'Lindsay had never been more proud of anything she had said in her entire life'

How do people live with themselves when they're responsible for shit like this?

Don't expect much sense or enlightenment from what I'm about to write. I went to bed about eleven last night, woke up at two, lay awake until five-thirty when I pulled the pin on going to the gym and then I slept half an hour or so, then got up and took Lenny to school and did not take myself to work. So I haven't slept much but I feel pretty great because I went to my favourite place for breakfast, then to the pool and swam some laps and sweated in the sauna, and now I'm at home on the couch watching Arrested Development; in other words, best day in a while.




I've been reading Transit by Rachel Cusk. It's extremely interesting and it's making me think and rethink how I am approaching the question of how to write. I haven't read anything by Cusk before this and I intend to read some of her other books. On the evidence of this one novel, which is excellent all right but I don't quite see how it is the masterpiece it has been called, the quality of attention to people and story in her work is a lot like Mary McCarthy's. And, from what I can gather, Cusk's fiction stands in a relationship to her own biography that is like McCarthy's in that it observes everyone, including the self, with the same level gaze, and it lets nobody, the self especially, off the hook, and this is apparently upsetting for many readers. The novel is one sort of very accomplished demonstration of how the ethical and stylistic problem of writing unflattering and unpalatable things about people can solved in the generation of a form - this unsparing and decentred approach to writing is the result. Cusk's review of two pretty bad-sounding books about the sacred cow IVF also shares some qualities with McCarthy's criticism, and has also been called bitter and retrograde. Cusk is quite fascinating actually. I was reading about her online last night and gleaned a number of resonant bits and pieces of her views on literature and writing. This piece is particularly interesting.  You can see I want to think some more about what's going on here.

At dinner recently my neighbour insisted I try this: toast with peanut butter, sliced tomato and salt and pepper. 'Try it and you'll find out' I was informed.  What I found out is it tasted stupid.

Somehow linked in my unfinished thoughts about Rachel Cusk's style is the remnants and aftereffects of a private conversation a few weeks ago with a friend whose work involves making decisions that will shape and influence the ways that many other people will form their conceptions of pasts in which they share. She talked about difficulties in making others in her workplace understand what is at stake in this situaiton. I used to do this kind of decision-making myself, as a university lecturer, in a different way, and in yet another way I am still doing it in my current job. So of course had I understood for a long time that there are different ways to produce these experiences for others, and that even the kind of activity we can broadly call selection or maybe even curation, if it's to be effective, has to involve more than just telling people what's important about the things you have chosen for them to engage with. But when 'telling' comes so easily, as it does to me and to many people who do this kind of work, there's the danger of trampling over the affordances of the things themselves - what can the things say if we say less about them? Or, if we are more selective and discriminating about what we choose to say, can the power of the thing itself resound more and maybe enter into harmonies with the other things we have set forward in a constellation of relationships that are more strongly felt for being implied rather than spelled out?

The last 'collection of things' I assembled in a cohesive and finished way was a list of songs I chose to express a perspective on the music of the 1970s.

Apple music
Spotify




What I think works best about this playlist is the relationships that emerge between the songs and the changes rung, in those relationships, on a set of ideas that the decade poured a lot of its energy into working out.

I wondered how little I could actually articulate of that notion and still invite the set to be experienced by others as a group of songs connected by more than just their individual awesomeness.