On aged shopping carts, debates in person and on the page, and topics not yet broached
September 24, 2020
Dear Eva,
I am extraordinarily sleepy on this Thursday evening, so I am currently tucked in bed under the covers with my laptop on my legs. Even in my low-energy state, I am determined to get this puppy (letter) done a day early so when we head out for the bike trails tomorrow in the late afternoon sun, I can experience TGIF satisfaction to its fullest extent. How has your week been, I wonder? We spoke on Monday, but somehow that feels like a month ago. Since then, I had the experience of doing burpees for the first time in years and then needing ibuprofen the next morning (Tuesday), a 4:30 AM full-scale smoke alarm that caused me to shoot out of the bed like a rocket straight for the kids’ room and then get them downstairs only to find it was, we think, a spider-caused false alarm (Wednesday), and then a night of insomnia and middle-of-the-night emails that led to a very hazy but mysteriously cheery day (Thursday). Oh, and an evening celebrating Bill’s birthday around a particularly smoky fire with my family (Monday). Phew! Is it Friday yet? Can I get an amen?
When I reread your letter this week, I was struck by your casual mention of a book that has been in your Amazon shopping cart for FIVE YEARS. Now that is some restraint! This led me to think about your tendency to bookmark things for later—both in physical space (books, magazines) and digital space (web bookmarks), and how you find it mildly satisfying to realize you will likely never go back to most of them. I am certainly no stranger to putting things until they can be properly tackled (often never), but what amazes me is that you seem to genuinely feel no stress about these open loops. If only I could channel this serenity. Instead, I feel a semi-constant low hum of anxiety at the thought of articles and books never read, thoughts never written down, projects never finished. Heck, the hum is a lot more like a loud clatter depending on exactly what it is I am failing to return to, or sometimes just my mood. Now I realize I am talking to a self-proclaimed un-finisher (heh), so you will remind me that this instinct to complete is a bit silly. And you will be right. But I am thinking of—and singing in my mind—a line from Hamilton: Why do you write like you’re running out of time? If only I did! Because of course we are all running out of time, and there is so much to know and learn and do. And while I admit that a checked box is a foolish way to measure time well spent, I do think there is something to doing a dang thing and eventually putting a frame around it. You have said yourself that sometimes producing a project and holding it in your hot little hands or seeing it on the screen with your own two eyes can be a delight.
It just occurred to me that I am, quite literally, engaged in a solo, imaginary debate with you, before you have even had a chance to read my words. I am sparring with Letter Eva, before Real/Now Eva has even arrived to the party. And now that I realize that, I feel a tad sheepish.
::straightens shirt and clears throat::
You wrote last week that every conversation is an opportunity to open doors and explore new idea-rooms. Yet here I am walking us down a familiar path. Here on this 2 year anniversary of the letters, I should find a new secret hallway to take us to an unknown room. That raises an interesting question—what is something that we have never actually discussed, here or otherwise? I wonder! We have covered a lot of ground in our day, turned over the soil many times to grow new. Are there topics we have never broached? Should we? Does going to new idea-rooms require new subjects? Somehow I doubt it. Somehow it feels like the most critical piece is whether we keep stretching. I wrote this in another context to you recently, but I am curious about the capacity for growth and stretching when staying in the same place. Among other things, this is something the pandemic is helping us test. Same place, same people, same events, same me—can they produce or lead us to new idea-rooms? Here’s hoping!
I hope you are back to feeling 100 percent and heading into the weekend with vim and vigor. I’ll be rolling into Friday on a low/empty tank, but feeling no less ready for that sweet sweet TGIF feeling.
Talk soon!
Your friend,
Sarah
Sunday September 20 – Friday September 25 2020
Dear Sarah,
It’s Sunday afternoon and last night I nearly finished Draft No. 4 by John McPhee. Today I am getting some other work done and a flash of yet another tidbit I’d wanted to mention from the text (going on three weeks and counting!) came back to me, so now I have paged back through the book to find it. The tidbit struck me as I was working on a writing project in which I was cutting and pasting some text that I had previously trimmed back from another written document; I was bringing forward the trimmed-back sections into other uses, and I thought about how we trim and modify words, sentences, thoughts for different purposes (on the page and in conversation) but we have to have some way of considering and remembering which versions of our words and ideas we might call the originals to which we want to refer back, or their truest forms; in other words, is a trimmed and reduced version of a thing always the version you want to carry forward? This made me think about the section in McPhee’s book called Checkpoints, in which he discussed the fact-checking process. He references Sara Lippincott, who was an editor at The New Yorker and worked in the magazine’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982.
McPhee writes, Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it “will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed...silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.” With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge.
