223. READ. LOOK. THINK.
What if you imagine the reader as someone who loves you? Teenage Zadie. A beautiful song. The book I am sure will help you as it helped me! Critical ignoring. What about me?
READ.
What if you imagine the reader as someone who loves you?
Zadie Smith on her teenage self.
The future of the campus novel.
‘'But the fact that I spent fourteen hours a day being numerous, writing in so many voices, had an effect. My I began to fray.' New Ben Lerner.
‘Philosophy takes an idea and gives it the kind of attention it rarely gets in daily life. Novels can do that too. I don’t think they’re about storytelling; you can tell someone the story of a novel in two minutes.’
‘There are some people I don’t want to have join the dinner. They deserve to live, but they don’t need to come to my house for supper.’
Tell Me the Truth About Love was a really nice ‘getting things done around the house’ book on audio.
LOOK.
90s art school on IG.
Enjoyed the This Jungian Life episode on creativity. (Trained to assess signs of grandiosity in patients, one of the podcasters says, a key one was ‘I’m writing a book!’)
Uncharacteristically I have bought a rug in the shape of a heart from H and M…
Katie Merchant’s box of biscuits for Christmas (she also has a whole Behind The Scenes of her beautiful wedding)
THINK.
I was SO impacted by Naomi Klein’s book Doppleganger, which I listened to on audio. Normally I just present things I’ve enjoyed like ‘oh, just a little something I enjoyed, take it or leave it, blushing smile emoji’ — but I am straight forwardly ADVOCATING that you read this! Naomi Klein has taken everything frightening in the world — Steve Bannon! Vaccine denial! Fascists! Colonialism and racist scapegoating! Inaction on climate change! — and made the state of the problem clear. Sometimes you just want someone older, wiser and cleverer than you to put your worries in order and point you in the right direction. That is what Naomi Klein does in this book!
Critical thinking isn't enough: we need to learn 'critical ignoring.'
Can’t think, can’t remember: more Americans say they’re in a cognitive fog.
‘… paying attention, under contemporary conditions, often means performing attention for an audience and in turn securing their attention and approval.’
‘In the long term, if you blinker yourself to reality, it limits your ability to formulate positions that are based in reality and therefore formulate positions that will achieve something lasting and moral. You need to be open to complexity because whatever narrow thing that you want to achieve in the real world will, if it gets put into practice, be put into practice in the real world. Not in the ideologically antiseptic world that you’ve created in your head.’
I found this ad for Substack a bit disturbing; I don’t like that white supremacists apparently abound; I don’t want 2024 US election content to flood the platform — I’m keeping an eye on it.
“I want to apologize for being so powerless.” In the New Yorker, a coder considers the waning days of the craft. / What is a website?
LASTLY.
Australians! as we approach holidays! don’t forget you have my novel just waiting to entertain you as you hide from your family or lie by the pool.
Seeing a copy of A Great Hope in a Shoalhaven charity shop (with a corduroy spine and sand in the pages) was one of the highlights of my 2022. I would commit a medium-sized crime to be having Christmas in Australia again.
A Great Hope on Amazon. At your local bookshop. For readers outside Australia.
This will be my last RLT of 2023. See you next year <3
Jess
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