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“To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible. . . . Perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent… On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lies the freedom of art.”

#FebruaryHopefuls stack (thanks @concerningnovels for the idea!) in addition to some fun audiobook stroll-and-listen titles I picked up in the nonfiction world (Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order and Empire of Pain by Patrick Keefe about the Sackler family), and a book that’s in transit (Donna Tart’s Secret History). What are your February reads looking like? February is a short month, but even if it weren’t, these are titles I’m just starting/trying to make progress on this month and having trickle into other months. These sparked my interest because: —Borges, well because he’s Borges. —Proust to continue journey up Mt. Proust —Suite Francaise, to couple with a lovely film adaptation I had seen —Turgenev as an ode to the month of amour —Jung because he’s been circulating in some of the podcasts I’ve been listening to recently —Tartt was recommended —Fukuyama because I miss political science —Sackler family was a random pick

new month, new books. Happy February, lovely ones. What do you have planned for this month? Any interesting trips? Books? Films or shows to watch? Hobbies or work to dig into? Something I’m thinking about this week: What is a worthwhile gift? Perhaps one answer would be — show children what you love, show children who you are: “There was a man who would come every week to sculpt in front of the kids. The director said, ‘I don’t want you to teach sculpting, I want you to do what you do and love it in front of the children.’ During that year, clay was never used more imaginatively, before or after…. A great gift of any adult to a child, it seems to me, is to love what you do in front of the child. I mean, if you love to bicycle, if you love to repair things, do that in front of the children. Let them catch the attitude that that’s fun. Because you know, attitudes are caught, not taught.” — Fred Rogers Because you don’t want the situation songwriter Bill Callahan shared in this interview: “I never understood her [Bill’s mother] . . . . And I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life. As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it. So now she’s still just an unfinished person for me. . . . We only have this time, each of us, 70 or 80 years, if we’re lucky. What’s the point of hiding?”

“We might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first Tolstoy; second Gogol; third Chekhov; fourth Turgenev. This is rather like grading students’ papers and no doubt Dostoevsky and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.” — Nabokov 🤦🏻‍♀️ In more important observations, anyone care to decipher the handwriting in the second photo? It’s been two years and I can’t for the life of me figure out what the second to last sentence is

This passage, where Mitya in Brothers Karamazov is made to undress during his investigation/deposition, how he is made to feel ostracized, wrecks me. His embarrassment with regard to his unsightly socks and undergarments. How “without his clothes on, he himself felt guilty before them, and above all, was himself almost ready to agree that he had suddenly become inferior to all of them and that now they had a perfect right to treat him with contempt.” Ah Dostoevsky, dissector of psychology like no other.

Newsletter dispatched this morning! In it, inter alia, I point to a few things I’ve been ruminating on over the week, among them being (1) a Tennessee school board banning Art Spiegelman’s comic book, Maus. I included a snippet of the author’s response by way of a bookmark he sent to a news channel reporting on the ban; and (2) George Saunders’ tender reflection on worry, where he writes that worry can paralyze us and leave us feeling like imposters, but it can also, if we turn the dial a bit, showcase our earnest wish to do that which we love and to do it beautifully. More on this and other thin(g/k)s by way of this week’s newsletter, link in bio!

Hello there, forever literary crush. (Ok, ok, second only to Fyodor Dostoevsky.) Having finished Sarah Bakewell’s snippets on Camus from her book At the Existentialist Cafe, I found myself yearning for more on the life of one of my favorite writers, Albert Camus. Hoping this book lives up to the effortless charm of the rebellious man in that photo—cigarette and collar and all. And hoping my French lessons @alliance_francaise_paris can get me to reading and understanding Camus in French some day. Swoon. Who are some of your favorite writers? Creatives? In other news, my 2022 agenda book and notebooks finally arrived. Here’s to more writing! ✨ I’m often asked what my favorite notebooks are. Believe me when I tell you it can be a distraction to ask that question. I’ve been there, the one asking for the perfect tools to get me to write more. The ‘thinking about writing’ portion of things got me no tangible results. So part of me hesitates to answer questions like that. Write with and on whatever you have in sight would in an ideal world be the answer. But my personal view on this aside, here are my two cents on things I enjoy using: I think Moleskine is overrated, and I prefer @leuchtturm1917, @roterfaden.de, and Tomoe River paper. I use @hobonichi1101 not strictly as an agenda book but as a place to dump my daily thoughts and notes and lists, to make room in my brain for non ‘remember this’ type of things. My actual schedule I run on is found on my phone’s calendar app. The rest of my brain is in notebooks and Notion.

