It’s overflowing with the most beautiful three- to four-word sentences I’ve ever read. I want to wear Lauren Groff’s writing around me like a silk robe.
A masterpiece of innovative narrative structure, “Fates and Furies” is broken into two sections. First, we meet the husband of a marriage. Second, we grow to understand his complicated wife. The revelations unfold like a flower in bloom, and it all moves so quickly, as if you are in a dream, and I could write a 10-page English lit paper on its symbolic use of birds, land, and water. This one will hurt when I finish because that means there’s no more “Fates and Furies” left to read.
Bracket copy sprinkled throughout. Insights from the muses. The fates themselves. Brilliant.
The book is a few years old, but it called to me like a siren from a bookshelf in the basement of the State Street Macy’s. I was dicking around while Justin tried on tracksuits, because this is 32.
Groff’s newest book, “Florida,” came out in June. So guess what will be on my list of books to read in September?
Take the bus up to Lincoln Park for aggression release by way of Bad Axe Throwing
Take a million photos of you and the axe that you landed in the bullseye because it’s pretty much guaranteed you will not even hit the board after you do that no matter how many times you try (No? Just me?)
Get a glazed donut at Stan’s, because battle axe throwing is tiring
Watch a movie at Century theater, located in the same building as axe throwing (This has proven to be our go-to ending for #The10to10 days. Perhaps we were a bit ambitious trying to stay out and about for 12 hours straight. We’re always beat the next day. So, spending the last two hours in a dark air conditioned theater has proven an excellent decision. This time we watched “Leave No Trace.” I cried a lot and am recommending it to everyone now, including you.)
P.P.S. If you want to play with lo-class dice like ours, just shoot me a message! We can send you a pair in your fave color: red, brown, purple, blue, or green.
I keep listening to this speech by writer James Clear from the 2017 Craft + Commerce conference. In it, he gives great advice for staying productive throughout the work week. For example, he has his assistant change his social media passwords every Monday so he can’t log in (and, thus, be totally distracted) until the weekend. I know most of us don’t have personal assistants, but we do have opposable thumbs that can turn off our phones during precious writing hours. But the most meaningful aspect of his talk is how succinctly he puts something we all know instinctually but don’t act on realistically: If you get 1% better at whatever you’re working on every day, you’re going to be in a much better place after a year has passed.
Whenever I get down on myself about not accomplishing enough in regards to a pressing deadline whose harbor I’m about to crash into, I remember this speech and I’ll ask myself, “Am I 1% closer to my goal? Is what I did today 1% better than what I did yesterday?” The answers are usually yes and yes. And that’s a win.
What are you doing today to make yourself 1% better or push your project 1% forward?
From Jennifer R. Hubbard’s essay “What’s This Doing to My Brain?” Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Spring 2018.
“We now routinely interact with one another in ways that were impossible for most of human history. Kenneth Goldsmith goes even further than Heffernan in celebrating cyberspace, finding the handwringing of naysayers to be overwrought. In Wasting Time on the Internet, Goldsmith contends that the web is social, not antisocial; after all, we communicate through it. As for fears of shrinking attention spans, he argues, ‘When I look around me and see people riveted to their devices, I’ve never seen such a great wealth of concentration, focus, and engagement.'”
Sears closing. Sears rebranding? Tarot table cards at a taco joint. So many synonyms! What goodies await in your community mailbox? I found a dinosaur.
On the way to my dentist appointment. At my dentist appointment. They were playing, of all things, Deep Blue Sea. That lyric is my new favorite Most Ridiculous Lyric Without Any Context.
For our first edition of #The10to10, I picked a red die and rolled an 8, so to Grand we went.
I was a little bummed at first when we rolled Grand because we’ve already been down in the heart of Chicago. A lot. I was kinda hoping our first fate-driven adventure would launch us into parts unknown. But Grand turned out to be the best starter pack! We still found lots of great stuff we’d never seen before, and since it’s a hot stop for tourists, we got a crash course in Chicago’s history and greatest hits.
Here’s what we found.
GRAND RED LINE STOP
Fuel up with a prime beef sandwich and Italian sodas at Eataly marketplace
Visit City Gallery in the historic water tower (There’s also the Loyola University Museum of Art nearby. It’s free to visit, as is the City Gallery in the bottom of the iconic water tower.)
Visit 360 Chicago, the observation deck in John Hancock Tower (Chicago residents get in half price! Woohoo, tax dollars!)
