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“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other.”

Rainer Maria Rilke in his first letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, compiled in Letters to a Young Poet. I need to pick up The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge again, I remember really enjoying it but left the pocket edition in the UK. Apparently there was a new translation of it in 2022, worth checking out. Maybe also worth reading Le Guin’s “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter” in parallel as a counterpoint to the sneaky “artist as mystic, troubled lone wolf” vibe. See also “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” by Alice Walker (yet to read).

A mourning dove has been sunning itself on our window AC unit for about two hours now, eyes half open. They used to coo outside my brother’s window on foggy mornings.

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“Please do not understand me too quickly.”

Please do not understand me too quickly.

Came across this quote via an old interview with Richard Ayoade when he was asked what he would change in the world. “I suppose maybe, maybe a slight slowing down.” “Of the world?” “Yes, of quickness, to feel that comprehension has been reached.”

The quote is originally from André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican. « Ne me comprenez pas si vite, je vous en prie. » Not sure I have the stamina for it right now but would like to read it eventually.

Apparently it’s also the epigraph to Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park… Why did I think so differently about the quote when I found that out? Quotes are like water, they take the shape of the vessel they are delivered in.

Anyways, the yearning to slow down the world resonated. I choose the vessel.

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“But still, you’ll live there beside the ocean”

Even though I’ve said to you that she hardly ever wrote a full-page poem, I know of one that I think relates to writing. And I’d like to read that if I could. I happen to have a copy of it. As far as I know it’s never been published, but I’ve kept Ursula’s poems from our group and I remember this one very well. And I think it relates to our discussion about writing.

It’s called The Practice.

That was writer Molly Gloss introducing and reading one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s unpublished poems that she kept from when they were in a small poetry writing group together. This was in conversation with David Naimon on his podcast Between the Covers in the 10 February 2022 episode “Crafting with Ursula: Molly Gloss on Writing the Clear, Clean Line”, at 42:04.

Check out the podcast to listen to the poem in full.

GC shared this podcast episode with impeccable timing, as always.

Edit 29 Jan 2023: The original version of this post had a transcribed version of Le Guin’s poem. But it was pretty presumptive of me to publish it here considering Le Guin had decided not to publish it in her lifetime. Finally got round to removing it today.

I really recommend listening to the podcast in general, but also of course to hear the poem. If for some reason you can’t listen to the podcast but still want to hear it, just email me. I do still have it written down privately.

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“Good enough for now, and safe enough to try”

Good enough for now, and safe enough to try

Yesterday, Gemma gave the SuperHi community a great talk on her work with Common Knowledge, a not-for-profit worker cooperative of technologists, designers, researchers and facilitators. She mentioned sociocracy, a governance framework that Common Knowledge works with to keep running smoothly.

When faced with a decision that requires consensus, the group evaluates whether or not the proposal is “good enough for now and safe enough to try”.

This was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. There are so many groups that I have been a part of that would have been liberated by this approach.

But not even that, my own brain would be freed up a bit by this approach. I sometimes get hung up on figuring out the best solution to something, when figuring out a good solution to something might cause significantly less stress and quicker results.

I suppose when you apply it to your own decisions, it’s similar to “perfect is the enemy of good”. But that’s more vague. I like that this phrase is more direct, something you can actually apply to the decision making process.

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“BE SOMEONE ELSE !”

The most recent edition of Blackbird Spyplane really made me laugh, about how “being yourself” can be terrible advice, especially when it comes to style.

Why does this advice irk me? The easiest way to problematize “be yourself” is to recognize that, while it contains within it a valuable kernel of truth, so does the exact opposite advice, which is also way more interesting and, ultimately, way more useful when it comes to developing a personal style: BE SOMEONE ELSE !

Yes!

I’ve been in a real rut style-wise for a long time, most particularly since B was born. I just constantly feel wrong-footed. Most of my former reference points are out, either because they don’t make sense in NYC, don’t make sense in this time (Do I mean trend-wise? Well yes and no…), or don’t make sense on my current body.

Honestly, I just need to shed a lot, donate it all. Then find some new, relevant references, copy, and gradually rebuild. It’s just very tough to actually do any shopping nowadays.

Two things I’m glad I still have? The short, black double-breasted pea coat with wide lapels from Banana Republic that I’ve had since high school (The 00s! What goes around comes around!). Added another button to the lapel to make it button up to the neck, and had it re-lined with thicker fabric. And the thick leather olive cross-body bag of unknown provenance that I got from Absolute Vintage in London (RIP) in 2010.

Edit / side-note: Years of living in the UK left me incapable of figuring out how to wear a shirt. I’d guess that I was in a sweater 85–90% of the time. Outdoors and indoors (those drafts will getcha). Somehow for the 10–15% of the year that this wasn’t the case, it was basically boiling and required flimsy things only.

So this is a long way of saying: How does one wear a shirt and look good? Layering is anathema to folks living in NYC, at least in my experience, because the radiators are on so damn high. So this means I can wear actual, nice tops again. But how? I’ve been wearing a lot of boring tees and it is making me sad.

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“I feel like my lounge is going to tip over”

Really need to make a habit of reading something that makes me giggle before bed. It sort of sets the day straight.

