I came home Christmas week after my second residency teaching at Antioch MFA and promptly got sick. I thought it was another stress cold (do you ever get those, when you somehow manage to hold it together just until a big project is finished?) but then the cold lingered, and worsened, and I spent many an afternoon doing what I would normally do except from bed.
No complaints, really. But that I’m sending this Sunday letter on an actual Sunday for a change (instead of Monday or Tuesday) is maybe a sign that I’ve shaken the cold, and hopefully also an auspicious start to the year.
When Julia and I were talking, over a card game last night, about our goals for the year, I offered this for my creative life: to finish a full draft of a big project, be it a novel or … something else. I’m just, at least for now, leaving the doors open for the something else.
Last month I dusted off my tech-essay writing breeches and penned this piece for Every about what becomes valuable when AI makes creative work “easy” (gift link). I pond-hop from Jack White to The Princess Bride to competitive gaming and Jorges Luis Borges and, of course, Chris Alexander.
This month my Antioch mentees and I are reading Karen Russell’s The Antidote, and of the many things I already love (I’m halfway through), I think I love most its atmosphere. The main storyline is set in 1930s dust bowl Nebraska, which I find to be a satisfying mirror image of the wet and feral Everglades setting of her last full-length novel Swamplandia. A real Tatooine/Hoth/Endor swing, a Lucasian move. Only made better by the fact that Russell’s two books aren’t of a series. The Antidote is sequel of spirit and setting.
Speaking of games, the card game mentioned at the top is Courtisans, to which my cousin Shaun introduced us over the holiday. Super-easy to set up and learn (a must for our feeble new-parent brains) and surprisingly dynamic even with two people. You play as attendees of a medieval royal banquet, casting cards, some in secret and others in the open, for or against six different families to try to put then in or out of favor with the Queen. Game of Thrones with far less gore.
I’m also finally playing the video game Sea of Stars, which was recommended to me by multiple people and is inspired by JRPG classics like Chrono Trigger. The last time I gamed was shortly after Rufus was born, and I needed a light-mental-load activity for when he was asleep in my arms. Sea of Stars is just about the coziest take on those Japanese originals.
Train Dreams is possibly the most ideal role for Joel Edgerton’s sad, frost-blue eyes. The film’s also beautiful, devastating, devastatingly beautiful. To come up with its look, the director and cinematographer took inspiration from colorized black-and-white photos of 19th century rail workers. Glimmers of Terrence Malick, too.
Tim Hartford’s year-end column in FT Weekend, which you can also read here (h/t Varsha), shouts out Stewart Brand’s new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, which I now have on pre-order. Hartford:
[G]ood maintenance is often nothing like the chore of brushing teeth and washing dishes, but an intellectually demanding task requiring knowledge, intelligence and curiosity. To repair a complex object requires patient problem solving and the diligent discovery of hidden trouble. It is an act of mastery.
Brand’s How Buildings Learn is a personal touchstone (though I seem to have lost my copy in a move). This new book is published by Stripe Press, an obvious perfect fit. Brand also worked on the book out in the open, as a pilot of Books in Progress, a “public drafting tool” made in collaboration with the magazine Works in Progress.
You see this with “early-access” for indie video games but not nearly as much with books – at least not in such a formalized way. Though maybe there is a certain kind of generous, expansive, non-fictional book that’s best suited for the format. Exactly the kind of book that Stewart Brand would write.
Might this be a good time to mention that January’s Digital Mending Circle will be next Tuesday, January 13, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern? Come join our small crew as we work on
the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.
Reply for the Zoom link, if you don’t already have it.
Speaking of ideal niche publishers: For Christmas Julia gifted me Hey Kids, Watch This! after I repeatedly talked throughout the year how I cannot wait to watch childhood favorite movies with Rufus. The book’s organized by age range, with a great mix of shorts and features, animation and live-action, and indie/international and less-obvious big-studio titles.
A couple things: 1) Book product pages showing interior print spreads should be standard practice, regardless of book or genre. I especially want it for pulpy trade paperbacks so it’s clear when I’m getting into a sardine typography situation.
And 2) I didn’t realize A24’s publishing arm was so extensive, that in addition to their beautifully formatted screenplays they published titles on directors’ sartorial tastes, compendiums on cool movie merch, picture books and The Daniels’ A Vast Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur, and quarterly zines mailed to you via their membership program.
Someone on a panel I was on once called this, quite aptly, “The A24 Industrial Complex.”
I love Jasper Nighthawk’s practice of reading a Big Winter Book:
A big winter book should be full of mood and perhaps some textual difficulty. Reading this particular book might feel a bit ambitious. Maybe you usually don’t read books this long or this demanding. But it’s winter, you don’t have so many other demands on your time and attention. You can tackle a big winter book, promise yourself to it, give yourself over to it.
The hope is that reading your big winter book will be enough of an experience that it will mark out a minor era in your life. You might even later look back and remember, “Oh yeah, that was the year I read that book.”
It’s just the kind of thing to pass the time while holed up with comrades in your own winter keep.
To close – I am, as of January 1st, officially a Michigan State University Extension Master Gardener, which is a fancy title that means I continue to learn a lot about plants.
And that, apparently, is my “speaking of” link to Joel Edgerton.
Buon anno,
Jack