how do people make their lives work?

10 things to think about this week

Meryl playing Susan in Adaptation, a film about adapting The Orchid Thief. I can’t remember exactly why Streep’s looking at her feet in this picture, but the screengrab made me laugh.

1. I’ve always loved Susan Orlean’s work. First through her stories in the New Yorker—some short, some long, always colourful, always humane—and then through her book, The Orchid Thief. The Orchid Thief is about John Laroche, an orchid thief with a (relatively) photographic memory, a portion of chips on his narrow shoulders, and few teeth to speak of who has is absolutely fucking obsessed with finding and cataloguing rare flowers. He is, quite frankly, an arsehole, but what a specimen of arsehole he is: a rude, belligerent, selfish, exploitative bastard given outsourcing his trauma onto his collection of some of the most beautiful, and ephemeral, and botanically-useless plants on earth.
   
   ”A lot of what I write about is a quest to find—to be perfectly blunt—‘the meaning of life’,” she says in an interview in the book The New New Journalism. “I want to understand what in life life has meaning for someone. As a cultural relativist¹, I’m curious to see how that meaning varies from situation to situation, from region to region… In The Orchid Thief, I took a single thing and burrow deep down into it. But [I] used the same intellectual architecture, which was to ask, ‘How do people make their lives work?’”
   
   At the story’s heart is a larger-than-life character, but he is surrounded by flower-fancying, orchid-collecting, middle-aged normies—all sun visors and orange juice, all polo shirts tucked into crumpled khakis—who just as bizarre as he is. Framing a killer hook with a close-reading of the everyday—peeling back its surface to expose the fascinatingly gunky sap below—is my favourite kind of writing.

   
   “An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be both heroic and plain,” Orlean writes in the introduction to her collection The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People. “I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. The challenge was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was.”
   
   

2. I’ve been thinking about doing a reading club on here. A bit like a book club but book clubs are lovelier in theory than reality. Books are long. And I love giving up on books almost as much as I love reading books. That makes me an especially bad book clubber. But if we were to assign—just once a month—a brilliant long-read or short story, we could manage that, right? A few thousand words portioned out over a few days or weeks, like little mouthfuls of a pastry you want to savour. And then, at the end of the month, we could come together and chat about it in the comments. I’d even be so humble as to ask for suggestions, occasionally.
   
   I don’t know: could be nice. Fancy it? Let me know in the comments. (Or just reply to this email, I guess.)
   
   

3. There was supposed to be a neater link between parts two and three here but I forgot what it was. My attention span—and I know I am not alone here; know that this is one of the thread-bare cords that keep us concatenated as we stumble through the dark—is shot to shit. Total garbage. I had been taking it quite personally: seeing myself as just one of those people who is doomed to forget all of the important engagements in his day-to-day and there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it. The acceptance brought scant relief.
   
   And then my girlfriend Steffi recommended we buy this notebook-slash-diary-thing by an influencer named Grace Beverley and her brand, The Productivity Method. I’d never heard of her—she’s one of those over-caffeinated, incredibly-online personalities who has managed to channel their frantic charm into starting several successful businesses—and, anyway, I was, if I’m honest, skeptical of the whole endeavour. I’ve tried these things before—I’ve tried grids and tick-lists, I’ve tried to-dos and to-don’ts—and our flat is chocker with aborted notebooks boasting well-intentioned attention-gimmickry. But something about this diary-notebook-thing has actually worked for me. It’s just a cloth-bound navy hardback notebook with an incredibly simple system: your daily schedule, three columns for task priority, and a box for non-negotiables. There’s also a space for goals: weekly, monthly, yearly. Keeping you vigilant; which might sound oppressive, but I’ve found very freeing. Having everything down on paper, readymade, has revolutionised my getting stuff done in that, now, I am actually manage to do it.
   
   This isn’t spon con—I wish!—but I thought it might help a few people out there. The book’s pretty expensive—twenty-six English pounds—but, for me, it’s been pretty life-changing, tbqwhy.
   

4. Speaking of productivity, here’s a playlist I made that I now write pretty much everything to: it’s called ‘light jazz piano for nighttime’. I thought about calling it something more esoteric—“POV: you are sat in a Parisian café drinking a lil’ pression and writing something that actually matters”—but here we are.
   
   

5. Now, I would like to talk to you about internet ugly. Or, as YouTube video essayist Tom Nicholas has put it, “Why YouTubers Hold Microphones Now”². The phrase “internet ugly” was coined by comedy writer and meme history Nick Douglas in his academic paper, ‘It's Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic’. The paper, despite its title, isn’t a great read³—it’s laser-focused on the kind of I Can Haz Cheezburger 4chan meme-ery which has always made me long for a good shower—but touches on something which I think is at the heart of what makes ‘good’ content right now.
   
   With regards to meme culture, Douglas described the aesthetic as “a celebration of the sloppy and the amateurish” but the same holds true, too, when you move out of the dank basement and into the light, where someone, somewhere, probably quite close to you, is pointing a camera at a person on the street, holding a tiny microphone towards their puckered maw, and asking them a question. For years creators wanted to appear professional.

   
   For a long time, the creator wisdom ran that if you acted like your were already a professional, then you’d be treated like a professional, and start getting paid enough money to actually live. But now creators are showing the strings—they’re shooting on iPhone again, they’re hand-holding microphones, they’re making things feel authentic, even when we know what we’re watching has been crafted with great savvy.

   
   It speaks to something Josh from Somewhere Soul touched on in last week’s interview. He described TikTok as “a platform for people connecting with other people” which is why he used his real name as his username. “I didn’t want to launch it there with a logo,” he said.
   
