Man on Beach, Florida, John Singer Sargent, 1917. Gift of Mrs. Francis Ormond, 1950. This man doesn’t… ummm… seem to be reading.

In 2003, I went to Hawaii for my older brother’s wedding. I was with one of my oldest friends, A., and my brother and his wife still ask after her, as she was the only non-Alam guest at this event. This was a more innocent time, technologically. The photographs I have from Hawaii were taken on a digital camera and A. brought with her an actual travel guide, Fodor’s maybe.

That guidebook directed us, one morning, to a beach in a residential neighborhood, promising it was especially beautiful. Somehow we found our way there; how did we do it, pre-GPS? I remember there was no public parking and we left the matter in fate’s hands. The beach was indeed especially beautiful. Very wide, in my memory, and deep, and empty. There were houses giving onto it, the people who lived there the only ones around. I remember exchanging some words with a prosperous looking woman walking a dog.

A. and I sat and stared at the Pacific. We talked about how my family had behaved at the wedding the day before (not well!). And, in a measure of true intimacy, we read our books in companionable silence. I was reading Buddenbrooks, the Thomas Mann novel I often say is one of my top ten favorite books. This was the sole time I read Buddenbrooks, though periodically I pick up the handsome, hardcover edition that I bought at a used bookstore in Park Slope (now long gone) to see if I can find Hawaiian sand in its pages.

I like to imagine I’m the only person to have read Buddenbrooks on that beach. Something so incongruous about enjoying the misadventures of a fading German family while basking in the tropical sun. At some point, A. and I were startled by voices, a frenzy of activity: three dozen or so hale young men sprinting toward the water, carrying boats that they tossed into the surf, leaping in and paddling about, some kind of team practice. Oh, how Thomas Mann would have loved it.

My favorite books change, depending on my mood. If Buddenbrooks doesn’t rank on a given day it nevertheless remains one of the greatest reading experiences of my life: poring over Thomas Mann beside a dear friend, the silence broken only by the arrival of an army of Tadzios. You can’t recreate a charmed moment, but I have since come to enjoy choosing a certain kind of book as a beach read. That phrase connotes ease, yes, but I don’t mean choosing a perversely difficult book (Buddenbrooks is like reading a soap opera) so much as an unlikely one. I think it might yield some similar experience.

The past few years, I’ve tried for this moment while on the beaches of Fire Island. It was here that I read Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, and the texts did approximate the odd disjunction I’m talking about. Robertson Davies’ trilogy is easy to read, but there’s something decidedly unbeachy about the Candian frontier or the Swiss mountains or a traveling magic show. But nothing strange happened in my real life, there was no moment that became a cherished memory.

A couple of years ago, at this beach, I went through all six volumes of My Struggle. If you’ve read it you know that it is at heart a beach read, maybe excepting the Hitler stuff. It was a superb experience as a reader. I think I cried? But again I didn’t manage that tilt from reality into something else, that elusive sense that I would remember the moment. I’ve tried the least likely beach writers I could think of: Doris Lessing and Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth. I read eight or nine books by J.M. Coetzee while sprawling in the sand beneath the unforgiving sun. But there was no shift. There was no spark. There was not that moment that I stubbornly am hoping for. The novels were their own reward.

Last summer, I read, on the beach, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. It’s a baffling, exhilarating book, and weirdly it almost takes as its subject what I’m talking about—the mad desire of a man to conjure a particular feeling. I loved the novel but it didn’t take on some life outside those pages, didn’t seem to affect reality, didn’t figure into a moment like that one in Hawaii that, even as it happened, I knew I would remember.

Any book is a beach read if you read it at the beach, sure. My big beach reads this summer have been on the nose: I picked up Moby Dick for the first time, staring at the Atlantic, hoping to see a spouting whale. I read John Updike’s Couples which is a beach read nonpareil, all sex and gossip. Less on the nose, I read two novels by Anita Brookner, possibly the least beachy writer I can think of.

I understand that it’s a bit much to expect a book to have this magical power, to figure in some scenario I’ll be unable to forget, to conjure a gaggle of strapping athletes leaping in the surf or whatever. I suppose in a way that’s what one hopes whenever you pick up a book. That it’ll reorder reality. That it will do something to you. That you’ll tell the story of the day you read it. But only a few books have that power, and you just have to keep hunting for them.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Pineapple, from the Fruits series (N12) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands. Issued by Allen & Ginter (American, Richmond, Virginia), 1891. The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick. What an innocent time! Trading cards to promote cigarettes!

It was my birthday. My husband, quite a gifted baker, asked what I wanted in a cake. Question for the ages, that one. You must commit. I wanted chocolate but I also wanted a carrot cake. The latter was the first cake we ever served our older son, for his first birthday. Carrots are healthy, right? (He took one bite and was repulsed, his tastebuds, accustomed to blueberries, avocado, green peas, brown rice, had no idea what to make of it.) I wanted a strawberry shortcake but I also wanted cinnamon rolls, something I have been craving for literal years now, an itch that I’ve yet to properly scratch. I decided, finally, on pineapple upside down cake.

I like the linguistic flourish. “Upside down” sounds like the coinage of a child, the kind of argot that develops inside a family unit, instead of proper phrasing. Also perhaps it seemed an apt choice. It’s been an upside down year in many ways, by which I mean, I guess, that it’s been a bad one. The morning of my birthday a friend texted to say maybe this was the turning of a page. Maybe bad luck was a matter for my 48th year, something I could now leave behind. Here’s hoping.

The day before my birthday I went to the office. I’ve been locked in battle with the book I’m trying to write, and Saturdays are often productive days, I think because I perversely enjoy working while most people are not. The heat was astonishing. I get soft, in the interregnum between Augusts, but that month (the month, incidentally, of most North American births) can be brutal. I worked on my book, then I walked home through that incredible heat. We ate these Asian-y noodles that is part of my husband’s dinner repertoire, and then, a day early, sliced into my pineapple upside down cake.

David had whipped cream in the stand mixer. Noisy and a lot of bother, mostly because the machine weighs as much as a six-year-old and we store it in the cabinet above the refrigerator. The couple of times I’ve had to remove it from there I’ve thought what an amusingly stupid way it would be to die, lifting a stand mixer from a high-up cabinet then falling off of the chic but flimsy step stool I need to reach most of the cabinets, because I am so short. If the Kitchen-Aid fell on my head, which seems distinctly possible in this operation, I’d be done for. In this case, I think the bother was worth it. Whipped cream is tasty.

2/3 of the rest of the family sang “Happy Birthday.” My youngest was still at camp, though he had called me while I was walking home and told me that he’d gone whale watching and seen many whales, as well as a sunfish. What is a sunfish? I asked him. I don’t know, he said, but it’s disgusting. I “searched it up” as my kids used to say, part of that aforementioned familial argot. He’s right, they’re repulsive. I blew out my candles. I was going to wish that my book be good, but that’s not up to the universe, alas, but me, and I’ve given enough to my work. I used my wish on something else.

Pineapple upside down cake is so good! David’s was exemplary. The crumb was kind of hearty, granular almost like a piece of cornbread, and the circles of tinned pineapple were precise and lovely. He’d nested maraschino cherries within, as you’re meant to, but said that if he had it all to do over again he’d use Luxardo cherries. The top was sticky and sweet but not repulsively so, not in that way that makes the teeth feel funny.

I put a picture of my cake on Instagram and someone I don’t know told me he approved, that his family teased him for liking “old man” desserts. I know this is an old-fashioned cake—recipes involving tinned things simply have an atomic age vibe—but I don’t think of this as an “old man” treat. To me that connotes things like licorice or hard candies. Anyway, I’m 49! Not an old man yet, stranger on Instagram. I ate one slice very quickly then, fuck it, it was my birthday, ate another. Delicious.

Sort of fun to have a birthday cake on your birthday eve. The next night David took me to a fancy dinner and the friendly server gave us two extra appetizers (we ordered three because why not) and an extra entree. I drank two Manhattans. When it was time for dessert, I had an orange sorbet that was quite sour. I couldn’t finish it because I had eaten too much dinner. When I got home, I considered having a slice of pineapple upside down cake, because there was still that, leftover, waiting for me, but I was just too full. At least that has come, with age: good sense.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Edouard Vuillard, The Artist’s Mother Playing Checkers, 1885-1895. Games are predicated upon the fact that someone has to lose but life is not a game!

I have been feeling, lately, like I’m on a losing streak. It’s self-pity, yes. I also happen to think it’s demonstrable fact but I’m not going to get into all that. We all have our troubles and for the most part, other people’s are not especially interesting. What is of interest, to me, anyway, is the point at which troubles have accrued enough that you can say, hm, this is odd, hm, this feels like a losing streak.

I was thinking about the Coen Brothers, specifically their 2009 film A Serious Man, in which Michael Stuhlbarg weathers considerably more than I have had to: his wife has fallen in love with someone else, his son is in debt to a pot dealer, his daughter is a drip, he is saddled with caring for his perhaps mentally unstable brother. It gets quite a bit worse: he’s subject to blackmail, he’s up for tenure, his wife steals all his money, he’s in a car accident. It’s Job, I guess, or something along those lines. The end of this movie is so bleak that you laugh because if you didn’t you’d lose your mind.

A losing streak isn’t so fun to deal with but it makes for good storytelling. Job is a tale about faith more than hard luck, I guess, but it’s still a fair point of comparison. And when we cite Job because of a movie we watched or a sob story someone’s told us, we’re affirming what’s being said by connecting it back to the Bible, central to our culture whether or not we believe.

