One result of the pandemic is that I’m actually able to attend author events at the same frequency I did before I had children. Last week I watched Edward Carey discuss writing and drawing his re-telling of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale, The Swallowed Man (and one of my favorite reads of last spring), while highlighting treasures from the Ransom Center here in Austin, Texas. (You can watch the whole talk on YouTube.) Here are my notes:
A few nights ago I had a glass of wine and doodled while I watched Mary Karr interview James Martin about his new book, Learning To Pray:
Once upon a time, before Martin’s newest book, I asked Karr for a reading list on prayer and she obliged:
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Musician James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem has taken up fishing during the pandemic.
“I’m somehow able to get outside myself,” he says, “unburdened for a few hours by whatever it is I really should be doing, while I, instead, do this repeated motion, over and over…”
He says that there’s “a meditative quality to the work” and he often repeats to himself, “Slow is fast. Slow is fast.”
“I needed for time to be meaningless so I could justify spending a few weeks learning how to do this new thing.”
It tickles me that he talks about learning to fish the way some people would talk about learning to play music.
I’m also thinking, well beyond the pandemic, we can declare time “meaningless” any time we want, and give ourself permission to learn new things…
Filed under: fishing
My kids — 5 and 8 — are way too big for the double stroller, so a few weeks ago, my wife and I decided to start doing solo walks. I started commuting on foot from our house to the apartment we used to rent, which, until our lease runs out or somebody subleases it, is now a really expensive office.
It was terrible. I mean, the actual solo walk was okay, but it turns out that our walk together is one of the only times we actually get to speak to each other for 15 minutes without the kids interrupting us. Plus, if the conversation gets heated, at least the hot air doesn’t linger in the house.
So I’m back to pushing 100+ pounds of kid around the neighborhood. Will I be the first parent to push a teenager in a stroller? At this point, I don’t give a shit. I need our walks together more than I need to avoid humiliation.
One day they’ll be back in school again — I think? — and my wife and I can frolic around town like in the days of yore. (Or maybe they’ll get mature enough that I can leave them home with a walkie talkie.)
I try my best to read everything Sam Anderson publishes. I am… a fan. (His book Boom Town was one of my favorite books I read last year.) Two weekends ago, he had an essay in The New York Times Magazine about hanging out with “The Last Two Northern Rhinos on Earth,” and last weekend he had a piece called “I Recommend Eating Chips.”
I read the pieces back-to-back — one deeply serious but funny, the other funny but deeply serious — and had the perverse idea to cut and paste them together in my diary. (The way the rhinos are referred to as “The girls” made me think of the way we call my sons “the boys”…)
If I taught a writing class, I would make my students do this exercise. One the one hand, it feels disrespectful to the writer, and on the other, what’s more respectful than the close reading and attention required to perform such an exercise?
This is exactly what writing feels like to me: a weird mixture of reverence and audacity…
Filed under: Sam Anderson
This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.