Head of a Woman Reading

There is no beauty without a public. I listened to this podcast episode with Andrea Long Chu recently. She talked about the role of the critic, what it means to dislike things, and the subjectivity of beauty. The above quote really struck me in its simplicity. She was talking about theoretical approaches to beauty (lots of name dropping Kant), something along the lines of beauty only exists such that you feel the need to tell someone else that you think something is beautiful--the "compulsion to speak about it." This line made me meditate much more personally about my own loneliness, though. I told a therapist several years ago that sometimes I just wanted someone to be in cahoots with, to conspire with. I find it very hard to act on my desires sometimes without someone else to spurn my momentum. It's usually the small, everyday things. I think to myself, "Ooh I've really been craving chocolate chip cookies." And then the thought passes and I never make ch...

I lamented to a friend recently, that I felt like I had all these ideas for blog posts, but to do them right I needed more time to re-watch films, and browse through theory, and really think about the connections I wanted to make. We'd been having an ongoing conversation on embracing slowness when creating. Suddenly, though, she switched gears. "All this talk about slowness also makes me think about how fun it is to sometimes make work really fast." The idea of slowness was kind of eye-opening for me to begin with--I think I always want the finished product to arrive faster so projects that go too slow end up feeling like a failure, but also that's capitalism sucking the juices from my brain again. And the she hits me with the joy of working really fast. Speed feels like an artist thing, but maybe it can be a writer thing too. Really, it's a kind of shitty first draft tactic, perfection is the enemy of good and all that. Ever the realist, I imagine it's a kind...

I find myself in a new place once again. For someone who prefers to play it safe, I keep finding myself in unfamiliar places again and again. As much as it feels more like anxiety than possibility, I am trying my best to bend the newness into something generative. I'm also overflowing with spaces: two offices at my job and a perfect little office nook at my apartment. For once, I feel like I can compartmentalize my writing. I'll even be able to mostly reserve my laptop for my own writing and keep "work" at work. I've really tried hard to make my personal writing spaces as aesthetically pleasing as possible. It wasn't too hard given that I came back from Germany with a stack full of art postcards. Here's my desk space:  Since I find it hard to balance critical writing and creative writing and want to find time for both, I really tried to make this space inspirational to both. My sweet spot seems to be modernist surrealism because it hits at the historical/c...