Hello Readers,
The filmmaker Werner Herzog said, ‘Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be private and brief.’ In recent years, there’s been an upsurge of defiance against the idea of silent suffering. I wonder about public emoting versus quiet courage. When do you know if you’re doing too much of the one and not enough of the other?
In Extra Large this month I offer four cover versions of songs you will be familiar with if you were born in the last century – cover versions that give songs you might have loved then a fizzy new lease on life.
Sam (who you will know from the Love Letters) and I performed four short love poems at a poetry festival recently. They represent a bilingual poetic conversation. Listen to our reading in Tracks, where you’ll also find translations of Sam’s poems into English.
I promised in Love Letter #09 that I would share a few of my favourite Substack reads. Substack is the newsletter platform I use for Love Letter and Extra Large, which offers a way for readers to connect with writers that speak to them.
Until the end of December, subscribers who opt for a founding membership can join me in my January Self Reset workshop (or offer the workshop to a friend as a gift).
Thank you to the subscribers who upgraded to paid from the free Love Letter to Extra Large. I look forward to our conversations in Extra Large as you become more familiar with its friendly interface and begin to feel comfortable with the privacy that subscription offers you as part of my community.
Suffering and courage
And how to have a good little wallow
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What authors have to say, I like to hear from their books.
I am not a reader who has an urge to know about authors’ private lives and I’m wary of a media culture that pushes the cultish adulation of writers. The nuance and profundity of what a writer can communicate in words on a page are often lost in the translation that happens between creative work and the adoring audience via the conduit of the insensitive, ill-informed and and often disinterested interviewer.
Yet, earlier this year, I went specifically to the Desert Island Discs podcast to see whether the writer Deborah Levy had been interviewed. I wondered what sort of music she liked. Not long ago, a friend sent me a link to a gentle mini documentary about Deborah Levy, which I liked so much I watched more than once, so that I could catch some of the author’s quotes. In the Desert Island Discs podcast that features her I was amazed to discover that there was a recording of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika sung by Sol Plaatje. This is not a new and hidden fact, just one that had escaped me.
But what really struck me in the interview with Levy was this thing she said about how, when her father was arrested – a noble arrest, though I doubt that makes a difference to a child whose parent is suddenly no longer at home – her mother encouraged her to be brave, but that:
‘where you have a stiff upper lip, you often have a quivering lower lip’
I was born into anger. Anger was the element in which my family operated. I was surrounded by it. It was a currency, a tool for effecting compliance to rules none of us – neither children nor adults – truly understood.
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