constellations #3: noticing

lotta writing about writing on the substacks lately

Hi again, thanks for being here.

I don’t know about you but for me the past week has felt slow and heavy. I have been thinking lately about how I see myself as someone who doesn’t really have much to say (which only troubles me a little bit personally but is probably bad for whatever kind of so-called “career” I am trying to have?) and how perhaps “having something to say” is a skill that someone (me) can get better at with practice. Conversely the other day on Twitter I saw someone claim that most millennials with a Substack just need a finsta, which is probably true of me, but I feel less adept on a visual-first platform, so … here we are.

One time, I think it was in Boston the year after I graduated college, I heard a writer say that being a writer just means looking deeply at something (at anything); that anything can be worthy of being written about if it’s looked at deeply enough. In college I majored in anthropology and I think I took away something similar — thick description, long-term ethnography, pulling apart the minutiae of everyday behavior, etc.* I also spent a semester in Marseille in a program focused on interculturalism, which I loved, but halfway through I blithely told the head of our program that I figured I was just not that good at “doing interculturalism,” just not a very observant person, I guess. Not sure if I still think that’s true. The person I am closest to in the world can notice if a single pixel is misplaced (a Virgo, of course) which I admire. More than anything I am aiming to get out of my own head and out of my own way lately — the world itself is full of things to say. Anyway:

Well put, Lars.

Here are some things that have given me a sense of perspective or hope lately:

• Cynthia Schemmer’s op-ed in She Shreds, written in the aftermath of the accusations against Burger Records, about the promises of community made by punk and DIY spaces and how toxic masculinity can ruin them.

• The latest Weird Girls Post from Mariana Timony, which gave me a lot to think about; more importantly it led me to read this post of hers about horses and songs about horses which — as you might imagine — put a huge smile on my face.

• This episode of Diversity Hire with Jazmine Hughes. In part of it Jazmine talks about doing things “for the story” — learning to swim; dressing like Cookie from Empire for a week — which I find to be such a charming concept. I’m not sure anything I’ve ever done qualifies.

• Spontaneous snack-gifting. I had the particular joy of surprising some I love (my little sister) with candy this weekend, and while I was driving to her house the sunset was just spectacular, so pink and so orange and filled with weird little wispy clouds, and it just kept getting better and better the closer I got to her house, so much so that I didn’t really even want to go into the house until it was over, but I did and by the time I left it was dark. I can’t believe I’ve already sent a couple newsletters and yet this is the first snack recommendation I’m including, but the snack in question here was Trader Joe’s Super Sour Scandinavian Swimmers. Growing up my little sister’s favorite snacks were Sour Skittles and Sour Punch Straws, so, RIYL those things; also recommended for those healing from heartbreak and crashing after a long restaurant shift surrounded by mask-skeptics. I’ve also eaten a lot of Airheads (blue flavor) lately from the fancy new Cumberland Farms in town.

• The new Bartees Strange song.

• This poem by Marie Howe called “What The Living Do,” which is also about a kind of deep noticing. In my office building (where I have not actually been in many months) the radio plays 24/7 in the hallways and the elevators and the bathrooms, and one time I went into the bathroom and Fresh Air (I think) was playing a repeat of an interview with Marie Howe, and Terry asked her to read this poem, so I kind of just waited around in the bathroom until she read the whole thing, and I cried a little bit, and then I went back to my desk and felt a little deflated, like, reeling from a very moving encounter with art and then isolated, sitting in my ergonomic desk chair, like, ok, well, here I am, back at my screens, time to send my little emails, which is silly because, of course, my little emails bring me into contact with a lot of wonderful and engaging art, and so perhaps a more enlightened version of me would see all these experiences as part of a larger continuum, would fold them all into one cohesive emotional arc, or something. Maybe next time it happens I’ll treat it that way, although who knows when that will happen or what it will look like, since who knows if we will ever be back in office buildings again, etc. Anyway here’s the poem:

“What The Living Do”

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Thanks (again) for being here. And to think I could have filled this whole newsletter with my hot takes about the new T*ylor Sw*ft album! Luckily for you, one (1) person whom I respect a lot said that my takes were the most interesting they had heard lately, a claim which filled me with so much joy that I put my hands over my heart and said, in a voice much louder and more sincere than I expected to come from me, “that means a lot,” and was immediately embarrassed.

I hope you catch yourself noticing something notable this week.

M

*My other biggest takeaway from anthro theory was that if you’re going to be a middle-aged white dude scholar of Marxist theory, you have to have a mustache. I don’t make the rules! I just notice them. I guess that’s anthropology?