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Reading Week – Output Input

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Happy Friday! It’s Thursday afternoon as I write this. The blinds are drawn from the late afternoon heat as the sun passes over this side of the house. The cats are chasing a bluebottle, prancing hither and thither like Disney creatures in a field (which is really fricking adorable), then bouncing off things and frightening each other and puffing up into big fur-balls (which is hilarious if unsettling). Is it just me or are they actively getting cuter?

My mind feels fuzzy and my thoughts incoherent today, which is a shame since it’s the one day that I owe you a missive. I’ve the lingering feeling that I’m coming down with something. Plus, it’s been one of those news weeks. Perhaps you’ll have noticed that I don’t tend to comment directly on what politicians are up to here? That’s by design. I’m interested in writing and art – and justice, sure – but it’s very easy to let mainstream politics take over. There’s enough of that on my feed (as probably yours) and when things are so chaotic it’s important to take a break from that to think about things that are more permanent, or joyful, or thoughtful. Though I must say I feel this tweet.

 

ART / WORK

Coming from a hugely creative city and moving to a predominantly agricultural one continues to be an adjustment. I miss literary and film festivals, book launches, receptions, and concerts, and I haven’t found a creative community that I really connect with here.

Lately, I’ve felt blocked in a way that I haven’t found words to describe – which is kind of a feedback loop. Austin Kleon says that problems of output are problems of input. I hope to make it to an art gallery or something while I’m in SF soon. But I’ve also having that feeling that I can never go home (in the philosophical sense). The iconic Mackintosh building in my old Glasgow neighbourhood burned down again, and it’s 2 years since the last Small is Beautiful (a conference for microbusinesses that I was lucky to contribute to bringing to life), so in some ways I feel further from my old creative work life than ever.

Working from home and online, I gravitate towards people who are sharing similar experiences. One thing that’s kept me going recently, both to immerse myself in and to have chattering gently in the background, are illustrators’ vlogs. I’m nosy and I also enjoy seeing how people spend their time; doubly so when they have a somewhat similar profession to mine. I’ve enjoyed Fran Meneses‘ videos for a long time, and she often shares her artistic process and tidbits from behind the scenes. She’s also ramping up for a big overseas move, which I’ll be following with interest. Recently, I’ve also been following a watercolour illustrator called Holly Exley, who does similar videos in a different style. Ashley Baxter, a founder and photographer I know from Glasgow, has also been sharing some of her business journey on YouTube. After going off business podcasts a little while ago, their videos have been scratching that water cooler chat itch.

 

BOOK- ADJACENT

Lauren Groff’s By The Book is an all-timer. Shut it down! Just kidding.

I didn’t know what to do after Anthony Bourdain died, so I bought a bunch of his books. (Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, A Cook’s Tour, and The Nasty Bits, if you’re curious.) I also saved these memorials about him from Helen Rosner and Patrick Radden Keefe, both in The New Yorker. I’m going to miss Parts Unknown, though there are many seasons to rewatch and enjoy.

I’ve mentioned how much I loved Anna Hart’s Departures earlier this year. When she went to pre-order her own book on Amazon, she found someone was using her name as a nom de plume. Guess what kind of books she writes? I tracked down a woman writing porn in my name. This is the story of our friendship​.

Men Reviewing Men: Book reviewer Anthony Domestico asks, “Why was I never asked to write about a female author?”

Austin Kleon shares 3 thoughts on a decade of publishing books.

 

ON MY SHELF

M Train set me off on a blitz of similar books. I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, the latter of the two books she calls her “living memoirs” and written during a time of transition, financial stress, and her mother’s death. The way she reveals links between ideas in her stories is pretty addictive, which is a shame because I’ve never read any others quite like her.

I also dove into Eve Babitz’s Black Swans, which is billed as fictional short stories but which I’m pretty sure are essays (they’re all in the first person and she refers to famous people and their behaviour, which is why I think it’s disguised as fiction). “Free Tibet”, about losing a friend, totally killed me. It also held some glimpses into her state of mind in the nineties (she’s known for the sixties and seventies). It was my favourite of her books I’ve read thus far.

Fiction-wise, I enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: it was more detailed and accomplished than I’d (snobbily) anticipated. I’ve now turned my attention back to The Idiot by Elif Batuman – a divisive novel that I began in March but found I wasn’t in the right mood to read. Now that I’ve renewed my focus and know what to expect, I’m enjoying it more. It also has great cover art in the UK (linked) and the US (pictured), which is very annoying because it makes me want to own both.

