5 things worth sharing this weekend

MFA writer friends love affair, skateboarding at the olympics, old delillo interview, digital minimalist + notes on reading/watching

1. Four Friends, Two Marriages, One Affair — and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It at New York Magazine

• Totally bonkers article of these 4 MFA writer friends from the mid 00s

• I won’t give it away, but this article is probably more interesting than any book they’ll ever write

• I don’t think I’ll read their books

• Don’t write what you know, get an imagination

• Everything wrong about MFA / writing / mid-list literary novelists, everyone’s suspicions are confirmed

2. The Five Thrashers by

Michael Weinreb

• Yeah, skateboarding at the Olympics

• Is that selling out? Or who cares
  

3. Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy by

Catherine Shannon

• Phones used to be sexy. A call from an unknown number. A little black book. Your heart pounding as you checked your answering machine. Calling someone from a payphone. Hearing someone say, “It’s for you.” This was romance.

• You don’t have to look good in person if you look good on Instagram. Our phones not only hollow out our true selves, but are starting to replace us.

4. Art of Fiction with Don DeLillo from The Paris Review

• This is from 1993

• Love this question and quote:

  • Interviewer:

    • Do you think it made a difference in your career that you started writing novels late, when you were approaching thirty?

  • DeLILLO

    • Well, I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn’t have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this. Even when I was well into my first novel I didn’t have a system for working, a dependable routine. I worked haphazardly, sometimes late at night, sometimes in the afternoon. I spent too much time doing other things or nothing at all. On humid summer nights I tracked horseflies through the apartment and killed them—not for the meat but because they were driving me crazy with their buzzing. I hadn’t developed a sense of the level of dedication that’s necessary to do this kind of work.

• Find a system for writing

5. How to be a digital minimalist (from me!) at Medium

• This is a list post of suggestions

• I recently turned my phone to grayscale to keep all those optimized alluring colors from jumping out to steal my focus. I’ll check my screen time next week to see if it’s working

• I do always charge my phone in a completely different room while I sleep. When I lived in a 2-story house, I kept it on a different floor

---

Notes on reading/watching/listening

Finished reading: “Blue Ruin” by Hari Kunzru

• Traveled to Louisiana this week and finished this on the trip

• A love triangle among artists, they reconnect in an unexpected way during the pandemic

• A lot about art & commerce & being true to your vision vs what the market wants

• Just realized this has some parallels to the first article I shared in this newsletter, but this is a novel

Returned this to the library: “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” by Hanif Abdurraqib

• Read half of it and the library demanded it back

Watched: “Zone of Interest” on the airplane

• Watched on an airplane

• Odd choice, but it’s in subtitles so it was close to my eyes and could read the subtitles easily

• Feels like an Oscar movie that didn’t win, and that’s what it is

• Disturbing story, even though they separate the viewer from it—that’s a choice

• Very stylized, everything is at a remove

Still watching “Stranger Things 4” on Netflix

• idk, it’s entertaining

The Olympics

• Been watching tennis while I had a few days off

• And table tennis

• Was disappointed by the men’s performance in the 3x3 basketball

Keep going-

Josh Spilker

---

• The top image is August Sunlight by Charles Burchfield.