What do the processes of writing do?
Create commons. Create publics.
- Silvia Federici
Welcome back to Think Club: the newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere! Thanks so much for signing up and coming along with me. Last month I arbitrarily picked a Thursday late in October for my first release, but I didn’t love the timing (I don’t do arbitrary very well). I needed a release schedule with more teeth. I receive a lot of newsletters on Fridays — end-of-week roundups that now feel thoroughly welcome and expected. I know when I’m going to hear from them.
So, since this is a monthly endeavour, I’m going to give you an end-of-month roundup and send you the goods on the last day of each calendar month. Ends of months are also arbitrary, but at least we all see them coming. Next month will be a particularly exciting one. The end of a month, the end of a year; the END OF A DECADE. That’s a lot of rounding up to do (but don’t worry I won’t stray into the internalised neoliberalism territory of the what-have-you-achieved-this-decade meme).
But I’m getting ahead of myself. November was frustrating, but a goodie. This month I spent inordinate amounts of time behind a screen trying and failing and trying and vaguely succeeding (thanks to the support of my incredible supervisor) at editing my thesis. Everyone told me that once I had my full draft I’d be on the downward slope. But, no. Re-writing has been pretty painful. Not because I don’t think I need to make changes, but because I’m over it. I feel like I’ve sucked the lemon of the subject dry and want to move on to something new. There’s no sour tang of discovery here, just some fibrous pith to chew through. Nine days until submission. Wish me luck (or, better yet, send me your best advice for ploughing through burnout and nurturing a decent attention span).
All that laptop time meant that my reading consumption this month featured more articles than anything else. I felt too guilty to sit down with a novel, even though that’s what would have probably re-charged me the most. But the screeniness didn’t detract from the quality of the reads. Keep scrolling till the end to find a bonus film feature, too: Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. I’m grateful for these pieces and the way they helped me think:
Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia, Rangitane o Wairau) and her recent essay “River monster: My elusive and charismatic father”. Anyone that opens a personal essay set in the year 1994 in the present tense is a winner, in my book. Marshall spins for us that teenage love and loathing so sublime: “A woman wafts past in white and tells [my father] she loves his leather jacket. Sadly, it is quite cool”. The piece lurches from paternal recollections to satire to historiography to the epigrammatic (“war makes men invent things”) to children’s films to grief. The lurching is a methodology. In these lurches lies the thrum of whakapapa, the layering of lives and beings and bigger forces. I won’t spoil everything, but the climax features this song (and anyone that loves this song is a winner, in my book). There’s something irreverent about nearly everything she does, making the knife twist of sudden reverence hit all the harder: “and look, now we are rowing through blood that is the greenest shade of blue.” It’s a crying shame that this writer, to the best of my knowledge, does not yet have a book that I can point you to. Marshall often publishes poems straight from her iPad notes app to her Twitter feed. She wrote a poem that I wanted to share here but she’s since taken it down. I’m not disappointed, though. The removal is giving me hope that she might put out a poetry collection soon. Watch this space.
The Guardian’s collective interview with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I am still fascinated by her, I’m sorry. This behind-the-scenes glimpse into her chaotic post-it notes, last-minute edits, and happy accidents gave me such a rush. For a second there it looked like PWB was teetering on cancel territory. The internet moves so fast, however, that this issue already feels like a non-issue (though it’s easy for me to say that; I’m sure it still stings for some, but I’m getting to my argument for why we shouldn’t cancel her). The optics of her Vogue photoshoot on the bus (glitzily-clad and flitting down an aisle of working class passengers) did nothing to help dispel the one major criticism of Fleabag — that it is simply too posh. Why did she not veto the gross, extractive, objectifying concept of the photoshoot is beyond me. But look, PWB is posh. She’s remarkably socially advantaged. But I see her more as a guide for what any sparky, cheeky child could go on to do with the right resources, the right safety nets, and the right kinds of unflagging adult encouragement. Look at what’s artistically possible with the right structures in place! More of these structures for more sparky people and their sparky art-making, please! Her declaration of love for writing ‘vulnerable rascals’ in The Guardian interview might represent a bit of a Narcissus moment but I still love her, I do.
New Zealand journalists Kirsty Johnstone and Alison Mau, with their excellent analysis of a recent high-profile murder trial (I’m linking to their pieces away from the top line in case you need to skip the sexual violence material therein). Now, unlike Wordpress, Substack doesn’t provide any stats on where in the world you hail from, dear reader, but no doubt many will have seen headlines on the trial of the man accused of murdering British traveler Grace Millane in Auckland last year. The past few weeks have seen a queasy public teetering between the desire to bear true witness to the trial and, on the other hand, a cloying kind of voyeurism of the True Crime variety, enabled by the media click revenue machine. The live blog updates were like some serialised drama, the most painful ‘episodes’ being the substance and strategies of the defence’s case. I am loathe to share anything from the New Zealand Herald, but investigative journalist Kirsty Johnston is one of their few redeeming writers. Johnston outlines the way that the trial “frequently felt similar to watching aliens make sense of [humankind]. The understandable actions of young women were repeatedly twisted through a masculine lens until they looked insidious, suspicious.” Mau also highlights the use of male lens and its propagation of false and blaming assumptions about female behaviour. Such assumptions gained wings and won much of the media’s favour, though thankfully not the jury’s. Philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this “testimonial injustice”— the idea that masculine people are worthy of credibility and belief, and feminine ones are not. And we’ve barely started on the issue of whose lost lives are deemed worthy of attention. A heavy, heavy time, but one in which effective journalism is making a difference.
