Weeknote 03/2024
In my view, there are four main energies you can tap into when you write your book. The main writing energy you discover may be just one or you may find that you have a combination of more than one of these energies that fuels your writing endeavors.
The four energies are Blissed, Blessed, Pissed, and Dissed.
Verbs
Reeling: Bobby Fingers, YouTube
It’s incredibly exciting when someone takes a firmly established medium, in this case, YouTube, and then obliterates the kind of thing you thought might be possible in that medium. Bobby Fingers has already done that for me in just four videos. I think he is an Irish artist, model maker, and filmmaker, and he seems to have a band as well, and in these videos he… well… he crafts extraordinary, dazzling, hilarious, videos/short films unlike anything else I’ve seen. His very first video begins with the staggering sentence, “Today I'm going to show you how I made this one to nine scale diorama depicting Mel Gibson's 2006 drunk driving arrest in Malibu and if you stick around to the end I'll tell you how it could be yours.”
Watching: For All Mankind, AppleTV
I mentioned For All Mankind in my 2023 Yearnote as we were deep into season 2 at that point, and loving every moment. We’ve now finished up all four released seasons, and season 5 cannot come soon enough for us. It’s a great premise; the Russians win the space race and are first to the moon in 1969, and it’s played out - with a decade jump every season - with all the drama, tension, and excitement that I loved from showrunner Ronald D Moore’s now classic Battlestar Galactica reboot. A show I maintain is the single greatest TV political drama of all time… For All Mankind has some deep, moving performances and punchy plot points that tackle politics, technology, inequality, and late-stage capitalism. Season 4 was especially brutal for my two favourite characters but my fingers are crossed that at least one of them might come to triumph in the long run.
Learning: Interview with Bill Hader, Ten Percent Happier
I’ve dropped in and out of Ten Percent Happier on YouTube and the podcast from time to time when there’s been a particularly interesting guest or topic, but it’s not in my regular rotation. This particular episode, Bill Hader on Anxiety, Imposter Syndrome and Leaning Into Discomfort, caught my eye though and I’m really glad I gave it a watch. Of course, Hader is incredibly funny from start to finish but he’s also startlingly open about quite debilitating levels of anxiety, fears of imposter syndrome, and struggles with mental health. As always, it’s great when people in the limelight come out and speak transparently about these things, but it can sometimes feel a little self-serving. There’s none of that here. Just a guy, with tremendous talent, and real insight into his own mind, being honest, funny, and open.
Thinking: Interview with Andreas Malm, New York Times
I’ve had Andreas Malm’s provocatively titled book How to Blow Up a Pipeline for a little while but haven’t yet given it a read, so I was interested to get more of a picture of him and his thinking from this NY Times article I found. Malm is a Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University and has taken the stance, laid out in this interview, his books, and numerous talks, that responding to the climate crisis is now of such overwhelming significance that acts of violence - specifically against infrastructure - are now not only acceptable but to be encouraged. This is something of an extreme view, I think, when taken against the view of most people but it is a view that may well be moving from the fringes towards the mainstream as time goes on. The NY Times piece certainly challenges Malm in his claims, and he holds his position really well, I think, whilst still maintaining clarity, conviction, and poise.
Listening: The Left Hand of Darkness, BBC full cast recording
I’ve been a subscriber to The Marginalian newsletter for a very long time, in internet years, and it’s always sending thoughtful, inspiring, provocative stuff my way. This entry on Susan Sontag came through last week and was a particularly great example of what The Marginalian does best. Helmed by the prolific Maria Popova, The Marginalian draws together writing, thinking, art, poetry, and literature from great minds of the past (and present) and curates and connects all of that around specific thoughts or themes. This entry about Sontag focuses on storytelling, being a human being, and writing, and the archive on the website is an out-and-out treasure trove.
Words
Worryingly, my car is now a Cars car.
Snow, ice, sleet, and then rain and wind, and then a bright, warm sunny day! And then snow, ice, sleet. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, And so it goes…
Quite fortunately, tomorrow I’m off to Abu Dhabi for 4 days where it’s a very civilised 24 degrees of lovely centigrade. This week has been occupied with lots of house and home things, small bits and pieces and the general everyday sorts of stuff, as well as getting ready for the workshop I’ll be running once I get to Abu Dhabi and the travel to get me there. It’ll be an overnight flight into Istanbul, a quick turnaround, and then on to Abu Dhabi for a morning arrival. I then have a whole day to make the most of which is quite an unusual pleasure on these sorts of trips. Having been to Abu Dhabi 3 or 4 years back I’ve seen the main sights so I’ll be able to take it easier and just enjoy a day settling in before getting to work with the workshop participants on Monday morning.
This week I’ve also been lining up some conferences and events that are coming up over the next few months. I like speaking at these sorts of things, and running workshops or giving talks, so I’m hoping to keep scouting them out as the year goes on and tossing my hat in the ring. They all need applications, pitches, or calls for workshops to be submitted which is exactly the sort of work I find I can really get into on a plane journey so hopefully I’ll use some of that time to make headway on the next tranche of applications.
It really feels like a sowing-seeds sort of time right now for me, and I enjoy that work as much as any other, but it does come with the anxiety of not quite knowing what (if anything!) will end up growing! I think, probably, the best approach is to sow far and wide, to chuck that seed anywhere and everywhere, and let things take their course. That said, I know less than nothing about gardening so maybe that metaphor has gone entirely off the rails. Either way, something will bloom.