070: brain dump/junk drawer

too hot to be organized

I always imagine that my summers will be sultry and studious affairs. In my plans, I wake up around 6:30 after hitting snooze on my 6am alarm three to four times, read every newsletter in my inbox (as well as any hot links shared in them), while working 10hrs a day and being an entertaining social butterfly. Of course, nothing goes to plan. As soon as I tell myself I’m ready to make the most of my summer, that’s when it all starts to fall apart. Instead of elegantly loping through the city streets, slathered in Nars Body Oil and getting absorbed in a 700 page book or making use of the n+1 subscription I bought in February, I am indecently tired 90% of the time and my computer is glitching from all the tabs I’ve opened and left unread. Don’t worry, I am also tired of my complaining. Here’s what I’ve been up to between dousing myself in baby powder and smearing anti-fungal cream between my sweaty toes:

I interviewed content creator and consultant Rachel Nguyen for Lens. I’ve been watching Rachel’s vlogs since my first year of university, and basically tried to be her for like three years before I had to accept that it was never going to happen. I was inspired to talk to her after that New York Times article about Lee From America and de-influencing came out, because it has always seemed to me that Rachel was (as she is with most things) ahead of that trend, seemingly never putting too much stake in the classification of “influencer” and finding ways to connect with her audience beyond algorithmic-friendly content. I had the best time talking to her about starting Warde (before anyone had heard of Geneva), teaching other people how to develop their own creative processes, and the time she made a whack video for Hyundai.

I watched Season 2 of The Bear. I’ll be honest and confess that I was pretty underwhelmed by the first season of The Bear, maybe because it had been so hyped up or maybe because I was going through something at the time. In a lot of ways, I’m set up to dislike this show because I’m not really wooed by fine dining (sorry Flynn McGarry)¹, and I am increasingly wary of shows and movies that depend on being anxiety-inducing while failing to offer any kind of story that I can be invested in. It can’t all just be people running around banging on things and fighting. The Bear sometimes can fall into this trap. Maybe that’s why I liked the much quieter second season a lot more. Sure it had its corny moments—any time Carmy is giving his little monologues at group, I’m tuning out—but it felt heartfelt in a way that made me tear up SEVERAL times. The best part of the hour-long sixth episode were the sweet moments (I won’t say which ones because 50% of you are in Canada so I know you haven’t seen it, but you’ll KNOW which ones I’m talking about) which mitigated the clown-car vibes produced by the sea of guest stars (Jamie Lee Curtis! Bob Odenkirk! Sarah Paulson! John Mulaney!) in that episode. If you want some good reading on the new season, RAFTM² Hunter Harris wrote a really beautiful essay about everyone’s favorite episode, “Honeydew,” that I think captures what feels good about that episode but also the season as a whole.

I read and reread Doreen St. Felix’s profile of Kelly Reichardt. Which to me is a sterling example of truly excellent profile writing. St. Felix manages to step back to give us a clear view of Reichardt and her work, without it ever feeling like she is subsuming her own voice. There’s also the sense that St. Felix has spent a lot of time with Reichardt’s work because the writing echoes the films: it’s attention as dissection; it’s observation without judgement; it’s placing images side by side and letting you (viewer, reader, whoever) putting together the story. Writing about Reichardt’s patient interactions with her students (she teaches at Bard College), St. Felix notes Reichardt’s awareness that she “was in the small but not insignificant position of shaping how another person sees.” Each time I think about this profile, I can’t help but think St. Felix possesses the same awareness.

I finished Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Not My Home. I picked this up after reading Parul Sehgal’s review of it. I was particularly struck by Sehgal’s declaration that in the last parts of the book, it fell apart in her hands. It reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnameable, which I was supposed to read last semester and got through twenty pages of. I preferred reading the criticism on it instead, which helped me think through the idea that writing and literature are activities that involve putting together the (a?) world and taking it apart again. Like Beckett’s novel, I’m Homeless is a strange journey through death and decay and language. Things add up and they don’t. Time moves between post-Civil War America and America at the cusp of Trump’s presidency, held together by a spidery thread. The significance of these settings matter, or they don’t. Moore seems to leave it up to us to decide or to not decide. The image I associate most strongly with the novel is someone shaking up a puzzle, dumping all the contents on the table, and throwing away the guide picture. The act of putting it together is more significant than the image it produces. If Ursula Le Guin had a carrier bag theory of fiction, Moore has a junk drawer theory of fiction—incidental relations, ever-changing fate, all of it only as meaningful as you’d like it to be.

Thanks for being here! If you’re in New York next week, maybe I’ll see you at Dirt’s “The Taste Economy” event.

1. Just to clarify, my ambivalence about fine dining is not because I subscribe to the message of The Menu in that good ol’ hometown American food (whatever that is) is the pinnacle of good food or whatever. I just can’t get excited about balsamic vinegar reductions or tissue paper thin radish or whatever else.

2. Reader and Friend to Me. I copped this term from Rachel Tashjian who probably invented it but if she didn’t…