My troubles are not Biblical in magnitude. That’s a dare to fate. Say something like that and you end up falling out of a tree or losing a leg or who knows what. I’m not interested in playing chicken with the universe. But I am interested in stories, and I did notice, recently, that if nothing else, I have kind of a good one right now.

I saw two of my dearest friends. Because of the miracle of text messages, we’re up to speed on what we’re all making for dinner, or the doings of our husbands or kids. But these communiques don’t give you the texture of life. You need to sit down together, in our case, over lunch at an anonymous Upper East Side bistro, and dig in.

They were both quiet as I started to spill (or complain might be the verb) about my year. Bad health. Bad luck. Bad writing. Bad generally. Gratifyingly, they were vocally appalled. They’re good friends. What a year, they agreed. I suppose that’s the only thing that helps when you are on a losing streak: having someone verify that it’s happening.

Middle aged, we skipped dessert but drank a coffee. We walked West together, through the quite astonishing heat. We lingered on a corner, unable to say goodbye, and then we did, scattering to our corners of the world, to the dinners and husbands and children we so often text one another about. I rode the subway, greedily listening to my audiobook, which was due back at the library the next day.

I got home and listened to that book—Stephen King’s 11/22/63—while I folded the laundry. I put the laundry away, and took the opportunity to reorganize my dresser drawers. Feeling enterprising, I hand-washed two favorite shirts. I tidied the jumble of rubbish my younger teen keeps beneath the bathroom sink. I took out the recycling. I managed to finish my audiobook.

It was, in some respects, a classic Sunday: chores, a sense of quiet, the strange atmosphere of a summer evening on which it seems like rain is coming but it never arrives. It was also the happiest day I’ve had in a long time. The simple, bottomless pleasure of sitting at even a so-so restaurant with people you love can compensate for a lot. For one moment, despite my long my catalog of laments shared that very afternoon, it didn’t seem like a losing streak at all. It seemed like a beautiful life.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

John George Brown, The Music Lesson, 1870. I chose this image as an homage to Joanna Newsom.

I make a playlist for the book I’m writing. It’s a habit. I like good songs but when I’m writing I listen to bad or even annoying songs. I can’t explain this. The goal is a kind of energy, a progression of mood, a selection of phrases I enjoy (“Know how to figure things on yellow pads”) and sounds that please me, soothe the savage beast, I guess. Here are the forty songs on my playlist. I wrote five words about each one.

• Angst in My Pants — Sparks

Agitation should be more charming.

• Spike Island — Pulp

Pulp make me feel young.

• El Gustito — Linda Ronstadt

Spanish never sounded more beautiful.

• Thursday’s Child — David Bowie

Bowie wrote some bad songs.

• There’s Too Much Love — Belle & Sebastian

Weirdly, I hate this song.

• Send My Love (To Your New Lover) — Adele

Adele is good? Stop pretending.

• This Tornado Loves You — Neko Case

Metaphors rule. Language is wild.

• Hotline Bling — Drake

I can’t explain but sorry!

• Eyes Without a Face — Angel Olsen

More sexy than is warranted.

• Worms — Aldous Harding

A genius can be baffling.

• Viva Ultra — Bonnie “Prince” Billy

Weird but go with it.

• Picasso Baby —Jay-Z

A love song about money.

• Wild One — Cindy Lee

A Lynchian mood thing happening.

• Never Let Me Down Again — Depeche Mode

A love song about friendship.

• Love is a Stranger — Eurythmics

A love song about metaphor.

• Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart — Judy Garland

Whatever guys. I’m gay. Zing!

• I’m Still Waiting — Kate Bush

This is Kate’s best song?

• Elvis Presley Blues — Gillian Welch

Thinking about Elvis is heartbreaking.

• Art Groupie — Grace Jones

I’ll never write my memoirs.

• Soft as Chalk — Joanna Newsom

Her songs are all novels.

• In France They Kiss on Main Street — Joni Mitchell

Gets richer on every listen.

• The Ballad of Lucy Jordan — Marianne Faithfull

A screwed up bedtime story.

• Thunder — Lana Del Rey

“Fucking Mr. Brightside!” Simply perfect.

• I Met Him on a Sunday — Laura Nyro & LaBelle

Should be two minutes longer.

• Sing Your Life — Morrissey

Weirdly, very positive, almost inspiring.

• Iodine — Leonard Cohen

This is a horrible song.

• Greenville — Lucinda Williams

You’re moved or you’re heartless.

• Jerome — Lykke Li

Yearning to finish this book.

• Somebody to Love Me — Mark Ronson

Boy George sings quite beautifully.

• Dark Child — Marlon Williams

Daddy issues only weirdly sexy.

• Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know? — Morrissey

I do think they know!

• Frogs — Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

I find this song frightening.

• Don’t Worry About the Government — Talking Heads

If you say so, David.

• Distant Fingers — Patti Smith

It’s about alien abduction, right?

• You Fucked Yourself — Quasi

It’s empowering to admit it.

• Jump in the River — Sinead O’Connor

Sounds like being in love.

• Sweet and Tender Hooligan — The Smiths

Their sexiest song. I blush.

• Rain Dogs — Tom Waits

I’m not a rain dog.

• The Waitress — Tori Amos

Pacifists have their limits, too.

• I Feel Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window — Yoko Ono

I know how Yoko feels.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Henri Rousseau, The Repast of the Lion, ca. 1907. You can visit this painting if you’re in New York! I’m kind of snobbish about Rousseau because I consider him somehow tangential to surrealism, which I cannot abide, but the truth is when I see his paintings in person I am always charmed.

Thus far in 2026 I’ve read 78 books, 77 of which were new to me, the outlier being Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. I’m generally reluctant to reread a book. If I didn’t like it the first time, why bother, and if I loved it, there’s the risk of disappointment if it doesn’t hold up. Never mind that there’s a finite number of books to fit in over a lifetime. That I’ll die barely having scratched the surface seems so unfair.

I first read Bellow in 2015: Humboldt’s Gift, which I often cite as a favorite, though I suspect its being my first exposure to Bellow’s magic has something to do with that. No one writes like Bellow. There’s music in his prose and none of the many of whom I might say the same (Norman Rush, Lorrie Moore, William Faulkner, Maxine Hong Kingston) is singing quite the same song. I find it lazy when people invoke genius, but with Bellow I think the term applies and honestly I’m not sure what else there is to say.

Between 2015 and 2018, I read most of Bellow’s ouevre, including The Adventures of Augie March, another book I designate a favorite. Why I chose to reread Henderson instead of those ostensible faves had something to do with the presence of a lion in the story, and something to do with the fact that a picaresque is the closest I can get to travel right now. It was an impulse.

Henderson is weirder than I remembered, yet somehow straightforward: Henderson, a millionaire pig farmer and amateur violinist, has a void within, manifest as an inner voice repeating I want. He decides to go to Africa and see if he can’t meet that undefined desire. Sure, why not. He meddles—he’s an American!—in the affairs of a tribe called the Arnewi. Trying to rid the village cistern of a plague of frogs, he blows the whole thing up. It’s funny, I promise. There’s a feat of strength, there’s a lion hunt, there are many philosophical conversations with a king, there’s a long trip back to the United States. It’s a masterpiece.

Likely you know that the author hadn’t visited the African continent when he wrote this novel. These days, we call that problematic but to me, Henderson is so purely a fiction, its Africa clearly not a real place, its characters barely people, that I can’t feel indignant. Bellow’s Africa doesn’t feel reductive but imagined, a stand-in for something spiritual or philosophical, a state of mind more than geography. Anyway, the choice is either to try to understand art from a benighted past or to ignore it altogether. Up to you!

Spoilers ahead but here’s what happens at the end of this book, a couple of pages that I can’t stop thinking about. Henderson, with a lion cub in tow, shows up at the American consul in Khartoum. They want to get rid of this lunatic, so he flies on to Cairo. From there, he goes to Athens, walks the lion on a leash near the Acropolis. Then he goes to Rome. “I bought a corduroy outfit, burgundy colored, and an alpine hat with Bersagliere feathers, plus a shirt and underpants.” Then he flies to Paris, and thence to London before heading for Idlewild.

Henderson can’t understand how his fellow passengers are reading.

How can you sit in a plane and be so indifferent? Of course, they weren’t coming from mid-Africa like me; they weren’t discontinuous with civilization. They arose from Paris and London into the skies with their books. But I, Henderson, with my glowering face, with corduroy and Bersagliere feathers—the helmet was inside the wicker basket with the cub, as I figured he needed a familiar object to calm him on this novel, exciting trip—I couldn’t get enough of the water, and of these upside-down sierras of the Clouds. Like courts of eternal heaven.

Joni Mitchell has said that a different description of clouds glimpsed from an airplane window, from earlier in the novel, inspired her to write “Both Sides Now.” So take that! One of the other passengers is an orphan, being sent to live with his American grandparents in Nevada. The kid speaks only Persian (we say Farsi now) and a flight attendant, taking pity on him, tells Henderson that the lion cub might cheer the boy.

He was very white and wore short pants with strap garters and a little dark green sweater. He was a black-haired boy, like my own. This kid went to my heart. You know how it is when your heart drops. Like a fall-bruised apple in the cold morning of autumn.

The lion cub indeed cheers the kid; even I, who hate cats, would probably enjoy playing with a baby lion. Henderson feeds the boy dinner, and the child falls asleep on his lap. When the plane lands in Newfoundland to refuel, Henderson and this child get out for some air. Here are the final lines of the book:

Laps and laps I galloped around the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great, beautiful propellers were still, all four of them. I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running—leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.

