How to Become a Prophet, or Happy Birthday
My Fellow Shennyer:
Twoscore and twelve Wednesdays ago, I emailed the inaugural Shenny to your inboxes, hoping for the best. What did I imagine? To be honest, more unsubscribes. Sending my writing directly to people who hadn’t asked for it felt like delivering them a court summons. The arrogance of it: You’ve been served.
Today’s Main Matter thinks more on the issue of writing about yourself, but here I’ll take a moment to celebrate 26 issues delivered ‘on time’. Some highlights from this year of Shennying include:
finally having a space to write about Jessica Fletcher
outsourcing to readers the search for Robin Bach
getting to share some beloved family recipes
writing about travel while sitting on a plane and feeling like one of those biz-travel bigshots
But the biggest highlight has been any time I hear from you. That you’re reading means more to me than I know how to express. (And knowing how to express it is sort of my job.) Thank you for being here, and for coming back.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Music from 2022-2023
Newsletter old-timers may recall that the first Shenny had a playlist (of Welsh music from 1976-1979), and here as a birthday present is another. A recent playlist challenge I did with friends is Songs Released No Earlier Than 2022. I was worried. Most vocals these days, female or male, sound like fifes, or two steel pipes sliding alongside each other—there’s a metallic, breathy quality engineered throughout. (I blame tiny cellphone speakers.) But lots of new stuff sounds old. I like Fazerdaze mostly because it’s Liz Phair again, and MJ Lenderman sounds like Sparklehorse.1 And old acts sound … well ‘new’ isn’t quite it; Belle & Sebastian’s latest single sounds like a Fun. song Neil Tennant produced. My rule was to prioritize new sounds and include only acts I’d never heard of. I ended up with 15 total gems:
If there’s one new band you listen to this year, might I recommend The Bug Club? (Also Welsh!) Tight songwriting usually under 3 minutes that’s often moving and never without a sense of humor. And if you’re a Shenny reader up on new music, I welcome your listening recs in the comments.
2. Poker Face on Peacock
Best show of the year. Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a young woman on the lam who’s essentially the kid Carol Channing and Columbo would’ve made together. And like Columbo, each ep begins with a murder you watch the murderer commit; the joy comes in watching the detective prove they did it. What makes Charlie a detective? She has a preternatural ability to tell when someone’s lying—a gimmick the show is smart not to lean on too hard. Lyonne is a total delight, but the strength of the show is its devotion to character actors, giving out-of-type roles to folks like Judith Light, Chloë Sevigny, Cherry Jones, Nick Nolte, Rhea Perlman, John Ratzenberger, and Tim Meadows (who’s totally having a moment, what with his new roles in The Mandalorian and Space Force). I watch a lot of murder mysteries, and Poker Face has some of the most clever-and-not-convoluted plots I’ve seen. Plus, look at its (Columbo-inspired) titles:
How to Become a Prophet
Writing isn’t therapy. People often mistake the two because therapy, turns out, is writing: it’s filling a blank space outside yourself with words. The key difference is audience; in therapy you’re writing to a professional trained at certain arcane forms of reading. To the, ahem, ‘general reader’, therapy reads like whining. (We’ve long made New Yorker cartoon cliches about this.)
Another wrinkle: writing is therapeutic. My pal Clay, after reading last Shenny’s main matter on ex-girlfriends, asked in an email, ‘Does writing about this kind of thing and sharing it out help to lessen the cringe factor?’ He had some cringe moments from his past that still made him embarrassed.
That was his word for it. I’d use shame because, to me, that feeling goes: What if people found out about me? It’s a worry about being judged poorly, even dismissed for being who you’ve been and doing what you’ve done. When far more often than not, the reality is: You are not alone in this.
That’s how writing about yourself becomes a service. You get what bothers you out of your head and onto the page, and it turns into an art object, not a wraith haunting all your lonely moments. Then you let it get read, and your readers—not all of them, but enough—tell you, ‘Oh god me too,’ and like that y’all get to feel less strange and unusual.
Lewis Hyde tells this story in his must-read, Trickster Makes This World:
A friend once heard [Allen] Ginsberg lecture on prophecy; at the end of the talk a young man asked, ‘Mr. Ginsberg, how does one become a prophet?’ Ginsberg replied, ‘Tell your secrets.’ Uncovering secrets is apocalyptic in the simple sense (the Greek root means ‘an uncovering’). In this case, it lifts the shame covers. It allows articulation to enter where silence once ruled.
One effect of lifting your shame covers is that silence, which once made you feel both safe and afraid, now makes you angry. You become very attuned to the question, Who is being hurt by our refusing to speak of this? You start seeking out topics people seem to want to avoid and starting conversations (or writing 5-part blog posts) about them.
These days, I’m talking with my therapist about something it’s even hard for me to say out loud to her, it’s not going to be in the memoir, it’s nothing I’ll ever mention to another person. There’s less a cover of shame over this than a shroud.
Happily, I have a therapist who’s very trained at certain arcane forms of reading. ‘What if you let yourself explore those feelings, rather than judge them?’ she asks, and I start writing in that room. I fill the silence between us with words that scare me a little, and I speak with enough volume that I know she hears me, and in her listening (a needed silence, a nonjudgemental silence) the words just hang out there, outside us.
Am I now less afraid? Have I changed in any way? It’s unclear, but one thing is clear: I’m still alive. I’ve said the thing I Could Never Say and it didn’t destroy me.
All this has happened before. After college, I started having recurring dreams of getting in fistfights with women. (A classic self-hating closet dream.) Drunk one night, I confessed them to a friend, who told me he didn’t think dreams were even figuratively about our desires, and like that the dreams stopped.
Then, a couple years ago in therapy, I filled silence with some other words that had scared me my whole life, and in February I read in public from the chapter I turned those words into, and someone (impossibly!) called those words beautiful. Someone else said their version of ‘Oh god me too.’
I don’t know if that’s why I write, but it’s why I’m writing this book, despite every voice telling me to shut up, don’t share my secrets. How, per Ginsberg, does that make you a prophet? I don’t know from prophecy, but one thing I know from trading in the truth is how rarely people want to tell it, and how much it changes a person any time it’s told.
This week’s natatorium is the bright, colorful, and pleasingly linear Stadtbad Gotha in Germany.
If you were raised on 90s alt/indie music and still basically seek out that sound (I mean: same…no judgement), I made an auxiliary mix just for you.