Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment
I started writing this from gate A3 at Logan airport at 4:30am last week after consuming a cold brew topped with what they call “sweet cold foam.” (It tasted as advertised.) Despite being from Boston, Dunkin’ is only my first choice in airports—sort of like how I only drink Diet Coke on airplanes now, and only if I feel like I really deserve it. You know exactly what you’re going to get, with those beverages, and its going to be just a few too many liquid ounces of deeply satisfying chemicals. The air travel of it all makes it okay, somehow, everything is terrible, everything is a miracle, things don’t really count in the same way.
We spent the holiday doing the cross-country family crawl, starting with my family in Boston for Christmas plus a few days and then spending 24 hours or so attempting to see my partner’s family in Michigan, gently foiled by delays and connections and the general brouhaha going on with air travel these days. (If you don’t know anything about it, good for you!) The play was to start East and work our way back to California through the Midwest, airlines allowing, which they eventually did. It was cold, in both places, but comforting, and also I consumed my mother’s famed butter-based Christmas cookies at a quite an alarming clip! And tried not to feel too badly about it. (Mostly failed. But the trying is important.) And anyway, now it’s a new year, which I rang in with friends, at dinner, in the midst of what is an unexpectedly rainy week in Los Angeles, about which I am not complaining. Quenched earth feels like a great way to start a new year in the land of drought. Also it gives the canyon where I live a sort of rainforest feel we’d normally have to go to Costa Rica to get. So happy New Year to you, and yours. To 2023!
I went to the MFA and saw the Michaelina Wautier exhibition, which, if you haven’t heard of her, don’t feel too badly, until recently nobody else had either. A forgotten female Old Master rediscovered a cool 300 years after her death! You don’t hear that every day. The Wautier paintings—a series inspired by the five senses, featuring young male models rather than the typical idealized female ones—were fascinating. They also happened to be positioned near this fabulous 17th century Dutch dollhouse, which I could have stared at for hours. I don’t know what it is about miniatures. Ordinary things made impossibly small: compelling in a way their life-size versions never could be! You just want to touch all of them, open little basket lids and sterling silver tea services, root around in the bed linens and rearrange the tiny porcelain urns. (Apparently that’s what their original owners did, too. That and be competitive about whose was better. 17th century Dutch high society, they’re just like us!)
As an aside, I highly recommend a targeted museum visit: go in to see one thing, or one section, and stick to it. Maybe you already do this. I don’t. Normally at the MFA I end up tooling around the American wing, going to see the Sargents and diluting everything I’ve seen with everything else I’ve seen before. No longer! This time I’m recommending that you go straight to the European wing, and then to the Netherlandish section, and then leave. Bite size! The better to really think about it! Of course this works best in a place where you can visit the museum more than once, but it is nice to develop a personal relationship with an artwork you know you’ll see again. (If you are at the MFA, on your way out stick your head into the neat little room where they have Claudette Colbert’s Boivin starfish brooch off by itself. It’s on the way to the exit. Another thing I was just absolutely aching to physically hold in my hand. Those articulated ruby and amethyst legs!)
The last book I read in 2022: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. It was a Christmas gift from my brother and it broke my heart, a little like Powers’ previous book, The Overstory, had. I loved The Overstory more, because it was so all-consuming and also because I think trees are the closest thing we have to gods around here (Earth), but I think if I was a parent Bewilderment would have split my heart wide open. Either way I keep thinking about it, because as usual Powers is both deeply sympathetic and right about everything and things don’t look great for us (humanity) and it’s hard not to see that, the more you think about governments and politics and fear and industry and chemicals and the climate and this abused planet and the way people would maybe rather die than be inconvenienced. (Despite mocking it ceaselessly, I also ended up finishing 1883 on my last United flight of the year, and honestly they’re not unrelated thematically. Take that as you will.) Bewilderment also gave me a new non-denominational prayer to consider, rooted in the Four Immeasureables. Which if you, like me, are looking to start off your year on a gentler, more compassionate bent, is a great place to start! And it may be recency bias but since I read it I have been seeing the word “bewilderment” everywhere, including the Rumi quote I used as the title here.
What else did I read? Well there was this perfect for today Lucille Clifton poem:
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
—Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and A Memoir 1969-1980
And then the always excellent Zadie Smith(!) talking inter-generational drama and power and Tár for the New York Review of Books:
"We are by now used to apocalyptic bad guys with the end of the world in mind, but it’s a long time since I went to the movies and saw an accurate representation of an ordinary sinner. It reminded me of that extraordinary Sharon Olds poem 'The Clasp,' in which a woman, angry with her four-year-old daughter, holds the child too hard by the wrist: she swung her head, as if checking who this was, and looked at me, and saw me—yes, this was her mom, her mom was doing this. Her dark, deeply open eyes took me in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment she learned me. This was her mother, one of the two whom she most loved, the two who loved her most, near the source of love was this. "
The best advice I got recently: I was listening to The Hoffman Podcast (very good, you don’t have to be a graduate of the process) and was very pleased to feel gently thwapped over the head with a big ol’ wallop of guidance from an episode with Dr. Michelle Robin, talking about how to approach the year ahead. My notes app version of what she said: “Open your eyes. Open your heart. If you want this to be ‘your year’ don’t sit on the couch and wait for it. Go out, make a change. Smile more. Be excited. Try new things. Throw away clutter—including the foods that don't serve you. Unfollow negative people. Go to bed early. Wake up early. Show more gratitude. Do things that challenge you. Be brave.” It looks like one of those eye-roll Instagrams or dorm room posters when written out like that, I know, but there’s not a bad idea in the bunch, really. Sometimes the best advice is really pretty obvious. Honestly it kind of always is.
I watched White Noise on Netflix. The end credits are the best part. (I preferred—and highly recommend!—the book.)
I am now beginning Station Eleven a year late, apologies, it’s already as good as everyone said when it came out, sorry I was busy HAVING A LIFE (/consuming other content). If you haven’t seen it, watch it with me! (It’s so, so good.)
File this news under: It’s about damn time. Henrietta Lacks statue will replace Robert E. Lee monument in Roanoke, Virginia
If I was in New York, I would simply run, not walk, to the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Museum of Natural History:
Have you ever seen How to Steal a Million? I hadn’t! I don’t know how I hadn’t. I guess we’d just been watching Charade over and over in my house. (Also highly recomended as both a film and a behavior pattern.) Audrey Hepburn! Peter O’Toole! Art theft! Paris! A young Eli Wallach! A series of incredible moustaches! It’s all fabulous, though its from that part of the late 60s when the makeup hadn’t caught up with the cameras so everyone has that kind of weird chalky pall in certain lighting. Just focus on the Givenchy designs (and the real estate!) instead.
Okay, that’s all for now. Thanks for starting this new year with me, whenever you read this, and as always, for being here. Happy new year. We made it! We continue making it. I love you.
