Table of Contents
Well, it’s been a minute
The lapse in time between my last newsletter and this one turned out to be longer than I had anticipated, thanks to a long overdue and very thorough unplugging. I kept aiming for a good time to take an extended break from email, phone, and home, but kept moving the goalposts.
Re-plugging has proved more discomforting than I thought, and I’m oh-so-okay with that. Despite the mountain of correspondence that awaited me, the majority was far from urgent—a clear indication that I need to do this more often.
Upon returning, I found…
You never know what might pop up on your internal horizon during a break.
Read this book!
Adventures in Hardcover
Our attention is being fracked.
Never has a metaphor so perfectly and permanently plopped down upon my psyche and made itself at home.
Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement explains this violent soul splintering and—here’s the good part—shows you that there is another way to walk through this world. The book is a call to conscious-living arms.
Reducing the pings and dings and always-availableness of life is routinely on my mind. This made Attensity! a particularly ideal read after I returned home and began re-plugging. Yet I also found myself reluctant to write anything about it. Here’s why:
It is challenging to do justice to a book that resonates so deeply with me and which I feel is mandatory reading for anyone who considers themselves to be a human being.
See? I’ve already said too much and I am already trying too hard.
I intentionally embrace the nut-graf-ness of my newsletter so I will stop here and give you the basics:
Attensity! is written by The Friends of Attention—a nonprofit coalition of all sorts of creators, teachers, activists and, most of all, thinkers. Three of these friends—D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt— brought Attensity! to life. I highly recommend giving it your full attention, whatever form(s) that may take, knowing your idea of what “attention” means will likely shift over the course of reading this book.
The Friends of Attention have also started the Strother School of Radical Attention located in (no sleep ’til) Brooklyn. The school offers in-person and online courses and is dedicated to “Attention Activism.” Curious? Looking for resources related to attention activism? Dive into the Attention Trove of videos, reading selections, and more. You’ll find amuse bouches, brain snacks, shareables, and belly-busting meals depending on your hunger for the subject matter.
If you are really ready to learn more, do check out The Strother School of Radical Attention and consider registering for a course. I am.
As someone who writes a lot about history, I spend a good deal of time looking to the past and thinking about how it informs the present.
George Santayana wrote in his 1905 book, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Winston Churchill clearly picked up what Santayana was laying down when he later paraphrased the gem in one of his speeches: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
But no matter our current circumstances, it’s not all condemnation and gloom.
This brings me to one of my favorite things about Attensity!: the underlying current of empowerment and optimism coursing through its pages, including this tidbit: “Telling stories about change in the past helps us see that change is always ahead, and helps shatter the inertial complacency that consistently makes now feel like it has a hold on forever.”
This spoke to me because I, too, relish looking to the past in search of inspiration rather than cautionary tales. Therein lies hope.
But Getting Back to Van Gogh…
“Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges”
I trimmed the Vincent van Gogh quote above because I wanted it to fit in the space I had in mind with the colors and the flowers and all the things. Now, in the interest of accuracy and context, here is the full quote (and then some):
✍ “I’m concerned with the world only in that I have a certain obligation and duty, as it were — because I’ve walked the earth for 30 years — to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings or paintings in gratitude. Not done to please some movement or other, but in which an honest human feeling is expressed.”
The Dutch painter wrote this in a letter to his brother Theo while in The Hague in early August 1883. Interested in more musings from the master? You’re in luck. The Van Gogh Letters Project contains a searchable database of letters written and received by Van Gogh. (Not all of them, though. While Theo carefully preserved his brother’s missives, Vincent was not as attentive to his personal archives and even burned some of them. I often consider doing the same thing when I read something I wrote in 1982.)
But wait! There’s more!
There is context—as there should be—familial, financial, chronological, location-based... The epistles are translated, annotated, illustrated—all the “ateds.” Van Gogh often included sketches in his letters, as is seen right here:
And I can never, will never, think of Vincent van Gogh without immediately being reminded of Tim Roth. The 1990 film Vincent & Theo marks the beginning of my lifelong fanning over the actor, and is directed by another one of my favorite artists, Robert Altman. This movie is available to stream and I recommend that you do.
Vincent & Theo came out two years before Reservoir Dogs, in which Roth plays Mr. Orange. Van Gogh often employed various shades of orange in his oil paintings and that very hue found its way into the title of several paintings, including “Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges.” Coincidence…?
Not oranges! you’re thinking, Van Gogh! Give me sunflowers! Okay.
Vincent once wrote Theo “…that they express an idea symbolizing gratitude…” and wrote his sister Willemina “… the desire comes over me to remake myself and try to have myself forgiven for the fact that my paintings are, however, almost a cry of anguish while symbolizing gratitude in the rustic sunflower.”
For Vincent: a sunflower in my back yard.
This and That and the Other
The Obstinate Daughters tour is taking shape and I am doing my best to keep my calendar up to date (but it is not…yet). More dates are being settled, so check back to see when I might be stopping by your neck of the literary woods.
Until then, here is a quick Q&A I did with “History in the Margins,” and below is an episode of the fantabulous new-ish podcast, “Lit Trip,” containing a lengthy interview with yours truly. I am thrilled to have been a guest early on in Lit Trip’s history, which I hope is a long one.
Oh, great. Now I have something else to add to my TBR pile…
🌻 Until next time… 🌻
Be grateful for the infinite reservoir of attention you have to offer the world, and be mindful to whom and to what you give it.
With Gratitude,
