Reality These Days

Because you should all have the chance to know Jess Janz’s poetry

Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.

• 🎶 Body Better - Maisie Peters. Once you get past the confusion that Maisie’s name sounds totally similar to fellow indie musician Phoebe Bridgers (okay, maybe it was just me who was confused), there’s a wealth of amazing music for you to enjoy. Last year she put out the scorching Blonde and certified bop Cate’s Brother, followed up this week by the incredible Body Better, the first single from her next album, coming later this year. This song pairs incredibly well with Miley Cyrus’s Flowers, in my opinion - I would listen the heck out of a mash-up! 

• 📖 Babel - RF Kuang. Yes, like almost everyone else on the internet, I have now read Rebecca Kuang’s searing anti-imperialist, dark academia, magical realist, 500-page Babel. It was incredible. I’ll freely admit that i reached the end of the book with only a vague understanding of how the magic system within it actually works, but that’s not important. (Ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link). There’s plenty of whimsy sprinkled throughout the darkness (in particular, the protagonist’s view that scones are the platonic ideal of bread - a view I have a lot of time for), and overall, this was the reading experience I was hoping I’d get from Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which I know a lot of people loved, but which didn’t quite do it for me. 

• 🥐 Toasted filled croissants. Fighting with scones for the title of the most perfect form of bread are, in my opinion croissants, especially when hot and filled with ham and cheese or other savoury fillings (although I’ll never say no to an almond or chocolate croissant either…). I shared a couple of delicious ones (I think one involved tomato and mozzarella?) with my parents at Fred & Ginger Coffee in Berkhamsted last weekend, and I also find the Starbucks ham and cheese croissant a surprisingly and consistently good lunch option. 

As part of my journalling habit, I copy out poems and quotations that I’ve taken screenshots of in my travels around the internet; often I find they prompt me to think more deeply or bring out something I hadn’t realised was on my mind. 

I was copying out Intimacy These Days by Jess Janz (pictured below but please do click through and show her some love) and in the act of copying it out, line by line, I found myself on a thought-journey I knew I wanted to share with you all. 

Janz’s poetry is so beautiful and readable - even if you don’t normally like poetry, I’d recommend clicking through to her In Lieu of Transformation, Hide and Seek, A List of Former Resolutions, or her website. 

I found Intimacy These Days incredibly relatable (almost to the point of ‘wow, I’ve never had a unique experience in my life’); I’ve probably sent almost all of those phrases as text messages to my best friends at some point over the past decade. I’ve also used those questions, instead of explicitly saying ‘I’m thinking of you’, to tell people I was trying to build a relationship with that I was, well, trying to build a relationship with them. That energy is captured in Sylvan Weekends’ gorgeous song, Every Day: 

“Do you have a favourite wine? Can I be your favourite guy? Cinema or theatre date? Alcohol or something light? Do you prefer it day or night? I live a real nocturnal life, But maybe you will change my mind, City life or countryside

Camembert or Emmental? Luxury or January sale? Sunny skies, or rainy clouds? Would you lick a cow? Do you think about me sexually? 

I think about you every day, I think about you every day, Every day, All I can think about is you, You”

What the poem made me realise was this: especially when I feel disconnected or like the world is a bit too much for me, making connections with friends (even when it’s over inane jokes) grounds me and reminds me that I still exist. And that put me in mind of something Leena Norms said in a YouTube video six years ago, that I have been carrying around ever since (in a non creepy way…):

“I realise I think a lot in my head, and especially if you’re into booktube and you’re a reader, you spend so much time in your head that you forget that you have a body… and I know that’s really weird, and maybe careless of me to forget, but I do just forget that I live in a body, because I live so much in my head… so exercise is really important, and also, I moisturise a lot more now.” 

This need to remember that I have a body is one reason I enjoy cooking and handcrafts (lately, embroidery and cross-stitch); I spend all day working at a screen and I’ve always found that doing something tangible helps in grounding me. 

But the ‘these days’ aspect of it - I think something has fundamentally changed in the three years since we were nervously watching the news reports about a new virus, especially for people who now mostly work from home and/or live alone (lucky me to do both). I went months without spending any time in person with the people I work with - lots of whom I hadn’t met before lockdown, due to changing jobs at the start of 2020 - and it was easy to feel as if work was ephemeral as well as being virtual. When I say that a huge benefit of my daily trips to the gym, or to read and write in a coffee shop, is to remind me that other people exist… I’m not really joking. 

I had Covid at the start of September last year, and spent a bizarre week quarantining (alone) in my flat. Luckily, there was beautiful bright sunshine streaming in, but unlike during the lockdowns when the world outside was quiet as well, I was still hearing the teenagers go past on their way to and from school, still seeing the bustle of everyday life happening outside, just… without me. The oddest thing, though, was that when I tested positive for Covid on September 3rd, Boris Johnson was Prime Minister and I was a subject of Queen Elizabeth II. By the time I came out of isolation on September 11th, Liz Truss was Prime Minister and Charles III was King. I couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t hallucinated it all - which is why one of the first things I did when I got out was go and watch the late Queen’s funeral cortège driving through the middle of Edinburgh. I had to convince myself it had really happened. 

This brings me back to Janz’s poem - with so much of life being virtual, and seeming ephemeral, I imagine we all feel the need to plant ourselves, to root ourselves, to make ourselves exist in other people’s brains.

And that made me think of one of the oldest poems I know, Shakespeare’s Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day (Sonnet 18), which ends:

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Or in other words - by writing this poem about you, I’m making sure that you live forever, because by reading these lines you will be brought back to life. 

For a more modern take on this idea, there’s Alice Vincent’s Rootbound (ad - Bookshop.org affiliate link), which follows Vincent’s journey to bring herself back to life through growing plants, after a horrible breakup. 

Alice Vincent writes a fantastic Substack, Savour, which I’ll link to here (partly because Substack loves it when you recommend other people’s newsletters, as well as because it’s genuinely a highlight of my email inbox). 

wingspan

Speak soon, (something lighter next week, I promise!)

Lily