Weekly Round-Up: May's End

Dueling, Etiquette, and Toast

Reading: From The New Yorker archives, this 2007 piece by Arthur Krystal on the history of dueling. Did you know Queen Elizabeth II kept an “official champion” on staff, just in case some errant knave issued a challenge to her right to rule? I wonder if King Charles does; I imagine he must - one can’t be too careful.

I would read a novel about being the monarch’s official dueling proxy in 2026: life is a slow decline into obsolescence, Parliament wonders what they are paying you for, and then, one fine spring day, a challenger comes forward…Starring Walton Goggins?

Kevin Kline and David Hyde Pierce in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Hamlet (1986). Image courtesy of NYPL Digital Collections.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men is both a serious examination of recent trends in feminist thought and a lighthanded romp through representations of female heterosexuality in 20th-century British sitcoms. (Like Maltz Bovy, I consider Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances an aspirational figure for people of any persuasion).

Maltz Bovy’s wry, considered approach to the emergence of “ban men” essays - “They can also have a way of leading people (‘people’ as in, me) to confuse irritation at having to do the normal chores of adulthood with a righteous cause that could be overcome in a way other than suddenly waking up a gazillionaire” - also made me think of Parul Sehgal’s brilliant review of Sarah Manguso’s Liars for The New Yorker.

Sehgal is one of my favorite literary critics, especially for her discerning and unflinching turns of phrase (“these steely certainties, swaddled in baby talk and baby thinking”) which cut through mountains of bullshit cloaked in overwrought, underdeveloped prose to reveal what’s actually going on. She takes a different approach in her most recent review, of Gisele Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life for The New York Times Magazine, which is a great example of her compassionate analysis and clarity of thought - I will be thinking about this piece for a long time!

Both Maltz Bovy and Sehgal push back against the way a flurry of thinkpieces - on the end of men, on the end of marriage - whose vocabulary seeps into the zeitgeist (“you’ve got to throw the whole man away”) become stand-ins for actual shifts in culture. In that vein, and on a completely different note, I’ve been enjoying Sarah Jane Ho’s 2024 etiquette guide, Mind Your Manners: How to Be Your Best Self in Any Situation.

You may recall that I have strong feeling about the righteous urgency of etiquette to a functioning society (when was the last time you took a train or a plane without being subjected to someone’s phone on full volume?) and I love that Ho acknowledges that etiquette 1.) can be learned and 2.) is important. There’s nothing wishy-washy here about how the real etiquette is the condescending game of convincing yourself that the insane person on the train blasting a video game from their iPhone speakers is actually just so socially disadvantaged that they can’t possibly know any better and allowing ourselves to be treated thus is a manifestation of social justice. Ho is deeply privileged (if you take a shot every time she mentions Harvard Business School, you’ll be in trouble), and sometimes charmingly out of touch, as when she offers feng shui tips for the placement of one’s office desk, as though anyone has a choice about where they sit at work, but I like the cut of her jib.

On the topic of self-help books, I’ve been contemplating a re-read of Megan Fairchild’s The Ballerina Mindset: How to Protect Your Mental Health While Striving for Excellence. Could I be any more different from Megan Fairchild, MBA and mother of 3, whose 25-year career as a principal dancer at New York City Ballet came to a close last Sunday with a joyful final performance of Coppelia? Just watching one of her Instagram stories makes me need a lie-down. I’m also a 43-year old whose biggest achievement this week was making it through Barry’s Bootcamp three times without crying. But I love Fairchild’s book - part of her genius is her lightly-worn humanity: when an artist who has developed so beautifully under such pressure shares a bit of how she did it, who am I not to listen?

Photo: Erin Baiano for New York City Ballet

Toasting: I caved and bought the little OurPlace Wonder Oven for the simple reason that it looks really good on my kitchen counter. Also it makes really good toast. I have already warmed so many pain au chocolat in this thing that I feel like Adrian Mole in his loft on Rat Wharf, heating his frozen M&S croissants, hopefully minus the aggressive swan and looming financial ruin.

I mean, come ON.

Wearing: This incredible 2019 Prada skirt which I bought from the incomparable Lizzie Wheeler over at Shit.U.Should.Buy and debuted at The Odeon on a cold, rainy evening.

Failing At: The Raphael exhibit at the Met. I wish I had something to say about it, but it was so terribly crowded, full of people rushing up to the art to snap a photograph on their iPhones that they will never, ever look at again, that I couldn’t think. It’s the same with any big Met exhibit now, even during Members’ hours. You’re better off enjoying the permanent collection.

I took this photo of a drawing of horse for my mother, because it’s fine when I do it.