09: What to Read When Time Feels Fake
We're talking about celebrity bookshelves, Zelda (again), Taco Bell, ~dark academia~, and Japanese toilets. 4+ articles and 1 book.
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Hi friends! Time feels both infinite and fleeting. I am both bored and overstimulated. As a result, I am thinking a lot about time, particularly in its wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey form. Here are some reads that make me feel like a time god, either because they literally play with time or because they talk about the unique ways that we humans spend it.
The Wibbly-Wobbly
Natasha Lyonne’s Alternate Reality, The Cut (~12 min). Sometimes it is easy for every day to feel the same, which is what made me want to re-watch Netflix’s insanely good 8-episode series Russian Doll. While this profile of Lyonne in The Cut is particularly memorable because of its accompanying photoshoot full of cats, the overall press circuit for Russian Doll was more philosophical than usual—likely because it is a show about dying, over and over again, and trying to end a Groundhog Day-esque time loop by getting your real death right. As a result, profiles of the show’s creators tend toward the existential (which is pretty unique for Hollywood promo). I thoroughly recommend reading this piece and then (re)watching Russian Doll.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask Was Never Supposed to Exist, Polygon ( ~9 min). Majora’s Mask is a time-loop Zelda game that repeats the same three days until you can stop the moon from crashing into the earth. It is also an alternate reality of its critically-acclaimed and well-loved predecessor, Ocarina of Time, and was apparently created as a happy accident. This book excerpt on the genesis of Majora’s Mask pairs well with this Game Maker’s Toolkit video that gets into the nuts and bolts of video games that play with time.
The Japanese Toilet Takes a Bow: A Personal History, The Rumpus (~37 min). As pitched by someone on Longreads, “You will not find a more informative story about defection and toiletry. If you do, it will not be this entertaining, this smart, this personal.” If that doesn’t goad you into reading a condensed personal history about the development of the tricked out Japanese toilet, I don’t know what will. It’s a piece about the varied and evolving ways that cultures perceive their time in the bathroom, and it’s perhaps the best thing I read this week.
Taco Bell Orders: Betrayal in Two Acts, Taco Bell Quarterly (~4 min). This article and its delightful source made me particularly nostalgic for my favorite first date. I went to a chic bar with my new potential beau and tested him by telling him I was going to have a nightcap at Taco Bell. He joined me. (Points for him!) However, he ordered his tacos without tomatoes because the tomatoes there “are not good.” (Points off! Who is discerning at Taco Bell about TOMATO QUALITY?) We have been dating ever since.
I have long loved Taco Bell and it is high time we had a quarterly publication commemorating our collective experiences there. Everyone has a Taco Bell tale to share.
The Timey-Wimey
If you find comfort in the dark academia aesthetic and crave an elitist, homicidal and coked up college tale, I’d be remiss not to recommend THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt. It’s very likely you’ve already read this book, but most authorities tell me it stands up well to a re-read because of its lavish prose. It takes a dark and tense plot and plops it in the picturesque Vermont countryside. It is an excellent metaphor for being somewhere that should feel like home, but is instead too laden with something sinister to truly enjoy. Its timey-wimeyness is tied up in the way that the narrator sometimes gets ahead of himself in explaining his part in his friend’s murder.
What to know going in: While I was inspired by how good this book would be during quarantine because it is Vox’s book club pick of the month (“Murder cults! Idyllic college campuses! A May where you can’t go outside is the perfect time to read [it]”), I first read THE SECRET HISTORY last summer and have spent the subsequent months attempting to recreate that literary experience. Every time I get a chance, I ask folks for books that read like THE SECRET HISTORY: my favorite podcast, Who? Weekly, has a prolific book-focused Facebook community where this question has been asked time and time again. Every time, that wonderful reading community comes through with hundreds of comments (including a link to this explainer about why it never became a movie and how we ended up with the apparently abysmal adaptation of The Goldfinch instead). This is a high we’re all chasing.
Even if you’ve already read THE SECRET HISTORY, you can approximate the experience of reading it for the first time if you read it exclusively while deep in a bottle of wine. And if you’re truly averse to a re-read, here’s a list of books that people claim are similar. I have purchased many of them.
A sled of children’s books I spotted on a recent walk through my neighborhood.
At this moment in time, I am reading several different books. I look forward to recommending at least one of them next week.
Until then, I recommend consulting the New York Times judgement of celebrity bookshelves (and Amanda Hess’s subsequent cultural assessment of that judgement); this Twitter thread of formative and foundational internet writing (that obviously recommends personal favorites of mine including Negroni Season and On Smarm); and this new list from Book Riot of bookish joys suited well to quarantine.
Talk soon!