065: dip in devotion
emma cohen on mirrors, coincidences, and devotion
Got something to say about Taylor Swift, her music, her persona, her power, her friendships, etc? Why not write something for Consumption Report’s Taylor Swift zine?
I met Emma Cohen through our mutual friend, Sonja, a couple of years ago. I was immediately dazed by Emma, who is exactly the kind of writer I would like to be. Her writing is evocative, at times sensual, and demands that you linger over it. I often find myself returning to her writing, especially this essay from last summer, “Time As Water, Love a Season,” which, like a wave crashing over you, surprises and soothes at every turn.
Emma is also the co-founder, with our friend Emily Wood, of Pack Animal, a literary series that made Toronto cool again. I will always feel incredibly lucky for being a part of the first one and am anguished about missing all the fabulous ones they’ve put on since.
In her dispatch for us this week, Emma finds pockets of devotion in the everyday. I’ve read it about three times now and it’s one to savor, to come back to, and find new gems. You’ll see what I’m talking about.
xx Akosua
I’ve been experimenting for a while now with the framework of devotion as my preferred state during consumption. This happens most, for me, when an era I’m going through (no matter how slight or brief) coincides wonderfully with what I’m consuming, allowing for a porousness between the material of the object and the material of my days. Perhaps everyone feels this way. But it can be a rare experience. Sometimes the circumstances are just not right for it.
This week, devotion did not reign. The rhythm of my week was one of transit, quick turns, plans-thoughts-conversations appearing and disappearing like life was the flat surface of a whack-a-mole arcade game. I decided, or rather it appeared to me, that the framework of devotion was being replaced by a netting that works much better for scattered consumption: coincidence.
I’m going to start at the end and loop back to the beginning of my week here. Saturday afternoon I took a long walk around my neighbourhood, overflowing with springtime flowers. I texted my friend a photo of the first lilacs of the season and listened to the Between the Covers interview with Lucy Ives about her book Life is Everywhere. In the interview, the host quotes Ives’ description of how she approaches fiction.
When I write I employ a system of mirrors. It is not that they are real mirrors, that you would ever be able to see them in real life, but they entrap images of the world all the same. This is the sort of appliance fiction is for me. I use it to look away from something, and still perceive it. Fiction is a way of seeing around corners, a system of mirrors designed to catch images of what I’m not able or permitted to see in my actual life. I am not exactly or always telling stories. I tell superimpositions, overlaps, coincidences, delays. This is my thinking, not diegesis, but recurrence, a style of conjunction. We can only determine how things look if we see them through one another.
After Akosua presented me with the thrilling idea of writing a consumption diary, I spent the week noting my habits in my notes app to expand into this. When I heard the above quote through my shitty headphones I thought it would be the proper way to retroactively filter my consumption. Seeing things through one another. Well, let’s see what we can see, shall we?
The high volume of transit in my week was mostly due to my job puppysitting and nannying, which is something I do every other week. The weeks I am doing it, I’m in motion across the city at least twice a day, and as such, am consuming in motion.
Monday morning, taking the subway in a straight zip from the west end to the east end, I’m reading Samantha Hunt’s new book The Unwritten Book. I love The Seas by Hunt, which was recommended to me years ago by RAFTM (and friend of/contributor to this newsletter) Jess Kasiama. I’ve been enjoying the new book but finding it slow to get through. Hunt writes about her habit of writing on the subway. I find this a preposterous idea, personally, but maybe that’s just the mood I’m in. Just reading feels difficult this morning. Even though I'm halfway through, I set the book aside for the week, telling myself I’ll pick it back up when I can properly engage with it.
On my way back across the city in the evening, I listen to Nymphet Alumni, a podcast. I have no idea how I found this podcast, and when this kind of anonymous origin story happens it makes me think about the claim that you don’t have memories of the internet. I’m not sure that’s true (I certainly have many visceral teenage tumblr memories) but nonetheless this idea itself actually seems like something the podcast would cover. The three hosts are fashion historians and writers that are all either the same age or younger than me. They talk about current fashion trends through the veil and cipher of history, unraveling the hyper-present by situating it in a detailed lineage.
I’m a casual listener of this podcast, but when I do really like one, I tend to try to force it on people, as I shall now do to you. A favourite is their episode “Lost Generation III” which focuses on 80s style: British synth pop, Whit Stillman and John Hughes, Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis, the legacy of the ‘Global North Bildungsroman,’ and the ways this era manifests in our contemporary memory. (If the Donna and Bret part of that was interesting to you, I’d also recommend the podcast Once Upon A Time…At Bennington College.)
I listen to this all the way to Dundas West station, where I meet my friend for ramen and then walk down the street to watch Queens of Qing Dynasty, a new Canadian movie, at the Revue. My favourite element of this film is that anytime media appears in it—a TV playing in the background, videos on their phones, etc—the media is presented as this sort of swirling, vivid, animated substance. It gives the feeling of a secret world, or a story within a story. As if the media is all elementally connected. I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate this, but perhaps if you watch the movie you’ll know what I mean.
