Attention Hour

My classes and workshops for spring 2026 are now live on the new celiumlit.net site:

The first celium workshop runs from February 5 - May 14
Imagined Archives starts January 20
No Future: On writing characters who cannot imagine a future, starts March 20

—Theodor W. Adorno in a letter to Walter Benjamin, February 1, 1939

The long river of crows are just now flying over our house on their way downtown from their daily roost along the banks of the Columbia. It is 4:40pm, almost dusk at this late day of the year. In the morning they reverse direction. The yellow plum tree has lost most of its leaves; each summer it grows more choked by the Himalayan blackberry vines that dominate our yard. They encroach from behind the neighbor’s chainlink fence, and so I have no choice but to find as many peaceful ways to live with them as I can. In the spring when their new leaves start to grow, I pick soft green bushels and dry them for tea. They make prime habitat for towhees and sparrows and creepers, without a birdfeeder needed. Their berries are plump and juicy, although they must be picked quickly with attention to the smallest hint of overripeness lest they bear the larvae of fruitflies (harmless, but squicky). I’ve made paper with their stalks once during a demonstration by Pulp and Deckle, but I lack the equipment and patience to make regular practice of it. And of course, there’s the dense green privacy they provide in the summer months in this tightly packed neighborhood, which is not to be be overlooked.

I’ve just finished reading the collected correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, from 1928 to Benjamin’s death fleeing the Nazi occupation of France in 1940. I find that reading collected letters are the best way to understand a period of history or school of thought. You can see writers grapple with nascent ideas and rejections; you see just how many projects or proposals were begun but never published or never finished; and then there’s the slow background creep of fascism and political realities that eat away at mental health, budgets, and livelihoods. Slow until it becomes very fast, that is.

I have been thinking a lot about attention. Since I’m leaving Instagram at the end of the year, it’s foremost in my mind. It seems I’m constantly hearing people bemoan the quality of attention, how difficult it is to focus and stay engaged or find sustained engagement from others, and yet, the moment one decides to relinquish a platform, the anxiety sets in about missing out or missing important information. How is it attention can be so depleted and yet we are so worried about leaving any of it on the table unattended, as it were?

When my husband took his music off of Spotify and Bandcamp, most people (myself included, at least initially) interpreted this act as a desire not to be found, rather than a political statement about not wanting one’s art filtered through a few AI algorithms of the very rich, very powerful, very conservative companies. I hear this language all the time at shows and readings: you can ‘find’ me here, I can be found on xxx, where can you be found? But art isn’t a vast game of hide and seek or one big treasure hunt*. What Adorno’s quote at the top of this letter helped both of us (i.e. me and my husband) understand is that in our departure from large social platforms, we’re not trying to not be found; we’re trying to be less exposed to the vagaries of monopoly capitalism.

It’s easy for all this to feel overwhelming or out of our control, and so last night we conducted an attention experiment on ourselves. What would happen if we attempted to completely saturate our attention for a short period? What would happen if we watched a film (The Neverending Story, a house favorite), listened to a record (Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures), a cassette tape (Tori Amos), and read aloud (Rilke and Beckett) all at the same time? What would it feel like to opt in to so many different pieces of media intentionally and simultaneously? To push the attention to 11?

The air became thick with attention; it felt dense and bready. At first I had a headache, but soon I grew accustomed to bouncing between the different registers and noticing synchronicities, like the eerie way the opening paragraphs of The Unnameable gave voice to an interior monologue of Atreyu’s horse Artax as he drowns in the swamp of sadness. We went for about half an hour, at which point we turned everything off and sat in silence, eyes closed, for ten minutes. Gregory fell asleep. The cat purred loudly between us. I thought about sponges. How when desiccated, if you trickle a little water into the center it expands and softens, leaving the rest dry. This is what it feels like when I’m on the neverending scroll for content. Part of my brain is active and enjoying the dopamine hit of the next vertical video, but the rest is dry and barren, crying out for deeper engagement. It felt good to completely saturate my sponge-brain for a brief period, to completely wring it out.

It’s clear that our capacity for aesthetic perception is, if not being weakened, then at least being influenced by corporations moreso than any other cultural actor. I’m not making any promises that I’ll never return to social platforms (Substack, of course, being one, and clearly I’m still here for now.) But I am looking forward to saturating my attention with other more nourishing forms in the new year. In the meantime, you can find the shadow version of this newsletter on my old fashioned blog, which still doesn’t have its own name, on my website, where I’ve been enjoying posting more informal records of my thoughts and days.

That’s all for now. I hope you stay intentionally attentive to what’s going on around you and in our world in a way that feeds your soul in the new year.

xo Cal

* (though I do maintain that despite the promises of publicists, most people of a certain intellectual bent prefer the books they find or discover themselves, outside of the year-end lists, reviews, podcasts or other exhortations.)