The Literary Piano

"Light-fingered highjinks..." I am a writer, theatre-maker, and scholar, currently based in Melbourne, Australia. My most urgent subjects include: modernity, mobility, the uncanny, objects (as collections; as fetishes; as mnemonics; as clues), women's lives, national literatures, art, writing, language, and poetry. Sometimes I post drafts of my own poetry. The title of this blog comes from an early name for the typewriter, an invention (like the printing press; like the internet) that has forever changed the way we live and write.

[literarypiano]

Of Note // 05.10.20

“Those newborn months made the everyday visible again. It was all suddenly there, the humdrum moments stretched like a holy skin across our days: my daughter’s giggling as she nursed, milk dribbling from her mouth; or the pin-prick drizzle against our skin on rainy afternoons, when I’d walk for miles with her sleeping against my chest. The warm breeze of her breath swelled against my ribs. Her hands in their fleece-lined mittens startled like birds when she woke”: I wish I could be as centred and eloquent with my newborn in the middle of the night as Leslie Jamieson in this beautiful essay, but I’m learning. The “sudden and exhausting plenitude” is real. (The New York Review) 

“Press conferences are held at short notice with details postponed until later, and inconvenient questions are easily batted away, well after headlines have established an underlying narrative. Outlets rush to break the news first, follow-ups are negligible, corrections are buried, and the media as a whole paints the picture you would expect from an ecosystem increasingly dominated by supporters of Morrison and his government”: Nick Feik on the Prime Minister’s endless, often substance-less announcements. “Australians have a great piece of vernacular once commonly applied to someone who talks a big game but never delivers on it. They’re called a bullshit artist, but it’s a term we don’t use so much anymore.” (The Monthly)

And with the budget coming this week, we can expect more of the same, plus tax cuts for the rich and cutbacks in services and benefits for everyone else, all under the convenient cover of the pandemic, writes Greg Jericho. (The Guardian)

Anne Applebaum is very good on the authoritarianism in America right now. On why some people abandon their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous leader, and on the super-spreading of disinformation and distrust. (The Atlantic) 

Another list, with more life advice:

Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise. 

(Kevin Kelly)

[literarypiano]

Of Note // 28.09.20

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them — work, family, health, friends, and spirit… and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls — family, health, friends, and spirit — are made of glass.” I had a baby! My daughter was born on her due date at the end of August, and my partner and I instantaneously felt all of our priorities shift — not unlike the way every part of my body had adjusted to make room for the tiny-but-chubby human inside me. I love advice and love lists and this is a nice list of pieces of life advice Ryan Holiday has collected over the years to remind me to keep my eye on the glass ball. (Forge)

“Under the sheer volume of competing facts and studies, news stories and social media posts that bludgeon us daily, we succumb to truth-lite. The overwhelm sees us seek expedient options”: Sarah Wilson has some ideas on why the wellness realm has fallen into “conspiratualism.” (The Guardian)

“All these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others I’d never met, were debating who owned an image of me”: Emily Ratajkowski can’t buy back her own image but can claim to have the final word in this devastating story (that subsequently went viral) of her abuse and exploitation in her modelling career (The Cut).

On the other hand, Ratajkowski may have missed an opportunity to broaden her argument to include people other than herself, writes Haley Nahman. Without further analysis of the complexity of the modelling industry and Ratajkowski’s own complicity in its value system (the male gaze, female objectification, and self-commodification), the essay falls into a common trap in late-capitalist reflective writing: “which is to assume that by simply calling out a problem, or exploiting it in her favor, she takes away its power.” (Maybe Baby)

For more on this idea of “the reflexivity trap,” Katy Waldman dared take on Sally Rooney and other contemporary novelists whose protagonists believe self-awareness absolves them of any need to effect genuine, systemic change: “that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance.” In a moment that desperately demands more than performative lip service, the danger of the reflexivity trap is that is casts self-awareness as a finish line, not a starting point. (New Yorker)

“It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity”: Judith Butler does not come to play. (New Statesman)

“She chose her words precisely, like silver arrows sailing to hit their targets. Instead of referring to something as “racist,” she called it “thoughtlessness”; she referred to underrepresented groups as “misfits.” She is aware of the ways words like racism and microaggression have lost their power, so she searched for new ones that might make people listen”: I watched and loved Michaela Coel’s incredible TV show I May Destroy You. It will be compared maybe to Girls and Fleabag because of the way we always fetishise and compare female creators, and it’s not unlike those shows but it’s also something completely original and beautiful and unique. E. Alex Jung has written the definitive profile — read after watching (Vulture)

