Jane Drinkard is a writer from a writing family. You could say living the examined life runs in her blood. Jane also was one of my first editors so it was a pleasure to turn the table and edit for Jane this week.
I think one of my favorite genres of conversation is the “you know what I mean?” variety. I love to scratch away like some sort of linguistic paleontologist to find shared experiences. I love that moment when everyone in the room goes “Yes, OMG that’s it! That’s the feeling.” This essay feels like one of those conversations.
Jane Drinkard is a fact-checker at New York Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.
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🌞 SCREMES (Shawn)
The Roundup
Links to the stories you should be reading this week
Catalonian Influencer Joan Palargemi has turned his mood board Instagram, Journal 1992, into an apparel line. ✺ Tennis player-turned performance artist, Yuki Kobayashi, blends sport and art. ✺ Nicholas Ghesquière is the type of designer who draws from multiple mediums, especially architecture. ✺ Under the brand direction of Ana Andjelic, Banana Republic re-embraces its classic safari style. ✺ If Wednesday is the 4 o’clock of the week, here’s how five creatives push through. ✺ In SoHo, the lifestyles, values, and plumbing of a tech oligarch and a bohemian artist clash.
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing? Read me.
The Dreaded Hour | Jane Drinkard | High Noon Original
It’s 3 p.m. and I suddenly can’t do anything. The day has been going pretty well, has been active, even. I woke up at 8 a.m. I did “The Only Core Workout You’ll Ever Need” (unexpectedly?) from the REI journal with some friends from college in the park a couple blocks away from my new apartment where I broke my wrist last summer. I drank two coffees. I called two Palm Beach real estate agents for a story I’m working on. I fact-checked a restaurant review. And somehow, now that the clock has struck 3, I can’t focus; a glass slipper is missing. We’ve reached the dreaded hour.
The dreaded hour, for those who need an explanation, happens every day between 3 and 4 p.m. when you’ve gotten enough done that maybe you could just stop. You could have the last black cherry Bon Viv that has been in the fridge for a week…. or keep working. You could go on a run…. or keep working. Maybe you should have another cup of coffee? But instead, you — or maybe just me — end up staring at a wall, picking at my hair, or calling my mom. It’s too late in the day to really get started on something new but too early to give up completely until the next day.
In a more positive light: it’s a languishing hour. A time to lounge like a woman in a Rembrandt painting. Or dab your wrists with some perfume, take a loop around the block, read a poem. But the potential pleasure of this hour has been harder to surrender to during the pandemic. As Zadie Smith writes in Intimations, “now there is no clocking off ever” and it has become increasingly difficult to know how to fill my time valuably or meaningfully. It’s 3 p.m., and I have successfully staved off my existential fears until now but my mind barrels in a treacherous direction. Smith again:
America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole, preferring instead to attack death as a series of discrete problems.
And death (or awakening?) is what comes for me at 3. I’d like to “attack” it with a mop or more typing but unfortunately, here I am staring at Zillow-approved brick and thinking about my existence and whether or not I’m doing it the right way. Slack messages be damned.
My mom tells me that when I was five and she was stressed out, I grabbed her face and said, “Don’t worry mama, it’s all just a dream.” Which is, on one hand, cute and on another, entirely creepy. But it’s actually apt for how I feel during the dreaded hour. Existence is but a dream, and my “discrete” actions (fulfilling job duties, guzzling coffee, putting the seltzers in the recycling) feel blatantly like my way of staving off death.
So I try to put it into words. I write because it’s the only action that seems to attack death, while simultaneously engaging with its inevitability. I know putting pen to paper has comforted my mom and her stressors her whole life and she’s passed that on to me. I’m figuring it out, I’m blindly stumbling my way through and hoping to add a little value while I’m at it. As Sarah Manguso writes in Green-Eyed Verbs:
The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair.
I like to think that’s true, but what I know beyond a doubt is I write to keep myself from despair. Come 4 p.m., I’ll peel my eyes away from the wall, log back onto slack and resume discreetly dying.
Listen
Steven, Lily, and Dasha reflect on the heyday of the PR Power Girl and imagine what it might be like to experience Kelly Cutrone’s infamous “live-work” space.
Cheers
Of all of the many establishments I’ve missed frequenting over the past year and a half, Bar Caló in Echo Park is right at the top of the list. Until they reopen, I’ll content myself with attempting to recreate their lovely cocktails, such as the Caballo Viejo.