The emergency was curiosity

5 questions for engaged neighbor, deep reader, and artist Christie George

The more I think about the kind of person I want to be in the world, the more I realize it has to do with being a reverent and intentional appreciator of art. That means when a friend writes something I really read it and engage with it, rather than just posting it on social as if I have. And if I’m not friends with the person who made the art, sometimes I still send an embarassingly enthusiastic fan letter to let them know how much their work has shaped me. I tell people when their outfit strikes me as beautiful when I walk by them on the street. I sometimes even tell pregnant women “You got this!” and pump my fist in the air like a maniac. I like living in the world like this—where people create things and I really honor those things. It makes me a better artist, neighbor, friend, and person.

One of the friends who has most shaped my approach to all of this in recent years is my friend Christie George. She is the ultimate, like black belt level, appreciator of art. She loves movies. She loves visual art. She loves poetry. She loves books. And she takes them all in, in this profoundly personal way—like each experience is a relational experience, not a consumeristic one. (She also buys art, which I find so exciting!) When she started making a “thing” in reaction to Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing a long time ago, I had no idea where it would lead. Neither did Christie. She just knew she had to have a long, multi-facted love affair with the ideas in this book and see how they crashed into her own beautiful, Redwood-shaded, covid-colored life.

The answer (for now) is that this love affair became an exhibit. I got to see it a couple weekends ago and knew I wanted you, the Examined Family readers, to get a sense of it, too. So meet my dear Christie…

Me and Christie last week at the small press fair at SFMOMA. The woman has never taken a bad picture. It’s infuriating. And, yes, her hat reads: “Failure is an option.”

Courtney Martin: Why did you engage so deeply with this book in particular? Do you think it was a “right time, right book” situation? Could you engage this deeply with a lot of books or does it feel like a rare and specific thing? 

Christie George: I first read How to Do Nothing while I was on parental leave after having my second kid. The weeks and months after you’ve had a baby are a pretty weird time of doing nothing and doing everything all at the same time, so I do think the book hit me in a moment when I was uniquely open to its messages. And working on the project certainly only happened because of the pandemic; I had more time and space to work on something I would never have been able to do without that forced slowing down. 

That said, I have become really interested in the project as a kind of form that is replicable, not just by me with other books, but by other people. I know that I’m never going to have enough time to read all the books that I want to. And, for better or worse, there are books out there that I want to know about, but I just don’t want to read. What I would read, however, is that book refracted through the experience of a friend. For example, I’d love to read your book report about The Breaks. [Here is it! Kind of.] Or every single one of my friends’ book reports about Nightbitch. Or maybe book reports can be collaborative things - a way of engaging deeply with a book, but also a way of engaging deeply with another person about how they experience the same text. I’ve long been wanting to do a book report with you about Easy Beauty. 

What was Jenny’s reaction? What was it like to have her at the exhibit? 

For a long time, I didn’t tell Jenny about the project because I wasn’t planning to share it with people. I showed her the project in person this summer, and she was incredibly generous with both her time and her openness to it.

And I was thrilled that she came to the exhibition! When this project started, I could never have imagined that I’d have a finished book, be showing it in an exhibition and that Jenny would be there celebrating alongside me and all my neighbors.

There was a great quote by Jenny’s friend Joshua Batson in this New York Times piece about her work: “She wants you to have an experience, not to listen to her.” I think about that observation a lot. I definitely had an experience.

When did you decide that your weird, small project--as we say--needed to be public in some way? 

There was, in fact, a very specific moment! I had given the project to four friends (including you!) asking for feedback. One of those friends wasn’t able to do it and asked if she could pass it along to a friend of hers who she thought would be into the project. At first, I said no. I was nervous about sharing it with someone who didn't already know me. I was worried about it being perceived as self-indulgent. (Although now that I’ve typed that out, maybe I should try to reclaim that word. One dictionary definition of self-indulgence is “characterized by doing or tending to do exactly what one wants, especially when this involves pleasure or idleness” which pretty much describes the project perfectly.)

That person (who I had never met and who lived in New Zealand) turned out to be the single most comprehending reader of the project. She understood (often in ways I didn’t) what the point of it was, and what I was reaching for, and she sent me back a 17-page book report in response to my book report! I know it sounds dramatic, but that exchange with her was the single most profound creative experience of my life. And I thought, “Wait, is THIS what happens when you share your work with other people?” That was the moment I decided to share the project.

Elizabeth wrote about all of this so beautifully here. In a lovely turn of events, she was also able to come to the exhibition, and I got to tell her all of this in person. The interesting thing was to hear her side of things: she was really unsure about whether to hit send on her response to me since it was kind of a lot. But my lesson from all of this is to just “hit send,” even if what you’re doing seems like a little much. Or, maybe, especially if it’s a little much. You never know what will happen.

These filled up real fast.

You have said that the journey with this book and the conversations you've had about your own work on, with, around it has been a way to talk about loneliness. Can you say more about that -- in what way? 

I’m still trying to figure that out. One of the things I find interesting is that while I mention loneliness a couple of times in the book, I don’t actually say a lot about it. I’m pretty sure all I write is, “I am so lonely sometimes.”

But somehow that has been enough to compel people to talk to me about their own loneliness. More specifically, Jenny’s book is about the ways that technology and social media and all the things that are competing for our attention are purporting to make us feel connected, but I think we all know that isn’t true. It’s just hard to figure out how to get out of it. Just putting away your phone isn’t enough. There has to be something else.

In my case, that something else was a bunch of things, including a book report and nature and poetry and other people. Especially other people in real life. Engaging with all of those things has made me feel less lonely. 

What is one thing you paid attention to today that surprised or delighted you? 

Of course, I want to give an answer that is perfectly calibrated about a very specific bird or a plant I watched over the seasons or something like that. But these last two weeks since the exhibition opened have been full of surprising delight. I did not know if people would engage with the more interactive elements of the exhibition; watching them do so has been a gift. I love seeing the ways people interpret differently even the simplest of directions (eg draw a spiral); I’ve been surprised by how our collective needs and wants can be so simple (“a root beer float”) and so elusive (“I want to know how to make myself happy”); and watching people watch themselves while they made blind contour drawings has been the absolute best. You aren’t supposed to look at your paper while you draw, and I love hearing people call out their friends for “cheating.” The whole project, in many ways, is an exercise in learning how to pay attention to my own delight. I highly recommend that as a practice.

This was made by Examined Family reader Laurie Mutchler, who happens to be Christie George’s mother-in-law, and I’m obsessed.

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We are donating to Shelterwood Collective in honor of Christie’s labor and delight.

What book would you like to do a multi-month book report on? What is the most “profound creative experience” of your life? (Be dramatic!) When have you felt like “too much” and it turned out to be just right for someone? We can’t wait to hear.