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
Tuesday New Release Day: Dante, Wilson, Riley, Waite
New this week: Clive James’s translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Edward O. Wilson’s Letters to a Young Scientist, Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley, and The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite.
Notes From the Underground
Alexis Mainland documents New Yorkers from all walks of life reading on the subways — the last outpost of low-tech, off-the-grid in-between time. (The NY Times)
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Wells Tower on Your TV Screen
Talk about burying the lede. This article about Alec Baldwin’s return to television acting, and how he’ll be playing “a Rob Ford-type mayor of New York,” doesn’t make a big deal out of the show’s pilot writer. But it should. Because his name is Wells Tower.
The Blog Post That Has No Name
“She was furious about the way the female college students of the next generation had been programmed to regard getting an MRS. degree as the be-all and end-all of their experience in higher education. She was enraged by the way the psychiatric profession regarded housewives’ unhappiness as a symptom of an out-of-whack libido. She was angry at the way the economy appeared to see her entire sex as simple consumption machines who built national prosperity by buying new appliances for the kitchen and searching madly for the perfect laundry detergent.” Betty Friedan’s second wave classic The Feminine Mystique turns fifty.
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$200,000? Who Said Publishing’s On the Outs?
Aspiring novelists, take note: when you get a $200,000 advance for one of your books, don’t buy any clothes.
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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. :)