PicoBlog

Hi!

I have a book recommendation. I realise what I’m about to say may sound like a big claim but I reckon I can back it up. Behold! I have found the perfect holiday read. I do mean that quite literally - I was walking around my neighbourhood the other day and someone had left a pile of books on their stoop so I went to have a look and that is where I found it. Street books are the best books.

Anyway - the Perfect Holiday Read in question is Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero. It is, essentially, a pastiche of the “group of children meet up on holiday, form a detectives club and fight some big monsters who turn out to be local creeps” genre, but for adults. In this case, the child detectives have grown up and have to get back together to solve one last mystery.

It is very silly but not stupid - written very vividly and, despite the frequent winks at cliches of the genre, takes itself quite seriously. It is enormously fun. Oh, and there’s a dog. And lesbians. What more could you possibly need from a book, especially while on a beach or similar! Or you could just read it in your day-to-day life. That’s what I did. I still found it highly enjoyable. I would recommend doing that also.

On a completely different note - I went to the Neue Galerie the other week, in order to look at some Schiele paintings, for my mental health, and was annoyed that they only had one big Schiele up there. I went home and did some googling and, quite randomly, stumbled upon this review of their big Schiele show from 2005.

I am willing to accept that not everyone may be interested in a random review of a 20-year-old show but I found it nicely written and quite thought provoking, on the broader works of Egon Schiele, and how we choose to frame artists, their lives and their art. Maybe you will be interested in it too!

Do you know what the worst thing is about hating Taylor Swift? It is that hating Taylor Swift is boring, and I know that it’s boring, and I’m having no real fun hating her, but I still can’t stop myself from doing it.

She became famous at some point and never really felt like my kind of gal so I let her do her thing in the background for a while, then for about a year I sincerely tried to like her music because somehow all my friends liked her music, and I realised that I just couldn’t do it.

It was roughly at this point - I want to say 2016? or maybe 2017? - that she really went stratospheric, just completely impossible to ignore if you spent any time out in the world or on the internet. It really wasn’t fun.

For a few more years after that I tried to keep my dislike of her as passive as possible, in the same way that you can not love beetroot but eat a few bites of it if it happens to be on your plate, but when the last album came out I had to come to terms with the fact that it was impossible.

If I put some beetroot in my mouth it will make me choke and gag until I spit it back out - true story! - and I loathe Taylor Swift with every fibre of my being. I don’t think she should die, because I am not a monster, but I certainly believe that the world would be a better place for me specifically if she could decide to retire forever, and never sing again. 

Does she ride horses? She strikes me as someone who does. Maybe she could do that. Buy some form of ranch and spend the next few decades of her life sleeping on a mattress made of hundred dollar bills, and be generically whimsical in some fancy stables. I would enjoy that a lot.

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