“When you look at the night sky, and that sense of awe grips you and calls something out of you to respond to your encounter with the infinite, with mortality, with finitude and limitation, all of that in relationship to the infinite, that sense of awe is also the calling forth of something out of you that can respond to the challenge of that infinite. That’s the microcosm within. It’s a reflection of the structure of the cosmos itself. That’s the divine ideal. And we either imitate that or fail to imitate that or pursue the opposite path. Given our technological power and our capacity for wholesale atrocity, it’s time we woke up and realized that.” — Jordan Peterson at @oxford_uni A snippet from a musing I’m discussing over on my weekly newsletter, which will go out later today. Link in bio to subscribe 💌

I’ll talk more about this in my YouTube video, but there’s something magical about the idea that short stories can alleviate reading slumps. Confined to a small space, short stories must be scrupulous in the information they convey to ensure no detail has gone to waste when resolving readers’ expectations through what George Saunders calls a transfer of energy: “Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story … like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.” In a good story, a reader’s energy sources for continuing page to page—curiosity and care—are graciously hosted by a writer’s response to profound universal musings such as the reality of a lonely existence, a writer’s response to questions like, “What if a lonely person is unable to find a way out of her loneliness?” That happens to be the reality Anton Chekhov explores in an 11-page short story titled In the Horsecart. I’d like to offer the same exercise George Saunders suggests when he asks his students to understand why we keep reading, or how it is that we like a story enough to read the next line. I think the following can help jolt readers out of a reading slump: (1) Pick up the short story. Clear your mind - approach with a clean slate, a blank page, an empty canvas on which you’ll paint certain expectations from the writer, whose aim will be to respond to your expectations (hopefully in non-banal, unexpected of ways). These expectations will be unique to you, and they’ll depend on your attentiveness to what the writer lays out line to line. (2) At each page, pause to provide a brief summary (note, a good writer provides what Saunders describes as artillery fire: “an initial shot, followed by a series of adjustments for precision”); indicate what struck your curiosity and where you think the story is going. (3) Catch the part where the writer introduces the element of a great story, where a character’s life changes forever. That’s the profound moment writers and readers alike thrive on. That’s the good stuff. sustenance. Where your motivation to read can be found anew. And that’s where you climb out of your reading slump ;) Thoughts?

missing travel 🥺 this here is Hallstatt, Austria. Picturesque, quaint, winter bliss. Currently looking out the window at 75 degree weather and clear skies. For all the talk of Los Angeles having perfect weather, it rings truer when one adds to that the idea that perfection is boring. I’ve been yearning for seasons and visual changes that also bring with them a fresh lifting of spirit. Travel on my mine, this day is filled with daydreaming. Whereabouts are you daydreaming of? Any interesting current reads? Films? Musings? My weekly newsletter is out later this weekend; in it I share seven links to worthwhile thin(g/k)s. Link in bio to subscribe. Stay tuned!

new YouTube video (link in bio!), in which I share my elevator pitches for current January reads, talk about my reading spreadsheet for the year, and exhibit the result of all nighter sweat and tears spent creating and editing the video (so if you enjoy it, please like/comment/subscribe so I can justify my sleepless nights 🥴). Sending you midweek hugs — hope the week is shaping up to be whatever you need it to be. PS — for those on the journey up Mt. Proust, i highly recommend getting Paintings in Proust as a supplement!

“The whole of Proust’s world comes out of a teacup,” wrote Samuel Beckett. And we in volume two see it blossom into adolescence. “We must bear in mind that the character which a man exhibits in the latter half of his life is not always, though it often is, his original character developed or withered, attenuated or enlarged; it is sometimes the exact reverse, like a garment that has been turned,” Proust wrote in the opening pages of Within a Budding Grove. Sneaky thought, since a garment inside-out is still of the same fabric. How much we might owe, then, to our younger selves and the experiences in youth that come to shape us… The journey up Mt. Proust’s volume two is looking more and more exhilarating, made enjoyable by the reflective aphorisms Proust employs more so here than in the first volume. The first novel was observational; this one is a layer deeper. This read is also coupled with me having signed up for French language classes. I’m knee deep in pronunciation mistakes, but therein we find progress :))

