1. This snippet is from a much longer article (that I didn't fully read) in T Magazine. I'm fascinated by this idea (fact?) that the West is filled with people struggling with self-judgment and self-hatred and then you go to the Dalai Lama and he's like, "WTF is self-hatred?"
2. I rarely make it to the "Bookends" section of the Sunday Book Review, but this time, by golly, I did. I liked the question (above) and found part of James Parker's answer interesting. Since you used to work in a bakery, I also (see subject of this post) immediately thought of you.
Parker writes:
"And finally, bakers. Nothing is more nobly nonliterary than manual labor, and the years I spent baking at Clear Flour Bread in Brookline, Mass., were sky-blue. What a great job. Startlingly physical, to begin with, with plenty of hauling and swabbing and rushing around; the bakery itself was like a ship in a Patrick O’Brian novel, fierce and insular, microcultural, every moment accounted for, every inch of space pressed into service. You sweated and clanked, and the flour flew up in slow clouds, until everyone’s face had received a kind of aristocratic powdering. The rewards were enormous: the fine, fuse-like crackle of a rack full of handsome brittle baguettes, which you have just pulled out of the oven — that’s a beautiful sound. Television’s “Marquee Moon” coming out of the bakery boombox at 1 in the morning, with your muscles so warmed up they seem to act as vibrational channels for the music — that too is a beautiful sound...
From my fellow bakers, those yeasty intellectuals, I learned about industry and cohesion and the moral obligation to be cheerful. The last lesson was the most important, and extended out of the bakery and into life. If you’re depressed, maimed, crocked in some way, fair enough — let us know. But if not, then in the name of humanity stop moaning. Keep a lightness about you, a readiness. Preserve the digestions of your co-workers; spare them your mutterings and vibings. It’s highly nonliterary, but there we are: Be nice."
What do you think, Kara? (And what does this mean: "To preserve the digestions of your co-workers"?)
Sending love (and not self-judgment) from the West (coast),
Amerzzzz
12.1.14
I managed to re-read all of your post, three other Megan Mayhew Bergman blog posts, and the T magazine article before my baby woke up, which just happened and which will make this overdue response, well, short! In that case, I'm going to list things, a handy trick you have perfected.
I am also going to thread Garrison Keillor pictures throughout my response, not because it relates exactly, but because I found this book on a shelf of ours in August and the cover is too great not to share.
1. The article above refers to American teachers of Buddhism like Jack Kornfield who, in the intro to his beautiful book A Path with Heart, wrote the following lovely words:
"In the stress and complexity of our lives, we may forget our deepest intentions. But when people come to the end of their life and look back, the questions that they most often ask are not usually, "How much is in my bank account," or "How many books did I write?" or "What did I build?" or the like. If you have the privilege of being with a person who is aware at the time of his or her death, you find the questions such a person asks are very simple: "Did I love well?" "Did I live fully?" "Did I learn to let go?"
(Side-note: my baby was just stuck under the living room chair with only her head and shoulders poking out, as if the chair fell from the heavens and pinned her to the rug.)
2. That James Parker passage about working at a bakery is brilliant. I could not agree more with the virtues of physical chores and personally find such drudgery the perfect compliment to writing. However, "yeasty intellectuals" are not the words that arise when I think of my co-workers. Sadly, "potheads" and "juvie" are.
I do subscribe to the be nice philosophy put forth by Parker's co-workers, however, and often wonder if my insistence on manners makes me a bore or, worse, a hypocrite when I fall short of my own standards.
3. In a total Megan Mayhew Bergman love-fest, I also love what she says about the Cat Power song in the video you posted, so much that I am going to quote her here:
"I imagine playing it for my daughters - over and over - and they're going to be like - Mom - what IS it with this song - and I'm going to be like: You will understand one day how easy it is to lose yourself as a woman. To give too much away."
On the heels of a Thanksgiving holiday, I cannot identify with this sentiment enough! It is essential to save secrets for yourself; secrets or pleasures or miracles of ritual. Otherwise you will have nothing to feed yourself when the going gets tough.
I can't believe I just wrote the words when the going gets tough. A child of the 80s for sure. Did you read Lena Dunham's book, by the way? In it, she writes about the comic strip Cathy, and I remember as a child totally not getting Cathy's obsession with weight, her shopping panics, and all other cliches of womanhood. Ditto some of the stationary in our kitchen, writing pads printed with sayings like, "When the going gets tough, the tough eat chocolate."
Here's a different piece of stationery, a glorious Post It note I discovered one morning when my parents visited this fall:
5. Finally, I have a little thing for Davy Rothbart, who wrote the wildly entertaining collection of essays My Heart Is An Idiot, which I consumed in a fit of pregnant concentration last Christmas at my in-laws. This discussion of it kind of takes all the fun out of life, in my opinion, but it's also a smart analysis of the ways fiction has schooled modern non-fiction.
6. I'm going to order MMB's new book now, the divinely named Almost Famous Women. I feel the need to point out that this post was not sponsored by her, however, if her next book is anything like her first, I'd like all my thoughts to be sponsored by her prose.
XOXO
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