Yahoo boys and the Magical Kingdom
The weekly digest: June 5, 2019
At any given moment, I’ve got at least two books in my docket: one, likely to be more theoretical or non-fictional or ambitious, “serious,” designed to challenge me in some way, and the other, usually about food, designed to bring pleasure before anything else. (Of course, these are fuzzy designations and the serious can be fun and the fun serious, but you feel me.) Having more time to read has been a wonderful benefit to quitting my job and traveling, as reading fills all those of crevices of travel and leisure: airplane rides, beach visits, solo dinners, commutes.
My reading has been an embarrassment of riches lately. I’ve recently finished up Alexis Okeowo’s A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Woman and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa (much better than expected), and just dove into James Ferguson’s Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal Order (incredible!), both part of a syllabus for myself to become wised up about “Africa.” And for pleasure, I am re-reading a collection of Jim Harrison essays on food (his prose makes real the verb “embodies”), though Harrison is perhaps far more known for his poetry, novels and scripts. Before him, I read a friend’s marvelous young adult novel, her first to be published: Goodbye Summer (the kind of book that I wish my friends and I were able to read when we were young adults).
What have you all been reading lately? And what have you been avoiding reading? (For me, the Mueller Report; I can’t believe they’re selling them in Barnes & Nobles ???) Does your reading wax or wane in the summertime, or is there no discernible difference between the seasons? Whatever your disposition, I wish you happy reading from this rainy corner of London I am in today, about to dip my nose back into a book.
reading
Nobody dies at Disneyland: what are the dreams and labors that make the Magical Kingdom so magical? And where do they break down?
The Believer published two articles that really stuck in my head this week. First, two Pakistani-American feminists watch Dr. Christina Blasey Ford deliver her account of being assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh together and reflect on their coeval journeys in feminist work. Second, Astra Taylor interviews Silvia Federici about what has changed under Trump and what has not. (I always feel a special fondness for Federici given that she used to teach in Nigeria.)
Two Nigerian rappers were arrested for defending and rapping about being Yahoo boys, i.e. those Nigerian princes who populate our inboxes and ask for vast sums of money. It’s funny and devastating, for me, to watch this saga unfold as there are untold millions of dollars stolen by corrupt government officials; Yahoo boys seem like the least of the EFCC’s problems… Almost every week when I lived in Lagos, there’d be a story about the raid of a former member of Goodluck Jonathan’s administration’s home where they’d find duffel bags full of hundred dollars bills insulating the walls.
Seeing like an oil company. James Ferguson, an anthropologist, has written some of my favorite articles on Africa — as a framework, as a relation, as a rebuke to globalization, as a “shadow” — and this journal article provides one of my favorite description of capital in Africa: capital does not flow like a homogenizing blanket, but hops from one intensely securitized extractive site to another.
watching
Yes, Fleabag season 2 is as good as everyone says it is. And yes, the hot priest is, in fact, hot. But what most struck me in this season is the relationship between the sisters which emits fiery pierces of intense compassion and violence like solar flares. There’s a moment where one sister gets overwhelmingly mad at the other for telling a good joke that the other sister then steals and shares with a crowd of her coworkers, making them laugh. It’s not the sister whose joke is stolen who is mad; it’s the sister who steals the joke who is mad at her sister for saying the joke in the first place, denying her the opportunity to come up with a joke on her own and instead implanting that joke in her head. She insists she could be funny on her own without stealing her sister’s joke. Can something so small and yet inspiring such brutality ring so true to sisterly relationships? Yes, yes, it can.
Jim Harrison, “Cooking Your Life”
The core of insomnia for me is invariably the emotion of feeling put upon, and there is no more comic emotion in the human repertory. Feeling put upon is in the same category as gout—a brutal self-affliction. I had recently invented an epitaph for a minor character in a novella: “He drowned in the sheer junkiness of his life, the sum of all his tastes, the incursions he allowed.”
The epitaph amused me so much that I quickly dismissed two irritations—the nineteen-dollar toilet paper that is being marketed in Beverly Hills (cashmere thread is woven into the paper), and the memory of an intensely mediocre six-hundred-dollar meal in New York. The dinner was so breathtakingly inept that on the way to the hotel I had the driver pull up to a Ray’s for a slice of pizza with eggplant. I’m not naming the restaurant, because so many others deserve this lame punishment. I am not the catcher in the rye standing before restaurants trying to prevent doomed experiences.
I photographed the Baye Fall of Senegal who cook feasts for fasting Muslims every day of Ramadan. I also produced a podcast for the Knight Foundation all about museums: the first episode dropped today!
As always, I am on Twitter and Instagram. You can also see what I’ve been eating on @charcuteriebored on Instagram.