The [Tuesday] Media Diet with Seb Emina

On the Happy Reader, France Inter, and Mavis Gallant

I’ve long admired the taste of Seb Emina (SE), and it’s a pleasure to have him with us for our first edition of 2024. Sending best wishes your way from team WITI. Good night from Phu Quoc. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

For the past decade or so I’ve been editor-in-chief of The Happy Reader, which, as readers hopefully know, was the literary magazine published by Penguin Books in collaboration with Fantastic Man. The Happy Reader’s final issue (“Tilda Swinton and The Odyssey”) will soon be sold out and I’m now in the process of launching a magazine-style newsletter called Read Me. It’s my first new editorial project in quite a while and I have exciting plans for it.

Elsewhere I am co-curator of the contemporary art project Five Radio Stations, a group show commissioned by the French organisation Lab’Bel and comprising, to put it simply, five artworks that are also radio stations. Then also (with Daniel John Jones) I’m co-artist of one of them, Infraordinary FM, which is both a real-time, rolling news service of the commonplace and quotidian — bird sightings, tides, ships, pinball scores — and a sort of ready-made poem ad infinitum.

Apart from that, I work as an editorial consultant for a few interesting clients, and as a writer contribute to magazines and newspapers worldwide. A recent dream assignment was interviewing Greta Gerwig for The Gentlewoman just as she was grappling with the final edit of Barbie.

I’m originally from South East London, and I now live in Paris. 

Describe your media diet. 

At breakfast I tend to listen to the French radio station France Inter then a bit later the World Service. I’m often haunted by a feeling that I should be listening to something more leftfield like NTS or Resonance FM. Some people must eat their granola to a backdrop of art radio, right? So I’ll listen to those stations sporadically while working or otherwise entertain my fetish for radio that is broadcasting from places I am not. College radio from Mexico, rock radio from Thailand, it’s all exciting: lately I’ve been getting into a community station from Tasmania called Edge Radio which plays poetry readings, ‘forgotten music’ and ambient soundscapes.

Recent TV favourites: Get Back, Severance, Slow Horses, The Bear. Despite mostly bad reviews I also loved The Offer, a fictionalised dramatisation of the making of The Godfather. It’s a show about creative problem-solving, basically, but so entertaining and visually lavish.

For news I’ve always looked at websites like the Guardian, FT and New York Times. I do this most of the time not via the homepage but a link that’s caught my eye on social media or that someone’s shared on Whatsapp (e.g. this amazing piece about the chimpanzees who escaped from a zoo in Sweden last year). I like the London Review of Books as an information source as it often goes deeper than a daily newspaper can or wants to. I’m on a New Yorker off year.

Some favourite newsletter subscriptions: The Ann Friedman Weekly, Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Hinternet, Hexagon, This Week in Sound, and Why is this Interesting?, naturally.

I’ve never found a more powerful cure for insomnia than putting in an earphone and listening to podcasts. Not that they’re boring, it just gives the mind something to do besides the wheelspin of night-thoughts. My ‘up next’ includes Hardcore History, The Week in Art, Backlisted, The Ezra Klein Show and Chaleur Humaine, a climate podcast from Le Monde.

What’s the last great book you read?

The Burning Time by Peter Hanington, the latest in a series of thrillers about an old-school radio journalist. It’s a relief that I like them so much because, full disclosure, Peter’s a friend of mine. Every time you read the latest installment you’re giddy with excitement to be reunited with the characters. Peter was a BBC radio journalist for twenty-five years, and his depth of experience permeates what is otherwise an epic (and topical) page-turner.

What are you reading now?

Lauren Oyler’s next book No Judgment, a collection of essays on subjects like gossip, autofiction and vulnerability. I’m only an essay and a half in so can’t offer an overall verdict yet, but she’s a fantastic writer.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I start my copy of The Paris Review (say) at the beginning and I finish at the end. I think every editor is aware that there are a lot of people who just flip through what they’ve done, but in their heart they believe — rightly? Wrongly? — there exists a loyal cohort who read every page in the order presented. It’s that latter group for whom they really work. It’s not that I actually read everything in that publication. I allow myself vetoes. But I try to look at everything, if I really like the publication.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

The short stories of Mavis Gallant are a bit overlooked. Perhaps it’s because, while brilliant, they’re also incredibly dense, like some of the fancier desserts you see in French bakeries where one is a revelation but two will leave you sweating and delirious. In my copy of Paris Stories, she herself admits as much, beseeching the reader not to attempt the stories at once but read them only occasionally, always punctuated by other things. If only she’d offered this advice in the prologue rather than, inexplicably, the afterword, that’s probably what I’d have done.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

An ‘anti-social media’ app called Minutiae. Once a day it buzzes and you have one minute to respond by taking a photo of something in your immediate surroundings. Then you get access to the photo-stream of a random person somewhere in the world, which has been accumulated in the same way, and someone gets access to yours. It’s all anonymous. You can see the place where the photos were taken, but not who that person is. It might be a stretch of road during a blizzard, a blurry wardrobe door or a cup of coffee in a diner. Occasionally you might even get a selfie. There’s this real sense of intimacy. Then, after another minute, it’s gone and the app has no further use until tomorrow.

Plane or train?

Having experience with both, I’m qualified to tell you that trains are best.

What is one place everyone should visit? 

The Greek island of Hydra. Or at least I suspect as much. I really want to go.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Well, for about ten years I was deep into the world of breakfast. As in eating it, but also thinking about it, writing about it, and, eventually, making media appearances as a sort of spokesperson for it. In 2005 I started a blog called The London Review of Breakfasts. It was my first big editorial creation, and featured the work of around a hundred contributors, some of whom have since gone on to be quite famous. It was indeed about places to eat the meal of breakfast but it was about writing stuff that was just really fun to read. There were reviews in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, and reviews from the point of view of the duck egg. I put together a breakfast recipe book for Bloomsbury in the same style, called The Breakfast Bible, and, with Daniel John Jones again, a radio station called Global Breakfast Radio that plays local radio from wherever the sun is rising. But I didn’t want to just be “that breakfast guy”. I wanted more from life. So I emerged from the breakfast rabbit hole and started work on The Happy Reader instead. (SE)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

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