Notes to Self
Homework in my quest to read and write better.
|
This is the second time I’ve missed my self-imposed weekly goal and, oddly, the second time my draft on Kit has vanished, replaced by last week’s template like some insistent ghost. Also, it’s April, yet I find myself reflecting on March. Why? Still, the machine creaks along. Missing my own deadlines has revealed a few things: I read more attentively (in terms of note-taking) when I know this letter is looming. There’s quiet pleasure in jotting things down, in knowing this might one day be read - by others, or just future-me. Less pleasantly, I’ve realized I only enjoy writing this when I’m “ahead” (of schedule, that is). Which, of course, was never the plan. Capitalist habits die hard. I'd imagined a tidy archive of notes and insights to draw from. Instead, I’ve scattered thoughts across Apple Notes and Stickies like a literary magpie. It is, in short, a bit of a mess. For now, the good outweighs the bad - uglier habits that I optimistically believe can be retrained. The cadence of this letter will determine that. On a brighter note, a piece of mine was accepted by Five Minute Lit, a publication I return to often, always with appreciation. I’m ecstatic! It was actually the first thing I submitted - back in January, when I took the leap and began sharing my writing publicly. The challenge of creating momentum in a story within 100 words is quite something. I can't wait to attempt another one. Since then, Substack prompts have kept me going and the rejections have politely followed. My “Submittable still life” is gaining depth. Plenty more grey to come, I’m sure - but there’s joy in every shade (unintentionally wandered into 50 Shades territory with that metaphor.) Onwards. A list of interesting tidbits is all I can surface from my ghastly notes across tablets (yes, even discovered a few from my rarely used iPad): I'm reading Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis and listened to his podcast interview with Ottessa Moshfegh. On writing fiction, he states "it is all about tone, style, and voice...once you have those things locked down you can do anything." I don’t like a voice that is too aware of its audience. I think that gets really tacky, and if I want to do that I’ll just watch tv. You can’t separate voice from anything else. Voice is the thing that gives birth to everything that happens in a book. -Ottessa I loved and deeply resonated with how Andrea Long Chu described herself as a 'professional dilettante' on the Critics and Her Publics podcast. Still thinking about her flipswitch: "what I mean when I say 'this is good', is why you should all care." Liked her essay in n+1, Bad TV all the way from 2018! Really great writing. TV didn’t have to be good to be good: all viewers asked for was the possibility of returning, over and over, to the scene of enjoyment’s crime — hence the episode, the serial, the sitcom. Trash just had to be reliable. Even contempt could breed familiarity. If the barrage of televisual garbage that Americans were willing to consume proved anything, it was that once hooked, desire is very hard to spoil. This was perhaps the ultimate spoiler. -Chu About Thomas Mann in the New Yorker, "Mann liked to say that he found material rather than invented it—a play on the verbs finden and erfinden." AND 😲 "...the self-mirroring lends an uncanny reality to the novel, as if a second author were watching from the wings. Mann observed himself as unsentimentally as he observed everyone else." Times were harder then - when a misplaced diary could carry real consequences. In the spring of 1933, Mann, then a few months into his exile, was agonizing over the fate of his old diaries, which had been left behind at the family house, in Munich. Because he had renounced right-wing nationalism in the previous decade, the Nazi regime viewed him as a traitor—Reinhard Heydrich wanted to have Mann arrested—and the diaries could have been used to ruin his reputation. Mann’s son Golo had packed them in a suitcase with other papers and had them shipped to Switzerland. For several weeks, nothing was delivered. “Terrible, even deadly things can happen,” Mann wrote in a diary entry in late April. Decades later, it became known that a German border officer had waylaid the suitcase but had paid attention only to a top layer of book contracts. The contracts were sent to Heydrich’s political police, examined, and sent back, whereupon the suitcase was allowed to proceed. I can hardly believe it, but I’ve started setting aside time to memorize poems I love. Waiting to see if it changes my life - Garth Greenwell’s brilliantly persuasive Substack made a convincing case. This echoes what I was told about learning to code, and what I now feel each day since picking it up: a slow, stubborn, strangely thrilling shift in how the world reveals itself. When you carry around Shakespeare’s sonnets or Keats’s Odes in your head, you start to see them everywhere, how they permeate the literature that comes after them; you start to see how poems have secret handshakes with other poems; you feel how every poem you’ve read enriches every poem you read. Writers and Mentors by Rick Moody is a brilliant essay. A rare glimpse into the kind of literary grooming (MFA, mostly) that explains quite a bit about who ends up running big publications/elusive lit circles of today. Much to learn on 'how to learn' and teach in the piece but also beautiful writing: In general, we read alone. In general, the bond between reader and writer is a bond between two people, and it is therefore an intimate bond. In general, a story is read in the way that one listens to a friend whisper. A story is not read in the way that one listens to a lecture, or to a PowerPoint presentation. When you listen to someone whisper, you accept him or her according to certain assumptions—the assumptions of intimate exchange—and these are more in the forefront of our reading consciousness when we are not writing comments in the margin of a piece or preparing to say something about it in class. 🪷 Hope April brings a few flowers to this letter, in between its showers. |
Notes to Self
Homework in my quest to read and write better.