Here’s a fun fact about me: I never went trick-or-treating. I did wear Halloween costumes–always homemade–and participated in school events or went to the occasional Halloween party. I was not wanting for candy. I just missed out on the seminal experience of begging for it at my neighbor’s doorsteps. Why, you ask? To be honest, I’m not really sure. I mean, it was the eighties, so on one hand, we were all raised to believe that razor blades in apples and LSD-laced stickers were in rampant circulation in our hometowns (is this why I always cut my apples into slices?) But on the other hand, gangs of unsupervised children explicitly instructed to stay out of the house until dark roamed the streets, wearing housekeys around their necks. So who knows. My parents were just not into it.

As a teenager, there was a period when I felt I’d missed out. When we were sixteen, my friends and I half-assed some costumes and drove to a neighborhood that none of us lived in or even near, and were summarily turned away at the first doorstep, outed as the bad actors we were. We shrugged it off and went to a diner instead.

The following year, we skipped the candy grift, but kept the costumes. My friends Holly, Jennifer and I dressed up as Captain Hook, Peter Pan, and Tinkerbell, respectively, and went to see this scrawny, folksy rapper-type dude we were into called Beck at Toad’s Place in New Haven. Holly and I kind of cobbled together our outfits (I did what I could with a flesh-toned leotard and some glitter), but Jenn’s mom actually made her a full Peter kit, complete with adorable green felt hat. Man do I wish I had pictures of that, we were freakin’ adorable. Actually now that I think about, that show was not on Halloween at all. Welp!

Happy Harryween to all who celebrate!

(Btw, I’ll gladly take all that rejected candy corn off your hands.)

Witch is it?

An interesting read in Boston magazine about Salem’s brooming economy:

“Is a witch-based tourism economy the best way to honor the legacy of executed individuals who weren’t even witches in the first place? Or is continuing to transform the town into the epicenter of modern-day witchcraft actually the perfect way to right the wrongs of the past?”

Since I’ll be home in Boston next month, I might visit the Peabody Essex Museum to check out The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming. Drawing “parallels between the country’s most infamous example of mass hysteria and current culture,” the exhibit crosses time to consider the ways a woman’s “virtue” continues to be subject to persecution and injustice.

The work of author and photographer Frances F. Denny brings a contemporary perspective on the reclamation of the witch archetype. The PEM exhibit includes a portraits from her 2018 series, Major Arcana: Witches in America. Denny traveled around the United States to capture the diverse faces of modern witchcraft from self-identifying practitioners. From Yoruba High Priestesses to herbalist healers, Denny’s striking images challenge assumptions and invite curiosity about the timeless powers of the feminine mystic.

Taken by the wind

Is it even a newsletter if I don’t write about Stevie Nicks? The correct answer is no. Especially a witch-themed newsletter. First, enjoy this exceptional 1976 performance of “Rhiannon,” which is like opening a treasure chest full of chiffon scarves and woven shawls. Then, read a bit about how Stevie’s song about an “old Welsh witch” is based on Rhiannon, a goddess of fertility in Welsh folklore

When Did Everybody Become a Witch?

Oh I don’t know, New York Times, maybe when I wrote about it FOUR YEARS AGO?

Stevie Nicks | Craig Lovell/GettyImages

I walked halfway down the path of writing one letter this week before I realized I was just wandering around my subject aimlessly. I know I had something to say, but what exactly? This is a predicament I've found myself in quite often lately. I write a lot of notes to myself, scattering ideas all over the place like a seedbomb tossed in a vacant lot, just waiting to see whatever crops up. The difference between a weed and a wildflower is pretty subjective in these circumstances, but at least you know the ground is fertile. It's in this spirit that instead of my own half-sprouted thinking, I'm sending out a round-up (not a terrible weed-killing pun, btw) of other writers' more finely manicured ideascapes.

