226. READ. LOOK. THINK.
‘Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw.’ Types. Sublimation. Paying great attention to ordinary living. Syllabus self. ‘Even if it feels insurmountable, you have to hold on.'
READ.
'I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare.'
'Good autofiction is realizing you can be a character in your own life and creating that life or bringing that life into being in part by writing about yourself as a character.' / The Critic and her Publics podcast.
‘Conversations about character and type abound in contemporary realist novels […] The results, allegedly, are blanched, lifeless novels, characterized by minimalism of description, coolness of tone, humorlessness of style, and wobbliness of genre—not quite fact, not quite fiction. Yet a novel like Rooney’s is interesting precisely because it troubles certain received and, indeed, narcissistic ideas about what a fictional character ought to be.’
'Don’t you think that all literature involves sublimation of some sort or other? What you bring to a book from your own life does not make or break it. What matters is your art – sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter. Terms like auto-fiction may stir up interest in critics and readers, but writers will write what suits their talents and needs of the moment regardless.' So much to take away from this discussion between Parallel Lives author Phyllis Rose and Sheila Heti.
‘It is only by paying great attention to ordinary living that I actually learn anything about writing.’
Alison author Lizzy Stewart on how she creates ordinary reality.
'Because it’s never the same “I” every time. If you don’t believe me, open your Notes app or an old journal. Flip to an entry dated six months ago. Was it the same you who wrote that? Every time I sit down to write, the “I” that emerges sounds different. The more I write in the first person, the more I become convinced that I’m producing a piece of fiction based on fact.'
'One thing my colleagues and I said in a reading group, though, is that we find it alarming how patients more and more rarely come and say “I'd like to be more free”. I don't find patients asking this of me anymore. Instead I find them asking me to tell them what to do.'
'a syllabus self'
LOOK.
‘Just off the dining nook is a full kitchen with enough storage for researching two more books.’
Tune into forests from around the world with Tree.fm.
Malia Obama’s style.
I urgently need about twenty of these pine boxes — exact usage TBC. And some room signs? Exact usage also TBC.
THINK.
'Agency is a concept I am still developing. Running has helped me understand what it means to be in control. [...] Running balances two opposing human impulses: to destroy and create. [...] Trauma rewires the brain, including your reward pathway. So does running. But the latter is constructive and healing. [...] Even if it feels insurmountable, you have to hold on. You cannot give up on yourself.' Grace Tame.
'As the days passed, I did not wonder if something would go wrong, I simply wondered when.' At 45, she grieved the idea of motherhood — then by pure fluke, she was pregnant.
‘Rage would bubble out of nowhere’: the premenstrual disorder PMDD.
'I can think of one more thing that helps a person self-regulate, and that is having lots and lots of money.'
‘We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection. Meanwhile, as an evolutionary hangover from a more dangerous world, we are exquisitely engineered to pay attention to spectacle and catastrophe. But screens have replaced a chunk of our physical-world experience with a digital simulacrum that has enough spectacle and catastrophe to capture hours of our greedy attention. These devices so absorb us that it’s very difficult to engage with them and be present with other people.’
The dead world of Blippi. (I couldn't agree more; this guy chilled me to the bone when I first saw him in the pandemic and immediately banned him from the home.)
'If liberalism cannot offer a moral and stabilising form of governance, then what is it for? In the midst of such a historically bloody and disruptive conflict, if liberalism shows no ability or desire to protect civilian life, regional security and its own electoral prospects, then its mission-defining claims of principle and competence collapse.'
'The hallmark of conspiratorial thinking is a quasi-religious conviction that nothing ever happens by accident, only by grand design, and that only people too naive to know how the world really works could think otherwise.'
Shaming works best, if at all, when 'a respected person directs a moderate amount of shame at someone who has temporarily departed from a shared value'.
'Feminism feels unfair to these young men because it’s based on the premise that women started from a position of inferiority (many young men find this hard to believe, because they were literally born yesterday) and now get to enjoy the glory of having beaten the odds. For young men to experience the same narrative of success, they feel they need to start from a position of disempowerment.' Can parents prevent their sons from sliding to the right?
‘Wounded entitlement is how cishetero white men in particular can position themselves as damaged and thus capable of resilient comeback.’
Which crisis tribe are you? (I'm climate change.)
Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving.
Jess
X