   The internet’s oscillation between trends of amateurism and professionalism are inevitable. Every generation’s subculture creates a set of rules that differentiates itself from the standard values of the parent culture. Those generations have never moved as quickly as they do on today’s internet. Slick web design fought off the hobbyism of the early internet, only to be shunted over by the ramshackle nature of the social media era, which was then professionalised by graphic designers and brands looking to Do The Internet, But In A Business Way.
   
   But things have changed again. This isn’t new new, I should point out. For those interested, you should also watch Lindsay Elliot’s video ‘YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit!)’ from five years ago. The trend has been in play for a while, but I’m only just properly getting my nut around it now. Working with brands to place them in a more authentic stance (for fun and profit!) runs deeper than just having the word ‘authentic’ on your About page. You have to understand and use the visual language of the form to connect.
   
   Seeing our work as being about connecting with people rather than selling something—whether that thing is a product or an idea—might be considered a little disingenuous, but it’s a little less bleak than the one-way communication
   

6. Speaking of selling out, I saw Fellini’s 8 1/2 at the BFI on Sunday evening. My legs were cramping from football earlier that day and that probably added to the film feeling longer than its already-ample 2h 18m, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It was a beautiful and frustrating and funny and boring and smug and thought-provoking look at art versus commerce. Or about having to do anything except the thing you want to do, which might often be nothing at all. I won’t degrade myself by trying to write a synopsis of the plot but it is a film in love with itself, with the world, and judgemental of itself and the world. It’s self-indulgent for sure, and I’m no cineaste, but I enjoy any creator swinging for the fences and for them to be unselfconscious in taking themselves seriously and accepting that what they have made aspires to art. Whether people like it or not, or ‘get it’ or not, is besides the point.
   
   “I don't like the idea of ‘understanding’ a film,” Fellini said of criticism of his film’s deliberately obtuse narrative, a vagueness that is literally a plot-point of 8 1/2 itself. “I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn't. If you are moved by it, you don't need to have it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.”

   

   Guido, in a daydream, in 8 1/2.

7. I’ve been on a bit of a Taffy Akner tear, this week. Going through her old, very fun magazine profiles of celebrities, marvelling at the gumption of her armchair psychology and sweeping narratives. I stopped on a more-recent Ethan Hawke profile, and one section caught me off-guard.
   
   Here she describes the actor remembering a talk given by the widow of John Cassevettes, his idol, who marvelled at the appeal of the late-director in death while he struggled with a disappointment that nobody would finance his movies. The impact that talk had on Hawke has a lasting effect.

   But [Hawke] never forgot Cassavetes. He never forgot that it was entirely possible that people wouldn’t appreciate your work while you were doing it. That they might appreciate it only long after you were dead. Or maybe even never! But that didn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

   
   The critics — the ones who called him pretentious and too earnest and too overly serious for a movie star — became a force he worked in contrast to, a dark shadow that rode alongside him. He learned to defy them, if not ignore them. He learned to let them remind him what he was supposed to be, which is an artist, which is someone who tells the truth, not just a puppet who dances to please his audience in a series of films that resemble the one he just did.

   As former-ESPN editor Paul Vix describes it in his blog about the profile, “That idea stuck with me, valuing your creativity enough to take it seriously and make it your life’s work.”
   
   Describing the second paragraph, Vix writes “Taffy tells the story of John Cassevetes’ artistic struggle, and Ethan Hawke’s, and her own, and mine, and yours, and anyone who wants to write for a living.”
   
   If you don’t even take yourself seriously, how will anyone else?
   

8. Here’s Susan Orlean again. Again from The New New Journalism:
   
   “I need to feel that a subject keeps expanding, rather than contracting. Each time I look, there needs to be more and more there […] I don’t really have ‘a beat’. There’s almost nothing that I can’t imagine becoming interested in. And maybe that’s my beat […] My requirements for a story are purely emotional, intuitive, and visceral. The only questions I pose of a topic are, ‘Am I curious about this? Is there something here that I genuinely wonder about? Do I get excited and passionate about somebody else’s passion?’”
   
   

9. And you know what? Fuck it. Here’s Fellini again, talking about truth in fantasy.
   
   “Today I still need this feeling of being a guest in the invented dream world of my films, a welcome guest in this dimension which I am myself able to program. What I need to maintain, however, is a feeling of curious surprise, a feeling of being a visitor, after all, an outsider, even when I am, at the same time, the mayor, the chief of police, and the alien registration office of this whole invented world, of this city that I have been led to by the shiny reflection in the faraway window and which I know so well in all its details that I can finally believe that I am inside my own dream. After all, it’s the dreamer who has made the dream. Nothing is so intrinsically true and corresponds so deeply to the psychic reality of the dreamer as the dream itself. Nothing is more honest than a dream.”
   

10. If you’ve made it this far, fair play to you. Here’s Shea Serrano asking for a suggestion of followers’ favourite heist films, my favourite genre. The suggestions are all great, even the bad ones. See you next week.
    

1. Not gonna lie, I had to look up what this meant. Here’s a definition I found: “A cultural relativist is someone who believes that different cultures should be understood and judged based on their own values, beliefs, and norms, rather than using an external or universal standard. Essentially, they argue that there is no absolute right or wrong; what is considered acceptable or moral varies from one culture to another.” Sounds nice.

2. It’s quite a long and rambling video, which also speaks to the way that clarity and concision are no longer necessary for internet absorption either.

3. Sorry, Nick.