The ending of this book strikes me as the most exhilarating thing I’ve read in a long while. It’s beautiful, technically, that repetition of “leaping”; it’s lovely as an image, a man carrying a young boy and running around an airplane, its four propellers stilled. You can hear Henderson’s voice in the few sections I’ve quoted here so you understand that it’s striking that so loquacious a narrator ends his story marveling at silence.

Sometimes you read the right book at the ideal moment. I’ve been yearning for surprise. It’s there, in Bellow’s music, inimitable as far as I’m concerned. It’s in the story’s conclusion, which brushes against joy without being insipid. Henderson seduced me, baffled me, perhaps even offended me (Africa is “discontinuous with civilization”?), then reminded me that even with respect to a book you’ve read before, you never know how a story is going to end.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Hablot Knight Browne, Ladies Coaxing Baby to Walk, 1835-1882. Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne. Thanks Mrs. Thorne, for giving this watercolor to the museum, because I love how this nineteenth century baby looks like anime. Also, do yourself a favor and look up who Mrs. James Ward Thorne was!

My job, such as it is, doesn’t ask much of my body. When I’m working, sometimes I pace, sometimes I improvise a standing desk; mostly, I sit. Days that I consider “hard”—what makes a hard day of writing a novel is tricky to say—I feel an unlikely combination of physically drained (yes, from sitting) and itchy to move.

Recently, several such challenging days of writing a novel coincided with beautiful weather. I finished my workday feeling eager to do something and also tired from doing nothing with my body. The closest analogue is maybe how you feel after a very long flight. So I decided to walk home.

Living in New York City entails a lot of walking, not least because the state has so thoroughly mismanaged the public transport system that sometimes one’s feet are more efficient than the subway. My office is about an hour’s trek from my home. This isn’t quite commuter privilege, or maybe it is; maybe a one hour walk is ideal after a hard day, whether you spent that writing a novel or not.

A couple of these days were very hot. Temperature is abstract to me, perhaps because I distrust numbers, but I’m talking about the sort of day where the breeze can offer no respite, simply pushes hot air against your body. Even after 5 PM, the sun was intense, but I welcomed it, wanting a bit of punishment after squandering another day of my finite life at a computer thinking about the nonexistent exploits of imagined people. Perhaps I ought to be baked alive.

I can locate some pleasure, some affection, for even the hottest summer day, in a way I simply cannot for the loveliest January day. People love to say that the snow is pretty, but a lot of things I hate (a bulb of fennel, a house cat) are pretty. Pretty is pointless. These days were not the hottest we’ll see this summer, though one of them was quite intense. I found it bracing, almost thrilling, to turn my attention to the simple task of walking and perspiring.

Some days when I walk home I listen to audiobooks or podcasts. Some days when I walk home I listen to music, but it’s mostly the same music I listen to when I write, which can conjure thoughts I’d as soon avoid. For the most part, the point is not to think at all, for which intense heat and silence (save the sounds of the city) are the ideal conditions. When I walk home in the winter, mostly what I think about is how cold I am. When I walked home last week, it was too hot to even think about heat. That’s my pitch for walking home in a nutshell: thinking is overrated.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

J. Carroll Beckwith, Study of Pendentive Figure for Electricity, Dome of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL, 1891–92.

The first bit of “Possibly Maybe,” one of my favorite Bjork songs, features the sound a ringing telephone used to make, the sound the caller heard before the person they were calling picked up. Maybe? I think? Truth is I can’t exactly remember the sound a ringing telephone used to make, that sound I used to hear before whoever I was calling picked up. Who was I calling, anyway, in my teenage years, that period when the phone meant so much to me? Stéphane Sednaoui’s video features a telephone; I’ll assume that’s what Bjork had in mind.

“Possibly Maybe” is probably one of Bjork’s more legible songs; a straightforward tune of romantic longing (“I wouldn’t mind perhaps/Spending little time with you”) then love’s unpredictability (“Who knows what’s going to happen?/Lottery or car crash”) then its demise (“Since we broke up/I’m using lipstick again”). It’s still a Bjork song, an odd affair by definition, so maybe I’m wrong, but this is how I understood it in 1995, when the album was brand new and I listened to it constantly.

I was in college then, and this was long enough ago that the dorm rooms had phones. I can’t recall how we paid the bills, but I’m certain that we did because I remember being vigilant about phone use, considering it an expensive indulgence. That sound of a ringing phone connotes so much that is fixed in time, that is no longer salient. A telephone call could contain, as Bjork’s does, the promise of romance, though for me, at that age, they meant a different sort of intimacy: me, stuck in Ohio and reaching for a far-off friend. Me, trying to convince myself that, like Bjork, “I definitely enjoy solitude.” A lie. I was terribly lonely.

It is a miraculous thing how certain sensual details can transport you through time. I hear the first notes of this song and am 18 again, and it’s in that combination of being a song I loved and the technology that it is sampling (other songs from Post, an album I still love, don’t quite have this effect). I can almost feel the plastic receiver, hot from my ear, even if I can no longer say who it was I might have called or what we might have discussed.

At some point in the past year my older kid heard me playing the soundtrack for Jonathan Glazer’s film Birth. It’s one of my favorite movies and I listen to Alexandré Desplat’s score often (indeed every day, if I’m writing a book). At around the three minute mark of this track, there’s a sound that recalls that of a ringing telephone. I’ve noticed it in the past but this time my kid pointed it out. “Wait,” he asked, confused, “is your phone making that sound?”

I don’t know enough about music or maybe sound itself to explain that these two noises strike my ear as the same, that these two pieces are kind of similar, or that they trade in the same thing, whatever emotion one has wrapped up in the very idea of a telephone call. Blondie, Carly Rae Jepsen, Stevie Wonder and many others have made pop music about phone calls. Bjork and Glazer fold the phone call itself into the music, and you feel about it however you feel about it.

I suppose I feel nostalgia. I still talk on the phone, because I’m old and therefore my friends are. I have one dear pal who lives far away with whom I can talk for hours. But cellphones have demoted the experience from ritual or rite to mere event. The sound you used to hear when you called someone is lost, though persists inside this music, probably in other music, too. Maybe the running meter of AT&T’s service had its purpose, and phone calls felt more special when you had to pay by the minute, or maybe I’m simply old and whatever is in my past feels special because it once happened to me.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Funerary Mask, Late Ptolemaic Period - Early Roman Period, 1st Century BCE. Egyptian, probably from Harawa, Egypt, now in Chicago. Egyptian artifacts now always make me think of Josh Ritter.

Kind of astonishing to consider the rate of technological change in my children’s relatively short lives. I took baby photos of my older son on a digital camera; we had a little video recorder too. That stuff is all just the phone, now, and many parents consider the phone and its predecessor iPad a staple, a toy, a childhood necessity. My kids began their education in Montessori classrooms, ferrying about little trays covered with beads and teacups and jars and cars. These days, basically everything they do academically is on a computer. Teens now, my boys probably can’t conceive of a different mode of life, and certainly can barely remember one, but I recall a more innocent era when screen time was a precious commodity I could dole out to them like a benevolent leader.

I would sometimes let my older son watch videos so that I could do his hair. I still have these videos bookmarked on my computer, and recently watched them for no particular reason beyond boredom. I was idle at my computer and I wanted to remember. I wanted nostalgia, though perhaps didn’t bet on it being so potent, slightly upsetting. I confess that watching Norah Jones sing about the letter Y almost reduces me to tears. I can all but smell my bath-fresh baby, can feel the unreal softness of his Afro and his damp hooded towel. Sesame Street is made by geniuses, and we used to watch quite a few of their hits—a song about my kid’s favorite mode of transportation, Johnny Cash singing “Nasty Dan,” Paul Simon being upstaged by a little girl, this absolutely deranged video that includes Jeremy Irons (one of the scariest actors alive) and the immortal Madeline Kahn telling Ernie to put down his rubber duck.

When the kids were older, they were sometimes allowed screen time as they waited for their ride to school. It was a good incentive to get coats on and backpacks packed. I’d choose something that sort of amped them up, because the screen was so anesthetizing. They were fans of this commercial Spike Jonze made for Kenzo and they were amused by the video Jonze made for Bjork’s cover of “It’s Oh So Quiet,” but more than such hipster fare kids want shlock, like the video for Katy Perry’s “Chained to the Rhythm.”

We’re all mostly inured to it, so it’s funny to be reminded that watching something on a screen can be so powerful. The sensory overload can mollify a weeping child who doesn’t want his hair brushed; it can stun a crabby toddler into silence. I was just irritating enough a person to want to foist my passions onto my children, to show them things I found remarkable and see what they made of them. I can remember watching Maria Callas with my younger son on my lap, drinking his cup of milk. I remember being quite pleased that both kids loved this Josh Ritter video, which has the quality of being made for a child’s eyes, yet is almost unbearably moving. “The dried fig of his heart!” Come on.

I don’t watch often watch videos on YouTube, anymore. The kids do, sometimes, though it seems to me that Instagram and TikTok have supplanted it. They’ve trained their own algorithms, watch stuff unintelligible to me: young men riding scooters and e-bikes in foreign cities, or people making what I understand are jokes about memes or other jokes, complicated bits of business that don’t seem comic to me though my kids find this stuff hysterical. When I do look at YouTube, though, it will sometimes remind me that once upon a time me and my kids liked to watch Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca sing Offenbach, or enjoyed the spooky video of Ryan Gosling’s forgotten band in a cemetery. I find it amusing that my algorithm has so long a memory. The computer may well remember my life better than I do. If I ever remove the bookmarks for these videos, or they break or vanish as happens on the internet, well, what then? Will I never again remember watching Feist send up her biggest hit with a bunch of Muppets? Maybe not.

