Hello old friend
A power outage at home sent me to my local library – and reminded me why it might be one of the most important places left in modern life.
Public Library, Cambridge, hand-coloured etching and aquatint (Thomas Rowlandson, 1809, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959).
Scrambling this week, popping in to say hello and goodbye as I wrestle with a Good Weekend feature with a Guardian one coming up fiercely behind. I’d like to thank understanding/flexible editors who come through with deadline extensions, the crew at doggy daycare, Uber Eats (oh, I know😢) – and, my local public library!
Today, in a brilliant stroke of (not) good timing, my apartment building’s electricity meters are all being upgraded and the power is off for much of the day. I can cope without lights because I have windows, without stovetop coffee because there’s a cafe on the corner, without heating because the Sydney day is lovely but, a major 21st century problem – I just cannot cope without being able to charge my laptop and phone.
So here I am, rediscovering the hush, the children’s voices in the background, the hard chairs, and the horror and embarrassment of accidentally having your laptop volume turned up when you happen, in a procrastinating sort of a way, to press play on a Facebook video. I swore. The library laughed.
Truthfully, while today is the first that I’ve sat down to work here in the library, I have, after years of ignoring it completely, been popping in and out quite a bit over the past few months. Lean times will do that.
Once I bought books. Before Jeff Bezos became the devil, I’d regularly get delicious parcels of titles delivered in boxes carrying that smiling curved arrow logo. Or, if I was in a hurry for something for work or I’d had a glass of wine or two, I’d hit “buy now” and a book would promptly appear in my Kindle app. I’d pop into bookshops and leave with armloads.
Alas, no more. No money, boycotting Bezos. And, in any case, what can I do with all the books I have spilling out of every room of my apartment already?
Rediscovering my lending library, borrowing books, has been a joy. When I leave the library today I’ll pick up a book I’d reserved (The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley) and return one I gave up on a few chapters in (The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud, nope, not for me). On my bedside table, from the library – George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. On my desk, research for a project, from the library – Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
How could I have been unfaithful for so long?
Like almost every other Australian kid in the 1970s, my mother took my brother and I to the library at least once a week (Toowoomba, Little Street, upstairs-downstairs). I think there were after-school and holiday activities there: somewhere my mother has a clipping from The Toowoomba Chronicle with a photo of me doing a somersault on the library floor wearing a very unfortunate orange-and-brown-striped woollen jumper she’d knitted for me. I think it was a theatre class or some such. (“Oh that was a nice jumper,” Mum has groused when I have suggested in the past that perhaps the jumper was a fashion catastrophe.) I have a niggling-guilty-memory that on another day I put a book back in the wrong place (or was it some other misdemeanour?) and a librarian sternly spoke to me.
We were library loyalists.
Then, for a long time, I wasn’t. I feel bad for my years of disloyalty.
Did you know – in my library network’s website at least, when you’re up to your ears in loans, you can build Wish Lists for the future?! Who needs Amazon anyway.
A man, he had the smell of booze and despair upon him, just asked if he could plug his phone into a powerpoint near my leg. I smiled at him, he didn’t meet my eye, I’ve seen him around the neighbourhood. There aren’t powerpoints in parks.
What an extraordinary thing … that in 2026, in an age of Bezos and his ilk, an age of greed and wealth-building for wealth-building’s sake and hollowed out public services and homelessness and nothing-in-life is free, something actually is free!
Libraries, borrowing books, libraries as workplaces and contemplative spaces, libraries as inclusive sources of sanity and solace and human contact and free wi-fi. Plus – Rhymetime and Storytime on beanbags. I might collapse with the kids for a while before I leave.
Zoom Meet-Up
As I announced last week, the third in my series of Zoom Meet-Ups will be held on Tuesday June 16 at 7.15pm.
I’ve invited Allison Bryant, one of Australia’s leading pelvic floor and incontinence physiotherapists, to join a special Vamp Zoom meet-up for paid subscribers.
This will be a big, candid, confidential, safe-space, judgment-free conversation about what actually happens to women’s bodies across midlife and beyond: prolapse, incontinence, pelvic pain, urgency, painful sex, ageing, exercise, treatment options, hormones, myths, embarrassment. And importantly: practical solutions.
I suspect many of us will have questions for Allison we’ve never been brave enough to ask.
The meet-up is a conversation for paid subscribers to Vamp only. I’ll send more information about how to join in the next couple of weeks. (If you haven’t already indicated whether you are interested in attending or not, it would be helpful if you can do so in the poll I published in last week’s newsletter … it’s under the main story about Rachel Ward … Substack won’t let me paste it in here again.)
🎵 Mood
I saw Annahstasia in Sydney a couple of months ago. Her voice just rocks me.
