Cristof de Loet

[Sharon] Olds still writes by hand, in cheap spiral-bound notebooks. When she’s really humming, she can fill a whole notebook in just a few days. Only a small fraction of this private writing will ever be published. Publication, for Olds, is not entirely the point. The act of writing itself, she insists, is fun — a physical discipline that sits somewhere between drawing and dancing. Olds writes searchingly, as a way to think and feel herself through the world. In her apartment, she told me that she had written, just that morning, a poem partly inspired by her feelings about our upcoming conversation. “Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that,” she said.

When Olds finishes a notebook, she gets very organized. (“I’m kind of a fussbudget,” she says.) She records its start and end dates. She creates an index. She reads the material over and over, dog-earing pages. In this way, she builds up a huge archive of thinking and feeling; although her finished books tend to be slim, they carry inside them, hidden like dark matter, the gravity of all the unpublished writing that helped make them possible.

—Sam Anderson
—from Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate [archive]

I don’t write seriously anymore, but I lovingly, longingly remember the feelings of the first paragraph, and wish I had (once) had the discipline of the second.

You know a cover of “Stairway to Heaven” has to be hella good for me to share it. 🎵

“If you’ve never seen a handfish before, imagine dipping a toad in some brightly coloured paint, telling it a sad story, and forcing it to wear gloves two sizes too big.”

—from Twenty-one red handfish hatched in successful Tasmanian conservation breeding program [archive]

I am finished — not altogether, but largely, I think — with political and cultural disputation. I want to write about works of art that transcend the box-checking, that thwart easy dismissals, that shake us up.

—Alan Jacobs in art for humanity’s sake [archive]

I love to hear it. The Daniel Walden piece from which Jacobs draws his opening quote from is worth reading in whole as well (the example of Max Meyer’s ideologically-driven “criticism” would be laughable if it weren’t accepted uncritically by those of the same political persuasion, so it is instead egregious).

Some guy from a neighborhood that had to have resembled mine once said, “The pessimist sees a pile of horseshit and thinks that’s all there is. The optimist thinks that if there is enough horseshit around, there must be a pony someplace.” And sometimes the plot in which we find ourselves requires us to become our own pony.

—Normal Lear (RIP)
—found in Even This I Get to Experience

…the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

—David Foster Wallace
—from “Incarnations of Burned Children”
—found in Oblivion: Stories

It’s gratifying to see so many “blogging is coming back!” posts. I miss those old days before social media and crowd-pleasing signaling took over. Now I hope this movement gains some real ground with folks outside the technosphere.

But look again, and you’ll notice that the middle class of podcasting—between the tech conglomerates and the dudes-in-basements crowd—is doing just fine. Unfortunately, for tech companies and the companies funding serious audio journalism, fine might not be good enough.

—Scott Nover
—from “The Casualties of the Podcasting Bloodbath” [archive]

And we are homeward bound

And I

I want this more than life
I want this more than life
I want this more than life
To touch something real

—from “More Than Life” by Whitley

I try hard to suppress my scorn for Tesla drivers because maybe it’s not their fault. But anyone who drives a Tesla Cybertruck has no excuses. Just replace “bumper stickers” (which I don’t mind) with “Cybertrucks” in Demetri Martin’s joke and you have my feelings:

A lot of people don’t like bumper stickers. I don’t mind bumper stickers. To me a bumper sticker is a shortcut. It’s like a little sign that says ‘Hey, let’s never hang out.’

Alan Jacobs writes:

…you come to understand that by “everything” they don’t mean everything, and by “broken” they don’t mean broken. They mean something like “Our dominant political and cultural institutions don’t function nearly as well as they should.” But that doesn’t sound as interesting, does it? “Everything is broken” is not a defined claim; still less is it an argument. It’s a cry of frustration.

And? Or should I say, so?

I get Jacobs' drift, but how many readers don’t see how the terms are employed for rhetorical effect? How many think these pieces are intending to provide prescriptions?

