Hello and welcome.
We only have four sections this month: Workspaces Part 1 (about other people), Workspaces Part 2 (about me), Three Books (about three books), and then finally What Else? (which is just links. Also a photo of a guy with a tractor).
Let's begin—
To start, we'll look at some wonderful photos of beautiful offices.
These came from a NYT Magazine article, which brought together several offices from past photoshoots of interiors from the past few years. What I found noteworthy about these is that none of them look like the contemporary ideal of what a productive space looks like—clean lines, mid-century modern decor, solid, neutral colors, a little bit of steel, a little bit of wood, ergonomic chairs, low-budget Bauhaus. For a while I was subscribed to a newsletter called "Workspaces," which offers a steady supply of variations on that theme (r/workspaces also has more of the same). And they're great setups, beautiful desks and computers, nothing wrong with that. Per se.
There's a critique to be made that this homogeneity is not great for anyone. With limited time available to me, I'm not going to make it—though if you want to read one, I'd recommend an essay called "Welcome to Airspace," written by Kyle Chayka way back in 2016. Instead, I will simply say that I am glad that tastes have evolved, or at least that my taste has evolved, to prefer a style more worn-in, varied, and interesting.
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As an example, a few months ago I saw that a digital studio called "Mouthwash" had redone their offices, and now they work out of a space that looks like a (very expensive) living room. I really like this. I appreciate the idea that even when you're working on a computer—which Mouthwash does, they do, like, apps and visual identities for brands—you do not need to do so in an office that looks like an Apple store.
Not long ago I read the novel Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico, which is about Tom and Anna, digital nomads from Southern Europe who landed in Berlin and are freelance creatives there. Designing. Typesetting. Speaking in English with new friends who just moved there from Portugal or Sweden or Brazil.
Perhaps it goes without saying that AirSpace saturates every word of the book, and Latronico describes it in rich, elegant detail, dialled in to every nuance:
"They would listen to LCD Soundsystem and Animal Collective on repeat on their headphones, tweaking a grid, checking paragraph styles, perfecting all the variations of a color scheme, and before they knew it the morning would have disappeared."
"They would come off a call or look up from a difficult email and see themselves from the outside, surrounded by leftover takeaways and scraps of paper, a bathrobe flung over a Danish armchair, and they would feel flawed, like imposters in a grown-up world that would have caught them out already had the webcam lens been any wider."
Something that sometimes happens is that writers will criticize a cultural phenomenon as self-defense. I may participate in Thing X, but, see, you can read what I wrote and then you'll know I understand the problems with Thing X, so it's actually not that big a deal. (To my mild embarrassment, I have been a participant in this process.)
But to his credit, I don't think that's what Latronico did with Perfection. It's not a send-up of Anna and Tom, he's not hanging them out to dry. Even the book jacket copy says it's a "scathing" portrait, but I disagree. Instead, it's just kind of sad that their lives are shallow like this. They optimized their life to be cool and comfortable, and they succeeded, but there are opportunity costs: they did not optimize their life for community or connection or meaning, or even, like, fun.
There's an all-timer tweet that I think about maybe once a day:
Anna and Tom's apartment is so nice. They've checked that box. The question that looms over Perfection is what happens next?
Well, uh, anyway, I've spent the past several weeks making my house nicer.
I was offered a free bookshelf that matches the bookshelf I already had, so I tried to rearrange the office to accommodate another piece of furniture, but that was too much for a small room, even though it added valuable storage space. But what if the couch—large, elegant, the most comfortable in the house—were out in the den, where we needed more seating anyway? What if we refocused the guest room so that it was clean and functional as a guest room instead of a catch-all storage space? What if I had natural light on my face for my video calls, finally? You can spend a whole weekend asking those questions. At the end of such a weekend, you might find yourself in a completely rearranged house.
