“Learn to be a person in the world… a vital, curious, intelligent, sensitive member of society.” — Ebon Moss-Bachrach
“I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.” — Eileen Myles, via Austin Kleon
Yohaku no bi: the beauty of empty space
“The sensation of improving as a writer to me is one of moving toward greater exactitude. Getting closer to the words themselves and letting simple words mean what they mean. Not trying to put them over with ornament.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan
The third conditional future
2023
“Don’t let them get you to hate them, because if you are in hate with them… then you’re weakened, you’re no longer in your center, you’re no longer in your soul or your core or your heart; you are in a weak, unbalanced state, and you get to ask yourself whether that’s ok with you. And if you’re not, you’re the only one you’re going to change. If you do change, and if you release those people by blessing them in your prayer life or thought life, sometimes the damndest things happen, and things just get a little bit better.” Anne Lamott, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
“You know what you have to do. Look after yourself. Look after the bits of yourself that need to be clear to make your work. And keep your flame safe.” Tilda Swinton
“It’s nice when people are nice.” Michelle Wasinger (RIP)
“Be kind. Be creative.” Carolyn Owen Anderson (RIP)
“I'm trying to find common ground, and to me common ground is not a middling space, it's a radical space. It's a space you can share in common. The commons is the thing that concerns me.” Zadie Smith
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
“That has stayed with me, the way in which he gently refrained. I have resolved to be more like him, less inclined to mock. His silence implied that all partake of some holiness, except perhaps in ways too obvious to mention…” John Jeremiah Sullivan
A Primer for Leaving the Body While Alive by Maureen Seaton
“I just think it’s a fundamental thing people struggle with. Being stuck inside of something. Being afraid to leave. To go out or to change. It’s very hard. In a way we are all capable of being locked in a box or bunker or something. Locked in our own identifies or sense of who we are, routine, the habits of our lives. To actually have the courage to leave that, or to unlock the door.” Michael Shannon
“I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own skepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window-shopping and just stepped through the door.” Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage
“The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed.” Marilynne Robinson, Home
Am I getting any closer to getting it right?
At the center of our earth is a spinning iron ball. The ball is about 1,800 miles beneath our feet, roughly the distance between St. Louis and Los Angeles. It is as hot as the surface of the sun. Every seventy years or so the ball slows down and changes the rotation of its spin. We don’t really know why.
Exquisite ambiguity
2022
Life Is a Particle Time Is a Wave (dir. Daniel Zvereff)
“Even our smallest actions have potential for great change, positively or negatively, and the way in which we all conduct ourselves within the world means something. You are anything but impotent, you are, in fact, exquisitely and frighteningly dynamic, as are we all, and with all respect you have an obligation to stand up and take responsibility for that potential.” Nick Cave
This: “There are some flowers that get your attention, even though you don’t notice them usually… I believe in those encounters. Whether you are calling for them or they are calling for you.” And this: “We realized the organic design of flowers is very strong. They can withstand strong water pressure and currents. Although flowers are very sensitive, they are actually very strong.” From “Flower Punk” (dir. Alison Klayman)
“Angel” by Terri Kirby Erickson
"Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another." Richard Powers, Bewilderment
Begin again
Inputs ⇢ Outputs
"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke
"Your calling may be something that you do that gives you joy but that you're never going to get paid for. It may be certain relationships that you're holding that are primary. Being a parent or being a child, being a friend, being a neighbor, the service you do in your community. It can be how you show up through your day, how you treat strangers. You can play an instrument. You can write. It's the things that amplify your best humanity." Krista Tippett
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
We are different people at different points, and we should allow ourselves to be free of someone we once were but no longer are.
"What life is about is the constant vigilance of trying to do right with the new circumstances presented by the birth of each new season." Nick Offerman
2021
"The cumulative effect of an absence of wealth (is) an erosion of grace." George Saunders
"Recall that the urge to distract yourself can be observed without being acted upon."
"Jesus goes around healing people of blindness, and he doesn't ask them what they plan to look at for the rest of their lives." Anne Lamott on giving without expectation
Notice when you are about to make a judgment and ask a question instead.
Bored by Margaret Atwood
"I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle." Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
"Cynicism is attractive because it gives you an excuse to do nothing."
"Take notes regularly. This will sharpen both your powers of observation and your expressive ability. A productive feedback loop is established: Through the habit of taking notes, you will inevitably come to observe more; observing more, you will have more to note down."
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." Maya Angelou
"I don't know who needs to hear this, but writing is a lifetime, not one book, or essay, or review. It's almost a relief: you will always have it, even if you think you don't. It'll be there. You can fold it up in your pocket and take it with you, forever, I swear."
How to Write an Obituary - The New York Times
2020
"Any piece of writing, after all, has only a particular, and limited, audience or readership. It is not necessary to try to appeal to everyone, or even to explain oneself." Lydia Davis
How to Write a Condolence Note
Deal with problems in daylight
Control what you can control and try not to stress about the other stuff.
What's the best thing that happened today?
"What have you done when you have bested a fool?" Mattie Ross
How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
"The key is, write what you actually care about. Because in the end, you're only doing this for yourself and for the three, four, five people who will know in the coming century that you ever existed. That's all you need to do."
How to be Perfect by Ron Padgett
2019
Vulture by Rae Armentrout
Drew Magary's mirror story
The Fellow by Joy Williams
Something I read today, paraphrased: Have no expectations of others. Do without the expectation of getting something in return. This will help chip away at any (false) sense of entitlement. It will make you happier.
