Dear Friends:
Welcome back! The summer is over, hiatus complete. I’m teaching undergraduates for the first time since 2017. They are chill and curious and funny and I love them. I love graduate students, too, but to risk an icky metaphor: teaching grad students is like parenting whereas teaching undergrads is like babysitting your friends’ kids.
(I would be terrible at both of those jobs.)
The summer ended too soon. (That exclamation point above is working overtime to convey an excitement I’m not feeling.) I did get a lot of work done, but that’s not what I want from a summer. I missed my annual trip to the Plains, which means I missed out on some of the best antiques not to buy. Did I even eat a hotdog once?
I peed outside, happily.1 One of the reasons I’d be a bad parent/babysitter is that I’m still a child who needs to pee outside at least once as a way to mark the summer. Not that I only pee outside in the summer—esp. in California, a place I do love but where it’s hard to mark any season, given how it’s mostly just 68 degrees here all the time.
Time, again, is passing. I’m curious how you mark your summers. Sound off in the comments!
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Grouping 6-Digit Security Codes into Three 2-Digit Numbers
This is likely more of a tip than an endorsement, because the last thing I want to endorse is two-factor authentication. My bank doesn’t need me to go find my phone after logging in my password, but this Bug Club show I want to see requires an app that needs both my email address and phone number to log into? At any rate, when you have to remember something like 280851, I’ve found it easier to think 28, 8, 51 than 280, 851. My guess is that my brain’s got more associations around numbers like 28 and 8 than the number 851. Yes, it’s all of 3 seconds you need to retain the number,2 but if you’ve ever picked up your phone, read the number, gone back to the webpage, forgotten the god damned number, and needed to look at your phone again, this may help you prevent that.
2. Joni Mitchell
Up until a month ago, my Joni Mitchell associations were (a) Love Actually, (b) dulcimers, and (c) ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, an utter embarrassment of a pop song. I was a respectful non-fan, but then my pal Steve tasked us to make a Joni Mitchell playlist, and I was a quick convert. Her catalog is vast: 17 albums of original songs between 1968 and 2007. And thus she’s got her eras: pure-voiced folk ditties, Steely Dan–ish jazz infusions, synthy guitar’d 80’s albums, stentorian meditations on the world. Her voice is a thing with wings, aging beautifully over the decades. (For music nerds: it’s like she was a sine wave in the 60s that kept adding harmonics.) And our gal can write a song. For evidence, look at how she gets out of ‘Blonde in the Bleachers’ or into ‘Old Friends’ in the mix I made, shared here with you. (You’ll note ‘Both Sides Now’ appears twice, because some songs are too astounding to hear just the once.)
On Election
Walking down the street, I want to kill everyone I see. How come I don’t like anyone that I meet? And despite my antipathy I’m longing to be someone better. In my heart is a violence I cannot dispel. I’ve lost my mind, I’m losing you, it’s just as well.
That’s the start of Shimmering Stars’ ‘I’m Gonna Try’, and it’s one of my favorite depictions of misanthropy. And I like depictions of misanthropy, because one of the foremost feelings you have inside misanthropy is that you’re broken or bad. If this were a good feeling, you think, the world would collapse in war and destruction.
Nobody should feel this, and therefore nobody does. That’s the lie. The truth is more like: you’re probably not human if you don’t feel this sometimes. But you can’t feel it all the time, or else you yourself will collapse.
So how to get out?
I’m gonna throw on these old jeans and I’m gonna head out on the street. I’m gonna dream up a new dream and I’m gonna dance to a brand new beat. I’m gonna find a new desire, then I’m gonna set this town on fire. I’m wearing a smile and it’s fake, but right now it has to be, ’cause I know that love is the only thing that’s gonna save me.
I’m gonna try. I’m gonna try. I’m gonna try.
The song isn’t even about doing anything. It’s not even about trying, it’s about wanting to try, about deciding to.
In other words, it’s about election.
We’re in election season, it’s been comparatively shorter than previous seasons, what a relief. I’m less interested, today, in The Election in November (vote early if you can) than I am in the act of electing, choosing to act. It’s a private action, deeply personal. Friends or social media accounts can all shout some form of the words ‘DO SOMETHING!’ And what they’re hoping is that you first take a moment to yourself.
I’m prizing that moment because for a long time I didn’t get to feel it. Back when I was directing an MFA program (38 days free!), I woke to an inbox I couldn’t ignore, found emails pop up like little fires someone had made, and I had to put the fire out.3 Quickly, I started working on autopilot; even when it felt like a flow state, I wasn’t electing anything, other than to keep going until the fires were gone.
At the end of those days I felt like an emptied hose.
I grew up in a house where next to the kitchen telephone hung a calendar where Mom wrote each night’s dinner for the next two weeks. On rare nights we’d eat out, my folks would set the Yellow Pages on the kitchen table, open to the restaurant’s take-out menu, in case you wanted to decide early what to order. If dinner reservations were at 6, and it was a 10-minute drive away, it was announced we were leaving at 5:45, and then we’d actually leave at 5:40, just in case.
I come from planners, is what I mean here. I knew my college major when I was 11, and just before my 18th birthday when I discovered I didn’t want to major in that,4 I had a mild panic attack. What’s the plan now?
The beauty of election is that it puts a plan before you. And that it’s your plan, designed by and for you. For Mr. Shimmering Stars, the plan is put on jeans, then go outside, then dream, dance, desire, etc. And it seems to me that the plan itself is less important in election than imagining a plan. That is: election lets us imagine a future that is markedly different from the present.
Which brings us to The Election in November after all.
Whatever your thoughts on Kamala Harris as a public official (mine are no different from the Democratic Party’s back in 2020), she’s unquestionably an inspiring candidate in 2024, if anything for how she’s made the electorate eager again to elect.
Before July, it seemed like everyone I talked to didn’t want to elect anyone. We didn’t feel that desire to choose, and if you’ve ever lived with depression you know that’s a deathful feeling. That kind of paralysis—why even choose anything?—can destroy you.
It was confusing to me, that paralysis, the lack of faith in what has been the most progressive administration of my lifetime, all because the guy behind it all stuttered on TV in the phoniest and most meaningless aspect of our political system. (You want to save democracy? Ban debates, then overturn Citizens United.)
But I can’t deny that everyone else seems very happy and excited that Kamala Harris is the candidate. I’m happy about the happiness. I’m wearing a smile and it’s fake, but right now it has to be because I know that love—of possibilities, of electing futures—is the only thing that’s going to save me. And maybe us all.
This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this child-size Smoky Joe cowboy outfit (with box!):
On the grounds of Sweet Briar College. Safe to assume it’s not a first.
And yes I understand the iPhone can often autofill the texted code where you need it. And speaking of phones, I always wanted to do this with my old phone number, 202-8312, saying it to anyone asking for my digits as ‘20-28-3-12’. I'd argue it’s (a) easier to remember, and (b) more fun to say, but my life is a saga of people giving me sad looks when I try shit like this, and eventually you learn to keep good ideas to yourself.
That’s my co-director’s metaphor, and I should point out that there were fires he could put out himself, but the real ragers were my responsibility.
English. It was English I suddenly hated and wanted nothing to do with, and I 100% never ever wanted to teach English, which goes to show how well we know ourselves in youth. (Example B: I understood myself as heterosexual at the time.)