It’s snowing here in DC, for the second time in a week. That would be unremarkable in many parts of the country, where two snowfalls in seven days is just called winter. But this morning’s fall of fat feather-pillow flakes on Capitol Hill feels like a gift. After the Capitol Insurrection of Jan. 6, after two months of attempts to steal a free and fair election, after four years of that guy and his minions, we needed a little bit of peace and beauty. The snow’s barely sticking, and it will be gone tomorrow, but it’s here now.
That’s DC’s flag, which we started flying last year as a way to keep local spirits up during the quarantine and the election. We’ve seen too many flags around here lately, hateful flags waved by and wrapped around hateful bodies. This one stands for local pride and the hope that DC’s residents will someday have full representation in the People’s House that our fellow citizens invaded last month.
The afternoon they stormed the Capitol, I walked over to see what was happening. Stupid, maybe, but I needed to see. I took this photo at 2:26 p.m. on Jan. 6. I didn’t know it then, but the rioters had already breached the building.
Behind me, a young woman out for a walk with her dog chatted with a couple of middle-aged women in MAGA hats, telling them how pleasant she’d always found the president’s supporters. Across the street, a man with an American flag wrapped around his shoulders yelled at police that THE REVOLUTION IS HERE, MOTHERF*CKERS.
There was a loud BANG up near the Capitol doors. The crowd surged. I got scared and went home.
There’s nothing like an attempted coup in your neighborhood to drive home that we’re always living through history. Fortress DC will be with us for a long time.
I didn’t set out to write about politics this morning, but the events of the last couple of weeks and months have saturated everything: the news, my neighborhood, my Twitter feed, my thoughts. (Yours too, I’m sure.)
I’d been scheduled to do a Virginia Festival of the Book Shelf Life event on Jan. 7, in conversation with my good friend the historian Meredith Hindley, but we were too rattled—it’s hard to talk about clutter when the fate of the nation hangs in the balance—so we bumped it back to the following week. If you missed it, you can catch the video here.
The Festival also did an author Q&A with me:
Do you have any sources of inspiration that you come back to while writing?
When I’m stuck, I like to get outside and take a walk or spend time in the garden. I probably solve more writing problems when I’m in motion than I do at my keyboard. I often listen to music when I write. What kind of music depends on whether I need to calm my brain down or rev it up. It could be anything from piano sonatas to Bill Evans to the Japanese House or The 1975 or Post Malone.
I also went on the Free Speech TV show “Rising Up with Sonali” in late January to talk with host Sonali Kolhatkar about consumerism and the ecological cost of clutter:
I’ve also recorded a couple of podcast interviews that should be out in the next month or so, so stay tuned for those (if you’re not sick of hearing me talk about clutter).
My publisher will be annoyed with me if I don’t put in a buy-my-book plug here, so please buy my book! You can get a copy directly from Belt Publishing (yay independent publishing), via Bookshop.org (yay indie bookstores), at that big place online, or at your favorite local book joint. It’s also cool if you ask your local library to carry it. Library sales are still sales.
Another great and much-appreciated thing you can do: Go on Amazon and Goodreads and say nice things about the book (assuming you like it, that is).
Beyond promoting Clutter, I am reading and note-taking and scheming and dreaming about what comes next. I’m hungry to get another book under way. Time’s a-wasting! I hate the intellectual restlessness of these in-between-writing periods, but I’ve also learned that I need them. They punctuate the process and fuel it.
And after the traumas of the last four years, 10 months into a pandemic, less than a month into a new administration that actually seems to give a fuck about democracy and about people, a pause to catch up, catch a breath, feels absolutely necessary. Then it’s back to work.
What I’m reading:
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald. I read one or two of these short essays before bed each night, and while some work better for me than others (isn’t that always the way?), I love her ability to see and appreciate non-human lives and phenomena in an exceptionally humane way.
Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, by Chris Myers Asch and Derek Musgrove. This is research for a possible project. It’s also filling in serious and shameful gaps in my historical knowledge about the city I live in and what a central part it has played in the history of slavery in this country. I’m reading it in e-book form, trying out the highlighting feature on the Kindle app.
Audiobooks are newish territory for me as a reader, and I haven’t fully figured out how best to work them into my life. I don’t have a commute these days, so I listen during workouts and on long walks, with mixed results in terms of attention and absorption. I need to write about that more at some point.
Still, imperfect a listener as I am for them, audiobooks have been good company during quarantine. I just finished Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, narrated by Shayna Small. I didn’t mean to buy the audiobook; I was trying to get it as a gift for my sister-in-law, heh. But it was a happy mistake. (I kept waiting for a catastrophe that never came, though; maybe I’m just that kind of reader.)
Now I’m halfway through V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, narrated by Julia Whelan. Not a short book, but linguistically rich, with a neat setup that I want to get to the bottom of. Never pray to the gods that answer after dark….
I hope you’ve got a good book (or two or three) going, regardless of the format.
Cheers,
Jen
P.S. If you have read this far, you are my hero. Do you own a copy of Clutter: An Untidy History (if so, thank you!)? Would you like a personalized bookplate? Email me and I will happily put one in the mail to you. And, because I love you all and want my lovely local East City Bookshop to get through this pandemic, I will order a copy of the book from them for the first person who asks for one. Thanks for reading!