Issue #9
December 31, 2023

I love traveling, but I don’t care for the part that comes before it. The planning, the booking, the packing. Prepping the house to rent out. I want to jump from formulating a travel idea to locking my front door behind me without all the in between.

Around five years ago, in an effort to streamline, I started making detailed packing lists, inspired by the late nonfiction queen Joan Didion. She taped her list inside her closet door, whereas I print one out for each trip. Hers included cigarettes and bourbon, while mine includes nothing more decadent than a neck pillow and snacks. We both list pens, notebooks, and current project materials, which she calls “files.” Plus skirts, sweaters, and shoes.

In her 1979 essay collection The White Album, Didion wrote of her list, “It should be clear that this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative.”

If her list shows a yearning for control, my lengthier, more detailed list may suggest an even more intense wish to impose order on chaos. My main list includes every single thing I could possibly want to bring anywhere, from dental floss to camp chairs. From it I carve out many sublists based on destination and length of trip, with file names like “Summer One-Week Plus” and “Urban, Fall.”

I tweak these or create new ones for each journey. Am I smart or symptomatic? You tell me. In my head, I hear my astrology-prone friends telling me I’m such a virgo.

My goal is to not have to think while packing, because trying to decide what to wear on a rainy night two weeks hence while staring into my closet induces paralysis. I suspect that the real secret to painless packing is to keep only a pared-down capsule wardrobe in my closet at all times, taking away any need to make choices. But I don’t expect to master that level of closet zen in 2024.

Once I’ve laid my list on the dresser, pen in hand for checking things off, everything goes into my REI Big Haul Recycled Rolling Duffel, which I use for trips of any length from three days to three months. (Pictured on its maiden voyage with its twin.) Yes, this means I check a bag, so I can slip into my seat with just a daypack while everyone is wrestling their maximum-size cabin luggage into the overhead bins.

Does packing stress you out or do you calmly grab and go? Streamlining tips welcome.

The OG Literary Meltdown

Twenty twenty-three was another year of nutty literary scandals. Bestselling novelist Elizabeth Gilbert indefinitely delayed her book set in 20th century Siberia because she didn’t want to “harm” Ukrainians. Would-be debut author Cait Corrain review-bombed fellow fantasy novelists, getting herself canceled by her agent, her publisher, and the internet. Romance writer Susan Meachen, believed deceased, came back to life, angering fans who accused her of having faked her own death. And ex-best friends and Instagram collaborators Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach, now bitter rivals, came out with dueling memoirs.

All of these scandals were firmly rooted in social media, with two involving reputational scorched-earth tactics on the reader-review site Goodreads. It got me thinking about the sensational British stylist Martin Amis, author of more than two dozen books, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 73. He became the center of a front-page literary controversy in the mid-nineties, a brouhaha that makes as little sense today as today’s scandals would have back then. It seems to have revolved around Amis asking for a large advance, switching agents, and getting dental surgery.

He also had the temerity to get divorced and marry an American at around the same time. American and British publications went berserk covering the story.

Better yet, the book at the center of the uproar — the one for which Amis dared switch agents and ask for a large advance — is a fictional tale of a scandalous literary rivalry between the wildly successful Gwyn Barry and his close friend, the acutely jealous Richard Tull. Amis said that both fictional writers in the novel, The Information, were based on himself, to the extent that they were based on anyone.

In the novel, Richard attempts to torch Gwyn’s career with false rumors and hired thugs. Maybe in a fictional 2023, he would have written fake one-star reviews on Goodreads like Cait Corrain. The technology may change, but authors driven around the bend with envy seem to be eternal.

Five Faves: News Stories from 2023

Sure, it’s tempting to look back on the year 2023 in human activity and write it off as a botched job. Death, Famine, War, Pestilence? Check! But auspicious things happened too, many of them in the sciences. The writer and entrepreneur Stewart Brand once said that “science is the only news,” which may have been an exaggeration, but it sometimes does seem like the major source of good news.

Viral Victory. In May, the World Health Organization declared an end to the Covid-19 global health emergency. Vast numbers of shell-shocked people emerged from our lairs and flung our ring lights off the nearest bridge.

Nobelle. Katalin Karikó became the 13th woman in 122 years to win the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. With her research partner Drew Weisman, she pioneered the mRNA technology that underlies two successful Covid-19 vaccines, and will likely soon be used to prevent and treat cancer. Artists painted murals of her in Hungary and Spain, and if people have any sense, there will one day be many monuments to her and Weisman around the world.

A CRISPR Cure. The first-ever gene editing treatment for humans won regulatory approval in the United States and Britain. The new medicine, Casgevy, treats sickle cell disease, an extremely painful and debilitating blood disorder that affects some 100,000 Americans, most of them Black. The drug uses the CRISPR technique to snip DNA, and I’d be remiss not to stay on theme and mention that noted females Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier invented these genetic scissors, for which they won the 2020 Nobel in chemistry.

The Glass is 35 Percent Full. Women now make up 35 percent of the 10 highest-paying occupations in the United States, according to a November study from the Pew Research Center. That’s up from 13 percent in 1980. In some of those top occupations, the figure is higher: Females make up 38 percent of physicians, 40 percent of lawyers, and, for some reason, 61 percent of pharmacists.

Species Survival. Sure, it took two decades to negotiate, but in March, nearly 200 members of the United Nations signed on to the High Seas Treaty, which will protect 30 percent of international waters from industry and overfishing. If executed effectively — okay, fine, a significant “if” — the treaty will slow down extinctions and biodiversity loss in the oceans.

In other news: Death, Famine, War, and Pestilence.

Let’s Talk

Write to me at eavesdrop@elisabetheaves.com. I read every email, and I’ll try to answer every question.

Happy trails,
Elisabeth