Great Novels with Chic Decor, Attractive Words, Horses, et al.
I love the term frequency illusion, both because of what it means and how it sounds. It describes the phenomenon of becoming aware of something (the Volkswagen Beetle, say) and suddenly noticing it everywhere. Punch-buggy galore. “We were just talking about that car!” the newly enlightened viewer might marvel, watching one whiz past just hours after learning its name. The term appeals to me because I find questions of coincidence, chance, and fate appealing.
It’s less immediately clear why those words—frequency illusion—sound so lovely. But in 1995, the linguist David Crystal wrote a paper on phonaesthetics, “the study of the expressive properties of sound,” which starts by collecting lists of words novelists and poets and newspaper readers find beautiful: melody, velvet, mellifluous, gossamer, mesmerism, froth, claret. Lots of Ms, he finds, lots of Ns and Ls and Ss. Frictionless continuants. Plosives. Three syllable are better than one. Our little term makes the grade.
Before the linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky coined frequency illusion as a term in 2005, the thing of noticing something and seeing it everywhere was called the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. The Baader-Meinhof Group was better known as the Red Army Faction, a self-described anti-fascist guerilla group founded in West Germany in 1970, which carried out kidnappings and murders of prominent authority figures including bank executives, police officers and, perhaps most notably, the industrialist and former SS officer Hanns Martin Schleyer. (If you want to fall further down that rabbit hole…) In 1994, a man named Terry Mullen learned about the group, and the very next day his friend pointed out a story in his local newspaper about them. He wrote a little column about it for the paper. A term was born. (If life were fair, surely, it would be called the Terry Mullen phenomenon. But.)
Alright, this is all really just to say that toward the end of last year I started taking horseback riding lessons and now, guess what, I see horses all over the damn place! On fashion runways and in pop music, books, and movies. So I wrote about it for Vanity Fair. The piece has got mythology from the Middle Ages and a dive into Nope and some stuff about animal ethics and exploitation. I liked writing it, hope you like reading it.
This year, it started with the spectacle of Charlotte Casiraghi, Grace Kelly’s granddaughter and 11th in line to the throne of Monaco, cantering down the Chanel couture runway on a gleaming bay named Kuskus. For better or worse, fashion and pop culture have long been in love with all things equestrian, running the gamut from Gucci’s classic Horsebit loafers to Kylie Minogue’s 2020 comeback single “Say Something,” in which she caresses an enormous golden horse while flying through space. But if a horse on the couture runway signaled a leveling up of contemporary equine lore, then Beyoncé astride a holographic steed for the cover of Renaissance, released in July, certainly clinched it: 2022 is the year of the horse girl.
Or horse woman. Or dude or man or person. We’re employing the term liberally here. (Though it is often a woman.) Historically, the horse girl has carried with her a certain cutesiness; she is viewed by others, perhaps, as a little bit dweeby. But there is nothing twee about the horse girl of 2022, and horses have long symbolized power and wide-ranging freedom—a natural yearning following years of being cooped up inside. “Creating this album allowed me a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world,” Beyoncé wrote in an Instagram caption, describing the making of Renaissance. “It allowed me to feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving.”
You can read the rest here.*
Read…
…one of my favorite comfort novels. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll covet the characters’ chic domesticity.
Happy All The Time by Laurie Colwin
She had her own ways, Holly did. She decanted everything into glass and on her long kitchen shelves were row upon row of jars containing soap, pencils, cookies, salt, tea, paper clips, and dried beans… In her own house, her collection of botanical watercolors was absolutely straight. The shoes in her closet were stuffed with pink tissue paper and her drawers were filled with lavender sachet. In each corner of her closet hung a pomander ball.
All Is Forgotten Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang
Now the house was a gracious, almost empty space with high ceilings, wide maple floors, and an amazing stained-glass window that had been hidden away behind a stack of old trunks. Lucy cleaned the claw-foot tubs and brass door-knobs. She hunted down a few pieces of oak furniture that fit perfectly into the wide hallways and spacious rooms. Over the fireplace, they hung a red and violet sampler Emily had knitted with wool from the sheep of western Massachusetts.
The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble
I had never lived anywhere that was less than beautiful: I had been brought up in Cambridge, in one of those large and lovely houses on Madingley Road, with shutters and an overflowing garden, and dark brick covered with plants and flowers.
Eat…
…cold noodles. Nothing’s more satisfying on a sticky summer day. Here’s a recipe for peanuts lovers, one with a kick, and one for farmer’s market enthusiasts or at-home green thumbs looking to make use of perfect summer tomatoes.
P.S.
*As in all essays, the editing process for “Horse Girl Season” left some scraps on the cutting room floor—anecdotes and items that didn’t quite fit. One of those was something that seems to speak to the opposite of horses-as-healing. I haven’t quite been able to wrap my head around it. Maybe because its context is so devastating. In a recent New York magazine feature, Lisa Miller investigates the events leading up to the mass shooting perpetrated at Michigan’s Oxford High, which killed Tate Myre, 16, Madisyn Baldwin, 17, Hana St. Juliana, 14, and Justin Shilling, 17. The parents of the alleged shooter, a fifteen-year-old boy, have each been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter for their role. “To convict someone of manslaughter through gross negligence,” Miller writes, “a prosecutor in Michigan must prove that the defendant knew of a potentially dangerous situation, that they could have averted harm through ordinary care, and that the disastrous harm to others presented by the circumstances would have been apparent to an ordinary mind — what the attorneys call ‘foreseeability.’” Miller’s piece focuses particularly on the mother, Jennifer Crumbley, called Jehn, whose name appears nearly twice as often as that of her husband, Ethan. The prosecution showed that “during the months that Ethan was spiraling, Jehn went to the horse barn after work several days a week,” and that, “during the very hours Ethan was having his two apparently hallucinatory episodes and asking his mother to reply, Jehn was at the barn, taking selfies and photos of her horses.”