“I don’t give a shit about radio or sales or anything. I’m only trying do something great,” says Jack Antonoff. Despite what it may seem, the tone isn’t aggressive. The New Jersey native is direct and elaborates on his answers, but he’s a nice, polite guy. And the day of the interview, March 31, happened to be his birthday. The busiest man in the music industry was turning 42, and instead of celebrating with his wife, the actress Margaret Qualley, he was at the Rosewood Hotel in London granting
“I don’t give a shit about radio or sales or anything. I’m only trying do something great,” says Jack Antonoff. Despite what it may seem, the tone isn’t aggressive. The New Jersey native is direct and elaborates on his answers, but he’s a nice, polite guy. And the day of the interview, March 31, happened to be his birthday. The busiest man in the music industry was turning 42, and instead of celebrating with his wife, the actress Margaret Qualley, he was at the Rosewood Hotel in London granting this interview to EL PAÍS’ fashion supplement ICON under heart-shaped balloons brought by his team. “Don’t worry, this isn’t a part of the job I dislike,” he replies to apologies for spoiling such a special day.
A quick one to say I’ve been thinking a lot about the different subtitles they’ve slapped on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift through the years, mostly because it was only this year I learned that the original 1983 edition looked like this:
I LOVE IT. WHY DID THEY CHANGE IT. WHAT GIVES.
The whole thing is a far cry from 2019’s:
As well as the copy I first encountered (published in 2007), which features a third option:
Which is…fine? It’s fine.
BUT WHO BURIED THE LEDE ON THE E
A quick one to say I’ve been thinking a lot about the different subtitles they’ve slapped on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift through the years, mostly because it was only this year I learned that the original 1983 edition looked like this:
I LOVE IT. WHY DID THEY CHANGE IT. WHAT GIVES.
The whole thing is a far cry from 2019’s:
As well as the copy I first encountered (published in 2007), which features a third option:
Which is…fine? It’s fine.
BUT WHO BURIED THE LEDE ON THE EROTIC LIFE OF PROPERTY?!
Audre Lorde originally presented “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” as a paper in 1978, but it wasn’t published in Sister Outsider until 1984—just one year after the first edition of The Gift came out.
(There’s a nice write-up of this design on Fonts in Use, if you’re into that sort of thing, *cough*ROBIN*cough*)
I wonder about this post-70s literary landscape, everything still reverberating with the energy of the 60s, the explosive visibility of sexuality in American youth culture, the rising tide of queer voices—but also the broader definition of eroticism.
I just re-read Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: a Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, which I picked up after Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Her exploration of eroticism veers more towards the question of what to do with desire that resists being codified, named, and negotiated in explicit terms. How do we reckon with consent culture alongside the lure of the unknown? What of discovery? What of the secret third thing?
Kate Wagner coming in at the right moment here with this essay:
A situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. […] Arousal is a matter of the self, which takes place within the body, a space no one can see into. It is often a mystery, a surprise, a discovery. It can happen at a small scale, say, the frisson of two sets of fingers in one’s hair at once. It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. Maybe what it means doesn’t matter. Maybe we don’t have to justify it even to ourselves.
This draft has been languishing because I don’t have a neat bow to slap on the end of this. If there’s anything I’m thinking of, though, it’s that Hyde (or his publisher) wasn’t wrong to foreground eroticism in that first edition of the book. Eroticism is creativity, and neither are as much work as they are play.
Login
