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I read the Page One: Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism last week. I haven’t had much time to read recently, and honestly I thought the documentary was better and I only bought this because it was in the $1 section of The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, and let me tell you I am a sucker for $1 books.

But it made me think about a lot of things. I love the media world and my super brief low-level stint in freelance work and music journalism. But I realized I was too lazy and scared of chasing stories to get to the level of significance. I was writing lagniappe not because it was about A&E, but because there’s just so much and I don’t have the kind of expertise and time to devote to the kind of story that deserves to stand out on the huge expanse of the internet. And no one has time to find it. I went through a period where I wanted to be a journalist because it let me engage in different worlds and ideas, but it let me judge without having to place myself in the hot seat. So even when journalism allowed me to be fearless, I was being a coward. Which I’ve been trying to consider and think about as I revise my thesis and edit new poems.

But some of the things talked about in the book - about institutions, ethics, having a moral code, advancing human society, how technology puts humanity in its scope - all those things are relevant to the adult life I’m transitioning into, and this weird new career that I don’t feel prepared or ready for or worthy of. Tired, tired.

And as I write that, I’m exhausted and sitting in my tiny beautiful room in a new city and taking the night off from socializing because I just can’t do any more this week, and for some reason my floor’s communal kitchen has been co-opted into a party room with weird flashy lights and I can hear people from my room down the hall and I feel like an asshole and old person but all this just makes me so tired. I don’t want to talk to other people right now. It’s weird, because these is the kind of social groups that I distanced myself from in undergrad, but sometimes here I’m okay with being part of it. Like, 80% of the time. So maybe I’ll just crack open Birds of America for the third time and do laundry and ignore the rest of the world today. Because sometimes you just fucking deserve it, and even if you don’t, you deserve to do whatever the fuck you want to do.

oh my god i’ve gotten so curmudgeon-y

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I haven’t written here in a while and I forgot a picture, but here’s what I read in the last two weeks:

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts by Julian Rubinstein

Saint Anything by Sarah Dessen

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

California by Edan Lepucki

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

So I have a lot of things about this, but seeing as no one reads this column let me say the important thing up top: Everyone must read The Empathy Exams !! A heart-slaying book, an examination of why and how we care about one another, our attempts to understand each other, how we fail, how we succeed, every elegant thought pivoting into the next surprising place. This is a gorgeous and tremendously intelligent, thoughtful book. I bet living in Leslie Jamison’s mind would be thoroughly overwhelming. BUT YOU CAN! for a couple hundred pages !!!

Also A Visit from the Goon Squad was a re-read for me and let me tell you it does NOT get old. There’s a reason that one won a Pulitzer. What a fucking masterpiece of heart. Ballad of the Whisky Robber I had lying around after John Green recommended it, and if you like action and humor and nonfiction, this is such an enjoyable read. I got sucked into while laying on the beach, and as a result got a horrible horrible sunburn.

The other thing this made me think about: Teen Fiction. I picked up Sarah Dessen’s new book because

I loved her books as a teenager

I follow her on The Twitter and didn’t know how I feel about her activity there, but she was talking a lot about this new book Saint Anything

Honestly as a young person did not care that all her plots were the same because they felt well-executed and kind of cheesy but cathartic and you cared about all the characters

Saint Anything fell far short of expectations. And I refuse to say it’s because I’m older now. We assign teens some lower level of intelligence, which is frankly bullshit. Maybe different experience / maturity level as an intrinsic consequence of age, but not intelligence. We dumb stuff down for them and have a largely horrific YA section of books, marketed towards teens. We say girls are dumb for loving One Direction. Then we say YA lit is stupid. NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE.

Which is why I was so disappointed in Saint Anything. I wanted it to validate my insistence that YA has heart, which most of Dessen’s other books do. But here it felt formulaic, a little directionless, and then presents the opportunity to talk to young girls about rape culture and sexual abuse, AND COMPLETELY DROPS THE BALL! In fact, its quick resolution and dismissal of the subject is probably even more harmful to young female readers. Ugh my jaw dropped and then the book was shortly over and all the plot tension was for naught and I wanted to pull out my hair omg it was NOT the most thoughtfully plotted move.

