Regular Thoughts + Things recommendations have been sparse lately. This week I have some for you—along with another episode of Dialectic.
Listen 🎧🎼
Dialectic Episode 4: Ava
Episode 4 is with Ava, one of my favorite writers (her Substack, Bookbear Express). I've recommended her writing before, so I hope you've been fortunate to read it. If not, today's a great day to start. It was fun to read some of my favorite excerpts of Ava's back to her. We talk about writing, consistency, commitment, friendship, authenticity, self-respect, taste, beauty, and much more. If you're curious about where to start, I've included some favorite essays that are referenced in the episode below:
the girl the internet made me (Authenticity)
Watch 🎥 📺
Anora (2024)
Someone more clever than me aptly put Sean Baker's Anora like this: Pretty Woman (1990) meets Uncut Gems (2019). The premise? Ani, a young sex worker meets Ivanya, an even younger boy-man and son of a Russian oligarch. The two get on and embark on quite the adventure around Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, only for the roller coaster to come crashing down.
It's probably the best film I've seen this year, and I think it will win the Oscar for Best Picture. I expect Mikey Madison to win for her titular role as well. If you can handle a lot of onscreen sex, you should get out and see this one in a packed theater. It is hilarious, thrilling, and delicately tender all at once.
Read 📖📄
a stupid bravery - Visakan Veerasamy
Visa is in contention for my (and many others) favorite Twitter user. I think it's safe to call him prolific: on top of his seemingly infinite library of threads (one of my favorites), he writes essays and books, makes TikToks and YouTube videos, and is simply a joy to listen to. He wrote one of the best essays I've ever read: 'Are you serious?'. Sam Hinkie put it well—Visa's writing is a bat signal for the most interesting people out there, or as Visa calls them (and himself), "friendly, ambitious nerds."
Visa published his latest this weekend—a meditation on his own potential and what it would take for him to write an essay every day. It's named after an iconic moment in this John Mayer interview. Around the 53-minute mark, John describes the "stupid bravery" it requires for him to start riffing live, only to do just that and blow Zane Lowe (and our) mind(s).
Visa: "Thinking is easy. Information architecture is hard." & Fran Lebowitz: “words are easy, books are not.” He expands:
I do believe that a lot of the skillset of being a good writer is simply allowing yourself to have lots of such happy accidents, and recognizing when they’re good, and employing them accordingly. But writing a good book is a different skillset entirely. It requires concerted organization and reorganization, over and over again. It requires discarding some of the good sentences and paragraphs that you wrote because they don’t serve the book you’re writing, which can be painful to do. And I think above all else it requires tenacity, grit, a dogged persistence.
In one of the best parts of the essay, Visa suggests that his "best" essay (Are you serious?) doesn't scratch the surface of what he knows he's capable of:
Several people have said that Are you serious?is one of the best essays they’ve ever read. I’d certainly point at it as the best essay I’ve written so far, though it’s not even close to the 10th best essay I have floating around in my mind’s eye.
Come on now!
Finally, he reflects on how his best work is not technically perfect, but has that feeling of aliveness. He then uses Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building to describe how everything creative, from writing to architecture, comes back to bravery:
But they feel right to me, and that’s actually what really matters, that what makes them feel alive. The quality I look for, I tend to describe as “animating spirit”, and it’s what I strive to invoke in all of my works across all mediums.
But I see so clearly right now that… past the bravery to begin creating, is architecture, which requires still more bravery. So it turns out “be brave” WAS the core thing after all, in more ways than I was appreciating. It’s fractal and recursive, it’s necessary at every stage of the process.
May you and I both employ stupid bravery today and everyday.
Share this post