roles, love, and their nostalgia for the past.****

It’s a bit hard to follow some of the arguments Mavor is making. She’s playing with allegory and there is something a little otherworldly about the novel. And though Hero may be our protagonist, during her illness ‘odyssey’ she reveals to an analyst that her love of Belle might stem from her mother wound, the real ‘hero’ of the story is Kate Shafto. I believe the below helps one see why that is:

Hugh is kind of deplorable with his old-fashioned views, telling his mother on page 102:

In the same conversation, Hugh demands his mother admit that she wishes she were a man. His mother, a woman who tells Hero that she took to shooting and donning men’s clothes while in India, is positive she never wished to be a man. Instead, she says, “I wish I’d been God!”

Read A Green Equinox if you're a fan of: Greek mythology, the excess and frivolity of the Rococo movement, posh British people moping about and living lives of leisure, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and cheeky ménaga à quatre.

Fun Things I Learned this Week:

• In the wake of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, in 1989, Doris Lessing, the author of The Golden Notebook and a Nobel Prize recipient, let Rushdie know she was on his side, even though she didn’t like the book.

• Angela Carter:

  • Had a real love for style and glamour

  • She also left her first husband to explore the world! After winning the Somerset Maugham award, which stipulates you have to use the money for travel, she went to Japan where she worked on her craft, explored the country and had two relationships with younger men.**

  • Upon returning from Japan, she struggled in London and then her father helped her buy a house in Bath.

  • At that house in Bath, Carter was working away in her abode when she ran across the street to talk to the builder who was working on a house in the neighborhood. She asked the man to help with a dire plumbing issue. The man, Mark Pearce, was 15 years her junior, would become her life partner. <3 age gap relationships!

• Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Arthur Cinader, the founder of J. Crew, were all born in the Bronx to Jewish families around the same time. As all three created fashion brands that are synonymous with American fashion, this is fascinating.

• Ursula Parrott, the author of Ex-Wife, recently re-issued by McNally Editions, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. How fun!!

  • I’m toying with the idea of starting the novel this weekend.***

• TikTok heating:

  • Lately, I’ve been really disgruntled! and disgusted! by my FYP. Everything is so dull and uninspired. Most of the videos I am getting served are people on their soap box breaking down Love is Blind, or the Kardashians, or something else just as, if not more, asinine. It’s gotten so bad, I actually don’t want to spend time on TikTok! Things are dire.

  • In the midst of my TikTok ennui, I finally read the ‘enshittification’ article that Tony shared which then led me to an article about TikTok heating.

    • ‘Heating’ is a manual push which TikTok employees use to boost specific videos such that it receives a certain number of views.

    • Forbes’ sources reveal that “TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view counts.”

  • Discovering this news, makes me question the seemingly ‘over-night’ success of creators I’ve seen blow-up over the last few months.

Mark Your Calendar:

Below is a list of things I’m looking forward to that might pique your interest but probably won’t!

• October 13th: Jyoty is DJ’ing in Montreal.

• November 3rd: Priscilla, the new Sophia Coppola movie hits cinemas! And, after reading Elvis and Me, I’m v excited.

• November 7th: Finally! After twelve long years, the long awaited fifth book in the Eragon world is here with the release of Murtagh. I have not pre-ordered this book but am hoping some kind bookstore will put it on their shelves a few days before the release date. In anticipation, I will be re-reading the first four books and that silly collection of short stories.

• December 1st: The ‘limited theatrical release’ of Eileen begins. Should I reread the book in anticipation? More importantly, why haven’t they released the trailer?!

• January 30, 2024: The new Crescent City novel drops lol

Miscellaneous:

• Doesn’t this painting of Robert Mapplethorpe in Drag by Annie Kevans have some similarities with the cover of My Husband by Maud Ventura?

• Shanghai Fashion Week is happening right now and there’s a lot of cool brands I need to look into:

  • Markgong: their latest collection was inspired by New York City’s working women

  • Oude Waag: soft yet sculptural with knots at the waist, cut-outs, and chiffon, which trailed on the runway as models walked

  • Staff Only: a menswear brand where models totted around suitcases as well as oversized pencils and backpacks

• I saw a TikTok about how Hailee Bieber uses this powder brush for her foundation and I kind of want it.

• The Raf Saperra video from Boiler Room’s Southall is finally on Youtube. The release coincides with the drop of some Southall merch. Should I get the t-shirt or the hoodie?

*No monetization on my watch!
**How do I win the Somerset Maugham award?
***In the midst of the research that is involved in doing this newsletter (it’s a lot of hard work! I take my non-job v seriously!), I found this article by Molly Young endorsing Ex-Wife so maybe I should really get on top of it.
****The latter is something which I felt was an opportunity for these characters to wax poetic about Britain’s glory days.