I have a new office now. The most important point of view is the one you can see from the webcam. Here's how that looks (I stole a moment during a real meeting to take this—JP, if you're reading this, I promise I was still listening).
Usually, sadly, my beautiful wife is not there with me, but even then, I'm pretty pleased with it. Let's take a closer look.
On the wall behind me is a whiteboard (the sticker in the bottom corner just says "Becky and Tim"; my dad designed it for our wedding), a poster from when The National came to Tulsa, and the certificate for the shares I own in the Packers. Even though they aren't super visible on the Zoom call, the idea here is to communicate that I am a person with specific interests—by no means am I trying to stand out or be quirky in the workplace, but I'm not trying to be some kind of anonymous wallflower either.
On the bookshelf there are my little trophies (two from Lightcast work, one for the first time I won "Best Costume" at a Halloween party). The books on top of that shelf are things I've had published work in. There is also a bronze statue of a bear. Below that you can start to see the vestiges of the storage area that this room used to be; a bunch of stuff had to go somewhere.
We got the lion painting at an art fair about a year ago, it was embarrassingly underpriced. Our thinking is that when this room is a nursery someday down the road, the theme will be "animals," which is also why we have the dog print there. The spaceship Mir is unrelated.
Buried in the corner between the fan and the cello is my Packers trash can that I got from my dad; Becky and I were looking at some baby pictures the other day and you could see the same one in the background.
The desk itself has less on it than it did in the other room, largely thanks to the shelves right there for my pens and pencils. The picture of the mountain is from the road to Clydehurst; in my camp days it was commonly believed that Tom Brokaw owned the pond in the photo. Not sure if there's any truth in that.
I love what I've filled the shelves with. There's a cup engraved with my Grandpa Hatton's initials, there's also the mug made for me by my Grandpa Gehrke, and a bowl my friend Ross made. There's a Lego minifigure of Dustin from Stranger Things where he's wearing a shirt that says "Waupaca, Wis.", which is right where my Grandma Hatton lives, and actually I want to say that she made the American flag tissue box holder, too. The Chris Hatton Calendar is there in the center of the bottom shelf. Several years ago my mom was a substitute teacher on school picture day, and teachers get lots of free prints, so she gave them to us kids as a joke, and has ever since. She's looking great!
The photo on the far right on the second shelf down is the header image I used for the Full Send newsletter (RIP). There's a toy hot dog that The Front Bottoms threw into the crowd when a few of us went and saw them in Spokane. My complete collection of Lucky Peach magazine is there for inspiration. On the far left of the second shelf is a bottle from Mountain Dew's Green Label Art collection, which is one of the first cool cultural things I saw online when I was, like twelve. All my books about work are there, too. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman is great. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin is not good. Most of the others are fine.
I painted myself into a corner by starting with the offices from the Times spread and then moving down several tiers to my own. Set aside that the furniture is less impressive and the budget is several thousand dollars smaller, I also don't have the photography skills to make my space shine like the pros do, but that's okay. I'm really happy with how the room looks and feels and functions. I don't have any, like, wooden beads from Target filling up space just to fill up space.
I don't deserve any credit for the concept of filling a personal office with inspirational books and personal mementos, we aren't covering new ground, but it's still a valuable approach. Without it, my fear would be that trying to create something objectively nice-looking but devoid of any significance or value.
The problem with AirSpace, and the trap that Anna and Tom fall into, is creating spaces that could be anywhere, or belong to anyone. And so even though I have a name-brand office chair, or I have back issues of Monocle sitting around, I think the difference between me and them about my space is that it is not interchangeable with someone else's. I don't think people would see it on a blog about offices and say give me that exact setup. And it would look different if I were someone else. I am not anywhere in the world. I am right here, right now.
As it happens, we own a banner with the words Right Here sewn on. But that's in Becky's office.
The weekend of September 20-21: I moved offices.
The weekend of September 27-28: I cleared out and organized the items that had been stored in here (and also replaced our broken garbage disposal, which was its own thing).
