2023's Pleasures, Guilty and Otherwise
by Susan diRende
When it occurred to me that the time was approaching
for this year‘s Pleasures of Reading, Listening and Viewing essays at Aqueduct,
I had a wicked thought. What if I told the truth?
I mean, I’ve told the truth in the past, but it was
the nice and comfortable truth for people who like reading, who take literature
seriously, and who recognize and enjoy diving into the thorny complexities of
human existence. I do have a highbrow side.
But also a lowbrow one. A taste for those guilty
pleasures with no redeeming qualities?
If I’m being kind to myself, I will call it my
mental spa time, a mental manicure or pedicure. Dealing with the surface things
in life. Soothing the mental aches and stress points of reality. A place where
I don’t have to think about anything meaningful.
Blame it on my imagination. My creativity is an
omnivorous scavenger. This is not self-praise. The only omnivorous scavenger in
nature is the cockroach.
What this means for me in practical terms is that
all the things other people do to turn off their idea-generator —taking a walk,
meditating, watching a movie, or reading a good book — in me does the opposite.
All those things beautifully made to engage me in story and nature and cosmic
understanding, all of them give me ideas. And there I am on the mountaintop
spinning a story or conjuring a palette for a painting or considering a
fantastical planet with conscious snow.
My inner life is a constant battle of focus, or more precisely of choosing what to focus on today, this minute. To get books written, to paint canvases, to market my work: that takes a lot of time. But if I read a book about the history of agriculture, suddenly I’m world building. If I come across a writer whose prose is just yummy, I stop to figure out how she did it, and want to practice putting it into my own writing. (I’m looking at you, Ursula LeGuin.) If I watch historical drama, I’m suddenly filled with impatience at the whole idea of kings and queens and want to break the genre’s focus on that by revealing the constructed nature of our love for hierarchy since I don’t believe it’s natural, but a cultural artifact.
Okay, I lied. I have some “real” book recs after all: David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything coupled with any of Ed West’s A Very, Very Short History of England Series. You will never view kings kindly or think an admiring thought about Richard the Lionheart ever again. And don’t get me started on The Enlightenment…
See what just happened? I started off writing about
the reading and viewing pleasures that turn off my brain, when I was hijacked
by the idea of suggesting just a couple of thought-provoking books. *Sigh*
So what do I do watch, read, and listen to to
relax? I’m almost embarrassed to say.
Reels. As in those short form videos on TikTok,
Instagram and Facebook. Even YouTube. I love them. Some are just what you’d
expect from the social media commentaries. Animal videos for instance. Antics.
Rescues. Relationships. Not only do they make me laugh or marvel, but a
creature doing something funny or extraordinary or surprising almost never make
me think about anything but the moment.
Sure they’re sentimental. And yes, Wilde did say that “a sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without having to pay for it.” Hence the “guilty pleasure” admission.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrPlfgHNnMg/
I also watch demo reels. Paper holiday decorations.
(Amazing what a person can do with toilet paper rolls.) Cooking. (Did you know
you can knock the seeds out of a pomegranate in ten seconds by cutting it in
half, holding it over a bowl in the sink to catch the splatter, and whacking
the back with a wooden spoon? Magic.) How to draw a horse. (You start with a
kite shape…)
Sometimes I tell myself that I am feeding my
writer’s knowledge-base by watching people building furniture or houses.
Training horses. Sewing garments. Weaving grass baskets. Tying knots. Wild
foraging. Mudlarking where people dig in riverbanks for a little bits of this
and that. I’m not gonna do any of that.
If I really want to zone out, I watch YouTube where
there are longer process videos. For instance, there are all these landscapers
who do videos of tending to badly overgrown yards for free and use them to get
viewers on YouTube. I watch these and I get absorbed in mowing, trimming, and
edging. It is weirdly satisfying seeing the chaos turned to order. Nothing I
would take and make a story out of, nor does it spur in me any desire to do it
myself the way a painting process video might. It makes the watching mentally
restful.
Another completely pointless pleasure is watching videos of people who buy abandoned storage units and go through them looking for valuable stuff they can sell. Likewise people shopping at thrift stores to list on eBay. There is a solid, low-level hum of curiosity generated by unwrapping the unknown or the search for an unrecognized treasure. I watch these when I want to disengage. And it works.
So if the holidays are full of stress, and if the
idea doesn’t give you rotten egg disgust, you could try reels. In the
beginning, they will send you lots of loud, obnoxious, sexualized content
unless you control it. Search for a hashtag like #animals or more specifically
#bees and watch the lady who moves hives from unwanted locations without
getting stung. If you’re crafty, try #diy or pick a material thing related to a
craft like #yarn or #fabric just to give the algorithm a place to start. Select
what looks interesting. Watch and “like” it if you want more of the same.
As for me, I’ll be watching some border collies move a herd of sheep.
Susan diRende has always been a fan of the empty-handed leap into the unknown, both in her life and her work. She creates stories at the intersection of worlds that make heroes of misfits, skeptics, and fools. Her published works range from serious academic to sci-fi space farce. Her art and videos has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals in the US, Mexico, Belgium and New Zealand. She has won numerous awards and grants for her writing and art from, among others, the Artist Trust, the Philip K Dick Awards, Seattle Arts Commission, Montgomery Arts Association, the Dixie Film Festival. Before Covid, she wandered the world with no fixed abode and is looking forward to getting back on the road with little more than a suitcase and her dog. Aqueduct published her novella Unpronounceable in 2016 and her debut novel, Knife Witch,in 2023.
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