Onward

Turned out this newsletter was going on hiatus for the week, but I think you can understand why. Beautiful, bold New York City has been out in force for ten days straight, and while the terms of my employment at a news organization prevent me from being out there if I’m not covering it (though not donating to worthy causes, thankfully), I was proud to see my friends and neighbors standing up for what’s right, even at literal risk to their lives, whether from police batons or coronavirus.

Now, for the first time in ten days, I’m sitting on my deck (taking a late on-call shift at work until midnight) and hearing the usual summer noises — fireworks (which seem to happen every night in my corner of Brooklyn from Memorial Day till mid-September, you get used to it), sirens from the nearby hospital and fire station, radios from neighbors who seem to be taking turns from night to night — but, for the first time in ten days, no police choppers overhead. A friend who lives across the park says they’re over there tonight. Figures. But the relative quiet is welcome.

And the city “reopens” tomorrow. Little will change, except that construction can restart; most stores and restaurants that could open have been doing curbside pickup already, which is the other big part of “phase 1.” We’ll see if the protests cause a new spike — but reports suggest most protestors wore masks, even if most police didn’t, and we know being outdoors reduces risk of transmission drastically, so we hope on.

Anyhow. I have been thinking of what to do with this little newsletter, which will morph and change as we shift in and out of lockdowns over time. I’m also fully aware of how precarious my employment is, since I work in two … well, let’s just call them tricky fields: higher education and media. At the moment I’m fine. In the future, who knows. It seems prudent to keep working in as many ways as I can.

I also have a couple of big projects underway (one of which I should be able to talk about soon), and all of this means I need to be doing two things with more discipline than I’ve been able to muster for years: Reading as a way of developing my own writing, and writing for things other than the fast-paced deadline of my Vox job.

So I will, in the “premium” section of this newsletter, be trying something out for a while. In the spirit of the name of this newsletter — Commonplace Book — I will be writing one, not-too-long piece about something cultural. I’m not going to restrict myself too much, but I’ll explain my thinking here.

When I was in grad school (the second time, earning an MFA) we had to write “annotations” for 62 books over the two-year period. They weren’t reviews. They weren’t recommendations. They were actually looking at the craft of someone’s writing, some specific piece of it, and figuring out why it did or didn’t work.

I started my MFA program more or less because the provost at King’s told me I needed to get a terminal degree, and an MFA was cheaper, less all-consuming, and more forgiving to people who had to work full-time than trying to earn a PhD. I figured it wouldn’t be that difficult. At that time I was already a fairly widely-published writer.

But it turned out an MFA was far more challenging than I thought it would be, because it forced me to confront the laziness in my writing and — chiefly through annotations — to learn to read closely and start to imitate what was good in others’ work. I would write about Joan Didion’s kickers, or the use of the second person in a particular memoir, or the word choices of a cookbook writer (yes). Anything was fair game. The goal was to learn how to, well, learn from other writers.

I graduated in 2013, which is a long time ago now, and I have published a co-written book in the meantime and written probably in the range of 2000 published articles at major outlets since then, including nearly four years as the staff film critic at Vox. But when you write at that pace you sometimes get, if not lazy, at least a bit sloppy. I can feel it here and there, the tendency to go for the easy turn of phrase just to file the article. It’s mostly a survival technique.

Sometimes I see more experienced writers doing this, and I don’t really begrudge them that (well, most of the time) because they’ve earned it. I don’t think I have yet.

So, I’ll be writing things in here under the “premium tier” that help me think through books, essays, reviews, and also movies (especially nonfiction) and theater (in whatever form that is right now), and maybe other art forms, in a critical way that isn’t about “evaluation” so much as learning from them. Close reads, if you will. I will welcome your feedback; as often as possible, I want to start a conversation, not just shout into a void, a thing I do plenty of in my day job. (Or both my day jobs, depending on how obtuse my students think I’m being.)

As I said, that’s in keeping with the spirit of a “commonplace book,” which for centuries was just a kind of notebook in which people kept all kinds of things they wanted to remember, from quotations and passages in books to prayers, recipes, and apparently legal formulas. We’ve gotten out of the habit of these in the digital age — I think Tumblr is probably the closest we’ve got — but I love reading notebooks like this. (Susan Sontag’s youthful notebooks, published as Reborn, might be my favorite.)

So anyhow. That’s what’s happening. If you want to see what I’m up to you can subscribe. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I’ll keep sending out my recommendations, more or less thrice weekly.

I hope you’re staying safe and healthy, and that you are persevering, and maybe even a little heartened by what’s happening in our world.