YA lit has the unique opportunity to speak to an audience that will take the message and the literature very seriously, to an audience that’s trying to parse out the whole adult thing and figure out which morals matter and in what way, and what things to prioritize. We do a disservice to humanity when our children’s and YA lit in particular fails us.

Maybe it’s unfair to be harder on YA lit than like, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book but hey

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You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers Citizen by Claudia Rankine On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss The Red Parts: A Memoir by Maggie Nelson

We all know how enormously let down I was by You Shall Know Our Velocity! by this point, so let’s move on (I still love you Dave Eggers! It’s just that the heavy-handed pointing-at-the-meaning-thing hurt every. single. time.)

The three other books were books I love, written by authors I love. Maggie Nelson and Eula Biss write with such kindness, deep analysis. They take something, hold it to the light, and then twist it around to look inside every crevice (also - Maggie Nelson read the first draft of On Immunity, so this is all just a grand way of saying I LOVE YOU MAGGIE NELSON.) It made me think that these kinds of books are the ones that would really change contemporary American society if everyone had to read them. And especially Citizen which just takes aim and absolutely FIRES. What a gorgeous damning book.

But if everyone had to read these, whether or not they agree with the premises, wouldn’t we all be much more thoughtful, kind humans? Wouldn’t our society be full of people who look out for one another, who are more open to plurality? I bookmarked so much of On Immunity, there are so many parts I loved. In a contemporary lit class last semester, I read The Human Stain by Philip Roth, and one of the book’s overarching ideas is that the search for moral, racial, etc purity being the wrong search. Eula Biss crystalizes that idea out of a discussion of medicine and immunizations:

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century. A passion for bodily purity drove the eugenics movement that led to the sterilization of women who were blind, black, or poor. Concerns for bodily purity were behind miscegenation laws... and behind sodomy laws... Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagine purity.

And on immunization as an act of privilege, which masquerades as an act of civil disobedience:

Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seeks to disrupt--a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.

The way her mind turns! I’m 100% pro-immunizations, but this also managed to talk about capitalism and mass media and privilege and our weird tendency to equate “natural” and “GOOD!” and the truly frightening responsibility of being a mother all these other things in such elegant ways. It was about immunizations, but about everything!! I want to write books like this. Eula Biss!! [if you’re interested, here’s a great interview]

Not related, but I read Citizen a few days before Serena won Wimbledon and her first Serena-year slam. Is that what the newscasters kept calling it? Regardless, remembering that section about her in Citizen made the win feel extra sweet.

I recently read a quote that said context was everything. The quote was obviously much more profound than the platitude I just wrote, and now I can’t even remember where it was from. I think it was an essay about the sorry state of film criticism? (RIP The Dissolve). Or poetry? Regardless, it was just that nothing exists in a vacuum, and you have to understand its references and the traditions it’s playing off of and who it effects and why things are here not there. Context is essential to meaning. I am pro-New Criticism, but I’m still onboard with the fact that most information is given to us in soundbites, out of context, simply because the short form doesn’t allow for much else. Context is important.

And this is why I think books and longform writing and all that will survive - because if we want to survive, it needs to, too.

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SHAME round 2

I didn’t read anything this week, and my excuses were that:

Busy with real world things like seeing middle school friends and packing and going to the doctor and stuff

I had to read this book by someone I was going to interview for some freelance work, and I didn’t even get all the way through the book. I read 128 pages and it was super interesting, just dense. 

The for-fun book I was reading was You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers which is not as mind-blowing as my high school self thought it’d be, and now I’m halfway through and am forced to finish it even though I have a copy of Citizen by Claudia Rankine staring me in the face.

I’ve started listening to podcasts (You Made It Weird and of course This American Life) again, and every two hours I spend on a podcast is two hours I can’t spend reading.

I spent about 15 (?) hours in a car this weekend, and unless I’m reading sci-fi, I just can’t read in a car.

So many excuses! Not enough reading! Smiting of thyself !!!

Okay going to finish You Shall Know Our Velocity! now

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The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (quoted above) The Last Two Seconds by Mary Jo Bang Missing You, Metropolis by Gary Jackson

A thing I just realized is that the three of these four books were published by Graywolf Press. Let me just say that Graywolf Press consistently just wins at everything (they also published The Empathy Exams, which I mentioned previously I had to return to the library because the need to write and highlight on each page was too overwhelming and so I needed to buy my own copy.)

