Claire McNeill

Lately: 28

7/24/2017

Vase, Alvar Aalto, 1937

My favorite teacher assigned poetry essays due every Monday, two pages analyzing poems he loved, wickedly un-Googleable. I stayed up late in our family’s dark-windowed office most Sundays, searching for meaning in phrases I didn’t understand. A flash of recognition only sometimes came. I kept one of the poems taped to my wall for years, unable to grasp what emotion, exactly, it made me feel so strongly.

It’s the elision of poetry that hooks me, the way a flickering image can bear the weight of the whole sketch. My love for poetry is misshapen, know-nothing, dumbly dependent on feeling, and it can take weeks of rereading for me to make sense of certain lines. Sometimes I hover at the doorway of understanding but can’t make my way inside. But coming to a poem as an amateur no longer feels like a barrier; sometimes my imprecise grasp makes the feeling cut deeper. It’s similar to the freedom I feel in art museums, surrounded by a craft distant and opaque to me. I can sink into the role of viewer, just letting the color pass through me.

So, a few poems for summer.

It’s thunderstorm season. I sit and watch the storms through the kitchen window, a smudge of green. Lizards slip into the house. It’s the season of permission to do nothing. The Gulf is soupy, the air dense and wet. I read in long stretches on the couch, watch TV on my phone and take long walks at night, swimming through the humid dark. Ferry rides, mosquito bites, Melodrama, flip cup. Anything but writing.

Halfway through the year, here are some books I've loved: Running, by Cara Hoffman, which is hot and sun-bleached and alive and addictive. Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta, insanely smart, best read in a tourist van rocketing along the blue edge of Costa Rica, pages ruined by the ocean. A Separation by Katie Kitamura, ice cold, the crispest prose. The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, like The Interestings, only sadder and sexier and realer. The Days of Abandonment, a plunge back into Ferrante’s feverish world of women on the edge. And, my favorite of these last few months, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, which I read with near-manic delight, in thrall to its depiction of being 19 meandering through the mundanity of college, dumb and overwhelmed and doomed by desire.

I am also a bit obsessed with Mary Ruefle’s odd little book My Private Property, which is studded with poem-essays on the sadnesses of every color. They're pure feeling.

Okay, some links.

I think about this a lot: Astronomers crack the secret of a beautiful, brief Sappho poem.

Writers look back on art they first saw a long time ago. Cara Hoffman remembers being “invisible and invincible.” Kyle Chayka writes about how certain pieces will "send a ripple streaming through the rest of your life.” Catherine Lacey weeps before a Cy Twombly, “moved by all that broken beauty.” (Also, a third grader’s poem written in front of a Twombly, “strangest of them all.”)

This profile of Lorde is the MOST charming. Subway rides with tinny headphones, midnight diners, wild dogs, color-coded heartbreak party songs. Also, “Happiness is for tourists write you little fucker.”

Monet’s home in Giverny / The London Review of Looks / Korean convenience stores / Alison Bechdel’s coming out story / Anxiety dreams / Landslide.

Jia Tolentino on the enduring magic of The Mixed-Up Files and the pleasure of a secret.

Before the internet / The first Pride flag / Love and confetti at City Hall / How to relax / George Bush’s painted atonements / Malingerer! / Traveling on Google street view.

Rest in peace Denis Johnson, tender heart, who cried in class and went out in his bathrobe looking “for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.”

All / the things I /embrace as new / are in / fact old things, / re-released: swimming, / the sensation of / being dirty in / body and mind / summer as a / time to do / nothing and make / no money.

“i have been too many things in the dead heat of time.”

Abbi Jacobson’s new podcast on contemporary art is a pure delight.

This essay on leaving a marriage and making lemon soup is a poem.

There’s an Ian McEwan quote I love: “What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger — then it fades, but never completely.”

Lately: 27

2/27/2017

Cressida Campbell, Verandah

George Saunders’ plane got in late, so he did his talk at Tampa Theatre in a rumpled plaid shirt and a vest, flanked by two slightly nervous authors in nice jackets. They floated above the stage in tall director’s chairs. Saunders talked about his new book and the way he chisels away at stories, looking for the boring line or twinned words weighing down a page so he can cut, revamp, make alive. My friends and I waited in a long, stuffy line for the signing.