I’m reading He Used Thought As A Wife, Tim Key’s first lockdown book. It’s perfect. Funny, poignant, captures so many of the absurdities of the first lockdown in the UK. Also the title is perfection, though I didn’t really get it until I got going.

This is the part that made me giggle last night. It’s the middle of a vignette titled “Book Arrangements”, the designer of this book speaking with him about his progress on said book.

JUNIPER: Get anything down today?

KEY: Huh?

Key approaches the SodaStream, strokes its shoulders and smashes a flask up it. Bubbles and a honk. Infinitesimal animated prisms are released into the air, kissing themselves to death and falling to the counter. Key pours the magic into his Simpsons mug.

JUNIPER: Tim?

KEY: I’ve placed my books in order of how many pages they’ve got in them.

Key nods at what he has said.

JUNIPER: You should be writing.

KEY: Well, I did that in the end.

JUNIPER: How does it look?

KEY: Unbalanced, I feel like my lounge is going to tip over.

JUNIPER: Richard E. Grant has his arranged by spine colour.

KEY: Classy.

JUNIPER: So you’ve not made a start then?

KEY: You listen to Five Live enough, you start to believe it’s fine to do fuck all.

JUNIPER: It is Tim.

Ugh, kind of regretting writing that down here because reading back through it, the humor is gone without the context. Leaving it in since it took a few minutes to format.

Just read the book, it’s great.

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Ursula K. Le Guin on menopause

Anyhow it seems a pity to have a built-in rite of passage and to dodge it, evade it, and pretend nothing has changed. That is to dodge and evade one’s womanhood, to pretend one’s like a man. Men, once initiated, never get the second chance. They never change again. That’s their loss, not ours. Why borrow poverty?

Ursula K. Le Guin on the menopause, from her essay “The Space Crone” in Dancing at the Edge of the World

This essay has maybe my favorite final line I’ve ever read.

“Into the space ship, Granny.”

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“I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext”

I generally have four or five books open around the house — I live alone; I can do this — and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

So, I guess, in that way, I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext.

Octavia E. Butler

Quote introduced to me in a convo with LS. Also shared by Édouard U. in his essay “On building knowledge networks” as published in the book How do you use the internet mindfully?.

It’s originally from a discussion between Octavia E. Butler and others at MIT on 19 February 1998. Topics included: The Value of Literacy; The Future of Literacy; Reading Hypertext; The Age of Misinformation; Who Controls the Web; Race, Cyberspace and Equality; Science Fiction and the Black Community; and The Ghetoization of Science Fiction. See also Butler’s introduction to this discussion, “‘Devil Girl From Mars’: Why I Write Science Fiction”.

I finally started reading Lilith’s Brood about a month ago, got started on the second book recently.

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Failures, low moments

Came across this tweet from Marleigh Culver yesterday.

Wish people talked about project failures more often.

And it really struck a nerve. It’s why I’m mostly off Instagram. Though I love popping on every once in a while to see what good friends are up to, it’s too rosy in general. Twitter’s kind of the same, but with the added complication of often-unnecessary dunking when someone on purpose or accidentally shares a vulnerable moment.

We need more talk about low moments online in general, ideally, but it’s extremely hard. If it’s work related, it feels like overstepping a boundary (imaginary, or real like an NDA). Even when it isn’t work related, it can feel… messy? Messy’s not quite the right word, but something along those lines. Feelings and the way we perceive them can be so fleeting and of the moment, whereas sharing something online is just so permanent.

I’d like to get better about sharing the low moments. Someone who is excellent at sharing the good with the bad is Alice Bartlett, her Weaknotes are so worthwhile.

I’ve created the tag low moments to start collecting these posts in one place.

It was hard to know what to call the tag… “Failures” felt too harsh. I *absolutely* feel like a failure at times but want to avoid imposing that label on myself if I can avoid it. Who am I to say if something I’ve done constitutes a real failure? Maybe I can make that judgement in 10, 20 years down the line, but not in the moment. So “low moments” it is, for now.

Will try to start sharing more of these moments. And I’m fully expecting more with a baby coming soon! Gonna be a ride.

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“I hope I’m pleasing David”

GP It felt like… he was trying… for me to be myself. Whatever that is. But I know that’s one of the hard… I mean, I always get very anxious when somebody says “be yourself”. Because that assumes that we know who we are. We’re just a collection of how other people see us a lot of the time, I think.

DB I didn’t tell you to be yourself.

GP No you didn’t. I just felt like that’s what you wanted.

DB Mm.

GP But in the end I’m just this sort of nervous construct of who I hoped I am. And that I hope I’m pleasing David.

Laughter

DB I’m very pleased!

Grayson Perry talking to photographer David Bailey about his experience being photographed. From Grayson’s Art Club, series 2 episode 1, around 15:30.

Grayson’s Art Club has been such a lovely watch recently, so wholesome, funny, and touching. Philippa Perry’s presence throughout is a huge plus.

Available on Channel 4 in the UK and possibly BBC Select in the US. Not sure how BBC Select has it though since it’s a Channel 4 show. There are a lot of clips on YouTube as well.