This piece was featured first on Jul 9 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
What is worthy of your attention?
In a sense, this newsletter is an argument about this. I try to draw your attention to bits of the Bay Area—botanical, historical, cultural—that might otherwise have escaped notice. Maybe the pale moon or hellebore blooms or the disco musician Sylvester or the view of the sky that opens up when a building is demolished.
In a new book, The Small Stuff, philosopher, Atlantic writer, and old friend of mine, Ian Bogost, argues for an even more radical sense of attunement to the big, wide world.
“Our culture makes wonder at the flora and fauna of the natural world easier because such admiration is directed at supposedly wholesome things that exist before and beyond our sullied human civilization,” Bogost writes. “But why withhold wonder, respect, and admiration from the world that humankind has constructed—and the one that people live inside every day? The machines, the infrastructure, the shops, the tools, and everything else that you might find are no less susceptible to awe than flowers or caterpillars.”
For him, this could mean the feel of a ridged coffee cup sleeve, the texture of couch upholstery, the mechanism of a motel ice machine. He is committed to an embodied life that is available to everyone, regardless of their life circumstances. All it takes is using the sensory endowments common to humans, which are not magical superpowers. “It should be absolutely gobsmacking that encountering the feeling of our senses would somehow be hard to do. This is madness, actually. You should be scandalized by the idea,” Bogost writes. “Feeling, hearing, seeing things—something that happens to you whether you like it or not ought to be the easiest thing you can imagine doing. So, why the disconnect? Because we are so used to being stuck in our heads, we can’t think to use our bodies.”
Immediately, I began to think of these moments in my life. Our studio door is extra heavy, but I get satisfaction in pulling it open each day. I love the twisting action of certain lamp switches. Or how about a leftover party balloon that you can’t help but bat into the air as it drifts downward?
Bogost came on Forum today to talk about the book, and we gave listeners the simple assignment to tell us about an interaction they have with the physical world that gives them pleasure. Let me tell you: the phone lines exploded and the comments rolled in.
Lesa from Alameda loved the phase transition of making hollandaise sauce. Penny recalled the feeling of unlocking a car with an actual key. Ian from Oakland described the gentle hum of bicycle tires on pavement. Lubov appreciated the sound of her wedding ring on a glass she’s washing, recalling, as it did, her mother doing the same thing. Thea wished for an old crank-driven paper towel dispenser in the office.
I delighted in several different comments that came in about coffee and tea. Barbara from San Jose wrote about how she uses “a spoon from the heavy cut crystal ‘spool holder’ of my mother’s” because “moving the spoons makes the crystal sing.” Carolyn loves her Dunlop fine bone china tea mug because of “the way that the edge of the cup feels on my lip.” Another listener described a mug by the Oakland ceramic artist Justin Kiene: “It’s bumpy yet smooth and grippy and colored like some bizarre mold growing in a sulphur pit. It’s a delight to hold in the evenings full of chamomile tea. The hot bumps against my hand ease me to sleep better than the tea.”
Of course, being a handy sort of guy, Bogost’s favorite comment came from Michael in Petaluma, a richly described paean to pliers. “I derive a lot of satisfaction using Vise Grip Locking Pliers. If you need to pull a nail and the nail head breaks off, you squeeze the Vise Grips on the nail shaft and they clamp on firmly, allowing you to pull it out,” Michael wrote. “What’s gratifying is the weight and quality of the tool in your hand, knowing how tight to set the grip, the feel of the steel tool flexing as you squeeze the nail with it, the clunk sound that tells you you no longer have to apply pressure, and the ease in pulling a nail that would otherwise be impossible to remove.”
Bogost’s book gives us permission to consider these experiences as they are—simple good things, gratifying moments—whether or not they bend the larger arc of our life towards happiness. It’s OK to care about paper towel dispensers, stick shifts, coffee cups, stroopwafels, towels, bubble wrap, plastic film, buttons, and door handles as you encounter them in your everyday life. Our interactions with our physical world are, actually, what much of life is.
Or as Bogost puts it, “Some moments are milestones, but most are instants. Every one of them wants to whisper a secret.”
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
My Tipline
- Hear about the art of the Anthropocene
- A party to support ILWU workers at the C&H sugar refinery in Crockett??
- Really into Pharaoh Sanders right now. Been listening to Harvest Time on repeat.
- Beautiful new addition south of Pacifica to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area
My Picks
LIVE
Come See Me and Samin Live in Oakland
You newsletter subscribers get a discount code: GOODTHINGS
NEWS
Muni Music Turns Buses and Trains Into a Unique Musical Composition
Gotta love an old-school internet project
BAY CURIOUS
Why Specialized Mariners Are Required on Every Ship Sailing Into San Francisco Bay
This Bay Curious on bar pilots is definitely Alexis bait