rough drafting
Does the world need another newsletter from an early 30’s would be public intellectual watching the world go by from the Upper East Side of Manhattan? Asked and answered. But one thing I think we’ve learned from this pandemic twisted year is that sometimes the luxuries are necessities, and what seemed like a necessity can turn out to be a luxury. I just read (in Ben Wilson’s excellent Metropolis) that writing began 5,500 years ago when the modern city became too complicated to manage, when there was too much stuff to count by hand. When data started to get big.
Maybe that’s still why we write: to count things, to put them down so we don’t forget them. If we write the truest sentences we know, maybe we can hold the beautiful things and keep the ugly things at bay. Or at least shore some fragments against our ruin, as the old poet once said. I believe in having and holding opinions, and also in changing my mind. I believe in curating the world, idiosyncratically. I want to make the complicated things simple, but also wise.
We take it for granted that we recognize a Pollock painting instantly, that Adele always sounds like herself, that our favorite TV show will give us the thrills that we know we deserve. But actually creating a voice and synthesizing a style is really hard. It takes work, and being a full person is always a huge risk. But that’s the task and the truth if we are to dare to be really interesting. If we don’t, for us this life will have been at least partially in vain.
Some of you might read me at the Forward or elsewhere, or maybe we’ve had dinner or drinks. Maybe we haven’t. I’m hoping this spot exposes me in a different, more dangerous and rewarding way. I’ll never be far from the things I care about: books, culture, beauty and absurdity, condiments, intimacy and its ecstasies and discontents, and the Jewish story. But I think there is a difference between thinking with ideas and using an education as a placeholder for raw and original thought.
I want the voice you meet here to feel real and unmediated, the one you’d hear in a voice memo I left you this morning or a dinner party you once invited me to or in a whispered conversation undertaken deep into the night. I want to hear from you too, whoever and wherever you are. I want to know what turns you on, and what you’d like to turn off. I want to talk about the things everyone actually wants to talk about. Together, I want us to figure out how we can live wildly and beautifully, in brush strokes that bounce.
We are breathing at a moment when it feels like history is only being written in headlines: Covid, political implosion, global chaos. All of these need the smartest minds we have to think their best thoughts, with compassion and competency. But here I’m after embodied wisdom and practical knowledge, what it’s like to be living and breathing and wanting and feeling right now. I think that’s where art begins, and also where it ends. How do you find someone you want to fight for and with? And how do you convince them to fight for you? What’s the banner you see on whatever marble arch you’d like to march through next? How do we live both in the fireworks and the sad and empty town beneath their radiance?
I am interested in how ideas land in the body, how we feel them beating under our skin and pulsing in that old sorcerer and truthteller and liar, our gut. I want to know the coordinates of the messy crossroads where we end and the world begins. I’ll try to map that territory here, once a week. I’ll be watching the world, and here’s to hoping that you like watching me.
With that, let’s start.