Announcement: I’m helping organize this event for arts and cultural workers in Seattle. We’re going to talk about boards of directors, analyze power structures of arts orgs, learn research skills for organizing your workplace, and hang out with some of the sweetest arts workers in town. Would love to see you there!
Today, I’ve got four essays I’ve loved reading in the last few weeks. Enjoy!
“Our Longing for Inconvenience” by Hanif Abdurraqib
I loved this piece, about nostalgia for VHS players and meeting a lover by touching their hand in a grocery store. Abdurraqib is particularly talented at details, at choosing something incredibly precise to illustrate a larger phenomenon. This passage stuck out:
Eventually, people could not resist returning to their lives, to routines more comfortable than standing in the streets with the sun glaring in your eyes, squinting up to check the position of snipers on a roof, or working with cramping fingers sewing your tenth mask of the night
“Céline Sciamma’s Quest for a New, Feminist Grammar of Cinema” by Elif Batuman
While researching my review of The Chronology of Water, I read this profile of filmmaker Céline Sciamma, the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (among other films). I recently rewatched the film (with my girlfriend, who had, shockingly, given her cinéaste sapphic interests, not seen it), and loved hearing her commentary on the process of making it. In particular, the choice to film a key sex scene with a stationary camera, to resist “ogling” their intimacy, but rather inviting the audience to share it. The profile also shares some of Sciamma’s artistic tools, including this process, which is a great dramaturgical strategy:
Sciamma begins work on a screenplay by drawing up two lists: a “desired” list, of the images and the lines that made her want to make the movie in the first place, and a “needed” list, of the scenes necessary to advance the plot. She then merges the lists, mapping the desired elements onto the needed scenes.
Finally, this piece really made me want to write a profile! The journalist and Sciamma went to an exhibition of women painters (from the same period as Portrait) at the Luxembourg museum, walking about and discussing the works—an excellent backdrop that creates a comfortable intimacy between the two. Sciamma quotes from Sappho, from Annie Ernaux; she comes off as effortlessly intelligent. As a reader, I feel like I’m eavesdropping on an excellent art conversation. I’d love to write something like it!
For several years, Gutiérrez Flores had a job as a tutor to a woman in her eighties. Weekly, they met for lunch and read just three pages of Don Quixote. This essay is a very sweet meditation on intergenerational friendship, on reading literature closely, on crafting one’s intellectual life against all obstacles, and on the pace of living, reading, and dying. A favorite passage:
Nonetheless, she never rushed, never disturbed her routine. She lived at her own pace, somewhat stubbornly. She never read Don Quixote to check it off a list. Don Quixote was a structural part of her life that had accompanied her for decades, and rushing to finish would have meant rushing to live.
I also resonated with the piece because I work as a tutor. I’m often particularly moved by the adults who come to me. Unlike the (usually lovely, curious) children who are there at their parents’ bidding, the adults are making a conscious choice to cultivate their relationship to language. Some are filling in gaps from an earlier education, some are expanding their confidence in their second or third language, some are diving into a particular project—but they all come with a precision of purpose I admire.
“The Strip Club Files” by Alison Rose Reed
Alison Rose Reed’s essay describing a night working in a strip club is languid, cinematic, funny, prescient, and sharp. She creates a wandering mantage, painting nuanced and compassionate portraits of her customers, while, with a tone both tender and dry, narrating her own interiority. Alison’s writing also consistently and expertly weaves her healing process with her abolitionist politics, modelling a relationship to herself and others I admire.
I know that convenient stories of villains and victims obfuscate messier realities and block my own healing. Even so, the wounded ego delights when a stranger soothes heartache with empty declarations. I’m only human. Meaning, I’m a damn fool, too.
Reminder that once a month-ish, this newsletter publishes I Will Always Love You, an advice column for creative collaborations (inspired by Dolly Parton herself). I’m looking for questions about your love affair with your lighting designer, your jealousy of your conservatory classmate, your long-distance literary pen pal angst, and much more. You can read more about the inspirations for this column here, and you can submit a question here.