But hang on, because the following selection of reading material is not without thematic intent. Last week, I off-handedly mentioned that I've got a music-related project in the works, so this gives me a good opportunity to tell you about it.

In the new year–which is coming up a LOT faster than it might seem–I'll be launching a new newsletter to focus entirely on writing about music. I figured it was finally time to come back around to the dream that put me on this writing path in the first place. The funny thing is, I've barely had any experience or practice writing about music since college. I have no idea if I'm even any good at it. But there's only one way to find out, and there's only one way to get better.

Meanwhile, I'll be transitioning this letter to a monthly-ish missive where I'll be checking in as your wayward penpal, sharing the odd bits of what I'm working on and sending postcards from wherever I happen to be headquartered. There is, however, a more strategic aim to this plan.

Whether I like it or not, growing as a writer, which is to say growing an audience, requires more dedicated and proactive self-promotion. Essentially, I've got to make it part of my job. And since I'm not about to waste any of my precious and dwindling time on this planet contributing to society's tweet-by-tweet ruination, I'm going to have to find other ways of putting myself out there.

To be perfectly frank, this letter hasn't exactly been a model of, "if you write it, they will come." Exactly no one asked me to write it, or to keep writing it. It's a labor of love to say the least. More than anything, though, it's been a practice, a kind of mental and emotional yoga that's helped get me in shape. So after all this practice, it's time to take the training wheels off. I've had some luck pitching pithy little food stories, and now I'd like to see how I fare pitching work in the vein of what I've been sharing here for the past four years. You can't win if you don't play, right?

Anyway, what will this music letter be about? I'm still fine-tuning, but basically it'll be about whatever I'm listening to. A vibe. A playlist as a soundtrack. A mixtape as a story. A mood in stereo. You get it.

Here's a little warm-up before the real gig.

Don't Let Me Down

Even though I didn't grow up with the Beatles, I grew up with the Beatles. I'm still growing up with the Beatles. In anticipation of Peter Jackson's forthcoming docuseries, Get Back, about the last days of the band, David Remnick's profile of Paul McCartney shows that Macca hasn't slowed down one bit. But I still couldn't help feeling like I wanted to stop time, just put the brakes on right now and haul Paul and Ringo to some cryogenic preservation chamber in an undisclosed location. Maybe grab Jagger too. Keith I'm less worried about. He's in it to win it.

Hauntingly Familiar

A while ago I got to to thinking that there'd been a noticeable resurgence of Stevie Nicks over the past decade or so. It seemed like millennial women had embraced her as their aesthetic avatar. Stevie was suddenly (but also always?) a whole mood, if you will. And this is even before Harry Styles entered the conversation. Ever the astute researcher, I Googled "why do millennials love Stevie Nicks." Despite feeling like my journalistic hunch had been scooped, I also felt very validated in having perceived this was actually a thing. Like really a thing. But why? And how? Of course, should we even be surprised that Beyoncé had something to do with it? More hard-hitting reporting on this topic to come.

Vision: Quest

One of the best hours I spent recently was watching Questlove and Jimmy Fallon, fellow Beastie Boys stans, just hardcore nerd out interviewing AdRock and Mike D last year. It was downright heartwarming. Quest, you are all of us, my man. Between his encyclopedic knowledge and open-hearted enthusiasm, Questlove is a massive inspiration for music obsessives. Jazmine Hughes' profile in last week's New York Times Magazine was a delightful shuffle through the cognitive card catalog of "hip hop's Library of Congress." Now I'm excited to take Quest's Masterclass on music curation and DJing, which he approaches with a narrative sensibility: each of his DJ sets "has a beginning, establishing action, rising action, climax, falling action and ending."

Blood on the Streets in the Town of New Haven

The Doors' Robbie Krieger remembers the night Jim Morrison was arrested on stage:

"Like at all the best Doors shows, we were creating a moment. A specific connection with a specific audience that would exist only on that specific night."

