Daybook: Better relationships

What are you going to do with that

Note: This is a long post comprised mostly of images! You’ll have to click “view entire message” to see it all. tysm :)

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I first grew enamored with these wrought-iron gates, and all their many variations, when I moved to Brooklyn last summer; they are everywhere here. They originally inspired me to write and draw a (much shorter!) comic about cursive, which you can read here.

Reading: The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut. Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines. How to End a Story by Helen Garner. Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya. And just finished Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, as part of Fran Magazine’s McMurtry May <3

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “The Reenchanted World” in Harper’s (which was especially interesting to read alongside Labatut’s The Maniac): “I didn’t read science books. I didn’t know why I couldn’t, but I couldn’t. . . . All this changed only in my forties, when I started on a project that tried to break down the barriers between literature and life. It had slowly dawned on me that it was the world I was interested in, life here, existence, and not the literature about it, which was just one approach among many. I had gotten the two mixed up.”

The aforementioned interview with Adam Phillips in The Paris Review: “You don’t have to worry too much about trying to have the lives you think you’re missing. Don’t be tyrannized by the part of yourself that’s only interested in elsewhere.”

Elif Batuman on Sayaka Murata in The New Yorker: “Writing became her obsession around age ten. She called it a church, and still talks about the process as a holy world governed by a light-filled entity she calls ‘the god of novels.’ When Murata was about twelve, her mother got her a word processor—a Fujitsu OASYS—which Murata believed was connected directly to the god of novels, who decided which novels got published. She would look for the novels she wrote in bookstores. ‘I thought they might have been chosen,’ she said.”

Speaking of AI and people and creativity, I loved Heather Christle’s post (“post” almost seems too insufficient a word) about all of the above. I’m a big fan of Heather’s poetry and nonfiction; her new book In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf is next up on my reading list (and so is, maybe fittingly, Woolf’s Orlando, which is my book club’s June pick…!)