“The cruel reality is that maybe improving my physical appearance is just as fundamental to my success as developing my art practice itself. It’s also frustrating to feel myself internalising this idea that I have to get sexier and show ass online if I want to play the game.” – Dylan, painter, New York
“I only glanced fleetingly at him as I passed, I did not really see him. But that uncertain glimpse was sufficient to stir my imagination, and I received and took away with me a vision of beauty… ah, of what beauty.”
Extracted and adapted from Tristan, a 1903 novella by German writer Thomas Mann.
“Won’t King Sausage cut your head off if you dip it in another pig?”
– Mary and George / Sky Studios / 2024
I bought a book for £6.99 that was only thirty-five pages long. It was so short that I read it in a hot bath in only ten minutes. But I liked the cover, and what I read resonated with me.
Things like:
“I was aware that this entailed a kind of cruelty towards this younger man who was doing things for the first time. Invariably when he spoke of his plans for a future with me, I replied, ‘The present is enough,’ never mentioning that for me the present was only a duplicate of the past.”
and,
“The people he greeted on the street were always young, often other students. When he stopped to talk, I stood aside; they watched me sidelong. He tore me away from my generation, but I was not part of his.”
The Young Man / Annie Ernaux / 2022
Jordan Firstman, American writer, producer, and comedian, in a Zoom conversation with Robert Pattinson.
An editor’s note co-written with Walter Kirn, editor-at-large, of the County Highway that has gone back in time by launching a print-only broadsheet that is available in book and record shops across the US and Canada.
“I live in Paris. I am a pupil at the Louis-le-Grand. I am sixteen. People say: what a beautiful child! Look at him, he really is magnificent. Black hair. Green, almond-shaped eyes. A girl’s complexion. I say: they are mistaken, I am no longer a child.”
In the Absence of Men/Philippe Besson/2001
“Strangely, his name was Jean, which he pronounced as the French do, and although just turned 17, he had already read Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, and believed he was reincarnated from someone who died of an o.d. in 1979 at Studio 54. He knew way too much about that infamous club, and about infamy in general.”
The ‘bicycle thief’ of Manhattan’s West 14th Street Pier/
Fred H. Berger/Propaganda Magazine/Winter 1999
I see something written by somebody else, and like it. But I will forget the words, and they will be gone. I shall put them here. When I am old, and remember nothing, I will know that they didn’t get lost.
“When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another’s arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on?”
Alan Hollinghurst/The Swimming Pool Library
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 