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Just very simply an unvarnished view of music writer Michael Azzerad's friendship with Kurt Cobain. None of the romanticizing, none of the conspiracy theorizing, none of the cautionary tale proselytizing.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Libra season! I took some time off because it was my birthday, whoopty-do! I got a record player, I went to the south of France, and now I could not be happier to be home as the days get shorter and the air crispier. Light the candles, it’s about to get gezellig in here!

Despite the growing resentment I feel towards all of the shit I've accumulated, and barely have the will to unpack knowing I'm going to have to pack it all up again in another year, well, there I was yesterday, joyfully swinging a totebag full of new records.

I wouldn't consider myself especially materialistic, but I am acquisitive by nature. I'm a collector. Books, wine, and now vinyl. But also: seashells and stones, notebooks, old letters, ticket stubs. Shoes. Coats. Friends. Cities.

In the essay, "Endless Inventory," from his brilliant collection, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty, music critic Ben Ratliff asks:

"But why do we build collections? Perhaps we want to turn a musician’s work into a living thing. We want to make it something to live around, rather than have it live around us. We want to corporealize it, give it a body and perhaps a soul. We want to have a relationship with it, as we would with a friend; or we want to codify it into a tradition or a belief. And at that point, when it is fully grasped and known, the work can be internalized for ever as an open question, a principle for living.

Over the past year, I've returned to this paragraph more times than I can count. I suppose you could say I have a relationship with it, in a way, having internalized Ratliff's words as my own principle for living. Sometimes it represents my desire for total immersion, or indeed, embodiment of a particular artist's work. Sometimes it represents how music and literature and art make me feel in general. Today, I'm focused especially on the first bit, the idea of our collections as something we want to "live around." How our collections make our home.

Isn't this just a more philosophical way of talking about–cough-cough–conspicuous consumption? How having the "right" books and music and wine are status signifiers meant to project a certain impression of who we are as people? I won't argue with the John Waters school of thought on this one, but it's not just about a matter of taste, for which we all know there is no real accounting.

For me, collecting is like building my nest. Twigs, bits of straw, feathers, and shiny things that catch my eye, finding each piece is its own treasure hunt. It's both determination and serendipity. The end goal is only an abstraction. It's finished when it needs to be, when I say it is, or perhaps not at all. It's a life's work, iterative. To live around a collection is to be enveloped in the spirit of someone else's own life's work, and the forcefield of the creative energy that went into it. What greater inspiration is there to create and produce oneself than to be surrounded by centuries of cheerleaders reminding you of everything that has been possible so far, and what might be.

All Your Music Are Belong to Us*

As an avid Spotify user and music collector, Kyle Chayka's piece about the "digital death of collecting" struck a nerve, and certainly hastened my long-standing desire to start collecting vinyl.

He quotes Walter Benjamin: “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects...Not that they have come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”

(*The real geeks know that’s not a typo…)

And All Your Books Are Belong to Us, Too*

As much as I despise being tethered to Amazon for my ebook purchases, I'm not sure I could live without my Kindle. I'm already on my second, and probably close to needing a third. I read a lot, and I move around a lot. But, yeah, ebooks are an abomination, and we just sort of accept it. I still buy plenty of books from independent bookstores. But for better or worse, ebooks help keep my compulsive book-buying somewhat under control. At least until I own a home, then all bets are off, and I'm totally going to live my dream of having a library with one of those rolling ladders.

(Not the first time I have used this GIF, for obvious reasons. It me, as the kids say.)(Probably they don’t say that anymore.)

The Museum of Me

Marie Kondo appears in these letters with shocking frequency. Maybe it's because I reject her principles with every fiber of my maximalist collector being. "Kondo’s combination of empathy and minimalism makes for good television. But it won’t get you to the kind of lived-in, peculiarly personalised space that, for most people, defines the ideal of home." This article, written by a museum curator, is a thoughtful guide for making and organizing our own acquisitions.

