October Reading; “Getting Friendly with Radicals”

This month I took a book off my pile of Things Recommended by Friends (only 473 to go!), and went on a bit of an unexpected journey; they say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can absolutely read a book based on cover alone, and sometimes doing so gives one the delight of ending up precisely elsewhere.

Photo sourced from Shambhala Publications

Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World

Kate Johnson

When a dear friend passed me this to read, I filed it away[1] in my mind under a topic I’ve long been interested in; exploring friendships as under-studied and undervalued relationships in our lives. There’s a lot of great theory and scholarship on decentralizing Romance as the pinnacle of our relationships, unburdening Partnership of the duty of fulfilling all our needs, and queering our notions of how we value different people in our lives—

—which this book mostly isn’t as even a cursory glance at the back cover and contents would have told me. Instead, I think of this book more as an invitation to mindfulness as a practice that makes us more concerned and indebted to each other, and to the practice of relationships as the site of and possibility for social change. In the process, there’s a lot of somatic and meditative exercises that are a welcome challenge as I continue to acknowledge my body of work as being “so drastically skewed towards people talking that aliens using it as a frame of reference would have no idea humans have bodies at all.”

I’d argue The Telelibrary is a work where the solitude and self-exploration of books and reading become an invitation to considering how we relate to others. Certainly over the years I’ve thought about the many ways the Frame for interaction sets the tone of how most participants treat each other, and even themselves. It’s been an interesting experience to see Johnson place Friendship in the center of a Buddhist frame. And lord knows this is a month that a little hope for kindness is helping take the edge off…

[1] in person, I filed it away in my “stack of books to read that might-be-work,” located next to the “stack of books I probably shouldn’t have agreed to receiving” and a shelf away from the “stack of books I’ve read and still need to email the author about for Telelibrary.” I live in a stack-dense home.

Related Readings to the topic I kind of assumed I’d be reading about before I actually started reading

Kate Johnson | Radical Friendship

Good Life Podcast

This is a pretty standard overview of Kate Johnson’s concerns and the road that led her to them, but there’s a point in this conversation Johnson and host Jonathan Fields calls out the “trappings” of Western Buddhism, and their overemphasis on solitary practice and isolation. As someone whose primary experience of Buddhist meditation was a Theravada 10 day silent [2] retreat full of white men stoically not talking to anyone, I appreciated the call out, and the reminder that most Buddhist teachings and texts pertain to how we are to relate to each other.

[2] story for another time

"How’s your friend life?" with Ann Friedman 

“How’s Your Sex Life” Hosted by Myisha Battle

Even a full decade after my brief career producing Sex Ed and Consent Education content for a University [3], I remain interested and nosy about the spaces advancing (and often regressing) a public understanding and conversation about sex. As such, and in keeping with my voracious appetite for advice columns[4] I’m already a fan of KCRW’s “How’s Your Sex Life,” but I appreciated the slant they put on this episode to really center friendships.

[3] story for another time - though if you’ve been presented my face in a video during a mandatory training somewhere other than NYU 

     a) you’re in surprisingly large and diverse company and

     b) please report your sighting to me, as I’m gathering strange and fraught data on that

[4] I have a grand unified theory of the advice genre, but that’s a story for a never time, as I’d really advise no one to indulge me in soliciting it 

The Best of Frenemies

Jessica Mitford

A bonus reading this week, as recognition of the subject-matter bait and switch I did on myself, in the curious interest of seeing what happens when I stack all this friendship reading alongside Johnson’s different approach, and because Jessica Mitford is one of my favorite ever authors, and this NY Times reprint of her Daily Mail column is just too delicious.