annotations: the artist who gave up her daughter
Sasha Bonét on Camille and Christa; storytelling and Game of Thrones; and other things I read
This is annotations, a newsletter in which I annotate a story every two weeks and also read and write other stuff.
If you are newly here from Delia Cai’s media newsletter deez links: welcome! If you are not: welcome back! Delia interviewed me about food writing, gatekeeping, and other miscellaneous media thoughts—check it out if you’d like!
Now for the real stuff:
annotated: “The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter” by Sasha Bonét, Topic Magazine
Camille Billops and James Hatch, New York City, circa 1978. Photo courtesy of the Hatch-Billops Archive.
“The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter,” by Sasha Bonét for Topic, is the biography of a woman as told through her art, her daughter, and her choices. The piece isn’t the usual narrative feature I tend to annotate; only the lede is a narrative “scene” in the true sense of the word. But what I find so compelling is:
The subject matter. How many profiles have we seen of male, usually white virtuosos whose artistry and genius are worshipped, whose choices and sacrifices are never questioned, whose children and families fall to the wayside as a preordained and accepted truth? No matter what you think of this artist Camille (I know that I can’t quite like her, and I know that my opinion doesn’t matter one shit), her choice was radical, and it’s kind of radical to read a story that approaches that choice in a way that does not condemn, while still teasing at that core tension and casting sympathy for the daughter, Christa, “who ended up as a casualty of Camille’s ambitious defiance.”
How Bonét blends elements from profiles, art criticism, and cultural criticism to create something bigger and more unique than each of those would have been individually: a portrait of what it means to be an artist (and a black woman artist, at that), first and foremost, and a mother (a black mother) second.
This is a story that you really have to click through to the original so you can view the photos and artwork in full-sized glory, but in any case HERE ARE MY ANNOTATIONS. (As always, comments are open, so feel free to add your own or reply to existing annotations.)
read
This close read of Fleabag season 2’s fourth wall device is so fucking smart. [Vulture]
Yet another chillingly dystopic and well-crafted David Wallace-Wells report from the end of the world. How good is this headline?: “Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End.” [Intelligencer]
How bankers, brokers, lawyers, investors, fleet owners, debt collectors, and other people with money stripped immigrant families of their life savings and devastated an entire generation of New York City taxi drivers. [NYT]
Jia Tolentino on the essential dishonesty of anti-abortion propaganda and legislature. [The New Yorker]
“I am the least reliable narrator when it comes to the story of my brain exploding. This is because, from the time right before I suffered a freakish brain hemorrhage last year to the time I regained full consciousness roughly two weeks later, I remember nothing.” [Deadspin]
Rebecca Jennings flew to Scottsdale, Arizona, to profile Curvy Wife Guy. [Vox]
The Style section’s Gen X package is a lot of fun! (In classic Caity Weaver fashion, for her contribution to this package, she lives out a week as if it were still 1994.) [NYT]
Reading this (fictional) interview with the chef of “the hottest restaurant of 2081” four years after its publication is … wow, prescient!! [Eater]
noted
For anyone interested in the different types of storytelling (which should be … all of you?), Zeynep Tufekci wrote a smart piece about the underlying reason the last season of Game of Thrones felt like such bad storytelling: left unchecked without the guidance of George R. R. Martin’s novels, the show’s narrative lane shifted from sociological to psychological, which Hollywood/drama is much more familiar with.
Even if you, like myself, have never seen a single episode of GoT (although I have enjoyed guessing at the events of each episode this last season by refreshing Twitter every Sunday night), this is still a worthwhile read as a work of broader criticism and analysis. Tufekci goes into the natural human affinity for psychological/internal stories (people like to relate to other people!), which are compelling, but can ultimately be harmful, if we focus so much on individual personalities that we lose sight of the greater context and economic, political, cultural, etc. forces that shape any given story (sound familiar, politics journalists?):
Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.
wrote
I wrote a reported story about fast-food workers and mental health, in response to that Burger King ad that tried to sell depression and Whoppers because this is where we are as a society. [Eater]
P.S.
Do you have a favorite work of cultural criticism? a preferred canonical critical theory text? Please send me your recs (you can just hit “reply” to this email)! I am personally/professionally interested in reading and learning more, and may delve into ~cultural crit~ more broadly in a future edition of annotations.
Thanks for reading, see you in two weeks!