Life Rafts That Loosened My Grip:

Maggie Rogers on “reverence for process.”

And this: 

Life Rafts That Made Me LOL (and reminded me of the great Kurt Vonnegut line that “laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”)

Keith L. Williams’ performance in Good Boys. The movie’s an endearing mess—like a more woke middle school Superbad—and Williams is the lovable, hyper-sensitive voice of reason, Lucas. In his group of shit-head minions, he’s the maternal babysitter—and also the most naive, which I didn’t not relate to. And (spoiler alert) when they all go to a *kissing party* at the end of the movie, he leaves right away. To which the 11-year-old host says, “you know you can’t come back if you leave?” To which Lucas responds, with the most feigned regret, “oh noooooooooo.” (I still think about that interaction every day. And still try to work that version of “oh noooooooooo” —timid yet sarcastic —into conversation.)

:27, :38, :47:  

 

Zach Galifianakis on Off Camera. On Tuesdays, Sam Jones usually uploads one or two video clips to YouTube before his actual podcast airs on Thursdays. Before Zachy G’s episode in September, Sammy uploaded SIX clips, the host’s way of implicity saying, buckle up. You’re gonna want to watch all this. I watched it all. Then rewatched it all. Then tuned in on Thursday. 

Galifianakis is a lot more Gene Wilder than Robin Williams, a lot more reflective Willy Wonka than bombastic comedian who can’t turn it off. And even when he can’t turn it off, his “it” —his instinctive, goofy performance—still has a rare kindness. All 65 minutes of the interview are lovely, but 2:30-3:43 might be my favorite minute: 

 

Josh Gondelman’s book of essays, Nice Try, specifically the essay “The 2 Best Times I’ve Fainted As A Grown Man.”

5 years ago, my mom and I accidentally walked into Gone Girl, thinking it was Wild. “You know the one where she’s a gone girl? She goes hiking and is a gone girl?” We hadn’t seen any trailers. And about 90 seconds into the movie, with all the blood and sex and Ben Affleck, we realized that Wild and Gone Girl are, in fact, different movies. Did we leave the theater and try to sneak into another movie that wouldn’t give us nightmares? No, we did not. (I blame David Fincher’s great directing. Or just Stockholm Syndrome?).

So, yes, I very much appreciate any writing about scarring movie-going experiences. Especially when the writing’s as profoundly funny as Gondelman’s. And especially when the scarring movie-going experience also involves Gone Girl. 

Gary Gulman’s The Great Depresh. I realize this is the third time in four Life Raft posts where I’ve included Gary as a Life Raft. But I adore Gary. And have. And will continue to. Linguistically, he’s the wordsmith lovechild of Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut. Interpersonally, he’s the empathic professor truly rooting for all his eager students. But what’s even more remarkable about The Great Depresh is its tone: the darker and sadder it gets, the funnier it gets (My biggest laugh, both times I’ve watched it, comes when Gary’s in a psych ward and tells an Office-related joke…). To watch—and be—Gary Gulman in 2019 is to live out the famous Jimmy Valvano line: “If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day.”

 

Life Rafts Where My (Aspirational) Celebrity Spirit Animal Dances On Stage Like How I (Try To) Dance (In Front Of The Mirror)—And Shows What It Really Looks Like To Feel Creatively FREE (1:58—to the end):

 

Life Rafts That Are Just Really Freakin’ Good Books: 

Letters To A Young Poet—Rainer Maria Rilke. I got this from the library and renewed it—twice! Not because it’s long—at all (105 pages)— but because I didn’t want to part ways. It became my trusty, empowering, affirming, commuting other-Half—or T.E.A.C.H for short. Last year, I had a professor who said reading Baldwin is like taking daily vitamins; I wholeheartedly agree with that and would extend the vitamin analogy to Rilke here: 

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

The Redemption of Galen Pike—Carys Davies. I remember last year when Ty Burr, at the Globe, wrote his review of Roma and began the review with an opener along the lines of, “I don’t quite know how to write about something I loved so much.” That’s essentially how I felt, a few months ago in class, trying to make sense of The Redemption of Galen Pike. When I started it in October, I was feeling under the weather— run down, a little feverish, a little foggy. And by about page 50—you can’t make this stuff up—I started feeling physically better. That’s probably as high praise as I can give a book: where the characters are so sympathetic and fleshed out efficiently and effectively, the writer’s portrayal of them is so tender, the prose is so succinct and digestible, and the stories’ structures and arcs are so satisfying that I somehow started feeling not sick. I inhaled this collection. 

Lost Children Archive— Valeria Luiselli. I’m cheating—I read this post-semester. I guess it’s more of an onshore life raft, really. A transitional life raft between bodies of water/semesters, really. (Barack listed it as one of his 2019 favorites!). I can’t even quite articulate what this novel is: a delightfully dysfunctional family road trip, from Brooklyn to Arizona, with two young kids and two parents at odds, both of whom are sound documentarians and traveling for work? A conversation with classic texts and an exploration of the books the mom narrator brings with? A very timely commentary on the child immigration crisis? A brilliant use of short vignettes and shifts in perspective? What I do know is Valeria Luiselli could write about anything, and I’d happily read. Well, during the day that is—her prose is so muscular, and her syntax is so clean, that I had to stop reading before bed because I would get too hyped reading her sentences to fall asleep.

When I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal,I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly micro chemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating…but sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.. 

The Art of Stillness— Pico Iyer. My spirit age is either 74 (or 4. There’s really nothing in between). And so, sitting still, being pretty content as is, is endlessly entertaining and fulfilling and restorative (for my 74 year old self, that is.) 

Life Rafts That Gently Rewired My Brain Into A New Understanding of “Rest”: 

 

Life Rafts That Were An Antidote To MFA Pretentiousness/Arrogance/Rigidity:

 

 

The second verse from Harry Styles’ song, “Treat People With Kindness,” a bright bop that sounds like the long-lost track off Sgt. Peppers: Giving second chances/I don’t need all the answers/feelin’ good in my skin/I just keep on dancin’

Life Rafts That Felt Like Hugs. Or Are Hugs: