Don’t let social anxiety trap you in your hotel room at AWP. At Tin House, Courtney Maum gives advice for how to make and keep your writer friends in an essay aptly titled, “How Not to Hate Your Friends.” Her first wise tip: “Only be friends with people you actually like.” Pair with: Our dispatch from AWP 2013 to know what you’re in for.
AWP Anxiety
Haruki Murakami: Master of Blandness
Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on “blandness” in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”
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Carl Crawford to Open Antiquarian Bookshop
Now that he’s signed a $142 million contract with the Boston Red Sox, outfielder Carl Crawford has turned his attention to pursuing his decades-long dream of running an antiquarian bookstore. (context)
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Tangled Legacy
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland, is known for her feminist classics—but she was also a devotee of eugenics.
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I think, “Only be friends with people you actually like,” is amazing advice. At forty years old, I am only now realizing that I have always had ‘friends’ based on circumstance, their choice, or obligation. I have a small handful of people in my life who I would deliberately choose.
I think it’s very wise to seek friendships that enrich both our friends and ourselves.
I am now making concerted efforts to examine my relationships and pay attention to whether or not I want them. This has opened me up to the idea that I may have time and energy leftover to fill those vacancies with people I really want to be friends with! THAT is worth pushing back against social anxiety for. :)