Welcome to THE CHIMERA, a newsletter of high and low culture written by me, Thomas Barrie. I’m a freelance journalist, ex- of British GQ where I was a staff writer for a few years, who has decided to jump on the Substack bandwagon far, far too late.
What can I expect to read?
Expect voice. Expect vocab. Expect write-ups of pitches that were rejected by everyone in online journalism, and so made their way here.1 I’ll cover everything from Tarkovsky to Taylor Swift, the Mabinogion to Magic: the Gathering.
If you’re a fan of any of the below, then this newsletter is probably for you:
- The Baffler
- You Must Remember This
- The AV Club
- Numb at the Lodge
- The Blindboy Podcast
If you’re a fan of up-to-the-minute coverage of new trends in pop and high culture then this isn’t the newsletter for you; posts are going to be thematic (“capitalism in video games”; “the psychology of emo music”; “why does Gen Z dress like they’re all characters in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?”) rather than topical (“I saw the latest Star Wars and here’s what it says about Joe Biden”). There are people out there doing slow news already – so think of this as slow culture. If you want 750 words of reaction scribbled out on the bus home from an album launch, you can go read the NME.
And if you’d like to try before you buy? Substack is a wonderful platform which allows after-the-fact editing, so you can – or will be able to – read my first three posts here:
- Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet and the problem of historical ethics
- Taylor Swift should star in a fantasy movie
- How Italian football clubs became world leaders in high-fashion drip
Why the chimera?
If you’re the type that lurks on Substack, you probably already know that the chimera was, of course, an ancient mythological creature who was meant to have lived in what is now Turkey. She was a subtle, many-headed beast. Deadly and beguiling, and most of all unpredictable, the chimera was described in the Iliad by Homer:
“that savage monster, the Chimaera, who was not a human being, but a goddess, for she had the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent, while her body was that of a goat, and she breathed forth flames of fire; but Bellerophon slew her, for he was guided by signs from heaven.”
Lions, snakes, goats and goddesses – lovely. More recently, though, a chimera has become a metaphorical byword for a foolish or unattainable dream. A folly. Given launching a newsletter is perhaps the most foolish and vain undertaking for a modern journalist, the name felt apt.
Expect footnotes, too.