Letter #1
Take some pleasure.
Welcome to the news. JK. If I ran the news… it would be structured like a co-op, regulated by the government, and art directed to the gods. C-SPAN with a William Eggleston palette and HBO production value. God, do I have to think of everything?
But I will be reporting live from this newsletter -- on the mostly timeless, sometimes fleeting, perhaps technically inconsequential, but hopefully fulfilling, pieces of art and music and writing and anything else that speaks to me, and ideally to you.
The world is hell. Existence means suffering. Systems built by those in power are designed to be violent and cruel. But my aim for this little prism is about the things that are so good they are energizing; so specific they invoke gratitude, so real they’re surreal and back again. Holy, beautiful, moody, strange …
I’ll call it Delighter. You get it.
(N.B., If you got this first email and don’t know why, it’s because you subscribed to my fiction newsletter that I sent out a few years ago. If you are compelled to unsubscribe, I totally understand -- please do so quietly as it will be devastating for me and my family.)
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The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Oh, a teenage girl is so wicked. And that wickedness so acute and self-contained. Giovanna, who observes the power of a charm bracelet but would never be so foolish as to believe in it, is a more outwardly obstinate, sexually liberated, self-aware iteration of her spiritual Ferrante predecessors. She tries to understand her parents in real time, as they’re happening, and comes up short. But who cares. Everyone’s an idiot, and no one else has ever been in love, and there are so many unknown corners where she can learn how to exist, and it’s time at last to go barreling toward them.
An everyman too-clever by half, wry dialogue, satisfying pacing, comforting bygone-yuppie aesthetic … wait. I’m single in a pandemic, about to write 100 words on why a big tall guy with curly hair and a dry sense of humor is a genius? Let me reel it in.
Forgive me but I’m late on them, I mean her, the band led by hypnotic Meghan Remy, usually singular but now a real group of 50 more musicians. She doesn’t believe in money or phones. She talks in code. She sounds like if Lesley Gore and Patti Smith and Blondie had a miracle child who learned how to do her eyeliner from Ronnie Spector and how to kiss from Lizzy Mercier Descloux and traveled back in time to invent both the Go-Gos and the Cocteau Twins before settling in the present on the exotic planet of Canada, where she rides her bike in the dark carrying a flashlight in her mouth like a menacing girl E.T.
The ballad of the 19 yr old young lady who may have non-consensually married her 89 year old patient. Wicked.
Mariah Carey Meets Leontyne Price
Mariah Carey is (whispers) fifty. And has published an autobiography of her self-actualized life. In this interview with Oprah she talks about being invited to Oprah’s Legends Ball, where she meets the legendary Leontyne Price (full name: Mary Violet Leontyne Price), the first black woman opera diva to open the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. In their encounter they learn that Ms. Price and Mariah Carey’s mother, Patricia – also an opera singer – shared the same vocal coach. Afterward, Ms. Price writes Mariah the most stunning letter, telling her that her career is a “crown jewel of success.” Can you imagine? How good it feels to be self-possessed, and rich, wearing silk gloves…imagine having opera in your blood. Imagine how much sacrifice it takes to have led an interesting life.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s translation of the Tao
I woke up this morning dreading sending this out, as I impulsively declared I would to the general public (130 people who consistently view my private Instagram story). What if I cause people to dissociate, and the words spread apart before their eyes, melting away into nothingness because they make absolutely no sense? What if the shadowy specter of Ketamine and Low Rise Jeans Revival Twitter develops a consciousness and thinks I’m a loser?? What if Olivia D’Angelo judges me (hey girl, thanks for the nightmare text)??? What if no one gets it and furthermore what. is the point. of doing. anything.
I turned to my copy of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t mean to insinuate that this is something that I do, per se, but I guess I did. The Way, as the Tao is often translated, has come to me via the oracle Le Guin, whose perspective I have revered and sought out since I read The Left Hand of Darkness as a teenager.
That book starts with “Right is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light,” an incantation informed by Le Guin’s lifetime (her father owned an edition from the 19th century) of studying the Way. The pendulum of dark and light, the action and its mirror, inaction. Mysteries of power, #56, reached me when I needed it, because whether or not I know what I’m doing, it all settles into the necessary symmetry.
Waving from the well of the deep sameness,
Delighter
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