One Year Later + Monthly Musings
The newsletter turns one, and notes on what I'm reading, listening to, and thinking about lately.
A year ago I set out to publish a newsletter at least once a month — short stories, essays, book reviews, travel diaries. Whatever I felt like writing, I would write it. And then publish it. I had no tool to “measure success,” to borrow a phrase from my days in tech. I just told myself that if I published something at least once a month, that was good enough for me. In the meantime, I’d consider graduate school for creative writing, also known as an MFA. Fast forward a year and eleven applications later, and I’m still writing. Though I did miss a post in February. We can blame fewer days in the month.
I’m still waiting on all the graduate school decisions to come in, so I’ll save my thoughts on that for another post. But for now, a year later, I’m celebrating the fact that this newsletter still exists. Truly a miracle in its own right.
It occurred to me on my run today, feeling guilty about not publishing a newsletter in February, that I needed to give myself a break. Not from publishing, but from failing to meet a arbitrary goal of publishing at least monthly. As some readers know, I write every morning, almost without fail. The vast majority of that writing has been toward my first book, which I will discuss in the future. It requires exactly as much time and effort as I thought it would. Which is a good thing, I guess, considering how many authors I’ve read about struggling for a decade on a single book. But then again, mine is not finished, and I’ve never published a book.
Anyway, as I was saying, it occurred to me out in the hot sun today, just how much I don’t write about. How often I think about the certain chords of a song that force me to put the song on repeat. How some movies suck me in before I even realize two hours have passed. How, lately, I’ve wanted to tell everyone, to include the grocery stork clerk at Foodland Farms, about the books I’m reading. And then it dawned on me: just put it in the newsletter.
So today marks the first “Musings” post, where I write flash features on whatever I’ve been thinking about recently. As nothing in life anymore is original, I’d be remiss not to mention that my subconscious probably came up with this idea after reading a number of pages in New York Sketches by E.B. White, a McNally Editions book I received last quarter, where the author details the sights and sounds of New York in bite-sized stories.
As always, thanks for reading.
Movies & Music
Every Saturday as a kid — for at least a year or two, I really can’t remember — my mother drove me to acting classes an hour and a half south to Birmingham, Ala. I’d rehearse whatever monologue or commercial I’d been working on out loud in the car to her, something I hated more than almost anything else in life. I’d rather stand on a stage and perform in front of a thousand strangers than go into character in front of someone I knew, especially a relative. There’s the comfort of anonymity in strangers. In family and friends, I’d have to see them again. What would they think of my performance? Would they reference it in later conversations? Would they hold it over me as future ammo during inevitable arguments? Weakness. I couldn’t show weakness.
We’re not diving into the psychology there; that’s for another post. But I learned a lot in those classes. For starters, how to project your voice. For a couple hours each weekend, we’d rotate standing in front of the class and practice our monologues and commercials. When a scene came up that required us to show anger, it never failed that most of us would raise our voices, yelling our lines out at those sitting just inches from where we stood.
Stop, one coach would say. You don’t need to yell. You can act and show anger without raising your voice so much. For some reason, that uninspiring comment stuck with me, to the point where I can’t watch movies to this day without thinking of him every time I hear an actor raise her voice just because she’s angry.
I thought of that feedback last night while watching the Oscar-nominated film, Anora, where most of the movie felt like the sister production of Uncut Gems. I say that as someone who enjoyed both films. Though, my god, the yelling.
Anora follows an exotic dancer, Ani, whose actual name is Anora, through what seems like several hectic days. Ani picks up a new client, the young son of a Russian oligarch, at which point hell breaks loose, as does the yelling. Whether it wins the Oscar is anyone’s guess, but I couldn’t stop watching.
Speaking of shouting into the ether. On a run this afternoon (pictured above) on the west side of O’ahu, I couldn’t get a handful of songs out of my head, all of which I wanted to shout as I ran. For obvious reasons, to include not getting shoved off the cliff that I ran along, I did not do that. But somehow, every song Royel Otis creates sounds like every great new wave rock song I’ve ever loved. Named for the two members of the Australian band, Royel Maddell and Otis Pavlovic sound like both cityscape pop and beachfront psychedelic twined into music that can’t be unremembered. In other words, pure bliss in an indie-adjacent genre. Though “Oysters In My Pocket” originally turned me on to them, give “IHYSM” or “Sofa King” or “Merry Mary Marry Me” or “If Our Love Is Dead” a listen and tell me I’m wrong.
