“My parents didn’t let us watch much television. Dad has us cover our eyes when the commercials came on. He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism. Shakespeare’s history plays and ‘The Three Stooges’ were major influences.”
“I can barely speak to a four-year-old in Ojibwe, let alone write in it. But I own the curse and glory of English, a language that has eaten up so many other cultures and become a conglomerate of gorgeous, seedy, supernal, rich, evocative words.”
—Louise Erdrich
When I put those Louise Erdrich interview links at the foot of Monday’s post, I knew they would surely be good reads for anyone who needed one (uh, two). But I’ve since read them and they are FAR TOO GOOD to have been eclipsed like that. So I’m claiming a do-over and giving them today’s full attention! If you’re not familiar with the novelist and her work, there’s a great overview/intro at the top of this first link—
• Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208 (2010, by Lisa Halliday) In this 2010 interview — which is outside the Paris Review paywall for the week — Erdrich talks about everything from her dad’s letter-writing skills to the difficulties of learning the Ojibwe language, to why she changed her name, tied herself to a chair, voted for Richard Nixon, rewrites her work even after it’s published, and so many other things. It is long and wide-ranging! But more than that, every answer is a total wow of a different sort from the one before it.
• A Conversation with Louise Erdrich (2024, by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain) With HolyWhiteMountain, Erdrich talks much more about her bookstore, her influences (Native and non), and the collective fight for Native sovereignty, “joke by joke, book by book, political win by political win.” (I believe this one lives outside the paywall.)
The first Erdrich book I read was Tracks, in a continuing ed class I took with my sister and a friend right after I graduated from college. (I don’t remember what the class was called but I remember we read The Bluest Eye and The House on Mango Street and In the Time of Butterflies … it was a great class.) Now I wish I could read her rewrite. The most recent Erdrich I read was Future Home of the Living God, which I liked many things about, but I didn’t quite love the whole of it. (Now I’m curious if this was the book she was talking about in the 2010 interview — “I suppose I could go back to my eternal science fiction novel …”) Somehow I think I’ve never read Love Medicine, so I’ll rectify that, but these interviews most made me want to read The Night Watchman. And you?
“Ultimately, I’m my best self in the outdoors—curious, brave, and present. That in turn gives me confidence and optimism. All these seem like character traits I should hold on to as I age.”
—Caroline Paul
I’ve chosen this quote from a million possibilities, as it happens to resonate with me, make the point, and continue a theme, but the thing about Oldster Magazine, a Substack-based publication I’m here to rave about today, is that I find myself wanting to save a handful of quotes from every piece I read there. (This one happens to be from a very funny excerpt of Caroline Paul’s new book, Tough Broad.) By way of both introduction and possible disclosure, Oldster is the creation of writer-editor Sari Botton, who I feel like I probably have friends in common with and might have met before?* (If that’s true and you know me and know her, please introduce us!) Or maybe she’s just one of those people you feel a kinship with even though you’ve never met. Anyone who describes themselves as a “late-blooming Gen X weirdo” is ok by me.
She describes Oldster like this: “Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures. Regardless of age, we’re all the oldest we’ve ever been, which makes every one of us feel, well, old.”
While I recently turned 55, I’m not even anyone’s mother, much less grandmother – I’m still just me — so it’s taken until now for me to accept the term “middle aged.” It just seems mathematically inarguable at this point, right? But while I am by no definition old, I’m increasingly aware that society thinks I am, and feel ever more pressingly the urge both to understand what that means along with people my age and older, and to disabuse younger women, in particular, of the idea that there’s anything wrong with aging. We all age (those of us who get the opportunity), and so for young women to perpetuate harmful and derogatory stereotypes about older women is to literally lay a trap for oneself.
But ultimately, I love Oldster because it is frank and irreverent and entertaining — just like a life well-lived.
//
*Also, I’m 100% certain I have friends in common with Caroline Paul, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.
Time measures Nothing but itself. —W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water
The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks. —Jill Lepore, How the week organizes and tyrannizes our lives
I do not plan to start anew in January that is for spring —David Gate, @davidgatepoet
. . .
Daylight Savings is my Christmas morning. The day on the calendar I look forward to with anticipatory glee. The most wonderful time of the year. Just as the shortness of winter’s days (lengthening though they may be) becomes insufferable, and evidence of spring is tauntingly everywhere, this brilliant thing happens. Literally overnight, the day is longer.
