Lo! A Parisian Email!

Hi Lo!-nuts,

(How do we feel about Lo!-nuts? I’ve tried Lo!-bodies before and that got zero response - so I guess Lo!-nuts it is).

Thanks to any and all of you who came to the inaugural Ben’s Book Club last month! It was a sold-out, bona-fide, 24-carat, compound-adjective success - if I do say so myself. Everyone, both guests and audience, were exceedingly passionate about All Fours by Miranda July and a lot of opinions and thoughts were shared. Highlights included: me accidentally firing an air-horn into the face of a woman in the front row, an eye-opening discussion of the merits of the romance author Emily Henry, some gruesome excerpts from the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, a lengthy tangent on the logistics of scissoring, and a deathly silence/boos when I casually suggested I could imagine Courteney Cox playing the lead character. Our guests Olga Koch and Temi Wilkey were exceptional, and the audience’s interjections were clear-eyed, fascinating and deeply-felt! It was a blast. Thanks to everyone who made it so.

The next one (for which there are startlingly few tickets left) is very soon…

And in fact we’re getting ahead of the curve, and announcing several more Book Clubs for the summer very soon. The line-ups and books for them I am putting together now and let me tell you: they are going to be JUICY. As a little newsletter exclusive for you guys, my inner circle, here’s the first one, on May 3rd…

Click on the image for tickets.

Also a reminder that I’m recording my 2025 stand-up show The Cut in Waterloo at the beginning of April. I’ve wanged on about it enough on this mailing list - but it really and truly is going to be the very last time I do that material (in my life? on this Earth?) and I’d love for any of you to be in the room when we press that shit onto vinyl*.

*Figuratively. It will absolutely not be available in vinyl. I expect in the fullness of time it will be available on your friend and mine, the Internet.

In less mercenary news, I went to Paris on the weekend, on my own, for no other reason than to go to Paris on the weekend on my own. And, as is often the way, finally divorced from my to-do list, I managed to have one of those rare but sweet moments where you are really glad to be alive.

Prior to the weekend I was feeling rough. It’s so interesting how firing an irregular, unpredictable but constant spray of emails and social media messages at your consciousness has the exact same effect as lowering your nervous system into a bath of uranium. Admin-wise, February made me feel burnt to a crisp, but also completely permeable, like I was at the exact centre of the Large Hadron Collider.

And then I slept. And then I went to the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature - which is Paris’ answer to Edinburgh’s Hunterian or London’s John Soane’s Museum. It’s full of stuffed animals and weird Victorian art. There’s a ceiling entirely made of owls. Things that may once have been alive in bottles. Long-time readers of Lo! might be able to cast their minds back and remember that I had a bad time at the Edinburgh Anatomical Museum - but this was very different, maybe a little softer.

Partly this is because there is some more trad art there. There was a slew of still lifes of dead pheasants on silver plates. Which I think normally I would find quite uninspiring. But I had a moment in one of the grand halls staring at one of these roadkill portraits - sometimes when you’re looking at a painting like that, what you’re looking at, the older you get, is the accreted sense of unlikelihood that you or anyone you know (and by extension, any human) could have ever made anything, and particularly something so skilled. You’re looking not just at the painting, but also the painter, and both of those things are not you and the combined results of your life. With more felt experience of what life actually is like behind you (and yes, I suppose, a slowly growing tumour of emails), you understand more the sacrifice of time and energy, and the unlikely confluence and co-incidence of inclination, inspiration and skill that led to a painting like this. The delta of these things happens only so many times in a life. And here you are looking at the sea mouth of that miracle.

I walked back to my Air Bnb feeling dreamy. Paris pulled out all the stops and assembled the postcard of itself: I genuinely saw students discussing politics outside a cafe. I genuinely beheld more than one turtleneck in action. I genuinely couldn’t believe how casually hot everyone was. The equivalent dusk-lit drinkers on the streets of London would look like a herd of sentient potatoes, or a gaggle of animate leather gloves. And obviously I’m not saying that if you’re ever on the cusp of an admin-based breakdown, the answer is to just go to Paris. That would be insane. You’re borderline psychotic? Have you tried Paris? The people there are so fit! The ceiling full of owls!

But nonetheless, it’s funny how many times I have to learn the same lessons over and over, and also how those lessons are so simple and make you sound so very basic and stupid. Art is great. Change your perspective. Broaden your horizons. Have you slept?

And then I got into my tiny little courtyard room and I noticed that, over the toilet, was a beautiful framed photo of the Manhattan skyline. The grass is always greener. Even Paris wants to be somewhere else. In Manhattan I’m assuming the cafes have pictures of Rome. Everyone’s pining. The dream is just over the hill.

Do you ever get completely hung up on one song? And sometimes even just one phrase of one song? I’ve been on a big Donny Hathaway jag recently - and I keep playing Jealous Guy from his live album over and over, and particularly the second verse where he does a mean little descant over the words ‘I was shivering inside’. And the way his voice sounds like it’s going to break right there and then - there is no reason I’m telling you this other than to get it out of my head and onto the keyboard and hopefully into your heads so I can infect you too.

As per the above indulgent Parisian update, I think it’s fair to say I’m feeling a bit worn out from work at the moment, and that includes reading unfortunately. I’ve opined before about how reading something bigger slowly is often better - but I’m what I’m going to christen an ‘Advice Top’ (I like to give but not receive). I simply refuse to learn my own lessons. I’ve been trying to read loads of stuff, fast. And it’s made me a bit crazy.

I think it's partly that I get whipped up in the braggadocio of people announcing how much they’ve read recently. The numbers game. I’m guilty of it too - cleaving to the stupid notion that reading more books will make me smarter or better, which, if you don’t dwell on any of the stuff you’ve read, it certainly will not. Eat a 100 apples in a day and you won’t get a six pack, dummy. Also, trying to make more book content for online has its own existential pitfalls. I don’t need to elaborate on that because Lydia Kiesling has already detailed that particular psychosis perfectly here.

Anyway, below is the paywall, past which point I will give you some genuinely good book recommendations, that did not cost my sanity, because they were so darned enjoyable. Subscribe! I dare you!