Ethical Procrastination
A new class, returning home, and performing party tricks for an idol
Thanks for bearing with me while I took some time off. I’d intended to write something about my final few weeks in Vegas, but moving took more out of me than I expected–I don’t know why I didn’t think that it would–and I’ve spent my first few weeks back in Brooklyn being in Brooklyn, socializing at a speed that isn’t sustainable (I’m paying the price for it now). I’ll say a little about that in a bit–some reflections on teaching upstate, on a few parties–but I should mention a class I’ll be teaching next week.
On July 16th, I’ll be teaching a craft class called Stealing, Borrowing, and Letting Go. We’ll be exploring strategies and best practices for drawing from real people. From the practical details--when to change names, features--to the impact of real life on craft--when does the true narrative get in the way of the better story? We’ll also talk about how to determine your own personal ethics on the subject. In the end, we all need to decide what feels right to us.
I’ve taught this class once before and it was a great success. It’s perfect for writers who are curious about how best to navigate the tricky task of writing about real people and events. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions!
As far as my real life, it’s been a whirlwind the last couple months. My final weeks in Vegas were marred by some personal tumult, the effect of living so far away from my life eventually wearing down my relationships. Long-distance dating, it turns out, is hard. I spent my last month in Vegas doing as much Vegas as I could, detached from NYC, visiting bars I wouldn’t return to, soaking up time with friends I’d made in the city. Maxing out my Trufusion membership before my life as a Vegas group fitness girlie ended: still missing my Rise and Rave Rides.
I also wrote a lot into a new book, though I don’t yet know what it will become. Completing a novel is a taxing, psychologically-scarring endeavor. But the easiest thing in the world is to write the first 100 pages –before that point, you’re just playing around, and you don’t have to decide if you’re truly writing a book. I’m at that point now: deciding. But what I wrote really excited me, and since returning to Brooklyn, I’ve been trying to find my way back into that excitement.
Except that I haven’t been writing. I’ve been doing a lot of Ethical Procrastination. Willie and I came up with this term to describe the many worthwhile tasks a writer can do to avoid writing. Many are things that a person must simply do to live in the world. They become ethical procrastination when you choose to do them in lieu of writing. Think ethical in the basketball sense, in which a player doesn’t go hunting for fouls. It’s procrastination done for the right reasons. Some examples include:
Packing
Grocery Shopping
Researching a book
Google mapping to a bar you’re going to later (I do this a lot)
Hosting a party
Falling in love
Telling someone about the book you haven’t yet written
Sending emails
Paying bills
Day job
Vacuuming
Pitching essays
Breaking up
Working out
Redecorating
Buying new clothes
Selling old clothes
Imagining elaborate and unlikely moral quandaries that will make completing your novel a crime
As for unethical procrastination, we must all decide for ourselves what that means.
Some Books I’ve Loved the last couple months
Tanya Bush - Will This Make You Happy
I admire Tanya’s ability to glide between internal doubts and the actions we take to try to relieve them. This memoir deftly captures the unique experience of learning to commit: to oneself, to relationships, to the pleasure that makes life worth living.
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano
A classic of disorientation and self-annihilation. A frustrating, uncomfortable, and brilliant novel, untidy in all the best ways. The Consul’s self-destructive descent into drunkenness and loneliness, written as an aspirational epic, is mesmerizing, maddening novel.
Rotten Evidence chronicle’s Naji’s ten-month prison sentence in Egypt for publishing fiction that “violated public decency.” Naji has such an excellent eye, and he captures the unique, harrowing world of the prison with a brilliant mix of irony, doubt, frustration, and care. But what I loved most about this book is how passionately Naji writes about reading. It’s a book about books, and the vital role they play in making life worth living.
As much an art object as it is a craft book. I like to pluck out a prompt in the morning–Imagine a time traveler who regrets time traveling; write a sentence that becomes an image–and let it shape my thinking throughout the day. It’s a book that makes the world more visible. Here’s a great review of the book.
Italo Calvino - Six Memos for the New Millenium
Technically, only 5 memos–Calvino never finished the 6th. The were written as a series of lectures on Calvino’s most cherished literary qualities–lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. These are potent, inspired reminders of why we return to the page, as writers, but largely as readers.