Most saliently, given that not everything is intended to pose a solution (there are many other possible objectives behind such pieces), at what point does something function insufficiently well that it can be considered broken? And there is a point unless one wants to use some prescriptivist etymological argument about the term along the lines of “proper” use of the term “severed,” which I find unpersuasive in either case.

Currently reading: The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson) 📚

Currently reading: The Sixth Directorate by Joseph Hone 📚

And while I don’t want to bring back the blogosphere, I definitely want to bring back the blog.

Now that the white-hot fire of Twitter is burning itself out, and its various alternatives (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon) are generating merely gentle (or sputtering) flames, and TikTok (which is not a social-media site in any meaningful sense but rather a media-consumption platform) is still going nova, this is the time for people to rediscover the pleasures of blogging – of writing at whatever length you want, and posting photos, and embedding videos, and linking to music playlists, all on your little corner of the internet.

—Alan Jacobs
—found in bring back the blog (archive)

Artists who served time have told me they’ve seen how their work can break this cycle, cutting past prejudices and helping other people see them as capable of redemption. “If we experience the art being created in those spaces,” Hughes said, “we will know, ‘These are human beings, and we need to rethink whether we should be throwing them away.’”

There are, of course, some in prison who don’t appear to be contrite after harming others, but in my decade of visiting prisons, I’ve found they are the exception; American prisons are full of earnest attempts at redemption.

(This matches my experience in both jails and prisons. Some mock they are full of innocent people. And that is a claim too common to be true. But there are also many who are honestly trying to find a new path…and, strangely, both of those things can be true within the same person.)

There are hopeful signs that our prison system could return to seeing music as a way to maintain hope inside — and prepare society to accept the people they’re going to release. In 2020, men at San Quentin State Prison were given clearance to release a stellar mixtape, while others were featured on “Ear Hustle,” the popular podcast made in the facility. One of the podcast’s hosts, Earlonne Woods, told me that a good prison artist, like the formerly incarcerated rapper Antwan Banks Williams, gives voice to the emotions that lots of people are experiencing inside.

—Maurice Chammah
—found in Redemption Songs: The Forgotten History of American Prison Music (archive)

For years, Albini had always believed himself to have airtight artistic and political motivations behind his offensive music and public statements. But as he observed others in the scene who seemed to luxuriate in being crass and offensive, who seemed to really believe the stuff they were saying, he began to reconsider. “That was the beginning of a sort of awakening in me,” he said. “When you realise that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side.”

—Jeremy Gordon
—found in The evolution of Steve Albini (archive)

Living in a privately rented home is linked to more rapid biological ageing, according to researchers who tested DNA and found the tenure is associated with twice the ageing effect of obesity and half that of smoking.

—Robert Booth
—found in Living in privately rented homes linked to faster biological ageing, study finds (archive)

Depression of the sort I suffer from has all the characteristics of a chronic, terminal illness. Why isn’t it treated as such?

Of the thousands of podcasts I’ve subscribed to over the years, and the 230+ I subscribe to now, I listen to every episode of only a handful. Now Spotify has shuttered two of them of at once: Heavyweight and Stolen.

Coincidentally, Heavyweight was just listed in the NYT’s “Best Podcasts of 2023” (archive link). Oh, and did I mention that Stolen won a Pulitzer and a Peabody?

I’ve been a Spotify podcast refusenik since they started their attempted hostile takeover of the open ecosystem. I’ve never listened to a single episode of any show limited to the platform (including Heavyweight, while it was limited to the platform).

I moved my streaming music listening to Tidal. Though streaming is problematic for most musical artists, so I most often listen to music from my own collection, 750 gigs of digitized CDs and LPs I’ve been curating since the long ago days of digital yore.

I don’t understand how more folks aren’t terrified by the insidious, evil Project 2025. This is the kind of stuff that paves the way to theocracy.