Updates, Soon and Lately
on various containers
It’s been a minute. Here are some things that are going on with me.
Reorienting this newsletter
I’ve renamed this blog/newsletter/publication (words arranged from modest to grand) to Immediacy. The new name expresses my wish to write more directly, spontaneously, closer to the edge of my sense-making, with fewer escape clauses.
And to live like I’m going to die.
Speaking of writing as sense-making, I learned a lot from Henrik Karlsson’s recent essay series on thinking in writing and audience-reader dynamics. They helped me see that I’ve been bringing a few unhelpful assumptions from my background in magazine and book publishing to the way I think about this newsletter.
Here are a few salient notes about writing publicly, some inspired by Karlsson and some less clearly so:
To whatever extent writing publicly is a tool for me to learn and solve problems, writing near the edge of my thinking and about specific questions is a better way to attract collaborators and fellow learners who can actually help, than writing in broadly accessible terms about things I already understand well.
The readers I most want, at least for this thing, are probably those who are interested in observing and participating in the process of my ideas. Products are somewhat secondary. This is great to see clearly, because it frees me up to speak in more directions about more aspects of my life.
Confident, specific claims force nebulous thinking into rigid forms. This is helpful for breaking those forms and creating better ones. It makes it easier for people to point out where I’ve missed something, so I can find my blind spots more quickly. It’s good exposure therapy for the fear of being wrong in front of other people.
Writing to make the numbers go way up (likes, followers, etc.) is not just a risk in terms of inviting audience/ideological capture. It’s also a tired model that hasn’t caught up with network dynamics and the fracturing of once-dominant worldviews. I want to make this more rigid soon, but something like: Mainstream fame is simply less worth wanting than it used to be, now that the mainstream is small and lame and mostly nonexistent. There is nowhere for culture to “come together” to the degree necessary for a person to be mega-famous in an interesting way or for interesting reasons. Groups, scenes, communities, and “networks” are and will continue to be the containers where interesting play happens, and most of the writing I’m interested in these days seems to be about or for or in the service of such containers.
Speaking of play
For those who live in NYC, this summer I’ll be co-facilitating a class at Fractal University called Play Studies.
Play Studies is one part nerdy metamodern reading group, one part loosely ritualized container for moving around in new and surprising ways. It’ll happen mostly in Prospect Park on Saturday mornings. I made it up with my friend Olivia Tai, who is one of the most playful people I know.
Putting together this class is a way of cohering learnings from The Most Playful Year of My Adult Life So Far, an arc I can roughly trace to an impulsive last-minute choice to go to last summer’s Vibecamp, where I encountered, to summarize ferociously, a whole new culture of intense and intelligent playfulness. I am told this would have been less revelatory if I’d ever been to Burning Man, but I hadn’t, so it was, and anyway I’m not sure that’s right. In the afterglow of the festival I started taking movement classes, attended a weekend clown workshop with Christopher Bayes and a second, much weirder two-week Pochinko clown workshop with Sue Morrison, took up contact improv, and found myself hosting a huge Halloween party with live monsters who I “trained” in a “monster workshop,” to name a few examples. None of these activities would have felt like “me” before recently, and I have the impression that they’ve been surprising to people who know “me.”
I’m realizing I could also trace this arc back to my first encounter with chöd practice, an extremely intense Vajrayana ritual I might describe as “terrifyingly serious play in the face of death.” That took place last year during the second leg of Evolving Ground’s summer retreat. I’m writing this update a few days after my second chöd retreat, which is too recent for the betrayal of words. At this rate I guess I can expect to glimpse the rough shape of its impact this time next year.
The practice and renewal of play feels very important to me right now, for reasons I’m only beginning to be able to articulate. If you have similar inklings, or you just like the idea of being weird and rolling around in the grass, the application deadline for the class is May 17.
(You might also like to check out the rest of Fractal University’s summer offerings.)
Archipelago: a project lab
Another playful thing I did last month was accept my friend Tyler’s invitation to co-create a “project lab” connected with Fractal University. We had to come up with a new name for this because our original attempts to describe it as a residency confused everyone, but it’s kind of like a residency.
Each island of an archipelago is supported by the sea floor. Likewise, Fractal University’s Archipelago Project Lab is built for you to bring singular focus to a project atop a bedrock of collaboration. The program has features you can mix and match to suit your particular project, including: support groups (crew), structured co-working, demo nights, coaching, and a final expo to showcase your work.
(You can find the full description here.)
It seems there is plenty of latent interest in this kind of thing. We kicked it off a few weeks ago with forty participants, after having to turn away at least a dozen others because of space limitations. I’ve been deeply inspired by the camaraderie and seriousness this community is making possible. If you missed it and are interested, I expect we’ll run more in the nearish future.
Or, let me point out that Archipelago is a completely replicable thing that requires little overhead and is not hard to set up. It’s also fun, and weaves social fabric. If you’d like to talk about trying something like it in your town or city or here in New York, reach out, I’d love to help.
In fact, this project has been so enjoyable that I find myself thinking about how I can do more work like it. What do you call work like this? Community organizing? Coaching? Scenification? All feel off for different reasons. I kind of like Tyler’s description of “worlding,” but a “worlder” sounds like a welder with a Welsh accent, and that could be misleading.
I’ll try to write some more notes about Archipelago after it wraps up at the end of this month.
I’ve been asked questions
Priya Rose kindly invited me to talk about my fiction class for the inaugural dispatch of the Fractal University newsletter. I blathered about my relationship with writing, my teaching philosophy, and recommendations for anyone thinking about designing their own class.
Until soon,
Andrew
Preview image: Flowers in a Vase, c. 1910, Odilon Redon.