Over the course of the next three or four days, sitting in the backyard while the puppy runs around, I watch a lunchtime-length portion of an hour-long interview hosted by the Toronto Public Library with the writer Esther Yi about her new novel Y/N, which I haven’t read yet. Yi discusses how her novel, ostensibly about K-pop obsession, is actually about the pressure on the individual to assert an impressive and complete subjectivity in the face of the breakdown of traditional systems of meaning and institutions (religion, government leadership, family structure), and how her protagonist uses K-pop devotion as a way to explore the sublimation of that individuality to a greater force, while at the same time, feeling special and individual in her devotion. “My interest was not loneliness on the internet or millennial loneliness,” she says, lifting an arm clad in an adidas track jacket to take a sip from her can of red bull. “My interest was human despair.”
Having given up on the Samantha Hunt book for now, the next day I randomly select a book from my shelf, trying to match the frantic inattention of my week’s structure to my reading material. I decide to read Heidi Julavits’ book The Folded Clock: A Diary. My copy of this book is in a category of what I might call ‘the longform borrow’: when you’ve borrowed a book for so long that it’s moved with you from apartment to apartment, over years, and yet it stands out on your shelf as a temporary object, not belonging to you despite time spent together. This book was lent to me by Rachel Davies, a most recent Consumption Diarist, when we both lived in Montreal. Hi Rachel! I promise I’ll bring you this book when I next see you–it’s in good shape. I read this on the way home from the east end, becoming increasingly late for a dinner because of a subway delay. Because I’m reading and don’t have headphones in, I hear them announce that the delay is caused by a ‘trespasser on the tracks.’
I’m going to allow myself the luxury of time travel here for the sake of clarity. We’re about half-way through the week at this point, and I’m reading the beginning of this book where Julavits is writing about dopplegängers: “for decades I never saw anything but my dopplegänger when I looked in the mirror.” Then we teleport to Friday night, where I’ve gone with some friends to Jacqueline Novak’s show Get On Your Knees, which takes place at The Royal Cinema.
Two people I’m with both confuse The Royal Cinema with Paradise Cinema. These cinemas are, you could say, dopplegängers: one on College, one on Bloor, both dark blue neon signs with bright white marquees on busy west-end streets, across the street from favoured cocktail bars with white wood siding and cut glass windows. In the show, Novak briefly talks about her concept of ‘two fools.’ The self split in two when looking in the mirror. Her argument is for self-deprecation as a defense tactic: if, when looking at oneself in the mirror, one of the selves acknowledges the foolishness of the other, then you’re just one fool instead of two. Twinning abounds.
While driving around the leafy east end, running errands and doing pickup/drop off for the kids I nanny, I listen to Feist’s new album, Multitudes, almost exclusively. This is the one place devotion creeps into my diary. Perhaps that’s what’s so nice about music when it hits: you can be devoted to it while you act and move. Her last album, Pleasure, is hot pink summer to me, sneaking off in a dark warm concrete chainlink alley, post-party. Multitudes is a springtime gift. In my experience of it, breezier and clangy-er, lighter and transitional. Cool winds and hot spots of sun in rotation as you move around. A friend, the writer Esmé Hogeveen, recently wrote a profile on Leslie Feist, which I read at my studio at the end of the week, looking for a rev of inspiration in the afternoon dip.
Having allowed myself enough alone time with the album, Esmé’s take on it seems to reinforce my own private seasonal resonances: “Having delved into the subjects of pain and its life-giving corollary, pleasure, on her appropriately titled 2017 record, Pleasure, Multitudes reflects a deliberate, almost spiritual, quest for cohesion.” I’ve never thought about it as such, but might spring itself be a quest for cohesion? (Perhaps a self-indulgent side note, but what’s a diary if not self-indulgent? I first came across Esmé and her writing when she wrote an essay on Ali Smith’s book Spring and dm’d her about it.)
And then back to the subway. On Friday I try a collection of short stories that I’ve read before, years ago, The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski. I realize retrospectively that I’m likely drawn to it as subway reading because I recall there being a story, which has stuck in my mind ever since reading it, about the subway. It involves someone jumping in front of a subway car. Is that what trespasser means? I have found myself thinking of this story most times I see the train rushing towards the platform where I and all the other potential trespassers stand. Imagine my surprise when I sit down in the subway car, open the book, and see that the introduction to the story collection is written by Heidi Julavits.
Thanks for reading! Follow Emma on Instagram @emmaoliviacohen, subscribe to her newsletter, Devotional Dispatch, and find more of her writing on her site.
Read more guest posts: Casey MQ, Rachel Davies, Tony Zelenka, Jess Kasiama, Blake Mancini, Kyle Curry, Sonja Katanic.