61. 🐸 eating the frog 🐸
thinking about writing setbacks
Hi there! 👋 I’m Ida, and this is tiny driver, a newsletter about research, pedagogy, culture and their intersections. Thank you for being here. Reach out anytime by just hitting reply, I love hearing from you.
Hello, and happy Monday.
As many other spaces have noted, this weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. Rather than reading the deluge of thinkpieces that have been published on the internet, I'm going to focus my energy on the second edition of Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire from Verso. Haymarket Books organized a panel of scholars (Noura Erakat, Naomi Klein, Jasbir Puar, and Keenaga-Yamahtta Taylor) to discuss the work's major contributions. If listening is more your thing, I've linked the panel (which also includes Kumar's summary of the book's main arguments) below:
What I write.
Y'all, I've been having some trouble eating the frog most days.
For those of you who haven't heard of this phrase before, Brian Tracy explains the idea in his book on motivation and productivity:
Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.
Last week, there were more than a couple days when I either waited until the end of my day to "eat the frog," or managed to avoid it completely. I don't think I'm alone in having this experience, which was my form of solace when I got frustrated about how I was spending my days.
Last week, I also wrote to you about how I now have the time and space to focus on turning my dissertation into a book. The first thing I've decided to tackle is the book's overall organization. I've always conceptualized this book as having a chronological organization, ever since my first year of grad school. After a small manuscript workshop last year, though, I found that many of my colleagues were asking me to think about what a thematic organization would look like instead. Particularly because my project thinks about echoes in history, I'd essentially cut up each of my current chapters into smaller chunks and stitch them back together.
This "to-do"—essentially: re-organize entire book—terrified me more than it excited me. No matter how I tried to re-frame the task—"playing" with organization, approaching organization with "curiosity", etc etc—I was still intimidated by the chain of dominoes that making such a decision may set off. My avoidance, in other words, was not necessarily in completing the task, but in what this would mean for the future tasks I had to complete.
Perhaps it is a matter of merely acknowledging these fears. But, if anyone has a solution or thoughts—or if you're just going through this yourself—feel free to drop me a line by leaving a comment or replying directly to this email. 📩
What I consume.
In the bookshop:
Currently Reading: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
On deck: Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
For September’s book club, we will be reading A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib! Thank you to everyone who voted, and feel free to purchase a copy of the book here! Details are below.
Here’s the event info:
Date & Time: Tuesday, September 28 @ 5PM PST/8PM EST
Registration Link!
Suggested donation (for those able to donate): $3-20 through Paypal or Venmo (@idyalz)
Item(s) of note.
A rare take on 9/11's legacy that I found interesting and worth reading.
Journaling can sometimes be difficult to start and intimidating. Catherine Andrews offers 8 "uncommon" journaling techniques to help folks get out of their head and get words on the page.
This list of 25 Best Horror films, paired with my recent access to Shudder (Netflix but exclusively for horror). I watched Audition today, and the last 25 minutes were WILD.
On a similar note, Candyman is coming out on Friday on Amazon and I am very excited about watching it!
"I find day-to-day life funny. I’m always laughing. Yesterday, I was in the car with my aunt and my uncle and my aunt asked my uncle, very earnestly, what a humdinger was. My uncle said: “It’s a very exciting event.” And my aunt said: “Oh, so it was humming and dinging?” It was such a serious conversation! “It was humming and dinging?” I laugh at anything." - Michaela Coel answers questions in The Guardian.
A pup-date.
Over the weekend, Girlie got her very first professional groom! She's looking super sleek and super chic. 💅🏼
As always, thanks so much for reading through, and I'll see you in the next one!
Warmly,
Ida
Been procrastinating so much and feelin so bad about it! Thanks for helping me feel less alone!
The guy in the bag in Audition always got to me.