If you’ve already listened to everything Royel Otis has put out and you need a break, I get it. Del Water Gap might fill the [insert gap reference here] in your Spotify queue. Samuel Holden Jaffe is the one-man band behind the music. Though “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” put him on the map, “All We Ever Do Is Talk” is destined for my end-of-year Top 5 list. And for what it’s worth, I could say this about much of his music, but “Doll House” sounds like the song you turn on in the car when the sun falls out of sight about six minutes past sunset. The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” also does that for me, but I think that had more to do with Rush Hour 2 featuring the remake of that song during an actual post-sunset driving scene (“I’ll Be Missing You” for the un-informed). There’s a similar chord in all three songs, but my single year of piano lessons a few years back didn’t teach it to me.
Books and Articles
Some days, exhausted from work, I can do nothing more than plop down on the couch and scroll through the news on my iPad. On the good days, I make a gin-based drink and move only once the sun goes down. That was the case last week when I came across “The Teacher in Room 1214” in the New York Times. For nearly 20 minutes I read the article through blurry eyes, wiping tears away every few minutes so I could finish the piece. So much of the story hit me that, after reading the comments, I realized resonated with nearly every other reader, too. It’s a habit now that after I finish reading something I open the comments section to see what everyone else has to say. It’s like supplementary material to the piece, though I never comment myself. Much of the time the comments are enlightening. Only occasionally do people show their true colors. That’s in part due to the fact that the Times regulates comments to avoid some of the filth that ends up on social media. But to a large degree, a full spectrum of opinion still thrives.
Ivy Schamis, the teacher featured in the story, deserves so much more than what she received in support from the school district and our government. For some reason, that’s only obvious to the readers of the article, instead of the decision makers responsible for taking care of their people.
As readers of this newsletter may note, I tend to lean toward books and stories with more tragic arcs (consider that when I tell you that my favorite book is still A Little Life). Occasionally, I like stories with a happily ever after. But life is rarely a fairytale, so I rarely read about them. I’m a quarter of the way through The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I’m embarrassed by how long it’s taken me to read this book, considering how popular it was when it came out in 2014. I’m even more embarrassed by the reason. Years ago, at the start of COVID, I decided to watch the movie instead of reading the book. For those who’ve read the story and watched the movie, you already know how terrible of a decision that was. I fell asleep on the couch while watching it, only to wake up to the movie still playing for what felt like hours later. That’s probably a little harsh, but the book grabbed my attention from the first paragraph, and I haven’t given up yet.
Last week I finished a book with more plot twists than any other I can think of in recent memory. Child 44, a book by Tom Rob Smith, follows the investigation of a child murderer in Russia by someone with a lot to lose and very little to gain. I won’t spoil the plot, but the book is just #1 in a trilogy, so whenever I finish the slog through the remaining thousand pages of The Goldfinch, I’ll attempt the second in the series.
Finally, for those who enjoy longer reads, I recently sat on my lanai and read about the history of the island I currently inhabit. A piece in December’s The Atlantic magazine discussed the small group of Hawaiians who continue to fight for the Hawai’i of long ago. It was an eye opening article. One fact I learned: the island of Niʻihau, nicknamed “the forbidden island,” is privately owned. It gets its nickname from the simple fact that no one is allowed to visit the island without a personal invitation from one of the two men who own it, great-great grandsons of the Scot who the king sold it to in the 1800s. As the article mentions, it’s the only place in the world where everyone still speaks Hawaiian. But for all the fuss about Larry Ellison owning the island of Lanai, I never hear controversy about access to Niʻihau. It’s just an accepted reality.
And speaking of reality, the sad bit of it is that half of what I want to write about occurs to me in the shower or while driving down the road, two places where writing down thoughts and ideas would prove difficult, if not dangerous. But I’ll work on it — remembering, I mean. Not writing under the shower head or causing a wreck on the poorly-paved roads of Honolulu.
Until next time.