I’ve noticed that I’m a pretty lazy reader. I was particularly aware of this while reading all of the books by Graywolf (sorry!) and it’s not because their difficulty was staggering. I think it’s because I get sucked into SOUND. I get drawn into its rhythm and my mind’s on the fritz from way too much time on instagram and facebook and I’m in this fourth dimension and then I stop following logic and have to reread passages multiple times. 

Let me just say that The Argonauts is an astonishment. Every single person should read it, and then maybe our world would suck less. It referenced more academic feminist theory than I was expecting, and it was more erudite than Bluets. Not that it made it difficult to read, because it didn’t. But it did make me think - god, my college education taught me NOTHING. I know VERY basic theory, and I feel dumb reading this, and especially dumb when reading reviews of the book that say Nelson deals with old school feminist theory because I don’t even know where that temporal line is. But that will not stop me from saying:

EVERYONE MUST READ MAGGIE NELSON. She is one of our most important writers. This book is smart and personal and generous and essential for being a 21st century person. I mean, it seems like everyone’s already read it. But if you’re one of the few uninitiated - PLEASE JOIN THE MODERN DAY CULT OF MAGGIE NELSON. It’s called Contemporary Progressive America.

Anyways, I also felt very dumb reading The Last Two Seconds, not because what Mary Jo Bang was saying anything waaay over my head, but because her mind moves so goddamn fast. I once got to workshop and meet with her, and she’s a pristine soul and mind. Reading The Last Two Seconds, I was reminded of her most important tenets - that poetry is a social space, a distillation - and that it’s okay to despair just a little because not all of us can be geniuses like her. I’m glad this hadn’t come out before I met her, or I hadn’t read more of her poetry, because I would have been incoherent. Also, she said a nice thing to me, and if I had known what a lightning bolt her mind is I also would have known that she was probably lying to me. The Last Two Seconds was great in that it hit home on exactly the issues with the internet and connectivity and social media that I’ve been having this week.

For example, I had meant to be productive and write something for a performance in a couple of weeks, but instead I watched hours of Khaleesi videos on youtube. Can I just say - I don’t even watch Game of Thrones?? And yet Daenerys has become so important to me !!! That and the deluge of information that’s coming from all sides all the time. I, like most people my age, am pretty sick of being told *millenials suck for ____* and *the internet is killing everyone’s minds!* and *the information age! has changed millenials! the apocalypse is now upon us!* because these messages reek of nostalgia and smug self-satisfaction in the writer’s own stable, controlled peace of mind and are entirely unproductive conversations. The information Age is here to stay and look, the generation before us was eager to gobble up as much technology as possible so let’s not blame the Internet and our generation for all tech-problems. BUT there must be smarter ways of synthesizing and accessing and processing all this information, because the current state of affairs is mentally unsustainable. 

I went to go return The Last Two Seconds and The Argonauts, and then I stopped because I realized I needed to reread them. 

I spent the weekend in northern Arizona (pictured above!) with my family - reading and hiking and trying not to look at my phone and failing. Is this the week I delete the Twitter app on my phone?! 

.

Next week: I am currently in the middle of You Shall Know Our Velocity and it’s kind of a letdown. Is it because I love A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius way way too much? Is it because the first third of Dave Eggers’ books tend to plod? Do I need to stop checking my phone every 30 pages? Important questions! Which I will visit next week / this week because I posted this late!

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This is my first SHAME post - not because I didn’t read, but because I don’t have the will to write anything coherent

My excuse - I was generally busy doing real people things this week! I know, I’m becoming a person! I would have taken pictures and done the whole shebang, but since no one really wants another multi-paragraph ramble about books and my feelings and life, here’s an abbreviated version:

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Sometimes he’s like, slightly racist or sexist, which I guess it was a different time and fine, it’s understandable. It still is so weird though to see it in the context of THE LEAVES OF GRASS, beautiful wonderful text. I hadn’t read it since high school. Perhaps it’s because I read John Green’s Paper Towns before it, which extensively quotes Leaves of Grass, but the parts that he quotes are still my favorites. 