Scents of Place

My acquisitive tendencies are inextricably connected to an aesthetic nature: a desire to be surrounded by the beautiful, the sensual, the lyrical, the poetic, the romantic. It's a Libra thing. And as much as I adore lighting a ritual stick of Nag Champa as I roll out my yoga mat, I'm also keen to up my incense game. Scent, as this recent T Magazine article notes, is a powerful way to define a space, both physically and mentally.

An Alleluia of the Romantic Self

Just a lovely piece of writing by the wonderful Lauren Groff, on re-reading Walden (which, as it happens, I am as well, albeit very, very slowly) and the shifting seasons and moods in her own writing space.

Just a little FYI: I’ve got a new music-related project brewing. Stay tuned!

Oops, I did it again. I got lazy on Sunday, choosing to take a long walk that led to a pizza lunch, which ultimately ended in a carb-induced haze. Sorry?

I don’t know how it is where you are, but here it’s one of those perfect in-between-the-seasons days that gets me all geared up for the cozy crispness of autumn. I’ve recently taken an informal poll of a few fellow New Englanders and the consensus is that Fall is our season. It lives in our bones, stirring with the crunch of leaves underfoot and that first plume of chimney smoke rising over the rooftops. As nice as these hanger-on sunny-and-70 days might be, I’m longing for the first real snap of cold, impatient for an excuse to break in a new leather jacket or fill the kitchen with the scent of roast chicken.

Bring on the sweater weather!

The Rise of the Creative Class

While I considered just publishing a round-up of all the Beautiful World, Where Are You reviews that filled my inbox with this week’s launch of Sally Rooney’s latest–and there were so, so many–instead I’m just sharing one from novelist Brandon Taylor in the New York Times. Taylor’s newsletter, Sweater Weather (hey would you look at that) is scary-smart and poetic and bitingly funny. God, what I wouldn’t give to be a millennial with an MFA. They are srsly having a moment. Read his recent essay, Bobos in IKEA as a kind of companion piece, where he’s working out some of the themes that end up in his take on Rooney’s novel. And maybe read David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise redux as a companion to that.

I May Read You

I haven’t even seen Micaela Coel’s award-winning series I May Destroy You yet, for no good reason other than access to the appropriate viewing platform, which is actually not a good excuse at all. But after reading this razor-sharp excerpt from her new book, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto, it's clear that I need to get my VPN and my priorities in order.

The Kids Are Alright

"I understand why listeners sometimes hunger to hear their identities reflected in music, but I also suspect that the hunger for difference can be just as powerful." Kelefa Sanneh, music critic for The New Yorker, is around my age and similarly spent his youth as a ‘part-time punk’ going to the same local shows as me. Brooklyn writer Kenneth Partridge captured and transported me right back to those sweaty nights spent dancing on stage at the Tune Inn, or trekking down to the Boiler Room in New London, following my favorite Connecticut ska band, Spring Heeled Jack wherever they played.

Lady Writers

As much as I loved reading both of the above pieces, I couldn’t help but be reminded that there still aren’t enough women writing about music, myself included. But we do have the badass Jessica Hopper, who kicked off her now pushing-thirty-year-long career as a fellow babe in zineland before taking dream gigs at MTV News and Pitchfork. Hopper recently released an updated edition of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, originally published in 2015. In an interview with The Creative Independent earlier this summer, Hopper made these comments, which hit me hard:

I write about talking to some of my peers, meaning dudes who do the same thing that I do for a living, about the experience of going to a show. They’re not speed-walking home, down the middle of the street afterwards. They don’t know what it is to have to do that because you had to stay to see the whole set because you’re reviewing it, and the band did two encores, so it’s straight-up 2 a.m., and you’re a woman by yourself. Speed-walking home down the middle of the street, checking over their shoulder is not part of their professional concert-going experience.