In a Tub by Amy Hempel
My Life by Matthew Zapruder
What to say when you don't know what to say
Sometimes you find things when you need them.
"To read is to plant the seed of endless excitement." Mary Oliver
2018
"Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen." George Saunders
This: "There are silences harder to take back than words." And this: "You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you." James Richardson
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Mark Singer's profile of Ricky Jay (RIP)
"We are each simply an arrangement of particles of light, she said. We are none of us anything if not a glimpse of something fleeting and minuscule, weightless as air." Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children
How to Talk to People, according to Terry Gross
2017
So much of this essay, but maybe most of all this: "It's a reminder that the 'Creed of Democracy' contains limits -- that no amount of assimilation or integration will protect you when an alien requires conjuring... that being a model citizen means little when laws can be enforced arbitrarily, and you no longer qualify." Hua Hsu in The New Yorker
In the park we kicked around the purple soccer ball, and another ball that wasn't a soccer ball but we pretended was due to Harold's little feet. After that we ate ice cream against a brick wall and let the sweetness encircle our mouths like fake goatees and saw the couple who had been flying a kite in the park earlier and said hello to them and their small dog. 70 degrees in February
Lois' resolutions: "I want to be an artist. I want to have fun, so I need to have more play dates. I want to take karate and soccer. I want to be a strong woman. I don't want to be one of the weak ones. I want to fight for our town."
The perfect vessel for coffee is a plain 10oz paper cup
2016
"At this moment, all over the world --- and most recently in America --- the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind... Those of us who remember [a] finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along." Zadie Smith, On Optimism & Despair
Linda Holmes on Pulling the Red Handle
"Everything feels too intimate, too aggressive; the interfaces that were intended to cheerfully connect us to the world have instead spawned fear and alienation. I'm worried that this sense of relentless emotional bombardment will escalate no matter what's in the news." Jia Tolentino on the 'Worst Year Ever'
"And your job as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding."
"When an inexperienced, thin-skinned demagogue rides into office by explaining away immensely complex problems while arguing that our national glory demands we strip millions of their dignity or their rights, our only duty is to resist by whatever means permitted us by law."
A mind-blowing observation about adjectives (from The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth)
Jia Tolentino on Lionel Shriver and her sad sombrero
"All-American Poem" by Matthew Dickman
"Lucky" by Tony Hoagland
"After it ended badly it got so much better" Kim Addonizio
"Productivity isn't about running faster or pushing yourself harder, but rather, about working smarter and paying a bit more attention to what is really going on."
Slatland by Rebecca Lee
Lois: "What does it feel like when your heart's on fire?"
"The German word Mitläufer comes to mind: going along to get along, in a manner that does not avoid misdeeds---one of the many banalities of evil." And: "A reputation for niceness may obscure rather than express the midwestern character." Lorrie Moore on Making a Murderer
Men by Lydia Davis
Call to Wait, a phone line that puts callers on hold for seven years.
"The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind." E.M Forster
Home by George Saunders
2015
36 Questions to Love
This photo
"A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short." Schopenhauer
"We are each simply an arrangement of particles of light, she said. We are none of us anything if not a glimpse of something fleeting and miniscule, weightless as air." The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch
"No silence was ever so deep." Ted Kooser
Rid your life of complainers and cynics Maria Popova
"Be kind, pay attention, err on the side of generosity." And: "This, of course, is what a 'role model' is: someone who, by gracefully embodying positive virtues, causes you to aspire to them yourself." More life lessons from George Saunders (and his teachers
"If you're judging your output by your tiredness, you're sure to be misled." Nobody Cares How Hard You Work
"[The] growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts... everyone can change and grow through application and experience."
"It was all make-believe. It was also all true."
"Here's a practical writing tip: if you're stuck, write 'Once upon a time.'"
"The first draft is always perfect. All it's got to do is exist."
This: "Decisions are made slowly, after thoughtful investigation, because they are a commitment that has consequence. It is better to be slow." And this: "Certainty is a prison." From On Slowness by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it... Life is long if you know how to use it."
The Late, Great Stephen Colbert by Joel Lovell
"Thom rarely reviewed what he did not like, and in general his reviews were written in the mode of appreciation."
"If you don't know the whole truth, you might as well keep whatever you have to say short. You might as well puncture the pretense of sheer size." And many other wise bits on the virtues of brevity.
"The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls --- and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that --- the clearer people's inherent dignity becomes." And this from same: "Never suppose that the humorous is the enemy of the serious. Middles can get ponderous, weighted down with their own importance. Lightness is a gift of the beginning --- try to keep it with you for the whole stretch."
"I've always wanted to be curious and provocative, I guess, and interesting, and interested in this kind of sparkling, you know, sapphire we all call home, you know. I always wanted to be mystified by it all --- and rather fascinated with life itself. I think maybe when you drink, you're probably robbing yourself of that genuine experience, even though it appears what you're doing is getting more of it. You're getting less of it. And it takes a while, when you've had a rock on the hose like that for so long. It takes a while for the hose to be a hose again, you know, and for things to start flowing." Tom Waits to Terry Gross
This American Life: If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS
The morning, as Lois and I were running late, and as I was clearly frustrated, she stopped me and put her hands on my cheeks and said with the greatest tenderness, "Caalllmm doowwwnn, just like Daniel," and I almost collapsed in her arms.
And if this all seems a bit askew, this nervous pitter-patter back and forth, this chronological shifting from one foot to the other, well I apologize and suppose I'm not sure how else to proceed.