This week, I’d planned to write a (sort of) review of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona, but have found myself going over the same words and ideas again and again, unable to figure out what it is exactly I am trying to say. So we’ll save that for another day.
On Monday, I saw Heti at the Toronto Public Library for a talk on Pure Colour. I have been recommending Pure Colour to just about every customer who comes into work (I work part-time at a bookstore) because reading it felt truly magical. I recommended it to RAFTM Ada and she devoured it in three days. Heti said something during the talk that really resonated with me because it describes exactly how I feel I have come to writing. She talked about how she’s always been a quitter — she quit ballet, she quit piano, etc. — but how all that quitting allowed her to realize what it was she actually wanted, which was to be writer. However, she did emphasize that becoming a writer was an explicit decision she made, not something that she just sort of stumbled on and through. It’s such a profound answer but one that you could sense people felt uncertain about because it refuses the cleanness of the “I wrote so many stories as a kid and I’ve always wanted this” answer that is so often expected from *successful* writers.
Jamaica Kincaid is another writer who resists easy or obviously profound explanations of her life as a writer, which of course makes her statements on her writing life that much more profound. I found true delight reading what she had to say about her writing in “The Art of Fiction No. 252,” from the Spring 2022 issue of The Paris Review. I’ve admired Kincaid since I read A Small Place in university but there is so much about her that I didn’t know that I am now obsessed with. Like the fact that she was a model (of course, she is so tall and elegant). Or the fact that was part of the whole Factory scene, singing backup for Holly Woodlawn. Journalling in bed this afternoon, I was reminded of her gorgeous answer when asked what her writing routine was: “Mostly now I love to write in bed. Sometimes I’ll write in the same clothes for days—sleeping and eating and working and writing and sleeping—and suddenly I’ll realize my clothes stink and I should change them. I’ve always been amazed by writers who have routines. They seem, mostly, to be men.”
Speaking of writers and their routines, I recently remembered Enormous Eye, Amy Rose Spiegel’s project that got writers to document their Saturdays. I remember reading them in high school before theatre rehearsal and imagining my own future Saturdays as a writer. Fresh flowers and sliced apples and baths and the New Yorker. EE is such a special project and I’m so glad it still exists online. I recommend spending your next free day, buried in bed, reading the archives until your clothes begin to smell.
I started thinking about taste again this week — how we cultivate it and whether it matters if our taste is ours or inherited from someone (or something) else. I touched on this question in an earlier newsletter and RAFTM Joel emailed me to expand on my uncertainty about whether it matters if your taste is yours or not. Joel, I don’t have much more to say about this today BUT I will recommend reading Kyle Chayka’s essay, “The digital death of collecting,” which I thought about a lot this week. In it, Chayka thinks about the relationship between collecting and cultivating one’s taste. He uses Walter Benjamin’s essay on what it meant to collect things to think through how our digital interfaces (Chayka is primarily concerned with music and Spotify) reconfigure how we come to love things and, as such, cultivate our tastes. The most important question Chayka poses, I think, is in regards to what makes us want to seek out things to love. He writes that “the endless array of options often instill a sense of meaningless: I could be listening to anything, so why should any one thing be important to me?” I thought that was a funny question largely because despite endless algorithmic offerings, I believe that we are still finding ourselves reaching for things to make special, listening to the same Maggie Rogers song on repeat, returning to films and books that stung us when we first consumed them. I guess I’m just not sure there is a crisis, if I’m 100% convinced of ‘the death of collecting.’ These are thoughts in progress so I am soliciting any readings on taste or collection or our relationship to cultural artifacts if you have them! (I will also accept movies and podcasts or whatever you think I’ll be interested in.)
Chayka touches on the importance of tangibility and physical relationships to things we love, which is probably why I see a connection between his essay and Julian Barnes’ latest for The New York Review of Books, on Bridget Alsdorf’s Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Barnes writes about the badaud, the tasteless version of the flâneur, describing the figure as “stationary, passive” and “ready to stare open-mouthed at any phenomenon that offers novelty or puzzlement.” Looking, or gawking, is the first physical action we take towards loving something. The more we look, the better we get at looking (and looking at the right thing), the more we are refining our taste and understanding. Good taste is knowing where/how to look. In the case of the badaud, their lack of discernment when it comes to their visual consumption is representative of their lack of taste. As the sort of opposite of the bourgeois flâneur, we can image the badaud to be a figure of the lower classes (those without sense and grace will gawk). This creates an additional layer to how we configure our definition of taste — what is good taste if not expensive or exclusive taste? Again, thoughts in progress. Barnes’ review is worth reading even if I am not making any sense — he does an incredible job in breaking down Alsdorf’s discussion of the figure in relation to the artwork of Félix Vallotton (who was concerned that art would become a bourgeois accessory).
A FINAL NOTE: I’ve been listening to my “BIG FEELING” playlist a lot (which RAFTM Tony used for his morning stretch this week!) and having a special appreciation for Selena Gomez’s “The Heart Wants What It Wants.” The thing about Selena is that she will make the saddest song about heartbreak that still makes you want to shake your ass.
That’s all for now! I am finally seeing Everything Everywhere All At Once this weekend and I’m already feeling tender so I’m ready for the waterworks. Add me on BeReal to see it all!
I’m honestly disappointed in myself I didn’t realize what a hottie™️ Jamaica Kincaid is... she’s truly such an enjoyable writer to read.