“I’m just interested at looking at some things from a bunch of different angles, and I feel like the essay offers the chance to give your readers, like, “OK, you’re looking at the front side of a thing, now come along to the back, and look at it from the other side,” and I think you can do that in terms of concepts, you can do that in terms of recounting what was said in an interview, where that interview happened, what fears propelled it, all that stuff …”

— Leslie Jamison is terrifyingly legit (and too young to be so wise) and you should go read The Empathy Exams when you get a chance. I interviewed her for Flavorwire.

March in review:

Read about atomic history, birds, things (Texas Monthly’s excellence) on the internet. Thought about Gwyneth Paltrow and schadenfreude, spoilers, sex addiction, and The Comeback’s comeback (maybe). Interviewed Leslie Jamison, The National and the National’s director brother, Stellan Skarsgard. Went to Paris in 25 books. Made a Mad Men/Daises joke. Documentaries, children’s literature, toxic teen relationships, St. Patrick’s Day movies, Keith Richards’ biography. Met Gloria Steinem. Loved With or Without You. Creepy photos of birds, True Detective-friendly industrial rot, Kiev, tattoos. Andrew Solomon is a genius, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, too. Walter Kirn is a good writer. Bret Easton Ellis is a brilliant provocateur, at least re: Lindsay Lohan. I want Lupita Nyong'o to succeed far more than Vice. Female artists (Lena Dunham, Adelle Waldman) spend more time talking back to their critics than Philip Roth.

Bonus: I know you liked True Detective, but please never forget that Surfer, Dude is a real movie that exists, brah:

Adult World didn’t feel like it got a fair shake. I was expecting the movie to be awful, befitting its reviews, and it’s actually a neat little comedy about striving and trying to be an artist in a completely indifferent world. Maybe it’s because for every bit of staleness in the flick — the worst plot thread is how the aspiring poet college grad ends up working at a porn store, and she meets a magical transgender character who teachers her how to be less virginal and suburban — there’s an equal amount of real searching and a very, very accurate sense of place in the film.

They filmed it up in Syracuse and it’s got an authentically shitty, dead mill town upstate vibe. The movie feels frozen and blue in a way you only get up in the hinterlands. I found Emma Roberts kind of charming as a chirpy 22 year old aspiring poet convinced of her genius with all the bonhomie of youth, clashing with John Cusack’s past-his-prime, former bad boy boy wonder poet. (Let’s be honest — it’s a lot easier to write poems and take them seriously when you’re a virgin, right?) And I thought the film did a good job of not really believing that, well, anyone’s art in the film was that brilliant or crucial, in a sweet fashion, compared to other zeitgeist shows of the moment that give me whiplash. I might have loved the film at 22 and figured out its wisdom years after the fact. Nowadays I just was able to appreciate it with the grace of somebody who moved away from home.

I’d love to read the original script.

“After seeing Shame, I thought that maybe the idea of “sex addiction” was just impossible for a filmmaker to dramatize, since the camera, that capricious machine, makes sex look amazing on film.”

— Asking “Are we in a golden age of films about sex addiction?” over at Flavorwire.

“In the case of most actresses, the beautiful dress is wearing them; not so with Lupita.”

— Over at Flavorwire, talking about my optimistic hopes that Lupita Nyong'o will take over the world.

Dating Jared Leto →

elisabethdonnelly:

There was a point in time where Jared Leto was dating a whole slew of twenty something actresses, and it made no sense. He was in his has-been phase, or he was pursuing his band or whatever (and they are inexplicably big, I believe). But seeing him squiring the likes of Scarlett Johansson…

STILL TRUE. To use, um, Twilight parlance, this man has basically imprinted on a whole generation of women. It’s crazy. And he’s going to win an Oscar tonight! Did you ever think it’d be Oscar winner Jared Leto?

“

She and Smithson had bought a small piece of land in Utah, and in 1974 she bought more: 40 acres for $1,600 in the Great Basin Desert, where she set about building “Sun Tunnels.” As she wrote later, installing the culverts — each weighing 22 tons — and documenting the process, required the help of “2 engineers, 1 astrophysicist, 1 astronomer, 1 surveyor and his assistant, 1 road grader, 2 dump truck operators, 1 carpenter, 3 ditch diggers, 1 concrete mixing truck operator, 1 concrete foreman, 10 concrete pipe company workers, 2 core-drillers, 4 truck drivers, 1 crane operator, 1 rigger, 2 cameramen, 2 soundmen, 1 helicopter pilot, and 4 photography lab workers.”

“In making the arrangements and contracting out the work,” she wrote, “I became more extended into the world than I’ve ever been before.”

”

— “Nancy Holt, Outdoor Artist, Dies at 75,” the New York Times. Spooky that I’m reading this now, and I’m reading The Flamethrowers. I met Nancy once when she had dinner with my family one afternoon. She had been my mother’s roommate at a silent meditation retreat for six weeks. That dinner was the first conversation they had with each other.

The French way of cancer treatment →

The French healthcare was not just first rate – it was humane. Rather than fighting with insurance, all our energy could be spent on one thing: caring for my father.

Apparently the French even do health care better than you, along with being better at being women than you. (Also, come on, the doctors can make house calls because Paris is small, guys.) But I’m glad that this man was able to access great health care while dealing with pancreatic cancer. May everyone be so lucky. France!

At some point I am writing a piece on French women that starts with “when I saw the French woman pull a bag of trash out of a dumpster and throw it at her companions, missing them in a whiff, I knew that French women have something different, a flame that burns brightly.”

Marissa Nadler X Modern Dance X Mirrors

New job alert

I’m joining Flavorwire in March as their Nonfiction editor, writing about books, journalism, “longreads,” and Werner Herzog documentaries. Very excited!

“If you’re going to write about yourself, some people are going to have a really violent response and they’re going to communicate that to you, and that is not that fun. But, oh well. But it’s worth it, because it’s so exciting to write the whole truth, precisely, the best you can.”

— The New Yorker Out Loud talks to Ariel Levy about her profile on Diana Nyad and her fascinations with the female body, gender, and sexuality. Great stuff for writers, and at the end she says that she’s writing a book-length version of her devastating essay about her miscarriage in Mongolia. Plus: Ariel Levy on Edie Windsor.

“Empathy isn’t just remembering to say ‘That must really be hard,’ it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing.”

— From another book out this year that I love, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. Read these essays in April, enjoy the first one now, courtesy of The Believer.

“How brave and resourceful the muse must be to balance, year after year, on the vertiginous high wire that her calling requires-to navigate the tightrope between imminence and absence, to be at once accessible and unobtainable, perpetually present in the mind of the artist and at the same time distant enough to create a chasm into which the muse’s devoted subject is moved to fling propitiatory, ritual objects: that is, works of art.”

— Francine Prose, The Lives of the Muses