Hello to our hundred fans. Maybe you signed up to this newsletter because your colleague in the civil service told you it was about succession. Maybe you were bullied into subscribing at a hen party. Don’t let this reminder that we exist lead you to unsubscribe. One day we might hit on something you actually want to hear. Maybe it will be our collaborative fanfic of Jonah and the Whale. Maybe it will be our roundtable discussion of why we like the Sopranos (isn’t the script good? aren’t the cast good? don’t you think the guys are so good?).
I am on my second period in ten days which is an intolerable situation. My IUD is missing for the second time in two years and my hormones are running around screaming after her. The doctor and I are sending out thoughts and prayers for her in the hope that she gets found. My mum is trying to procure me some Valium because last time I had an IUD inserted I spent an hour lying down in the doctor’s reception crying and moaning publicly which is a nightmare of mine whilst a doctor offered me a lollipop and asked me why I’d chosen to do this if it hurt so bad. I turned my face away and picked someone else to blame
As my body revolts and I begin to worry that I am inventing reasons to go to the GP, every bit of culture I consume wants me to ask myself if I am a Nazi. In the space of a couple of weeks I watch the Zone of Interest, listen to Naomi Klein narrate Doppelganger and read Operation Shylock. If zoning out makes you a Nazi I have to really start to wonder. Sorry to be the girl in the Sally Rooney book who wrote an email to her friend about how she looked at a sandwich and panicked about the economic violence that produced it. Sorry to be Bella Baxter having an adolescent awakening in Egypt at her first confrontation with suffering and inequality. Sorry to be eleven-year-old me having a catastrophic existential crisis. At the time my mum said in six months I would stop obsessing about what everything might MEAN and she was unfortunately wrong. I have an exceptional sense of hearing due to my historically terrible eyesight. Do you hear that? It’s the Eurasian wren.
Is it that I don’t like Philip Roth anymore or is Operation Shylock just not a good book. There is something about wading through a book of ranting and clowning men that just exhausts me where it used to thrill me. Oh god Philip Roth is in Ramallah I text Tash. I almost smile at Anti-Semites Anonymous. I am borderline amused at Disasporism, which involves sending all the ashkenazi Jews back to Poland in order to avoid a second holocaust and letting the arabs (shout out) fight it out amongst themselves because they are indigenous enough to the region. This really just minorly makes me perk up because I have seen similar sentiments non-satirically spelled out in long twitter threads in recent months. But it’s my fault isn’t it for getting on twitter ‘for the war’.
A whole book of Philip Roth’s protagonist Philip Roth and the character Philip Roth’s doppelganger who is going by the name Philip Roth running around Israel and Palestine talking about the holocaust and the Nazis. Philip Roth and Philip Roth and Philip Roth. Behind the veil there is another veil. Isn’t there always? I used to find this kind of layering compelling but now it just makes me want to eat the book and throw it up. A book where everyone has a take and you don’t know if they’re fronting or mad or traumatised or all of it. When you’re in an unstable place, your paranoia is mounting and your sense of reality is collapsing. I get enough of that every day thanks! I guess to be thematically consistent the only reason Operation Shylock made me question if I’m a Nazi is because it made me want to burn my copy of it.
I came to Operation Shylock from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. It’s sadly very difficult for me to retain any information from an audiobook so everything about Doppelganger (on balance good) is a blur (asperger was a nazi, you aren’t far from what you think you’re not, something about gyms and covid?) and everything about Operation Shylock (exhausting), which I went to to avoid spoilers from the audiobook, is extremely clear. WAKE UP. What can be spoiled anyway in Roth? There is the narrative, there is the chaos it sits on top of, and there are the moments the grotesquery breaks through. Someone vomits on their daughter’s face or on their manuscript or at the thought of their cousin’s stump. The other world warps our psyche. We are sick when it confronts us. Our doubles are something like our traumatised inverse. I know already!! And now what!! I’m pretty sure Naomi Klein sets out what to do with that in the final chapter of the book but that’s somewhere inaccessible in the ether of my brain because I hear but I don’t listen unfortunately just like the Nazis in the film.
Tash here chiming in because no respectable news outlet is responding to my unhinged think-piece pitch on The Zone of Interest X The Act of Killing X The Rehearsal. That is to say, there’s been a lot of rot lately. Everywhere I look a man who has committed genocide is standing alone in a concrete place retching. Why are Jewish men obsessed with detachment? Why must they create an environment so meticulous to make themselves feel something?
I also want to shout out my friend in LA who while there were literally missiles in the sky above my head sent me this video with no caption:
If there are ever any other big bombs in the sky please only send me content like this.
Lots of love
B and T