📸 Jersey Train Tracks on Portra 400
📚 Finished reading: On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg
The core subject of this book—broken relationships and how to mend them—is a critical topic for human flourishing and an increasingly lost practice. Pitched to me as an antidote to evangelicalism’s overemphasis on the injured party’s need to “forgive” and underemphasis on the injuring party’s pathway to repair; unfortunately, the book did not quite live up to my expectations. Ruttenberg’s heart is no doubt in the right place and her left-leaning views are roughly congruent with my own. However, her tendency to morally front-load her suggestions takes away from the credibility of her ideas, none of which would be novel to someone who has spent an even moderate amount of time living in communities where friction, apology, and inconvenience occurs with relative frequency. While I applaud this book for championing a worthy cause and good principles, I don’t see myself recommending it anytime soon, as it ultimately did not leave me as equipped as I had hoped.
📸 Central Park Tunnel on Portra 400
📸 After the Snow on Portra 400 on The Upper East Side
📸 Two Lovers Resting on Portra 400 @ Brooklyn Museum
🎵 I can’t explain precisely why, but I firmly believe that Chicago by Sufjan Stevens is an Easter Song:
You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mind set
All things know, all things know
You had to find it
All things go, all things go
🎵 Listening To:
- Dopa(mine) by Joony
- Nesety Nafset by Nour
- I Believe In You by Kacy Hill ft. Francis and the Lights
- Waiting Room by Jenevieve ft. Jordan Ward
- OFG! by Mike Will Made-It ft. J Cole
Notes—The Egyptian language in #2 is so beautiful & where was this energy from Cole during the beef?
✍️ First They Came (Grammar Edition):
First they came for the em dash
And I did not speak out
Because I did not use the em dash
Then they came for the Oxford comma
And I did not speak out
Because I did not use the Oxford Comma
Then they came for the serial semicolon
And I did not speak out
Because I did not use the serial semicolon
Then they came for iambic
And I did not speak out
Because I did not write in iambic
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
That knew how to write a defense for me
How I feel when people tell me not to use em dashes in my writing anymore because of AI. 😆 Click here for the original poem I based this parody on.
🪴 My local library in Brooklyn had a “plant swap” on Saturday, where I escaped with some great new greenery. I absolutely love this kind of interconnectedness and community-building.
🃏 I made up a joke, tell me what you think:
Question: What do you tell your friend when he wants to message a girl but is too scared?
Answer: “Carpe DM”
✏ New Word Learned:
Kvetch: a person who complains a great deal
🎨 Been fascinated with Jeremiah Goodman’s gorgeous paintings, especially the “garden in hell"— which was the living room of former Vogue Editor-in-Chief, Diana Vreeland. Her eclectic home has inspired an abundance of beautiful derivative works. See attached photos for examples.
🚇 After a popular part 1, here are more Subway Takes for those of you who might need to borrow some opinions in a pinch:
- We should bring back blooper reels at the end of movies.
- Pets, particularly dogs, should always be allowed on the couch. Dogs that are not allowed on the couch are being treated as second-class canines.
- The best way of sitting, in order, is (1) on the floor (2) on a stool (3) on the arm of a sofa (4) one leg up on a table (5) a regular chair.
- There is no polite way of asking someone, “Do you exercise?".
- Collared shirts and business ties stifle creativity.
- iMessage should allow me to create hyperlinks instead of pasting the entire URL.
- Deep down inside, everyone is “a foodie.”
- You should be able to thumbs up or thumbs down trailers in the movie theatre; a trailer with too many thumbs down gets skipped.
- The little ellipse indicating that you or someone is texting back should be banned. It is anxiety-inducing social surveillance disguised as reassurance.
- A grilled cheese is the most perfect kind of sandwich.
👂 Interviews & Podcasts I’ve enjoyed recently:
💬 David Shurman Wallace on the poetry (and witness) of John Ashberry:
Increasingly, consumers are offered the image of art-making as a subgenre of celebrity, and the works of art themselves are allowed to remain laudable but forgettable byproducts. For the serious reader or writer, perhaps celebrity is beside the point, but most find the social orbit difficult to escape; the result is thousands of voices clamoring against the algorithm, riffing on the same jokes. Poetry — good or bad, distinct or homogenous — is somewhere else… In a time when “the right to be forgotten” — the ability to have one’s internet trail removed from search — feels increasingly difficult to secure, there is something prescient in Ashbery’s inwardness. So much of the beauty of the New York School relied on its essentially non-public interiority — the sense that there was a secret between friends you weren’t quite in on, but might glimpse for a moment. That we are moving away from Ashbery’s aesthetics makes it all the more important to remember the link between the creation of small, informal communities and a curiosity about new language.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Revanchism: a political doctrine aimed at the reversal of the losses incurred in previous political or military defeats, most commonly, incurred territorial losses.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Chronophagic: (derived from Greek chronos “time” and phagein “to eat”) means “time-eating” or time-consuming. It refers to anything that wastes time, or is used to describe the “Chronophage,” a series of mechanical,, “time-eating” grasshopper clocks created by Dr. John Taylor that dramatically depict the passage of time.
Not just a new word, but a new favorite word. Can’t wait to drop this one in a sentence (probably when discussing social media).
💬 Spring has officially arrived and I can’t help but think of one of my favorite love poems, Everyday You Play, by Pablo Neruda. The final stanza especially:
