🗓️ #279 - What will we make this year about?

Thanks for joining us again for the start of another Inneresting year! Even though a new year is a somewhat arbitrary place to make a fresh start, it's a good time to take stock. What have you been doing? What are you doing? What do you want to do? Answering those questions can be rough even in the best of times.

For those looking to add some extra oomph to a resolution to write more, in Episode 676 of Scriptnotes, John and returning guest Dennis Palumbo had a conversation about being creative in challenging times:

I don’t think of entertainment as outside of relevance. I think there’s value in any kind of creative entertainment that you do because it’s an expression of what’s in your mind and heart. An expression of what’s in your mind and heart, no matter how silly or outrageous it is, is relevant to others who can have us.

You don’t have to have been Rocky Balboa to know what Rocky wanted in that boxing match. He wanted to be taken seriously, to feel like he wasn’t a bum. We all understand that. You didn’t have to have been raised in poverty to understand what Frank McCourt was writing about in Angela’s Ashes. [....] It’s about human connection. If anything is important when times feel crazy, it’s anything that supports the human connection.

–Dennis Palumbo

In a New Year's post, Chuck Wendig lays out some of the reasons it’s hard out there to be a writer, but still holds on to his optimism about the value of writing and the urgency of putting more human thoughts and emotions out into the world:

And this isn’t just about AI, either — this is about publishers who want trends, this is about filmmakers who want to make films. Some of the most amazing things are always the things that set the trends, rather than the things that follow them. And looking at movies this year, it wasn’t the Repeated Franchise Work that really sang. It was Sinners, it was Weapons, it was Sirat and One Battle After Another and Black Bag and the Baltimorons.

Rafe Meager connects the dots between Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with prominent academics, Kendrick Lamar v. Drake, and Beowulf to make the point that the burdens of forcing change are often placed on the backs of people already suffering most under the status quo, and that people with more power and access also need to exercise more courage:

People do not want to think of themselves as selling out. So next it becomes necessary to sell oneself the lie that one has never done this. And unfortunately by the point that one would need to do that, one is already good at selling.

Maria Popova shares a short work by E.E. Cummings on the courage required to be yourself and to feel things deeply enough to share them through your writing:

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Blackbird Spyplane fights one of these battles by actively retraining his mental capacity for sustained attention, and to stop living each moment like it could be mined for content. Dan Drake looks at the internal struggle between the safety and vulnerability via Punch-Drunk Love, and the courage required to be vulnerable and risk safety for the potential rewards of being seen.

Maybe the question about what we want to do in this new year is too broad. Maybe a better question to ask is what can we do in this new year that requires us to be courageous?

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In case you missed it...

In the most clicked link from our last issue, Joe Karaganis starts with data from the Open Syllabus movie lab to see what films were assigned in the last 20 years at universities, leading to a conversation about what patterns we can see in which films get chosen (and what has staying power).

What else is Inneresting?

• Eira Tansey announced her divorce on Instagram and found out Meta copied and pasted it into an AI slop advertisement.
• Blue Monday is an evergreen way to pack the dance floor. Take a look (and listen) to how its iconic drum beat came together.
• Currently on repeat at Inneresting HQ: The Mountain Goats "Cold at Night"

And that’s what’s inneresting this week!

Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team. 

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🗣 Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, Bluesky @ccsont.bsky.social, or Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art