First picnic since lockdown began

[literarypiano]

Of Note // 24.08.20

“You are not the work you do; you are the person you are”: life lessons from this 2017 piece from Toni Morrison. (New Yorker)

Ezra Klein re-shared a 2019 interview with Jia Tolentino, a conversation about how we live our lives online that opened up new meanings for me now that we are almost exclusively living our lives online due to social distancing restrictions. The conversation is mostly structured around five intersecting ideas about the internet, drawn from Tolentino’s book: “First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.” (The Ezra Klein Show)

“One of neoliberalism’s best tricks is to blame ‘the market’, ‘the bureaucracy’ or ‘rogue individuals’ for the predictable consequences of government decisions”: Richard Denniss on the failures of neoliberalism and an Australia that has dismantled the modern welfare state it spent the twentieth century building. (The Guardian)

“Welfare chauvinism” is another way of putting it: an Australian-bred aspect of populism, “the post-free-marketeer idea that government spending should be retained (or increased), on the proviso it is directed to preferred groups,” writes Richard Cooke on the Coalition government letting its ideological foes (arts, universities, the ABC) wither away during the current crisis. (The Monthly)

“Notable in a genre where women are frequently the objects of violence rather than the subjects of their own stories, this true-crime narrative is a distinctly female-centered one, with observations on gender and trauma”: I do feel ambivalent about ‘true crime’ or, at least, about its proliferation in recent years. Like any genre that becomes increasingly popular and established, certain formal features ossify into tropes, or tendencies... As a consumer, I feel uneasy about being curious and entertained by violence (usually enacted against women) and by a form that can over-identify with perpetrators simply by dramatising their actions. But, I found myself very moved by the series I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, about the true crime writer Michelle McNamara. The title comes from a threat a survivor heard from her attacker but it also applies to McNamara herself, who died while investigating and writing about the Golden State Killer. One of McNamara’s own insights I can’t stop thinking about was how darkness begets darkness; the way her obsessive pursuit of this ‘dark’ person ate into her time with her family, with her health, with her ‘light’. And, on the conscious choices made to avoid over-identifying with the killer, the director Liz Garbus says: “With the cinematography and the way that we chose to shoot the scenes, it was very important to not take that killer’s perspective on a woman and really center the storytelling in the survivor’s point of view.” (The Cut)

Is it the pandemic, #cottagecore, an anti-capitalist pivot? I’ve read three things just this morning on the therapeutic, meditative, reflective, restorative, joyful, nurturing qualities of gardening: Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker, Caitlin McGregor in Kill Your Darlings, and Anne Helen Peterson in the free Sunday edition of her new newsletter Culture Study. “If it dies, it dies; if it thrives, that’s good too. It’s not about the end product, but the daily practice of the garden.”

[literarypiano]

Of Note // 10.08.20

“Perhaps now we can hear whatever it is that our inner voice has been struggling to tell us”: Nyadol Nyuon wants to salvage from the wreck left by this pandemic a fresh point of view and a new way of life. “We have an opportunity to ask whether all the things we used to do, and which we can’t do now, brought meaning to our lives. We can now weigh up what truly belongs and what can be left in the life before the plague.” (Guardian)

“For years, Sternberg had been saying that the fashion industry was a giant bubble heading toward collapse. Now the pandemic was just speeding up the inevitable”: Irina Alexsander sort-of profiles designer Scott Sternberg, but mostly reports on a fashion industry in decline. As with so many other industries the pandemic has shone its exposing light on, the models for doing things are no longer fit for purpose. (New York Times Magazine)

“Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate”: Lili Loufbourow on why online “cancel culture” just isn’t a thing. The argumentative hyperliteracy of internet discourse is what inhibits intellectual exchange and the undermines the the concept of a free and fair debate. (Slate)

Speaking of arguments made in bad faith... Richard Denniss debunks the fatuous “trolley problem” debate circulating about saving the economy versus containing COVID-19: “False binaries force phoney debates about brutal choices while also stifling public debate about creative solutions.” (Saturday Paper)

You’re Wrong About had an excellent episode explaining the reactionary movement against disco and the ways in which aesthetic choices are exalted or disparaged, depending on whose choices they are. “Disliking something without being a dick about it is a fundamental skill of adulthood and a huge number of people seem to struggle with it.”