After hours mashing and thrashing about like a kinetic force field, the wave of slippery bodies would spill into the cool night air, gathering and scattering like magnet shavings. Suddenly you’d find yourself utterly alone. I remember the dancing, I remember the ringing in my ears, the thick black X on the back of my hand that wouldn’t wash away for days, but I’ve chosen to forget about all those walks home, keys in hand, heart-racing. Those walks were edited out of the story.

Worth a listen: Jessica Hopper in conversation with Ann Friedman for Powell’s Bookstore (one of the best bookstores in the world, IMO.)

Finally, a PSA:

Just letting you know that I’ve finally entered my Simone de Beauvoir phase.
You have been warned.

This morning one of my astro apps (come on, you know I have at least three) flashed its daily notification on my screen: Be decadent, it suggested. No problem, I replied. This app in particular often tells me what I need to hear, and occasionally tells me what I want to hear. Today feels like a little of both.

The truth is, with few obligations beyond consuming and producing a few thousand words per week and maintaining a steady diet of tomato toast and Earl Grey, well, daily life can feel pretty decadent on its own. Little things amplify the luxury: long weekend morning chats with friends, fancy body wash, eating potato chips for dinner while watching hours of music documentaries.

I cringe at the malappropriate use of the term self care in reference to my Aesop habit, and the way it cheapens Foucault’s ideas about care of the self as an ethical project. Of course, I think we’re in much deeper trouble if we see self care as something decadent in the first place, something to counter the self-discipline, self-denial, and self-criticism that define our systematic rules of conduct.

Foucault’s concept of self care is similar to the way Giddens discussed identity formation. Building on the idea, Foucault sees care of the self as a set of efforts with the aim of transformation, of treating our lives as a body of work, an identity project. To this end, to indulge ourselves is, in a way, to become our best selves. To be decadent is to allow ourselves to live up to our own ideals of happiness and satisfaction, even if just as a temporary allowance, a break in our otherwise strict regimens.

So let me flash this message–one I know you need to hear, too–onto your screen today: Be decadent.

Summer Reading List

And speaking of decadence, despite an entire summer absent of days entirely dedicated to languorously lounging in various positions of repose in relation to the angle of the sun, I’m still (always) spending as much time as possible with my nose in a book. 100% less sand in uncomfortable places, 90% less sunburn, 50% fewer potato chips and 0% celebrity gossip mags consumed. I’ll get back to the beach next year, but in the meantime, here’s what I’ve been (or want to be) reading.

Essay Study

I’m working on writing essays–sort of an unfamiliar territory for me–so naturally I’ve been devouring essay collections to learn the ropes. My favorites so far:

Chloe Caldwell, I’ll Tell You in Person

Michelle Tea, How to Grow Up

Leslie Jamison, Make it Scream, Make it Burn

Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love

Up next: Nichole Perkins, Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be

The Big Summer Read

I like an ambitious summer reading project. Last year I was all about Henry James, this year I’m making my way through Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. A pleasant synopsis: “It charts a smart, sensitive woman’s exhaustion with modern gender dynamics, “the men vs. women business.” Indeed! I’m thinking of it as my Infinite Jest, except that I’m actually reading it, enjoying it, and will finish it rather than just casually mentioning it as a signifier of my literary superiority. If I were going to write a paper about it, there’s a good chance I’d be throwing in a Salinger reference or two, so stay tuned for that.

Absolutely Shameless

Boy-band bodice-ripper meets literary fiction, a genre I never knew I needed, but now I don’t know that I can ever go without.

Next up (because I’m being decadent, after all): Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Daisy Jones and the Six

Are You Even Serious?

I am. I am very serious. The 90s were a long time ago, so writing about them requires some research.

Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Next up: Peggy Orenstein, Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World

Finally, some poems

Craig Teicher-Morgan, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey

Welp, you know where to find me

I was lazy this week, the heavy drapes of summer had me in a mood, and I barely left the house except to keep myself deep in watermelon wedges and lime popsicles. Yesterday I finally managed to eek out a few ounces of mojo, so I hit the streets and made my way down to the canal, where I sat for a few hours just scribbling in my notebook and people-watching. Afterwards, I popped in my headphones and strutted towards the Bastille, grooving in my little bubble to my latest assemblage of sweaty summer jams. It was glorious while it lasted, before the humidity wilted my will and made me fussy and irritable again. I wasn’t back home for five minutes before the sky came crashing down and washed it all away.

