Letter of Rec

A clean and happy bartender + bonus stick friends

Author

Laura Brooke Robson
July 30, 2024

I ingest an inordinate amount of content so you don’t have to! Here are the best things I spent time on this month:

  1. Loveseat by Still Woozy. I had the classic conundrum of traveling between summer (northern hemisphere) and winter (southern hemisphere) this month, which comes with it the disconcerting sense that half of the music you’ve been listening to no longer feels appropriate. Happy to report that this album holds up at a park picnic as well as curled under a blanket.

  2. 30 Life Lessons at 30 on Shameless. Australian podcast hosts share 30 things they’ve learned about life/business/relationships. Made me feel like I was grabbing coffee with older sisters!

  3. Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds by Rachel Aviv for The New Yorker. This is from last year, but I just read it this week and it’s bizarre and fab. Basically: some philosophers have some complicated romantic relationships and muse about them. It reminds me vaguely of one of my all-time favorite books, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, in that it confronts the question of intellectual love—and the possibilities and limitations of falling in love with someone’s mind. Idk but maybe some of us need to think a little less.

  4. Robert Pattinson’s hand-held pasta. A quarantine throwback, but this is IMO an all-time cultural moment we must preserve. I was reminded of this piece because I can’t stop listening to Suki Waterhouse, with whom Pattinson has a baby. Here, Zach Baron interviews Pattinson for GQ, and Pattinson proceeds to keep a straight face as he does the most exquisitely unhinged things. Enjoy:

Nevertheless, penne and water in the microwave for eight minutes. In the meantime, he takes the foil and he begins dumping sugar on top of it. “I found after a lot of experimentation that you really need to congeal everything in an enormous amount of sugar and cheese.” So after the sugar, he opens his first package of cheese and begins layering slice after slice onto the sugar-foil. Then more sugar: “It really needs a sugar crust.”

Then he realizes that he’s forgotten the outer layer, which is supposed to be breadcrumbs but today will be crushed-up cornflakes, and so he lifts the pile of cheese and sugar and crumbles some cornflakes onto the aluminum foil before placing the sugar-cheese back on top of it. Then he adds sauce, which is red. The microwave dings, and Pattinson promptly burns himself on the bowl of pasta. He sighs, heavily, looking at it. “No idea if it’s cooked or not.” He dumps the pasta in anyway. At this point, his spirits have visibly begun to flag. “I mean, there’s absolutely no chance this is gonna work. Absolutely none.”

  1. The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape by Taffy Brodesser-Ackner in the New York Times. This was also the Daily Sunday Read (I listened), and it came at an opportune time because I just finished Long Island Compromise and wanted to unpack it. I liked the book a lot, but I actually think this article might stay with me even longer. Brodesser-Ackner recounts a birth experience with shades of “The Husband Stich” (Electric Lit piece for more on that), but the whole piece is really about trauma: what we allow ourselves to count as trauma, how we get over it, how we don’t. It’s about the business of getting on with the rest of your life after you’ve gone through something horrible—and the fact that the “getting on” can become your life.

  2. Things have to happen by Heather Parry. Found this newsletter via Haley Nahman’s newsletter (it’s newsletters all the way down). Worth a read! This has been on my mind after watching season 3 of The Bear. I felt like I had to bring this up re: my newsletter earlier this month about stressful TV, but I’m not sure this season is worth the stress! Season 1 has a high-stakes question (“Can we make enough money to save this restaurant?”) and season 2 has a high-stakes question (“Can we redo the restaurant in time to open? Also, can we fall in love?”) and season 3 has plenty of high-stakes but no focus or direction. It never feels like it’s building to anything, and then it ends. Anyway, that fits well with Parry’s newsletter about writing stories where things actually happen:

When you get to the point of mentoring and editing emerging writers, you see a clear pattern of issues shared by most people’s early work. If you look back, you’ll see that you made the same mistakes too. Mistakes like overwriting (solution: use simple language well), being so desperate to make pretty sentences that you don’t actually describe what’s going on (solution: use simple language well), failing to give basic information clearly (solution: use simple language well). We are often so keen to be good at something, to be artistic, that we forget the basics. We forget that writing is a method of communication, and unless you’re being unclear for a very specific reason that will eventually reveal itself, in communication, clarity is key.

  1. This poll, which I saw on Instagram as a screenshot of a Tumblr reblog of a Twitter post. I can’t stop sending it to people.

  1. The Thing Is by Ellen Bass. A brief poem I think you should read!

  2. More Normal Gossip. I rec’d an episode of Normal Gossip last month, and everyone was like, “Hey, it’s really good, you should listen to more!” Well, a month has gone by and I have listened to pretty much the entire catalog. I have no excuse except that I had some very long flights, and also, it is, in fact, really good. Some of my favorite eps are:

  1. Your best friend’s wedding. Can’t recommend enough!

Currently reading: Summer Romance by Annabel Monaghan. Nora Goes Off Script, also by Monaghan, is one of my all-time favorite romance novels, and I was delighted to find I like her new one just as much. Monaghan is writing some of the most emotionally nuanced romance novels out there at the moment!

Non-urgent thought of the week: Can’t wait for the paint companies to anoint brat green as color of the year.

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