For me, a weight lifts. But for others, despite the fact that we all “lose track of time” on a regular basis (muttering things like “2:00 already?!” and “Where does the time go?”), the loss of that lone hour upon “springing forward” is experienced as a bodily misalignment, and there is a documented increase of strokes and other health risks in the 48 hours after the time change. That we can be so bad at tracking time with our bodies and senses throughout the year, and also so impacted by the time change is a modern mystery. But then again, time is a bit of a mystery: one of those seemingly unquestionable things that, the more you think about it, the more questionable it becomes.
What is time? Why are we so ruled by it, so attached to measuring it? And can it really be lost?!
. . .
There was a piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker a few years ago called How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives, in which she discusses the history of “the week” — a concept not only man-made but changeable! — and it will twist your mind into a pretzel trying to imagine how the world would function without the construct of weeks, so fundamental are they to 21st-century life. If we only minded days (marked by the rising and setting of the sun) and years (by the repetition of seasons) how would anyone know when it was the right day to do recurring things involving other people, like attend a church service, or watch a broadcast TV show, or play a game of sports?
Not to mention the week’s central role in how modern-day, Western calendars are typically laid out, with the grid of weeks stacked into months, which then form years. (“Months”! That imperfect tool for trying to align the calendar, the year and the moon’s cycles.) But nothing about calendar time is set in stone. To this day, cultures around the world mark different start dates for a new year, and even in Christian Europe, as Jason Farago notes in his exquisite 2023 art-essay Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar, “for many centuries … the new year didn’t start on Jan 1. It began on March 25.” Spring was a fresh start in even more ways than it is today. Plus not all modern-day calendars across the globe have the same number of days or months from one year to the next, or dates that repeat or are fixed in any sense, like ours are.
Farago’s piece includes a look at many calendars from different places and eras, but it is primarily a deep dive — both funny and fascinating, a lesson in seeing — into a stunning hand-painted early-15th-century calendar, the private datebook of a wealthy French duke, known as the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. I really urge you to click through and enjoy the ride he takes you on, but what struck me most (which I’ve been chewing on in the year since I first saw it) is the discussion of time being cyclical on the left-hand pages of the duke’s datebook, and linear on the right. “We perceive time only through change,” Farago writes (and those of you who know my past struggle living in seasonally monotonous places will understand how vigorously I nodded my head). “But what kind of change? Do our lives evolve in history or do they repeat themselves? Is time an arrow or a wheel?”
I was, at that moment, in the middle of recording both — in two separate journals.
THE CIRCULAR
In mid-2020, quarantined at home with my husband in Nashville, having closed down my business, and in the midst of that perilous election year, I saw a mention of someone’s 5-year journal and it seemed like a good idea at that particular moment in history. So I ordered one from Letts. I kept it simple: Each day I recorded what we ate for dinner (thinking it would give ideas to future me), noted the temperature (for year-over-year comparison), and added a sentence or two about the day’s events. Similar to the duke’s perpetual calendar, with a 5-year journal you start back at the beginning every January, so by the time Farago’s piece came along in April 2023 I was on my fourth pass through the book, entries stacking up on top of each other. Each day was not only itself but its past selves, remaining present.
Sept 30 — as the random example it fell open to — was the day that one side of our tiny NY galley kitchen was completed (2023); that we flew to TX for my grandma’s funeral (’22); picked up dear friends who came to visit us in FL “post-Covid” (’21); and that I finished emptying out my old business studio space in TN (’20). Others ranged from mundane to amusing to aggravating all over again.
Like the calendars that fill store shelves every year in our world, the duke’s 1410 calendar contains 12 monthly spreads, each with a calendar opposite a pretty picture. His pretty pictures (intricately handpainted by a trio of Flemish brothers, and topped with a half-circle of cyclical time) depict how central the seasons — and more specifically the management of land and crops — are to the wheel of his trés riche life. Up until my parents’ generation, my people were middle American farmers. Every March, my ancestors prepared to sow and harvest. In the years contained in my 5-year journal, every March I packed or unpacked our belongings.
THE LINEAR
My second journal, kept simultaneously, was the version of a DIY datebook I’ve developed for myself over years and iterations. In late 2020, I settled on the form I’ve been using ever since. People familiar with the bullet journaling community would call it a “bujo,” despite that the only thing it has in common with Ryder Carroll’s inspiring Bullet Journal method is the linear 1-31 date list — which, as the duke’s book shows us, is a tradition as old as calendar-making. I couldn’t help but feel an affinity with this handmade datebook from 1410, as extraordinarily different as it is from mine, and wonder what of its features I might be able to incorporate. Farago compares it to an almanac; mine does track the weather.
. . .
