6 things worth sharing this weekend
magazine death, writing abyss, 3rd place, publishing field report, audiobooks? + reading/watching notes
I’m on the road again, and will be near St. Pete, FL for a few weeks before hitting Nashville. Anyway, here are a few things that crossed my transom this week…
1. Death of the Magazine by
When I was in college I remember NYC being awash in printed material
Not so anymore
Now, National Geographic is closing its print edition too
Gioia shows how these huge cultural institutions fell apart
2. The Abyss and the gulp from
“An abyss lies between the journalist’s experience of being out in the world talking to people and his experience of being alone in a room writing. When the interviews are over and the journalist first faces the labor of writing, he feels no less resentful than the subject will feel when he reads the finished text.” - Janet Malcolm
4. Go find a third place at The Atlantic
Hang out
I just got back from having dinner with a friend
At a diner. It was a Greek diner, just like the old days, so I ordered the souvlaki platter with bad pita bread and ok french fries
Working at coffeeshops are sometimes difficult and weird and honestly I don’t talk to too many people when I go
This hit home »
“The ersatz third place is a consequence of a culture obsessed with productivity and status, whose subjects might have decent incomes but little recreational time. Urban-dwelling Americans, however, tend to place work at the center of life in part because cities are so expensive to live in. They might work 50-hour weeks to survive, leaving little to no time for leisure and community engagement. Unstructured quality time with friends is replaced with a scheduled series of continuous catch-ups. Subsequently, these overscheduled people lack meaningful ties with their neighbors, and so they patronize spaces to make those connections even less frequently.”
5. Publishing Field Report #6 (Calamari Press) by
Blake is a novelist/writer/now memoirist who I’ve mentioned before
I enjoy this series because Blake talks about how each of his books were published and the grind of doing so
I remember when this book came out, I always thought Blake was semi-successful, he became more successful over time, he also worked extremely hard, he kept going
“In the end, it was my method—and my refusal to give up—that led me to exactly where I wished to be. Not long after finishing my manuscript and sending it to exactly the one place I could imagined it belonged, Derek wrote me back and told me he wanted to publish Ever; that he already had vision for exactly what kind of form that it could take, a perfect fit. I remember reading his response on my mom’s computer that afternoon feeling like I’d finally burst through my own seams, suddenly able to think of nothing else that I could do but run outside and jump in the pool in all my clothes. It had all felt so impossible until it didn’t, and now absolutely everything had changed.”
6. ICYMI: Audibooks are a complement, not the main thing by me!
“I would say all of these books were for “fun” though I mostly read for fun. In other words these books were truly a distraction — if I missed something or a key point it didn’t matter as much…In that case, audiobooks are better as a complement or a supplement to my real reading.”
Notes on reading/watching/listening
Reading:
“Help Wanted” by Adele Waldman
Fictionalized inside story of a manager change at a Target-esque store
Literary fiction that’s a lot about the struggle of just making it
Somewhat comedic
“10:04” by Ben Lerner
One of my favorite books, but I haven’t re-read it since moving to NYC
I’m bringing it along to the beach
“No Judgment” by Lauren Oyler
No judgment but I’m *listening* to this. See the audibook article above…
But it was also $1.99 on Kindle so I get to do the thing of going back & forth which yes is my preference
Literary essays on autofiction, gossip and more, interesting so far
Watching:
“Stranger Things 4” on Netflix
idk, it’s entertaining
somewhat frightening and too long
The Olympics
Was into the men’s tennis final and basketball
Haven’t watched quite as much this week
Moonlighting
My wife and I remembered this being on when we were children
Cybil Shepherd! Bruce Willis!
We tried the first episode and it was pretty bad and the pacing seemed off, we won’t be continuing
Until next week…
Keep going-
Josh Spilker