Read Me #1: Robe Me Up

Welcome to Read Me, a very small magazine in the form of a newsletter. The creative energy to make Read Me is available thanks to the demise of The Happy Reader, which I edited until its final issue earlier this year, but this is not the same as The Happy Reader (which after all was a mostly-print collaboration with a publisher, Penguin, and the team behind another magazine, Fantastic Man) so much as an evolution of certain tendencies it had. I’m still interested in books, literature, art, pop culture, Balkan liquor, and so on, and the ways those subjects can end up being the same thing. I’m still endlessly curious about what artists — especially huge, celebrity artists — read, and in having conversations with them to that effect.

I’m excited so many people have subscribed, so far mostly based on a glancing mention in my soon-to-finish newsletter for Penguin. If you’re glad Read Me exists and would like it to flourish, and also receive more of it — you know, in quantity terms — please consider being a paying subscriber. More on that later but, for now, please enjoy this first issue.

1. A Q&A with Laurie Anderson

As in literally. One Q. One A.

READ ME: Which book is closest to you, as in physically, at this exact moment?

LAURIE ANDERSON: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, because it’s in my head.

Laurie Anderson, ‘O Superman’ (1982)

2. First sentence of When We Cease to Understand the World

“In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day.”

3. Writers’ robes

Benjamín Labatut, 43, lives in Chile. Of an attempt to describe his outfit — as witnessed during a Zoom call — an interviewer lately said: “I was confounded by his garment, which at various points I thought could be a track suit, a rain jacket, or a winged cloak. Finally, I settled on a kimono-like robe.”

Not unrelatedly, Henry Miller’s bathrobe is up for auction today. The American author (1891-1980) wore a blue, terrycloth dressing gown at dinner, during late-night painting sessions and, yes, while being interviewed. The robe, which is medium in size and, alas, has some wear to the collar and cuffs, is expected to fetch between $3,000 and $5,000 during an auction titled Iconic Items from the 20th Century, from 7pm GMT.

Henry Miller’s bathrobe

4. An attempt to speak with someone from every city in the world, in alphabetical order, starting with Aachen

The first city in alphabetical terms with a population over 100,000 is Aachen, on Germany’s western border. Regina Herdt, a 24-year-old resident of this spa city — in the foothills of the diminutive Eifel mountain range — agrees to answer a simple question: what did you do yesterday?

I got up at 10:30, had breakfast, then went shopping with my mum at the Outlet centre in Roermond, a city in the Netherlands. My mum loves a good deal and otherwise we never get to spend time alone, just the two of us. It’s actually a very Aachen thing, to visit the surrounding countries — very Aachen to not be in Aachen. I bought a warm hat and some Puma socks. What colour? The hat was black and the socks were very blue, and I was like, I need this blue, it reminds me of Yves Klein’s International Blue. Then in the afternoon me, my boyfriend and my brother ordered some pizza.

In the evening I went to an art opening with a girl I got matched with on Bumble. It wasn’t romantic. I was looking for other people to do these kind of activities with. She seemed quite funny and after three messages asked, do you want to do something? I’m like, sure, on Friday there’s an opening at Ludwig Forum. I was quite nervous. It was my first time meeting someone like this. What was the exhibition? It was a combination of the work of one artist, Ulrike Müller, and then a selection from the collection of the museum in dialogue with her work. Müller is New York-based. She worked with these kind of paper cutouts. Sometimes it looked like she just used white paper and had some sort of vectors or graphics on it, clean lines showing forms, compositions, but without any colour, without any cutting, just the forms, just vector graphics surrounding everyone in the room.

We got to another room where people were drinking and eating and networking, and sat there and really talked, about what it’s like being a child of immigrants, for example. She likes to work with children in art and I’m working as an art mediator in a museum and we bonded about that. After that I told her, I can drive you home. You don’t have to go alone on the bus because I know that’s kind of scary. I dropped her off and she told me, yeah, we should do it again. So when did you get home? Around 11pm and then I played video games with my boyfriend until, I think, 2am. [ENDS]

Yesterday in this instance was Friday 8 December 2023. The exhibition ‘Ulrike Müller: Monument to My Paper Body’ includes an artwork by Laurie Anderson. Regina is on Instagram here. Coming next: Aalborg, Denmark

5. Radio watch

Benedikt H. Hermannsson’s cyclical radio station 24 Hours at the End of the World doesn’t sound like much like waiting room music, but it does sound like Iceland. Hence why guests in the waiting room at the Icelandic Embassy in Paris are entertained with the sound of crunching footsteps, floaty synths or choral singing. Don’t have any upcoming meetings at that particular embassy? Don’t worry, the radio station is part of a group show (which, full disclosure, I co-curated for Lab’Bel with Silvia Guerra) and can be heard online here. The recordings of which it is made were compiled by Hermannsson, a musician and poet, over the space of several months in 2022 and 2023, a time in which he travelled across the whole island, patiently amassing a loop of sound exactly twenty-four hours in length. A listener could theoretically set their watch by it. Perhaps at the embassy it’s becoming the audio equivalent of a wall clock.

It is one of the Five Radio Stations: artworks which are also radio stations. If you own e.g. a laundrette, bookshop or good hotel, why not become a listening post yourself?

What does Iceland sound like?

6. Forecast

Here’s a Google Drive folder containing all the glossy, corporate trend reports for the coming year. It could be helpful if you need to drop a phrase like “according to Top Chocolate Trends 2024...” into your next big pitch but, beyond that, let’s be honest, it’s aesthetically more representative of our time than most exhibitions we might go to, or books we might read.

7. A.O.B.

You’ve now read issue one of Read Me, and that makes me very happy. Free editions of this newsletter will be published occasionally. Paying subscribers will be guaranteed to receive it fortnightly, as well as getting the bonus newsletter First Pages, a completely different thing to be unveiled shortly, and several other benefits too. Be aware that there is an amazing deal on annual subscriptions, which make good Christmas presents. Thank you everyone. See you soon.