Monday Miscellany: HAND CLAP SOUNDS

Notes from the week of May 27 - June 2

It’s drizzling again as I write this; everything outside is the lush, extra-saturated green of early summer, and I have the living room window open so the cool dampness can seep in. Every year Jordan and I play the game of “how long can we delay turning on our AC?” and so far we’re still holding out, but I know it’s just a matter of time. I’m trying to enjoy the lower temperatures while they last. Happy Monday, friends.

Currently reading

Have I already mentioned my personal Margaret Atwood back list reading challenge? A few years ago, when Anchor Books re-released a number of Atwood’s older titles with new, coordinating cover designs, I won an Instagram giveaway for a whole stack. I’ve read one or two, but for the most part they’ve just been sitting on my shelf since I got them. So, along with my McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern project, which I talked about in a previous newsletter, I’m attempting to work my way through one Atwood title per month in 2024, and I’m doing it in chronological order of publication because hi, hello, it’s me.

This year so far I’ve read Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, a re-read after first experiencing it in high school AP English class). This month’s Atwood was Cat’s Eye (1988).

Elaine, the protagonist, is a painter who has returned to her hometown of Toronto for a career retrospective show at a gallery there. The narrative jumps back and forth between her childhood and the present day. This book is on the longer side, and I’ll say it… it’s kind of a bummer! Beautifully written, of course, and poignant, but goodness, little Elaine was a mess, and her friends were cruel, and now adult Elaine sees the world in a pretty dark and cynical way:

I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. (373)

The dual timeline structure is quite effective, both in showing how Elaine got to this mental and emotional place, and in breaking my heart about how horrible kids can be to each other and how little the adults did to stop what was happening (THANKS, MARGARET).

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I’d pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said. (166)

My experiences as a child were not nearly as awful as Elaine’s, but her story did reactivate some tender places in my memory that had been dormant for a while. When I finished reading I just wanted to hug all my favorite littles tight and remind them to please be kind, be kind, be kind.

On an entirely different note, Radical Candor by Kim Scott is a business book about how to manage more effectively and create a better culture at work. I first heard about it from Jeff and Rebecca on the Book Riot podcast, who read it with their whole Book Riot team a while back and who still use and talk about its core concepts.

Scott’s premise is simple: care personally and challenge directly. The idea is that we should be getting to know our coworkers and investing in them as people, but also respecting them enough to be honest and detailed with feedback, whether positive or negative. I’m not currently a boss, but a lot of Scott’s advice is applicable to coworker relationships, and I’m saving up the rest for potential use someday. If your job requires you to manage people, I bet you’d find some helpful tidbits here.

Currently listening

Phoebe Go’s song “7 Up” appeared on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist last Monday, and when I went looking, I realized that it’s part of a short album (8 songs, 29 minutes) she released last month called Marmalade (2024). Genre-wise, this is Australian alt-pop, and vibes-wise, it’s summertime. The higher-energy tracks, especially “7 Up” and “Something You Were Trying,” feel like driving to the pool with the windows down, and the more subdued ones, like “Marmalade” and “Good Fight,” are that moment in the late afternoon when you’re just hot, bored, sticky from too many popsicles, and ready for a nap. I’m thinking this will be on heavy rotation through the coming months.

My favorite band, The Mountain Goats, just re-released a split album with John Vanderslice* called Moon Colony Bloodbath (2009), and I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet, but I immediately fell in love with the first song, “Surrounded.” Hear me out: it has piano and guitar together (a favorite combination), unexpected harmonica (always delightful), AND HAND CLAP SOUNDS (my personal catnip)!! Something about John Darnielle’s slightly nasal and frantic voice singing “let me die, let me die, surrounded by machines” ((clap clap)) ((clap)) is sending me today. It’s not on Spotify, but you can stream for free on Bandcamp, which I linked above.**

*I had kind of forgotten about John Vanderslice! Quick shout-out here for his 2004 album Cellar Door, with an especially affectionate nod to the song “White Plains.” I can’t think of many other pieces of music that make me feel so exquisitely melancholy as this one. I mean: “I tried, but the old devils, they found me in my room / I hid under the covers, and I cried out as they tore off my sheets / So I went east.”

**Quick housekeeping question: do we have a preference for music links? I know not everyone has Spotify, so is Bandcamp better? Is anyone even using the links to begin with? Let me know! I’m just a little guy trying to figure things out!

Haiku round-up

This week, a regular at my coffee shop, who happens to be an astrophysicist, put on a private planetarium show at his university for our staff (side note: working as a barista is possibly the best way to meet interesting people in your community). It was incredible. I knew that our planet was small, that our place in the universe was insignificant, but seeing the size comparisons, for example, between Earth and Jupiter, between the planets in our solar system and the sun, between our sun and some of the largest stars that exist? It blew my mind.

First, how dare human beings kill other human beings, when we’re all alone on this fragile little marble, when the mere fact of our existence is such a miracle of happenstance?! And simultaneously, with a great sigh of relief: I am but a speck. Not even. My problems are nothing.

Here are some teeny-tiny poems from another week in my teeny-tiny life:

Monday, May 27

Sometimes there’s a change
so subtle others miss it
Where is it you’ve gone?

Tuesday, May 28

The sort of friendship
where there’s never any doubt:
my home is yours too

Wednesday, May 29

Attention is love,
and existence is trying 
to pay more of both

Thursday, May 30

Breeze blows, plants surround,
birds sing gratitude for this
neighborhood we share

Friday, May 31

When the work week’s done,
plop down and decompress on
a friend’s kitchen floor

Saturday, June 1

A caterpillar!
Slow and fat, electric green
Future luna moth

Sunday, June 2

Clutching a book stack,
I try to whittle it down—
No! I buy them all.

Until next time

When my anxiety brain is getting overwhelmed with obligations and notifications and the weight of endless mental to-do lists, one of my favorite ways to turn it off is to go for a walk with my fancy camera. It slows me down and makes me notice, not only the obvious beauty of the flowers, trees, and clouds, but also the quiet elegance of, say, a row of wispy weeds growing from a crack in the YWCA parking lot. (I will not belabor this paragraph with the ~*siGniFiCaNce*~ of plants emerging from concrete; we get it, we get it). I’m not sure what it is about carrying a lens that sharpens my own eye, but I’m grateful for it. This week I’m wishing all of us the delight of observing something previously overlooked.

See you next week, and until then, QUACK!