Tell all the people that you do not know

My neighborhood book club is reading Deciding to See: The View from Nathan’s Bus. Seattle readers, especially those who ride the bus regularly, are familiar with Nathan Vass, who’s been driving for King County Metro long enough that I first read one of his pieces, “Ode to the 358”, way back in 2013. He’s also a storyteller, photographer, and filmmaker, and that skillset together with a sharp observational sense and the plethora of stories available on city buses—especially the routes and times of day he tends to drive—make for the kind of work that reminds us of our shared humanity.

For awhile now I’ve been struggling to articulate just what it is about the kinds of stories and artworks I seek, the experiences I look to have, my passion for stories and for tracking (two things which are intimately and inextricably linked)—what is the thing that I’m after?

It came to me while reading Deciding to See: kinship with the unfamiliar. Comfort zones can nourish us, give us space to rest and heal, and provide a sense of safety. They can also become prisons.

I had cause recently to re-read T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which is the origin of one of those phrases that has since become a colloquial saying, divorced from its original context:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

…minus that context it still retains a great deal of its original meaning and power, mind you.

Here, have it read by Jeremy Irons. Chilling.

Speaking of hollow men, the Atlantic article, What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat, is enough to put you off your lunch. Every so often I interact with other people who worked at Amazon in the early days, and every so often one of these people comments on how much Jeff Bezos has changed. I don’t think he has.

I finally read Matthew Jackson’s essay on…well, it’s not really about “The Pitt,” that’s just his operative example, really it’s about storytelling and expectations and people who get absolutely outraged when a story’s plot doesn’t go the way they think it should. As he says, you can have whatever opinion you want about whatever’s happening on the screen (or on the page), but I agree with him that getting hung up on plot, to the point that you’re arguing for people to be fired, sells the entire experience of absorbing a story short. If one of the reasons I read, watch, listen is to acquire a feeling of kinship with the unfamiliar, part of that is intentionally immersing myself in the creator’s world. That’s not to say that I don’t often enjoy picking the thing apart afterwards, whether to work out how they did something or to analyze what I didn’t like about it, but I think there’s a difference between disagreeing with a creator’s choices and rendering a moral judgment about something that I personally didn’t like. Even when Roger Ebert wrote his review of North (the one that starts, “I hated, hated, hated this movie”), he wasn’t calling for the heads of the people responsible.

Awhile back I mentioned Jeff VanderMeer’s article for Orion magazine, about (generally speaking) how very odd it is that people go looking for cryptids like Sasquatch when there are amazing, verifiable, extant creatures out there. Such as bears.

Anyway, Orion did a Q&A with him and writer McKayla Coyle, who I wasn’t previously familiar with but whose work I now want to read. Check it out:



(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)