“I want you to know that life with you was beautiful”
In this edition of the Weekender: Gatsby at 100, a precious shade of porcelain, and the art of collage
This week, we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, chasing an elusive red glaze, making beautiful music, and taking a fresh look at an American classic.
MEMOIR
The other shoe
In this reflection on inheritance and loss, Rob Tourtelot traces a family legacy through missing shoes, forgotten jackets, and the things we leave behind.
The Things We Lose
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inI remember a time playing in a vacant lot down the road from my mom’s house, after a heavy rain. I had new Nikes on, but couldn’t resist playing in the mud. If I moved quickly enough, I found I could scamper across a little mud pond that had formed, scurrying across the surface before my feet sank. It was the most thrilling game—until I got snagged halfway, suddenly knee-deep in thick, sodden muck, unable to move.
This must be quicksand, I thought, having read something about this deadly stuff. I panicked, and pulled hard, my socked foot leaving one of the Nikes behind with a sklorp sound. I managed to reach solid ground, and turned to look just as the mud closed in and filled the leg hole, entombing my shoe. I never saw it again.
I ran back home in my single Nike and a muddy sock, the rain starting up again, pelting me. Our front door was locked, so I banged on it, urgently. My mom opened the door and looked down, noting this one-shoe situation.
“I know this looks bad,” I told her breathlessly, “but it’s good news.”
“It sure doesn’t look like good news,” she said.
“It is,” I told her. “There was quicksand, and I almost got pulled under.”
“Quicksand,” she said, with barely concealed amusement. “So tell me the good news.”
“I’m right here,” I said. “I made it back to you.”
ILLUSTRATION
MUSIC
Tables and chairs
Yesterday we wrapped up The Substack Sessions, a series of live performances and conversations with musicians across the platform. Here’s the song “Tables and Chairs” from Andrew Bird’s live session, and make sure to watch the whole thing for more lovely music (and a cameo from Hamish McKenzie).
Andrew Bird Substack Launch
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in
PAINTING
CERAMICS
An elusive red
Naomi Xu Elegant traces a notoriously difficult copper-red glaze from Flaubert’s fiction back to its origins in Chinese ceramics, revealing how a subplot in Sentimental Education captured a genuine artistic challenge spanning centuries.
In search of the blood red sublime
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inIn Sentimental Education, Arnoux is not presented as especially sympathetic (not that any character in Flaubert’s novels escapes the author’s cool and ironic judgment); he’s a bit of a fool, oblivious to Frederic’s designs on his wife, frivolous and ineffectual in his pursuit of aesthetic beauty and business success. All of these traits are exemplified by his failed attempt to achieve the “copper-red of the Chinese”. The whole thing is really just a comic sub-subplot.
But in fact, Arnoux was trying to do something very difficult, something that the greatest artisans in the only country in the world capable of producing porcelain at such a high standard took generations to perfect.
And it’s not as if they cracked it one day and solved the problem forever, either. The beautiful copper-red glazes achieved by the “great technical advances of the High Qing” mentioned in the Sotheby’s catalogue were themselves considered lesser imitations of red-glazed porcelain produced in the 1420s and 1430s, and then basically never again.
The red porcelain of the earlyish 15th century Ming dynasty is widely considered the high-water mark of the copper-red glaze. In Chinese it is called xianhong 鮮紅, “fresh red”, or jihong 祭紅, “ceremonial red”, because the pieces were used as altar vessels. A remarkable feature of these pieces is that they are monochrome. No dragons, no phoenixes, no landscapes, no calligraphy. Just color.
There are just a few dozen surviving examples left. In the later Ming, the ability to produce quite such a vibrant red was lost; centuries later, during the Qing dynasty, Jingdezhen ceramicists diligently tried to match the glossy blood red their antecedents had achieved. They came close, but never really re-created it.
PAINTING
NONFICTION
Train of thought
James Worth shares some relatably ungenerous thoughts while on the Boston T in this work of “flash nonfiction.”
I’m standing on the train
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inI’m standing on the train. The seats all swallowed by sweaty asses. I type these words into my phone. I want to tell them all that I’m a writer, I am writing, this is how I use my cell phone unless I’m using it for a different reason I don’t want anyone to know about. Normally, sitting, I’d have a book propped neatly on the knee of my crossed legs and, with my hair tucked behind my ear, I’d nod along thoughtfully to the words I am reading, smile if something funny has happened, frown when the plot turns unsavory.
I like when funny things happen.
I find bad things to be in poor taste. I stomach it.