Keep it cool, folks.

Hunger: Scents of self

As with most of my passions, I’m as much an enthusiastic consumer of knowledge about a subject as I am a consumer of the goods themselves. Wine, bread, music, literature: I have, as you are well aware, a robust appetite. In an except from her new book, The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration, writer Sarah Everts explores the fascinating history of perfume with a visit to the Osmothèque, an archive of scent not far from the palace of Versailles (and to where a day-trip is imminent!) Go further with this rapturous essay on the ritual of scent from the wonderful Natalie Toren, one of my former writing instructors and fellow scent obsessive. She writes of an ‘atmosphere of scent,’ ‘an environmental transformation’ wherein “…[s]paces became something other than the way they were physically experienced, some place expansive and resonant and inhabited.” When I wear different scents, it’s a way of transforming my self, a way to try on a different identity, to inhabit a different way of being, of shifting my molecules into a new formation, even just for a few hours.

Bonus: This fascinating overview of style and culture at the ubiquitous hipster perfumery, Le Labo. A gripping read, full of spicy opinions.

Thirst: Dancing on my own

I’m still out there, dancing in the streets. “Think about how your body, not just buildings, end in the air, writes New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas. “It’s all about relishing the in between.”

Knowledge: The Matrix

I do my best to keep my finger on the pulse and all, but the fact is, I’m an old. The wedge between me and social media grows ever wider, inversely proportional to the level of fucks I have left to give. I’m sure you can relate. But sometimes a meme will just keep inserting itself in your life and you have no choice but to get to know it. And so I embarked on this useful overview of the Alignment Chart. I’m mostly Chaotic Good, but also sometimes Lawful Evil. In case you were wondering.

Life: The soul of a chef

When Anthony Bourdain passed away three years ago in June, I found myself surprised by how much it affected me. Yes, I’d been a fan, though not an especially ardent one. I suppose I just appreciated his being around. His presence. His voice. There was something about the way he lived his life that felt close–if not precise–to being an example of a life worth living. Unfortunately, for reasons it is unfair to speculate over, the person behind the personality felt otherwise. Even writing this, I feel overcome with unexpected emotion, as I have often in the past few weeks, reading the many reviews and tributes anticipating the release of the bio-documentary about his life in the spotlight, Roadrunner. I found some solace in re-reading, for the millionth time, his legendary debut essay in The New Yorker. In over twenty years, I’ve never once ordered fish on a Monday because of it.

Destruction: Any major dude will tell you

"...as long as false optimism, self-delusion, conformism, superficiality, and all of their cousins hold sway in society, there will be Steely Dan People. That is to say, forever."

And I, though not immune to the charms of a song or two, will never be one of them.

Insatiable: Chaotic good

I told you awhile ago about how I’d adopted the habit of writing morning pages, a daily routine that is still going very strong. Sometimes it delivers lightning strikes of insight and sometimes it’s just collecting raindrops in a bottomless barrel. Lately, on the advice of a writing coach, I’ve embraced the practice of free-writing. Letting myself be messy has never been in my constitution, but I’ve been working on turning the beat around over these past few months, and it has been liberating.

In the best email I received all week, writer Rachel Jepsen tackles the sneaky self-editing impulse that cripples writers’ ability to trust themselves, to allow themselves to write without fear of judgement. Invoking the Beats’ mantra of ‘First though, best thought’, Jepsen writes:

"The point is, all of creation begins in chaos, because chaos is energy. All life coalesces from chaos, and all life will dissolve into chaos again—it is the resting state of the universe. This doesn’t discount the utility of unity or second drafts or big ideas or concepts. Planets happen and we live there for a while. But chaos as the ultimate creative force can’t be discounted or undervalued. It’s certainly Saturn’s thought when he pleads, “Where is another Chaos? Where?” How can we begin again?

