Exercises in Paying Attention

Paying attention by taking notes: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, books worth your attention about art and empire

Like many people, at least according to one Substack post, it’s an Artist’s Way fall. For the unfamiliar, The Artist’s Way is a self-help book by Julia Cameron, created in the 80s, published in the 90s, deeply informed by both eras, and designed to unleash your creativity. It’s prescriptive: there are active daily steps to complete. It’s religious: deference to God (of your choosing!) is structured through 12 steps to self-improvement. I agree with Kate Lindsay (linked above) that the book is not magical, transformative therapy itself, but powered by ritual and structure. It’s a process of giving yourself permission to take yourself seriously via repetition.

As Kate Lindsay also notes, it’s basically impossible to do without telling people you’re doing it. I am doing it as part of a group that meets every week, which you’d think would eliminate the need to talk about it further, but here I am — yapping. One of the ideas in the book that resonated with me was the rewards of paying attention. That creativity is borne out of paying attention, that attention can heal and bring delight, and that “the quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight.”

In a similar vein, from a favourite Ask Polly about staying open to delight (emphasis mine): 

Staying open isn’t an analytical act and it’s not about trying to be positive or cheerful, either. It’s not a preemptive decision that some experience will definitely be valuable. It’s merely a choice to try new things, to see new things, to notice what’s there. It’s a choice to tolerate new things without shutting yourself off from them. It’s a commitment to letting the world come in and change you.

This is veering dangerously close to self-help, so to be candid: god, it’s so hard to pay attention. Really paying attention, experiencing something in multiple senses and not just out of the corner of your eye. Heather Havrilesky, Julia Cameron, and Jenny Odell, among many others, all implore you to experience the natural world as a means of paying attention. I’ve experienced that phenomenon myself as an asshole with a backyard: it’s been easier than ever to pay attention to the minutiae of the world by watching the same space, season after season. When you have direct access to green space, it’s much easier to recognize nature as glorious transformations to behold as the face of god or whatever… but what if you’re more inclined to stay inside? 

How to pay attention when you’re a windswept former teen goth with a mild sun allergy, living in a polycrisis? 

Paying attention, to me, is working on taking life a little more seriously. This may not resonate with everyone, I know. Many people already take their lives extremely seriously. Living in the lap of luxury, it can feel easy to remain detached and uninvolved in your own life. Paying attention means practicing indulgence and consideration. In the latter half of this post, I also have two book reviews because, well:

Going analogue 

If you spend long enough being known as a “person who reads” eventually you will be given 1-12 notebooks as gifts. After years of aspirationally using them on and off, I’m trying to become a note-taker. More specifically, embracing the fact that writing things down is an exercise in paying attention. More (more) specifically, I’ve been keeping (on and off) physical, long-hand notes on the books I read. 

It’s easy for books to become a media consumption habit, something that is a distraction without meaningful engagement. When you’re trying to pay attention in the same way you’d pay attention to the changing of the seasons, a new leaf on a budding plant, writing something down helps. Writing longhand notes is an exercise in being alone with your thoughts (heinous), forced time to meaningfully consider the books you’re consuming. Writing by hand is moving your body, it trains your hand to be better at writing and maybe uses up a few trees to do so. Sorry trees.¹

I loved Petya’s guide to annotating your books. I’m not quite at that level!  As I commented on that post, my current haphazard way of saving quotes and memorable passages is entirely digital: I take a photo of the page, and copy the text from the photo into a Google doc. Simultaneously, I’ve also been taking more notes and jotting down thoughts about books as I read them. In the past I’d write down general thoughts about a book after completing it. But that felt like an attempt to review and analyze the book—which, to me, is better left to a format in which I can perform proper analysis (e.g., at this keyboard).

Instead, I’ve taken to pausing after reading for a while, and rather than going back to the distraction device of my phone immediately, finding my notebook to jot down whatever I’m thinking as I’m reading it. Answering simple questions like What’s happening? What narrative or creative purpose does that serve? What is standing out about the book, right now? What elements of the style stand out? What do I like or dislike? 

Writing by hand is better for memory and learning. It requires active attention: it cannot be done mindlessly and necessitates some measure of analytical thought. Writing down thoughts about books as I read them has allowed me to better remember and document what happened in a book²—rather than trying to do so in summary at the end—and to appreciate the arcs and development of a well-crafted story. 

As a side note, there’s a practice I keep coming across on the YouTube rabbit holes: using notebooks as a Commonplace Book, wherein you take notes by hand on topics of interest, write out full passages, and so on. I am not describing this, which feels fundamentally different and, in the digital age, a hobby in its own right. 

I will know I’m really On One, (really aggressively paying attention) if I start writing long-form, analogue notes about the truly mindless media I consume in between reading, seeing friends, and having a day job. Maybe handwritten notes about Yolanda Hadid will unlock something powerful in me. Or maybe paying too close attention will have its downfalls.