Are you a writer? he asked kindly, signing my book and drawing a Sharpie ghost.
Yeah, I said, surprised, blushing. Or I mean, I’m trying to be.
Are you a student? Who’s teaching these days?
Oh, no, I mean, I work at the newspaper. Trying to make it work with my job.
Well, that’s how I did it, he said. That’s how Hemingway did it!
At this point the redness of my face was out of control.
I’ll tell you one piece of advice, he said, as a husband and a father of two daughters. Women have to be fiercer in this world.

And then I think he told me good luck. And then I went and drank a gin cocktail and debated at length, not for the first time this month, which songs rise to the level of a Strictly Bangers Only playlist. And a few days later, I shelved a story I’d deadened via nervous revision and returned to messy scenes I’d written of something truer.

I’m making and breaking resolutions all the time. Surprising myself, disappointing myself. Highs and lows: A sunset picnic with cheese and strawberries and my dog barking at the air, then coming home to find another dead mouse behind the bookcase. Mapping out the scaffolding of stories I love, then flushing at flimsy attempts to construct them myself. Meals in the sunshine and in the windowless office.

As always I take solace in the ongoingness of things, blue skies, days compounding. I think about Zadie Smith’s essay on the terror and rarity of real joy, and the sustenance we find instead in smaller pleasures (popsicles, people-watching). The small good things gather into something potent. Like this, from a New Yorker piece on Leonard Cohen: “He seemed not so much devastated by Marianne’s death as overtaken by the memory of their time together. ‘There would be gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room,’ he said. ‘There would be a little sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweetness everywhere.’”

Really all I’ve done since the new year is read. I devoured All My Puny Sorrows, which nails the absurdity and terror and tenderness of grief while also managing to be funny (How! I kept writing in the margins). Stag’s Leap was about a different kind of grief, being left by a husband of three decades and rifling through the years to see where, exactly, his love shifted. I began My Name Is Lucy Barton without expecting to love it, but I closed it a few hours later profoundly moved, texting photos of favorite passages to my best friend, who’d read it, so she could say, I know! I know! (For example.)

I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time and was relieved to be reading Atwood’s dark, measured depiction of what it is like to live in a female body. And it was a relief in a very different way to visit Saunders’ America in Tenth of December, full of people beleaguered by the indecencies of corporate life and making rent, but kind, and always tethered to hope.

Ahead of the reading, I immersed myself in a sort of Saunders syllabus. He wrote a timeline of his writing education for the New Yorker, gently teasing the older version of himself stumbling around in the dark, trying on all the voices but his own.

“December 1986: End of our first semester. We flock to hear Toby read at the Syracuse Stage. He has a terrible flu. He reads not his own work but Chekhov’s “About Love” trilogy. The snow falls softly, visible behind us through a huge window. It’s a beautiful, deeply enjoyable, reading. Suddenly we get Chekhov: Chekhov is funny. It is possible to be funny and profound at the same time. The story is not some ossified, cerebral thing: it is entertainment, active entertainment, of the highest variety. All of those things I’ve been learning about in class, those bone-chilling abstractions theme, plot, and symbol are de-abstracted by hearing Toby read Chekhov aloud: they are simply tools with which to make your audience feel more deeply—methods of creating higher-order meaning. The stories and Toby’s reading of them convey a notion new to me, or one which, in the somber cathedral of academia, I’d forgotten: literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form.”

In a new preface to Civilwarland in Bad Decline (also a delight, weirder than his newer work), Saunders wrote about his soul-grinding years biking along a frozen river to a dehumanizing job where he wrote fiction at his cubicle, years that managed to land among the happiest of his life.

“I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn’t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant.”

A few other things:

So many lovely images in Donald Hall’s short essay on the “soft power” of double solitude, the way he and his wife retreated to different rooms to write, then talked about their separate days over slow dinners.

I’ve read this Lauren Collins piece on love and learning a new language three or four times now and it’s so dense and gorgeous and funny that I keep finding new things to pocket.

Carrie Fisher’s diary entries during her affair with Harrison Ford. “I’m sorry it’s not Mark—it could’ve been. It should’ve been. It might’ve meant something. Maybe not much, but certainly more.”

