reading/writing: how to herd your attention

Yu Nishimura, Cat's Family, 2018

Reading:

1. I watched all four hours of the Reesa Teesa TikTok series “Who TF did I Marry” and it’s amazing. This is a recap but what you need to do is go to TikTok and put it on 2x and listen to all 52 parts (lol) while you work out. Or just watch it like a movie.

2. On Marquis de Sade’s wife:

   One cannot decipher it through traditional concepts of wifely love, for her fixation on Sade far transcended most such attachments and makes the usual marital loyalties seem prosaic. Like an exemplary Christian whose love for a sinner must be as vast as the sinner’s transgressions, she seems to have felt that if Sade became a monster of immorality she must all the more become a paragon of devotion.

3. This wonderful interview with Merve Emre: “You don't have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism that's about a book like Liars, and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.” I keep thinking about this part:

   So then there's the good version of autofiction, which is, if you are someone who is breaking down, the world around you is spinning and spinning and spinning, it's no longer recognizable to you; where there was meaning in your life, now, there is only nothingness. What this gives you is a peculiar kind of freedom. It's the freedom to choose who you want to be. And all of her characters have this moment where they realize, ‘Oh, I am a character. I can be a character. I can make myself up as a character. And, as a character, I can choose which genre my life gets to participate in.’ That's the good version of autofiction, which again, I don't think most people realize, which is when you have become so estranged from your life that it no longer looks like reality, you win from it a freedom that lets you become who you are, and to write who you want to be into existence.

4. Or, you know, you can just write an essay about your divorce like Emily Gould did. I love her writing and have been reading her old blog posts here.

5. This article on Alex Cooper (of Call Her Daddy fame) and her husband was interesting to me.

   Their romance is inextricable from their jobs. They love to work and rarely stop. In her downtime, Ms. Cooper, who studied film and television at Boston University, will read through Mr. Kaplan’s scripts and give notes. He was recently in London filming a movie called “Jingle Bell Heist” and in Montenegro filming a thriller called “Family Secrets.” A time-travel slasher movie, “Time Cut,” is coming to Netflix.

   They met on Zoom in 2020, while Ms. Cooper was taking meetings about turning “Call Her Daddy” into a television show. At the time, he advised her to stay focused on the podcast. (Now, they’re developing a documentary together.)

Writing

Here’s a typical Friday for me:

9 AM: Take Akko out on walk, get coffee from Sightglass, come back and open my laptop and check Twitter, TikTok, whatever before I properly start the day.

10 AM-1 PM: Writing

1-3 PM: Browse the Internet, do chores around the house, reply to emails, read, call friends, whatever. I generally try to finish something (like a post, or a chapter) before I break so I can feel like I’m rewarding myself for being productive.

3-5 PM: Writing

5 PM onwards: Work out, take Akko on another walk, get dinner. I’ll sometimes write in the evening if I’m not hanging out with a friend, otherwise I’ll watch a movie or do the crossword or something.

As you can see, I don’t have meetings or Slack or anything that provides external accountability, which works for me but took some time to learn how to manage. When no one’s watching over you, it’s very tempting to read articles or browse social media or online shop, and you can sort of fritter away literally all of your time doing that, and then end up Hating Yourself because you’ve Failed to Be Productive way too many days in a row.