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There is, in fact, no master plan, but this is what is happening: I'm growing.

No, I'm not referring to the physiological impact of the morning oatmeal cookie (butterscotch!). I'm referring to my spheres of interest, the books I'm reading, the ways I'm paying attention to the news, the bravado I displayed when I buckled down to learn how to throw a clay pot on a wheel (to learn, not to master; hardly master), the expanding repertoire in the kitchen. Hisham Matar's The Return has taught me some of the history, geography, and politics of Libya (and disappeared dissidents). Rebecca Mead has taught me Middlemarch and George Eliot. Katie Roiphe has taught me John Updike, Maurice Sendak, Dylan Thomas, and James Salter (among others). Scott Anderson, with his glorious New York Times Magazine essay, has taught me the antecedents of contemporary Middle East. Viet Thanh Nguyen is teaching me, with his Pulitzer winning The Sympathizer, the Vietnamese experience of war.


The world is complex. The news requires perspective. Life is once. I'm going deeper.

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Our greatest writers do not merely assuage, entertain, delight, and challenge us. They teach us something about humanity, something about how art gets done.

Marilynne Robinson is one of our greatest writers, and while I have not yet read her new novel, Lila (I will), I have been taking great pleasure from the reviews and conversations surrounding its release.

Take the magnificent conversation Robinson has with New York Times Magazine writer Wyatt Mason, which can be found here. The profile goes far beyond the bounds of the writer's work and ways. It dives straight into the heart of us. Here, for example, the two are musing over fear—the control it has over our lives:

“I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear.” Perched on the edge of a sofa, hands loosely clasped, Robinson leaned forward as if breaking bad news to a gentle heart. “What it comes down to — and I think this has become prominent in our culture recently — is that fear is an excuse: ‘I would like to have done something, but of course I couldn’t.’ Fear is so opportunistic that people can call on it under the slightest provocations: ‘He looked at me funny.’ ”

“ ‘So I shot him,’ ” I said.

“Exactly.”

“ ‘Can you blame me?’ ”

‘‘Exactly. Fear has, in this moment, a respectability I’ve never seen in my life.”

Later, Mason returns to the topic:

And it was here that Robinson brought up fear: How it has come to keep us at bay from our best selves, the selves that could and should “do something.” In her case, that “something” has been writing. For Robinson, writing is not a craft; it is “testimony,” a bearing witness: an act that demands much of its maker, not least of which is the courage to reveal what one loves.

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This week’s podcast is remarkable both for its complete lack of curse words (not even kidding), and for its very professional discussion about Garth Hallberg’s recent essay Why Write Novels at All? that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. We were fortunate enough to get Garth in on this podcast so that he could expand on some of his ideas and observations about a few contemporary American novelists who tend to get lumped together: Franzen, DFW, Eugenides, Zadie Smith, etc.

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I have been thinking about how people spend their time.  About what we do when heat overtakes us, or horrific news erupts, or dreams are crushed, or people disappoint us.  About how we show those we love that we do love them.  About how we make time's passing matter.  The other evening, while at dinner, my son was explaining what matters to him when choosing friends.  "I don't want to spend that much time with people who spend too much time judging other people," he said, naming a top criteria.  I thought about me:  Do I spend enough of my own time not judging?

During this past week of both celebrating birthdays and escaping heat, I have found myself at more restaurants than usual, watching those at neighboring tables spend the great portion of their time interacting alone with their own jewel-encrusted phones.  Three teen sisters never once spoke to one another.  They texted, the three of them alone on their phones, through the lemonade, the salads, and the shared dessert.

How do people spend their time? 

How is a day delivered and consumed by a gardener, say, in Dubai, or by a man who is in radiant love?  Yesterday, I read a story I encourage you to read about the making of a documentary film based entirely on YouTube footage.  The story, which appears in the July 24, 2011 New York Times Magazine, was written by Adam Sternbergh and is subtitled "How more than 80,000 videos and 4,500 hours of raw footage turned into one unexpectedly emotional 95-minute movie."  The film, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, was edited by Joe Walker.  From the story:

"I noticed fairly early on that a lot of men with very good cameras were taking beautiful pictures of their very beautiful girlfriends backlit in parks," Walker says. So they tagged all those clips "My Beautiful Girlfriend" and built a montage out of them.  Other tags included "Ablutions" and "Footwork." "So many people shot their own feet walking, we could have made a continuous 12-hour film out of people walking," he said. "We could have made a film out of watermelons. We could have made a film entirely shot by women named Linda...."

Read the whole story.  Watch a few of the clips here.  And ask yourself what film you'd make about the life that you are living.

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Mark Armstrong of Longreads posts his top essays and articles over at Mother Jones each week, and this time around I’m his “Featured Longreader.” Here’s some of what I’ve been reading recently:

A Disney trip with kids meets lots of furtive weed smoking in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Rough Guide to Disney World. “It was a double hallucination,” he says. “You were hallucinating inside of Walter Disney’s hallucination. That’s what he wanted.” Already an official #longreads pick, I know, but: it’s so, so good and only gets better as it goes.

I’ve also been revisiting Eudora Welty’s fiction in preparation for a Granta event [held at the New School last night]. “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “Petrified Man” are two of her most beloved stories, and with good reason: they’re funny and relentless and so accurately and minutely observed. Returning to them, I realized what an influence she must have had on Dorothy Allison (whose Bastard Out of Carolina, a #longlongread, I also recommend). Then I confirmed it. “I was seduced by Eudora Welty,” Allison wrote in 2005, though “I had every reason to distrust her, as I had distrusted Faulkner—both of them products of the middle-class South I disdained.”

To round out this unexpectedly southern round-up, for anyone who missed it last week, I recommend my friend Anna Holmes’ essay on the female Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement. One, a factory worker and mother of two traveling after a miscarriage, refused to give up her seat to a white couple and kicked a deputy in the groin when he tried to make her.

I spend so little time around here these days, I forgot to mention my inclusion in Paper Magazine’s Lit It Crowd. I love the photo; all my companions — Thessaly LaForce, Sadie Stein, Emma Straub, and Hamish Robertson — look dead sexy (which they are), while I’m off to the side, hands folded, gazing skyward and seemingly clucking like a delighted schoolmarm/auntie.

It’s a group, Lorin Stein said, “lousy with Parisians”: Thessaly and Sadie are editors and writers at The Paris Review Daily, and Emma and I are contributors. News of Thessaly’s upcoming departure for the Iowa Writers Workshop and that The New Yorker’s Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn will be taking over prompted The New York Observer’s Kat Stoeffel to note the Paper feature, in “Les Filles du Blog,” and to observe that “Although many intellectual and literary magazines have come under scrutiny lately for a lack of female bylines,&rd

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