The Fifth Minute

On slowing it down.

Hi friends.

I went to a morning talk at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art yesterday. It was a breath of fresh air in my busy week to take that kind of break. I rode my bike downtown in this early spring weather through the French Quarter, noting along the way how various parts of the city were being gussied up for the Super Bowl tourists next week. This is not for us, I mused.

I enjoyed the ride, though. People love to drink and carouse all night in the French Quarter, and that’s fun, too, but my money’s on the early daylight hours, when you can really see the fine lines of all the old buildings. When it’s just you and historic architecture and all the ghosts.

Anyway, I was biking to see Brooke and Miranda in conversation about Brooke’s show at the museum. I loved seeing Brooke’s big paintings one last time, but I really loved seeing my two smart friends talking about making art.

I liked the parts where they talked about our crumbling environment and how they dryly laughed about the fate of the world as I sometimes do myself. But I also liked the parts where Brooke said, “Making art is a testament to being alive,” and Miranda agreed and said, “It’s a gesture of hope.” You can have all those things together in one conversation and they all can be the truth.

Of interest to me was when Miranda talked about a graduate school professor who would make his class engage in an exercise where they had to look at a painting for five minutes in a row. She said in the first minute you’re tracking all the elements and the next three you’re just sort of processing it and in the fifth minute an actual image starts to emerge.

This appealed to me because lately I’ve been reading books much slower than usual, really taking in sentences slowly and deliberately. I had gone through a phase—or maybe it was years?—where I felt this pressure to consume so much. But right now I’m only reading what I want to, when I want to, and I’m taking from it what I need.

My friend Mik just loaned me Claire Keegan’s Antarctica, and immediately it felt irreplaceable to me. I thought: Well, I only get to read this for the first time once, so I better slow it down. So I’m only reading one story from the book a day.

But also I’m just making sure I understand every goddamn sentence. And she gives you lots of nice little details, Claire Keegan does, like that shotgun cartridge behind the clock radio in the title story from the collection. And in slowing it down all these other little details have been emerging. Lots of space between those details, too. Might as well enjoy the pacing of a story while we’re at it.

I wondered how the fifth minute of looking at a painting translates to the world of reading. Maybe, I thought, it’s just about reading the same story twice in a row?

So I sat down this morning and re-read that title story, and something different did emerge for me this time. This time I saw how she was setting up the ending all along. Maybe I’ll read it one more time tomorrow and see if another new image emerges. Maybe it’ll feel different if I read it in the late afternoon after I’m tired and I’ve given up on the rest of the world and I need a short story published 26 years ago to remind me that words can retain their power for a lifetime or longer.

It’s a gesture of hope to make art, but it’s also a gesture of hope to consume it, too.

Hang tight out there.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.