Time is not only how we experience the world, it’s also how we describe it. Halfway through writing this, I became aware of time-based language piling up in the sentences, completely unintentionally: time as metaphor (“my Christmas morning”), as compulsory citation (a piece published “a few years ago“), as a point of comparative reference (“21st-century” life) or indicator of current relevancy (“modern-day” calendars) and as common parlance (“to this day”). Would we be able to tell each other stories without the components of time to lean on? But also why do we lean on it so hard?
On January first of this year, when it was time to start a new #bujo for myself and also turn again to the first page of the 5-year journal, I decided to let the latter go. Living in the present means letting the past be in the past, for better or worse. Whether like a wheel or an arrow, time moves forward, and I have my book of days to keep me on course.
You’ve likely heard Brené Brown’s phrase “dress-rehearsing tragedy” (from her book Dare to Lead), and if not, you probably immediately get what it means. According to Brown’s research, 90% of us do it: “Something wonderful happens, and for a brief second you let the joy wash over you — and then five seconds later, the excitement is gone and you’re panicked about a bad thing that’s going to happen to counter the positive. When’s the other shoe going to drop?”
In the face of joy, we imagine terrible scenarios, tell ourselves we’re bracing, preparing, practicing, in an effort to lessen the impact of the imagined inbound pain or disappointment. We’re dress-rehearsing tragedy. The antidote to this thoroughly pointless tendency, she tells us, is gratitude. Simply appreciating the good things in our lives as they happen — and actively, outwardly expressing that on a regular basis — can help break the catastrophizing habit and allow more joy into our lives.
I can attest to that, but a recent NYT Well newsletter by Jancee Dunn, on the power of savoring, contained an idea by a professor of social psychology named Dr. Fred Bryant that goes one step further:
“Dr. Bryant amps up his appreciation for the present by imagining himself in the future, pining for his current life. He has a 7-year-old granddaughter, and sometimes he’ll pretend that she is all grown up, has moved away, ‘and that I would give anything, just for one more day with her,’ he said. Then he opens his eyes and tells himself that his wish is granted.”
Corny? Maybe. But effective.
I do a version of this when it comes to sleep. If I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, or too early in the morning, with enough time left for at least a nap’s worth, I imagine I’ve already been up (or sometimes I actually get up for a minute and walk around the cold house) and that I get to slip back into bed for a precious nap. Imagining and savoring that stolen moment of curling up and tuning out the day, which I get to do so rarely, is often enough to put me right back to sleep.
I run into Joan Didion everywhere lately. Quotes, subreferences, citations, literally everywhere I turn. (In one of my favorite passages in the Sigrid Nunez novel, the narrator challenges the unchallenged veracity of one of Didion’s most famous memories.) I’ll have more to say about Didion and her present ubiquity — I’m just putting a pin in it for a second — but one of the quotes I’ve recently encountered more than once, which immediately lodged itself in my brain, is “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” from the essay On Keeping a Notebook in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I bought but haven’t read yet. (I’ve been making my way through The White Album off and on for several months.)
Anyway: notebooks and nodding terms.
Yesterday, my husband sent me a link to this rather dense Popular Mechanics story, Scientists Believe They’ve Unlocked Consciousness—and It Connects to the Entire Universe, which made me want to put together something about the scientific pursuit of spirituality (“It’s just a simple quantum wave …,” the story says), and immediately brought to mind three quotes:
From Atmos editor Willow Defebaugh, earlier this month: “Restoring balance means elevating all human and non-human life to a place of equal sanctity. It means understanding that the seemingly disparate and many crises we face—whether personal, political, or planetary—are in fact all fractal expressions of the same root dissonance our species has developed between ourselves, each other, and the wider realm of nature. A holistic mindset reminds us that the idea of individuality is subjective, for just as we are part of larger networks and ecosystems, we also all contain microbiomes and communities, thousands of species working in concert to keep ourselves healthy. We are unique creatures, and yet we are also one.”
From Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ, 1995 (which I’m perpetually rereading ever since): “Some waves on the ocean are high and some are low. Waves appear to be born and to die. But if we look more deeply, we see that the waves, although coming and going, are also water, which is always there. Notions like high and low, birth and death, can be applied to waves, but water is free of such distinctions. Enlightenment for a wave is the moment the wave realizes it is water. At that moment, all fear of death disappears.”
And a quote from R. Buckminster Fuller I wanted to track down to get it right. I went through a big Bucky phase 20-odd years ago, and felt certain it was his concept of Universe that I was thinking of.
