recitation
In Joshua Tree I kept thinking, "when I write about this," and then, "I'm not going to write about this." I had left my phone in the glove compartment of my car in order to prevent myself from taking pictures. I was doing an experiment in not narrativizing my life. Not because there's anything wrong with it, per se, but because I do it pretty constantly, and it seemed like it would be interesting to take a break. Also because there's no cell service in the park, so I didn't really have to be that disciplined: my phone was basically a brick for two days anyway, whether I liked it or not.
It didn't work. Of course it didn't work! Here I am writing about it, or at least the meta-experience of considering writing about it. I took a picture of J standing on a rock near our campsite, and it felt like a satisfying compromise: I only needed this one thing in order to communicate to everyone else what it had been like. I didn't miss my feeds from Twitter or Instagram, all of those inputs, but I couldn't shake the urge to output: to tell you what it had been like, or at least let you know that it had happened.
On New Year's Eve we were sitting in P's van drinking whiskey and reading poems. We'd run out of the ones in J's book that she liked, and then the ones that we'd memorized (P had some Ginsburg, and I've always got He Resigns at the ready). It turned out that J saves my Tinyletters on her phone, so she read us the one that includes Robert Haas' Meditations at Lagunitas, which is about me & P. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, about sex.
Is there anything more humiliating than hearing your own dizzy prose recited back to you on a frigid desert night? There is, and it is when the boy you wrote it about hears it for the first time, and holds your hand, and howls with you while you listen. I mean, it was also hilarious. J stopped when I asked her to.
Anyway, occasionally someone who was involved in a story I've written, here or elsewhere, will mention it to me, what it was like to read it. I know people read these things in theory, but I really do forget to think about exactly who that "people" entails, because it is basically the only way I can do this.
I don't know. It was a good reminder, as the year turned over, that what I'm doing is... how to say this without sounding dismissive or upset. It's just different, maybe, than living. It's okay. I like both of them. It's good to tells stories. It's good to be able to hear them, too, and feel intimately, viscerally, the distance between what happened and the way I wrote it down.
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One of the first Tinyletters I ever wrote was about dudes & writing about people. RIP that, um, relationship.
More recently, I got to interview Lili Anolik about Eve's Hollywood, her book about Eve Babitz which came out this week and which I highly recommend if you've read Eve's work. (I mean, you should read Eve's work.)
I also covered the global finals of WeWork's Creator Awards, which was a truly bananas experience not entirely encapsulated by this blog post. Ashton Kutcher got on stage and talked about having a cold sore for a full five minutes. Diddy was there. The Red Hot Chili Peppers played? I waited around a lot, and ate a lot of cake.
And speaking of that kind of, let's say brand-centric work, I wrote a piece for Pressland about how freelancers figure out how to interact ethically with publicists who want to give us free stuff. It's more complicated than you'd think!
All of the above gives you a pretty decent sense of how I cobble together my living, I think: I write about books, and for brands, and then about what that looks like and means. I also teach, and I'm teaching a class on Writing Workshops LA's winter schedule about how to get your writing published on the internet-- how to conceive, write, edit and pitch pieces that will get you paid. I'd love to have you there if you're in LA and interested in that kind of thing.