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood I know! I somehow got to 22 years old without having read Oryx and Crake. Beats me how. But of course it was wonderful and unfolds in just the right manner, constructed like the most intricate, seamless nesting doll as only Margaret Atwood can - while still writing about the future and ethical issues and science, and without gorgeously fleshed out characters. Once I can get my hands on the rest of the trilogy, I’ll be polishing those off too. But DAMN, Margaret Atwood makes it all look so easy. This awakened the middle school desire in me to write science fiction, or vaguely science fiction a la Another Earth.

Point Omega by Don Delillo I genuinely enjoy Delillo’s writing? I actually chose to read this? I enjoyed this? I feel like a real literature type person who reads high-minded stuff like DELILLO in their free time?! 

Life is full of hiking and friends and exploring and yoga with middle aged men who are sadly more flexible than me and telling my parents i’ll go to the gym but then sleeping in late. It’s not like I don’t have time to read, I just don’t have an endless day stretching before me that I can only think to fill with naps and reading. BUT I’ve started Invisible Man and Mary Jo Bang’s The Last Two Seconds ! 

This is the most boring thing I’ve ever posted on the internet! I’m so sorry! I used an excessive number of exclamation points to try to make up for it and now deeply regret it !!!

This blog is rapidly degrading I am so sorry world ie myself because no one reads this

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June 11, 2015

The Tent by Margaret Atwood Word of Mouth: Conversations with Visiting Writers on Their Craft The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg Tooth and Claw by T.C. Boyle

Living at home is weird and formless, but I also love it because I can do pretty much whatever I want all the time, and here I have a car so I don’t have to convince others that it’d be fun to do things with me or do adventuring or go someplace far. Morning hikes, random trips to nowhere. 

Unfortunately, because outside is HOT AS HELL, meaning it is probably the exact same temperature as Hell, venturing anywhere means I try to maximize time indoors and minimize my potential for sun damage. I bet you anything my Vitamin D levels are crazy low. Today the high was 91, which was insane so I tried to spend as much time as possible outside before it climbs into the 110s for the rest of the summer. Such is living in THE HELLHOLE OF AMERICA.

I joke, I joke. I love Arizona.

Nevertheless, my new penchant for Indoors has led to more reading! Which is great because I’m so behind on my goal for 50 books by December 31! This week I read the collection of short stories Tooth and Claw by TC Boyle, which I randomly got at a yard sale, persuaded by 1. Author name 2. the $1.50 price tag. I am shallow in all the ways one can be shallow about books. Except that the cover was “eh,” so I wasn’t really that shallow on that front.

I love social media because, after reading this book (which btw was just really inventive and smart and overall well-done and I am in awe at the number of characters Boyle can just come up with. It was just a lot of fun to read) we had this interaction:

which is possibly him being sassy and I get that because who wants to hear, “You’re great and I spent no money enjoying your hard work! Well, the smallest amount of money possible and it didn’t even go to you, it went to some stranger! Continue doing profitless work !!” TO WHICH I have to say, he has a new book coming out! I will buy it and right this wrong! But maybe he’s not being subtly sassy! I don’t know! 

And this is why social media is horrible.

Other things I read this week:

Word of Mouth - As a high school senior, I did this huge interview weekend at ASU for some super prestigious scholarship. ANYWAYS, one of those days I talked with the head of ASU’s creative writing and he handed me some books the department had put out, for free, which was very kind, and made me look very smart because I carried around a small stack of books for the rest of the day. This was a transcription of interviews with eight visiting writers throughout the year, including Franz Wright and Charles D’Ambrosio, talking about writing. I found it buried on my bookshelf, and it was actually really great. Honestly probably better and varied than most craft manuals. All schools should do something like this, although the interviewers seemed more adept at asking interview questions than most live author interviews I’ve attended at universities.

The Tent - MARGARET ATWOOD IS A GENIUS. How does she have so many plots and characters at her disposal, the voicing, the pacing? These were all like, 3-page stories, a few were around 10 pages. But you can see from the size of the book, they were more like 4-paragraph stories. This is why she is canonized. ALSO LOOK AT THAT BOOK COVER!!! She is a queen among plebes. I give up on writing.