Done with Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Cafe and already yearning for more of her writing, which clears the fog from some of philosophy’s more convoluted and nuanced elements. In this book, we find ourselves at the table with the likes of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. Edmund Husserl and others make appearances, too, as we dissect what phenomenology means (it has to do with “any ordinary thing or object as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality”). A snippet of what I’m pondering thanks to Bakewell and Sartre’s critique of Camus’ The Stranger: Sartre maintains experiences arrive already charged with meaning (this is where he differs from Camus, who treats the things around him as absurd by default), arguing that, say, we process a doorknob as just that. It becomes a meaningless object only when there’s something pathological at play. I’m still not quite sure with whom I’d agree. Instinctively, I have a softer spot for Camus. I mean, I look at some of the sports we’ve come up with and think, “What on earth…” 🙃 Still swooning and gathering my thoughts on Bakewell’s superb work here. ““…freedom may prove to be the great puzzle for the early twenty-first century…Science books and magazines bombard us with the news that we are out of control: that we amount to a mass of irrational but statistically predictable responses, veiled by the mere illusion of a conscious, governing mind...Reading such accounts, one gets the impression that we actually take pleasure in this idea of ourselves as out-of-control mechanical dupes of our own biology and environment. We claim to find it disturbing, but we might actually be taking a kind of reassurance from it—for such an idea lets us off the hook. They save us from the existential anxiety that comes with considering ourselves free agents who are responsible for what we do. Sartre would call that bad faith. Moreover, recent research suggests that those who have been encouraged to think they are unfree are inclined to behave less ethically, again suggesting that we take it as an alibi.”

I have reading goals for 2022, am scared of stretching myself too thin, but at the same time am feeling compelled to pile on to my reading list for the year just to keep up against the backdrop of all the ambitiously long lists and lofty reading challenges I’m seeing popping up everywhere like literary versions of New Year Resolutions. Are Goodreads reading challenges helpful? I’d love to know your thoughts. All it’s given me so far is pressure to read more. Wondering how to turn that kind of pressure from defeatist to motivating. One comforting thought accompanying the pressure to ‘read more’ I’ve experienced over the past few days is this… Whatever one’s reading goal: It’s better than nothing. A few pages today are better than nothing. A chapter this week is better than nothing. One book is better than nothing. I hope this mindset eases the anxiety we might develop as we see each other’s long lists of books to conquer for the new year. If you’re already struggling to keep up (I for sure am), these personal observations might make for a better reading experience: — Read better, not more. Quantity does not equal quality. I’d be way more impressed if someone were to share with me their experience of reading one book, how it moved them beyond what they could have imagined, how it challenged or shaped them, than I would be if someone were to tell me they read 75 books in a given year and left it at that. I’d like to adopt that approach for myself to minimize the fuss over number of books read. — Reading in uninterrupted blocks of time is a game changer. — If not possible to dedicate chunks of time due to schedule constraints, tweaks like audiobooks and Kindle help act as reinforcement troops. Often, jumping from book to audio to kindle etc. helps shake off reading stress and managing tasks. As does patience with ourselves. ♥️ Happy *better* reading! Or *more* reading, if that’s your style! Regardless, happy reading! May it be enjoyable and enriching this year ♥️

Here we are, having turned the leaf to a new chapter, having greeted 2022 with a nod to the passage of time, from one year to a new one. I am so incredibly excited. As I was compiling my list of ‘things that made my year in 2021’ over the past few days, I was fixated on how the past year felt like a blurred continuation of the year before it. And how both my body and my mind felt curled up in the corner of a couch. How eager I’ve been lately for a good stretch — mentally and physically. How ready I am to expand on projects and goals and creative endeavors. Onward, we go! I finished reading via @audible an Oppenheimer biography. So well executed! I’m adding my book notes to my newsletter and upcoming YouTube video (links in bio to subscribe!), but for now, the gist of my reaction is thus: Like Prometheus, Oppenheimer managed to capture ‘the sun’ for his country and ended up falling victim to political hysteria — his trajectory led me to questions like ‘what accounts for scientific progress? Do we find science easily tainted by politics? To what extent was Oppenheimer a hero? A villain? Merely human? These Qs hold relevance in our crazy world today. Next on my list: Open, an autobiography by tennis giant Andre Agassi. More Russian and classic lit. The second volume of the Proust behemoth. And more! I want this year to be the best one yet in terms of stretching my creative muscles, writing, reading the most I’ve ever read in a given year, feeling curious and inquisitive and leaning into more depth of knowledge and moving my body more and toning my muscles (actual and otherwise). I don’t yet have a roadmap, but the enthusiasm and disciplined focus are there. Hopefully the rest falls into place. As the cover of my journal reminded me today, “Whatever should have been, is.” There’s an interesting sense of motivation and satisfaction bundled up in that worldview. Also! Film update: floored by Cillian Murphy’s performances in Peacock and in Breakfast on Pluto. Send meeeeee more movie recs, please! I love good films. Your turn! What are you excited to stretch and expand this year? What are your reading plans? Any good movies? Lots of love to you, Ani