The weekend of October 4-5: I cleared out and reorganized the garage.
You can see the progression here—the items displaced one week needed to find homes the next, and their new homes displaced still more items, which needed to go into storage, which meant finding new space to store them. I hate to say it, but next weekend might bring me out to the shed in the backyard.
During this time I also read a book called Organize First, Decorate Second, by Caroline English, which was not really an inspiration at all—the reorganizing process had already begun—but it was a nice little companion to help me mentally process the shape that things were going to take. The book itself was fine. English is a fun mom who turned a talent into a career, helping people just like you navigate life's little ups and downs (this is a type I think many of us would be familiar with). So I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book itself, but here's the nice thing: it was not a blog. I read the tips and tricks without any ads, and the text never jumped around because a video was loading, and there were no affiliate links for me to click. It was a luxurious experience.
Far be it from me to loudly and pretentiously mourn the decline of attention spans, etc. etc., people these days need to get off the damn phone and pick up a book, etc. etc. But there are advantages.
Speaking of books: Robin Sloan, a writer I really admire, has been thinking about books. He sent out a little manifesto about them. A broadsheet about ebooks, to be specific, printed on risograph. Every print copy comes with its own copy of the ebook, but with some unusual conditions. Every copy can only be opened 100 times, and it's also bound by geography—more than one person can open it at once, but not if they're over 1,000 miles apart.
It's a weird idea, but I'm all for weird ideas. How else would we see what works?
Here's the link to read (no sign-in or app download necessary, nothing like that). Go ahead and get there first, before the copies run out.
(I'm sure I've recommended Sloan's newsletter before but I'll do it again now. It is a significant inspiration for Septology.)
Also speaking of books, I've been reading The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. This second season of the newsletter is ostensibly focused on reading a great book every month, and I've been really excited to work through this one. I've meant to for a long time (I was given my copy in 2010) especially because I know it's a favorite of many of my friends—when I lived with Peter and Taylor, I think somehow we owned four copies between the three of us. But I'd never read it! I'd tried, but I couldn't get into it, the words just kind of bounced off my mind. Thankfully, finally, I broke through this time, which was probably my sixth attempt.
I have not finished it, though. I was on track for a while, but then my weekends filled up with house projects, and also I ran out of Spotify audiobook time, which I'd forgotten one could do (I'd been switching between reading and listening). So I'm about two thirds in.
One reason the reading process is going so slowly is because the prose is unusually difficult to get through. Umberto Eco wrote the introduction to the edition I have, and this is the main point he makes:
"The Count of Monte Cristo is of course one of the most gripping novels ever written, and on the other hand one of the most badly written novels of all time and of all literatures. Dumas' writing is all over the place. A mass of fillers, shameless in its repetition...the author [is] always, obsessively, bent on telling us that the chair they had fallen back into was the same one on which they had been sitting a second before."
This was unexpected encouragement. Looking back on my false starts, I had been willing to accept that I was just not good at reading, or that this novel wasn't meant for me at the particular time I attempted it, but turns out it's not my fault at all! I can blame Dumas! And I will!
Two quick observations there. First, it's funny. You wouldn't expect one of the greatest novels of all time to be badly written, and you also wouldn't expect the introduction to say so, but there it is. Second, I think my strength as a writer is on the sentence level, making sure the words flow together smoothly and clearly. It's strange to consider that a piece of work doesn't have to be neat and exact for the story to shine through. A good reminder for me to not prioritize the style over the substance.
As for the book itself, I'll wait and offer most of my thoughts until next month, after I've finished it, but there's one move I want to spend a little time with. Very quick summary: Edmond Dantes, 19, was falsely imprisoned in a solitary dungeon. A fellow prisoner, tunneling through the walls, ends up in Dantes' cell and they become friends. The old man tells him about a vast treasure buried on the barren, rocky island of Monte Cristo. The old man dies, Dantes escapes, claims the treasure, and devotes himself to vengeance on the three men who put and kept him in prison.