Napkin love letter / Top pinks and purples of 2016 / How Moonlight undoes our expectations / Loving Oliver Sacks / Places to go / 100 years of women’s protests / The new White House after dark.

“The inside threat to feminism in 2017 is less a disavowal of radical ideas than an empty co-option of radical appearances—a superficial, market-based alignment that is more likely to make a woman feel good and righteous than lead her to the political action that feminism is meant to spur.”

The pleasure and pain of the climbing life / Becoming reduced to a body on the Appalachian Trail, then transforming back at trail’s end / Being a black woman on the trail, carrying black voices.

“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain&more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love” — Jenny Slate.

One more quote from Saunders. “Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

Lately: 26

1/9/2017

Nathalie Du Pasquier

I bought my Christmas tree on a Saturday in late December, my legs still shedding sand from a long beach day. Eighty-degree afternoons, key lime pie in a cooler, those big clean blue skies: I had forgotten it was almost Christmas. I strung my shabby tree in lights and tried to conjure holiday feelings, the silvery end-of-year magic I love so much.

Unanchored by seasons, I forget constantly how long I’ve lived here. The masochistic part of me misses grim New Jersey winters (salted sidewalks, the undying mound of blackened snow in the mall parking lot), if only to locate myself in time. I’m writing this on the last day of the year in a coffeeshop with the doors flung open and it could be any month at all. I miss the inwardness of winter and the promise of a blank January. But I’m still a list-maker, a Resolution Person, trying to impose order upon myself with lofty commandments.

So, like a marathon trainee who announces her weekend runs with the intention of shaming herself into completion, I will say that my resolution for 2017 is to become a better notebook-keeper, to take the project seriously, and to turn those scraps into writing. I used to be good at this, but then my compulsion to document spiraled; my sentences grew into unwieldy chunks of text, dense with run-ons and arbitrary descriptions of sky and slices of sun I was afraid I’d forget, conversations I wanted preserved in amber. Eventually the prospect of recording each day became so overwhelming that I quit altogether. So I bought a new notebook. (“First try to be something, anything else.”)

December was a long and full month, carried on a wave of leftover surreality (enhanced by a guilty avoidance of news). But it was a good one. I shared a house with eight friends in New Orleans, drank Hurricanes on a ghost tour, pretended I knew what I was doing in jazz clubs, twirled down the street with a Christmas parade, ate oysters and beignets and po boys with creole mustard. I found a signed copy of Bark and bought H Is for Hawk at my favorite bookstore (“Perfect if you like grief and birds,” the cashier said.) My family came to stay in my apartment — two dogs, five adults, one stolen air mattress and one acquired by legal means. My brothers and I rode roller coasters and ate theme park churros, built a doomed sandcastle, made games out of everything. On Christmas we raced to the beach for sunset. My brothers and dad ran around the beach throwing a ball and I read on a blanket with my mom until it was too dark to see.

I keep a small, hot pink post-it on my desk at work. “OR YOU CAN SUFFER THE MOLTING,” it says, a fragment of a poem that reminds me how I want to be now and in the year to come.

“The trees in wind, the streetlights on,
                   the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
            It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
                                                                        green beautiful green.
      It’s simple: it isn’t over, it’s just begun. It’s green. It’s still green.”

On resolutions, Plath, things done and undone.

I really really love this Kathryn Schulz piece on the dailiness of running and where the mind goes, especially her look at a professor’s running log. "Very early on in the book, in the entry for February 29th, we learn, without preparation or preamble, that Gardner’s younger brother died of a heart attack the day before. As both writer and runner, the author retains his form: 'Cold rain this morning, 45 degrees, crying hard by the time I hit the pond.' For the rest of the book, grief will trail him just off one shoulder, the way his brother used to do until, always the faster runner, he pulled ahead at the end."

This very heartachey poem about home and Americana. “You never forget / how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.”

I loved Girls on Fire, which I read because of this essay: "It is this ragged edge, this blurriness of the teenage self, that makes Girls on Fire a more reliable guide to the lived dystopia of adolescence than the melting masochism of Twilight or the righteous fight of The Hunger Games. Because in my experience there is really no clarity or meaning to be made of a misspent youth. Girlhood is there, and then it is gone."

