2 Apr 2019
been speaking at some college writing classes lately and one thing I’ve been telling the youths is to cultivate and nurture an authentic obsession for at least one subject on the side; you may never write about it but then again you might write moby dick
I guarantee you that Melville’s friends were like oh my God Herm give it up with the whole fucking whale thing, we get it, you’ve seen a whale
oh! so some tips bc some people have asked on how to cultivate this weird obsession (i mean it’s intuitive but still): always be reading a book about that thing. plan a trip around it. visit the archival libraries where secrets about it are held. talk to/email experts about it.
watch documentaries. listen to old radio shows on youtube. lurk message boards. dip into the corners of museums. and the key is: don’t do this always with the idea that any of this will be useful. if you immediately convert the thing into use the quest starts to rot on the vine
get comfortable for a while with being the weird girl who is far too into turtles/abstract art/alpine throat singing/street style from the 1970s/the history of the daguerrotype; one day this could all come in handy
one of the things that hustle-heavy late capitalism has beaten out of us is how to construct a world of interest and obsession around a thing that is not
immediately useful; who has the time? who has the luxury not to immediately convert knowledge into $? and it is luxurious, so
treat it like a luxury; you have to budget for it and around it,you have to be like, this is a hobby i give myself to with no true idea of where it leads
and that’s the story of how i’ve ended up in the archives of murderous shipping heiresses for funthis is sort of like julia cameron’s artist walks, but put 2-3 hours on your calendar every month (or week! i don’t know your life!) that is just labeled “rabbit hole shit” where you clear your whole schedule to go down the rabbit holes of your obsessions until you hit water
anywayslol that’s what i tell the youths; if you invite me to your classi will tell the students to get more interested in whales