Nº 35: Julieta Caldas
The poet recommends custom ringtones, peppermint oil, and a newsletter to rival GSTS.
We’re back with Julieta Caldas. Read on to find out what she’s into, and if you’re new here, hit subscribe for secret recommendations once a week.
Julieta Caldas is a writer, poet, and translator based in Cambridge and London.
☞ MASK ON, BLINDS UP: The best way to sleep is by putting your mulberry silk eye mask on before bed but leaving the blinds UP. Then it’s 50% easier to wake up because once you’ve removed your personal light shield, the room is already bright and you don’t have to lie there staring at the blinds willing them to move.
☞ POLITICO ‘LONDON PLAYBOOK’ NEWSLETTER: I can normally only be bothered to read this newsletter when something specifically juicy is happening in UK politics, but when it’s good it’s so funny and real. I started reading it because I heard the guy who writes it is the godfather of BJ’s recent son. You can imagine Westminster people reading it and having veins burst in their foreheads, i.e. it gives an irl Thick of It experience. Dominic Cummings’ newsletter has the same effect when he’s in a bitchy mood.
☞ WATER BOTTLE WITH SIPPY FUNCTION: I’m so thirsty all the time but I can barely drink more than a few intermittent sips unless it’s from a bottle with straw. Maybe it’s a kind of oral fixation that develops in the years after you graduate from dummies and sippy cups… In any case it feels like a natural human instinct and I trust it. Also it means you can drink in bed without sitting up.
I don’t recommend the one I have because it looks like merch from one of those fake evil companies you see in cartoons. You can definitely find a gorgeous millennial one online (at least 1-1.5L). In my opinion the mouthpiece should be squishy but the body of the bottle should be metallic, not plastic.
☞ PEPPERMINT OIL: The way this evaporates a hangover is unreal………. You put a couple drops on your forehead and temples and it feels like the cool hand of god on your skin……
☞ COLES MAG: Sincerely my dream job is to be a recipe developer for this magazine. I heard it’s the most read magazine in Australia, which makes sense because it’s free outside the most famous supermarket. Woolworths makes one too but the recipes are more normal.
I have my favourite recipes (like chicken korma rissoles, prawn ciabatta pizza, fish finger tacos with kiwi salsa). But this is visually one of the best: it’s an egg cracked into a hole in bread. The ingredients for the salsa? 1) tomato 2) chives :) x
For misguided nutritional reasons not a single recipe mentions salt. Every one is awkwardly like ‘season with pepper’...
☞ PERSONALISED RINGTONES & VIBRATE PATTERNS: In the iPhone contact book you can set specific ring/text tones & vibration patterns for each person. It reminds me of having a Blackberry and all my friends flashing up as different colours on BBM. Extremely Pavlovian :)
☞ PICKLED MUSTARD TUBER: Ji Xiang Ju mixed vegetable pickle (spicy flavour) is the one I got recently. There’s Sichuan pepper in there so you get the tingle but it’s kind of a greasy tingle. This and some kimchi and olives and beer is a delicious snack to have of an evening.
☞ OLIVE OIL CHIPS & CHOCOLATE MOUSSE: I “invented” this with my friend Anya when we canonically lived in Spain for 3 months. It needs to be those olive oil crisps you get in Europe & (unfortunately probably also European) supermarket chocolate mousse. No one had told me at that point that potato and chocolate were a ‘classic combo’ so I felt like a toxic genius test kitchen chef. It reminded me of this Jared Leto interview where he said he gained weight for a movie by eating chocolate ice cream with olive oil and soy sauce and I was like ‘that sounds so good’.
☞ A WAVE (1984) BY JOHN ASHBERY: I’ve read so many (you could almost say most) of JA’s collections and I don’t know what he’s saying ever, but he’s the best to cruise through – it’s like looking out of a car window, you’re like ok blah blah blah that’s a tree, but then you might see something deeply intriguing every few blocks.
I don’t think this is the right way to “engage with his work”, but I like collecting my favourite bits in a phone note and then going back and reading over the hits.
I think A Wave is my #1 in terms of how many snippets I’ve saved. There are many big moments, like:
“The promise of a new day, living with lots of peopleAll headed in more or less the same direction, the sound of thisIn the embracing stillness, but not the brutality,And lists of examples of lots of things, and shit—”***“the answer, also,To the question that was on my mind but that I’ve forgotten,Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together.”***“To have been loved once by someone—surelyThere is a permanent good in that,Even if we don’t know all the circumstancesOr it happened too long ago to make any difference.”
♪ LISTENING TO: Teen girl mode: ‘iPad’ by the Chainsmokers (I came for the title and stayed for the lyrics which are actually sublime…) Old man mode: ‘Jackie’ by Scott Walker; the Van Morrison album Inarticulate Speech of the Heart.
☠︎ HATES: The ‘Standard British woman’s dress’, like the Dorothy Perkins type ones they put the girls in to make them look normal on Snog Marry Avoid.
TY Julieta! Follow Julieta here and here. Read Julieta’s latest work here.
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