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Terry Castle and “the dark heart of shelter-lit addiction”

The Atlantic is quickly becoming my favorite magazine, and Terry Castle is a major contributing factor. Castle is an English professor at Stanford, and she’s the author of The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, one of my favorite books of all time. Castle seems to have the best kind of brain—the kind that finds everything interesting—and she’s the best kind of writer—the kind that can make anything fascinating. She’s also funny—honest-to-goodness, lol funny—which is a rare and precious commodity in an academic.

The latest issue of The Atlantic contains her lit-critical, gently Freudian, and delightfully candid analysis of shelter lit—high-end glossies and lavishly produced books devoted to interior design. Myself, I’m addicted to food porn, but that’s probably only because it’s a cheaper habit: The magazines are cheaper, the books are cheaper, and I can occasionally afford some Amish chickens or a chunk of Humboldt Fog, while the same cannot be said of a room’s worth of Woo Kim wallpaper or Dwell crib sheets.* But I believe both habits have a lot in common. Both appeal to a desire for comfort and self-expression, and, while I believe that anyone tending towards OCD might find more pleasure in interiors, I have to say that, when I’ve got a good mise en place going, it’s like I’m dancing to the music of the spheres.




*Actually, now that I think about it, shopping for baby seems to have unleashed my inner design snob, perhaps because outfitting a nursery that doesn’t fill me with the same existential despair as a stroll through Wal-Mart on a Saturday afternoon is proving to be such a challenge. There are gorgeous things I cannot afford—have you seen the Ooba Nest, and do you know how great it would look in my living room?—and then there’s all the giant, bulbous, plastic crap in bright primaries or simpering pastels that I really just cannot introduce into my home. There is no affordable, acceptable middle. If any designers or furniture manufacturers are reading this, I’d like you to know that I am but one member of a large, untapped, and acquisitive market. And any millionaires in a gift-giving mood who might be reading this should know that the really expensive stuff is on the last page of my baby registry.

February 20, 2006 | Permalink

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