What I wanted to learn.

I wanted to take the "Master Class" from David Sedaris, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $99 for a subscription to the app until I saw that they also had a class from Billy Collins, a poet I've liked ever since I randomly picked a book off a high shelf at Paul's Books and read one poem.

Both Sedaris and Collins, I see now, begin their writing by noticing some little thing that is present in their own life. Both teach that you ought to carry a notebook with you everywhere and jot down these little things as they happen.

That's all writing. Of course, I wanted to learn about writing, but what else? Master Class has 80+ famous people teaching how they each do their thing. I've watched 2 others, neither in the writing category. I watched Bobbi Brown, who teaches about makeup — the kind of makeup that honors whatever face you happen to have. (You do not need to "contour" your nose or "overline" your lips.) And I watched Alice Waters, the restaurateur, who says you really need to start your cooking by getting in touch with your local vegetables.

Do you see the theme of these 4, which I chose without thinking of a theme? The theme occurred to me as I was doing my sunrise run this morning. I don't listen to headphoned-in music anymore when I run. I listen to the immediate environment and let thoughts rise up from within my own head, and I got where I could see how these 4 choices represented a single desire on my part. All these lessons have to do with awareness of what is right here.

When I got back to my car, the radio was on MSNBC, which I'd listened to on my little drive out to my running place. I'd put up with Joe Scarborough angsting about Republicans being less likely  to wear masks than Democrats — what is wrong with them?! — but I didn't want that infecting me on the ride home. I clicked over to music. It was Neil Young:

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away
But there's a full moon rising
Let's go dancing in the light
We know where the music's playing
Let's go out and feel the night

Neil was getting what was for him an unusual idea: To go out and experience the moon.



I got the idea a while back to get out and experience the sunrise, to go running in the light.

"I am from provincial people, though some were academics and scientists and musicians. There was very little money, some religion..."

"... much education, some unrealized talent, some actualized talent, and a strong sense that the world was simultaneously beautiful and unwelcoming. My strongest memories of childhood are of quiet interior spaces as well as the outdoors, full of mud and bugs and us kids running everywhere. I miss running everywhere. It was flight in both senses."

From a New Yorker interview with the writer Lorrie Moore.

The last question in the interview is about something Moore wrote in the New Yorker last month about finding Trump's voice "reassuring." I blogged about that here. The interviewer, the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, informs her that "The response on Twitter was censorious" and asks her if she felt "misunderstood." She says she felt "misread" and, in fact, "Not really read at all."

I only meant to present some self-mocking, cock-eyed optimism.... I was a little rambling and wrote past the assigned word count, so things had to be removed from every paragraph. But the point at the beginning is that, if you are in the next room, feeling mildly deranged, and can’t hear the words, the potus can sometimes sound like Merv Griffin or Mel Tormé: one hears a crooner’s croon. This is not praise. This is noting a sound... Twitter’s feeding frenzies seem a display of people with obscene amounts of time on their hands, yet a disinclination to read in any real way. And it seems possible that this one was triggered by the right to get the left to eat its own....

ADDED: The 7th comment at my blog post about Moore's meditation on Trump's voice — from commenter eric — was "She's about to be cancelled and will soon apologize."

AND: If you write about politics and don't say predictable things in an obvious way, you will be misread and read in a way that's well described as not really read at all. But that makes it even more important to keep writing where you don't belong, in that world that is simultaneously beautiful and unwelcoming.