Two books worth paying attention to

Two books that I found particularly rewarding to pay close attention to, both of which I read in the last month, were Enter Ghost by Isabella Hamad and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Writing notes while reading both of these ambitious books helped me truly admire how the stories were told, the plots themselves, their clear intentions, and their experimentations. 

Martyr! is the debut novel by poet Kaveh Akbar, and I am fighting with my autocorrect to implement the absolutely perfectly placed exclamation point in the title. It’s the story of Cyrus Shams, an orphaned, recovering alcoholic on a desperate search for meaning. A meaningful death, meaningful life, or finding any meaning in the seemingly meaningless cruelties of empire. It’s a slippery novel, as I took notes on it I kept being surprised by how many forms it takes:

• Dream narratives

• Poetry

• Small vignette prose poems

• Non-linear interludes from Cyrus’ family 

All of this is brought together by memorably beautiful writing. Akbar invokes every one of your senses with his descriptions: “Something delicate released in my chest, like a gold ring dropping in a bowl of milk,” while simultaneously obsessing over the impossible limitations of language. Real, true beauty and understanding defy our attempts to describe them: “Incredible, how naming something took nothing away from its stagger. Language could be totally impotent like that.” 

It’s not a perfect book—the best sections to me are those from Cyrus’ perspective, whose underlying anger clarifies and directs his voice. Sometimes all the forms the novel takes on start to dilute it. There is at least one plot point that I found baffling against the themes and tone of the novel otherwise. But it was incredibly rewarding to not only read it, enjoy its story, but to pay close attention to it. 

The other book worth mentioning in this vein was Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. As described by Martha: perfect literary fiction. That is, it does the magic trick that only novels can perform, balancing the rich, small story of one individual perspective within a very potent larger context. 

In Enter Ghost, Sonia Nasir is returning to Haifa after many years away. She is a struggling semi-successful actor who has appeared in TV procedurals and plays. She loves acting, but is otherwise deeply alienated: she has seemingly no major connections back in England, where she grew up and has just ended an affair. Palestine, her family’s homeland, is for obvious political and logistical reasons hard to reconcile with or to just to be in. The novel opens with the difficulty of arriving, as she is held at the border for further questioning.

Upon her return to Haifa, Sonia ends up involved in a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. From there, she finds a sense of meaning and purpose, a connection with the cast, the familiar Shakespearean story, and the struggle for Palestinian sovereignty. The novel is about sisters, those long complicated years of shared connection, and the ways we hold onto history. Both history as deeply personal slights and grudges between family, and history, the echoing, disastrous consequences of decades of occupation. 

I write this in October 2024. Enter Ghost was published in early 2023, and in the last year, it has taken on new dimension. A year ago Israel denied bombing a hospital, now it has bombed two dozen more. The colonization and military that looms at the edge of Enter Ghost has taken on new horrors in the real world. Taking notes while reading this book helped pay attention to the story: how it reminds the reader over and over again of the connective power of art, and simultaneously, the futility of art in resistance. As Mariam, the play’s director, wonders to Sonia: 

She went on to explain her theory which she presented as truth, that when you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more eas-ily, and so time goes on running like an open faucet [...] and while there are moments in these concerts and poetry readings and lectures and plays when you might feel connected to the other people in the room, to the people behind the screen, you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community's resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved, momentarily, and perhaps our Hamlet would be just another version of this narcotic and what, if anything, could we do about that? 

There is no easy answer to undo human greed. You know how Hamlet ends. In an interview with Sally Rooney, Isabella Hammad discusses the passage quoted above and the fact that it is left unanswered. In it, she says:

I don’t think we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical [...] I am increasingly certain that racism and the forces that lead to this kind of genocidal violence are, in essence, non-thinking. Racism, it seems to me, is usually not calculated but is rather a form of stupidity: it’s the absence of thought. That’s why it is very important to think and speak as clearly as we can.

There is a temptation to stop paying attention when it is too much to bear. That’s also when it feels the most important to do so. Reading books is not going to do that much, just like admiring the beauty of a single branch over the seasons is not going to stop the mass clear-cutting of old-growth forests. Paying attention somehow feels like simultaneously the most and the least we can do. As a book and reading experience, I can easily recommend Enter Ghost. In addition to its depiction of Palestine, it is a rich, beautifully told work of art.

As a Jewish woman with family history in Israel — my mother was born there in 1951 to refugees who subsequently moved to Canada; I have been there twice (ages 10 and 13) and was baffled that this militarized state was supposed to protect and represent me; I have second cousins who continue to live there—I resonated deeply with Maris Kreizman recently saying that in the last year, “My biggest realization is not that Israel is culpable, but to what extremes so many [North] American Jews will go to in order to avoid looking.” 

With that, here I go into the world, taking notes and paying attention to stay sane. 

1.  My current notebook is a Muji A6 made of recycled paper, at least!!! Lays flat and is good for fountain pens. 

2.  The simple contours of a book’s plot are often all I’m trying to remember months or years later - and with the exception of books popular enough to have full summaries online, that’s exactly what I cannot recall unless I did the legwork at the time