Once upon a time, it was a particular source of satisfaction that my children enjoyed the closest thing Joanna Newsom has to a pop song. True when they were small but now, well, neither of them have the metabolism for a long and meandering song. They would find this tune bizarre and off-putting, one more ridiculous thing associated with their ridiculous parents. Oh well. I don’t think Newsom is singing about parenthood on this one, but she might as well be, or I hear some wisdom in her words: “For the time being all is well. Won’t you love me a spell?”

*

This summer, I’m leading a virtual workshop. It’s courtesy of my pal Lynn Steger Strong. We extended the application deadline so hit the first link for more info.

*

Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

“Representing the last stage of mental and bodily exhaustion from Onanism or Self-pollution”, engraving from The Secret Companion, a Medical Work on Onanism (1845). I’m not going to spell it out for you here but this image struck me as apt.

I am writing a book, and when I write a book, I talk to myself. I’m not being poetic, suggesting that the text is a missive to myself (it most decidedly is not!) but literal: I talk, out loud, to no one, well, to myself, I guess. The man with whom I share an office as well as a life can corroborate this. Lately, I’ve been thinking out loud quite a bit. I’m not sure what this says about the book I’m working on. Almost done, or not even close; better than usual, or my worst work yet.

The other night I read a profile of the novelist Richard Powers in a two year old issue of The New Yorker that I have been saving specifically to read this article, in which the writer is described as (in part) “dictating” his work. I seem to remember reading this about Powers in another profile, perhaps in the Times Magazine, and both times I have learned this about Richard Powers it has made me feel better about myself. He’s a better writer than I am, but we have this in common: when I’m writing a book, I’m talking.

When I have completed a full draft of a book, I read it aloud to myself. This is common practice, I think; lots of writers advise this, or I almost certainly came to adopt this tactic because someone told me to. I do think it’s effective: I can revise the same sentence ten times and then hear it out loud, in context, and understand immediately what’s wrong with it, or what I want it to be.

But that’s not quite what I’m referring to. I am not in the read the full draft aloud to yourself stage. I’m at the stage where I read the thing, mark it up, sit down to make those changes, get carried away and do more cutting and rewriting than my handwritten notes indicate. (It’s because these snowball; you cut one bit in the second section, and the third section now requires further explanation, thus, so many necessary changes not reflected in the stuff I write on the manuscript.) It’s not a logical process.

I suspect the development of truly effective noise-cancelling headphones has something to do with this phenomenon of talking aloud. The music in my ear as I work (I listen to the same things over and over, cannot, it seems, accept novelty when it comes to the music I listen to when writing a book) makes my literal voice seem as remote as my inner voice. Or I confuse the two. When I have Alexandre Desplat’s moody soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (I listen to this every workday) blasting in my ears, I don’t know if I’m thinking or talking.

Or maybe I’m emboldened in middle age and can now embrace this tactic I find helpful. I’m fortunate to have a room of my own in which to work. If I have to talk something out when I’m writing, there’s no one around to hear, except sometimes my husband, and he’s surely used to this. So I talk, as I revise, as I write, trying out the sentences, feeling my way toward a specific word. This talking isn’t confined to that room of my own; I’m at that point where I’m thinking about this book all the time, like an unrequited crush, and sometimes I talk in the shower, trying out sentences I might write when I’m dry and have a pencil at hand.

I joke often about how writing a novel is similar to mental illness: a preoccupation with imagined people and events, a sense that the narrative in your brain is apart from and more significant than reality. I suppose we imagine unwell people talking to nonexistent voices, which isn’t quite what I’m doing, though it would certainly look like that to someone who didn’t know I was not “insane” but “a novelist.”

I slip, sometimes, and talk to myself when I’m in public. I went to see some art recently and I found myself talking to myself twice. Once I said, simply, “Alice Neel,” like I had spotted the woman, alive, after a long absence from my life, like I had recognized her and was excited. Oh, hey, Alice. Cool. Later, I said something like “What a funny sicko.” I was talking about Eric Fischl. To myself, I guess. There was no one in the gallery with me, at least.

I was discussing with another writer, recently, a theory that I have been kicking around, that a work of art—in this case, a novel—contains a trace of the mood in which it was created. I think if you’re having fun while you make something, some echo of that enjoyment remains in the finished product. What do I know. Do I recommend talking aloud? Maybe it is a symptom of not caring too much about things, which I do endorse. Sure. Why not? Talk to yourself.

Work is work, not fun, but I am having fun with this book, lately, and I think the talking out loud is a symptom of that. It’s not only that I’m listening to Mitski too loud; it’s not that I’m undergoing psychic break. It’s that I’m enjoying making the words concrete and spoken months or years before they become fixed on the page of a printed book, something to be read, but not read aloud, unless you’re an audiobook performer or reading a book to a child, though I don’t think the book I’m writing should be read to any children. What a funny sicko applies to me as much as it does Eric Fischl, or at least, that’s my hope.

*

This summer, I’m leading a virtual workshop. It’s courtesy of my pal Lynn Steger Strong. I’ve not taught since last Spring, about this time, and I miss it. The first link has more info on the class structure and how to apply.

*

Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

A Banana Tree, watercolor on paper, 19th Century, Rajasthan, Kota. Harvard Art Museums.

One of my favorite photos of my older son shows him eating a banana on the beach. I remember it, albeit in that complex way you remember things you’ve photographed, like maybe you’re recalling the picture and not the event. It was 2011, and he was not quite two years old. It was early in the morning, cool enough still that he’s wearing a sweatshirt. He’s looking at the camera, or whichever parent is wielding it, and he’s holding a banana, and it’s clear his small mouth is full of banana. He always had a kind of serious expression. He had a natural furrow to the brow that, coupled with his hilarious hairline, made him look more a small middle-aged man than a toddler. It’s crazy how cute he was then and still is.

I associate bananas with babies. Bananas were among the first things both my kids ate, surely true for most American kids. Bananas are mild and mushy, thus perfect for a baby’s tough gums and showroom-new palate. When this same kid turned one, I made him a carrot cake, which he found revolting—too sweet, surely. But bananas! They were a part of that time in my life. There was always a half banana moldering in the fruit bowl, because babies and toddlers can only eat so much. I remember mashing banana into that strange watery baby cereal that is technically a “solid” food. I remember a child on my lap, either this one or his little brother, leaning forward to bite into a banana that I held tentatively like a visitor to the petting zoo.

I remember carrying a banana in a tote bag. There’s no good way to transport a banana. If you peel and slice it and put it in one of those little containers for toddler snacks, it turns black and unappealing immediately. So I’d sort of balance one on top of the other stuff in the bag and hope for the best as we headed to the park. I don’t think I have a photograph of it but I damn well remember the sight of a banana sliced into coins (then halved again, don’t let baby choke!) arrayed on the tray of our hand-me-down IKEA highchair.

Here’s a line from Shirley Hazzard: “It was always summer—and was afternoon more often than not, hot with smells of chalk and gym shoes and perhaps the banana uneaten in someone’s satchel.” She’s describing the endless afternoons of her characters’ youth; the smell of a banana uneaten in my own tote bag is the smell of my children’s infancy and toddlerhood. (I often use this passage as an example when I teach; one of this country’s most prominent writers once told a workshop that it’s not possible to write about smell. Babe, Shirley Hazzard would like a word!)

It’s a long time since I mashed a banana for a toothless diner. It’s a long time since I microwaved a bowl of oatmeal with banana and raisins. It’s a long time since I sliced banana, apple, grape, whatever we had on hand, to make a fruit plate snack. It’s a long time since I baked rotting bananas into bread, so regular an occasion in my life, once, that I could do it without consulting a recipe.

The baby who once rejected his homemade birthday cake as too sweet now goes through a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch every two days. His little brother is always asking if I have anything for dessert and rolling his eyes when I say a banana, an apple, grapes. We still buy bananas every week but my husband is the usually the only one who eats them though lately I, too, have been enthusiastic about eating bananas.

When I find a certain food newly or surprisingly delicious, I suspect it’s simply reflecting that my diet is deficient in some fashion. I had all these weird health problems, earlier this year, and was in fact diagnosed as being so in need of certain nutrients that I’m still taking supplements. I don’t know what bananas contain that my body finds so irresistible lately but there must be something, because bananas taste incredible to me now.

I’ve taken to leaving a bunch in my office, because as discussed bananas are tricky to transport. I eat one when I get in, which is usually after going to the gym, so I’m very hungry, and the banana is somehow able not only to sate me but to make me feel better. Mystical, almost. The banana, sometimes even just the sight or smell of it, is able to remind me of all the things I’m talking about. Slicing off the exposed blackened end of a half-eaten banana to get at the fresh fruit beneath. A toddler hand reaching out to offer me a bite of banana, too. Waking up at 4 AM in a California Airbnb and feeding the baffled baby some Cheerios and banana. Like I said, mystical, almost.

*

This summer, I’m leading a virtual workshop. It’s courtesy of my pal Lynn Steger Strong. I’ve not taught since last Spring, about this time, and I miss it. The first link has more info on the class structure and how to apply.

*

Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Metropolitan Print Company, c. 1896, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

My family pays for Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu and DisneyPlus (these are now the same), Apple TV+ and YouTube, because I was tired of my kids saying “Joe Biden is sending illegal immigrants to your door,” a line they were being bombarded with before I bought the ad-free option. I pay for Paramount Plus, but I have no idea why. They email me every month to charge me and I carry on with my life as though that thirteen dollars means nothing. What can I say? I’m an American. I love to waste money.

At some point, I decided I needed to also have access to the Criterion Channel. It seemed a nutritious offset to “The Morning Show,” which (respectfully) is the stupidest and most beguiling television program ever made. Same principle as eating a kale salad to atone for a dinner at McDonald’s. I make such bargains constantly. I’m delusional.

