Joshuah Bearman’s website led me to Christy Wampole’s “The Essayfication of Everything” and Wample led me to Phillip Lopate’s “The Essay: an Exercise in Doubt.” After that, I stumbled onto Andrew Bird’s “Words Will Tell.”
Wampole writes that the essayist “offers a model of humanism that isn’t about profit or progress and does not propose a solution to life but rather puts endless questions to it.” After reading Lopate’s essay, I thought that maybe my constant second-guessing and self-doubting weren’t negative traits after all, as he believes the essay feasts on doubt. Andrew Bird shares his songwriting process “with all my doubts and insecurities laid bare.”
I’m in Connecticut and on my lap are letters that a third-grade class wrote to a troop in Vietnam on Valentine’s Day. My uncle was in the troop and the letters are from 1971. All their letters are in cursive and some include “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue” poems. The kids wrote about shooting and the war (sometimes spelled wore) and their pets (my dog is funny bunny) and drew hearts with red crayons. I’m getting teary-eyed for a lot of reasons, not just because I’m a sap, and touching these pages makes me feeling that time does indeed pass.
Gina Frangello’s This Is Happiness.
Marina Kappos has been wandering around Japan and through her blog, I discovered Mori Art Museum, its current 10th anniversary “All You Need Is Love” exhibition, and I fell in love with Sophie Calle. (Sidenote: I like Marina’s post Elegant Man.)
In Sophie Calle’s project “Take Care of Yourself,” she asked 107 women to respond to a break-up letter that a man wrote her. In this interview, Calle says “I wanted to avoid any pathos or pathology. I really enjoyed it, for example, when the whole discussion would turn around a single comma, like the philologist, who discusses the world existing between two sets of quotation marks.” I fell in love with Calle on a Thursday night and the next afternoon, after visiting the Happy Baby set, I wandered into Spoonbill and Sugartown and saw on the front table a red book by Sophie Calle titled “The Address Book.”
On my way back to Manhattan, I was about to board the train and had the passing thought that I should watch Before Sunrise soon. I first learned about Before Sunrise when I read Michelle Orange’s essay “The Uses of Nostalgia and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face” in This Is Running For Your Life. (If you have yet to read her book, here’s an excerpt of the essay.) When I returned to my friend’s apartment, she asked me if I wanted to stay in and watch Before Sunrise. I told her that sometimes my life seemed filled with synchronicity.
