Today, I have three wishes for you (and me).
1. May you heed your inner girl’s wisdom and awakeness
From V1’s 2011 book I Am an Emotional Creature:
If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others?
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This book is a call to question rather than to please. To provoke, to challenge, to dare, to satisfy your own imagination and appetite. To know yourself truly. To take responsibility for who you are, to engage.
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I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don’t want you to have to wait that long.
In the video below, hear the author read the whole introduction:
2. May you read books if and however you damn please
Below are the imprescriptible rights of the reader, a 10-point permission slip by French author Daniel Pennac in Comme Un Roman. This 1992 book is a manifesto for the pleasure of reading, as opposed to the duty to read—read certain books, in a certain way—aimed in particular at parents and teachers. (My translation follows; here is another English translation illustrated by Quentin Blake.)
In terms of reading, we “readers”, grant ourselves all rights, starting with those we deny young people whom we claim to introduce to reading.
1 - The right not to read.
2 - The right to skip pages.
3 - The right not to finish a book.
4 - The right to reread.
5 - The right to read anything.
6 - The right to bovarysm2.
7 - The right to read anywhere.
8 - The right to nibble.
9 - The right to read aloud.
10 - The right to keep quiet.
I remember reading those as a child and feeling a little frisson of Really? That is allowed?! Even as adults though, how many books do we finish, conscientiously, even though we’re bored / repelled / not in the mood? How many films do we sit through and endure rather than enjoy? How many unspoken rules do we obey without thinking them through?
3. May a fraction of Albini’s sturdy integrity rub off on you
Here are some excerpts from sound engineer Steve Albini’s pitch letter to Nirvana band members. Do read the full letter on Shaun Usher’s wonderful Letters of Note Substack:
I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering.
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How much you choose to pay me will not affect my enthusiasm for the record.
Albini did work with Nirvana on their 1993 album In Utero. In the clip below, he talks about the production process and the final (remixed) result:
formerly known as Eve Ensler
I’ve seen this translated as “The right to mistake a book for real life” or “The right to escapism”—which are milder and apter here than the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition of bovarysm (or bovarism, after Gustave Flaubert’s character Emma Bovary).
Rights of the reader are so, so good -- and I absolutely LOVE that Quentin Blake illustration.