Tiny musings to end a big year 

Sometime early this year, I was grating parmesan over a sheet pan of family-size baguette-pizza with a small stainless-steel grater when I realized it was the same grater I once used to rough up the soles of my pointe shoes. 

I inspected the grater: Was it really that same one? I recognized the slight warp in the grating plate, the result of the force required to scrape flat surfaces of hard leather. I recognized the handle that is prone to detaching. The grater is perhaps my oldest functioning tool. I’m almost certain I initially bought it, likely from the kitchen section at a store like Marshall's, for pointe shoes, not for the kitchen. But I don’t recall how it migrated. I imagine there was delight in the ridiculousness, at the initial moment of need, of taking the tool from my dance bag to the sink (I’m sure I washed it!). Maybe there was a period in which I moved the grater between my dance bag and the kitchen depending on whether the need was reducing the slippage possibilities of new pointe shoes or distributing hard cheese. In any case, I know that all the pointe shoes I ever wore needed grating, and I know that I only ever had the one shoe grater. So the movement of the grater represents the relative importance in my life of preparing pointe shoes to cooking. 

The grater functioned only moderately well as a pointe-shoe rougher but still works decently for certain cheeses. Its size is perfect for parmesan, and in fact I use it almost exclusively for that, as its siblings, the larger grater and the microplane, serve other needs. As the middle kitchen grater, this shoe grater is exactly what is needed and nothing more. 

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The Gym has a tiny recipient list by today’s Substackian standards, and the thing is, every one of you has opened at least one of my dispatches this year. A fraction of those opens evolved into conversations, which I’ve cherished. I have known most of you, recipients, in real life. And one thing I admire about you is your simple persistence in continuing to make the work you need to make. You create the world in which it’s possible for me to send this goofy letter. At the risk of sounding like every other end-of-year letter and post and podcast episode out there, good gracious thank you. 

Despite my occasional more grandiose thoughts about what The Gym might/should/could be, and despite the flood of regularly scheduled and pointed subscription letters that are now available to us from accomplished and famous people, I see now that this letter is the same humble tool I’ve used for all the latter part of my life: periodic short-form writing for a small readership of people I’d like to have dinner with, whose studios I’d like to visit, whose bookshelves I’d like to browse. It enables me to bide my time practicing what I’ve always practiced in the nooks and crannies of the day, holding off atrophy and staying connected with you all. 

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Earlier this month, the Washington Post laid off Sarah Kaufman, the second-to-last full-time staff dance critic in the country and maybe the very best yet at broadening the role of the dance critic to engaging the public beyond performances, less from a lens of “poor, misunderstood dance needs advocacy” and more because how humans move and the histories we embody are damn important to understand if we are to live intentional embodied lives. 

I no longer worry too much about artist’s arts criticism. Although artists and companies cannot rely on media coverage as they did in the past, there are and will be niche publications, podcasts, socials, passionate freelancers, and, I hope, more writers-in-residence. But the role of the public culture critic—I mean those who round out the news of politics and entertainment, who come at popular things from a slant, who illuminate the shape of things we don’t know how to name—is untethered at the moment. Kaufman and her colleagues are circling without a place to land. Maybe it’s the need for a place to land at all that needs to evolve. But lack of context, constants, and depth worries me. It’s exhausting all of us, readers and writers, whether we worry about it or not, as we try to keep up. 

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Which brings me to . . . 

~ Errata 2022 ~

The discourse of 2022, American English first edition, contains errors. Replace the erroneous words with their corrections to enhance your experience. 

1. For “reading,” read “skimming”

2. For “user,” read “avatar” 

3. For “tweet,” read “twit” also “twat” 

4. For “cookies,” read “rabid robots” 

5. For “preferences,” read “TPS reports”

6. For “metaverse,” read “Metaverse^™”  

7. For “attention economy,” read “distraction economy” 

8. For “children,” read “pawns” also “targets”

9. For “pregnancy,” read “statehood” 

10. For “data,” read “anxiety” 

What other words/phrases in the popular discourse would you correct if there were a second printing?  Editing is designing ~

In awe and solidarity! 

Jonelle