Talking about work while on a hike with a friend
The Sunday Bundle: books, films, shows, music, art and reflections
The Sunday Bundle is a list of my best recommendations and reflections from the week! Soon to be a bonus offering for paid subscribers. If you like what you see, consider upgrading your subscription. The fruit is always fresh.
Included is an audio recording of the newsletter with bonus chat. I’m so sorry I messed up the pronunciation of literally every single name haha 😭 it’s 12:00am as I record this and I am delulu, I chugged two glasses of cold water right before, and all my pronunciation YouTube videos failed me NEXT TIME IS HOT TEA I PROMISE.
Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre: “A state of emergency has been declared in France,” and in between the mess is an out-of-work poet. The poet finds themself among a confluence of protestors and police who skirmish as France, and the West, deal with a rise of nationalism. The poet is written without gender markers and the structure of the book is experimental and fun to read.
Our unemployed poet uses their free time to smoke weed and walk around the city eating bananas, quietly desperate to understand how capitalism has their world in a chokehold. They study the origins of nazism and wonder how they can be a poet and an employee meanwhile the city is about to implode?
They play political tug-of-war with their opinionated father as they come to decide on their own slippery moral leanings. “It’s true that I see fascism everywhere since there's come to be more and more of it around, though I don't even know what fascism means.” Lefebrvre injects the book with a kind of humor that appears dumb and lucid on the page all at the same time.
There is satire in the way the poet talks while weighing up the costs and benefits of nationalism versus the health of the global community, especially in conversation with their “superego of a father,” ending every sentence with, “Papa.”
“Of course not, Papa.” “I have no idea, Papa.”
The meat of the story is when the poet becomes disturbed by their own privilege and complicity in humanitarian crises: “[My father] wouldn't stop reminding me that like him I belong to, oh yes, to that food lineage, that I'd therefore never had the nearest experience of hunger or thirst so what made me someone who could talk about either without being ridiculous or even becoming frankly appalling?”
Read this if you’d like a political farce, Papa.
Book club updates!
We started the March book club pick Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead! The discussion threads are open to receive your thoughts and gossip here in my chat! It’s not too late to join, so grab your copy in any form you wish.
Here’s a welcome to the book club post introducing my tastes for all our new subscribers, hiii! So fucking cool to be chilling with you.
The short story, Sleeper Hit by Jinwoo Chong, on Guernica: “Hud told me he didn’t love me anymore around one or two in the morning…”
The interview Jenny Slate Doesn’t Want to Gross You Out: The comic on love, stagefright, and her new standup special’s focus on bodily fluids (The New Yorker).
This discussion with author Lauren Groff on the opening of her new bookstore in Florida, which will feature banned books, hell yeah (LitHub).
The stand-up comedy special Taylor Tomlinson: Have It All (Netflix), who’s dark jokes about mental health and depression especially tickle me. A good romp. Hehe. And still on the theme of work, Tomlinson ponders whether she can have a successful career and a relationship and a family and be happy? Can she have it all?
The series Rap Sh!t (HBO Max), starring Aida Osman and Kamillion, created by Issa Rae: An addicting must-see for fans of Insecure, about two estranged friends who form a rap group, meanwhile navigating love, relationships, and the mounting pressure to pop that pussy and sell-out. A topical show about what success looks like for creatives and the working class in the age of social media.
I watched the whole first season on the first day of my period curled up with a pillow and a Van Leeuwen Nostalgia ice cream bar. I’ve never made a better decision. (And I was thinking, I can’t believe I ate ice creams bars almost every day for lunch in middle school.) These two characters are still on my mind, I hope all their dreams come true. 😭
New-to-me artist Cecilia Carlstedt, an illustrator from Stockholm, who’s work is “essentially linked to the world of fashion.”
“Experimentation is an integral part of her working process and she uses various techniques in her work such as ink, screen printing and collage.”
The Gender Spiral Podcast (Spotify, Apple, Patreon): Hosted by comedy writer Ally Beardsley and radio producer Babette Thomas. I’ve been looking forward to this new podcast ever since I saw the trailer on Beardsley’s Instagram here who I’m a huge fan of. At the end of the trailer they say “Come spiral with us,” and I was like absolutely, this is incredible, this is the moment, omg omg omg.
“Gender Spiral is our quest to explore the modern experience of being a human in our gendered world…Through conversations with the foremost experts on the topic of gender: trans and queer people.” The first episode dropped last summer and now the whole first season is out. It’s fantastic.
The R&B album Wasteland by Brent Faiyaz (Spotify, YouTube, website), and this song of naughty promises which turn to empty platitudes in the music video:
How do we cultivate an environment of free curiosity? I went on a hike with a friend (another huge accomplishment since the accident) and we talked about philosophy the entire way up, inspired by the culture of office work in San Francisco which is pretty rough. You’re commonly expected to work all week and take on additional job roles even when you’re not getting paid for it. We got onto the type of people he knows who’s work is their entire identity, their religion even, because they want to be the best most successful person. They didn’t have a life outside of work. He was on the way of becoming like that, and he was losing his curiosity with the world around him.
As we walked and took some photos, we poked at the idea of individualism in the pursuit of success as being the antithesis to curiosity. Talking about how it keeps you focused on your goals of being the one winner of capital, where you must be right all the time, the best in the room, the know-it-all, effectively dampening your ability to have social awareness and free curiosity.
He said, when he’s in an environment where experimentation is too great a risk for fear of failure, and he’s supposed to be the person who’s right all the time, it’s much harder for him to learn. He’s too busy worrying about how to be the best to also think enough about other people. When he realized this, he refused to become the boy-boss he was growing up to be, hating the erasure of his more expansive identity, and so decided to change the entire goal of his life and pivot careers.
To which I said: that’s fucking incredible.
We were almost to the top and I was so out of breath, dying really, but absolutely crushing it! Our convo brought me to some other things I’d been mulling over lately. I said: Curiosity is an evolutionary necessity, and so I’m worried capitalism and its required assimilation, will technically make us devolve as a species, and in fact is already in the process of doing so.
And wow, Look at this great view!!
Lmao, stunning! And then we went back down the hill and talked some more. I couldn’t move for two days afterwards but it was so damn worth it.
What do you think about our reflections? Have you ever made a similar decision?
The Sunday Bundle 😍. Love love love! And I love the audios ... they are a whole podcast. I really resonated with the reflections on work and curiosity. I am on this journey. Journeying toward that which embraces experimentation and curiosity rather than stifles it 🫶🏽
Can’t wait to listen to the podcast! I loved the Jenny slate interview, which inspired me to watch the Marcel the shell movie this week, which was everything I could have hoped and more (made me cry!). Wondering if you’re willing to share what hike it was? :)