An Old School Update Email

Greetings from the icy north. After a couple months elsewhere ( Portugal, Philly), I’m back in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont for a long stretch; enough to dip my toe in the word “home” (for now).

Texting with a friend last night I admitted that I was mostly feeling at a loss for words lately. Sitting in the contradiction of feeling personally invigorated while vascilating between heartbreak and fear in the larger scheme of things.

I wish we had a collective agreement to just not for January1. No emails, no newsletters, no meetings. Creation is welcome, but just for your own pleasure.

I say this, and yet I’m typing an update to you now.

I always block the first couple weeks of the year off for myself for visioning, planning, deeper work at a (ideally) languid pace. It’s not quite gone as planned so far, but I do have some updates and a brief list of glimmerings to share.

This is a bit of a throwback email; oldheads will recall that early Elysian Fields emails were always in this “5 things we’re thinking about…” format, long before curation became the creator mode du jour.

First, some updates

1. This week I’m putting the finishing touches on a new zine.

   It’s about Slogan Practice, my own idiosyncratic process for guiding my year: a pithy statement; a mantra or koan crossed with good advertising copy.

   It’s an anti-resolution practice, in that good slogans encode mystery and uncertainty and will never resolve; they facilitate goals or plans, while refusing to fully define them.

   Digital download will be available to all paid subscribers, or for purchase standalone. There’ll be a small edition of hand bound print copies, available either via a Zine Club subscription or the secret handshake.

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2. New Whiskey Fridays episodes are underway after a lil’ pause. I have back-to-back Boss Talks interviews with two of my favorite thinkers in the universe, and then John and I just re-recorded an episode about how to make sure you get paid because we didn’t appreciate our own tone on the first go ‘round.

3. We have waitlist spots for both bookkeeping services and coaching, consulting, and advisory work with myself. If you’d like to chat about either or both, get in touch here.

Five Things

1. Elza Soares, Brazilian legend, No Tempo da Intolerância. This is a posthumous album and it’s just killer. We listen to a lot of Brazilian music in my household (my beloved is Brazilian), though apparently I came to this Soares album all on my own because Kharina was surprised I was listening to it. Blame the algorithm.

   [ While we’re on the subject of music: I was pleased to confirm for the umpteenth year in a row that my Spotify top ten remains unchanged, a bunch of songs that are towards the top of my “Working” playlist, a Pavlovian mechanism I use religiously for focus work and writing. Could best be described as “Sigur Rós and friends”; mostly I have no idea what’s on it despite having listened to it on repeat multiple times a week for 8-9 years. Kharina claims this is one of the weirder things about me, I’m not so sure, but there are a lot of contenders to choose from. ]

2. Book recs.

   I read about 100 books a year, split between what I think of as work reading— non fiction, mostly around economics, politics, business, philosophy etc…— and fiction for pleasure, a large percentage of which is historical detective novels, a palate cleanser for my brain.

   Here’s the fiction that stayed with me, non-detective novel category:

   - The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff: propulsive; dunno that I can think of another book where NATURE is so vividly rendered.

   - A Prayer for the Crown Shy, Becky Chambers: queer, positive futures.

   - The Arsonists’ City, Hala Alyan: family saga spanning multiple continents.

   - Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton: so twisted, these young activists!

   - The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese: one of those books where I felt bereft in the final chapters knowing that it would end.

   - Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver: I had to take breaks from this one it was so intense.

   ( That said, this is probably the book I actually recommended most. It’s just fun. )

3. Hot Hands.

   

   I grew up in a three hundred year old farmhouse with drafty windows. For reasons I still can’t explain (like, it wasn’t lack of money), we had a “heat saver” plan for the old furnace, which meant that the heat did not turn on during the peak hours of 3 - 7pm. Among the stranger (possibly apocryphal) memories of my chaotic childhood is of my brothers and I watching television after school with our winter coats on. My mom liked to (still likes to) open the windows in February to let in “fresh air”, so a small part of me suspects she made the whole “heat saver” thing up.

   As a result, all four of us pathologically prefer cold houses2. I’ve lived in Minnesota and now Northern Vermont and enjoy the winters.

   And. And! I have recently been experimenting with the idea that I don’t need to be cold just because it’s cold out. The same mother who innoculated her children against warm homes now gifts us Hot Hands for christmas every year. Go figure.

   Since I got back to Vermont, I’ve been cracking a pair almost every morning and sticking them in my pockets for the day. Revelatory.

4. This old interview with artist Pope.L, who passed away last month:

   MW: I’m anxious to establish for the reading public why your work is embedded in contradiction, why you choose to use all the mediums that you do, and why you seem to be fixated on language.

   WPL: The reason for the contradiction is that I’m suspicious of things that make sense. Maybe I’m afraid of it. False security. Whereas contradiction does make sense to me. When I was able to accept that something could be true, and not true, I felt at home.

5. “We know enough to join the struggle”

   This quote is from Becoming Divine by Grace Jantzen, and came to me via , and has been something of a mantra for me these past months. (While related to my Slogan for 2024, it’s not my slogan).

   I don’t take up much space in public, me-to-audience spaces like this one to process atrocity; there’s lots of reasons for that, and lots of questioning on my part whether that’s always the right choice. But not processing on public platforms isn’t the same as not doing anything, and I continue to hold myself accountable to activism and political engagement in my community and the world, even without complete answers. This phrase has been a helpful piece of that accountability process.

   We know enough to join the struggle.