Wild thing
“What happens when you take a bird who lived in a cage his whole life and you just let him go?” … In Manhattan, Flaco, an escaped Eurasian eagle owl from Central Park Zoo, became a cause célèbre. For some, Flaco’s freedom became a symbol of hope. The hope could not last forever. World premiere screening in Central Park, July 29.
5 Things
In her Substack, “This is Precious” Sarah Wilson writes of the stop she took at a pub on the Central Coast, the conversation she listened to, then joined and added to, a conversation about pokies, French tabacs, shithouse days, loss, the importance of third spaces (see “Hello Old Friend”, above). “When you kill a community’s “third space”, or tiers-lieu,” Wilson writes, “the people go insular. And sad. And individualistic.”
Oh god, how here for this I am! Claire Foy and Richard E Grant in The Savage House. The Guardian didn’t love it (a “haranguingly one-note and unidirectional period romp of the raucously bewigged and be-poxed 18th century”) but I will not be deterred. Coming, apparently, to Australian cinemas soon.
Viriginia Trioli considers the new Kylie Minogue documentary series on Netflix. What, Trioli asks, is the secret to Kylie’s enormous appeal. Nick Cave answers: “Wreathed in delight, [he] explains that like pop music itself, Kylie is a joy machine, a positive, life-affirming source of joy and rapture.”
Gift link here to a moving New York Times’ article (from last month) about a woman coming to terms with, and tracking, her 59-year-old husband with early onset Alzheimer’s. “I wondered if I would feel guilty spying on my husband. But as I began tracking him, following his dot on a digital map, I felt connection. When his dot appeared at a favorite record store, I pictured him flipping through LPs. When his dot paused on Central Park’s Great Lawn, I imagined joining him on the grass. If he knew I was watching, he would feel like I’d betrayed him.”
The Australian restaurant above all others I want to visit right now. Chef Analiese Gregory’s new Tasmanian 10-seater, Lumachelle. … video below is intoxicating! (See urchin potato cake, rock lobster congee, wallaby pho, scallop tart, abalone pizitte … oh my!) (I still haven’t watched “A Girl’s Guide to Hunting, Fishing and Wild Cooking”. Must start! … on SBS on Demand.)
Plus, one more: Ian Thorpe on ABC’s The Assembly this week was profoundly moving. What a guy. And I love the way he talks about what happens after he dives into the water … “the silence” he says, the sensory experience, that’s what he loves.
Decoded: Mogging
“Mogging” is a Gen Alpha term that describes, mostly playfully (apparently), one person outshining or outperforming another.
Eg, from a New York Times article – “Einstein developed the theory of relativity. We can effectively say that he mogged physics and mathematics.”
According to the Times article, the term has existed for decades but has recently taken on a new life, particularly in the context of “looksmaxxing, an adjacent concept that holds male attractiveness as the key to success”.
(Not so playfully) NPR says the term is closely associated with incel and manosphere communities and has its origins in the acronym, AMOG – “alpha male of the group”.
Examples of usage:
“If you ‘frame-mog’ someone, your shoulders are superior to theirs.” (Via The Guardian)
“ ‘I mogged him with my boobs tonight,’ offers Lia Palmer, a model from the show.” (Via GQ)
In the past few months, the term “mogging” has become particularly associated with the figurehead of “looksmaxxing”, the controversial foul American internet personality “Clavicular”, who promotes extreme methods to physically maximise male attractiveness. (Anyone for a bit of light hammering to the jawline?)
In early February, Clavicular visited Arizona State University and found himself “frame mogged” (physically overshadowed) by a student he encountered.
Clavicular was apparently approached to have his picture taken with a buff fraternity leader. “When the photo was posted, his followers lamented that he had been, ‘brutally frame-mogged’ by the larger man. In short, he got shown up.”
Apparently, according to one clip I chanced upon, there are now “mog wars”.
As if we didn’t have enough to be afraid of.
Beautiful Things
Via Instagram; love this – how one guy dives for 19th century broken bottles in Sydney harbour and turns them into candles. (I love his patience, from beginning to end.)
Via Instagram; these miniature dolls and dolls’ houses … divine!
Via Instagram; love too, so much.
Stolen words
“… In an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it – so at least it seems to me – is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”–Bertrand Russell, Portraits From Memory And Other Essays, 1956.
I need to get back to the library. I too spent my childhood borrowing books from the Toowoomba library (I remember going there in my pyjamas and red dressing gown when it was open in the early evening!) and I am sure I read every book in the children’s book section and what passed for ‘’Young Adult’ in that era. When my own kids were little, although they were lucky enough to own stacks of books, we also loved library visits and the chance to find new favourites. Long may this wonderful resource continue to be an important part of communities.
I LOVE my library. Cos its winter, and cool enough (and dry!) I've taken to walking to the village and having an informative rest in the library before walking home again! Bliss