months since i’ve written, much less engaged with the literary. i miss the feeling of my frontal cortex absorbing, chewing on, grappling, interrogating, circling, focusing. the summer in bullet points:
- lighthouse writer’s workshop in denver with meghan daum. - unseasonably warm san francisco beach evenings. - work. lots of work. lots of time commuting and working and being drained and tired and too evacuated of motivation or verve at the end of the day to extend myself to the world — physically or intellectually. - austin for work (also warm). hours spent in our test vehicles driving around, which precipitated a sense of urgency to be in bipedal motion; two hours of walking to barton springs and back, sweating furiously under the texan sun.
books: maggie nelson’s the argonauts, speaking to my brain and soul. it improbably straddles the carnal and the cerebral, probably the only book i have encountered which exemplifies an examined (queer) life. movies: mosquita y mari, which stayed with me the day after, with its suffused lighting and quiet, earnest truths of being a teenager. aya, the oscar live action short entry from israel; i admire its mastery of the form, and most of all, its ambitiousness for telling a story that is a few degrees off from what we’ve been primed to expect from the movies.
this has been a summer of miranda july. lots of her. i saw her thrice — once at her mind-bending, tightly choreographed yet chaos-admitting, participatory play, new society; twice at city arts and lectures, notably the most recent interview with thao nguyen and sheila heti. during audience q&a, i mustered the courage to ask a question: if either of them had advice for the second-shift artist, the second-shift writer; those of us who spend most of our hours doing something else, before coming back to our art. i felt uncertain about asking the question. to my knowledge, miranda july and sheila heti had always been artists — it seemed to me that art, for them, is never a second shift. to my surprise, the question elicited a thoughtful, sincere answer, the kind excavated from the depths of experience and genuine struggle:
Miranda: It’s easy to say, “I’ll make my art when it’s easier,” (whether it’s a financially or emotionally easier time) but the truth is most of us humans are in some sort of bind, and that’s why we need art. It’s important to write from that place, that position, the second shift, and that’s the hardest thing but that’s where “it” goes, and it’s the rightful match, it’s not a misplaced thing. You hope it retains some of that blood. (Pause.) Good luck.
Sheila: The morning is a good time to work, even for half an hour. When you have energy.
Miranda: It could even be the one sentence that you come back to later.
Sheila: Before you look at your phone!
(special thanks to phoebe who scribbled notes frantically while all i could do is attempt to capture the moment in my head).
perhaps i had also been narrow in my conception of the second shift. for many parents, having a personal and professional life is the perpetual second shift.
a few other nuggets from the interview:
- on social media: ‘tis a dangerous thing. sharing often takes that edge away from that hunger. the hunger that is needed to actually make art. you have to make something worthy of that connection. - on consuming media: to curate what you consume, to cultivate a feeling that might be suitable for a project. to think of them as ingredients (one part this, two part that). not from a fear of imitating/being influenced by someone else; you can’t be something new. and (by definition), you can’t actually be like the person you’re imitating anyway. - on projects: to have many. so that when you procrastinate on one, you are directing your energies to another (as opposed to nothing).
when encountering miranda july, i think often of my friend, sarah. in many ways, the strangeness and truths of miranda july’s turn of mind remind me of sarah’s, and remind me of the one tattered, ancient piece of correspondence that she sent me eons ago, now stashed away among two boxes of college nostalgia, which i have lugged around to every apartment in which i’ve ever lived. periodically, i unearth this piece of correspondence, read it all the way through from tattered paper to tattered paper, and feel a renewed kinship with those for whom art is vital to living.
If you’re like me, and I think you are in this way, you don’t worry about the future as much as you ought to because you’re fairly certain that art will save you. Art will save me. Somehow. If I can just live in art, make art, play with art, go to the ocean and shuck art, go to the fields and husk art, go to the orchards and mill art, go to the factories and stamp art, go to the sofa and sink into art, go to the dentist and get my cavities filled with art.
I want it! I want it! I want it!
to close this update: a piece of prose from sheila heti that is breathtaking because it is so precisely crafted, so dense and yet so wonderfully plain-speaking and untortured.
How Should A Person Be? (excerpt)
by Sheila Heti -----
How should a person be? For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too. I noticed the way people dressed, the way they treated their lovers—in everyone, there was something to envy. You can admire anyone for being themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it. But when you think of them all together like that, how can you choose? How can you say, I’d rather be responsible like Misha than irresponsible like Margaux ? Responsibility looks so good on Misha, and irresponsibility looks so good on Margaux. How could I know which would look best on me?
I admired all the great personalities down through time, like Andy Warhol and Oscar Wilde. They seemed to be so perfectly themselves in every way. I didn’t think, Those are great souls , but I did think, Those are some great personalities for our age . Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein—they did things, but they were things.
I know that personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there’s just temperature. So how do you build your soul? At a certain point, I know, you have to forget about your soul and just do the work you’re required to do. To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life. To worry too much about Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol is just a lot of vanity.
