Seashells and Beach Pebbles

November is a liminal month in Los Angeles. It feels like everyone is just about to leave, and it's true, a lot of us are, for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the New Year and ski trips and beach holidays and other festive far flung escapes before and during and after. It’s winter, sure, but not one this child of the east coast can recognize. It’s cold at night and dark by 5pm, and the holiday lights are up on the streets and the Christmas music channels have appeared and the deeply silly holiday movies are dropping (I actually cannot wait for that), but it’s also still mid 70s in the midday. You can still get a sunburn. (For the record, no matter where you are, you can always get sun damage. Did you see that viral tiktok about the woman who didn’t put sunscreen on her neck? I swear by Elta MD.) People in Los Angeles are surfing and eating every meal outside and wearing white jeans and tiny clothes. The seasons are changing and yet everything feels the same. Yet another very famous and famously attractive woman is allegedly dating Pete Davidson, for example, which is starting to feel like the way that the studios keep just remaking the same movies over and over with more diverse or younger casts. Perhaps everyone feels out of ideas, in ways both obvious and not. Maybe that’s how we know the year is almost over.

Some of Joan Didion’s things sold at auction yesterday. A few of you sent me the link, either because you thought it was ghoulish or that I’d be interested; you were right either way. Most of the lots seemed like the type of thing we clear out from our recently departed loved ones’ homes and closets and garages and pay someone to take away. Clunky wooden furniture and junky desk trash and knickknacks. Nearly all sold for eye watering amounts. I’m personally torn between the $7,000 bid for “group of shells and beach pebbles” and the $11,000 for a pile of blank notebooks. $27,000 for the Céline sunglasses from that ad campaign I wrote breathlessly about in 2015. A Kardashian-Jenner will probably wear them to the next Met and someone will find them between the cushions at the Top of the Standard the next day. (Thankfully the nearly $2 million in proceeds from the auction are going toward medical research and a scholarship for women in literature.) It’s a funny thing, fetishizing someone’s stuff. It’s love, it’s fandom, it’s obsession, it can be a personality. A person is gone, and this is what you can hold of what’s left of them. It’s ultimately an empty gesture but one I understand: provenance is fun. When you run out of regular things to spend your money on reasonably, finding things with deep, rich histories opens up a whole new field of play. I do wonder where those blank notebooks will end up. I guess you put them on your own shelf until someone buys them from your own buzzy posthumous auction. Hopefully you’ll have labeled them.

I went to see Picasso’s cut paper works at the Hammer museum (works from age nine to 80!) and left thinking about Françoise Gilot. Have you read her book, Life with Picasso?  It’s WONDERFUL. She was the only one of his lovers to leave him of her own volition. They had two children together. When she did leave he told her she was “headed for a desert,” that no one else would ever be interested in her beyond her connection to him. (Nice.) She went on to marry Jonas Salk (yes, that Jonas Salk)—with whom she stayed married for 25 years. She had taste! She made beautiful art. She writes wonderfully. It’s a great memoir. No slouch, our Françoise. She is currently 100(!) years old and still terrific looking, if you’re wondering. Also, if you’re utterly repulsed by this wretched old (admittedly singular genius) of a man and this gorgeous young nubile thing, I feel like this explains it a little. Her book explains it a lot.

Ok, here’s a theme emerging: you should certainly read the deeply underrated painter Celia Paul’s stunner of a memoir, Self Portrait, about her life before and during and after her ten-year entanglement with Lucian Freud, for whom she served as partner and muse. There is a challenging, singular childhood, some significant boarding school experiences, deep artistic talent, and a famed male genius with a taste for young women just out of frame. (God, isn’t there always.) He needs her adoration, she spends years obscuring her own needs (if she’s even aware of them). I asked for this book for Christmas last year and devoured it before the end of Boxing Day. You could do the same! 

On the topic of Lucien Freud, I’d be remiss not to mention another terrifically talented woman once in his orbit (as his wife), the society beauty turned great writer Caroline Blackwood, whose slim little thinly-veiled very hilarious novella Great Granny Webster about her grimly gothic matriarch is maybe the best thing to read this Thanksgiving. It will soften any of your own relations by comparison, trust me. One of Blackwood’s husbands after Freud, the poet Robert Lowell, described her as “a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers.” Fun fact: he died in the back of a New York City taxi clutching Freud’s painting of her, ”Girl in Bed” to his chest. They were divorced. I mean! As the kids say, “no choice but to Stan.” 

I swear I wasn’t planning to write this whole thing about women artists involved with monstrous (and monstrously talented) male artists but I have started listening to Death of an Artist, which is (so far) a fascinating podcast about the life and death of the artist Ana Mendieta, as well as her relationship with minimalist icon Carl Andre, who was… how do we put this in a non-litigious way? Acquitted of her murder? I don’t identify as a true crime person, really, but this is art history. And rather recent history, at that.

I really enjoyed this piece about Colette in this week’s New Yorker (which is actually rich in excellent writing about brilliant women, namely Sarah Polley—whose new film, Women Talking, sounds so excellent but so harrowing I might just avoid it entirely—and Annie Ernaux, who just won the Nobel, about which she sounds delightfully nonplussed). It’s interesting that most Americans don’t really read Colette. I didn’t until later. Though I did see the not great Michelle Pfeiffer version of Chéri. I think it’s on Amazon prime? This is not a recommendation, just a fact. Anyway I blame the puritans. (When don’t I!)

I saw The Banshees of Inisherin last week. It’s beautiful. Sadder than I thought it would be, but funny too. A friend advised me in advance to think of it as a fable, and that really clicked it all into place for me, so I’ll advise you to do that as well. The cast is all tremendous but Kerry Condon has a real barn-burner of a performance. So does Ireland. Marigold yellow and plum never looked so good as set against those moors.

This story came out over a year ago but was news to me—and after reading it I am never complaining about an airport or airplane or really anything ever again for the rest of my life. (Maybe don’t read if you have a fear of planes?)

I am not recommending anything in the way of physical objects or snacks this week. That’s because I am planning to do that next week as a Thanksgiving distraction (for me, and for you). Things to get and give and eat and maybe wear over the holidays? If you don’t want that, and are gift-guided out, well guess what, you don’t have to read it. We’re all just here gathering our own seashells and beach pebbles on the long walk to that auction in the sky, okay? 

That’s it for this week. Thanks for being here. I love you.