Drove to Toledo this past weekend to see Ocean Vuong in conversation at the Toledo Museum, and realized as I talked to some folks at the event that this month marks the ten-year anniversary of my being back in Detroit.
When I moved back in 2014, one of the first things I did was sign up to volunteer at John King Books. I’d go in once a week and spend a few hours in the dusty stacks shelving and re-shelving books. I earned a nominal amount of store credit for doing so, but it was mostly for fun and to help structure my week.
I remembered this, too, because a friend and I were talking about the kinds of work that you can leave at work. That you don’t take home with you. The friend said, rightly in my opinion, that a big factor is personality. It’s less that work inherently has more or less meaning than it is your attitude toward that work that gives it meaning. You can imbue even the most mundane thing with great significance – I could have spent my off hours thinking about the way in which I shelved those books, the systems that led to the way those books were organized and how they might be improved, etc.
But I didn’t. For me, that volunteering stint was more like playing physical Tetris for three hours every Wednesday after lunch. Which is why I think that it’s important to distinguish between knowledge work and – I’m trying not to use the term manual labor here – embodied work.
The former more easily bleeds into off hours, whereas the latter is highly contextual. And there are jobs, vocations, that involve both! But my hunch is that even when they do involve both, they flip back and forth between those two types of work, rather than running both in parallel. And the more-highly contextual stuff is easier to leave at work, leave in that particular context.
So personality matters, for sure. But so does modality!
All this amounts to a reminder, a nudge, that when I’m reminiscing about the last ten years, and thinking about the times I was happiest and most – I’m trying not to use the word productive here – engaged with my work and with life in general, to think about the mix, at that particular time, of knowledge activity and embodied activity.
Speaking of knowledge work and embodied work: I’m slowly watching the recorded talks coming out of the final XOXO conference, and was deeply moved by Ed Yong’s 35-minute presentation on his Pulitzer-winning pandemic journalism, his eventual burnout, and his becoming a passionate birder. What generous intensity.
Speaking of bookstores: Katie Clapham’s Receipt from the Bookshop is a perfect newsletter format. Every Friday, Clapham catalogues every single customer interaction at her independent bookshop in Lancashire by the sea. It’s full of bookseller-inside-baseball, intriguing recommendations, and humor humour. And Moomins. (via Daniel Benneworth-Gray)
Speaking of books: The one series Julia and I watch for which we don’t skip the intro sequence is HBO’s adaptation of My Brilliant Friend. The reason? The pitch-perfect theme music by Max Richter. Here’s a video performance of Richter’s 2014 recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and a documentary on the 8-hour open-air concert for his experimental Sleep album (Spotify/Apple Music). My favorite living composer.
To end this week, I learned, from a Jet Pens review of the best pressurized ink pens, that the anecdote about how NASA spent millions developing the space pen while “the Russians used a pencil” is, in fact, an urban legend:
NASA did have a stint with pencils, but they came with their own set of problems. Pencils were prone to breakage and the little wooden shards could cause dangerous situations as they floated around the cabin. Moreover, the wood and graphite could burn rapidly in a pure oxygen environment. After a fire in Apollo 1, where three astronauts tragically died, it was obvious that they needed a better solution.
The humble pencil has its place. But so does obsessive “over-engineering.”