The Middlesteins - Jami Attenberg else who makes me give up hope. I have actually seen her a few times at readings and things in New Orleans, so I thought she lived in New Orleans (a perusal of the Internet tells me it’s a part-time residence.) My good friend opened for her at a reading months ago, and I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not because my friend had mentioned in January that The Middlesteins was a book she would recommend to other people. And then a month later, she opened for Jami Attenberg! Which seems obviously planned, but coincidences DO happen to my friend at a freakish rate so who knows. Anyways, this is completely off-topic. Point is, my friend is right about a lot of aesthetic and life things so I finally picked this book up and it was deeply thoughtful AND deeply entertaining and not self-absorbed. This is a book I could read many times. I loved it DESPITE the Franzen approval blurb on the jacket. Can’t recommend this enough. Also, what a great book jacket !!! Judge books by their covers if that’s a thing you’re into !!!

*

Here’s a DISCLAIMER about the past week: I did a thing I said I would stop doing, which is I started a book only to put it down. This book was Dispatch from the Future, a poetry collection which blurbs told me I would be entertained by, and another said “I love these poems.” Three to four poems in, neither was true, so I put it away. And then I felt bad because

Someone took the time to write all these poems and I know poems take a lot of work. I should validate them!

I need to be open to a greater range of styles!

But it was so boring! Does that make me feel better to say? NO. On a different note, I started Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and a few pages in got so overwhelmed because it’s like Maggie Nelson on prose steroids and so good. I wanted to write all over it, in the margins, highlight things. But the copy was from the library, and so now I guess I need to buy it. This is what 13 year old boys trying to sound macho to their asshole little friends would say, in the little dude parlance, *a cock block*

I feel like I’ve offending myself and half of the books I tried to read this week.

Also this post is not short at all, which was a thing I was aiming for.

The takeaways from this week are:

Always judge a book by its cover, unless it’s a book you got for free or for $1.50 in which case

Always judge a book by how cheap it was, but of course both of these should be amended by the advice

Always judge a book by whether or not you can get any kind of pleasure at all in the first 30 pages and are compelled to continue unless

You are required to read this book, in which case many save your judgments until the end because otherwise you will feel overwhelming resentment the entire time.

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June 4, 2015

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward This Won’t Hurt A Bit by Michelle Au

The last week has been one of the weirdest of my life. One moment I was making life-changing decisions, in the next I was desperately hugging my roommate goodbye in the torrential New Orleans rain, Notebook-style; then days later I somehow found myself on my second nap of the day because summers in Arizona are the most depressing thing you can possibly imagine.

Since I don’t have a car at home, my activities have been limited to bumming rides from friends and family, being pummeled with toddler’s bodies while playing with my little cousins, reading, and napping. There’s a little bit of piano playing in there. Also some half-hearted yoga, but I get bored easily.

I have never been this bored before. I can’t wait for summer to be over.

While leaving New Orleans for the last time ever, I was halfway through Jesmyn Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped. First of all, I want to say this is incredibly embarrassing. I should have read it before, but somehow never had time (that must be a lie. I think I tried to get it from the library once but it was checked out, so I never tried looking again. “LAZY, Steph! FLAKY !! How will you get anywhere in this world!!” - is what the tiny version of me that has already become a 44 year old and basically my mom is saying inside my head) 

Jesmyn Ward is inarguably one of the coolest, chillest, silliest people I know, one of those people you can easily pass an hour with and feel like no time has passed. So to read this other part of her mind and life that occupies Men We Reaped is incredible. Jesmyn is one of the most badass people I know. Hopefully this blog is buried deep enough into the internet that neither she nor anyone she knows ever comes across this blog.

I don’t want to keep sounding stupid so I’ll just say the book is relentless. On the plane ride back, I was intermittently chatting with the super super nice older woman sitting next to me and I tried to give off a good impression, like I was a respectable post-grad. Not one of those kinds of post-grads, the other ones! The Good Ones !! But the last 50 pages of Men We Reaped had me crying like an idiot and in a weird emotional state where the book’s tragedy was overlapping with my devastation at leaving my home of four years and let’s just say it was a very confusing time (3 hours. It was a confusing 3 hours.)

I’m pretty sure that woman thought I was an emotional wreck.

When I got home, I remembered that I had How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents on my nightstand, which I’m pretty sure I got in a book exchange. In high school, I was in this Great Books program which meant we took two humanities classes together every year- English + history or philosophy. In retrospect, I think the only people I liked in my entire high school were probably in this program. At the end of each year we’d hang out and do a white elephant-style book exchange. I’m pretty sure I brought Best American Non-Required Reading 2007 multiple times because I have no literary range. One year I received Julia Alvarez’s book and left it on the bookshelf.

