It's been a while since I've shared recommendations, so here are a few for your weekend. Enjoy!
Watch 🎥 📺 or Listen 🎧🎼
RAYE: Escapism. (Live) - SNL
D shared this after discovering RAYE on the Coachella subreddit, which suggests she smashed her set out of the park last weekend.
This performance blew me away and, from a bit of additional listening, differs quite a bit from her other performances. Some obvious Amy comparisons, to be sure, and still totally fresh. Rocks. I'm enjoying her Tiny Desk as I write this if you want a little more.
Read 📖📄
The Overstory by Richard Powers
I recently finished Richard Powers' grand green epic, The Overstory.
Think Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999), with a smattering of characters and intertwining lives, all against the backdrop of trees. These grand, slow, wise, magical beings all around us.
I'll be honest--it's a long haul and it took me several months of picking up and putting down. It's possible that it's not quite the sum of its parts, and frankly, spends less time concerned with plot than it does with people, ideas, values, and the living world. It is full of prose you'll want to hang on a wall, and has some iconic segments that I've already gone back to read again.
But speaking of sums, in the weeks since, I've been rewarded most by the novel's subtle impact on how I view the world around me. I feel as though I have new eyes for the living world. Simple joys, appreciation of beauty, a connectedness to all that is growing. It's funny how stories can work on you long after you thought you'd finished them.
Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book, where Powers challenges his character and his reader, and perhaps all of us...
Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.
That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.
A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.
While I'm at it, I'll make this a double rec and include this lovely essay from Jasmine that I stumbled upon shortly after finishing Overstory: attending to the other. It's about attention--in many forms--but this pair of excerpts feels particularly suited to reference in the context of the novel:
Instead, he calls for you to allow yourself to be drawn into a reciprocal relationship with the tree, where you see the tree in its entirety. “Whatever belongs to the tree is included: its form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars”, all of the tree, confronting you bodily.
The sociologist Rosa Hartman calls a similar mode of relating resonance. Instead of viewing oneself as a closed off, independent system bent on controlling the other, one leaves oneself open to being affected by the world, responsive to its call, and thereby allows oneself to transform and be transformed by it.
So many beings -- animals, trees, mountains, and rivers -- have no place in any sign system we might design, no expressive agency in any human semiotic. To encounter the other, we can develop language, yes, but we should also learn to open our hearts and bodies to the speech of breath, beak, and branch. We must sensitize ourselves to the poetics of everything.
Joy by Zadie Smith
M generously shared this essay just last night, in response to something I wrote. I love it. Zadie argues that pleasure and joy are entirely different things, rather than one that leads into the other. In particular, that joy is something far more rare ("that strange admixture of terror, pain and delight"). Near the essay's completion, she observes:
The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn't happened at all, at least once, how would we live?
There's a particularly face-slapping quote from Julian Barnes near the end, on grief: "It hurts just as much as it is worth."
Zadie replies: “What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal. Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do.”
I'm reminded of that short poem by Emily Dickinson:
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
Thanks for reading,
Jackson