On Optimism, a New Project, and "The Legend of Ochi"

A monthly digest of reading, from books to Substack and beyond.

Apr 29, 2025

Here we are then — at the beginning of something new. With it comes all the hope and dread of doing anything creative in public, which sits on top of the usual anxiety that comes from staring at an empty page. Will I have enough worth saying? I wonder. Will I find the words with which to say it? Will anybody care either way? Who knows, except for the future me and the future you (if you stick around, dear reader), so I might as well set off from the present into that distant land of hindsight to find out if it all works out in the end.

And what is this new thing? I’m calling it The Round-Up. I’ll publish it once a month, and it will feature some of what I’ve read lately in the pages of physical books and in the digital pages of Substack.

But, seriously, what is it? The initial idea for The Round-Up came before I discovered

Rumaan Alam

’s quite wonderful Current Enthusiasms, but it was that Substack’s conversational tone that inspired my approach to this project. His piece about the common desire to make lists of what we’ve read and watched, written in his appealingly casual and intimate style, shaped my thinking about The Round-Up.

It will be a list of sorts, pointing you toward things that I think are worth reading (and links, where that reading is online). But it will be more than that. Expect short-form, off-the-cuff pieces written like a letter directly to you, in which I wax ecstatic about a new novel, or gush about some rediscovered classic, or wonder out loud about absurdity #481,516 in the growing list of strangeness that defines the modern world. Also, expect it to alter and evolve as I find what works.

This will also be a space where I can address you more directly. I’ll update you on new developments with Art of Conversation and ask for your input on various projects. I intend at some point to make The Round-Up available only to paying subscribers. I put my entire life into building Art of Conversation, and I am infinitely glad that anybody with an internet connection can read so much of my work for free. But some of that labour must earn me a living, or none of it will be able to continue. If you’d like to be a part of growing and sustaining Art of Conversation, click the button below:

Now — Edition #1 of The Round-Up:

Q. What moves you most in a work of literature?
A. Depictions of goodness that are not fraudulent or sentimental.

[George Saunders in response to The New York Times]

One of the reasons I read is to show me lives and worlds of which I’d otherwise remain ignorant. It’s a way of transcending the limits of my finite mind, forever trapped in what David Foster Wallace called a “one-by-one box of bone”.

Another reason for reading shows up in the sentence you just read — I borrow words to give shape to my own thoughts and feelings. My reading gives me words to articulate something I’ve already experienced. In feeling out the contours of that experience with language, I understand it a little better. When this happens — when I recognise myself in someone else’s words — it’s always a thrill that starts in that place just behind the eyes where it feels like “I” live, then travels down the neck to arrive in my chest and drop into my stomach, somewhere between which (the heart and the gut) resides my soul. Basically: I like it quite a lot.

So, I was gratified to experience it yet again when I read

George Saunders

’ brilliantly terse and pitch perfect response to a question from The New York Times, as seen above. Yes, I thought, exactly that.

The quotation from Saunders came to me by way of an email from the film studio A24, which sent out to its mailing list an article written by Isaiah Saxon, director of a new film called The Legend of Ochi. Saxon opens his letter, “Dear Movie Lover,” and invites us out of our homes “and into a movie theatre to see a film starring Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Finn Wolfhard, Helena Zengel, a gang of Romanian boys, a realistic animatronic puppet, and several people in ape suits”.

Saxon describes some of the thinking that went into making this film, his first, which took seven years. But he describes much more than the intellectual process; he tells us about the heart that went into it. He says his love for cinema began with a childhood passion for drawing, which led from ignoring school in favour of his art through an interest in sculpting, then filming those sculptures, then an early filmmaking career — all of which developed “an approach to filmmaking grounded in the sublime power of pictures and music to tell stories”. This led, at last, to The Legend of Ochi.

“I have tried,” Saxon writes, “to double down on this approach to art that began when I was five-years-old.”

That sentence woke the soul of the child I once was, which lives deep within me like the tiniest piece in a Russian doll, and I felt him leap with joy. How often I forget that all of this — my love of words and their choreography on the page, my storytelling, the imaginative leaps that take me from the book in my hand to the essay I write — did begin somewhere. When I’m most in contact with that big-hearted, wonder-filled, cynicism-melting inner-child, that’s when my writing is at its best. There is no writing without that foolhardy optimism that believes it can put something of value on the empty page at the start of each new thing.1

This belief in possibility, in the ability of art to do something in the world, more than that to do something good, is the place from where Saxon’s film emerges:

“It’s an expression of my optimism, which like pessimism, is of course incomplete and wrong. But I feel nobody can rightly claim to be a realist — nobody can truly know the world — so if you’re going to be wrong, be wrong in the direction of kindness and beauty.”

There it is: the vivifying thrill of recognition, of language that brings some useful order to the chaos of feeling, and a new expression with which to make sense of my mind for myself: If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong in the direction of kindness and beauty.

Reading:

This is simultaneously a lucid primer on John Berger’s philosophy of art as a revolutionary force, an exploration of Thomas’ own uncertainty about what he does as a filmmaker and critic, and a kindly guide for the rest of us finding our way through that same inner-labyrinth of meaning in our work.

Fewer, Better Things, Glenn Adamson

What do you know about the chair you’re currently sitting in? This is the question that opens Adamson’s joyful enquiry into what he calls “material intelligence” — the wisdom that comes from the physical world and how we interact with it. I’ve recommended and gifted this book to a bunch of people since reading it.

Language itself takes a bit of criticism in Saxon’s letter (he’s suspicious of the way it shrinks “the big sea of feelings” we’re made of into “a short linear string of symbols”) but that’s an argument I can have with him, in my own head, another time.