I don’t need a lot of words to say this: the book is perfect. THANK YOU to some anonymous person for this book 4-5 years ago. Alvarez’s writing and characters and plotting are incredible and I am stupid for letting this book fester. Everyone go read this now.

A few months ago, I think I told someone that in the next four years, I want to be able to completely start over. In retrospect, I think I was being

dramatic

naive

the kind of person who believes in becoming a New and Improved person and that Wiping the Slate Clean is a) possible and b) works

full of bullshit

I was thinking this while reading This Won’t Hurt A Bit. The memoir is 300+ pages of humor on what medical school and residency and fellowship is really like, and how much it deeply deeply sucks, written by someone who wrote humor for Wellesley’s newspaper. My old roommate recommended it to me and it’s in turns heartening and deeply depressing about things I already knew: the enormous responsibility of the medical profession, how much stress and shit I’m going to get in the next couple of years, the lack of sleep and food that will characterize my life, and how much I don’t know and will probably never know. 

I’m ready for this (probably) transformative experience, but the book helped me realize that the MD degree doesn’t make you an all-knowing, compassionate, patient, careful, ethical person overnight. And it doesn’t happen just by going to medical school. It’s all part of the slow process of living and learning. 

Come on, why can’t things be easy.

I didn’t want to criticize the book (she’s done two residencies AND had a child! she’s obviously smart and writing is certainly not her profession! how did she have time to even do this??) but the font IS huge and that’s a pet peeve, so here it goes. On one hand, it’s a huge testament to her writing that she makes the book a fun read, and I am never tired about reading 300 pages of jargon, numerous stressful anecdotes, etc without getting lost. It’s truthful about the relentlessness of medical training, and how lost people feel the entire time while still feeling that they’re not living up to an impossible standard.

AND YET. The book tends to get bogged down in anecdotes without providing substantial commentary or voice of judgment. Sometimes Au needed to choose 2 rather than 5 stories to get her point across. Punchlines aren’t worth the extra 5 pages of text (unless you’re getting paid by the word, in which case type away.) And the narrative arc wasn’t exactly there, and the point of the book wasn’t really that focused or clear, other than that medical training sucks, give your doctors more credit because look at all this shit they put up with, but if they use humor it’ll be fine okay great!

Something I learned in a nonfiction workshop and agree with is that:

You have to signal your honesty and show your fallibility in order to gain readers’ trust. 

Do not be afraid to assess the situation. You have positioned yourself as an authority, show judgment.

This was something I struggled with in reading this book. On one hand, Au does say often and throughout that doctors are plagued with self doubt and worry that they’re not prepared enough or doing the right thing - you can never know anything. And yet she’s never wrong - either it’s someone else’s fault or it’s really not a big deal (like ordering too much blood from the lab) or everything was going to hell already or it’s fine but she’s got some doubts about it. I kept feeling like she was holding me at arms’ distance. THEN AGAIN I suppose you can’t fault a currently practicing physician for refusing to broadcast any mistakes she’s made. We want and EXPECT doctors to be perfect 100% of the time, which is unfair, and even an author who recognizes that isn’t able to supersede it here.

And maybe she just wants to write a funny book. There was potential for more and I wanted more, but my wants don’t need to be her wants, so maybe I’m expecting things out of the wrong project.

Also, Au briefly touches on how much it sucks to be a woman in a career that prioritizes 24/7 work and careerism and is NOT especially family-oriented, and even though the workforce is relatively 50% women is still not always feminist minded. BUT SHE DOESN’T GET TO IT UNTIL PAGE 290. That’s almost 300 pages of convincing readers to be on her side before she gets to anything of controversy, and by that time there are only 30 pages left !!! I wish it had come earlier and she had dug into it more. She had a platform, and here was the meat of it! Maybe she doesn’t care about it all that much, but she still took the time to address it. Maybe she was scared to address it. But this is a book, and if you’re afraid of controversy, the Internet would be the one to avoid. She buries the lede so so far into the book. It seems deeply unfair to criticize her but I wish she was more fearless and more honest, and of course then I feel bad because maybe I want her to be my version of “perfect.”

The lessons I have learned this week are: 

I am an asshole. I also need more activities in my life because the indoors is driving me insane.

