Something’s happened this year and I’m back to getting 2-3 books from the library every week and blowing through them, a pace I kept up through my early twenties. Granted, most of them have been detective novels that are pretty easy to blow through, but it’s been really nice to be reading again.

At the library I saw that there was a third book out from Sara Gran in the Claire De Witt detective series, which is kind of like Raymond Chandler but with a punk lady and a lot more drugs. This quote about the LA hills hit me, because I had just driven through there a few weeks before reading it and thought, “What the hell, why is this city so mountainous?”

Why were the Los Angeles hills so arcane, so occulted to the world outside? People talked about Los Angeles as it it were New York, spread out and deformed, melted like hot cookie dough on a pan. I didn’t know until I got there that the city was a web of mountains and valleys and canyons, starting out wet and cool and drying itself out into desert as it headed east, unlike anyplace else on earth; a maze of dead-end streets that were never parallel and curved in and across themselves like snakes. There was an energy to Los Angeles that was sharp and would cut you if you didn’t recognize it. Every grain of sand in the beaches and the desert buried under the city was a little razor, ready and willing to wound.

But if you saw it for what it was, I was learning, you could maneuver in between the knives and glide through the city, like a needle in a record. You just had to keep your eyes open for synchronicity, and never expect kindness. Just shut up and be grateful when it appeared.

When you go into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees… and some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens and some of them are–whatever. And you look at the tree, and you just–allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is, you sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way, and you don’t get all emotional about it, you just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that, and you’re constantly saying, “You’re too this,” or “I’m too this,” or–that judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are.

(From a blog post by Ram Dass in 2016, here)

Something from David Foster Wallace (via Austin Kleon) and something to keep in mind as you choose (or write) your books.

“Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

Via Austin Kleon, who is reading Thoreau’s diary entries on the same day they were originally written, a quote about how to live:

We are receiving our portion of the infinite… I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it.

The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most life. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business….

I am convinced that men are not well employed, that this is not the way to spend a day. If by patience, if by watching, I can secure one new ray of light, can feel myself elevated for an instant… shall I not be a watchman henceforth?

It’s nearly the end of my first month with the trainer and while I’m so much stronger than when I started, I’m still working my way up to doing anything with the bar and real weight. This week I struggled, I was frustrated, I forgot my form, everyone else in the gym was stronger than me and knew what to do already, lifting was hard and was (by design) never, ever going to get easier.

Then my work bro, who also lifts, sent me an essay by Henry Rollins (yeah, that one) and oh look! We have another post about doing a hard thing in a sport that is really about doing hard things in life and embracing the struggle, not fighting it. (If I get nothing else from learning to lift, I will have gotten so much blog content from it.)

Joking aside, though, it’s a pretty great essay–kind of a “Zen and the art of lifting.” From Iron and The Soul:

I used to think that it was my adversary, that I was trying to lift that which does not want to be lifted. I was wrong. When the Iron doesn’t want to come off the mat, it’s the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn’t teach you anything. That’s the way the Iron talks to you. It tells you that the material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you.

Via Swiss Miss:

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river—small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

-Bertrand Russell

I picked up Eve Babitz’s first book on a whim–someone on Instagram was talking about her and her Wikipedia entry was just eye-popping, so I thought, “Let’s see about Eve.” I’m only about a third of the way through Eve’s Hollywood but so far it’s a delight. She loves L.A. the way Raymond Chandler loves it–passionately and ironically–and it shows:

But when the sky was its occasional non-smoggy, dry, clean, cloudless self, Hollywood High made sense, and even teachers would gaze quietly out at the shining palm tree tops blowing in the breeze. And when summer came and we went to the beach after a dismal morning of summer school, the palm trees high above the sea on the Palisades would look black against an aggressive sky which drained away all color of anything that was forced to silhouette against it […] We were hot, the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.

She also reminds me of M.F.K. Fisher, in the sense of someone uncannily insightful:

Gary [asked] me if I were going to the dance that night.

“No,” I said, my eyes narrowing. So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.

There’s gossip about famous people and descriptions of taquitos and memories of being not-quite-popular enough in high school, and, like I said, it’s a delight. Highly recommend Eve for your summer reading.

Kottke.org has been posting about Mr. Rogers a lot lately and pointed me to this video, where he tells people about his mother making his sweaters. This quote really stood out to me:

It’s a lot of work. But that’s one of the ways that she has of saying that she loves somebody. 

Never forget that crafting can be someone’s love language.

“We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens.”
― Michael A. Singer

Via Swiss Miss, who says it’s “from The Untethered Soul, a book that is changing my life.” I’m not currently in the market for another life-changing book but it’s something to ponder.

(Cf: Mark Strand on existential housework.)