reboot
we're so back
The calendar year 2023 has been a doozy for me (iykyk) but now that it’s a proper grey, misty day, and I can feel the temperature shifting ever so slightly towards the coming Fall, I’m in the mood to sit down and wriggle back into your inbox.
I’m learning that having days like today where I lay on the living room floor in complete solitude and do breathing exercises and write in my journal and listen to records and just stare at the ceiling and out the window etc. is actually crucial to my happiness. I’m not acting like this because I’m depressed, this is something I enjoy, I’m enjoying myself. I feel connected to myself when I take these days. I’ll be living alone for the first time in my life come September 1, and I look forward to more of this in the coming months.
This is just going to be a list of things I’m thinking about while laying on the floor blasting Hail to the Thief at 4pm on a Thursday.
Sometimes I lay on the floor (or on my temporary mattress on the floor situation) and stare at the ceiling and rearrange the furniture in the room in my mind. It’s like I can’t appreciate the size and shape of the room unless I’m looking at the blank slate, then its potential reveals itself. Or maybe the emptiness is what I actually really like, erasing the room around me and imagining myself in that blank white space.
Hail to the Thief is my favorite Radiohead record. Why? Because years ago I decided that was true and so now everytime I think about Radiohead I think “Hail to the Thief is my favorite Radiohead record”, and isn’t that kind of how having favorites always works? I think it’s funny that I can’t really imagine getting anything out of Kid A or OK Computer because they’re such important monoliths. Because everyone has already taken so much meaning from them there couldn’t possibly be any left for me? Bullshit. This is a moment when I remind myself that I’m not special, which has been an important mantra for me for the last few months. Not in an “I hate myself and I’m being cruel” way, but in a way that actually makes me feel really free and more connected to everyone around me.
This started when I was sent what felt like a hyper specific meme (pictured below) and had to contend with the fact that thousands of people (at least) in the world could relate to this meme that felt like it was made by a close friend about me, and the idea that I’m not unique or special suddenly felt like a beautiful gift. I think part of growing up that I’m really enjoying is letting go of my need to be an individual, and instead embracing the way I’m shaped by everything and everyone around me. I’m a collage, and that’s lovely. I want to gracefully and gratefully let what I love change me.
I recently spent too much money on this mushroom oracle deck because I’ve coveted Daire’s dirt gems oracle deck for so long and miss it now that we don’t live together anymore. I will say the art is gorgeous, but the accompanying booklet with blurbs about each card leaves MUCH to be desired. Certainly style over substance going on here, but I’m still enjoying building a relationship with this deck. Anyway, I pulled a card today and ended up with Chef (one of the categories is mushroom people) which says “generous, indulgent, pleasure” on it. Now, a pet peeve I’ve always had is when a list or collection of words mixes parts of speech like this, but I’m trying to have fewer pet peeves so let’s just meditate on the concepts of “generosity, indulgence, and pleasure” and move on. These are the concepts I’m going to carry on through the rest of my day and beyond, until I feel it’s time to pull a new card and find new concepts to hold and embody. I like guidance and prompts, what can I say.
Let’s talk movies: this week I was able to see the Contempt (1963, Godard) restoration on the big screen, as well as Passages (2023, Ira Sachs) in theaters, and then last night I re-watched Sibyl (2019, Justine Triet). These ended up being a perfect happenstance trio of films to watch back-to-back-to-back:
movies about making movies
romance and infidelity
we switch back and forth between French, English, Italian, and German in each film
spoiler:
Adéle Exarchopoulos gets an abortion in both Passages & Sibyl
I don’t know if I really care to expound on each of them here, but I love all of them, and I think each film is fantastic at balancing drama, comedy, sensuality, and anxiety. They’re all films where it’s appropriate to laugh out loud, groan, and get turned on.
Books:
I wanna talk about Wendell Berry. I had never read anything by him until earlier this week when I picked up his slim volume “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer” which includes two short essays 1. “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer” (1987) and 2. “Feminism, the Body and the Machine” (1989). In these two essays he articulates a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and talking about recently around gender, labor, technology, etc. etc. and what many people have been saying for decades (I’m not special), but he concisely laid out some crucial stuff that I feel gets purposefully lost in these decades-long conversations, because if we were honestly contending with this shit on a large scale it would be Bad for Business.
The first page of “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer” reads as follows:
Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.
My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it.
The second essay in this book is written sort of in response to the response to the first. He addresses backlash he received for describing his working relationship with his wife, and gets some amazing points (and digs) in, here are a few:
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.
—
I know that I am in dangerous territory, and so I had better be plain: what I have to say about marriage and household I mean to apply to men as much as to women. I do not believe that there is anything better to do than to make one’s marriage and household, whether one is a man or a woman. I do not believe that ‘employment outside the home’ is as valuable or important or satisfying as employment at home, for either men or women.
—
Why would any woman who would refuse, properly, to take the marital vow of obedience (on the ground, presumably, that subservience to a mere human being is beneath human dignity) then regard as ‘liberating’ a job that puts her under the authority of a boss (man or woman) whose authority specifically requires and expects obedience?
—
How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot improve themselves by submitting to it.
— and finally:
To have an equal part in our juggernaut of national vandalism is to be a vandal. To call this vandalism ‘liberation’ is to prolong, and even ratify, a dangerous confusion that was once principally masculine. A broader, deeper criticism is necessary. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else.
And he’s so right, thank you Wendell, stoked to read more of your work. I’ve been carrying my notebook around with me again, and it’s felt good to just pull it out and write for five minutes here and there, even if I then pick up my laptop to type all of this up (it happens). I love that I live a life where I basically only have to open my computer up once a week to do zoom therapy, and any other time I use it is by choice, rarely necessity. I love not having a computer job.
Before I started writing, I was laying here thinking about some lyrics in “I Need My Girl” by The National that I will end with:
Remember when you lost your shit and
drove the car into the garden?
You got out and said ‘I’m sorry’
to the vines and no one saw it
xoxo