to be sorted later #1

in which what's old is new again & I'm testing it out

Oct 28, 2023

Back in my sophomore years of blogging, when I was a copywriter at Groupon and would come home to my cats Layla and Mufasa (may they rest in peace), a little red-eyed from a day under fluorescent lights, bloated from drinking too many of the free cans of La Croix, I started a series I called “to be sorted later” that I posted on a semi-regular basis.

This was in 2014, right before I’d moved on from my original blog, “Chasing the End of My Rainbow” and the various series I’d created there, like my much beloved “Monday Mix Tapes” and my shorter-lived and far more ridiculous “Swayze Fest” series. (Good lord, the internet used to be fun!)

Unfortunately/fortunately, all my “to be sorted” posts have been largely lost, because most were published during my stint of hosting my blog on a little platform called Virb (may it rest in peace).

But it all started with this post — to myself, to the internet — about my intentions:

I’ve been writing a lot of emails to myself lately. Mostly, I’m sending articles to read later, essays, and short stories, but I’m also sending notes, quotes, and music I want to remember. I get a strange kick out of emailing myself, because while on the one hand it seems like a completely logical method of reminding oneself to do something, and on the other hand, it feels completely ridiculous. “Dear Me, read this later.”
These things, these writings, that I've been emailing Me, are not at all related to one another, really—mostly they're just different things that interest me and that have threatened to destroy my productivity at work that given day. So instead of letting the Internet win, I have created a chain of emails to myself, all under the subject line "to be sorted later," not that I know what it is exactly I plan on sorting.
Currently, I am planning to sort the following things out later: a recent short story in the New Yorker, submission guidelines for a website, two writers' tumblrs, an interview with one of those writers, and something about Lars Von Trier, and something about walking. Specifically, something. One email says only, "LARS VON TRIER - ?" and “on walking…”
Yes, I am aware I sent these notes to myself, so I probably should know what these things mean. But I don't. Two Sundays ago I watched Nymphomaniac, Volumes 1 and 2, and it left me feeling odd and unsure of my feelings and vaguely disturbed, but not as disturbed as I thought maybe I was supposed to feel. I think I wanted some critic to tell me if Von Trier was a misogynist or pro-woman. Then I thought that maybe I should be an adult, and come to my own conclusions. Regardless, I continue to be confused and haunted by Nymphomaniac, and wishing I could get some of those images out of my brain.
Moving on: I still have more to sort. Come to think of it, I haven’t actually sorted any of these things yet. I haven’t read that short story yet. I haven’t yet read Roxane Gay’s piece in The Guardian about Ferguson. I still haven’t read the poem “The Lost Art of Letter Writing,” for fucks sakes!
One of my problems is that I want to read everything at once. Sometimes this gets more out of hand than others. I still haven’t finished my summer Shakespeare project. My brother and I are in our third year of doing this. We pick a different Shakespeare play each summer to read, and then we might talk about it a lot, or a little, or not at all. The point is the reading of it, mainly. Jay texted me about three weeks ago, saying, “Finished Lear” and still, I’m not done. The underachieving younger sister strikes again! Ha, ha.
It’s no wonder I haven’t finished King Lear yet. I’m also currently reading: The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles, Living History (because I felt it was required reading before reading Hillary Clinton’s latest book), and Bad Feminist. Oh, and A Wrinkle in Time, because I learned it was going to be made into a movie, so of course I needed to read it again. (My most recent reading of it was in 2010. I am insane.) I’m supposed to be halfway through a book, Cutting for Stone, as part of a book club my friend Natalie invited me to join. I haven’t opened the book.
I’d say I’m not always like this, but I’m always like this. I have a permanent stack of books. The other night I grabbed Malcolm X off the shelf, and then The Dream Songs, and then I realized I was walking into my bedroom with four books, and my journal, in my hand. And then you add the Internets, including the entire fucking New Yorker archive (!) to this equation, and that’s it. I’m dead.
Sometimes I feel like I’ll never getting around to sort it all out later. Constantly, I’m reminded of my mother, sitting in her green chair, which is now my green chair, a stack of books on the floor next to her. She had bookmarks in all of them, including Les Miserables, which I stole from the pile after my mother died. I’ve added it to my own stack of books from time to time over the last 12 years, but it never makes the cut. It always ends back on the bookshelf, to be sorted later.

Okay, a few things here: why was I giving Lars Von Trier so much space in my brain? Moving on from that, forever. I still haven’t made it through Les Miserables, but maybe 2024 will be my year. I have re-read A Wrinkle in Time at least twice since that writing, and I did indeed read — and love — Cutting for Stone, even though I have zero recollection of whatever book club I referenced.

I got rid of that old green chair, sometime around when I stopped emailing myself “to be sorted” later notes.

But I feel like having some fun again. So this is a test, to bring it all back, and to share a little bit of what I’m sorting through, once again. I’ll probably play around with the format a bit and see what sticks.

image via violetes-verdes (& my original post)

this Charles Wesley Godwin album my friend Logan shared with me, then I forgot about, then he asked me about again, and I forgot again, but hey dude, I’m listening to it now, right at this very moment! He likes the track “10-38,” but so far I’m pretty partial to this one:

that poem I was all worked up about back in 2014. It was worth a revisit.

“…And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see
The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became
Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew
By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?”