#57: loving what you took

a brief dispatch from summer break + moving across the country

Good morning,

I’m writing a long overdue dispatch from an unplanned summer break which, so far, has included 27 days of travel, internationally and nationally, with another 11 coming up. It has also included an entirely unexpected move across the country from NYC to San Francisco which I am currently in the middle of, sitting in the hallway outside my apartment, watching it get emptied out as my belongings embark on their own three-week journey across America.

Such moves are not easy and leaving NYC is incredibly hard. Still, I trust timing and find it auspicious that I’ll arrive in SF 10 years to the day I moved into my first NYC apartment.

Needless to say, writing time has been pretty limited, confined mostly to a few hours while on flights. So I’ve decided to let all the inputs of the summer simmer for a while and plan to return to weekly letters in September… after a writing retreat in Italy where I will finally get to process all that’s passed :)

In the meantime, here is a dispatch from my notebooks in no particular order.

Unsurprisingly, they do all sort of add up to a cluster in my head about the meaning of work and how to nurture my inner life while engaging thoughtfully with the publics (historical and contemporary) around me, especially in this next chapter of life.

Isn’t it funny how much we can learn about ourselves from what we consume?

art by Morgan Harper Nichols

loving the things you take

One of my NYC goodbye dates included seeing Regina Spektor at Carnegie Hall. She’s the most soft-spoken singer with the richest inner life I’ve ever seen. I’ve loved her music for years, but hearing her lyrics live really shook me. One phrase I’m turning over in my mind as I leave NYC is “loving what you took” which comes from the part of the song “On the Radio” that goes:

this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took

And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again

Which I love because it’s a perfect metaphor for what writing (and living?) is to me: fishing for things inside of you, trying to love what emerges and nervously sharing it with someone else’s heart. Repeat it over and over and you end up with a community and warmth, even in a big city.

And juxtaposed with the world of “content,” which I’ve intermittently been binging and abstaining from depending on how I’m coping with change, this kind of life feels like the worthiest pursuit. I look forward to constructing an entirely new relationship with it in this next season of life.

Here is a related quote:

Too much of human experience has been flattened into a single “technological portal,” Smith writes. “The more you use the Internet, the more your individuality warps into a brand, and your subjectivity transforms into an algorithmically plottable vector of activity. — How the Internet Turned Us into Content Machines

What has also been sustaining me, aside from bittersweet quality time with friends, is reading a rotation of books as I wait on very long airport lines. It kind of feels like a playlist. Here are quotes from a recent mix.

current book playlist

📚The Brass Notebook - memoir of pioneering feminist economist Devaki Jain, whom I met for the first time at our recent conference in Geneva. It’s so wonderful to read about freedom and ambition from an Indian woman who made things happen.

She writes:

So much of our society, so many of our institutions seem to me to rest on the assumption of a wife working quietly away in the background, anticipating the needs of others and fulfilling them without resentment. No doubt this ought not to be so, but many things about the world need to be changed so that those of us without wives—or someone to play the traditional function of a wife—can lead the lives that wives make possible.

📚Know My Name - one of the most impactful books I’ve read this year, Chanel Miller’s incredibly vulnerable account of being the victim in the Stanford sexual assault case and the media cycle that followed it. I will write about this again.

She writes:

If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s how much you can get away with by saying work. It’s almost concerning. Why are you home? Work. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen you. Work. We should get lunch next week. Can’t, I said, work. You look tired. Work, I said. Totally, they said, I feel you. What I wanted to say was trial. When they said, How are you, I wanted to say, Terrified. When one said, You look tiny! I wanted to say, That’s not always a good thing. They walked away thinking we had caught up, while I held the quiet knowledge they knew nothing.

📚Networked Press Freedom - piecing through this one slowly, but I’m all about media scholar Mike Ananny’s premise, which is that the public’s right to hear is as important as the journalist’ right to speak.

He writes:

If we see press freedom not as heroic isolations—journalists breaking free to tell truths to the publics they imagine—but as a subtler system of separations and dependencies that make publics, then we might see each era’s types of press freedom as bellwethers for particular visions of the public. Ideas of press freedom become evidence of thinking about publics. Rethinking press freedom can be a way to see how press power flows, a prompt to ask which flows produce which publics, and a challenge: what types of news, publics, or presses are we not seeing because our vision of press freedom is so narrow?

📚The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area - I’ve never moved to another city in my adult life and I wanted to start my history lesson from the beginning. This is a quirky, 25-year-old book that offers an unusually intimate take on history; I haven already found myself looking at acorns on an SF hike, immersed in thought about what it took to grind acorn into meal daily. (Open to other great reccs on SF history!)

This framing is especially poignant:

They were only forty or so independent tribelets, each with its own territory and its own ways of doing things, each working through its own destiny. In short Ohlone was not an ancient entity; it is merely a fiction that we have invented to deal with a human situation far more complex and far richer than anything our own politically and culturally simplified world has prepared us for.

📚Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close - I read this earlier in the year but recently reunited with my “big friendship” friends and had the opportunity to dialogue about so much of what this book raises with them. 10/10 recommend that friends should read this together.

Ann and Aminatou write brilliantly about the work values that drive our desire for friendship intimacy:

From the earliest days of our friendship, we were each fascinated by the way the other organized her thoughts and ideas, and we wanted to know each other’s opinion about every single thing. This feeling has never faded away. Even today as we talk to each other, we swear we can feel ourselves sharpening in real time, getting a clearer sense of the world around us and our place within it. It’s no wonder that throughout our friendship we have found ourselves devising ways to hang out with more purpose.

Even if we didn’t realize it, we were creating excuses to light up each other’s minds and jointly focus. We relate to the writer Daniel M. Lavery, who, in his email newsletter, described his friendship with the writer Nicole Cliffe this way: “We have often used work, or the appearance of work, to justify navel-gazing and mutual admiration. We have also often arrived at serious, meaningful realizations about what we mean to one another, what we can give to one another that no one else can, during conversations at least ostensibly ordered around business.”

📚These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson - I was a huge Dickinson fan as a teenager and this book is similar to The Ohlone Way in that it is a history written imaginatively based on research and I love it.

Of Dickinson’s “work”:

On the surface, Emily Dickinson lived an ordinary life: she resided in one town, went to school, never held a job, lived in her parents’ home, remained single, and died at age fifty-five. To many who knew her, Dickinson’s only acclaim was winning second prize for her rye and Indian bread at the annual cattle show.

When she died, her death certificate listed her occupation as “at home.”

Dickinson’s internal world, however, was extraordinary. She loved passionately, wrote scores of letters, anguished over abandonment, fought with God, found ecstasy in nature, embraced seclusion, was ambivalent toward publication, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer.

That about summarizes where I’ve been, physically and mentally. And I’ll leave you with a quote on the emotional part.

“What is the pain of being human? It is the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either.”

— Steven Pressfield in Turning Pro

Time Spent is an entirely free resource on media/culture and a public part of my writing practice. Spreading the word is immensely helpful as I test out some of this thinking. If you enjoy it, please consider sending to a friend :)

Happy Wednesday!

Jihii