Do the 360 Chicago Tilt (If you dare… I have already blacked out most of this terrifying experience of being tilted out 94 floors above Chicago)
Pick up tacos to eat at home while you rest your feet and write to your reading-age niece and nephew on the postcards you picked up at Hancock’s gift shop 🙂
P.P.S. If you want to play with lo-class dice like ours, just shoot me a message! We can send you a pair in your fave color: red, brown, purple, blue, or green.
Summer in Chicago is renowned for being the reason so many of us who live here are willing to put up with its insane wind tunnels, lake effect snow, and polar vortexes. Spending a day chilling on a Chicago beach, with the iconic skyline floating on the horizon through the sunny, lazy haze? It’s living the dream.
This + you in a bikini = Summer Forever.
And now that SUMMMMMERRRRR 2018 has finally arrived, Justin and I came up with a game to help us get out and explore our city. Actually, just Justin came up with the game because “making life fun” is his number one contribution and responsibility to our marriage.
Because he’s excellent at it.
Case and point: This new game #The10to10.
Here’s how #The10to10 works:
Choose an L train line and number the stops you’d like to explore as 2 through 12.
Roll the dice.* Add up your numbers. And at 10 a.m., take the L to the stop that corresponds with that number on your map from Step 1.
Start your journey there. Don’t come home until 10 p.m.
* We got a few sets of colored dice to represent the color of the L train lines we want to explore: the blue, red, and brown lines. We blindly draw a die out of a bag. Whatever color die we draw determines the train line. Then we roll two dice to get our stop number in Step 2.
Here’s our #The10to10 map. You can see how we numbered the stations.
We’re pumped to dig into some neighborhoods deeper than we already have and visit some we’ve never really hung out in before. So many times we end up going to a neighborhood for just one destination and then head back home.
But you know you have to stay a while, get your hands and feet and soles a little dirty, to find the b-e-s-t, gemstone-in-an-alleyway kinds of spots. When you spend a lot of time just walking around somewhere, you truly get to know a place. And I think we’ve finally decided we want to truly get to know this place. Plus Chicago, the city of neighborhoods, has so much potential for adventure.
We’re doing our first #The10to10 today! Follow us on Instagram @jackiemantey and @justingolak to see where we end up and what we find.
P.P.S. If you want to play with lo-class dice (like ours below), just shoot me a message! We can send you a pair of dice in your fave color: red, brown, purple, blue, or green.
Amanda Wachob is a New York-based tattoo artist whose method gets rid of the black border around a tattoo, opening the piece up for a softer, blended look with fluid lines that resemble watercolor paintings or gestural paint strokes. (Watch her and other pros talk about the watercolor tattoo movement here.)
By Amanda Wachob
If you want her to ink you next, good luck. Her waitlist is supposedly years long. Luckily, there are plenty of other ways for you to get your eyes on her work.
She prints hyper-close images of her skin tattoos on to silk canvases, and collaborates on super cool projects, such as the Skin Data project with neuroscientist Maxwell Bertolero. The pair recorded the time and voltage of her tattoo machine’s power supply as she created several tattoos, and they made images based on the data that resulted. I also really dig her collaboration with conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll, called HOLÉ. Participants wore an article of clothing with a hole in it and the artists then “filled the hole” with tattoo ink as if to say “all holes can be fixed permanently.”
By Amanda Wachob
In Amanda’s Bloodlines series, she tattoos a subject with meaningful shapes in a non-permanent water line. The body will eventually heal the tattoo and dissolve the mark into the skin, the energy of the symbol also absorbed symbolically into the person.
And while her specialty is skin, don’t miss her work on fruit. Tattoo artists practice on plant rinds before moving on to human skin. I’m particularly smitten by her lemon tattooed with the word “tryst.” What a great word, especially to betroth the bitter, beautiful, impermanent lemon.
You know how they talk about finding your people, your soul tribe? The type of soul tribe Anthony Bourdain belonged to felt like it overlapped with the soul tribe I belong to, if you were to venn diagram it all out. He was my favorite kind of person—so sour and cantankerous and sharp-edged, but he had more heart and intelligence and perception in that quick-witted tip of his tongue than most people can hope to have in their whole bodies. I loved him, and his writing will go down as one of the best of a global American generation.
His suicide was a real punch to so many of our well-fed guts. He represented the type of American a lot of us want to be: Open minded but opinionated, humble but confident, idealistic but realistic, brave in the face of bullshit with a keen eye for spotting it (his rants against Donald Trump’s idiocy were the most recently hilarious/ cathartic). He also, in a lot of ways, represented the type of writer every modern writer wants to be. Bourdain’s style was impeccable, and he was a master storyteller.