[overbookedofficial-blog]

OVERBOOKED: It Chooses You by Miranda July May 27, 2015

I should be packing right now. I’m moving at the end of the week and instead of finding the mugs I’ve misplaced or jigsaw-puzzling my clothes into a suitcase, I’m laying on my mattress (recently sold to a new owner) except that in a fit of productivity I accidentally packed all my sheets and blankets away. The walls are mostly empty and I’ve cleared out several boxes of junk - old Mardi Gras beads, shoes with the soles hanging off that I’ve been too lazy to fix or toss, paperclips that I kept just in case. In a zealous, reckless effort to consolidate my life, I’ve narrowed down my belongings to fit into two boxes, plus a suitcase filled with books and another filled with clothes. So admittedly, I’m making progress!! I am sad! What a fine time to take a reading break !! 

I have a lot of *bucket list* things I’ve been meaning to do, so perhaps it’s dumb that one of them was to read It Chooses You by Miranda July. I can do that anywhere, BUT I can do it best here because my roommate owns a copy and what if I can’t find one at the library back home and don’t want to order a copy?! Carpe diem! Okay! It’s published by McSweeney’s so the book is well bound and nicely printed. There are lots of photos (exhibit above) by Brigitte Sire and the text is large (it’s a godawful sans serif, bolded maybe? is this 13.5 font?! and ambitious margins? was this done to make the book longer? UGH I WANT TO PUNCH YOU, LAYOUT TEAM). Regardless of these *feelings*, it made the book a quick read and I don’t feel like I’m really procrastinating that much by making time for it.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way - A book by Miranda July? you say? Oh. How millennial of you to like her. How 20-30s of you! How Williamsburg and Silverlake-esque-enamored of you! (if this is not how you feel about Miranda July, ignore the rest of this paragraph) Okay 1. fuck you 2. I personally think writing is a much better medium for her than film or performance art etc 3. You just need to get past the strange kitsch factor and see what she’s actually saying, because she has one of those singular voices and I would love to live inside her head. She writes with a strange honesty and quiet boldness. To see the world from her perspective which is part-child and part-clear-eyed-seer is a wonderful kind of privilege.

It Chooses You is a nonfiction account of how, during the summer of 2009, July went to the homes of 13 people in Los Angeles trying to sell things in PennySaver (leather jacket for $10, fifty Christmas card fronts $1, etc) to ask about their lives and hopes and motivations. She interviewed them while procrastinating the screenplay for The Future, which disclaimer I saw and hated (I was definitely in the wrong mindset for it and probably would have liked it better if I’d read It Chooses You first. I was in Houston during a hurricane and was absolutely not in the headspace for a movie narrated by a squeaky cat voice. Maybe now though...) 

Half is told in interview form and half is narration. At first I was struck by how weird everyone was - what they were selling and why. But of course, one of the things I learned in the last few years, and in this book, is that no one is *weird* (unless you’re misogynistic or racist or sexist etc in which case that is not a normal way to be, stop it.) No one is strange if you can recalibrate what you define normal to be, and set it to something kinda like “person who is curious about the world, and engages / copes with it in their own singular way”, because that’s ultimately what we’re all doing, right?

The way Miranda July chooses to write about the people she meets is so interesting. On one hand, she is coming from that avant garde art scene and the large scale media it-girl thing and Hollywood-mind. But I never felt that she was trivializing the book’s characters - these are all quick, intimate portraits of people in their lives’ bare motion. But July is also occupied with the question of what the Internet and technology is doing to our relationships to others and the “real” world. How does it change what and how we experience? What are other ways we can choose to interact with strangers, other than forums or Youtube comments etc? Does it matter, and how?

I want to be exasperated by Miranda July (does everything need to be turned into art?) but I can’t be because she makes it clear - everything IS art. It’s not that you can choose to look at everyday life as art, it’s that the fundamental specificity and implications of everything we do 24/7 is itself art. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but that’s how I felt when reading It Chooses You. 

I think it’s become cool and the easy, snarky thing to treat Miranda July as kitsch. But it took me making that huge leap to settle into her mind and being okay with it in order to recognize myself all over this book - that she’s also writing about me and around me and inside of me, and she does it with honesty and endearingly clumsy grace.

Also, I’m so behind on this reading list. Summer’s coming around, gotta kick it into high-gear ugh -