Periodically, I remember that I have this Criterion subscription and resolve to watch a bunch of their offerings. It’s a way to justify the expense and also to fill in the gaps in my knowledge—despite enjoying movies, I’ve never seen most of the classics. I think of this as I do books. It’s not too late until you’re dead, so don’t be embarrassed if you’ve not read the canon. Just start reading it!

Two weeks ago, I experienced such a period. I watched Wim Wenders’ “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,” an adaptation of the Peter Handke novel, and John Cassavetes’ “Opening Night,” and Ingmar Bergman’s “Through a Glass Darkly” and “Autumn Sonata”, and the Coen brothers’ “Blood Simple,” and Michael Haneke’s “Caché,” and Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton.” These don’t have much in common—I chose them randomly, a crash course in the agreed-upon highlights of American and Western European cinema.

I know Wenders from “Wings of Desire,” a movie sensitive gay teens are required by law to talk about too often. I’ve not read Handke’s novel, so didn’t know what “Goalie” would be about. It turns out it’s about a lunatic! Or maybe it’s about how the media and America itself have made us all into sociopaths? My favorite part of “Goalie” was its depiction of permissive European parenting. There’s a mom in this movie who truly doesn’t give a fuck. I respect it.

I watched “Opening Night” because it’s a film about an actress and I’m writing a novel about an actress. I’m not sure I understood the climactic scene, but the film is so good that doesn’t matter. I felt fidgety and insane when it was over. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Is Gena Rowlands the most charismatic actress to ever appear on film? Seems possible. This movie made me really want a cigarette, though it did not make me want a drink.

I know that his name is shorthand for sophisticated European cinema, but I don’t know anything about Ingmar Bergman, really. During another, earlier, Criterion binge, I watched “Persona,” which I found thrilling. So I chose to watch “Through a Glass Darkly.” I was personally offended, perhaps, by the depiction of a patriarch who is a writer and a self-obsessed blowhard and not a very good father. But young Max von Sydow is kind of hot!

Maybe “Autumn Sonata” was more my speed because the monstrous parent was a mother? Ingrid Bergman (surely another one of the most charismatic actresses ever to appear on film) is a famous pianist and egomaniac who goes to visit her daughters, one of whom is paralyzed and the other of whom is Liv Ullmann. There’s a long scene in which mother and daughter fight that is very stressful to watch. This movie, too, made me want a cigarette, because I imagine that, when smoking, I look as alluring as Ingrid Bergman does. Movies are fantasy.

I saw “Blood Simple” when I was an undergraduate; Oberlin had a robust film series back then, maybe still. It turns out I remembered the mechanics of the plot better than I’d have expected. This film, as many older movies, made me wish we lived in an era of interesting faces. Don’t get me wrong; I saw Frances McDormand at a restaurant in Los Angeles last year and she’s gorgeous. But her beauty has something unusual in it. Maybe M. Emmet Walsh is a better example of what I mean. We just don’t have as many guys who look like that in movies anymore and we should.

I did not especially enjoy “Michael Clayton,” despite people telling me, for years now, that I would. So I’ll talk instead about “Caché,” not technically a part of my Criterion binge, because I had to rent it, though it certainly seems a Criterion film, which is to say, arty and distressing.

I have watched Haneke films as part of previous binges; once “Funny Games,” a movie I’ve seen several times and love, and later “The White Ribbon,” a movie that is such a masterpiece it made me rethink my all-time top ten films. If you haven’t seen it, and like creepy children, and historic guilt, and inexplicable violence, I recommend it highly.

“Caché” turns out to have creepy children, and historic guilt, and inexplicable violence, too. It also has Juliette Binoche and one of the sickest apartments in Paris. I had no sense of what this movie was about, and maybe that’s always the best way to go into a story. This is a film that revolves around a central mystery that it never bothers solving. I find that more gutsy than annoying, but I might be in the minority there.

Watching movies takes time. “Opening Night” was more than two hours long, and the evening doesn’t always have those hours in it, once you’ve finished the dinner dishes and forced the kids to brush their teeth. I like movies, but I truly love books. And there’s just less time to read before bed if I’ve watched a two hour movie. I fall asleep at eleven no matter what.

Despite paying for all our subscription services, my husband and I often can’t think of anything to watch. Or we just do the dishes and read. But periodically it’s a great comfort to give myself over to screen time, to let Criterion tell me to watch these interesting, nutritious films, and then to feel smug that I’ve obeyed, and got my money’s worth to boot.

*

This summer, I’m leading a virtual workshop. It’s courtesy of my pal Lynn Steger Strong. I’ve not taught since last Spring, about this time, and I miss it. The first link has more info on the class structure and how to apply.

*

Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

I took this photo because this mailbox is green. My camera roll is full of things I have photographed because they are green: a pot, a plate, a door, a stranger’s tee shirt, and so on.

When we got married, in September of 2008, I wore green shoes: Gucci drivers, in a kind of grassy suede, with a chunky black horsebit. I still have them. I still wear them. I attended an event in Nashville last spring, and I remember packing them for that trip, telling myself that Nashville seemed the sort of city in which a man might wear green shoes.

There’s something silly about the notion of a favorite color. Seems reasonable or logical to have a variety of favorites, depending on whether you’re talking about a sweater or a plate or eyes or the shoes you’ll wear to your wedding. Still, for simplicity’s sake, if it comes up—and strangely it does seem to with some regularity—I usually say green is my favorite color.

I rarely wear green, or any color besides black. I lack imagination. But I always stop and consider green garments. I try to imagine myself some other person. I own a cute pair of green gym shorts that I never actually wear to the gym. I have a quite perfect green sweater that I never wear anywhere. I’m sporting it in this attempted author photo that I had to reject because I don’t look like myself. I did buy my husband a quite perfect green sweatshirt that he loves. Perhaps what I want is to see green, not sport it. Last Christmas, my present to myself was another pair of green shoes. I haven’t worn them yet but I’m working up the courage. They are, my younger son pointed out, outlandish.

One of my favorite greens is malachite. It’s popular in housewares, though quite expensive. I have a very small malachite box with a lid that I keep in my office. There’s a Lego man inside of it; I can’t remember the story there. I also have a small malachite pyramid. These are the kinds of things you see at auctions of dead people’s belongings, labeled as ‘desk articles.’ They are indeed articles, and do have some relationship to my desk, though they’re ultimately both useless, unless you consider beauty useful.

I was at the Museum of Modern Art a couple of weeks ago, and I saw a favorite Ellsworth Kelly, one so vibrantly colored I found it strangely difficult to look at. This painting looks, of course, like a carrot. Or like peas and carrots, maybe. I thought of a side dish of peas and carrots I ate last winter at a revolving restaurant in Midtown. You can almost taste this painting. I looked at it for a long time, then I looked away, and had some afterimage of its green in my eye, making it hard to see straight.

It is funny how your eyes, the thing that show you color, themselves possess color. I think the hierarchy is that brown eyes like mine are humdrum, blue eyes like my husband’s are lovely, and green eyes the best. My maternal grandmother, who hailed from Afghanistan, had green eyes. I used to lament that I didn’t luck into that gene but whatever. You have to look in the mirror to appreciate the color of your own eyes, so maybe our own eye color is always wasted on us.

If I call green my favorite color, perhaps what I mean is that I notice it the most. I’m not sure why that would be, but it’s true. I am aware of the color green. I see it. I even have some impulse to photograph it: a passing car, a book jacket, a garment worn by a stranger. I don’t know what this means, but I suspect it means something.

Winter is finally slipping away. March is in retreat, though not as lamblike as I’d have hoped. I’ve been taking many long walks, recently, and while it’s not been quite as warm as I’d want it to be, it cannot be denied that there are bits of green, now, where for months there has only been brown. Such moments, surely green is everyone’s favorite color. You see it in the tender shoot of some brave plant, and cannot but feel something. Maybe green is the color of hope, who knows.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Edouard Vuillard, Game of Checkers, 1897-1898, Rosenwald Collection. You can see so much of this room from the artist’s vague gestures at its decoration: the curlicues that imply a wallpaper, the suggestion of a floral upholstery, the curve of a chair’s back, even the glimpse of the checkerboard’s grid. The mind sorts all this so quickly, completes the picture so you see it, privately, with the fidelity of a photograph almost. It tells a whole story, I think, if you’re attuned to the language of rooms.

I like rooms. I have for as long as I can remember. My dad’s an architect; is there something in that? My siblings and I grew up in a home of our father’s design, severe and modernist by the standards of the exurbs. Our house had many windows and none were covered; our chums from school thought this was insane. We had open riser stairs, like the house on The Brady Bunch, and double height ceilings in the living room and the solarium, an all black and white room containing nothing but some potted plants. We had a white kitchen table, pill-shaped, steel coated in rubber. I tried to get my hands on it in my adulthood, but it had been lost over subsequent moves, alas.

I was one of those teens who was possessive of my bedroom. I shared with my little brother for a while, then at fourteen moved downstairs, claiming what was intended to be a guest room. I remember taking great care with its design. I had a poster for the Cure, my favorite band in that era. I had those cardboard sleeves in which compact discs used to be sold, for the Smiths Best compilations, taped onto the wall: the incredibly handsome actor Richard Davalos, in some film still.

I was just as fussy when designing my college dorm room. A first chance to telegraph adult identity! My first year, I had the outer half of a space divided in two; my roommate, the straightest man at Oberlin College, had to walk through my territory to enter his room, which contained nothing. I had a big poster showing a detail of Lorenzo de Medici in a Botticelli depiction of the Magi, and a small framed notice from a show of Klimt drawings I’d seen in Prague the summer before I went to college. I imagined this made me a sophisticate, and perhaps it did.

