Last Week's Look-Back, 1/31/21
While watching us as young kids, my grandmother would take my siblings and me out of the house, on occasion, to meander thrift stores. On one of these days, my sister and I ended up in the movie section, where I spotted a VHS copy of the popular mid-‘90s film, Harriet the Spy.
I felt drawn to Harriet before I even watched the film; I’d seen previews for it, and I fancied her colorful outfits, her intimate friendships, and her curiosity for the world. I cannot remember if I begged my grandmother to purchase it, but she wasn’t an easy sell, so I must have. VHS in hand, I hurried out of our car and into the house to start the film as swiftly as I could.
In the film, Harriet M Welsch (played by a young Michelle Trachtenberg) is a curious observer. Wearing a worn yellow raincoat over baggy sweatshirts, she finds writing inspiration by recording observations in a worn composition notebook on her neighbors, local business owners, and sixth-grade classmates. “I want to remember everything,” states Harriet. “And I want to know everything.”
It wasn’t long until I was filling my own composition notebooks. I was not given permission to go off and explore as much as Harriet was able to, so my notebooks mostly contained observations from my backyard, the day’s happenings, and really, not much at all. But I wrote with vigor, hiding away in corners of the house, pressing hard with dull pencils.
Fast forward ten-plus years to one of my final English courses at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. Our professor assigned us to read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I devoured the book, shielded under giant oak trees around campus, then dim reading lights in my dorm room bed. In the book, Joan attempts to make sense of her grief in the year following the death of her beloved husband. And just as I’d admired Harriet’s affinity for writing through observation, I was enamored by Didion’s impeccable ability to reflect on her grief from places above and surrounding it, removed from within it.
As Hilton Als writes in the Forward of her latest essay collection, released this year on January 26 and titled Let Me Tell You What I Mean, it’s “a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching.” Although its 12 essays span decades, much of Didion’s observations within them remain true - like the tendency towards bias and distortion by even the most well-intentioned journalists in “Alicia and the Underground Press”, or the unyielding pressure on young adults to get into the right school and set out on the right path in “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice”. One could argue her observations are even more true today.
In another essay in the collection, “Telling Stories”, Didion writes about being chosen for a “widely-regarded” course at Berkeley, “a kind of ‘writers’ workshop”. “I remember each meeting of this class as an occasion of acute excitement and dread”, she writes. “...I ransacked my closet for clothes in which I might appear invisible in class, and came up with only a dirty raincoat. I sat in this raincoat and I listened to other people’s stories read aloud and I despised of ever knowing what they knew.”
In reading this, I was taken back to my college classroom, its desk seats filled with anxious English majors. Like Harriet and Didion, we all wore our own versions of raincoats, to class and in the world. We all had within us a desire to blend in quietly in a world that values loudness.
Writers are introspective background lurkers. We’re curious listeners and ponderous observers. We’d climb on rooftops to observe through skylight windows, like Harriet, or visit Linda Kasabian in prison, like Didion, which she writes about in one of her most famous books of essays, The White Album. We write to put our curiosity at bay. We write to tell ourselves the story.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean is another example of Joan Didion’s brilliance in telling stories through remoteness, and her mastery of observance.
“Let me tell you one thing about why writers write,” says Didion in Why I Write, about the development of the main character for her novel A Book of Common Prayer. “...had I known the answer to any of these questions [about her] I would never have needed to write a novel.”
Things I’ve loved this week
The “Better Days” Biden/Harris Inauguration 2021 performance by Ant Clemons featuring Justin Timberlake is worth watching well past election day.
Joan Didion’s recent interview with TIME. You don’t need to say a lot to say something.
The Latest “On Being” podcast episode with Krista Tippett, featuring ornithologist Drew Lanham - ‘I Worship Every Bird that I See’.
The Flaming Lips “Race for The Prize” performance on Cobert last summer. If this is a solution to getting live shows back in motion, I’m all in.
The poem “Murmuration” by Linda France, with which France weaves together five hundred collected verses about our relationship to the natural world, created in 2020 “while the human world was roosting in confused frightened isolation, swarmed by the shared terror of the pandemic and the smoke of unprecedented wildfires, suddenly more aware than ever that we are a single pulsing living dying organism.” - Maria Popova
Songs bringing me life this week
"Morning" by Francis and the Lights
"Better Days (feat. Justin Timberlake)" by Ant Clemons, Justin Timberlake
"Heat Waves" by Glass Animals
"Ferris Wheel" by Sylvan Esso
"July (feat. Leon Bridges)", Noah Cyrus, Leon Bridges
"Dance Monkey" by Tones And I
"Girls Like Us" by Zoe Wees
"Birds (feat. Elisa)" by Imagine Dragons, Elisa
"Space Song" by Beach House
"Leave a Light On" by Tom Walker
"Afterglow" by Ed Sheran
Follow this Playlist on Spotify
What I’m reading this week
“Let Me Tell You What I Mean” by Joan Didion
"'Caste': The Origins of our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkenson
The “Last Week’s Look-Back” series will be posted on this blog weekly each Sunday afternoon. It’s me at my most honest: an unpolished spewing of reflections and ramblings on all that’s happening in the world.
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