By the time Dantes escapes, we're several hundred pages into the novel, and he's been a classic hero the whole time. We feel terrible for him. He was so capable and innocent and earnest, his whole life ahead of him, and it was all taken away. And then immediately after escaping, one of his first priorities is to use his newfound wealth to anonymously rescue a friend who had been good to him earlier in life.
But then something shifts. Suddenly, we're following a different character ("Franz") with no explanation. Franz stops at Monte Cristo on an unrelated sailing voyage, and he's taken to see the Count. We're no longer in Dantes' head; instead, we're looking at him like a stranger would, and to be fair, we're strangers ourselves. He's unrecognizable in silk shirts and gold slippers, living in a cave draped with oriental carpets and full of bowls of exotic fruit. He has a whole roster of servants. Eventually, he meets Franz and his friend Albert in Rome, and then on to Paris, and all the while he's running all kinds of schemes—rescuing this person from bandits, insulting others to their face, renting a house that was supposedly the scene of a murder, inviting the killer back there, buying horses at four times their cost and giving them back for free. He has a master plan at work, I would assume, but I haven't seen how it fits together yet. I'm optimistic it's something great, because the novel is so beloved, so here's hoping.
In the meantime, though, the Count of Monte Cristo is a weird guy. But of course he would be, right? Edmond Dantes was a respectful and hardworking young man, but then he was left to rot alone in a dungeon for over a decade. And then he came into unlimited wealth. Either of those things individually would permanently shift one's psyche. Both of them together is unimaginable.
Dumas uses a lot of storytelling elements (prison, revenge, buried treasure, disguise) that have been common stock for storytellers for centuries, but to his credit, he didn't use them to create a fairytale. He took his characters seriously and wrote a novel for grown-ups.
So far my favorite moment has come when the Count is talking with Villefort, the man who sent him to prison through trickery and betrayal. The Count launches into a speech inspired by Matthew 4 when Satan tries to trick Jesus, but instead of responding like Christ does (resisting temptation), when offered the world, the Count takes it. He strikes a deal to become "an agent of Providence." "I may sacrifice my soul, but what does that matter?" he says. And he says he'd do it again.
Later, Villefort asks, "You say you fear nothing but death?" and the Count responds "I did not say that I feared it; I only said that that alone could check me."
The Count of Monte Cristo is at once our sympathetic protagonist, and he is also a deeply chilling figure. He is funny. He is not relatable. I wouldn't even say he is good or bad. I think one reason I loved that scene with Villefort so much is because it helped the character and the story click into place in my head: instead of thinking about the Count as a man trying to reconcile himself to the impossible life he's been given, he is instead an all-powerful spirit of vengeance, let loose in 19th century France upon three men who absolutely deserve it.
Excited to see if this theory holds up. You'll know a month from today.
Great tidbit from this one—Bryce and Aaron Dessner from The National do not know if they are identical twins or not. Me personally, I have a guess about if they are identical twins or not. But you can't be too careful these days.
When W.H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan in 1941, his syllabus included 6,000 pages of some of the most classic and challenging literature in the world. Dante, Shakespeare, Horace, Kierkegaard, everyone. A few years ago, a few enterprising professors decided they would try it again and see if contemporary students would be able to take it. Here's the strange part—this happened at the University of Oklahoma in 2018! I was there! Two of the three professors were my teachers! Why didn't I hear about this? Nothing to do but make up for it now, I guess (by reading Organize First, Decorate Second by Whitney English).
I found out about that course at the end of a rabbit trail that began with this blog post about enjoying reading. It's good! (Reading and also the blog post—both good)
"The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter." I cannot conceptualize that but I enjoy trying.
That's all for now. Expect the next issue November 7, which is a Friday. Thanks for reading. I'll see you then.
Tim