Molly Wizenberg’s coming out essay made my heart light up. "I thought then, and for a long time after, that each of us has some kind of essential self, a core or foundation, and that foundation is sturdy, dependable, unchangeable. There would be things that we could always count on, a sense of me that would be constant over a lifetime. ... But a year and a half ago — something in me shifted without my permission, and it wouldn’t go back to the way it had been, no matter how hard I wished it would."

Do you have kids? Do you have plans? Do you have regrets?

“All my life I’ve had goals to go after, goals / in a molten distance.” This poem!

The way a library makes you feel / Best maps and best book covers of the year / Every literary plot ever / Here’s what helps / HOPE.

Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city, a deeply reported story of a writer torn between the “right” school and the just school in a city (and a country) that can’t get integration right.

Generation Adderall. "This was sublime, these afternoons I spent in untrammeled focus, absorbing the complicated ideas in the texts in front of me, mastering them, covering their every surface with my razor-like comprehension, devouring them, making them a part of myself. Or rather, of what I now thought of as my self, which is to say, the steely, undistractable person whom I vastly preferred to the lazier, glitchier person I knew my actual self to be, the one who was subject to fits of lassitude and a tendency to eat too many Swedish Fish."

I loved this Nathan Heller profile of the new campus activism at Oberlin because it managed to gently skewer some of the more outlandish demands of college kids while also making an undeniable case for their convictions.

Tab hoarders / Eating alone in Toyko / Ends of top 10 lists / Ariel Levy’s book! / The Annihilation movie! / A residential library / My other life / “It arrives like twilight, and at first the eyes adjust.”

I’ve started thinking of this as “the daily poem” because it so exactly captures that endless tide of to-do, to-do, to-do.

These won’t always be so long. Thanks for reading.

Lately: 25

12/4/2016

Adam Adach, Rain, Snow, Fog, Frost, 2009.

“You simply go out and shut the door
without thinking. And when you look back
at what you’ve done
it’s too late. If this sounds
like the story of a life, okay.”
Raymond Carver.

The last time I opened the document where I draft these lists was late July. I was apprehensive then, still processing the shock of covering Orlando, the sweat and despair and long hotel hallways and the creaky foldout bed. If I listen to the recording of my first interview that first morning, June 12, I can hear myself repeat the number of the dead without registering it. The next four days were sun-bleached and vacant except for the mission of work and the need to document those moments of terror. I took a photo of myself in the motel mirror on night three, when most of our team had gone home. My entire face is swollen and distorted. I had finally let myself feel the grief.

This is how the summer felt. Baton Rouge, Dallas, Minnesota, the country fragmented, moments of grace, grief again. The election looming, the knife edge of change. At least in Orlando I could bury my focus in spiral notebooks and urgent feeds tapped out on my overheating phone. After I left, I felt a desperate need to force myself to attention.

I turned 24. I cried at Pride, my tears melting streaks in the waxy rainbow on my cheek. My friends and I drank beers in the Gulf at sunset, cooked vats of pasta, threw my dog a birthday party. The long project I worked on for a year finally ran, resulting in paralyzing relief. I drank wine out of plastic cups at the best pizzeria of my childhood with my best friends from college, climbed a mountain in Arizona, touched a frozen lake in Colorado. I dog-eared predictable poems and walked my neighborhood every morning. A makeshift healing, or at least the steady accretion of time. (Well. And then.)

Lots of books. Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet went out with a bang. Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts was a stunner (and a good place to start, I think, if someone wanted an entree to her work). Lorrie Moore’s Like Life delivered a reliable punch to the heart. I also liked Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which I read on a plane above the Midwest, remembering the intensity of adolescence in a small town.

My favorite book of the year might be Nine Island, a dreamy technicolor ode to aloneness and loneliness in a Miami high-rise, and the truest depiction of Florida’s heat and hyperreality I’ve ever read. At its core it’s a poem about lust and longing and the pain of desire. And it made me cry in a way reminiscent of Fried Green Tomatoes, which is to say, I bestow upon it my highest recommendation.

A few more: Hood was perfect on grief and love and life halfway in the closet. I loved the narrator and would have followed her anywhere. If you were once an athlete, Swimming Studies will conjure the feeling of those black early mornings in the high school parking lot, slush on the ground, school bus rattling, teammates sleeping on cold vinyl seats in gray sweatpants. Grief is the Thing with Feathers was incantatory and strange and moving. And Mary Oliver’s Dream Work is my new favorite of hers. (“And nobody gets out of it, having to / swim through the fires to stay in / this world.”)