Samantha Josephs - Carrying (Out Oct 6)
Josephs’s debut novel follows a married stealth trans woman named Martha who mysteriously becomes pregnant. Carrying is a biting, Stepford-wifey body horror about the lengths we go to protect our relationships: the secrets we keep, the friends we lean on, the sacrifices we make. A funny, paranoid page-turner. I’m excited for it to be in the world.
Elizabeth McCracken - A Long Game
A perfect craft book as far as I’m concerned. In lieu of close reads, McCracken shares vignettes of wisdom she’s learned over the years. This book is full of insights, epiphanies, and contradictions–just like the act of writing itself.
Megan O’Grady - How It Feels to Be Alive
Not much to say other than that I loved being inside O’Grady’s mind. The best kind of essay collection: one that feels like a walk with a brilliant, considerate friend.
Ana Paula Maia - On Earth as It Is Beneath
Imagine the World’s Most Dangerous Game reimagined at a Brazilian prison. A taut, captivating novel about the harsh angles of human depravity. Gruesome and frank. My first read by Maia, and I’m excited to check out more.
Some Movies I’ve Loved the last couple months
Maddie’s Secret
Rose of Nevada
Desert Hearts
Misericordia
Backrooms (discounting all the parts about trauma)
Current and Future Reads
Nicholas Russell - Observer (I’ll be moderating Nicholas’s book launch in October at Book Culture)
Krista Diamond - Close Relations with Strangers (come to Krista’s NYC Launch at Books are Magic!)
Emeline Atwood - A Real Animal
Stephanie Krzywonos - The Blue Hours
John Dos Passos - USA Trilogy
Writing Conferences, Salons, and Launches
Congratulations, OG
Omega
A few days after I returned to Brooklyn from Vegas, and emptied my suitcases, I packed a new one to travel upstate, where I taught at the Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. It was held at a new age wellness retreat in Rhinebeck called The Omega Institute. An employee drove me to my cabin in a golf cart. On the way, she assured me I’d leave Omega calmer and more relaxed than when I arrived. Many guests reported feeling this way to her. She showed me the wellness center, and the stairs to the sanctuary, and a large white horse sculpture–isolated in a field–which is on loan. When she asked me about my writing, I felt self-conscious, because she assumed I was an environmental writer, and instead of answering her I pointed at Tajja and Tara, who were walking toward their cabins, and asked if we should give them a ride.
The Orion faculty was brilliant. I got to hang with Tajja and Erica and work alongside writers I’d long admired from afar. The students made everything easy. I sat back while they took over discussion of assigned readings and the work of their peers, occasionally interrupting to deliver lectures on World and Voice and my Infidelity Theory of Nuance in Fiction (a new one). I splurged on a massage. I meditated in the sanctuary. I hunted my ankles for ticks after hikes. I went hard on the vegetarian meals in the cafeteria (Omega only served meat on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the same days they served dessert). As a connoisseur of the slop bowl, I relished the opportunity to create my own slops at every meal: a precarious bed of spring mix topped with scoops of under seasoned tofus and tempehs and beans. Add in 6 - 8 everything crackers, and you’ve created a perfect meal. I drank draft kombucha on the deck of a cafe in the afternoons, reading Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millenium, as a man paced below me telling someone on the phone about all the emotions that had been recently freed from his neck. I taught in the Ram Dass library and spent the time after class plucking books off the shelves, flipping through texts about apparitions and near-death experiences and the modern art of face-reading (the right side of the face reveals your public persona, whereas the left side reveals your true nature). I read from the opening chapter of Satellite, and got to hear Tajja and Erica read from their new books, the writing so deft and inspired I felt proud to call them my friends. It was a profoundly inspiring week–I cherished the late-night discussions and karaoke with the faculty over contraband bourbon and wine–but not very relaxing, as my tour guide had promised.
Scanner
Back in Brooklyn, Sarah hosted a scanner salon with Phil at their apartment. Everyone brought an object or two they wished to scan, and we took turns saving them onto their computer, adding cellophane and handkerchiefs, or waving our hands over the object, to distort and texture the final image. I brought a photo I took of a steel beam across from my apartment. I’ve been thinking a lot about beams lately, after learning my great grandfather fell to his death off a beam. In the scan I created, I let my hand hover behind the photo, as if reaching for an object that had slipped from my grasp. My favorite scans were a face with a hand waved in front of it, making the skin look swimmy and tugged, and a series of scans of everyone’s glasses. Sarah and Phil are planning to make a zine of the images.