My junior year, I lived in a house with eight other kids. Our outgoing telephone message, if you can imagine such a thing, was: Hi please leave a message for Amanda, Christina, Randy, Rumaan, Monique, Jumee, Kimi, Jeanie, or Jameson. I can’t remember how we chose which rooms we’d get, but I loved mine. There was a niche into which a twin mattress fit tidily. I made a headboard of a little bookcase. I had a promotional poster for Bjork’s Telegram, and that Jacques de Loustal New Yorker cover of a gay couple as groom and groom, and a photo of Morrissey and Johnny Marr that I still have tacked up over my desk. I pinned old bedsheets over the room’s two open closets. I filled the room with flotsam like those David LaChappelle photos of Leonardo DiCaprio torn from The Face, postcards people had sent me, that sort of thing.

I’m redacting this photo. I wouldn’t want to ruin his chances at a political career. This is the view toward my bed from the door. I like how my lamp doesn’t quite fit on the top shelf; Apartamento magazine would approve.

I had studied in London the previous year, and returned with a plastic box with a frame inset in its lid that I used to store cigarettes, and a chrome ashtray with a flip top that I bought at Heal’s. I kept cartons of cigarettes (they were $25 and I had three jobs so I was rich) and decant Parliaments into the box. Thus people would naturally want to hang out in my room. I wish I had more photographs of this room, which I loved, truly made into a perfect little place, but there are simply fewer such documents from those days before cellphones.

The couple hundred dollars weekly that made me rich in Ohio didn’t go as far in Brooklyn. But in my first apartment I had both my tiny bedroom—with space only for a twin bed and a kidney shaped vanity at which I wrote a horrible novel—and the living room to decorate. I had that same poster of the Botticelli Medici over my bed. In the living room, I had overstuffed Billy bookshelves and two houseplants that lived for two decades, then died, one after another, like longtime spouses. I loved that room. I loved that apartment! I still walk by it, and feel a particular kind of twinge.

This is our current living room. My husband photographed this; Wendy Goodman published it recently. From left to right, there’s a painting by Patrick Eugène, a painting by Gretchen Scherer, a painting by Kara Walker, a vintage mirror, a bust of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a lithograph by Helen Frankenthaler, and a painting by Logan Sibrel. It’s not only my room, of course, but represents both my and my spouse’s taste. Somehow, though, this is just another version of me taping up that box with the Smiths cover art on it. Yes, we really do eat the oranges that are in that green bowl. Healthier than cigarettes, I guess.

I recently saw a small show of work by Eduard Vuillard. Though Vuillard always makes me stop when I’m poking around a museum, I hadn’t quite considered that he might be among my favorite artists, certainly of that period, but I think he is, because he and I share this interest in rooms. I love rooms and so perhaps it follows that I love paintings of rooms: Vuillard, Fairfield Porter, and Gretchen Scherer, whose work you can’t quite make out above, but is so lovely.

I don’t quite know what it is about a room that makes me feel exhilarated and curious, and, if it’s my room, proprietary and almost romantic. I like to imagine showing our living room to Vuillard. Would he like it, and would he want to render in an image the sofa’s stripe, the clashing greens of the bookcase and the rug, the beat up Moroccan pillows? Would he appreciate the unlikely yellow of the walls, the little wooden obelisks, the flourishing plant? Would it make a good painting, and what would that painting feel like?

Would that painting feel, to anyone looking at it, the way the room feels to me? Probably not. Maybe that’s not possible. A room is a personal thing, a paragraph in a private language. You can enter it, if invited, linger and smoke the cheap cigarettes on offer, but a room only has one or two or a handful of people who occupy and therefore truly know it. A room is a mystery, maybe that’s what I mean, maybe that’s what I appreciate.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Utagawe Hiroshige, Loquat and Bird, c. 1830-1844, gift of H.R. Warner. Despite playing the word “loquat” in Scrabble (and various knock-offs) over the years, I’m not sure I knew what a loquat was until just now. It is edible, though I do not believe that I have ever eaten one.

About a year ago, I removed from my phone some of the things I knew were making me insane. Since then, instead of tweeting or watching Tik-Tok dances, I do the Times crossword. To be clear: I’m staring at my phone like every other slack-jawed 4 train passenger, and I don’t really think that’s great for one’s life (or neck, or eyesight, or mood). To continue to be clear: I feel crazy when other people are self-righteous about how they’ve shaken off the yoke of BIG PHONE. What I want to talk about is what I love about my phone.

And that is word games. I spend a lot of time doing the Times crossword. I only do the Friday and Saturday installments. (Thursday’s play stupid tricks, Sunday’s are too long, the rest of the week are too easy.) I’ve been working through the puzzle’s archive; I’m in 2021. When I feel adrift, on a stalled train or waiting for a movie to start, I do a crossword. I don’t know why I find this endeavor so satisfying, but that doesn’t matter. I simply accept the pleasure of this benign little vice.

We live in a culture of productivity, in a moment when all data—how many steps you took in a day, how many books you read in a year—are how we account for ourselves and how we spend our time. The phone, after all, will tell you, if you care to know, just how much time you’ve spent with it in a given week!

This is kind of a grim way of going through life. One’s week should have those pockets of time that if not must be than could be filled—sitting on a stuck train, waiting to see the doctor. Does it really matter if you spent that time staring at your phone? It’s your life! Do a crossword puzzle, live a little.

I’ve told myself some ridiculous things about my word game habit. I pretend it’s educational, but that’s nonsense, because the crossword doesn’t teach you anything save for how to solve other crosswords. I sometimes imagine it’s beneficial to my health, that all this time trying to remember arcane vocabulary means I’m staving off dementia. I’m not sure the science bears that out.

Recently, the Times unveiled a new game, Crossplay, a rip-off of Scrabble. I’m rarely an early adopter, but I must have been one of the first to download it as there were no other users. So I played against the computer and fell in love with the game immediately. I played again. And again. A couple of weeks ago, I matched wits with the computer twenty times in a day and told myself to chill out.I played seven matches yesterday. Healthier, maybe.

I probably sound like those sanctimonious people who won’t stop talking about how they deleted Instagram, or made their display gray instead of alluring colors, or installed some device that won’t let them fiddle with various apps, or jettisoned the thing for a so-called dumb phone. But I don’t think playing word games is a lofty pursuit, though I do recommend it over spending your screen time on misinformation or propaganda or depressing headlines or other people’s moronic opinions.

Sometimes I am struck by how odd it is that I spend my working days writing, then I go home and to relax, I read. It’s somehow fitting how I’ll fiddle with words all day at work and then to unwind on the subway I fiddle with more words in the context of a game. I guess words are just what I know, or where I feel relaxed, or what have you. I think we can all be forgiven seeking a bit of comfort in this world.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Milk Jug, Staffordshire, 1760-1770, Gift of Harry A. Root, Jr. in memory of Curtis Chapin Palmer. No offense to this jug or the donor or the person in whose memory it was given, but I almost cannot believe how ugly this object is. Unsure why but somehow this combination of colors inspires disgust.

My older son is allergic to peanuts. Food allergies are frightening—or his scares me, though I know it could be more severe, even scarier. The body (all bodies) is feeble, though not defenseless against allergens. There’s some innate sense of revulsion against the things that might kill us. Think of how spiders send a shiver down the spine. Because of his vulnerability to them, my son is attuned to the smell of peanuts. Once he was out with my husband, and they passed this bakery that specializes in fat underbaked cookies (a little gross). My husband thought it smelled alluring; our son felt it smelled of peanuts, and was put off.

I recently realized that a similar instinct pertains with respect to my lifelong disgust at the sight of milk. I don’t think I’m allergic to milk, or that it would kill me, though I’m told it made me quite ill when I was a baby and child, so perhaps I once was. I remember my mother talking about how I had to be given goat’s milk for a time. Milk is a big part of American childhood, though not mine. I’ve never, at least in the time I can consciously remember, drunk milk from a vessel. Just the thought or the sight of it makes me sick. I found the scene in Babygirl in which Nicole Kidman drinks a glass of milk absolutely disgusting. I would accept a lot from Harris Dickinson, but I’d draw the line there.

I could overlook my revulsion at milk during my sons’ baby and toddlerhood. You have no choice, and parenting is gross work. A baby vomiting milk in that little gap between my neck and my tee shirt, so that it ran down my bare back, was just one of those things.

I mostly outgrew the systemic sensitivity I have to milk or lactose or whatever it is. At some point in my young adulthood—that is to say, post high school—I ate cheese; I’m fairly certain that I never had prior. (I mostly ate peanut butter and jelly.) I love eating ice cream, and until recently I think the single thing I eat the most of in a week is yogurt. That said, I would never drink a glass of milk, and I would never eat a bowl of cereal in milk. Indeed, I am quite certain that I have never in my life had a bowl of cereal in milk.

I’ve been quite ill, recently, and the road to recovery seems to involve this complex and very restrictive diet. I can no longer, for example, eat yogurt. Or apples, which is devastating, though it turns out the proverbial apple a day didn’t do a damn thing to keep doctors away from me. I’ve been puzzling over how to adhere to this diet while also regaining some weight—in the past few weeks, I’ve lost 10% of my bodyweight, and am convinced if I just got some pounds back on I would feel better.

Gaining weight without eating dairy products struck me as an impossible conundrum until I remembered the existence of oat milk. So, for the first time in my life, I’ve been eating cereal that isn’t dry, but served in a bowl of oat milk. It’s a very strange feeling, maybe akin to driving on the wrong side of the car and road while in the United Kingdom: familiar but totally counter to my every instinct.

