Tag: 100 days
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76 Days: Convening
The Democratic Convention is underway in… the internet. It was supposed be in Milwaukee, but Covid-19 pushed it online, as it has pushed so many things. This smaller, studio- and home-taped version is working. It is more intimate and faster-paced. Perhaps the days of expensive conventions are over. Decades ago, the convention floor ceased to…
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77 Days: The Next Generation
A few weeks back I pressed play on part one of Jacques Rivette’s epic 1971 film Out 1. I knew little about it other than the brief introductory sentences in the art cinema app Mubi. I saw that it had ties to the French New Wave and was promoted with stylish images of Jean-Pierre Léaud…
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78 Days: Time Loops
Much of Nick Flynn’s new memoir This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire concerns the childhood trauma in the title. Late in the book he compares his lifelong revisiting of this trauma — and the mistakes he’s made in his life that seem to be related to his obsession with it — to the…
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79 Days: Adopt A State
Today is a Sunday, the day I post a quick step you can take to help defeat Trump in the fall. I live in D.C. Many of the stories I’m telling on this blog concern friends here, or in Minnesota, New York and other states that already tend to vote for Democrats in presidential elections.…
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80 Days: Nostalgia
It feels like I only go backwards, babyEvery part of me says, “Go ahead”I got my hopes up again, oh no, not againFeels like we only go backwards, darling —Kevin Parker / Tame Impala I’ve been watching movies on most Friday nights during quarantine. Last night, picking a film seemed hard and staying awake for…
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81 Days: Redes
The opening scene of Redes, the groundbreaking 1936 film directed by Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, shows a man casting a net in to the ocean and pulling it in to find only a single tiny fish he throws back. The fish are late to the village’s waters this year, and so there is…
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82 Days: Readership
Just because everyone can write, doesn’t mean that everyone will be read. How to build readership in 2020? “Every stylistic choice may deepen or narrow the readership,” the author Elizabeth McCracken said in a recent discussion of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. In that book, Dillard seems to take great joy in her stylistic choices. The…
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83 Days: Expertise
There is no certification board that gives a writer permission to write about electoral politics, anxiety, or life during a pandemic. Unlike with doctors, lawyers, or hair stylists, there is no system to keep people who are bad or dangerous writers from practicing. For a long time, I didn’t write much because I didn’t think…
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84 Days: Poetry
I thought of my posts on truth and fiction last week initially as organized in a straight line, a spectrum from false to true. But as I went along, it turned out that each has some element of its opposite. Lies and fiction must be grounded in some believable truth, must be anchored to reality…
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85 Days: Crusade
I’ve recently started reading Timothy Denevi’s Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism. Denevi is a familiar face at all the literary events in D.C. I’ve been missing since February, like Little Salon and The Inner Loop. So reading his book — which has been in my to-read pile since its…
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86 Days: Learn Anti-Racism
On Sundays, I interrupt this improvised narrative with a short post on a course of action. One concrete thing I’ve done, or that I pledge to do to help defeat Trump in the fall. It’s a sacrosanct tradition that dates back to last Sunday (we’re only 14 days in). It has not escaped my notice that the…
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87 Days: Nonfiction
This week, I’ve been working my way from fiction to fact in this exploration of how a writer should write in the 100 days leading up to the 2020 election. Having covered fictional, false and dishonest writing, today we cross safely in to the true end of the spectrum, or at least the end that…
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88 Days: Spin
So far this week, as I continue to explore what it means to be a writer in quarantine with the 2020 election fast approaching, I’ve written about fiction, lies, and conspiracy theories. Fiction is storytelling that asks you to suspend your disbelief. Lies attempt to create belief in something untrue. And conspiracy theories are webs…
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89 Days: Conspiracy
In college, I published a zine filled with writing on music and art, with essays from friends on their passions of the moment: cats, travel, ska, tea. Its manifesto called for supporting the artists in our midst and turning off corporate media. Soon after one issue came out, I received a long handwritten letter from…
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90 Days: Lies
What is the difference between a fiction and a lie? A fiction writer aims to tell a story that is believable even though you know it isn’t real. A liar also aims to tell a story that is believable, but they expect you to believe it is real. Their intention is to deceive rather than…
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91 Days: Fiction
I’ve spent much of the past few years working on fiction: a novel and short stories. Would I be better off spending these hundred days staying in that mode? Would a serialized novel of life in a dystopian 18th year of Trump’s regime be more effective than whatever this series turns out to be? In…
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92 Days: Second Best
I am grateful for the opportunities I had to witness national politics up close, to play some tiny role in supporting Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012. It felt that much worse to see Trump elected in 2016 knowing that I’d spent that season on an esoteric art project instead of participating in things I’d…
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93 Days: Are You Registered to Vote?
If my time working in online advocacy taught me anything, it is to always have a call to action. So, after writing the first 5,500 words of preface this first week, it is long past time that I remind you of the most important thing you need to do right now: make 100% sure you…
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94 Days: Sleep When It’s Over
2012 is the last year remaining to look at in this opening series-within-a-series reflecting on how I spent the 100 days leading up to the six elections of my voting-age life. That fall, I was more involved than ever. And we won the election. But I felt none of the exhilaration of 2008. In fact,…
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95 Days: Black & White
During the 100 days leading up to the election of 2008, I was in D.C. working long hours for an ally of Barack Obama, crafting graphics and websites in rapid response to every twist and turn in the election. As part of this work, our team went to the Democratic Convention in Denver, where I…
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96 Days: Winning
I began this series writing about election losses because each was a very narrow loss that left me wondering after the fact if I might have done more, spent the last 100 days in some more intentional manner. It’s only natural now to turn to the years I voted in an election victory. Since the…
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97 Days: A Circuitous Path
During the 100 days leading up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I was an artist in residence at D.C.’s Halcyon Art Lab (then S&R Foundation) north of Georgetown. I had been paid to work on the last two elections, so it was strange to be on the outside, not traveling to a…
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98 Days: Flip A Coin
In the 100 days leading up to the election of 2000, I was living in South Minneapolis, working as a barista downtown and attending classes part-time at the University of Minnesota. The conversation at the coffeeshop and on campus was a cynical one. The salacious Bill Clinton impeachment spectacle turned some off from politics altogether. Others…
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99 Days: A Turning Point
I was living in Philadelphia during the run-up to the 2004 election and working my final few weeks at a nonprofit art gallery. I had been at the same gallery on the morning of 9/11, had watched George W. Bush turn that unifying tragedy into a power grab with the hastily passed Patriot Act and the…
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100 Days: The Start of Something
We are 100 days out from the U.S. presidential election. This will be the seventh I have been eligible to vote in. Of the previous six, three went the way I voted and three did not.* It’s the losses I have been thinking about as this election nears. Not because I believe Trump will be…
Future Cartographic 