Seneca has an order for friendship: think long and hard before admitting someone and, once they’re admitted, trust them as you trust yourself. Whoever reverses it — admits first and judges later — has confused the duties. Read on the same day as the rest, the letter seems to apply only to the bond you choose, because in the others the order already comes reversed. The network of women in two rural parishes in Ecuador handles childbirth and the postpartum period where the state doesn’t show up, and it’s the same network that later watches what each of them does with her own body. Betsy married in 1940, was committed by her husband and her father ten years later, and her family spent decades saying just one word about her. Mary Austin is the rare case of a bond that lost its premise and kept its trust: she learned there would be no marriage from a shake of the head over a dress, and stayed by Freddie Mercury’s side until the end.
River Lerner’s collage essay supplies the image for all of it: a dam and a corset work through the pressure between walls, and whoever stays inside a bond usually pays by keeping half of themselves out of sight. The review of Meu nome verdadeiro é Elisabeth says the same thing without any metaphor, when it points out that lobotomy aimed less at curing the patient than at making her fit to go on living in the environment she came from. The two remaining texts deal with what comes before: wanting something, and having time to notice the other person. Robin Kirman’s patients can’t say what they want; the boy Natalia Kucirkova watches at an airport sees a character’s crying turn into a smile faster than you can blink. Seneca asked for a long time to judge a friend, and Kucirkova reminds us that in early childhood even realizing that someone else feels differently takes time.
connection
The Extraordinary Untold Story of Freddie Mercury: Mary Austin on Her Best Friend–and Love of Her Life, Simon Hattenstone, via Longreads — Mary Austin had been living with Freddie Mercury for four years when he told her, with difficulty, that he thought he was bisexual. She replied that she thought he was gay, and he didn’t argue. What she felt was relief, because she was no longer sure the two of them were headed in the same direction. He left her the house, much of his fortune and his most personal belongings, an inheritance she has spent her life managing with loyalty and discretion. I read the excerpt Longreads pulled, and the line that stays is the one about the dress he advised against with a shake of his head: “So I knew from there on …”
Seneca on True and False Friendship, Maria Popova, The Marginalian — Popova gathers passages from Seneca’s letters to Lucilius in which he separates friendship from business. The order is judge first, trust after; whoever picks a friend for what that friend can yield has found a fair-weather friend, who vanishes at the first rattle of the chain. Flattery imitates friendship and beats it in the race, because it finds the ears already open. I find the final bar almost unusable, it’s set so high: a friend is someone you could die for or follow into exile. The framing about the age of likes is what interests me least; the letter holds up on its own, and the line that stays is “He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays.”
Therapy Used to Be Hot, Robin Kirman in LARB, via 3 Quarks Daily — 3QD clipped only the opening, so this is a teaser. Kirman treats two young people, Kessa and Anthony, who couldn’t seem more different and between them add up to nearly every symptom of the youth mental health crisis. What they share is that neither can name one thing they do for pleasure, without obligation or compulsion, and neither can answer “What do you want?” — what they actually want, not what they think they should want. The title suggests a thesis about therapy having lost its prestige, and that part I didn’t read. From the excerpt, what stays is the image of sessions in silence, with “the muted voice of desire grown too faint to guide them”.
culture
The bombarding of childhood, Natalia Kucirkova, Aeon — Kucirkova, who researches children’s media, says one thing that may weigh as much as screen minutes and content quality gets measured very little: pacing, the time a cartoon, game or app gives a child to make sense of what they see. A show can have a good lesson and move too fast for it to settle; in Paw Patrol the rescue is so efficient that urgency runs over care for others, and Prehistoric Planet, with Attenborough’s voice and its slow zoom, comes up as the exception. The list of features that shorten time also includes the offer of AI to summarize a long text, which sounds like help and carries a philosophy. The page I have cuts off before the part about what to do. The line that stays: “The clock records the same duration but the child does not live the same time.”
