015: practicing intermittent affection

on men -- writing, carrying flowers, and doing that little smirk that they do!

Over the weekend, I was talking to RAFTM Tomi about the social lives of writers and artistic ambitions, and he sent me an old essay by Gabriel García Márquez on how he became a writer. (Disclaimer: I have never read any García Márquez — magical realism is not really my bag and I’ve known enough years of solitude, if you know what I mean.) I delighted in the essay, not just for its brilliant lines (on his literary influences: “And so many other great sinners, may God keep them in his kingdom;” on the belief amongst his friends that women were trying to trap them into marriage and the motivation of such women to do so: “They did this not for love but because they hoped to live with a window facing the sea.”) but also his belief that he could only truly become a writer when he felt he had done enough, and was not quite convinced of his skill or his status as a writer by the recognition of a well-known Colombian paper. He also speaks to writing as revision: how each new story he wrote was a way to fix (what he saw to be) mistakes in his previous stories and how all of this was a move to uncovering the truth. Not an unarguable capital-T truth but the truth of his perspective, of his reality. It’s what Kiese Laymon is getting at when he talks about radical revision. It’s becoming increasingly important to my own writing practice. I am not a woman of a thousand ideas but (possibly) ten; I’m always moving them around, seeing how they fit with each other, watching them grow, sticky and amorphous.

I’ve been enjoying reading Dirt, a newsletter on entertainment and art and crypto (they take an interesting lens not a brainwashed/tacky one). It’s a daily newsletter and although I easily get overwhelmed by the constancy of most newsletters, I look forward to each new dispatch of Dirt. In all honesty, not all the writing is made equal — its submission-friendly and values ideas more than style — but I have a real appreciation for anything trying to think through our culture rather than diagnose it. Even more, I am coming to desire writing that meanders on the page, that lays out the writer’s web before you and forces to take that tangential journey. It’s something that I think this essay, “Dot, Dot, Dot,” from The Drift kind of touches on. The Drift is a new literary journal from NYC that has been featured in the New York Times and other *notable* publications. Its real draw for me was that I saw it in a McNally Jackson last week, was drawn by the thickness of its pages and then Lake Micah (who is an editor there) tweeted about it, and that’s enough to make me curious. “Dot, Dot, Dot” discusses the state of the American essay and how it has entered this stage of confusion and uncertainty (at one point the author discusses how many “maybes” and “perhaps” he encountered in most contemporary essays). The piece is half review of a recent anthology of essays, The Contemporary American Essay and half essay on what the essay could look like. I laughed multiple times while reading — essays should be funny even if they are not *funny* — and appreciated the author’s posit that essays are no longer predicated on being curious, no longer interested in unpacking an idea, especially one you know little about and has little to do with you. Instead essays have become a stunted form of autobiography, always centered by the authorial ‘I’ in a way that reaps little reward and lots of boredom.

On Tuesday morning, I had a truly opulent morning lounging in my bed meandering through Men Carrying Flowers, a photo book by Ophelia Mikkelson Jones, with introduction by Durga Chew Bose (both good friends of Lorde!). A compilation of blurry zoomed-in iPhone white of men carrying flowers in various cities — Melbourne primarily, but also LA and Paris — it’s the sort of thing that I wouldn’t pick up without Chew Bose’s influence/association. But of course, her writing and perspective taught me how to find quotidian beauty, which this book is full of. I was especially moved by the above photo of a man carrying white flowers in a plastic bag. There is something unromantic and luggage-like about it and yet I found myself filled with yearning, understanding why Mikkelson Jones might feel the impulse to follow and capture this specific person. RAFTM Kyle always makes fun of me because I once posited that the things we ultimately find to be romantic — kisses and flowers — are coded to be so. My true argument was that when we consider this, we can potentially let go of the hold these things have on us, and the pressure that to have these things is to experience love or romance. (I am firm believer that platonic and familial love is equally as important as that thing we call L-O-V-E.) I think this book sort of touches on that — as readers and perusers, we are made to think of the other declarations that a bouquet, especially in the hands of men, can make. In her introduction, Chew-Bose identifies carelessness, haste, routine. I especially love a paragraph in which she thinks about a scene from a screenplay she is currently working on in which a man, Raymond, cuts and carries gladiolas. I was particularly struck by this line: “Have you ever held a bouquet of gladiolas? They’re long and heavy, and they’re meant to be cradled. Raymond—I imagine—is not one to cradle.” A devastating blow!

Speaking of love and the romantic: on Wednesday night, I took a second to honour my man, LOML, Ben Affleck, and watched Deep Water (on Amazon Prime for ye old Canadians). Directed by Adrian Lyle, starring Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracey Letts, Jacob Elordi and others, Deep Water is a movie in the way that Kacey Musgraves’ terrible album movie for star-crossed is a movie — it’s a sexy music video that reminds me how much I love BANKS. In Deep Water, Affleck and de Armas play Vic and Melinda Van Allen, a wildly attractive married couple who are the stars of their small East Coast community. For some reason or other, everyone seems to trust and respect him, are charmed by his wry smirk. She’s beautiful and exciting enough for them to never really question her tangible chaos. He’s successful because he made the microchip that lets military drones find people to either bomb them or deliver them food, depending on your view; she’s his beautiful, foreign (read: exotic) wife who wows everyone when she plays fun Italian songs at parties. She has affairs with younger men and lets the whole town know by bringing her paramours to dinner parties and kissing them by the pool. When he gets too embarrassed by her flaunting, he kills them. This is not a spoiler — he confesses to it pretty early on and its revealed soon after. With such an early reveal, the movie loses its oomph and instead becomes a vehicle for watching beautiful people flirt and fuck (Jacob Elordi and Ana de Armas press tour when?!) and watching Ben Affleck do that little flick of smile that both mocks you and charms you. If Gone Girl was the real deal and Girl on the Train was the discount version of that (the no name brand if you will), Deep Water is that one off-off brand version that you usually find in dusty truck stop gas stations or sold for exorbitant prices on eBay. When I think about it, I must confess: I love it!

That’s all for this week! As always, thank you thank you thank thank you thank you! There’s new Maggie Rogers tomorrow and I’m seeing Lorde (for the first time after a decade of being a fan) so this weekend is going to be real trip!