POV: Block.

POV ("point of view") is a series that addresses many of the same themes covered in my Equals Record column: growing up, saying yes to adventure, learning to embrace a quarter-life crisis. While my previous column focused largely on ideas, POV focuses on moments - glimpses, glances, tiny stories.

This was a POV of many false starts.

I wrote the first version late last week on a bus, on my way out of the city for the weekend. I had six tabs open on my laptop that morning, and between edits of an interview with a Spanish lighting designer and the quick composition of a story on the difficulties of making pie crust, I was able to write exactly four slapdash sentences before deleting every last one. 

Recommended Reading / 36.

Every Monday, words to start the week. 

This week, from The New York Times: thoughts on the continued relevance of one of my all-time favorite artists, Nina Simone. Writes Salamishah Tillet: "The feminist writer Germaine Greer once declared: 'Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.' This year, that just might happen for good...Simone is not simply an alternative to today's image of an oversexualized or overmanufactured female artist, but the idol most suited for the multilayered identity politics of our social movements." Read more, here.

Photo by Jack Robinson / courtesy of Getty Images.

Three more, just because:
-Writers' favorite words, from clot to clart to whiffle-whaffle.
-Getting googly-eyed at the Frieze Art Fair.
-I love illustrator Christoph Niemann's thoughts on the importance of creative inefficiency: "Sometimes you look at something and you think, that is awesome, and then the next day you look at it and you are horrified. Sometimes I do something three times over and think, this is terrible, and then I go back and find there’s some strength in there. You need the second day to realize the strength in something. On the one hand, I wish I didn’t waste so much time, but on the other, I really try and savor the inefficiency. I can be efficient with my work day and technology and everything, but one thing you must not – and cannot – be efficient with is creating. Once you start thinking about what works faster or better, you start ruling out mistakes, and that’s really awful. So I really try to be as inefficient as possible."

More recommended reading, here. Have a lovely Monday — and happy summer solstice! I spent the weekend on Long Island in the rain — a perfect beginning. (Also, new POV coming tomorrow this week — many apologies for the delay!)

Non-Career Advice: Alex Feder.

Non-Career Advice is a series that asks people - young, old, and in a range of occupations - for words of wisdom unrelated to work, career-building, dollars, or getting ahead.

Name: Alex Feder / Musician 

Also: Songwriter / traveler / tripper of the light fantastic

Avoid the second arrow. "Possibly the most profound thing I've learned since moving from New York to LA — where I'm becoming a total cheeseball Angeleno — is a tenet within Buddhism that's referred to as the "second arrow." 

I'll explain it like this: often, life shoots us with a painful 'arrow' — not necessarily an enormous tragedy, but some littler nuisance that can lead to a bad day. Let's say you're working from home and there's a dog barking all day long next door. The dog, in this case, is that arrow. But the thing is, no matter how annoyed you are, the dog is still going to bark. No amount of rage or frustration is going to change that. And the more we let our negative feelings overwhelm us, the worse our day becomes. This negative reaction is essentially like shooting ourselves with a second arrow, and it's often more painful than the first.

The first arrow might have been out of our control, but the second is ours to dodge. Dogs bark. People are rude. Commutes get delayed. It's important to realize that while we often can't change those things, we can be mindful of our reactions to them. If we stop dwelling on anger, or how much we wish things were different, then we are able to prevent one arrow wound from turning into two. And life goes on."

--

Thanks so much, Alex! More from the Non-Career Advice series, here.  Photo by Brian Michael Henderson.

Living Close.

Some of my earliest memories involve making homes out of some of the tiniest hidden corners in the house. I'd cart my things into the front hallway and camp out under the narrow table near the heater, or the space beneath the bottom shelf in the hall closet. Somewhere, there's a photo of me reading a book in a plastic laundry basket, limbs overflowing. Small-ness, I remember thinking, was soothing.

Photographer Won Kim's series Enclosed shines a light into some of Tokyo's tiniest living spaces —in this case, the rooms are part of a backpackers' hostel. Each room is made of plywood and contains no windows or doors. Won writes, "For me, the real interest of the resulting portraits is in how each resident has made use of such a small, confining space...the sharply-defined space and its contents tell something about... his or her ability to function in such a strange, enclosed environment." What I find fascinating about them are the looks on each resident's face. They seem — to this fan of small spaces, anyway — lost in thought, completely comfortable, oblivious to the walls around them.

See more at Won Kim's website, here. 

Recommended Reading / 35.

Every Monday, words to start the week. 

This week, via Brainpickings: wonderful reflections on growing up from a 24-year-old William Styron. In a letter to his father in 1949, Styron writes: "For some reason, although I'm not exactly ecstatic about the world and life in general, I'm very happy. I don't know why that should be, as I’ve always thought of myself as an exceptionally melancholy person. Maybe the melancholy was merely adolescent, and maybe, though I can’t really sense it, I’m growing up, or reaching an “adjustment,” as the psychologists say. Whatever it is, it’s nice.

It’s not love — love of a girl, that is, because I haven’t found her yet. It’s not the excitement of being in New York, because I’ve been in New York before and now know how to take with a grain of salt its synthetic stimuli (though I still love New York). Actually I don’t know what it is. For the past four or five days I’ve been alone, not seeing anyone or talking to anyone I know except over the phone. Ordinarily this aloneness would have made me miserable, utterly wretched. But I haven’t minded it at all.

I haven’t drunk hardly anything — a few beers, that’s all. And yet I’ve been quite content, suffused with a sort of pleasant well-being that demanded really nothing strenuous of myself, or of anyone else. Perhaps it’s merely that I’ve gained a measure of Emerson’s self-reliance. Perhaps it’s just that, for some reason I can’t put my finger on, I feel surer of myself than I ever have before — more confident of my worth and my ultimate success, and less fearful of failure. Maybe — again for some reason I haven’t quite been able to analyze — I’m finding that life excites me, appeals to me in a way I’ve never felt before. I still have awful moments of despair, and I guess I always will, but they don’t seem to be as overpowering as in the past. I don’t take so much pleasure in my despondency any more; I try to throw my bleak moods off — which again perhaps is a sign that I’m growing up." (Read more on Brainpickings.)

Three more, just because:
-Hundred-year-old chalkboards.
-A Chinese village gives in to greenery.
-Lastly, I loved this description of a milkshake made with roasted strawberries: "After a solid 30 or 40 minutes, they'll release their juice and relax into their bodies — they will be like you at the very end of a yoga class, when you're allowed to lay flat and extend your limbs and forget how to move your toes. They are strawberries living their best life."

More recommended reading, here. Have a wonderful Monday. Photos by Max Wanger.