What art has changed your mind?

Travels with Charley, April 2024

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.

Where I’m living

I just spent a month in Buenos Aires, where I had enough time to get into rhythms of observing: kids walking to the bus stop in the morning, crusty-eyed with backpacks askew; primly coiffed older ladies wheeling their shopping home; one teenager scooting closer to another in the park; gray-hairs in flat caps sharing a newspaper; families with babies improbably out to dinner in the 11pm heat.

Wonderful, too, to spend so much time in international art museums where the contextual frame isn’t Europe — where an exhibit on 20th century art is grounded in the South American history of dictatorial regimes and political instability, not the World Wars. A nudge to remember that I’m always seeing through a lens.

What I’m reading

“Poacher,” from Niall Campbell’s beautiful collection on becoming a father to a boy, which is full of poems that land the ending and reminds me of my favorite-ever book on fathers and sons (this is from Campbell’s Noctuary, thank you Jesse for the astute recommendation; my favorite-ever is, of course, Danny, the Champion of the World):

It’s not the pelts and meat I love,
the rabbit furs — their tails’ soft fires —
and I don’t think I’m drawn to violence
seen here as a knife and a gun barrel;

though yes, there is a second violence
that maybe does appeal to me:
beneath the mud and the night marching,
there’s the ownership of things

and someone standing where they shouldn’t,
filling a bag that shouldn’t be filled;
hand in the sky, hand in the stream,
I hope they take everything they can.

Karen Russell with a laugh-out-loud precise description that reminds me of All My Puny Sorrows, a very big compliment (Swamplandia!):

Cubby Wallach was complected like a bowl of oatmeal and yet carried himself as if he were wearing a top hat and spats. He had the bellicose dignity of a kid who refuses to excuse or even to acknowledge his own extreme ugliness. I admired this trait. It reminded me of the Seths, with their scarred, alien faces and their beautiful oblivion.

I often admire Wesley Morris’ criticism, but as a sucker for sentences, I’m also always distracted and delighted by his precision and rhythm—here, describing Larry David’s physical comedy (“Larry David’s Rule Book for How (Not) to Live in Society”):

Eyebrows as up-yanked drawbridge, forehead creases as lasagna of vexation. That rawboned voice of his soars, if not in octaves, then certainly with tickly, prickly dynamism. He can shout anyone down. For insinuation and seduction — for seductive insinuation — he can drop it low. David has imbued Larry with so much guilt, exceptionalism, cluelessness, terror, cowardice, innocence, avoidance, vindictive zeal, genuine curiosity and joie de vivre that the performance becomes what Larry loves: a buffet.

Gladly adding this description from Melissa Febos to my canon of Thinky Girls With Roiling Inner Worlds* (Girlhood, also excerpted in this essay):

Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives. Its channel was not always open, and what opened it was not always predictable: often songs and poems, a shaft of late afternoon light, an unexpected pool of memory, the coo of doves at dusk whose knell ached my own throat and seemed the cry of loneliness itself. It was often possible to open the channel by will, an option that I found both terrifying and irresistible. I would read or think or feel myself into a brimming state—not joy or sorrow, but some apex of their intersection, the raw matter from which each was made—then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, thrilled and afraid that I might combust, might simply die of feeling too much.

*Please reply to add to this canon.

What I’m wondering

What’s art that has changed your mind — your perspective or your mindset? (Is there music that has pushed how you think? An author who consistently changes your mood?)

Also, for a story: Do you know anyone retiring from an interesting job in April?

What I’m writing

The New York Times sent me to Alta, Utah to shred the slopes with skiers in their 80s and 90s. Despite my fears, I managed to keep up with them. Here’s the story. I also got to write an NYT Insider (A2) story about being a later-in-life skier and what it was like to interview elders from a chairlift, always fun to get to do some more first-person writing. Read that story here.

Brian Lehrer interviewed me about the story I wrote on regret (feat. Sjanna and Peter, with the sweetest romance I know).

Not my writing, but Tony Cobb, an incarcerated writer that I work with through Empowerment Avenue (if you’re a writer, check them out/ask me about volunteering), wrote a moving piece about the impact of the felony murder rule in Florida.

yours,

Charley