Embarrassing but true that the first time I made myself a bowl of corn flakes and oat milk, I couldn’t quite look at it. I didn’t close my eyes, but I avoided making eye contact (the sliced strawberries were the eyes). I pretended that I was eating something else, or that I was someone else, I was my brothers, with their normal American childhoods, eating bowls of Kix in milk, drinking cups of milk with dinner. I was my own children, with their normal American childhoods, drinking bottles of milk they’d vomit onto their parents.

But it’s just me, in my normal American adulthood, one of what seems to me premature decline, though maybe it’s right on time. I hope this diet and recovery will pass. I choose not to believe I’ll never eat an apple again. I only just discovered envy apples, which have supplanted honeycrisp in my personal apple ranking; it would be too unjust. While I suppose I could go the rest of my days without eating yogurt again, I don’t know if I can continue to eat cornflakes in oat milk. I don’t object to the taste, but it’s hard to eat something you can’t quite look at. But I will keep at it, until I gain some weight, until I feel better, or until I die, whichever comes first. Nice to remember, I suppose, that you can be almost fifty and realize there’s all this stuff, no matter how prosaic, that you’ve never done.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

George Wesley Bellows, Love of Winter, 1914, Friends of American Art Collection. I do not possess a love of winter. I wonder whether I in fact have a hatred of it.

Dating involves coming up with clever ways to spend time with another person. You want to communicate, to someone who doesn’t quite know you, just what you’re all about. By saying hey let’s go to the Guggenheim, or for Thai food, or to this quiet bar I know, you’re saying I like Matthew Barney and I love fried dumplings and I enjoy a whiskey on the rocks. When I first met D., we went to the movies all the time. I don’t think it was more his idea or my idea; I think we both enjoy seeing movies.

I keep a notebook into which I’ve pasted ticket stubs from concerts, films, lectures, museums, that sort of thing. Depressing to me that, in this day and age, stubs are so often supplanted by QR codes. I’ve recently been to the Frick, and the Joyce, and to several movies, but I have no tangible record of these outings for my little red notebook. So it goes. That book is just clutter to be thrown away when I’m dead.

I was looking at this book recently, marveling at how many movies D. and I saw in our courtship. I think my most specific memory of a movie date we had in those early days was seeing The House of Sand and Fog at BAM. In my memory, this film made me feel incredibly tense. In my memory, we saw this movie on a Sunday afternoon. Indeed, in my memory, we often saw movies on a Sunday. You need something to do on a Sunday.

We saw so many movies in that period of courtship, in the years before we had a child. Indeed, the first time we went out alone, after becoming parents, was to the movies. My brother babysat and we, for some insane reason, went to see Precious, a movie about child abuse, maybe not a great choice.

Then, for eight years or so, we didn’t go to the movies very often. At that point, we had kids who were eight and five, old enough to go to a movie, which is what we did with them almost every winter Sunday. You need to get out of the house, but it’s awful to sit at the playground when it’s cold. We mastered the art of stretching these trips to the theater—trek through the mall we built over the mass grave of the World Trade Center, stop for a bagel at the food court in the mall just across the West Side Highway, keep walking to the Regal at Battery Park City. You barely even have to go outside, but all the walking and that screen time wear out two little kids.

I think there’s a reason we’ve gravitated to movies on Sundays, first as a couples date, then as a parental diversion. Sunday with small children is a specific kind of purgatory, waiting for Monday and the resumption of routine. But Sundays, generally, are a kind of purgatory, a day I’ve always found it hard to enjoy. It’s a truth captured by the flawless title of that Jean Stafford story (also flawless), “Children are Bored on Sunday.” I am bored on Sunday. What better way to wait out the worst day of the week than in the dark, relative comfort of a movie theater, Regal Cinemas as some kind of church?

Though I saw basically every children’s film released between 2016 and 2023, I remember these with less clarity than I do The House of Sand and Fog, because I often napped through them. Then something strange happened: our children grew up. At this point, they rarely want to go to the movies, maybe because they’re embarrassed by their parents (their right, a rite of passage) and maybe because their generation has no attention span.

These days, the Sunday afternoon movie, a more ingrained habit than I had realized, is less a matter of parental survival than it is a matter of courtship, again. Movies make great dates because you sit around together, experiencing something, then later you can discuss how annoying Hamnet is. If you had told me, some January Sunday when I’d dragged the children and their coats and hats and scooters and a tote bag of water bottles to Manhattan to see some horrible film and eat $30 of popcorn and Sour Patch Kids, that someday I would once again go to the movies, without a squirming child to mind, without a leaking water bottle, to watch an actually good film (or Hamnet), I’d never have believed you. But time, it passes, I guess.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Mary Bradish Titcomb, The Writer, c. 1912. When we lived in our old house, my husband would force paper whites, some winters. It was really lovely to have something alive in the place during the gray, cold months. I also rather liked that, when they’d died, you could see how the roots had snaked around all the rocks.

My favorite television show of all time is The Golden Girls. It’s not especially known for its grip on continuity. In a rare example of a character recurring twice, there’s a guy called Glen O’Brien (not to be confused with the Warhol guy who edited Madonna’s Sex book and wrote that style column for GQ) who is a gym teacher at a school where Dorothy is substituting. They date, she discovers he’s married, and it’s over. He returns a couple of seasons later; he’s divorced! They resume their romance, but it doesn’t work out.

Because this is television, maybe it doesn’t matter that he’s played by two different actors—in the first episode, by Alex Rocco (best known to some as Moe Greene, who gets shot in the eye at the end of The Godfather; best known to others as the voice of Roger Meyers Junior on The Simpsons) and in the second episode, by Jerry Orbach, a legend.

This information was all I could think of as I was watching the fifteenth episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote, which guest stars both Rocco and Orbach. How strange, I thought; they both played the same character on the same television show, a far more specific coincidence than, say, both having played MacBeth or something. This kind of thing is all I can think of when I watch Murder, She Wrote. This kind of thing may be part of the reason I so love Murder, She Wrote: it reminds me of my favorite television show, though it’s another thing altogether. Indeed this same episode stars two other Golden Girls players: Barbara Babcock, who was Blanche’s sister, the romance novelist Charmaine Hollingsworth, and John McMartin, who was a priest on whom Dorothy had a crush.

In real life, I am very bad with faces. Sometimes I will go see movies and be unable to place an extremely famous actor. Who’s that? I’ll whisper in the dark. Denzel Washington? my concerned date will reply. Somehow, with character actors who once appeared on The Golden Girls, I’m a savant. Oh, look, that’s the actor who played Hunter McCoy, whom Blanche takes to the fancy fundraiser because she doesn’t think Jake, her caterer boyfriend, is good enough. Oh, look, that’s the actress who played the daughter of the Alzheimer’s patient whom Sophia befriended at the boardwalk.

I love Murder, She Wrote because when I watch it, it’s basically impossible for me to think about anything besides this tangle of guest stars and their resumés. Indeed, this often prevents me from thinking about the murder in question, which is fine, because it’s usually the least exciting part of the show to me. I like the locations and the sets, the costumes and the strange anthropological details (the cigarettes, the cocktails, the necessity of placing phone calls via an operator, sometimes even the dialogue feels like it’s from not the 1980s but the 1950s). I love the strange dissonance of high and low production value—cinematic establishing shots of the landscape alongside primitive attempts at gory effects.

I spent the past few days in the hospital. Not an experience I enjoyed, though after 22 hours in the hallway of the emergency room, the room to which I was finally admitted struck me as perhaps the most beautiful place I had ever seen. Practicing gratitude, I suppose. I huddled in the unfamiliar bed, in my dirty clothes, tubes delivering sustenance into my veins. I needed to think about nothing. Jessica Fletcher to the rescue again.

I had the good novel I’m currently reading (Lauren Rothery’s Television) and some magazines and of course my phone, but I ignored most of that and watched thirty episodes of Murder, She Wrote in a couple of days. My body was confined to that narrow bed but my mind was free to free associate. There’s an episode of Murder, She Wrote in which the guest stars are not only the immortal Rue McClanahan, who played Blanche, of course, but also Howard Witt, who played Blanche’s father, Big Daddy. Bliss.

That’s the appeal of comfort television, I guess. A world of familiar faces, a world that makes sense. Troubling questions are answered definitively. All is made well again. Yes, bad things are done, and people die, but there’s still logic and even justice. It’s all very different from the real world, naturally, where you can be sick, indeed convinced you’re going to die, and never quite answer what you have, or why you have it, or how you got it, or whether it will kill you. It didn’t (at least, not yet); no need to call in Jessica Fletcher.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Heinrich Hamann, Turner on the Parallel Bars, from Turnverein, c. 1902.

There are boring but necessary tasks in life the silver lining of which is the chance to be alone. Commuting is a good example: rarely enjoyable, but still just me and a podcast or the Times crossword app. Could be worse. I hardly relish the task of doing the laundry or wandering through the weird subterranean Whole Foods near my house, but being on my own for these stretches isn’t the worst thing. It’s me time, almost.

I used to consider going to the gym this kind of experience—I didn’t look forward to the moving and lifting and sweating, but did enjoy the requisite solitude. In a way this was a delusion, me wringing pleasure out of errand. But it’s still true. The joy of going to the gym was less in being alone with my thoughts—I can’t think of anything while I’m working out—than in my mind going wholly blank.

At some point in the last two years, I took a class at my gym, which is one of those gyms that is very big on classes. I didn’t think it would be for me because I had persuaded myself that solitude was my objective. I didn’t think it would be for me because I had once been a gay kid terrorized by gym class.