What’s on your nightstand?

 

TIL NEXT MONTH…

Your turn! Read anything good lately? Tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend,
Nicola x

Reading Week – BA 0282

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Happy Friday!

I hope you’ll forgive my absence in your inbox last month. I went to Scotland on a 30th birthday pilgrimage of sorts and failed to plan ahead.

I’ve wanted to take a road trip to Skye for years. I’ve seen more of California than I have of Scotland. Evan and I never got around to hiring a car when we lived in Glasgow, through means and circumstances and laziness. But when a friend celebrated her birthday on Lewis, it planted the seed of an idea to do the same thing, a little further south, and invite a few friends to Skye for my 30th. My birthday was in March, but we waited for longer nights, booked the trip and drafted an itinerary. It was the most charmed 4 days – with hikes and whisky and great meals and funny conversations. Evan and I spent 2 days there, followed by another 2 with a few close friends. The weather and the visibility were glorious.

On the way up, I bought John Muir’s book about the Sierra from a Scottish publisher (Canongate) in a Scottish independent bookshop (The Highland Bookshop), and I thought about how lucky I am to be able to split my time between two such spectacularly beautiful places. I love these twin west coasts.

This weekend, we’re heading down to SoCal for a wedding, and had thought to go to Catalina Island, exactly a month after our trip to Skye; but it was too poetic to be.

It’s been awhile. Wanna talk about reading?

EXTREMELY ONLINE

I have the same predicament as Dan Nosowitz – I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore. (Also, this makes me feel kind of old.)

‘Like’ if you support my divorce – Jessica Furseth on the weird predicament of sharing those not-so-celebratory life events.

I’ll Just Have a Coffee.

I Think About This a Lot: The Sliding Doors in Sliding Doors. I really like the idea behind this series.

HISTORY & WORD SALAD

At the Talisker distillery in Skye, the guide referred to their peatiness as “half an Islay”, which made perfect sense to me. (If you’re not a whisky drinker, he meant that they use about half as much peat when treating the barley, so the whisky is about half as peaty as, say, Islay’s Lagavulin.) A week later, I read about a remarkable and harrowing piece of Islay’s history as The Scottish island that buried America’s dead. Further viewing here.

A delightful idea from Austin Kleon, via his father-in-law: Clippings.

I loved this gorgeous piece by Julie Sedivy on The Strange Persistence of First Languages.

Do you prefer your dictionaries prescriptive or descriptive? Annotated tracks how a big shift in American dictionaries occurred in The Dictionary War.

I’ve talked your ear off about Eve Babitz on here. She’s been famously reclusive since the nineties, but here’s A rare interview with Eve Babitz, the long sober, cool again author. (If you haven’t been following along with me, start with All About Eve—and Then Some.)

ON MY SHELF

I’ve been nibbling on a smorgasbord of short reads over the past couple of months. The Penguin Modern box set turned out to be a great investment (especially as I got a significant partial refund after I complained about the state and tardiness of its arrival – yass), and I’ve enjoyed gobbling up snippets of Ralph Ellison, Jean Rhys, and Anaïs Nin, to name a few.

I was charmed and creeped out by Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands. I marvelled over Deborah Levy’s originality in her partial memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know. Part two, The Cost of Living, is in the post.

Right now, I’m reading Patti Smith’s M Train – a memoir which she released a few years ago. I bought it a few days after we arrived in California after our permanent move, on the same day I realised that many of my childhood favourites and some other books I’d shipped did not arrive with the shredded box. It was meant to cheer me up; instead, it sat on a shelf for over 18 months. Now that I’m finally reading it, I’m glad I saved it for this moment. She drinks coffee, travels, and ruminates over books and art over the course of about a year, with some memories from earlier life thrown in where relevant. It’s exactly the kind of book that I’m in the mood for right now, and I’m loving it.

What’s on your nightstand? Hit reply and let me know (I really do want to hear about it)!

TIL NEXT MONTH…

Your turn! Read anything good lately? Tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend,
Nicola x

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the title refers to the flight I’ve taken, and written on customs forms, a dozen times from London to LAX.

Reading Week – The Titular Role

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Happy Friday!

I write to you from Midtown Sacramento, from a coffee shop that is right on the knife-edge of Scandi-chic and fart-sniffing coffee-snob central. I like it, though.

