Read Me #6: Got the Pea
1. THAT QUESTION AGAIN
READ ME: Which book are you closest to, as in physically, right now?
JEREMY DELLER1: A proof copy of 1983 by Tom Cox, which is staring at me.
2. AND A NEW ONE
READ ME: Is there a key that you own and perhaps even carry around with you that has no current practical purpose?
LOUISE CHEN2: I still carry the keys to a loft in Bushwick in New York that I used to stay at fifteen years ago.
JEREMY DELLER: I have a key for a long lost bike lock on my current keyring.
CONOR O’BRIEN3: I have this Yamaha-branded key. I don’t know what it’s for.
3. BLENDING THE ABOVE
Asked if there’s a sentence he wants to share from his aforementioned upcoming novel 1983 (all the better if it mentions keys) Tom Cox sends the following:
“My dad asked my mum if she had the house keys and reminded her not to drop them because if she did someone would know they were the keys to our house and burgle it, even though it was eleven and three quarter miles away and the burglar would have to try the keys in thousands of other houses before they reached it.”
1983 is out on 8 August. Also, Tom’s illuminating newsletter The Villager covers “landscape, music, books, folklore, psychedelia, the natural world and other misty magical things outside the mainstream.”
4. RITUAL REALITY
Last month I spent an hour in the nineteenth century, doing things I assume were typical at the time, like dodging horse-drawn carriages and standing behind Monet as he painted a sunrise. It was my first contact with a serious, high-end VR headset, for an ‘expedition’ about the birth of Impressionism. When I finally took the headset off I was surprised to see that, despite my having been on the move constantly, the room wasn’t actually that big, and was packed with other people. In non-virtual reality I’d been walking around in circles. I was at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the VR experience in honour a more conventional re-enactment of the original impressionist exhibition, bringing back together many of the paintings of which it comprised.
By coincidence I had my second and third VR experiences a few weeks later, courtesy of my friend Darren Emerson, who’s won a lot of awards for his VR documentaries, two of which were showing in Paris for the first time. In Letters from Drancy I followed the extraordinary, harrowing story of a young Jewish girl (Marion Deichmann, now 93 and living in Chicago) escaping from Nazi Germany. For In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats I was teleported to the city of Coventry in 1989, at the peak of the Second Summer of Love, where I joined a group of friends following the carefully-concealed trail to an illegal rave, lurked in a police station with Coventry’s anti-rave unit whose job it was to get there first, and enjoyed a series of hallucinogenic interludes, my favourite being the one where I was able to walk up and down a huge, glowing FM dial tuning in to real radio from the late 1980s.
As futuristic technologies go, I wonder if virtual reality is feeling a little sidelined in the face of mounting excitement/foreboding about other long-awaited ‘harbingers of the future’ such as artificial intelligence and flying cars. But at least it doesn’t threaten to supersede us as a species, or increase our already not-great carbon footprint. The worst endpoint here, I suppose, is more along the lines of: we are made permanent inhabitants of a false reality. And maybe that would be OK.
Or is it happening regardless? Something I kept doing, in all three experiences, was momentarily reaching for my phone.
5. DIAMOND LEE
A very unusual use of time is to stare at this forever-zooming landscape painting while listening to Diamond Jubilee, the new album by Cindy Lee.
I’m pretty excited about Cindy Lee, the creative alter ego of Patrick Flegel, who won’t do interviews, has no social media presence, and won’t release the record on streaming services. Not that it has a physical release. You get Diamond Jubilee by downloading a massive .ZIP file from a Geocities website, and people are really raving about it. (Caveat: I have listened to the record twice and while I quite like it I’m not sure I quite get it yet, but, hey, the story’s good enough to keep me persisting).
6. DIAMOND KEY
READ ME: Is there a key that you own, and perhaps even carry around with you, that has no current practical purpose?
CAMILLE MERVIN-LEROY4: When I moved to China, I had a phone with a single SIM card slot, but I needed to use both my local SIM and international SIM throughout the day, depending on who I was communicating with. My phone came with a particularly beautifully shaped SIM tray key — a sort of diamond with rounded edges and an elongated end — that I would have to fish from the depths of my bag several times a day.
Eventually, for easier access and to avoid losing it, I threaded it on an earring. It made a very nice pendant and isn’t immediately recognisable for what it is.
It’s been five years since I no longer have that phone, and yet I still wear the key as an earring. It’s one of my favourites. The form has become completely detached from the function.
7. SOME ADVICE: A SHORT STORY BY AARON AKIRA
“Do you need some advice?” asked the clerk at the specialty greengrocer.
I stood in the middle of the shop, which was deserted at this darkening hour of the early evening. He may have been the shop’s manager. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a fleece vest against the winter chill, which the shop maintained through its open storefront in order to keep the fruits and vegetables fresh. I suppose I wore a certain look of disorientation and impatience. I had a two-month-old baby strapped to my chest and a small dog tied up on the pavement outside the store. In my fist, one red onion.
“No,” I said. “I just need a red onion for a salad I’m making, and maybe -”
I scanned the rows of plywood bins upon the shelves: squash, leeks, cress, radicchio, black radishes, bitter lettuce with broad, mortadella-colored leaves…
“If you’re making a salad, what you want is a good white onion.”
I began to reply, shaking my head, that it was a cabbage salad, shaved finely on a mandolin, with apples, pumpkin seed oil, cider vinegar, all items I already had in the pantry at home. But I stopped, realizing I did not need to explain the details of my dinner to the clerk or manager at the specialty greengrocer. In fact, this was precisely the superfluous conversation I did not have time for, the one I had declined to engage in, when the clerk or manager initially offered his advice.
What’s more, I fumed, as I untied my dog’s leash from the brass door handle of an adjacent building, it was bad advice!
If the mere mention of a salad, with no further detail as to its composition, were enough to call for white onion, rather than red, there would be very little reason for the specialty greengrocer to stock red onions. Yet the specialty greengrocer did indeed stock red onions, I had one right here in my fist, because there are many types of salad in this world.
It was something to bear in mind, when volunteering advice.
Aaron Akira Ayscough is the creator of the natural wine newsletter Not Drinking Poison
8. THREE OF MY FAVOURITE INSTRUCTION PIECES FROM YOKO ONO’S BIG RETROSPECTIVE AT TATE MODERN, IN LONDON
PEA PIECE (WINTER 1960)
Carry a bag of peas.
Leave a pea wherever you go.
CLOCK PIECE (DATE NOT GIVEN)
Alarm clock is placed on stage and set to ring at an undisclosed time.
It is announced that the piece will be finished when the alarm clock rings.
MAP PIECE (SUMMER 1962)
Draw an imaginary map.
Put a mark where you want to go.
Go on walking an actual street according to your imaginary map.
If there is no street where it is in the map, make one.
When you come to the spot where you marked on the map, ask the name of the person you meet there, and give flower.
The map must be followed exactly, or the event has to be dropped all together.
Ask your friend to write a map.
Give your friend a map.
9. HOUSE OF HOUSEKEEPING
This newsletter adheres to ten secret rules, one of which is: