What I Read & Wrote & Loved in July

Hey everyone,

What a month! It has been so hot, first of all. I’m tired of it. Also, I turned 33! I do not feel any different and consistently forget how old I am. Today I asked someone what year it is, so—doing great, you know?

How are y’all? What have you been up to? Tell me about your lives, I’m curious.

In other news, the August virtual writing session is scheduled for Saturday, August 19, and 9 am PT. You can sign up here!

Anyway. I’m excited to bring you this month’s What I Read & Wrote & Loved. I hope you’re doing well, wherever you are.

An English garden in July. Source.

Things I Read & Loved

• Judy Blume Taught Me What My Parents Wouldn’t

• Why does the epitaph on Jim Morrison’s headstone suggest he was possessed by demons?

• It’s funny—I don’t have a strong emotional connection to any of Guillermo del Toro’s movies. But I love reading about him. I’m endlessly curious about him, his process, his work. So I really loved this edition of

  Noted
  by
  Jillian Hess
  —it covers his truly gorgeous notebooks.

• Psychology Today is tackling the hard questions, like “Can I be friends with someone who doesn’t read?” I think they might have gotten the answer wrong though.

• If you thought the plot of Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny was a little too weird, don’t read this article about ring wormholes that could maybe act as doorways through time and space.

• The term “blurb” was coined 101 years ago.

• Erik Hoel
  of
  The Intrinsic Perspective
  is also asking important questions, like “How the fuck did fatally immature, petty children come to be in charge of our public discourse?” (I might be paraphrasing.)

• Did you know that Edgar Allan Poe once waged a very one-sided war against beloved poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?

• There’s a lot to love in this article about how unbelievably gullible Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could be when it came to Spiritualism and faeries, but my favorite feature of it, by far, is writer Katie Spalding transforming ‘Victorian’ into an adverb. “‘It seems to me that with fuller knowledge and with fresh means of vision, these people’—by which he means fairies, just to be clear—‘are destined to become just as solid and real as the Eskimos,’ he wrote, Victorianly.” Chef’s kiss.

• I’ve been thinking a lot about how everything I do is “towards” something, so this article from

  Mike Sowden
  of
  Everything Is Amazing
  about what he calls the tyranny of usefulness arrived at just the right time for me.

This is really about what I call the tyranny of usefulness: where the value of doing a thing, the “sense” bit of “it has to make sense”, goes back to two things.

Firstly, the old economic-based model of productivity that’s been haunting us since the industrial revolution - does it help me produce more widgets and therefore make more money and maybe help me retire a bit earlier? You know: “useful” stuff, not for “fun”.

And secondly: we can quantify the usefulness of it in advance. We’re doing it because we already know what we want to get out of it.

But here’s the thing. As I hope I’ve demonstrated over the last four and a bit seasons of this newsletter, there is great value in discovering things you never knew you didn’t know. It just feels great, and opens your mind in all sorts of ways - including so-called useful ones - to realise the world is filled with more interesting and even more joyful stuff than you ever could have guessed. 

Some Things I Wrote & Published

• Reconsidering the Condiment Bar in coffee shops post-COVID

• The Sprudge Guide to Coffee in the LA Arts District

• Don’t Forget to Stake Your Claim - a call to arms

• Barbenheimer: A Dissertation on Dread?

• On Rejection: Jay Light

• Balloonomania!

• What You Need to Know About Barista Certificate Programs (Yes, they’re real!)

• Unruly Figures Episode 30: Sarah Bernhardt

• How to Use Maslow’s Hierarchy to Figure Out Your Character’s Motivations

And that’s it for July! Here I was thinking that this was not a very productive month, but actually, it hasn’t been so bad.

If you wrote and/or published anything in July that you’re particularly proud of, drop it in the comments!