Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, is out now. i will probably read it, ideally sooner than later since i missed out on the discourse windows for the other gossipy books of the year so far, but i’m already in the middle of a novel and i don’t want to start a new one until i finish it. also, i’ve generally enjoyed the books of Cusk’s that i’ve read (the Outline trilogy) but i also don’t…crave them, if that makes sense? (i know i need to read her memoirs)

this notion of “crave” comes up for me a lot recently. when Deborah and i go on a long walk, we’ve found that it’s motivational for her to have at least one planned waypoint: a plant shop with some interesting succulents, a place to get a matcha latte (exerting public pressure for her to make a zine ranking the matcha lattes of Portland, Oregon) or a new limited-edition ice cream flavor, the library to pick up a hold she’s been waiting on. i'm happy to do this, even though for me, the only purpose i need for a long walk is the walking itself. or, at home, we’ll be trying to decide what to order for dinner and, though i’m sometimes “in the mood” for something in particular (which i would classify as much less intense a phenomenon than “crave”, though related), i prefer for her to choose because often there are a number of options i will be happy with, but often only one or two that she really wants bc that’s what she’s craving. but then it’s a bind because i know that it’s stressful for her to always feel the burden of choice and to feel that i’m denying myself and not asking for and getting what i want in order to please her (a workaround is usually one of us gives the other three places to choose from, using structure to enable overlap).

our friend ec, though we are alike in many ways, is my polar opposite in terms of craving objects. she’s constantly hitting up estate sales and vintage stores around the area looking to discover lost treasures (my favorite of which is an enormous honey i shrunk the kids-esque spoon which is the centerpiece of her kitchen island). while we were out drinking and talking recently, she was asking us what our dream estate sale finds would be and, while i think of myself as very game for hypothetical conversational play of this sort, always quick to have a strong opinion, i couldn’t think of anything for several moments and eventually i said something like “i do not desire physical objects” *

which was an intentionally glib exaggeration but if, i’m honest, not that much of an exaggeration. i work from a home i rarely leave and so i rarely need to buy new clothes or shoes. i’ve never owned or wanted a car. all of my hobbies are digital in one way or another so i’m sometimes buying an app or a subscription but not like art supplies. i play some video games but haven’t bought a new system since the Xbox i got in 2023 to play the game Starfield (which turned out to be so horrible it immediately made me regret buying an Xbox). working in tech and getting to keep my old computers when it’s time for them to upgrade me to a new one has meant i haven’t had to buy a new computer in a long time (i’m particularly glad that five years ago they got 64 gigs of ram on the computer i am typing on now, which means that even though it's only an M1, it's got good oomph). music gear is probably the closest thing to the category of objects i desire and would spend money on if money were no object, but i have a ton of great music gear already that i don’t use enough and so unless i can really confidently believe that this new sampler or guitar pedal or whatever will be the thing to finally fix me (which, based on the evidence, i can’t ever), i don’t really desire them.

perhaps most meaningfully, i basically stopped reading paper books after grad school. all our grad school apartments were stuffed with books, either that we’d bought or, in my case, borrowed from the university library for so long they were basically mine, and then we moved a couple of times and i just didn’t want to deal with it all anymore. especially as someone who reads thick books fairly often, and especially now, when my prime reading time is between like 10:30 and midnight in bed next to a sleeping person, being able to read with one hand and with a backlight is essential and it's very hard for me to go back. i love having every book in the palm of my hand all the time but i’m sure there’s a loss there too! it makes me think of one of my favorite books of all time, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (which i first read in an old hardback from the library and have since read digitally many times), and how a recurring trope, as he struggles to make himself write a book about DH Lawrence, is whether or not he has all the books he needs to write it and whether he wants to deal with bringing them along with him on his misadventures. it would be a much less interesting book if he had a Kindle! (though he totally would have been the person to put it on airplane mode to hang onto library holds until he finished them).

anyway, i was reading a recent New Yorker and saw the beginning of Becca Rothfield’s review of Life of M. i don’t know if this is just that i'm a freak, but i have a weird psychological relationship with book and film reviews, which is something like: if i don’t think i’ll read the book or have already read the book, i read the book review immediately (since i’ll have lost nothing of the experience of reading a book that i wasn’t going to read or have already read). if i think i’ll read the book, either before starting the review or after starting it, i’ll often stop reading the review so as not to be “spoiled.” this is kind of dumb, honestly, especially because often i don’t actually end up reading the book and so could have enjoyed the experience and context of reading the review without having to think about how i was possibly kneecapping my hypothetical future pleasure of the text.

the review of Life of M begins with a long quotation of a mental tactic the protagonist uses to fall asleep:

[She] visualizes a brick wall. It fills her field of vision; its perimeters are out of sight. With a narrow implement she begins chipping at the mortar around a first brick, usually the one directly in front of her. She works steadily and calmly. The mortar loosens and falls away piece by piece. When it has been removed she pushes the brick forward with her hand. It falls down the other side of the wall, and now in its place there’s a small rectangle of blank white light. With her implement she begins chipping at the brick beside or above it, and then at the one beside or above that. The white shape made of light gets bigger and bigger. When it is big enough, she crawls through it.

i stopped reading the review after that since i’m planning to read the book lol. but the quotation caught my attention because it’s similar to a meditation technique i used in the past and had kind of forgotten about. i’ve been meditating off and on (mostly off) for many years. it's one of those things, like exercise, that is so hard to make myself do and yet that i am always so glad i did once it's done, especially during the periods when i can string together days of doing it. since i quit my job, i had a brief and intense period of devoted daily mindfulness meditation that was doing great things for me and that i the lost, in part because of spending time working on this newsletter and also because it’s “too hot” (which the whole point of mindfulness meditation is accepting the state of your body rather than critiquing it, but if it’s 95 degrees i struggle to do that!!). i’ve used a variety of techniques other than "pure" mindfulness over the years: breath meditation, counting meditation, mantra meditation, loving-kindness meditation.

one i was doing for a while is what i called assembly meditation. the idea is that you close your eyes and imagine yourself slowly assembling a simple structure in physical space. this is easy at first (you lay one brick in front of you, then another) but as it evolves, in order to maintain the mental image of the structure in your mind's eye, you have to stay focused and not think about anything else. today, inspired by the technique in Life of M, i decided to make you a guided meditation of the type i used to do:

* i eventually landed on either “object i don’t otherwise care about but it has a hidden drug stash in it” or “box of someone’s private letters and diaries,” neither of which will surprise readers of this newsletter