I’m so tired of election takes but these are a few pieces that have stayed with me. Trump in his own words. We all know Ivanka voters. “I cried because it does things to you to always come second.” Hillary Clinton vs. Herself. What Trump voters want now. “I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk.” A time for refusal.

“Try to praise the mutilated world. / Remember June’s long days / and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.” 2001.

Sit with this Jonathan Franzen piece. It’s about a trip to Antarctica but it’s also about the majesty of penguins and the ways we have to learn over and over again who our relatives really are. I haven't read any of his books but this totally won me over.

Somehow this writer managed to cram all of the magic and grief of life into a NYT Magazine piece about the search for a loved one who will never be found. It is really incredible, slow-moving and poetic, and worth your time. “He was never alone in the sea, always with Takahashi or another diver, and every month they swam slow and quiet as manatees over the seafloor. Their flashlights illuminated dog bones and bird bones like constellations in the sand. ‘What did you see?’ I asked. ‘All the things in a person’s life,’ Takamatsu said.”

Children don’t always live.

“It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live/work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless ... Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.”

Fleabag is a heartbreaker. / Lonely, holy, hip, irreverent blue / Old postcards / Off-kilter portraits / This killer of a four-line poem.

First gay bars. Frank O’Hara, dancing. Portrait of a Pulse survivor, desperate to make something of his life.
“‘At the end of the day, you know,’ one woman said. I burst into tears. In front of everyone. Partly drunk, partly still devastated from my last relationship, partly because I’d just finished a book about a not knowing narrator. I myself did not know. At the end of the day I did not know. And it was causing me strife, grief, extreme distress. I used to know myself so well. Maybe someday I would, again, but on this night around the fire in California, I did not.” The laziest coming-out story you’ve ever heard.

Dreamy photos / Third spaces / I’m a Guy Fieri apologist / Maggie Nelson’s favorite books / Steering into it.

This was just a lovely piece of travel writing. “In the morning we ate tomatoes and strawberries on the hood of the car, then drove all day, passing through Summerford and New World Island, and arriving at Twillingate before sunset. I was both giddy and apprehensive about whether the place could live up to its name, and pulled over so we could go by foot. Here was the lighthouse, red and white just as I had imagined it; here were the jagged cliffs lush with wild grass. I stood on a decaying picnic bench at the edge of an overhang to study the horizon. Icebergs thrust up from the glassy water, their tips tapered to points by the summer sun.”

“However bad life is, what’s important is to make something interesting out of it. And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff, snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes your phenomenal existence from moment to moment. How consoling—that this stuff goes on and that you can keep thinking about it and making that into something on the page.” Anne Carson.

PS, you can sign up to have these delivered to your email. Go here.

Lately: 24

5/10/2016

I read the second Ferrante and am now in a self-imposed recovery period before I trust myself to open the third. Same goes for the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which I read in a half-day of relentless, clammy dread. A Little Life gave me a similar liquidy fear through its hundreds of pages: what devastation comes next.

I’ve been reading Inferno: A Poet’s Novel (toting it under my arm on hot morning walks, greasing the pages with sunscreen on long beach Saturdays) and I feel like I’m being opened up. Like somehow this portrait of a young Eileen Myles making her way in New York has given me permission to use my voice, to say “art” and mean it.

What else. I became a dog walker for a week and a half, then quit. I build routines every Monday and find them broken by Thursday. Turns out it’s possible to subsist almost entirely on Trader Joe’s veggie potstickers and black bean dip. I read The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty while disappearing into my own New Orleans getaway: four days of bookstores and flower-lined streets and fried food with my best friend. I peeled my first crawfish in the dark, willing myself not to think of roaches. We danced to zydeco between sloppy frames at an old bowling alley. And now it's back to deadlines.

“What is it like to be fun? What is it like to feel like you’ve earned this?” I loved this piece on the surreal world of 2013’s Silicon Valley.

Carrie Brownstein’s 10 desert island books. And Tilda Swinton’s.

“There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.” Sylvia Plath’s self-commandments.