Turns out I was wrong, or misunderstood that group fitness is an act of collective solitude. All of us are in that room, suffering or enduring or thriving, but we’re all alone, too. A strange contradiction. The class I most enjoy involves alternating between a complicated routine of strength exercises on the floor and running or pushing on the treadmill, but despite this complexity almost no thought is required. The teacher tells me what to do and I do it. I love the simplicity of this, even if I hate some of the things I’m asked to do.

I tried that first class in the same spirit with which I’ve always encouraged my kids to try new foods. I didn’t expect to like it, and certainly at some point in my life I wouldn’t have. I suppose we all change, in some ways, over time.

This is on my mind because it’s the start of the year, and the gym is unusually crowded, though my experience last year was that traffic waned by the end of January. I hope the new years resolution crowd don’t interfere with my ability to get a spot in class, because I’m now a group fitness enthusiast. I’m loyal to certain teachers. I recognize certain other class regulars. But I never say hello or make small talk; I imagine that we all want to be alone together.

Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Martin Rørbye, Young Clergyman Reading, 1836, through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Chauncey B. Borland.

Reading is less a current than a perennial enthusiasm. Family lore is I learned to read at four and was ever after with a book in hand. Seems true in the way family lore does, by virtue of repetition, article of faith more than strict fact.

I read 150 books this year. That seems a lot to me though in my defense I was one of the judges for the National Book Award. (It also seems a suspiciously round number. My bookkeeping is probably inaccurate but whatever.) I have, in many conversations, likened the experience of judging a literary prize to a sitcom father’s approach to catching a sitcom kid smoking. Oh, you think you like reading? Read ALL THESE BOOKS then get back to me.

I’ve talked to people who have judged such prizes before and they told me the sheer amount of books put them off the task of reading altogether. I confess I felt a bit shaken by the intensity of it. I finished the first big round of reading near my birthday and felt so liberated, but it was still summer and I’d nothing better to do, so I read some nonfiction and classics as a break. All of which is to say, I read a lot but not enough to destroy my love of it. Thankfully.

Here’s the list.

If I knew how to interpret data I wouldn’t be a novelist but, well, I don’t even know what job I’d be qualified for. Presumably it would pay pretty well. Anyway, I don’t know what all this means.

Some takeaways, because I feel I must provide those to myself.

The writer whose work I read the most this year was Anthony Trollope. I read ten of his novels, a scant percentage of his oeuvre (47 novels!). Trollope goes down so easily. He’s able to make the most baffling premise into a plot that has you on the edge of your seat, and he’s very funny: character and place names are often a gag, the dialogue can be quite cutting, and he asserts this knowing authorial or narrative presence who is kind of… bitchy? The series—The Chronicles of Barset, and the Palliser novels—were more enjoyable to me than the standalone books I read, but he’s great.

I read six books because I was blurbing them. I read four novels by Stephen King; I read three novels by Iris Murdoch; I read three books by Carson McCullers; I read two novels by Gustave Flaubert and two novels by Amitava Kumar and two books by Amy Odell, these last two incredible palate cleansers. Who will she write about next?

Here’s the rest of the list:

I find it funny how I can form a specific memory around the experience of reading a book, one quite apart from remembering the book itself. My hold on the individual texts is spotty. My memory has never been good and I’m a middle aged and overstimulated American. But I can remember reading Iris Murdoch while alone at dinner in Melbourne. I can remember reading Jamaica Kincaid while lying on the beach.

I read some great books this year. I thought David Szalay’s Flesh was good. I liked In Ascension a great deal. I’m grateful to my friend Jessica for telling me to read Lolly Willowes. I enjoy being baffled sometimes, and William H. Gass and Don DeLillo both left me so confused. Has there ever been a more skilled writer of the English language than Saul Bellow? Did you even know that Bellow wrote a book called The Dean’s December? I swear I have never seen or heard of this book before, but it exists, and I read it. Not his best work but still, those sentences! What a genius.

I enjoy stories about people of letters in midcentury America and therefore loved Gerald Howard’s book about Malcolm Cowley and Mary Dearborn’s book about Carson McCullers. All midcentury people of letters did was drink and talk about communism! It’s actually crazy how much people talked about communism (which was a much larger part of Native Son than I’d expected). It just doesn’t come up that often anymore. Guess the Reds decisively lost that one.

If I like seeing other people’s lists of the books they read, perhaps I’m nosy; if I like showing other people my list of the books I read, perhaps I’m an exhibitionist. Some folks get worked up about all these year end lists of things, all the gleeful sharing of our data. I don’t think it’s important enough to get mad about; I just can’t help discerning in my list of books a fuzzy impression of the year that was. Also, I like the idea that someone, friend or stranger, might see on my list a writer they’ve not heard of, or a book they’d wanted to reread, or something.

To that end, because people will ask: the best book I read in 2025 was Madame Bovary, and the worst book I read in 2025 was This Side of Paradise, which I truly hated. No, I never read Bovary before; no, I don’t mind admitting that Fitzgerald is not for me.

I know that sometimes lists like this make people feel sheepish that they haven’t read more. That’s not my intention; reading is, in a way, my job. Anyway, a shame about this dovetails with a commonplace embarrassment about not having read the canon. I find this pointless. Read more if you want to. And don’t be embarrassed or feel you need to have read something. Anyone who makes you feel thus is a bad, annoying person. You shouldn’t read Flaubert or Woolf or whoever because it’s what people do or because you feel you should be the sort of person who has. You should read them because it might make you richer in a way you cannot predict.

Some further endorsements: I think more people should read Edna O’Brien. Carson McCullers was so gifted that I love her work despite my hatred of novels for adults about children. If you like short stories, Curtis Sittenfeld and Karen Bender and Lauren Groff are good at writing short stories. If you want to read a great contemporary novel, Washington Black is superb.

Now 2025 is almost over. I only started keeping track of the books I read in some consistent fashion a few years ago, but it’s a satisfying enterprise, even if it doesn’t tell us anything worth knowing.

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Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.

Eduardus Jacobus (after Charles Le Brun), Admiration, after 1698, The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection.

Two years ago I was walking down the street—in Midtown! Where was I going?—when Natalie Merchant strolled past. She was instantly recognizable even to me, a man notoriously terrible with faces, a measure of how much she meant to me when I was a teen. My instinct was to say something to her, but that impulse was too slow; she was chatting with someone, she realized that my husband I had recognized her, and we were walking in opposite directions. I wish I’d waylaid her if only to say thank you. I’ve come to relish the opportunity to express my admiration to artists I care about.

This might make me uncool—you’re supposed to act blasé around celebrity—or, worse, rude. I’ve convinced myself, though, that if you have something sincere to say, it’s not impolite to pipe up. I wouldn’t accost someone just because they’re recognizable, but if I see the artistic heroine of my adolescence strolling down the street, I think I’m allowed to freak out. (Obviously, Natalie Merchant would have been within her rights to ignore me as I told her that I still think the phrase “My mother the war” rules.)

I’m not lamenting that I didn’t have a brush with fame: I regret I didn’t thank Merchant, given what her work once meant to me. (I’d leave out the past tense; in some meaningful way I’ll forever be a fifteen year old listening to “Hope Chest.”) I believe artists, no matter how lauded and successful, deserve to hear such things from their audience. Thus I’ve decided that when presented with the chance to thank an artist who has had some effect on me, I will take it. I think it matters, or at any rate I’ve seen people pretend that it does, which is nice of them.

My heroes are mostly writers, and writers do not exist at the same remove from us as, say, movie stars. Thus I’ve had the chance to thank a number of my heroes. I once saw Margaret Atwood at a reception, and took the opportunity to tell her that Cat’s Eye had done a number on me as a young reader (I still consider this her best book). She seemed amused. Similarly, I was once at a party chatting with Deborah Eisenberg, trying to play it cool, then I just told her, look, I’m sorry to be earnest and embarrassing but I don’t know how to explain to you what Twilight of the Superheroes meant to me when I was a younger man. She seemed pleased, I think. I won’t even discuss the time I threw myself at Joy Williams when I spotted her at the Broad Collection.

Only recently, I was seated at the same dinner table as George Saunders, a fact that would have been incomprehensible to the 19 year old Rumaan who was driven almost to then point of madness by CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. During a lull in dinner, I sheepishly crept over to him, and said that I knew he heard it all the time, but then just gushed at him—that CivilWarLand had challenged something inside of me, and then later, in my undergraduate writing workshop, I read “Sea Oak” and understood something new about fiction’s possibilities. I still have the pages of “Sea Oak” that I tore out of the New Yorker. Saunders is kind of legendarily a nice guy; he let me get it off my chest.

Perhaps my desire to thank the artists I admire is ultimately selfish. The encounters I describe above were likely quickly forgotten, and possibly irritating. Mr. Saunders just wanted to eat his lemon meringue pie! Yet I feel better, as though I’ve squared some cosmic debt. To me, this is a version of thanking men and women in uniform for their service. Alas, Delta doesn’t give priority boarding to people who wrote great books. Writers may have to settle for the high of hearing from some random weirdo like me that your work meant something to him. I’m sure most writers would rather get priority boarding on Delta.

I fear this all sounds like confession, or name-dropping, when all I mean to say is that it is cool, not embarrassing, to like something, to be a fan, to admire someone. And it’s so great a stroke of luck when you’re able to communicate that admiration directly to someone that you should take that opportunity. Art is mostly a one-way street. How you feel about a book or a movie or a painting or a song is a private thing, and maybe the expenditure of your money (and time, a far more finite resource) is thanks enough. Or maybe saying thank you, if you’re given the chance, is just the polite thing to do.

Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.