After fruitlessly riffling through my brain in search of the quote this morning, I turned to Google. There was a new Bucky bio recently that didn’t tempt me, but my search quickly turned up 2016’s You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, which does. However, given that Bucky used the word “universe” a lot and it’s included in that book’s title, which got a lot of press, I was never going to find the quote I was seeking — not that way. And then I recalled an old notebook of mine, still in a moving box in the basement, and felt sure I’d find it in there. So I dug it out, and cracked it open (almost literally).
I started this notebook in early 1997, according to the letter I wrote myself within the first few pages. Somewhere between a scrapbook and a commonplace book, it takes up less than half the pages of a large black sketchbook. I was still working as a graphic designer at the time, and was big on brown kraft paper and vellum, so both are layered in — along with handwritten quotes and notes, reading lists, magazine clippings, doodles, photocopies of pages of books, a museum exhibition catalog, some postcards. But all my themes (small structures, rat-race avoidance …) and influences (none stronger than The Book of Tea) are there. Many of the glued-in bits have come loose, but the ideas it held had all adhered to my core more strongly than I even realized.
A few pages in, just past a bunch of Thoreau and a sketch of the little live-work compound I still dream of somehow one day building, there are a few pages from Jack Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma, which I just referenced in the Nunez footnote the other day, along with a full-page photocopy of a portrait of the author with his cat. A page of architectural and interior photos I could happily have pinned on Pinterest today. The 1997 Mirabella magazine interview with Vicki Robin that led to my first reading of Your Money or Your Life. Several spreads later Bucky appears, then disappears just as quickly, to my surprise. A few spreads after that comes an Albert Einstein phase, including copious bits from Denis Brian’s Einstein: A Life, and there I find the quote I had been seeking from the wrong author:
“A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
Handwritten on the opposite page, another: “For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious.” My early-adult and current selves couldn’t agree more.
I appear to have added to this notebook far longer than I recalled. Toward the end are several pages from Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (including, blown up and highlighted, the sentence that inspired the blog title), which according to the notation I made on that book’s title page was 2004. The penultimate entry is the very Thich Nhat Hanh quote above, written out in my then-legible hand. And the final item? An article from Elle magazine about meditation (I still don’t), which ironically has on its reverse side that month’s Ask E. Jean column, along with a big grinning photo of her.
On page 1 of Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel The Vulnerables, she (or, rather, her nameless narrator) writes: “Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t.”
I personally don’t care much what happens in a novel, or whether anything happens at all (unless plot is all there is, in which case it better be good). What I love best is the kind of book where it doesn’t matter because I could listen to the narrator talk for hours about anything, and be perfectly engaged, amused and inspired. And The Vulnerables is the best example I’ve met in a long while. If plot is important to you, this might not be your book. There is only the faintest whiff of one — an NYC writer (old enough to be dubbed “vulnerable” but, as a novelist, not “essential”) during early Covid agrees to petsit a friend-of-a-friend’s parrot, and finds herself with an unlikely quarantine companion — and it is probably mentioned or acted out on fewer than 1/4 of the book’s 242 pages. (I believe the first mention of it comes on page 73.) It’s a good plot, what there is of it, but it’s not really the main draw.
The main draw is the character — a deep well of anecdotes, opinions and insights, especially with regard to novels and novelists, vulnerability and essentialness. Is the “I” here the voice of a made-up narrator or is she Nunez herself? Whichever she is, she has thoughts on that too.
“Elegy plus comedy” — a phrase she attributes to an unspecified friend — is her own perfect summation of the book. I read the last page, turned right back to the first, and read it again. Consider yourself forewarned: this won’t be the last you hear of it here!
//
[ IMAGE: Photo of books including Sigid Nunez’s The Vulnerables. The book it’s making eyes at on my coffee table is Paul Rand “A Designer’s Eye” (which I got from Available Items). And it’s on top of Jack Kerouac’s Some of the Dharma, which I just realized is funny because not only does Jack get a mention in the Nunez novel, but the one line I remember from reading it ages ago was that we are all “visionary flowers in the air.” ]
‘The human mind is easily exploited when it’s trying to swim the choppy waters between fact and fiction.’
—Abraham Josephine Riesman
This week kicked off the new season of Election Madness in America, sure to be the rowdiest, most nauseating yet. If I had the power to make every person in the U.S. read just one article right now, from start to finish, it would be The Best Way to Explain the G.O.P. Is Found in the W.W.E. (NYT Gift Link), the single most insightful thing I’ve ever read about Donald Trump. Perhaps I could persuade you to read it? And please, pass it on.
Collapse and Delight 