This came to mind as I continued to ponder the conversation you and I had with our friend J, in which among other things we were discussing firmly held ways of thinking about things, ways of thinking that flow down through generations even though they may be incorrect, thinking about things as “that’s how that’s always been.” We were talking about DJT’s intent to reject the 1619 Project curriculum in schools, and I was thinking about the WTFJHT newsletter and its recap of the news item (from Bloomberg and the Washington Post):
Trump blamed nationwide protests against police brutality on schools teaching students about the impact of slavery and racism on American history, calling it “toxic propaganda” and “left-wing indoctrination.” Trump – again – denounced the “1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning public school curriculum developed by the New York Times that aims to reframe American history from when the first slave ship arrived, equating the curriculum as “radical” “toxic” “child abuse” that threatens “to impose a new segregation.” Earlier this month, Trump tweeted that the Department of Education would cut off federal funding to schools that adopted the 1619 curriculum. Trump also announced he would create a “1776 Commission” to promote a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” which he said would encourage educators to teach students about the “miracle of American history.”
To state what seems obvious, the curriculum we’ve had until now has essentially been a “pro-American curriculum.” While I was reading the Bloomberg article — Trump Blames Protests on ‘Radical’ Lessons About Slavery, Racism — from September 17, I pasted various chunks of text into my letter draft for further reflection, but I am not sure I want them to live on here. My state of mind is that I continue to be mystified by certain people and certain ways of thinking. It is truly confounding to live essentially similarly as humans, and yet to see the world so differently. This quality is both a window of opportunity and excitement, and at the same time, a kind of window of despair.
I am thinking about how the power structures that produced the histories we have learned and followed have told us stories that have become so ingrained over time that it takes a real act of will and determination to unlearn them, or to broaden the ways in which we can understand stories and histories. I have a firm belief in the concept of nuance and multifaceted stories; people we consider overwhelmingly good can have done bad or complicated things, and people we could label bad have done good things; no one person is all one way or another. To perpetuate an American history told only in a positive light, to have told a limited story when there was more to be told, is to have committed a fact-checking error in the largest sense; to check these facts requires an intention like that of the 1619 Project, a turn in a new direction of learning, taking a holistic view of where this country came from and what it is.
What is taken as true is passed along in all kinds of ways of writing, thinking, and talking. This is the power and danger of writing — of storytelling, producing histories, putting facts and non-facts into writing. Many things at first glance look fact-y once in writing; it requires attention at every step along the way to think critically about the perspective from which a story is told or an opinion has been developed.
It can be exhausting to push back against all statements, to pursue facts with the urgency and single-mindedness of the fact-checker, assembling documents that can be verified, that have been verified, that stand as truth and can be confidently passed down as such. I was going to say that we don’t all have to be fact-checkers, we just have to think critically before we write and speak, but I think these days perhaps we should all become fact-checkers. I’ve certainly spoken vaguely of headlines I saw without reading the full articles and cross-checking what I read there. The pace of conversation (and of social media) often moves faster than the pace at which we can absorb and fact-check our daily news. That doesn’t make the need to do so any less pressing!
On another note, I recently listened to part of a City Arts and Lectures interview with Trevor Noah, a rebroadcast of an interview from 2016 between Noah and Laurene Powell Jobs. Trevor Noah has been my favorite pandemic comedian, or perhaps he is my favorite comedian in general and I’ve just been catching his highlights most frequently during the pandemic, when I reference the Times’ “Best of Late Night” recap as a part of my morning ritual. Noah was telling a story from his book Born a Crime, about how when he was young his mother would type him letters to let him know he was supposed to have washed the dishes or folded the laundry or such, and slip them under his door, and he would reply with his own typewritten letters, so that they had a funny and formal correspondence going about the business of life, things they might argue over if they were discussing them (arguing about them) in person and out loud. He said that when they spent time together their conversations were pleasant, with the gritty business or any sort of disagreements happening on the page. This made me laugh and also made me think of our letters, and your words from last week. The idea that some conversations happen with voices, in person (or not), and some conversations happen in writing, on the page, is interesting to me, and feels completely natural. On the page you can weigh your words, have a moment to think about how you want to say something, play around a bit with the wording. It’s not so instantaneous, subject to the mood of the moment or whatever pops into mind. If something pops into mind and you write it down you can delete it later if it wasn’t right, wasn’t quite what you meant (e.g. half of this week’s letter); say it out loud, and you can’t take it back!
This letter has gotten very long (would you believe that I had a first draft going that spilled into four pages?) but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention RBG. I am wondering if you feel a certain kind of sadness for her loss since you are a woman in the law? I have to imagine this is so, and I am curious if you can describe it to me sometime (on the page or by voice!), since you inherently live with the perspective of being a woman of the law! I feel her loss in a more distant kind of way, which I think is my loss, and my not entirely acknowledged privilege as a woman living today rather than 10, 20, 50 years ago or more. There is always work to do and progress is not to be taken for granted or assumed permanent!
I’m looking forward to reading your words and talking again soon! Until then!
Yours,
Eva
P.S. Happy two-year anniversary of the letters! I am not sure if they are exactly walking around but perhaps in some ways they are speaking for themselves at this age? What happens at two? Are we entering the terrible twos of our letters? What would that even be like? Not possible!