#11 Going to space and remembering the past
Personal stories are great stories
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Hey, Substackers,
Probably one day I will reach an end to my quest, and it will be harder and harder to find new and unknown authors here on Substack. But for now, this particular literary pond seems endless. The journey of finding inspiring texts to read is an ongoing adventure—one that can feel overwhelming sometimes because of the sheer amount of great work produced weekly. It involves keeping an open mind, being receptive to new ideas, and embracing the unknown. In the process, I hope to bring you unexpected treasures and lead you to authors whose words resonate deeply with us, leaving a lasting impact on our lives.
SUPER BUCK MOON 2023
Stir-crazy
One week ago, four volunteers stumbled into a 1,700-square-foot red sandbox. The door to their domed habitat, which was designed to simulate a dwelling on Mars, was locked behind them. The door will remain locked for the next 378 days.
Conducted at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, this NASA experiment will subject the volunteers to various stressors—resource constraints, malfunctioning equipment, communications breakdowns—all to study the physical and, more importantly, psychological toll that a long season spent on Mars might take on a human being.
Is it time to bring back the Luddite movement?
What an 1800s labor rebellion can teach us about surviving AI, with Brian Merchant
Hey friends. Have you ever fantasized about smashing your phone or throwing your computer into the sea? If so, you’re in good company, because today’s episode is all about the story of the Luddites, an underground network of early 19th century machinists and textile workers in England who took up arms against industrialists looking to automate them out of a job. They did this, quite literally, by smashing the machines that threatened to put downward pressure on their wages and flood the market with poorly made imitations of the goods they were producing. Sound familiar?
All about cheating
Sometimes you read an excerpt of a memoir about adultery, and you think, Huh. That’s an interesting structure for a book. So you buy the book and you read it. Then you remember that you have another memoir about adultery somewhere in one of the stacks on your dining table that your husband keeps gently reminding you to remove so that the family can once again eat together, should you all happen to be at home and hungry at the same time. So you pull that book out of the stack, feeling virtuous because the stack got smaller! What a wonderful wife you are! You read that book.
Whose behavior have you excused?
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
I was once charmed by a pedophile.
His name was Humbert Humbert, and thankfully, he was safely contained in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I was in my early twenties, working 14 hour days at a big law firm in New York City and desperate to inject some art, some beauty, some literature into my life, when I plucked Lolita from a bookstore shelf without foreknowledge of the taboo subject matter.
Art Style Stress Made Me Do It
Googling "how to find your art style" and desperately forcing yourself to be visually consistent is NOT IT. Didn't magically solve all my problems, 0/10 do not recommend.
Something I’ve always felt insecure about with my art is my tendency to jump back and forth between styles. I’ve made a few actual 180 turns through the years, and I’m currently jumping between a) outline heavy “doodles”, b) painterly and loose flowers or landscapes, and c) painted paper collages at an almost weekly basis. Sometimes I don’t mind, and sometimes it weirdly makes me feel like a failure.
Backpedaling, then Breaking.
How to keep from getting stuck in the past, back when you were cool and good at things.
Often, when I get to the interabang portion of my downward spiraling reflections on the existential nature of my creativity, I open an older post and I read through it all the way, out loud, to myself. Even though I only started this substack earlier this year, the months that have passed have proven to be enough time that the words I look back on feel as though they were written by someone else. Someone, I’m happy to report, whose voice I generally enjoy and in whose reflections I do find merit. Reading and listening to the words and thoughts I was able to generate even in the recent past is a strong motivator for me to remember that my voice is one worth sharing and worth listening to, a key aspect of my ongoing impostor syndrome on this platform that I’ve written about many times before.
Fridays are for Feminism: the birth of "full of yourself"
I used to be obsessed with making the perfect milk shake that would bring ALL the boys to the yard...
When I was 20, I had a friend who swore up and down that his job was to keep my head from getting too big. He would comment on my confidence, calling it arrogance. He would crush my self esteem (and my dreams) and I was convinced he was truly, helping me out.
I was so sure that this dance between us both was adding VALUE to my life, that he was doing me a long term favour by “keeping me in check”.
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Thanks so much for including The Books That Made Us, Luiza! So good to be included with so many other good pieces - though of course the credit belongs to Samantha for writing the Lolita essay to kick things off for us!
loving all of these different pieces of writing!