Which is to say: How can we begin?"

So here’s to those shitty first drafts. (Says the person currently laboring through a real steaming pile for her first essay.)

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” 

Jack Kerouac, New York, Fall 1953.

Hunger: Words’ Worth

Newsletters as a new literary genre? Sure, I’ll buy it! But…will you? I’m not at the point where I would even dare to ask anyone to pay me for the privilege of being welcomed into their sacred inbox space each week. It’s a tenuous relationship at best, and I’m not about to rock the boat. Yet, as Molly Fisher writes this week in The Cut:

A newsletter reshapes a writer’s relationship to their readers. The first-person informality that has been present since the earliest days of web writing achieves its business apotheosis in the newsletter: from personal essay to personal brand. “Subscribe directly to writers you trust,” urges Substack. In a newsletter, the reader is welcomed as a supporter, an ally — or perhaps even a friend. 

As someone who’s been kicking out URLs since those early days, perhaps it’s time I consider that even a labor of love is still, well, labor. It’s a tricky subject. I’ve only just recently worked up the courage to believe that I actually could get paid to write, and let me tell you, that courage is constantly in flux. But it’s one thing to convert a pitch into an assignment, and another to be what’s essentially a penpal with delusions of grandeur. I’m not sure what my personal measure of worth will be for deciding it’s viable to charge for these letters, or whether I will ever attain it. Until then, I accept that my love’s labour might be operating at a loss.

Thirst: Sunrise, Sunset

Maybe it’s been on my mind since reading Helena Fitzgerald’s essays about Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy films. Or maybe it’s that as a woman of a certain age, Ethan Hawke is just always on my mind, living rent-free for the past thirty years (which would be fitting for his inexplicably desirable dirtbag character in Reality Bites.) Either way, something compelled me to re-watch the second in the series, Before Sunset, which might be the best one, at least according to Fitzgerald.

“Consequences,” she says, “are our form of time travel; everywhere we arrive is a story about where we have been and what has brought us there, which is why the past always seems falsely innocent and better than it was.”

I’ve been writing a lot of these stories lately, doing my own version of time traveling, which is just one of the reasons why this movie hit so close to the bone. Towards the end of the film, Celine muses on her experience of reading Jesse’s autofictional novel: “It was both flattering and disturbing, to see myself living in someone else’s memory.”  So much comes rushing back as I write, but is it real, is it really how I felt then, really what happened? I re-read old journals to fact-check myself, but, as Fitzgerald reminds me, the “times that seem immediately present are in fact period pieces, stories about memory and not about life.”

Knowledge: This time it’s different

I’m not proud to admit it, but I’ve been known to give in to the will-weakening powers of social media ad-targeting. I’ve signed up for Noom twice, drawn in by its behavioral psychology approach. But it’s never fully resonated with me, having found the whole ‘NoomNerd’ quiz vibe infantilizing, and I’ve abandoned ship. This article in Every, however, shows a darker side to the so-called ‘anti-diet’ app, one that implicates disordered eating behaviors and the primacy of a mindset that continues to promote thinness as an ideal equivalent to healthiness. Curious–anyone else here have experience with Noom? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Life: Lost in Translation

Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast is an endless source of wisdom and inspiration, and I’m sure you already know that. A recent episode features the authors of a new translation of poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Joanna Macy, a philosopher of ecology and Buddhist teacher and Anita Barrows, a psychologist and poet herself, in conversation with Tippett. Rilke keeps popping up on my radar, the universe obviously sending me a message, and ok, universe! I am listening! (and you should, too.)

“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers.”

Destruction: BookTok

The Guardian covers the teen influencers pushing books up the charts.
Which begs the question…would I have been a BookTok-er?

