I opened up my laptop and immediately my cat took this as an invitation to curl up in my lap, so currently I am typing with my arms stretched out far enough to leave space for her as I don’t have the heart to move her right now.
This week has been a lot about quiet though large internal shifts, realizations, boiling points, adjustments, connection, and rest. Welcome Taurus season! I usually mourn leaving the fiery Aries spirit behind, but I’m trying not to fight comfort and groundedness at the moment, so let’s ring the season in with open arms, shall we?
Some personal highlights:
I’m working officially part-time in a bookstore just down the street from my house, and the sheer joy and fulfillment I get from being a cute little shop girl in the neighborhood, organizing my overcrowded shelves, flirting with cuties who ask me for recommendations, using my employee discount to very responsibly buy one book (just one!) per week, let me tell you…… that’s all a job should be! I feel like I’m playacting having a job, someone is paying me to just be surrounded by books, send back the bad ones, order in better ones, reorganize, plan low stakes events like sidewalk sales, etc. this is literally a dream come true for me. One day I’ll convince the owner to let me come in more than 10 hours each week….. but that’s another story. One day even further down the line I’ll convince the owner to let me run the store and then maybe sell it to me…… but that’s another other story :-) For real though, the way that I’ve been able to connect with people each day in these short but intimate conversations about what we’re reading and what we recommend and what we love is such a joy, getting to connect with a stranger a handful of times every day is just really really good for the soul.
This week my very empty house gained 2 pieces of furniture (oooooh), we now have an antique hutch in our dining room (thank you DD for finding this on fb marketplace), and our basement (chill zone) now has a giant pistachio-colored sectional (which I found used for five hundred bucks and figured, big comfy couch, this is a good investment. Only after getting it in place did we figure out it retails new for $4k are you JOKING!) This brings our communal space furniture count up to 5 and that’s a milestone.
On the tarot front, and also on the personal highlights front (2 in 1), I pulled the six of pentacles in reverse the other day in a reading about how to pull myself out of where the cards said I was, which was the nine of swords in reverse. Basically the nine of swords reversed was telling me loud and clear what I already knew: that I was in a downward spiral of anxiety and misery, but that it was self-imposed, that my internal narrative wasn’t matching up with reality, it was just me creating fresh hells for myself.
The six of pentacles in reverse turns out to be the antidote I’ve needed for so many years, but have always rejected: taking care of myself — like in deep, meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful, intentional ways, not self-care. I had what I would call a small breakthrough in therapy last week where I acknowledged that so often one of the first signs I pick up on that I’m not “in a good place” (which is also something I’d like to start interrogating, and stop assigning good & bad to natural cycles of emotions) is that I am having a harder time being present to take care of others. This creates a sense of urgency, I have to “get better” asap so I can better serve those around me, otherwise I have no value, I’m not fulfilling my duties and the expectations of me, and ultimately that will lead to abandonment because I will no longer be of use to the people I love. This isn’t the first time I’ve recognized and understood this pattern, but it is the first time that I started to acknowledge how cruel it is to myself. I decided this time that I want to “get better” for me, not just so I can get back to the work that needs to be done sustaining others, I want to sustain myself!
The six of pentacles in reverse is about making sure that while you’re giving to others, you’re also giving to yourself. I, and many others, have a tendency to give beyond our means, especially when those means are our time, energy, care, and attention. I want to extend the grace to myself that I extend to others, and not just see every single person around me as someone who is better than me who I need to be learning from, but also see myself as someone who is worth sitting with and attending to.
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reading reading reading:
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell — I’m very likely not the first person who has mentioned this book to you, and maybe you’re like me and have seen it floating around for the last couple of years and thought, “yes, I would like to pick that up at some point”, but haven’t felt a sense of urgency around it. The subtitle of the book is “Resisting the Attention Economy”, which I’ve been trying to do in my own ways on my own time. Honestly, at first glance the book struck me as a self-help book for millenials addicted to their own personal brands, and I’m so happy to report that it’s so much more than that! I read the introduction and the first chapter Tuesday night and I already feel so grateful for what she’s been able to communicate, I wanted to include some highlights to help nudge my friends towards picking this one up:
It’s explicitly anti-capitalist from the get go — “To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.”
Interrogates the ideas of productivity and usefulness in meaningful ways — “The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.” She loves to ask “Useful for what?” and she’s right!!!
Respectfully critical of the 1960s back to the land movement and privilege in many ways, instead interested in doing what we can right now where we are — “What would ‘back to the land’ mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now?”
First chapter references Pauline Oliveros, John Muir, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, David Abram, multiple historical labor movements, and that Mister Rogers documentary that made all of us cry. It’s full of gems!
The Overstory by Richard Powers — look at me reading a contemporary novel by a man who isn’t Ben Lerner. Truly this novel has broken me open more than a handful of times while I’ve been taking my time and savoring it. I’m in the last 100 pages now and can say that while this book sometimes suffers from “I’m writing a bestselling novel” style, I am so deeply invested in the characters that I stopped caring. I know that I’m kind of a snob, I’ll own it, and when I can see through someone’s writing to the conventions that we both know will sell more copies and win more awards it bugs me, but I’m GLAD they gave this novel the Pulitzer, they did the right thing. The book is about trees, but it’s also about people, and I just won’t say any more than that, but I will say to you please read it!
