Ethopoeitic: transforming truth into ethos.
We live in such a high-velocity state of raging consumption.
Much of what we consume --probably 90%-- drifts by in a mad deluge. I, (probably like you), am worn from the Sisyphusean game of keep up.
So, I was curious.
I wanted to contrast the volume of what I’ve read/watched/heard against its impact, to sift gold from dross and ask: Did these stories graft into my life and reshape me? Or did they ricochet off my thick head, echoing back into the ether?
I combed every corner of my consumption kingdom: Pocket, Readwise, DayOne journal, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Apple News, NYT, Twitter faves, podcasts, etc. and cataloged each by priority of impact, whether a movie, an interview, a book, or even random moments.
I compiled this list for me, for recall, but thought I would share it here in case you can pluck something from it and add to yours.
One thing about lists …
In 2021 I read fewer books … but deeper. Per Readwise, I highlighted notes from 139 books and over 40 articles. (Quantity is not a metric for merit it’s merely a sign of neurosis. I abandoned many books along the way.)
Beyond books: My most treasured podcast was an episode featuring Lisa Tobin and Michael Barbaro on how they construct their show, The Daily. The Tweets I saved the most were from a finance wiz who thinks like a philosopher, Paul Portesi.
The top four pieces that challenged me were not traditional books at all but 1) an article 2) a poem 3) a letter 4) notes from a speech.
At the top of my list is an obscure article from 1983 by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” a discovery via Hervé Guibert’s journal, The Mausoleum of Lovers. Foucault’s article was the axe I needed for the frozen (overwhelmed) sea inside me, a tactical method to channel the mind-numbing deluge into a fruitful stream. I must have read his article six times. He explored how to weave what you ingest into the fabric of your life (a labor of thought + a labor of writing = a labor of reality) or what Plutarch referred to above as ethopoietic: “transforming truth into ethos.”
Following Foucault is Agnes Martin’s notes from a speech she gave in 1973 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania), “On the Perfection Underlying Life.”
The rest of my impact list consists of a variety of sources: non-fiction, articles, interviews, essays, apps, email newsletters, even a house and a drive to nowhere (everything becomes a heuristic if you open to it).
What surprised me was how much non-fiction made my list this year. Pandemic related? Not sure. But I kept company in quarantine with some brilliant strangers (now friends).
One tip if you are a list-lover (like me): Take one or two from the list that interests you but more importantly, tune your inner ear away from algorithms or “top lists” and turn it toward your own curiosities, your obsessions, your fascinations (Joseph Campbell). The world doesn’t need more sheeple who read, listen, watch the same stuff. It needs more weirdness.
“Be true to your own strange kind.”
““It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her, redeem her.”
”
A Life in Letters, Vincent Van Gogh
“The Abnormal is Not Courage” (poem), Jack Gilbert
The Art of Solitude, Stephen Bachelor
Erosion, Essays of Undoing, Terry Tempest Wiliams
Conversation with a Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin
Index Cards, Moyra Davey
“It Never Occurs to Us Not to Work” Nick Cave, Red Hand Files #156
Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle
The Unknown Craftsman, Soetsu Yanagi
What About the Baby? Alice McDermott
Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Gluck
Coda, Ryuchi Sakamoto
Hojoki, Kamo no Chomei
The Accidental Life, An Editor’s Notes on Writers and Writing, Terry McDonell
“Art of Fiction No. 119” Maya Angelou (Paris Review)
“A Storyteller's Shoptalk,” Raymond Carver, New York Times
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett
“The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,” Joan Didion (Paris Review)
Biography of Silence, Pablo d’Ors
Earth Keeper, N. Scott Momaday
The Friend of the Desert, Pablo d’Ors
“A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More” (The Atlantic)
In the Distance, Hernan Diaz
Bringing Together Narrative and News (Lisa Tobin, Michael Barbaro)
Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag
The Table by Francis Ponge
Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil
Opening to Our Lives, Jon Kabat-Zinn, OnBeing
“The Inner Ring of the Internet” Ali Montag
The Situation and the Story, Vivan Gornick
Life Work by Donald Hall
Funny Weather, Olivia Laing
Poems, Louise Glück
Collected Essays, Loren C. Eiseley
“The Art of Nonfiction No. 10” Kwame Anthony Appiah
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
A House of my Own, Sandra Cisneros
Yo Yo Ma (Masterclass)
Futura (Masterclass)
Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm
Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah Levy
The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry
About This Life, Barry Lopez
Ten Windows, Jane Hirshfield
These Precious Days, Ann Patchett (and the NYT Book Review podcast featuring Ann)
Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton
Letters to Merline, Rilke
Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
On Contemporary Art by Cesar Aira
Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford
The Grain of the Voice by Roland Barthes
The Journal, Henry David Thoreau
The Struggle with the Daemon by Stefan Zweig
New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton
Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner
Pity the Reader, Kurt Vonnegut
Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag
The Chemistry of Fire, Laurence Gonzales
“Ryuichi Sakamoto on Life, Nature and ‘Time’” (NYT)
“Leonard Cohen Makes it Darker,” David Remnick (New Yorker)
“Thomas McGuane on Not Living the Writer’s Life,” Téa Obreht (LitHub)
“Art Is a Tool for Thinking: An Interview with Olivia Laing” (Pen)
“The Art of Fiction No. 12,” Mario Vargas Llosa (Paris Review)
“The Art of Fiction No. 89,” Thomas McGuane (Paris Review)
“An Interview with Lydia Davis” (Believer)
Sound of Metal (movie)
“Daisy Alioto on Getting Your Work Out Into the World” (Creative Independent)
“Monk with a Camera: An Interview with Nicholas Vreeland” (Bycycle)
Rabbi Mordecai Finley On Ancient Wisdom, Virtue & Mysticism, Rich Roll Podcast
“How I Grew This Newsletter: What Worked, What Didn't, Weird Metrics I Use” (Ann Handley)
Episode 120: Creativity: Drawing from the Inner Well (This Jungian Life)
Pig (movie)
Nomadland (movie)
“‘What We Make, Is What We Feel’: Agnes Martin on Her Meditative Practice, in 1976” (Art News)
Artists: Steven Paul Judd, Katrien de Blauer, Theaster Gates, Cecily Brown, Sara Imloul, Saul Leiter, Donald Judd, Hélène Demaire
Davis Mountain Preserve, Texas
YouTube Channels: Birkenstock, Gagosian, Nowness
May Sarton, “The Art of Poetry No. 32,” The Paris Review
California Typewriter, (Sam Shepard segment)
New-to-me portals I loved: JSTOR, The Creative Independent, WEPRESENT
Apps: Readwise, related subreddits, Pantone Studio, Milanote, Airr