It’s Friday! We did it. For a short workweek, it was long on literary updates. Let’s dive into the day’s highlights.
Can you guess the most-read books on Goodreads this week?
The latest viral TikTok sensation is a self-published self-help book.
The weather won’t be the only thing heating up when you read this sexy novel about art and queer intimacy and more of the hottest queer books of summer 2024.
❷ The sophomore slump is real, but not for these terrific second novels.
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Walton Ford, Culpabilis, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York. Photograph by Charlie Rubin.
I touch down at Marco Polo on Wednesday afternoon, one among the many who have come for the preopening days of the Venice Biennale. The airport—with its series of moving walkways shepherding passengers toward the dock—will turn out to be the only place in the city where I manage not to get lost. The line for the water-bus into the city is easy to spot, and as we wait for the next boat to arrive I count fifteen Rimowas, five pairs of Tabis, and several head-to-toe outfits of Issey Miyake. The boat ride, unaccountably, takes an hour. I alternate between fending off seasickness and watching the Instagram Story of a microinfluencer who’d been on my flight and is already flying down the Grand Canal in a private water taxi.
My first stop after depositing my bags and downing two espresso is Walton Ford’s Lion of God. The show takes up the two full stories of a church-like building in the same square as the city’s opera house, which my boyfriend is telling me—with the sort of walleyed zeal that suggests it’s one of a handful of facts he memorized for the trip—burned down in the nineties. Inside, it’s surprisingly dark, the main floor cut up by temporary exhibit walls painted black, the lights so dim that the details of the building, and the historic paintings spanning the rest of the room, are almost completely obscured.
In other words, you have no choice but to turn your attention to Ford’s four enormous watercolors, which, despite the best of intentions, strike me immediately as somehow “dorm room.” Maybe it’s the richness of their color set against the black of the room, but I momentarily perceive these objectively impressive works (at least on a technical level) as velvet paintings. The subject is always the same—a lion with a skull in its mouth; a lion with a book in its mouth; a pentaptych of a thorn-impaled paw. Each painting seems to be a different scene from one unified narrative. It’s something biblical, clearly, and the name Jerome pops into my head, along with the fact that Venetian iconography is clearly lion-obsessed, but I can’t quite fit everything together.
Upstairs, a giant Tintoretto has been moved into the space specifically for the exhibit. It takes up the central wall, and shows Saint Jerome (I was right!) in a state of ecstasy as Mary descends from heaven. I stand before it, a sophisticated-looking group nearby. As it turns out, Ford himself is in attendance, and he strikes up a conversation with one of the women in the group. “I saw you looking at this one,” he says. He points out a faint, shadowed lion in the painting’s bottom right corner, which I’d failed to see, then gestures to the perimeter of the ceiling, where a few paintings have been carefully spotlit, highlighting the animals often buried in otherwise busy canvases. “I thought, what if you took all the people out,” Ford says, “and focused on the animals?”
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We’re on the eve of the Champions League final! Marcus, Luke, Jim and Andy are getting in the mood by trying to work out what medicine Andriy Lunin is using to recover from the illness that is keeping him out of the final.
Elsewhere, Luke and Andy show genuine fear at the prospect of José Mourinho managing in Turkey and we hear about an amateur side that won 43-1 on the final day of the season to win the title. Remarkable…
Join us for our Ramble Euros watchalong. Click HERE to get your tickets now!
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Today it's a huge industry – but 50 years ago, it was much more revolutionary
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Hospital corridor. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
When I entered the emergency room at 3 A.M., I knew only that the fragment of crab shell in my throat could not be swallowed, extracted, or solved with marshmallows (the glottal escorts recommended online). The actual solution was morphine and emergency surgery; up until I recovered consciousness, my visit to the hospital represented some of the most pleasant hours of 2024. When I woke, it was to a body with several new ports of entry, established so that my most tender innards could be tethered directly to the hospital bed. My gown was essentially a garrote with modesty bib attached, and mysterious things had been taped to my arms and legs; a tube to nowhere emerged from one nostril. I spent what felt like multiple twilit days wriggling up and down the bed, orienting myself by proximity to beeps, until my exovascular system got so tangled the nurses (themselves attracted to beeps) came running. I had been out of surgery half an hour.
The nurses unwound me, retrussed me, and stupefied me with fentanyl just as a pack of surgeons materialized to deliver complex and consequential information about my health. A total of six surgeons comprised my “team,” and all six could have played background Kens in the Barbie movie. I remember humming to myself to drown out their talking; I do not remember repeatedly whispering “I’m asleep” while making eye contact with the lead surgeon, but I defer to his sober account. They summarized our morning: After extracting the fragment of crab shell in my throat, they found several smaller shards in my stomach, which they took for good measure. Then they glued shut the centimeter-long tear, as esophageal tissue is too fragile for stitches. They had pictures on their phones.
While the hole in my esophagus healed, the doctors commanded I eat by tube, and presently introduced the week’s single continuous meal: a beige substance in a wobbly bag that joined my proboscis at a threaded connection with which I was immediately desperate to tamper. My eating has qualified as disorderly since childhood, and my diet represents a deranged détente. I regard eating as a game to be won by wringing the most time and flavor out of the fewest nutrients. It is a game I play with vats of broth and salads big enough to stuff pillows; tubular delivery of calorically dense slurry to my stomach is absolute and demoralizing defeat.
The looming food replacement—Peptamen 1.5, manufactured by the Nestle corporation, who online brook requests for samples—resembled wood glue and smelled like vanilla synthesized by a chemist. I was scheduled to absorb two bags every twenty-four hours.
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From Inside Out 2 to Yorgos Lanthimos's follow-up to Poor Things
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With just a couple of weeks until the Euros kicks off, we’re pretty sure about how Gaz’s Gang will line up in their opening game against Serbia - but how should he use his substitutes? And does Gareth Southgate have a track record of failing to properly implement changes from the bench?
Elsewhere, Ashley Young provides the Take Thermometer with its spiciest offering so far and we wonder if Gareth will bring back the waistcoat as a nostalgia play.
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