Selection Bias no. 2: CMBYN, Cusk, Charli, cocktails, & cetera
Hello again, friends, and apologies for the long absence. (In my defense, I did say that these would be occasional newsletters.)
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Two things in particular have been most on my mind since I last wrote. Those two things are the news media and literature, and they've been on my mind for converse reasons. I've been thinking about news media because, since January, I have cut virtually all manner of it out of my life; and I've been thinking about literature because, since January, I have spent more of my time reading books than I have in a long while. And though my reasons for quitting news and binging on literature were initially independent – I started reading so much literature because of the class I was teaching winter quarter, and I started avoiding the news because, well, see below – these two new habits, I now see, ultimately stem from the same root.
Let's start with the news. Really, my feelings here are nothing new. This newsletter itself, as the attentive readers among you will recall, was born out of a sense of social media fatigue – the feeling that the very structure of online social networks was prohibiting me from connecting with others in the way that I wished. But this was just an instance of a broader sense of fatigue that I have been feeling towards all forms of new media as of late. It's a feeling of being given a woefully imbalanced diet, of being inundated with too much information and too little insight – an epistemological disparity that is only exacerbated by the Internet's de facto economy of shares and likes, which ends up elevating the punchy and the immediately digestible, an economy which, alarmingly, now sets the agenda for all other forms of media, too. And even though, in light of recent events, the tide is clearly turning and new media is under scrutiny like never before, it's disappointing that the public discourse has thus far focused almost exclusively on the failure of these platforms to protect us from foreign infiltration and manipulation, and not on the inherent epistemic limits of the platforms themselves – as if the problem were just that some of us are reading fake news, rather than that all of us are reading shallow news.
Sidebar: One of the more frightening aspects of the recent surge of 90s nostalgia in popular entertainment (e.g., I, Tonya; Confirmation; The People v. O.J. Simpson) has been to observe how the circus-show insanity of the then-revolutionary twenty-four-hour news cycle now looks quaint in comparison to what we have today: an all-hours wall of news, spread over innumerable sites, whose stream moves as rapidly as you can read, scroll, and swipe.
Anyway, since January I've cut out pretty much all of my up-to-the-minute news intake. No more flicking through headlines, no more NPR in the morning, no more push notifications about the latest disaster. (Which is not to say that I'm fully living under a rock; I still read the stale news reports in "The Talk of the Town" each week, I listen to the occasional topical podcast, and I still read plenty of long-form journalism.)
I recognize that writing about this runs the risk not only of seeming like a humble brag but also of being an expression of privilege: the privilege of having access to (not to mention time enough for) the news in the first place, as well as the privilege of being able to separate the news from my life, since the news is not happening to me. Yet one of the things I've realized since cutting out the news is that being "tuned in" and "up to date" feels less like a privilege and more like an impediment to clear thinking, and something we'd do well to not hold up as so great.
A side effect of quitting the news was that it left me with a gap in my morning routine. Suddenly I had to figure out what to do with that "coffee hour", when it is still too early to do any real work but too late to leave one's mind unoccupied. In January, I ended up filling my mornings rereading the Odyssey, in Emily Wilson's new translation (which, I might add, is quite enjoyable). And as I followed up Homer with Dante, and Dante with Faust, a new morning routine was established, the news replaced with the classics and reportage with verse.
At the same time as I was making literature a regular part of my mornings, I was thinking a lot about the role that literature plays in a good life, or the contribution it makes to one's living well. These thoughts were occasioned by the class I was teaching last quarter, "Literature & the Moral Imagination" (syllabus here, if you're interested), which was essentially a ten-week investigation into the question of whether reading literature, as the saying goes, "makes us better people" and, if so, how. One of the things I became convinced of in teaching the class was that, if there is anything truly morally special about reading, it lies in how literature (and art more generally) brings us into this special imaginative headspace, which serves as a counterweight to our other, more common modes of engaging with the world, a reprieve from both the all-consuming demands of one's ego and the overpowering urgency of righteous action, an opportunity to be not so caught up in oneself as well as not so caught up in the world and how to fix it.