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listening listening listening:
My listening habits have changed now that I’m in a retail setting where I have complete control over the radio, but also want to play bookstore browsing appropriate vibes so I’ve been listening to a lot of Men I Trust, especially Untourable Album & I’ve been listening to Beach House. I didn’t know there was a new Beach House record until youtube auto-played it for me and I really really love it. I have been making the joke that I’m entering my “indie legacy” era where I am back to earnestly listening to the big, standby indie bands like LCD Soundsystem and Beach House and chipping away at that desperation to only listen to music no one else is listening to. I’m trying to go back to my old house and dig out the bag of clothes I know I left in the attic that hopefully has my old Neutral Milk Hotel shirt in it, I’m embracing it.
Sadurn!!!!!!!!!!! Get into it, I just listen to them on a loop, can’t wait for that full record to be OUT on May 6. These songs just kill me :’) in the best way
Today at the bookstore I was playing If Only There Was A River by Anna St. Louis, which is something I come back to over and over. It was the only time in recent memory someone in the store has asked me what I was playing and taken note of it, that felt nice in a way. I think she’s an incredible songwriter and I’ll also say I think she’s mad underrated, so if you haven’t listened to this record, I recommend it. It’s a sultry, kind of spooky folk record with so much restraint exercised, really fascinating stuff. Also, the subject line and flavor text for this email are a lyric from this record, a little bonus for you.
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watching watching watching;
I went to NY and saw a double feature of The Day He Arrives and The Day After as part of the retrospective on Hong Sang-soo’s work currently on at the Film Society at Lincoln Center. I’ve now seen 6 of his films and can confidently say that The Day He Arrives is my favorite so far, which makes me want to go back and start watching his older work as this is the oldest of his films that I’ve seen.
Hong Sang-soo captures the magic of life and cinema in the same ways that Éric Rohmer does (for me), in that he captures the mundane and the fantastical as they interweave. True to life, but also heightened, aestheticized, and crafted in wonderful ways. Most of both of their films involve a small cast of characters discussing the ins and outs of life, love, philosophy, god, art, infidelity, etc. over food and drink. You get to see where people bump up against each other, where they change each other, what makes them tick, and what attracts them to each other. One of the most exciting parts of real life for me is being brought into a group of people who loosely know each other, say a mid-sized party, and getting to interact with different people, see who I gravitate towards, and who else gravitates towards each other. What a fun experiment, what an enlightening experience! That’s a little bit what these films feel like to me.
The Day He Arrives (2011) is a capsule, there are just a small handful of characters, they run through the same motions day to day: wandering the streets of Seoul (it’s very cold and they remark on that often), eating dinner and starting the night’s drinking at a specific restaurant, and then finishing the night out with more drinks at a specific bar. This is where the bulk of the film takes place day after day and you get to watch these characters unfold for you scene after scene. I love the comedy that coexists in his melodrama, the absurdity that feels so real and so human. I love any movie where I can laugh out loud and also shed a couple of tears. I love the way things that were shown or mentioned early on fold back into the frame later, and the narrative mirrors he creates, oftentimes in ways that the characters are blind to, but the audience can see. It causes a sense of odd comfort as a viewer, thinking about a zoomed out version of your own life where patterns and logic may exist that you’re just too myopic to see in the moment, but they’re holding things together nonetheless.
The Day After (2016) was a highly enjoyable experience for different reasons, one of them being that my girlie Kim Min-hee stars, and when she walked on screen for the first time the entire audience quietly gasped. Someone behind me whispered to their companion, “there she issssss”, and I felt like I was with my people! I’ve written before about the drama of Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee’s offscreen relationship, which began not long before the release of this film, but I bring it back up because the crux of The Day After (the absolute loosest of sequels) is infidelity. A woman, played by Kim Min-hee begins an office job at a small publishing house, and on her first day is accosted by the wife of her boss who mistakes her for the last office girl, the girl her boss was having an affair with. This misunderstanding becomes the center of the rest of the film, and you get to watch all 3 women in their own time drunkenly berate this man for being a coward. The film is still gentle and comedic, and there is a particular Chinese restaurant that the characters return to, most conversations happen over a meal and drinks (always soju), or at least over coffee. There’s a safety in formula, and room to explore so much when certain parameters have already been laid down.
I’m heading back up to the city on May 10th for one of the final screenings of this ongoing retrospective — Nicolay and I snagged tickets to a “secret screening” where no information about what is screening will be revealed until you’re already seated in the theater and someone is introducing the film. I am assuming it’s his latest, The Novelist’s Film, which was announced for Cannes this year, but hasn’t screened in the states yet. Whatever it ends up being I’m really excited to make time to go back up for it, and I will report back!
On the movie front I wanted to mention that I also did one of my favorite things in this world last night, which was to watch Harold and Maude. Who knows how many times I’ve watched this movie in the last decade, but it never fails to make me LAUGH. There’s something so special also about becoming so familiar with a film that you can anticipate your favorite moments and get so giddy right before a punch line or a visual cue, much love to the “possession of a stolen shovel” line! There’s so much to love about this movie that I couldn’t possibly list it all, but special shoutout to Cat Stevens for that banging soundtrack. I love the late 60s/early 70s trend of having just a couple of songs in your soundtrack that fold back in at different moments, that’s good stuff.
That’s what I have for you today, go forth and eat a delicious treat, read a good poem, think about how there are too many delights in this world to even keep track of!
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