023: a love note
Public assistance, beautiful phrase
At work last week, I recommended Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger (which I am starting this weekend) to a customer who was buying a book about women writers and concussions. He told me that he was buying the book for a friend who had recently been diagnosed with PCA (posterior cortical atrophy), a disease that eventually leads to dementia. He was buying the book to read out loud to her. Most of the time, I am impatient with customers oversharing but I couldn’t help but be touched. Reading out loud to a person you love is one of the greatest ways to show them love. I recently watched The Reader so the story reminded me of the part in the film when Ralph Fiennes makes tapes of him reading for Kate Winslet while she’s in jail (sorry for the spoiler!). The pleasure that the both of them get from it — he, the pleasure from giving her something she loves but cannot always access, and she, the pleasure of receiving some signal of his love after so many years — made me weepy. Reading out loud to someone is equivalent to sharing the last square of chocolate; the same as meeting eyes across the table and hearing the joke before it’s ever said; it’s a secret world.
In the moment, the customer’s story inspired me to curate a list of a audio readings that captured the same intimacy. When I actually sat down to do it, I couldn’t actually think of that many. I am, largely, controversially, anti-audiobook. They will do in a quick fix, like when I’m trying to get through a massive memoir (Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries, for example) or have to get through mindless, silent tasks at work (thank you Sharp Objects). But I get no real pleasure from them. However, there are two audio readings that give me real pleasure and feel as comforting as lying down underneath a blanket weighed down by a pile of clean laundry. The first is “A Choice of Three,” (above) a short story written by Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner and recorded for the edition of Late Night Tales curated by his friend and bandmate, Matt Helders. Apart from being a good story — vivid imagery, the quotidian becoming romantic — there is something quite special about Turner’s rough Northern accent curving over these words he’s written. I listened to it again the other morning, over breakfast, for the first time in years and couldn’t help but feel contented. The second, equally perfect audio reading is Chris O’Dowd’s recording of The Fantastic Mr. Fox which was part of a lovely 8tracks playlist that I used to listen to before going to bed in my teen angst years.
I’ve been listening to Mitski’s Puberty 2 a lot recently, always feeling special love for “Thursday Girl” and “Your Best American Girl.” Every time I listened to “Your Best American Girl,” I was reminded of Summer Kim Lee’s essay, “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality” 1 which I had skimmed over when I was working on grad apps. In her essay, Kim Lee writes about how Mitski and Vuong imagine asociality not as something isolating or alienating but something that can bring one closer to others. She argues specifically for Asian American asociality as a response to the way in which Asian Americanness is “that which is not in the in-crowd but nevertheless moves, problematically, from within.” As such, asociality rejects assimilation as participation, but it also rejects a complete anti-assimilative turn; asociality allows the “turning toward oneself in order to be inclined differently towards others,” it provides a “public life” for that which is solitary. After reading, I was most interested in how Kim Lee’s understanding of asociality played out in relation to “Your Best American Girl,” specifically the line: “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me / But I do, I think I do.” I had never been able to distinguish those lyrics but once I’d, with the help of Apple Music, figured it out, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I think I used to hear the lyrics as Mitski rejecting her upbringing so that she could be the best American girl. Like, my mother wouldn’t approve of you but I do, I do. But actually what she is rejecting is the disownership of her upbringing. She tried to be the best American girl, maybe because she’d convinced herself that to receive love or attention from the best American boy, to achieve “well-roundedness” as Kim Lee puts it, would make her fit; it would kill the feeling that you’re betraying some part of yourself by being both the person your mother raised you to be and the person you’ve moulded all on your own. I think it’s something any person of color who has grown up around white people, and has been told their interests make them “white,” has experienced. The strange feeling when your friends tell you that your family traditions are weird. Your inability to defend yourself, your family, your upbringing, because maybe your friends have a point, and you don’t always agree with what your parents tell you.2 In her asociality, Mitski, as Kim Lee argues, rejects either approach. She finds her own postionality, her own way of being that exists. Sometimes, it’s fun playing by yourself.
QUICK REPORT
Reading: The Situation and The Story By Vivian Gornick — not to be dramatic but I was in a bit of a writing rut and five minutes after I started reading this, my brain felt like it had been unlocked so that’s the only review you’ll ever need; Vladimir by Julia May Jonas; Book Lovers by Emily Henry—it’s staying-up-till-12:30am-to-read good; This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
Watching: Anatomy of A Scandal — I am thankful to the God (i.e. casting director) who was as desperate as me for Sienna Miller to work again! This show is so messy and the editing is whack but I love watching it! If you liked The Riot Club and The Undoing (“I killed the family sister! ”), ask a family friend for their Netflix login.
I finished Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights this week. It’s the kind of book that you want to underline every sentence, not just for its beauty but the crispness of perspective, the elegance of the execution. I’ve been thinking a lot about the final lines which capture, for me, what we’re all doing here (in writing and reading this newsletter):
Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for. Public assistance, beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up in the middle of the night to address myself to B and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.
You all are those I care for. I hope that through these musings you’ll come to know me. I will continue to talk to you throughout the night (and spread it out before you at the break of day — 7am texts I will always send). Thank you always.
You know where to send your love notes!
If you don’t want to make an academia.edu account or want to avoid the millions of emails they love to send, email me for a PDF version.
At the risk of being a Disney adult, I feel like Turning Red is a really good movie about the challenge to reconcile your family traditions and background with your own desires and interests.