Insatiable: The Kids are Alright

Sleepovercore and Bedroom pop: The teenage girl’s inner sanctum as culture’s creative epicenter. To which I say, YUP.

Bonus, because holy shit!

Everyone knew ‘Cat Person’ was a kind-of true story, but no one suspected it belonged to someone other than its author.

Since relentless iteration is pretty much the name of the game for me, I’m coming at you this Sunday with a new ting. Well, not new-new, exactly. Awhile back, I introduced and then summarily abandoned the link round-up aspect of this letter that I'd christened as "Appetites." After my first few rounds, I felt the letter was becoming way too dense, and thus at risk of losing your attention. And frankly, it was just A LOT to come up with an essay and a big set of thematic links every week. I’m balancing a bunch of writing projects these days, which is a dream come true, but I have to be realistic about my bandwidth. Think of it as quality control.

Still, I’ve missed the fun of pulling together some bits and bobs from around the internet. So, a compromise: I’m going to alternate between essay letters one week, and round-up letters the other. It gives us both a little breathing space.

Since there are plenty of other newsletters that are great sources for curating the best o’the week reads, I’m not going to be too focused on timeliness. My selections are really meant to be an expression of my shifting appetites: the things I crave, the things I’m curious about, the things I’m inspired by, and the things I can’t get enough of. Because a girl’s gotta eat. Care to join me at the table?

Hunger

The second season of Ted Lasso lands later this month, and as a recent convert, I am thrilled to invite more of Ted’s brand of optimism into my life. Another one of my favorite recent discoveries has been the Youtube channel The Take, which produces short and sharp video essays on pop cultural tropes. Their recent episode on “The Rise of Relentless Optimism” astutely observes that Ted’s positive outlook “is a choice, and a discipline that he practices.”

Thirst

I fully watched the entirety of the rather sad-sack live broadcast of the BAFTA Television awards in hopes that Paul Mescal would win the Best Actor category for his stunning performance in Normal People, which I am still unabashedly obsessed with. The two-ish hours of my life I sacrificed to enduring Richard Ayoade’s tedious snark were well worth it for Mescal’s heartfelt and slightly awkward acceptance speech and post-show interview. What an absolute bastard.

Life

You didn’t know you needed The Philosophy of Elliott Gould, but I’m here to tell you that you do.

Knowledge

As I’ve begun writing and researching for my project about midife and adolescence, I’ve realized that coming of age in the early nineties gave me a kind of feminist blindspot. Because this feels like a central strand in my narrative, I’m re-reading The Feminine Mystique to see if I might re-capture some of my headspace from when I first encountered Friedan’s seminal book in my junior year of high school. It occurred to me that feminism itself was in an in-between space at the same time as I was, transitioning from the second wave to the third, which led to a real sea change in messaging. How did that gap influence my own identity as a feminist?

Destruction

Speaking of feminism, perhaps some of you read author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s open letter in response to two former students who publicly accused her of being transphobic. (The letter has since been taken down from her website.) I did, and I had an opinion, one that was quite conflicted. On one hand, I felt that she’d made some good points about the sanctimony and righteousness of callout culture in general, but I also felt that individuals should have the ability to choose how they identify themselves, and it’s not really my place or hers to make any kind of remark on the matter. I’m still sitting with the nuances of my own perspective, and I’m not looking for any external validation or rejection of it. But this piece by Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler feels like a very measured consideration worthy of attentive reading. Nevertheless, to quote one of the best parts of Bo Burnham’s Inside: “Is it necessary that every single person on this planet um, expresses every single opinion that they have on every single thing that occurs all at the same time? Is that… is that necessary?”

Insatiable

A beautiful interactive ‘Close Read’ of my favorite poem, ‘One Art’, by Elizabeth Bishop. This stanza, in particular, has inspired me immeasurably:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

And as a bonus, since we’re talking villanelles, here is the inimitable Michael Sheen reading Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’