Sonya Nair and her live tweets from The Wheeler Centre’s Broadside, a feminist ideas festival in Melbourne. This item is less a review and more a celebration of this celebration of ideas, and all the people clustered around the events that were generous enough to share proceedings. I used to spend a lot of time in Melbourne when my best friend lived there. I haven’t been back in a few years but this festival made me wish I was there. Thankfully Nair’s tweets made it digitally possible! I was also tipped off to the magic of a Zadie Smith and Jia Tolentino conversation by posts from Leah Jing McIntosh of incredible Liminal Magazine-founding fame. Nair covered it, too, catching a great line from Smith on hearing “a lot of people blaming each other but even the blaming feeds the machine. Everything feeds the machine. The casino always wins. The guys at the top are making money off your opinions and your feelings and that’s the core of our despair.” It makes me wonder about who is profiting from this newsletter. In case you were wondering, this Substack platform does not charge me unless I charge you. No ads, but a commission structure. So right now we are writing and reading for free on the outskirts of the profit model. A tiny commons. May we always find ways to hack the profit model, until we manage to topple it! Speaking of Broadside and email newsletters, I received a podcast link to the brilliant Broadside conversation between Aminatou Sow, Fatima Bhutto, Jia Tolentino, and Tressie McMillan Cottom on feminism and capitalism via Amelia Barnes’ Recommendations newsletter. Always keen to hear of more great newsletters, so feel free to share your favourites with me!
Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit - Before I watched this film at the cinema I saw that one of my heroes, Eileen Myles, hated it. They have since deleted their tweet but it made me need to see the film even more. (As an aside, this phenomenon makes me feel better about writing critical reviews. As long as it’s substantiated and not a personal attack, a negative review brings that sticky syrup of inquisitive compulsion that can drive more people to the work to make up their own minds). With Myles on my mind it took me a while to warm to this one. At first it felt just plain wrong to laugh at Hitler. It probably still is. But after a while the comedy felt like vinegar cutting through the fat of fascist pomposity. That’s the problem with fascists - they’re so damned serious! I think that anyone that can laugh at themselves is safer against succumbing to authoritarianism. That’s what Jojo’s mother tried to instil in him, anyway: an ability to laugh at himself and the world. Last month you might recall that I felt uncomfortable about writing that was too sincere about the truths of the Holocaust. I saw the novel Fugitive Pieces as an example of lyricism wrangling beauty from horror as a prosthetic kind of peace. So can I really be upset about its opposite - humour? Come to think of it, though, maybe humour is not the opposite of beauty. Maybe humour, in its own beautiful way, simply says there is no meaning to see here. There is no sense that we can wrangle from senseless violence and loss. The Holocaust defies representation at all. Speaking of representation, though, I’m not sure about the depiction of the one Jewish character, Elsa. Was she just there as an heuristic to facilitate Jojo’s personal growth and break his Nazi loyalties? I hate the idea of only being able to cultivate empathy via proximity to the Other, like a privileged leech. But see it for yourselves. For Hitler-haters (err, EVERYONE) there’s a rather cathartic scene at the end.
Quick quotes, quick links:
Since this month’s newsletter focuses on digital reads I’ll throw in an extra section. These pieces did not make the review pile but you simply need to read for yourself:
Novelist Pip Adam’s “Writer, Incorporated”:
"I class-shifted because I thought I needed to – because I thought that was the only way to be a writer. I’ve never felt at home in the big academic machines – I feel too loud, too big, my lunch never looks right.”Essayist Rose Lu’s “The Tiger Cub”, excerpted from her new book All Who Live on Islands. On her brother’s recovery from depression she writes that “I noticed that you smiled more. You would squeeze your eyelids at something particularly funny, and your eyes looked like tadpoles, tails shaking with delight.”
Writer and photographer Kirsty Dunn’s “Whakamā”:
“I think about whakamā and how it permeates and operates in ways that I’m still uncovering. I think about the things we do not say to each other, in English nor in Māori. Maybe the right words don’t exist.”
See you back here on the last day of the year. Gulp.
Until next time, thinkers!
Hannah x
P.s. I meant it when I said that my inbox or DMs are open to suggestions!
P.p.s. If you came to this newsletter via a friend then please thank them for me. Hope to see you next month as a subscriber ;)