After dinner, we squeezed onto the porch, where a few of us read from work and shared projects. Arya Burke read two excellent poems from a collection coming out later this month. Damian Thomas talked about two projects: Unplatform and The Summer of Ludd, the latter of which was a series of phone-free public events in Brooklyn. I read from the opening chapter of Satellite. Another person talked about the home server she’d built for herself and her friends, and a tenant organizer in Kansas City read from a letter written by one of the tenants, a moving, courageous speech defending their rights–all of our rights–to a dignified standard of living.
After the presentations, I hung on the balcony talking to other writers and filmmakers, so engaged I forgot to go in for dessert.
Kismet
Kismet launched its first print magazine last Monday, hosting a reading in the garden next to St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. I’ve admired Samuel Rutter since his work with Astra–gone too soon–and have loved the work he’s done with Kismet.
It was the first really hot day of the week, and I wore a breezy tan tunic—the kind of thing a 70s cult leader might wear—and, regrettably, tights. By the time I arrived at the church the tunic was darkened with sweat. A bird shit on me when I entered the courtyard, though I wouldn’t realize this for some time. Me and another person walked around the church looking for an entrance, thinking the party was inside, but we walked at such different paces there was no room to exchange names, and I felt too self-conscious to share my name, hoping the image of me in this dampened, bird-splattered tunic might fade from everyone’s memory.
I showed up early, to the VIP pre-party, and promptly started talking to Mina, an agent friend at Janklow. The venue was fittingly Edenic. Thin dirt paths between flowers and bushes of wild ramps. Fresh flatbread hung from a tree. I got a drink–a grapefruit Campari gin cocktail. Simon Critchley came over to say to hello to our group. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Infinitely Demanding changed my life, and his books on humor and tragedy were vital to my thinking when I was in grad school. He introduced himself, and I gave him my name, and rather than politely share how much his work mattered to me, I asked if he knew any party tricks–he didn’t. I showed him that trick where it appears you’re pulling your index finger apart. His uncle used to do that, he told me.
I talked to a few friends about Vegas and felt myself wishing I had more to say. I’ve been having trouble talking about Vegas, even with friends. Not just because of the final month tumult, but because my experience doesn’t seem to align with what I assume people want from my time in the city. What do they want from my experience? I don’t know. The truth, likely. No one seems disappointed by the stories I tell. But travel places an expectation on the traveler to see and do all that must be seen and done, and I’ve never been the type of person to see or to do very much when I travel. And Vegas, perhaps more than any other city, seems like such an alien destination, a site of transience inhospitable to prolonged habitation, ripe for the most captivating of stories. But what I loved about Vegas was its hospitable nature, how easy I found it to live there, and whenever I’m asked how it was, I have trouble explaining that what I loved was the walk to my local coffee shop on temperate winter mornings, or shooting the shit with Nicholas behind the book store when I walked downstairs to pick up my mail. What I loved was how living there slowly weathered my thinking into a new shape, in ways I don’t yet understand.
I told Jen and Jeremy about the bird shit, and they told me it looked like a pattern on the dress. This put me at ease. Kendall and I shared a cigarette. She raved about Emeline Atwood’s debut, A Real Animal, and sent over a copy this week. Adam arrived. Then Sam arrived. We stood on the far side of the flatbread tree, opposite the flatbread, discussing which forthcoming books are not-so-secretly about established authors behaving badly.
The readings began.
First with an entrancing hymnal from Kyle Kidd. Their voice is a canyon–mesmerizing, expansive. Wayne Koestenbaum read from My Lover, The Rabbi as I watched bees duck into the flowers beside him. Megan Nolan closed the readings with a brief excerpt from an essay on the love we feel for the people we love, as compared to the ire we feel for our work, and the repeated shock of spending our lives with the latter when the former is always so close. Kidd ended the performances with an a cappella hymn.
By then, the booze was all drunk. I chatted with Zefyr and Bobuq then fled home, and after getting off the train, I bought a small box of tortilla chips from a Mexican food truck close to my stop, my favorite chips in the city.
Dyke March
It was my first time waiting at WSP for the march to arrive—normally, I march, but I hurt my leg the night before and wanted to go easy. I’d been having a tough week, had been very hard on my body and myself, and it all fell away seeing the marchers cascade into the park. What a profound feeling, to look into their faces, to see their joy and perseverance and pleasure and love, to shower them with the affection and admiration we all deserve.