I keep this excerpt from a piece he wrote for Lucky Peach #5 at my desk. It’s a perfect example of his ability to tell stories, even when they weren’t his, with humor and heat (which is what, I’m assuming, made him so great in the kitchen too). I’ve kept this piece in my desk drawer for a while now. I pull it out and reread it sometimes, mostly when I need a reminder that even the most basic piece of writing can tell a great fucking story. And it’s better when it does.
That Bourdain no longer is out in this world somewhere, learning, eating, meeting others, means there’s one less good and powerful voice speaking for so many of us. A good and powerful voice that was also incredibly entertaining. God speed, my man.
THE HEAD OR THE FILLET
By Anthony Bourdain
“Back in the day, when wealthy merchants used to travel across China in caravans, they were, from time to time, set upon by organized gangs of bandits and highwaymen. These enterprising free market enthusiasts would ambush columns suddenly and without mercy, quickly slaughtering guards and escorts, then stripping the members of the party of any valuables before killing them. The head man, however, they always saved for last.
Dragged kicking and screaming and begging for his life from his litter, forced to kneel on ground still soaked with the blood of his bearers and entourage, he would find himself at the feet of the chief bandit. The Chief Bandit, inevitably a fearsome-looking fellow, would offer the trembling merchant a whole cooked fish. Steamed, grilled—it didn’t matter. But it was always whole.
‘Eat!’ the Chief Bandit would command, pushing the fist in the direction of his prisoner. There would be a hush as the other bandits took a break from looting, disembowling, post-mortem violation, or any totemic preservations of remains they might be engaged in to move close to the action for what was clearly a Very Important Moment.
If the terrified merchant’s fingers or chopsticks moved straight to the fish’s head, tunneling into the cheek, perhaps, or tearing off a piece of jowl, there would be much appreciative murmuring among the Chief Bandit and his colleagues.
By choosing the multi textured, endlessly interesting mosaic of flesh buried in the fish’s head, their captive proved himself to be a man of wealth and taste. Clearly a man such as this possessed more wealth than what he and his caravan were currently carrying. This man would no doubt be missed by his family and his many wealthy friends, at least some of whom would likely pay a hefty ransom. The bandits would spare his life in the reasonable expectation of future gain.
If, however, the merchant chose instead to peel off a meaty chunk of boneless fillet, the bandits would jerk a cutlass across his neck immediately. This nouveau riche yuppie scum would be worth only as much as he carried in his pockets. Not worth keeping alive—much less feeding. Nobody would miss this asshole. The minute he chose fillet over head he proved himself worthless.”
Sonya Renee Taylor is a slam poet whose movement of radical self love started in a conversation she had with another woman before a slam poetry competition. Sonya’s friend shared an intimate secret: She didn’t always use protection when she had sex because she was disabled and felt like it was too much to ask. Sonya responded, to her friend as much as to herself, “Your body is not an apology.” This new book is an exploration of that idea, and it takes great steps to clearly define the differences between radical self love, self confidence, and self acceptance. Through stories and prompts, the book asks readers to examine how they might give greater radical love to their bodies and, in the process, the bodies of other humans around the world.
“Best-interest buying is also about reducing the harm our purchases cause other bodies. What are three ways you can reduce the harmful or exploitative outcomes of your purchases?”
This 2015 book by journalist Sam Quinones foresaw the way the 2016 election would shake down, at least in terms of the desperation so many small- or medium-sized towns were feeling to change something, anything to stop the devastating slow build of addiction in their communities. Moreover, this book is an incredible, concise look at how we got in this mess in the first place. From interviews with families who lost children in addictions that began at, of all places, the doctor’s office, to the families in tiny Mexican villages who started running heroin to the States as means for their own survival, to the advertisers and doctors whose cartoon-dollar-sign-eyes added to the trouble. This book reads like a thriller, even though it’s nonfiction, and is thoroughly researched: Quinones spent decades covering crime and Mexico for various print journalism outlets. I highly recommend this book, and if you’re in Chicago, try to read it in the, um, next few weeks, OK? At 6:30 pm on Monday, June 25, City Lit Books in Logan Square is hosting a book club circle about “Dreamland.” See you there!
A good friend of mine recently recommended this book, which came out last year. It’s a graphic narrative memoir (how cool are all those words strung together as one thing?!). At a funeral for Kristen Radtke’s uncle, she drove through an abandoned mining town. She was so moved and curiously crushed by the sight of its emptiness that it inspired a journey that took her to many other deserted places around the world. Her black and white illustrations further compound the story’s deep dive into the murky black depths of grief, loss, and loneliness. What’s left of us when we’re left behind?
