Hey, hi, hello, I’m a little late on this, according to my entirely self-imposed deadlines, but I won’t bother apologizing because I feel pretty confidant that the only person who cares is moi.
The thing is I got sidetracked by reading a stupefyingly long New Yorker story about a stupefyingly long diary that relates to a pretty long book I recently re-read and have been meaning to write about. So that’s that, and here we go.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this book
If you haven’t read The Secret History by Donna Tartt, I think you should just close this window and walk away from your device and straight to your local library where you can start reading it right now. I wish I were you because then I could experience reading The Secret History for the first time again.
Since you’re probably not actually walking out the door right now, let me give you snippets of this book’s opening.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you now.
…
Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top of the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.
…
Though I remember the walk back and the first lonely flakes of snow that came drifting through the pines, remember piling gratefully into the car and starting down the road like a family on vacation, with Henry driving clench-jawed through the potholes and the rest of us leaning over the seats and talking like children, though I remember only too well the long terrible night that lay ahead and the long terrible days and nights that followed, I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
The Secret History is the story of some eccentric, wealthy liberal arts college students who kill their friend. I don’t want to spoil anything but that’s not the only horrifying thing they do. There are a lot of gasps in this 544-page book, broken up by a whole lot of inaction that’s equally enthralling. Everyone in this book is dramatic and weird as hell in a way that’s part fairytale and part Gossip Girl. Here’s the lineup:
Richard Papen. Narrator. The only one who isn’t from a wealthy family. An only child of parents who don’t like him and don’t make a lot of money in a barren California suburb. More or less talks his way into the college. Lies about his background.
Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran. Victim. From an old-money family with apparently zero current income. Has a bunch of brothers, all blond football player types. Talks like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. Another character says his mother taught him that money is everything but it’s shameful to work for it.
Henry Winter. Nearly impossible to summarize. From St. Louis. Massively wealthy. Extremely smart. Extremely stoic. Extremely old-fashioned. Pretty big body, pretty tiny glasses. Bunny’s best friend???? Likes gardening and being an asshole.
Francis Abernathy. Also extremely wealthy and old-fashioned. Gay, well-dressed, slight, and red-headed. Mother is a cougar living in Manhattan. Has a Victorian mansion in the woods near the college. In another book, he’d be a vampire.
Camilla and Charles Macauly. Orphan twins raised by their grandmother in Virginia. Living together. Camilla is very beautiful and Charles is very drunk.
Unsurprisingly, this book inspired a lot of fanfic, fan art, and fan-casting for a movie that just can’t get made. (But someone needs to do it before Lucas Hedges ages out of playing Bunny, please!)
Anyway, they all study Greek together at Hampden College in an ultra-exclusive class taught by the eccentric, reclusive, wealthy, worldly, and notorious Julian Morrow. It’s his class and the ideas and obsessions developed in it that lead to Bunny’s murder, not to mention a lot of other nonsense, horrifying and ridiculous.
This is where The New Yorker comes in. I just learned that Julian Morrow is based on a real man — Claude Fredericks — who taught at Bennington College, on which Hampden College is based. Or more accurately, Tartt, who was his student, said the character is based on the gossipy image of Fredericks “as a sinister, ridiculously wealthy, and larger-than-life personage that he was not.”
The reason he’s written about at absurd length in The New Yorker is that he kept a diary of absurd length. He kept a diary for 80 years. And now that diary is at The Getty. It’s estimated to be more than 65,000 pages long.
His life is interesting for the reputation he cultivated at Bennington — seducing students and throwing lavish parties in his “dazzling” farmhouse — and his proximity to accomplished and wealthy people. He was friends with another famous diarist, Anaïs Nin, and dated Pultizer-winning poet and Merrill Lynch scion James Merrill. But that is still so, so much diary. The writer describes it this way: “At once more addictively engrossing and fatally tedious than anything else I have read, it is the strange chronicle of a ‘great’ man whose genius is recognized almost exclusively by the chronicler himself.” It’s also, apparently, not well written. Oof.
So now I’m stuck in a chicken-and-egg loop trying to figure out why I should give a shit and why anyone gives a shit and why I do kind of give a shit! Is it important for its sheer volume, or is it his actual life that makes it worth our consideration? Is a thoroughly documented life of any kind inherently fascinating? If he didn’t insist upon its value, would anyone have noticed? If I did the same thing, would anyone care?
If anything it’s a colossal act of ego (she said, writing a too-long personal newsletter). And engaging with it feels *bonkers* pretentious, even if there’s something to be learned about the diary as an art form or a carefully cultivated life or not having sex with your students and then writing them baroque, horny notes that you copy into your diary. Or something.
But it added a whole new dimension to The Secret History for me, so I’m telling you now before you read it or re-read it.
let me tell you about this song
Mitski released a new song this week — “The Only Heartbreaker” — and announced the release date and title of her sixth album: Laurel Hell (Feb. 4). Here’s her incredible explanation of that name, as told to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 (and found by me on Pitchfork):
‘Laurel Hell’ is a term from the Southern Appalachians in the U.S., where laurel bushes basically grow in these dense thickets, and they grow really wide. And, I mean, I’ve never experienced it myself, but when you get stuck in these thickets, you can’t get out. Or so the story goes. And so there are a lot of Laurel Hells in America, in the South, where they’re named after the people who died within them because they were stuck. And, so the thing is, laurel flowers are so pretty. They just burst into these explosions of just beauty. And, I just, I liked the notion of being stuck inside this explosion of flowers and perhaps even dying within one of them.
Depending on your mood at the moment and your personality in general, this is either way more cool or way less cool than naming an album for something Milhouse Van Houten once said.
My mercurial ranking of Mitski album titles in this particular moment:
Bury Me At Makeout Creek (you don’t even need to get the joke, it’s perfect)
Be the Cowboy (yes mommy)
Puberty 2 (we love a 2 when there’s no 1!)
Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (drops when I’m in a less dopey mood)
Laurel Hell (devastating, but requires explanation)
Lush (meh, and if I’m honest, there’s another debut Lush I prefer)
Anyway, Synthi Mitski is here and she’s all in with an ‘80s-ish groove and a video to match.
My friend Alex got to it before me and texted, “i promise you won’t expect what it sounds like” and then “or maybe you will lol i realize that was a big promise,” which was good management of my expectations but unnecessary in the end because, yeah, I didn’t see Synthi Mitski coming. Or maybe I could have guessed there’d be synths but not these synths.
We’ve heard all the variations on Guitar Mitski, including the excellent Big Dumb Chords Mitski, plus Sax Mitski and Screaming Mitski and I Went To SUNY Purchase Mitski. And even though I find it pretty difficult to pin her down, even though each album gives us a handful of new Mitskis to love, she’s also never not 1000000% Mitski. Some of that lies in her vocal performances — usually so careful and controlled against the changing currents of the instrumentation — and a lot of it is a sensibility. She’s often noted for being arty, poetic, brainy, and fairly shy of the public eye, but Mitski is always painfully relatable (even when the love song is actually about writing songs or the entire album is fiction).
On “The Only Heartbreaker”:
If you would just make one mistake
What a relief that would be
But I think for as long as we're together
I'll be the only heartbreaker
That’s the stuff. And that was all a long way to say: The new Mitski is really different but still Mitski.