“The heroism of masculinity, white masculinity, it never dies. Even in the face of the politics we live in, in our government, that image in filmmaking always gets a roar of applause. To me it seems so … passé”: I really enjoyed Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which opened Melbourne International Film Festival (the digital edition) last week. Part Western, part settler-colonial satire, part-heist movie, and a meditation on masculinity, friendship, immigration, nature, and capitalism. (LA Times)

[literarypiano]

Dora Maar, ‘Untitled (Fashion photograph)’, c. 1935

[literarypiano]

Darning samplers and other needlework from the Whitelands College Collection, shown in A Remedy for Rents, curated by Vivienne Richmond. 

A Remedy for Rents showcases a rare collection of exceptionally fine needlework by working-class women in the last quarter of the 19th century. As students at Whitelands College, the first all-female teacher training college, now part of the University of Roehampton, the women were training to teach in elementary schools for working-class children and their needlework focused on the production and repair of simple garments and household textiles.

[literarypiano]

Max Beckmann, Carnival Mask, Green, Violet, and Pink (Columbine), 1950

[literarypiano]

Song, by Adrienne Rich

You’re wondering if I’m lonely: OK then, yes, I’m lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns’ first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning

[literarypiano]

Contents from Common Sense for Housemaids, by a Lady

Brass, how to clean. Bug poison carefulness, hints on carpets, how to clean.

Clear-starching dress, observations on daily work, housemaids’ fire, how to light.

Floor-cloth, how to clean French polish, how to clean lamps, how to clean mirrors, how to clean

painted walls, how to paper walls, how to pipe-clay, how to prepare sweeping, ways of

scouring floors, ways of daily work, housemaids‘.

[literarypiano]

Hunting is full of singular drama—with my spear I slayed this bear. A group of women gathering grain, on the other hand, doesn’t have a singular gesture or target or much drama. “I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible,” says Le Guin toward the end of her essay. Among the Iban people of Borneo, I read recently, the men gained status by headhunting, the women by weaving. Headhunting is more dramatic, but weaving is itself a model for storytelling’s integration of parts and materials into a new whole.

Rebecca Solnit, “When the Hero is the Problem”, Literary Hub

[literarypiano]

I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset. I’d worked hard in college, but as an old millennial, the expectations for labor were tempered. We liked to say we worked hard, played hard — and there were clear boundaries around each of those activities. Grad school, then, is where I learned to work like a millennial, which is to say, all the time. My new watchword was “Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good”: Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.

Anne Helen Peterson, “How Millenials Became The Burnout Generation”

[literarypiano]

Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.These are your in- and out-boxes. All the forms in your inbox must be logged in by the date shown in the upper- left- hand corner, initialed by you in the upper-right-hand corner, and distributed to the Processing Analyst whose name is numerically coded in the lower-left-hand corner. The lower-right-hand corner is left blank. Here’s your Processing Analyst Numerical Code Index. And here’s your Forms Processing Procedures Manual.

From “Orientation,” by Daniel Orozco

[literarypiano]

Her Kind, by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

[literarypiano]

Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.

Jane Kenyon, “Everything I Know About Writing Poetry” (via Brain Pickings)

[literarypiano]

[literarypiano]

For many groups, movements and uprisings, there are spinoffs, daughters, domino effects, chain reactions, new models and examples and templates and toolboxes that emerge from the experiments, and every round of activism is an experiment whose results can be applied to other situations. To be hopeful, we need not only to embrace uncertainty but to be willing to know that the consequences may be immeasurable, may still be unfolding... Think of hope as a banner woven from those gossamer threads, from a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, of the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst. Of an indivisible world in which everything matters.

Rebecca Solnit, "PROTEST AND PERSIST: WHY GIVING UP HOPE IS NOT AN OPTION"

[literarypiano]

In February 2010, we moved into this little terrace house and took this photo. After almost six years, tonight is the last night we will sleep here, after hours of sorting, packing, cleaning, removing, shifting... A lot of things happen in six years. Amongst it all, this was the place I came home to. I will miss you, little house.