S1E9: A Very Diary Xmas
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Pickle your beets, sniff your jars, and wrap the Christmas ham in a teatowel! We’ve reached the toe, the toenail, the heel – no, the sole of the year, and Jenny and Tracy are bringing (or at least name-checking) the A-list celebs for A Very Diary Xmas.
In this final episode of Bad Diaries Podcast for 2023, recorded on a thundery (Wellington) and hot (Melbourne) day in December, we bemoan the tyranny of email, and celebrate staying in bed and sensible shoes.
We look to other people’s diaries on our bookshelves (hello, Andy!), as well as mining our own diaries for the good, the bad and the ugly-crying of our diarised Christmases past.
In not-so-Christmas-y content, we ponder the power of photos vs diaries as archives and records. Tracy brings along some diary-adjacent books she’s read lately, and Coercively Controlling Ex-Boyfriend makes yet another cameo.
We finally six-of-the-best each other – as we have each six-of-the-bested our fabulous Bad Diaries Podcast special guests this season – and we look ahead to 2024, and Season 2 of the podcast, bringing you more guests, more chats, and more diaries (and diary-adjacent) content.
Wishing you all A Very Diary Xmas and everything fabulous for 2024.
In this episode:
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport (2016, Piatkus)
The Faber Book of Diaries, Simon Brett (ed.) (1987, Faber and Faber)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000, Anchor Books)
The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett (2010, Penguin Classics)
90-year-old Kitty Miller – who gets a mention in Andy Warhol’s diaries – can be found in the Andy Warhol Photography Archive at Stanford University. Here’s a proof sheet of photos Andy took of Kitty Miller at home with her dog ca. 1976-1979
Also mentioned in Andy’s diaries, Bob Collacello was a longtime editor of Interview magazine, and Warhol’s ‘right-hand-man’ in the 1970s
Here are Paloma Picasso and Mick Jagger by Andy Warhol
So Evelyn Waugh as a young man did have quite the boyish face
Noel Coward and his silk robes, pyjamas, dressing gowns
It was (so says Auntie Google) Edith Sitwell who said “All women should have a day a week in bed.” Couldn’t agree more.
Robert Lord Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell, Vanessa Manhire and Nonnita Rees (2023, Otago University Press) — here’s a great review in The Spinoff
Tracy talks about Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (2023, A&U), The Conversion by Amanda Lohrey (2023, Text) and Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar (2023, Picador)
A Novel Idea by Fiona Kelly McGregor (Giramondo, 2019)
Fiona was in Aotearoa New Zealand this year as Michael King Writers Centre x Varuna Writer in Residence. She was one of four readers at our Bad Diaries Salon at Verb Readers & Writers Festival in November 2023
Fiona Kelly McGregor’s novel Indelible Ink (2010, Scribe) was The Age Book of the Year in 2011
Tracy refers to the previous Bad Diaries Podcast episode with guest Nadine Anne Hura
For Xmas in 1988, Jenny got The Tommyknockers by Stephen King (1987)
Tracy first learned the Daily Diary format – Tracy calls it DID / SAW / HEARD / DRAW – from Lynda Barry’s highly recommended “how-to” book Syllabus (2014, Drawn & Quarterly)
Lynda Barry is @thenearsightedmonkey on Instagram
Tracy’s not the only one who thinks Lynda Barry is a genius – Barry was awarded a MacArthur Fellows Program “genius grant” in 2019
Here’s the recipe for pickled baby beets that Tracy makes every damn xmas (forget roasting the salmon, just buy good smoked salmon; forget the crème fraiche)
Films that Tracy watched on telly, Xmas 1987: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34th St (1947), Love You till Tuesday (1969), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), Let’s Dance (1950)
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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.
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