It is difficult to say exactly how this makes us better people, except to gesture vaguely at the virtues of openness and humility. Not that these virtues are sufficient to make us good; in extremis they can even make us worse, insofar as they can encourage paralysis and inaction. But they do seem to have some crucially necessary, if obscure, role to play. Here I'm reminded of that paradoxical adage about the humanities, that although the humanities are to be studied and valued for their own sake and not for the sake of anything else, somehow this act of valuing them for their own sake brings with it real practical benefits, which aren't gained if one comes to them for the sake of those benefits.
It's the indirectness and unforeseeability of these benefits that makes the liberal arts both so ethically indispensable and so hard to defend in practical terms. And reflecting on this has helped me see my replacement of the news with poetry as something more than mere indulgence, as much preserving my social and political awareness as it is diminishing it, even if it'll never be clear-cut how exactly it does that.
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There has, however, been at least one straightforward benefit to all the reading I've been doing, which is a number of great recommendations to share in the remainder of this newsletter.
Before we get to those, though, one last life update: I recently launched a new website called Things Drake Has Rhymed, a tumblr devoted to cataloging the many things Drake has rhymed.
And while I don't know why, after seeing this tumblr, you'd still feel the need for anything else, here are some other arts & letters recommendations.
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WORDS // LONG FORM
Call Me By Your Name, by André Aciman This book. This book. Where had it been my whole life, how had I not even known of it till last December? Not only does it impeccably capture the phenomenology of desire – its logic, its ecstasy, its flight patterns and detours – but it also (as if that weren't enough) artfully arouses those same ecstatic feelings in its reader, directed back at itself. From page one I was smitten with this novel, then immediately covetous, then just as quickly self-doubting, then all the more decisively convinced; I wanted to take in the whole book at once, yet simultaneously for it never to end; soon I began feigning indifference, coolly putting it down for a while to, say, nonchalantly flick through my phone, knowing all the while that its pleasures would be all the more sweet, all the more intense, after even a brief separation; but eventually I could do nothing but give in and pounce on the novel yet again. This book is pretty much everything that I want a book to be.
Sidebar / shout-out: Though part of my interest in this book definitely came from all the attention it was getting from its recent film adaptation (which, incidentally, left me totally cold), I probably would not have actually picked up CMBYN were it not for the recommendation of Chiara, my fellow Stanford humanities TinyLetterer, who has written more eloquently about the novel than I could ever hope to. For this and other reasons, you should subscribe to her TinyLetter, too – or at least read her dope essay on Rupi Kaur.
Outline, by Rachel Cusk This novel is like a distillation of the literary imagination, consisting almost entirely of acute observation and careful attention, untethered from the confines of action and plot. On its surface it is a series of conversations between its narrator, Faye, and the people, mostly men, she encounters while on a work trip to Athens. Underneath it is a novel of searing images and a meticulous dissection of human relationships. At its heart, Outline is about watching the multifarious ways in which a woman is ignored, misunderstood, and idealized by others. After 250 pages of this, the novel's final exchange – of Faye politely declining a man's invitation, correcting his malapropism, and getting him to admit to his error – felt positively triumphant.
And in (what is perhaps just a continuation of) the "no news to anyone" department, two other books that I finally got around to reading this winter, George Saunders's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, were just as excellent as everyone always said they'd be.
WORDS // SHORT FORM
"Does anyone have the right to sex?" by Amia Srinivasan A model of what public writing by philosophers can and should be. In this essay, Srinivasan takes on the tangled web of feminist thinking about sex and provides an account, as she herself aptly described it, of "what a political critique of sexual desire can and should look like – one that avoids authoritarian moralism, but nonetheless takes seriously that who and what we sexually desire is often shaped by oppression." The piece is commendable enough for its trenchant synopsis of decades of feminist philosophy, but the view Srinivasan articulates makes it essential reading.