But I am standing and cannot convey the same air of casual engagement, as to hold a book upright is to endure the story being jostled by slouchers and normies, ketchup-colored jerseys calling me away from the page again and again. Forced back into this world which houses me. So I don’t read. Nothing can be controlled. I am miserably spinning.
It’s something, though, to hold nothing but a moment. Attention trained on even that which upsets me. Greasy mullets vs. balding crop circles, McDonald’s bag peeking out of a JanSport backpack, shorts hitting below the knee, pigeons picking at loose garbage past the dirty windows, the harsh overhead light of modernity. Everyone is swimming in it. We share this.
I play a game with myself in which I predict what stop a person is going to get off at based on their appearance: how they are dressed, what kind of facial hair they have, how many piercings—which could be problematic if I wasn’t batting a 90 average (baseball?). It’s just that I can see the pronoun pin on your Fjällräven backpack. I know you’re getting off at Harvard Ave. I love that you are who you are.
Does anyone notice me?—whatever. That game got boring. Notice me, what, standing around waiting to get noticed? How embarrassing is that. How embarrassing to toss myself out into the world and wait for what is right in front of me, and then ask more of it. None of this is in my control. I only have myself, my observations, the love I harbor for the ugly, constant world.
I’m just going home. This is the world I move through, crowded, reckless and resistant to my touch. To get home, I unleash the world on me. I’m part of it for a moment. I’m standing on the train, and so are you.
ANIMATION
POETRY
Love and the end of everything
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inAbout a year ago,Eva said something that,in all the times we’d be together after,would, when I remembered it,cast a sort of halo over the present,as if my recollection of her words alone altered the atmospheric conditions of the moment,softer, yes, but stabbing,right in my sense of chronological time,like when we were in the sea and I couldn’t perceive anything else,no restaurants, no people, no cars, no shops, no commerce, no horizon,it was just us in the sea and I made a small approving sound as I watched her tread water and thought about all the tiny actions coordinating to keep her afloat,the unimpaired integrity of her body’s working order,the most essential thing about her, about anyone,and I loved her more intensely than usual because I remembered that all of this will end.About a year ago, we were in bed together, and what she said was,If something happens to me, I want you to know that life with you was beautiful.
COLLAGE
Handmade
An excerpt from Sophie Mulgrew’s essay-in-collage on what the art form means to her.
Go Make Something with Your Hands
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in
FICTION
Gatsby at 100
This year marks the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby. Naomi Kanakia takes a meta approach to celebrating the Great American Novel—imagining an unseen side character with a notably familiar solution to his woes.
Have you heard of this book that sucks? It’s called The Great Gatsby
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inYou know, there’s more to this story. Like, Gatsby had friends. He had friends who listened to him talk for hours about that girl, Daisy, and we didn’t think it was absurd. We agreed with the plan, to throw big parties and get her attention. It was a good frigging plan.
And yeah, yeah, these complexities are already present already in the book. It’s all in the book, The Great Gatsby. It’s got all that pathos, all that grandeur. That’s what people say.
But you know what it’s missing? Me! Gatsby’s friend. His real goddamn friend. Not just some rich asshole who came in last-minute like these guys always do, to swoop away whatever you think is great.
And that’s why I made lots and lots of money, and I’ve been throwing big parties, and everybody who wants to be a part of them has got to hear me talk about how The Great Gatsby sucks. And I know they don’t agree with me. But guess what? I’ve got the money now.
Except you know the problem is … I kinda feel like these guys are just humoring me. I mean I knew they would. I knew they wouldn’t take it totally seriously. But these guys, I thought they’d at least consider the idea that The Great Gatsby sucks. But I don’t think they care at all. A lot of people don’t even have opinions about The Great Gatsby. They’re like why are you still hung up on this book from a zillion years ago. You’ve got money, you could be doing anything other than getting hung up on this book. But you know what? Screw them, and screw this book, which I’ve never read, but which I can assure you completely sucks.
I mean sometimes after these parties I just go and pull out my copy of that freaking book, with all those lights on the cover, and I think … I really liked that frigging guy! I liked those parties! And I feel like, you know, like … like why are mine not the same? I did everything Gatsby did, but it’s just … it’s not the same. When I was with him, I felt so alive, so full of happiness, but now it’s just … it’s all different. It’s tough. I dunno—I keep trying to turn my life into something like those times, but somehow I just get pushed away and can’t never make my way to anyplace great.
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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Thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated all the wonderful artists on this Substack!! Just discovered this. Will restack and recommend to others. Made my day!
Collage made me cry. Beautiful.
So much beauty I could hardly believe how moving every thing was the art and the writing the sentimental education
Essay on Gasby the color red the art l am a bit emotional but my eyes are tearing from such beauty
So amazing thank you