Notes
🔖 Read What Is a Strike? Reflections from the Virtual Front Lines of the UC Academic Worker Strike by Mary Jirmanas Saba (LA Progressive).
Currently reading: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo 📚
Kind of resent that I have to do anything besides read this book, even though I love a lot of the other stuff I do.
🔖 Read Attention, trust and GPT3
“If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.
Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”
📚💬
“I am most interested in confessional writing when it allows us to move into the personal as a way to go beyond it. In all my work I invoke the personal as a prelude.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬
“I had been so well socialized by graduate school that I was torn between which writing path to pursue, agonizing over whether I could write from various standpoints in various genres.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
🔖💀 Read If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body by Caitlin Doughty (New York Times Gift Link).
I hope we get human composting in NC eventually. For now, we can donate ourselves to Western Carolina’s body farm.
Lately I often find myself feeling alert but unable to focus. This is a new vibe for me. If you’re a person who experiences this feeling regularly and has found a way to manage it, I’d love your advice. (I’m going to start by having a cup of coffee.)
Finished reading: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl 📚
Read this because it’s on Austin Kleon’s list of books about motherhood & art. But it held extra delight for me because it’s also about the theater.
“Perhaps having children makes one increasingly distrust the symbolic world. Because suddenly nothing is as important as the very real particular.” Sara Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write
📚🎭
This week’s Craft Talk from Jami Attenberg is another great one:
“Don’t ever talk yourself out of writing something because you don’t know how it fits in the world yet.”
Y’all ever think about how the worst moments in your life personally align with some of the most personally important cultural moments? 1989-1992 was a rough run personal but wow the movies of that time look large.
🔖 Read Creativity as Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Adina Allen (My Jewish Learning).
“Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.”
📝🎭🎨🧶🧵🎵💃🏿 This is a reminder that I write Genetrix, a very occasional newsletter curating stories of creative mothers. If those are the kind of stories you’d like to know about, please sign up!
🔖📺📝 Read TV Recaps Taught Me How to Write Criticism by Joelle Kidd.
I love Kidd’s discussion of the role of pleasure in criticism.
🔖📺 Read Wednesday Addams Is the Ultimate Outcast by Miyako Pleines (Catapult).
🖤
🔖 Read Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, Helena Fitzgerald
“A return to 2019 is an attempt to erase all of the losses that happened between then and now, but those losses, like the monster in a horror movie, will devour us if we refuse to face them.”
Want to read: Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose 📚
🔖 Read How’d That Thing Go? by Kate McKean.
“I don’t want a schedule, I want a sandbox. I want a list of things that need to be done and a container of time to do them, and then I get to pick.”
Yes! Life as sandbox game! I needed this.
Just listened to a super stressful strike townhall and I’m tempted to watch tonight’s Neverafter but I think TNG is the smarter move right now.
🍿 Watched Falling for Christmas.
I’ve been an unironic Lindsay Lohan fan since I saw Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, so I was delighted to see her in this adorable trope-filled bit of holiday fluff. Cute & funny.
Q asks Baby Q Amanda Rogers if she’s ever caused the spontaneous combustion of someone she doesn’t like, then gives Picard a look as if to say, “You see how much I like you? I haven’t combusted you! 😍” 🖖🏻
Trying to figure out if I can make a crow cane head work on my adjustable cane so I can walk the streets of Amsterdam pretending it’s Ketterdam and I’m Kaz Brekker… 📚
🎮 Apparently my Dragon Age: Origins character isn’t in leather armor that looks like underwear. She’s in her actual underwear because I guess I unequipped her regular clothes but failed to actually equip the leather armor. I’ll fix this when I’m next playing.
🎮 I’m more than 10 yrs behind & have already played Inquisition but some quick thoughts after 1 hr of DA: Origins:
-
I appreciate that the music in the Denerim Alienage has Klezmer vibes.
-
I do NOT appreciate that my leather armor is a bikini.