I’m pretty taken with the state capital, which I’m visiting for little over 24 hours while Evan makes a business trip. Midtown has a relaxed, leafy-neighbourhood NorCal feel while Downtown feels big, like things are happening, but not too busy. It’s refreshing to be in a walkable city that doesn’t feel overwhelming. Plus, one of the first things we saw when we drove into town was a mural celebrating Lady Bird, the film that was already serving as our touchstone for the look and feel of the city.

I felt differently about Scottsdale, which I visited a couple of weekends ago with my in-laws. No doubt the desert has its charms – the sunsets are stunning and the palm trees and hills are lovely to look at. Old Town Scottsdale was walkable but pretty overrun with Wild West gift shop tat. Aside from that, we mostly saw were strip-malls and freshly poured tarmac. Not unlike Central California, to be sure, but I do love California for its shabbiness. It gives the place character.

Oh yeah, I also turned 30 this month. I feel pretty good about it.

How’s about some links?

OTHER THINGS CAN BE SAID

‘Rage Blackouts,’ a Short Essay on Losing Your Temper by Sadie Stein. My hope for you is that you’ll read this and think, “And I thought I was bad!”.

The web can be weaponised – and we can’t count on big tech to stop it. When Tim Berners-Lee is worried about the internet, we probably should be, too.

Similarly, this writer has concerns about YouTube, The Great Radicalizer.

File this under Things We Know But Are Still Upsetting to Read: Racial Blindness outlines the ways in which American’s founding principles enshrine inequality and white supremacy, and some immediately recognisable ways in which those ideas are expressed in news and media.

In related, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens urges protestors to call for gun control and demand that the government Repeal the Second Amendment. I’m glad someone finally said it.

IT WAS GIVEN TO ME, BY ME

Appropriately, my good friend Rosie wrote about how Lady Bird dares to tackle the mother-daughter relationship that so many films shy away from

Annihilation was a great cinematic, and post-cinematic, experience. I left wondering, just a little bit, why critics had made such a fuss. Then I was doing the dishes and suddenly came up with a whole host of theories. It’s been a fun one to discuss with friends. There are plenty of theories online, but the piece that struck me the most was Anjelica Jade Bastien’s personal and critical essay on How Annihilation Nails the Complex Reality of Depression.

Inkoo Kang asks, ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Isn’t a Great Film, But Why Does It Have to Be? I look forward to a time when women and people from under-represented communities can make an ok-to-bad film and the critical response can be like, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . But if we have to keep talking about it, I think this article makes for a great blueprint.

Meanwhile, Angie Han asks, Why is Wes Anderson’s ‘Isle of Dogs’ set in Japan? We’re not sure either. I haven’t any strong feelings about Wes Anderson, but I think it’s fair to say that film critics (and perhaps audiences) are getting tired of his shtick. As I was about to publish, I found this other point of view that seeks to answer one of Angie’s questions and tell us What It’s Like to Watch ‘Isle of Dogs’ As a Japanese Speaker.

(P.S. I’ve seen neither A Wrinkle in Time nor Isle of Dogs. I might, I might not.)

ON MY SHELF

This month I absolutely devoured Departures by Anna Hart, whom I’ve followed on social media for many years. You may recognise her work from any number of magazines – she’s often the one writing about coworking spaces on tropical islands and what-not. The book is laid out in chapters, each from a different country that has made her: from her childhood in Singapore and teens in Belfast, through student years in Glasgow, to her first forays into solo travel and notable trips that defined her life and career. The book also contains some of her best advice for world travel and many life lessons gained along the way. She writes with an ease and self-deprecating humour that feels warm and generous. She manages to allow you to join her on her journeys while reflecting upon everything from the privileges to the challenges of a life of travel. I highly recommend it.

It seems that the winter of my (fiction) reading discontent isn’t over after all. White Oleander was a delight (by which I mean a great, tough read), but I haven’t picked up much else. Today I finished Women by Chloe Caldwell, which was similar in style and voice to her personal essays. It’s an episodic novella about a woman’s first lesbian relationship. It reads like a memoir and moved along pleasantly enough, but it never really built to anything. It felt like a stone skimming across the surface of a great lake – complete with a sad little plop at the end.

What’s on your nightstand? Hit reply and let me know!

TIL NEXT MONTH…

Your turn! Read anything good lately? Hit reply or tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend,
Nicola x

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