"When Deportation is a Death Sentence" / "No Refuge" by Sarah Stillman Whatever you already think about the state of deportation in this country, this article will assure you that it's even worse than you imagine.
(This piece is nicely supplemented with this recent This American Life episode, which offers an up-close look at today's immigration courts, and this not-so-recent This American Life episode, which offers an up-close look at what it's like to be a Border Patrol agent.)
"When Barbie Went to War with Bratz" / "Valley of the Dolls" by Jill Lepore A tour de force from Lepore: erudite, wide-ranging, funny, and insightful. A perfect example of how to see the present world in a grain of historical sand.
(And while I'm at it, this piece is nicely supplemented with this recent This American Life episode, their #MeToo contribution, which is also a testament to what slow journalism can still add to an already well worn topic.)
"Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet" / "Antisocial Media" by Andrew Marantz And talking about media fatigue... Andrew Marantz has been churning out article after killer article this past year on new media and the alt-right. This piece is his latest, and quite possibly his best. Marantz takes a deep dive into Reddit, treating it, rightly, as a synecdoche for the Internet at large. There is an unfortunate, though typical, air of presentism to the whole discussion (Marantz asks, centrally, "Is it possible [for social media networks] to facilitate a space for open dialogue without also facilitating hoaxes, harassment, and threats of violence?" – but the real question is, Has this ever been possible?); but the piece still manages to beautifully portray the plain yet critical truth that "[s]ocial networks, no matter how big they get or how familiar they seem, are not ineluctable forces but experimental technologies built by human beings. We can tell ourselves that these human beings aren't gatekeepers, or that they have cleansed themselves of all bias and emotion, but this would have no relation to reality."
SOUNDS // EXTENDED PLAYS
Charli XCX (ft. Tove Lo & ALMA), "Out Of My Head" Listening to Pop 2, Charli XCX's latest mixtape, feels like you've entered into the deep end of pop music and the lifeguard just went off duty. "Out Of My Head" is probably the mixtape's most approachable song, and it's hella catchy while still managing to squeeze in a post-post-modern post-chorus and a sweet back-up jungle squawk.
Helena Deland, "There Are a Thousand" An indie gem. This song would be more than good enough if it just stayed within the confines of its dreamy folk-jazz verse, but it reaches a whole 'nother level with the unexpected turn it takes in its chorus, which modulates down two steps and blows the whole thing open.
serpentwithfeet, "bless ur heart" Soulful, tender, electrifying. This song starts like a slant rhyme on Moses Sumney but ends up sounding like nothing but itself.
SOUNDS // LONG PLAYS
Faye Webster, Faye Webster This record dropped in May of last year but I had heard nothing of it until the start of this year, when I saw it way high up on Gorilla vs. Bear's Albums of '17 list. They summed it up perfectly: "Like a millennial’s modern re-imagining of Tapestry — with a lot more slide guitar — as filtered through the lens of a teenage hip-hop photographer from Atlanta." 'Nuff said.
Kacey Musgraves, Golden Hour Country pop at its finest. 'Nuff said.
DRINKS // MIXED
Regarding Cocktails by Sasha Petraske & co. is one of the finest books of its kind. Precise and elegant recipes, rules of decorum, and a beautiful layout, replete with handy infographics (this is a cocktail book by Phaidon, y'all). The book is a celebration of Milk & Honey, the legendary NYC cocktail bar; but more than that it is a touching tribute to the bar's late founder and mastermind Sasha Petraske, who virtually invented modern cocktail culture as we know it. If you're at all interested in cocktails, you have to own this book; but if you're not already convinced, here's a recipe to win you over:
Oaxacanite
1 oz. tequila blanco
1 oz. mezcal
¾ oz. lime juice
¾ oz. honey syrup (3 parts honey + 1 part hot water, chilled)
scant ½ tsp. Angostura bitters
a 2" grapefruit twist
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Add one large ice cube and shake vigorously until the drink is sufficiently chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe.
A PARTING PHOTOGRAPH
Untitled (Arrowhead Provincial Park)
Till next time,
W