The Art of Holding Things Together by Holding Them Apart, River Lerner, 3 Quarks Daily — A collage essay that starts from a poetry the dam and the corset share: the pressure between opposing forces is what gives both their function. Lerner carries this over to the person, who is made as much by what they take away as by what they add, and whose upkeep has to stay invisible, partly out of consideration for those who can’t bear being near suffering. Lerner practices psychiatry, and the hardest passage is about outpatients, for whom functioning stops being a sign of health and becomes a demand. Then come Omelas, The Lottery and The Substance, in which Sue has to draw fluid from Elisa every day to exist, and that care, done with disgust, is still care. The version that came through stops halfway; the line that stays is the one about the thousand concessions, white lies and silences, “until we become unrecognizable but palatable.”
brazil
Me chame pelo meu nome, Maria Fernanda Barros, Quatro Cinco Um — The review is of Meu nome verdadeiro é Elisabeth, by Adèle Yon, a mix of novel, memoir and essay about her great-grandmother, of whom the family said only one thing: she was schizophrenic. On a car trip from Lisbon to Paris during the 2020 lockdown, Yon says one word to her grandmother, Betsy, and sets out after two answers: why everyone keeps quiet, and whether the illness is hereditary — a fear that other relatives, it later turns out, carried in silence through summers in Brittany. Betsy had six children in seven years, partly because her husband followed a doctor who thought pregnancy was good for her mental health; she was committed in 1950 by her husband and her father, went through electroshock, insulin coma and lobotomy, spent seventeen years in a psychiatric hospital and died in 1990. In letters from before the wedding, she asked her fiancé to accept her as she was: “a person who needs a lot of space, physically and morally; I can’t live in a closed environment.” Barros sets the case beside that of Adelina Gomes, born in the same year, 1916, who in 1946 began attending Nise da Silveira’s studios at Hospital Pedro II while Betsy was getting electroshock in France. On Saturday it was dementia that unlocked a name in a grandmother; here it’s the whole family keeping it locked.
science
Sororidad ambivalente y cuidado reproductivo en el medio rural: un estudio cualitativo en las parroquias La América y La Unión, cantón Jipijapa, Ecuador, Aguilar Cano, Alonso Muñiz, Loor Alvarado and Vélez Rodríguez — A qualitative study with twelve participants in two rural parishes in Ecuador, done with interviews and textile narratives; I only read the abstract, which doesn’t explain what those narratives were. Where public health services are missing, the informal network of women is the infrastructure: childbirth, postpartum care, information about contraception, support through teen pregnancy. The same network watches, judges and repeats patriarchal rules about sex, contraception and other women’s bodies, and formal medicine, for those who have already had many children, arrives mostly as late sterilization. The knowledge in circulation is recent: it was the adult generation that began breaking the silence about menarche with their daughters. The study reads the ambivalence as an effect of gender barriers and the state’s absence, not as a failure of solidarity. Read after Betsy, it bothers me to see medicine come in through pregnancy again: there prescribing one more, here arriving after many, with a scalpel.
findings
You Have to Ask Questions: Svetlana Alexievich, Unlocked, The Paris Review — The magazine unlocked from its archive the excerpt of Voices from Chernobyl it published in 2004, to go with Elena Kostyuchenko’s new interview with Alexievich. The link is worth it for Alexievich’s admission that she sometimes merges two people’s stories into one, so that neither can be identified, and still calls it nonfiction.
stalled sources
Eat Your Nuts, 349 days; First Round Review, 322; Dirt, 304; Gurwinder (The Prism), 260; Literary Hub, 112; web.dev, 109; Out of Office, 82; A List Apart, 76; Anti-Mimetic (Luke Burgis), 61; Off Brand, 53; Philosophy Now, 43; Adjacent Possible (Steven Johnson), 36. Literary Hub publishes every day, so 112 days with nothing looks more like a broken feed than a stalled magazine.