In Real Life

In Real Life is a free newsletter from writer/dancemaker/DJ Ann Glaviano, sharing her upcoming events – mostly free DJ sets through her longstanding dive-bar dance party, HEATWAVE!, but also her occasional public readings, dance performances, master classes, community classes, recruitment of people for upcoming art projects, etc. She usually includes a few links of things she's found interesting – and/or a free playlist, a recipe, a short essay. She sends the newsletter no more than once a month. You can learn more about Ann in her bio and find links to her work at annglaviano.com and knownmass.com.

IRL is a jokey title for an events newsletter in an era of perpetual screen time. But it's also a way for Ann to encourage joyful in-person gathering as a basic sanity practice. Despite her public-facing work, Ann is in fact a weirdo introvert who fights the urge to be a hermit, and the framing of this newsletter is as much a reminder to its author as to anyone else of the importance, and therapeutic impacts, of face-to-face human encounter and communal catharsis.

Ann ran a blog for ten years (2004-2014) called What the hell is water that she killed off, like most bloggers did, as the Facebook news feed took over. Over the subsequent decade, the platforms and algorithms of the dominant social feeds continued to morph and devolve, ongoingly and capriciously, throttling audience reach, dictating and churning forms of content, with no end in sight. Another function of this newsletter-as-sanity-practice for Ann is to escape the algorithmic feed and cut out the corporate billionaire middle man, restoring direct access to content for anyone who wants it, in the formats Ann prefers.

The site title What the hell is water / This is water is taken from David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College. Here's how it opens:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

And here's how it ends:

[T]he so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving ... [t]he freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about ... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

[It] has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with ... what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”