“I like to think that what literature can do that op-ed pieces and other communications don’t do is describe felt experience, the flickering, bewildered places that people actually inhabit.” Maggie Nelson. (No surprise that I loved The Argonauts.)

“What I really want is body neutrality: for none of it to matter. For our bodies to move through the world unremarked upon.” Lucy Morris.

For a belated tribute to National Poetry Month, a grab bag. I loved “Service” by Ada Limon, “Notes to a Young Poet” by Sara June Woods, “Young” by Anne Sexton and especially “Walking in the Woods” by Grace Paley.

Junot Diaz visits Hokkaido, “Japan’s great wild frontier, the North Beyond the Wall.”

The poetics of cruising / The fiction of farm-to-table food / Goodbye to a dress / Viral dance moves / So woke / A need to disappear / 10 books about loneliness.

“All I wanted was anesthetic, the very opposite of a book.”

Pop culture in a small town / Evolution of a first novel / A friendship affair / Piers / These maps! / "A lonely ambulance ride will do that to a person."

In love with the art in this Australian home and these dreamy studios.

“Most of my books are like this. They act as physical placeholders for my thoughts and memories, and they create a sort of map to the past and future for one part of my life.”

Lately: 23

3/24/2016

Helene Delmaire

Judith Sinnamon

Cy Twombly

Okay, okay, okay.

Lately:

Books I’ve read and loved since the last time I wrote: The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, whose entire catalog I’ve now collected; Stoner by John Williams (“This made me cry in a coffee shop,” the Kramerbooks cashier warned, and she was not wrong); An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken; Fried Green Tomatoes (Idgie and Ruth!); The First Bad Man by Miranda July; My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, now the subject of one long text thread.

I’m now on the second Ferrante (even better than the first) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, both of which are slow going since I want to stretch them out as long as possible.

A reminder to you but mostly to me: I collect quotes here.

Was there a more pure delight in 2015 than Miranda July’s talk with Rihanna, probably not. (“I said that it took me a long time to find a guy who wasn’t threatened by my power, and Rihanna quietly replied, ‘I’m still in that time.’”)

From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself by Marlon James: “I was a kid again, frightened by school, praying to God every night, please let me wake up in another body. One that walked and talked right. That did not play house with a boy in the neighborhood that time when he was 8 and I was 9 and ruin him and myself.”

“As I wandered across Copenhagen from artisanal coffee shop to curated bookstore, I thought about why I want the things I want: an industrial loft apartment, a precisely poured cortado, intimate dinner parties... Lined up, they seem like the punchline of a joke at my own expense, the reduction of an identity to a few arbitrary objects, and yet I feel an unjustifiable loyalty to them as mine.” A meditation on ‘lifestyle’ and Kinfolk.

The sheer abundance of #longreads on the internet means I often get to things a few months late, but w/e. Everybody was right; “The Hunt for El Chapo” was fucking great. So was “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.”

“Neither of us are the same. I’m still learning how that will be true.”

“There Once Was a Girl.” I love Katy Waldman’s writing so much.

A week in the life of fairy godmother Maira Kalman.

More good reads: The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield. On “diversity.” On widowhood. Hope for a real homecoming. “I wished more than anything that I had always known.” A fuck-off fund. A love story.

Lorrie Moore on Miranda July. Parul Sehgal on Mary Gaitskill. Wesley Morris on Carol and Transparent.

Justin Bieber: “Everyone told me not to bring the monkey. I was like, ‘It’s gonna be fine, guys!’ It was”—he shuts his eyes—“the farthest thing from fine.”

I would read Jia Tolentino on just about anything, but here are a few favorites: Kidz Bop, Cracker Barrel, drawer novels (“It seemed a great human constant to try, and fail, to escape one’s own self”).

Hoping to read soon: What Belongs to You and The Lonely City (Olivia Laing wrote that gorgeous Aeon essay on loneliness I love).

"Mon...fuckin...tana."

An interview with the owner of my favorite Boston bookstore / 25 songs that tell us where music is going / A poem.

“Part of it is just the fiction of being alive,” she said. “Every step, you’re making up who you are.” All of a sudden everybody’s interviewing Eileen Myles and I am here for it. From Ariel Levy’s piece on Transparent.

“She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write.”

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