I have been watching a lot of interior design videos lately. Nathalie Farman-Farma is an exquisitely interesting textiles designer and curator who I really cannot waste too much time being envious of given that she’s not only a Hewlett-Packard heir but married to a literal Iranian royal—yet I really genuinely admire her erudition and her aesthetic sensibilities. I even tried to go to John Rosselli today on the way back from my much-needed ear cleaning in order to look at some of her fabrics, but it turned out every shop in the magnificent and expensive Design & Decoration Building was closed because of Easter. I know they literally did kill Jesus, but that harshed my vibe.
In her home tour, Farman-Farma relates her personal history, as a way of explaining how she found her way to a design career: first a classics student, then an editor at the New Yorker, then a wife to a descendant of the Qajar dynasty and a mother, then the founder of Décors Barbares, which features vibrant textiles inspired by the meeting of East and West.
Immense wealth is clearly an asset when it comes to being able to follow one’s whims and passions the way Farman-Farma has, but I don’t think it’s necessary. She is clearly incredibly smart and good at what she does in addition to being batshit rich.
I was really struck by this comment on the video:
It’s an important takeaway. Farman-Farma has a lot of experience, knowledge, and personal lore which she’s made work for her. It all hangs together in the form of her home, her family, and her career: not an easy balancing act no matter how much money you’ve got. Her preposterously posh fabric company is a synthesis of not only European history but of her own history.
As someone with a lot of personal lore, I look to people who are able to pull this off with style for inspiration. Sometimes I really do feel like I’m dragging it all behind me. Manhauling, as it were: that unnecessarily laborious form of travel which contributed directly to the deaths of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his polar party, 112 years ago today.
I met up with a friend from the Edinburgh Fringe last month and the usual pleasantries were exchanged, catching each other up on our current projects.
“And for the polar research I’m doing,” I began, “you know, my Antarctic thing—?”
The look on his face revealed he did not know. “You never told me about that!” he exclaimed. We had spent a month together in the clown trenches, so to speak, and that oh-so-prominent bit of my lore somehow never managed to leak out.
This kind of exchange is not rare. “I didn’t know you were in a band!” “I didn’t know you produced comedy!” “I didn’t know Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer sang a song you wrote when you were 14 onstage at the Town Hall in New York!”1
In some ways I’m proud when this happens because it has proved I’ve managed to stay just a LITTLE mysterious (I am a chronic braggart and blabber). Holding my lore close to my chest can feel like a much-needed exercise in making my current work and personality and style and whatever speak entirely for itself. But on the other hand there is that frustrating sense of weight—the manhauling harness tugging on my chest—the fact that with so much random shit I’ve done over the past decade and change, it’s very hard to give people the full picture. People specifically being potential employers or collaborators, the ones who need to be impressed fast and with reference to templates of successful adult life that they can easily understand.
I don’t really have a template. I have not been, how you say, regularly employed. New acquaintances can get my lore on a drip-feed, and that’s fine and even fun, but you can’t really drip-feed a resume into the gaping maw of capitalism. I’m out here applying to really stupid AI-training jobs that promise a paltry $30/hr to train our new robot overlords thinking imbecilic things like, if they knew Neil Gaiman sang my song they’d hire me to run the damn place.
And just like the endless snow drifting over the polar party’s Antarctic tomb, covering up the tent where they died at a rate of a few feet per year, the lore does not cease to accumulate. I’m always doing weird shit and then having to add it to the list of things I’ll eventually have to explain to people. Despite the stress it adds to daily interactions and my bank account, I have no plans to stop.
Polar pundits have said (and will keep saying) that manhauling was pointless, idiotic, unnecessary. In some ways it was all of those things, but the men who did it did it for a reason: they exulted, however misguidedly, in the use of their bodies and their will for a purpose.
The joy of life is in doing things as well as being able to say you’ve done them. It will all be useful, someday. Sure, I wish I had gotten interested in tasteful, eclectic, interior decorating 10 years ago so I could be good at it today. But I’m getting interested now, and in another decade when I have the most whimsical, beautiful, antique-filled historic home in Evanston and am featured on one of these glossy video tours (MANIFESTING MANIFESTING) I will not regret the time and effort it took to add even more to my lore.
Banger of the week
This event (and much much more) is discussed in depth on my episode of the Fangirl Central podcast.