When I was a little girl everybody – my parents, my teachers, people I met in the street – told me that when I grew up, I could do whatever I liked. They didn’t tell me this because I was special or because I displayed any particular talent. They told me this because it was simply what you told children.

But nobody really thought it through, and now there’s a whole generation and a half of 20 – 30 somethings who are deeply, profoundly disappointed. Because nothing’s that simple.

You know what they didn’t tell me? They didn’t tell me: you’re going to get bills every month. You’re going to have to pay rent. You’re going to have to spend more money than seems decent at the dentist because you’re going to become very vain and not want all your teeth to fall out prematurely. You’re going to lust after expensive shoes. You’re going to buy expensive shoes, and you’re going to buy them knowing full well that a pair of boots is not a responsible investment. You’re going to discover cocktails. You’re going to discover debt.

Also they didn’t tell me other things, like, you’re going to get rejected. A lot. By people, by publications. And even worse, you’re going to be ignored! You’re going to be ignored by every major newspaper in the English-speaking world! You’re going to have job interviews that go really badly. You’re not going to get an “A” in every class and when you graduate from college you’re probably not going to have a clue what to do with yourself, even though you have a degree, so you’ll move across the ocean just to make things more interesting (and consequently more difficult). And then you’ll get another degree and guess what? You still won’t know what to do with yourself. You’ll never know what to do with yourself. They didn’t tell me that you can’t control who you fall in love with, or where he happens to be from.

Not that I’d have wanted them to. The entrance to adulthood is the first time we make these discoveries, and that’s part of the fun (the first time I paid a bill with my own money, I felt a shiver of pride. It was quickly replaced by a shiver of fear and horror, because responsibility feels like that, but there was a blissful moment whereby I accepted my responsibility for myself and enjoyed it).

The reality is somewhere between what we were set up to expect and what we’ve subsequently discovered. It’s not all shit, but it is all difficult. In a way this is good. Challenge is good. And I’m glad we were set up to be idealists. This is a beautiful thing. But the problem is, we have not prepared ourselves well for this challenge. We have dreams and an undeserved sense of entitlement that actually prevents us from properly pursuing those dreams.

Oh, it’s not quite as dramatic as all that. We’re not all slaving away in drunken ruins, falling asleep every night to the cold sound of our hopes dying (at least, not all of us). But many of us do seem to have gotten stuck. I know all these talented people, and there are some days I wake up and say, ha! 20 years from now we are going to be the creative royalty. We’ll be on Desert Island Discs remembering “our strange distorted youths”, publishing our memoirs, laughing over all the times we ran out of money or steam.

And then I remember that the one thing I’ve learned is that we can never assume this. Assumption does not equal actuality. The problem is that we assumed for too long that someday (next year, next decade) we would wake up with it all. We neglected to consider how we would get there. It’s like dreaming of crossing an ocean and forgetting that you need a boat, or a plane, or a really good pair of flippers. And money for the boat or the plane or the flippers. And the strength to undertake the journey.

So this post is for all the idealists who went to school thinking they owned the world and left thinking the world owned them. Everyone out there who is, in spite of the masters in astrophysics (or creative writing, or obscure African languages, or marine biology, or whatever), still doing things they didn’t expect to do after the degree.

Ladies and gentleman, put your flippers on.

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…Rhodri Marsden of The Independent was kind enough to quote last week’s sunday rant in his Cyberclinic post on Wednesday. It appeared in print and everything. You can read the piece here.

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Every sunday is the same: guilt-soaked.

It starts with writer’s guilt. There’s always this point in the afternoon at which I’m on the couch and I shouldn’t be. Writing is such a self-indulgent game; nobody else profits, really. If I do or if I don’t won’t matter in the long term.

Whereas, I think, the more productive things I could be doing as I sit on the couch will matter. I could actually get dressed, which would probably improve my self-respect (an old pair of boxer shorts paired with a stained t-shirt never did anyone any favours). I could buy some puff pastry so that the man can make a tarte tatin, which will later bring us both pleasure. I could do the laundry, which will ensure that I don’t wake up one morning midweek to discover I have no clean pants. A long walk along the river would be good for my health and my sanity, even if it is cold outside. Or, if I insist on staying inside and sitting on the couch, I could respond to any one of a dozen emails.

Yes, that’s what I’ll do! I think. Something nice and easy, that will make me feel more productive than I actually am, so that when I appear in the kitchen later after the man has made soup from scratch and done all the dishes I can confidently announce that at least I’m all caught up with my correspondence. So there.

Except that email is actually just another sore point. Because of that thing, where you need to reply to an email and then you don’t and then it’s too late, and you end up looking like an asshole when all you actually wanted to do was write a thoughtful and considered response. Which is a thing I do all the time. If I haven’t responded to your email, it’s probably a good sign – it means I actually really want to. And probably won’t anytime in the near future.

It’s just that email is basically too easy. And so everybody expects you to respond swiftly. A hundred years ago, a swift response might have taken weeks, and involved actual ink, melted wax, galloping horses, ships bobbing in the sea. Nowadays a swift response takes minutes, involves only the press of a button. And for some reason this just freaks me out.

So I guess I’ll just sit here paralysed by my own guilt and anxiety, and think about all the emails I need to send, and then after all that I won’t send any of them and in a week it will be inappropriate to respond anyhow. And I’ll feel guilty about it, so I’ll try to distract myself by writing something. And then I’ll think, gee, you should really go put a bra on and brush your hair. But that will seem like such a lot of effort, so I’ll think, I know! I can catch up on correspondence!

And then I’ll just end up staring out the window, watching the almost imperceptible change in the leaves and trying to decide if it’s Autumn yet or if we’re still in an in-between season.

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You know what I’m just so tired of? The idea that the internet is somehow the pinnacle of all that is and ever has been evil. I mean really, honestly, I find this the dullest thing in the world. Journalists, baby boomers, and Shoreditch hipsters in retro T-shirts have all united against an enemy that doesn’t exist. Cultural criticism is dead, at least until some brave soul somewhere comes to a conclusion which doesn’t rely on the assumption that the world wide web created some sort of massive vacuum that sucked the life out of anyone young enough to have had a computer before the age of 20.

I.

Take Camille Paglia’s recent Sunday Times Magazine feature on Lady Gaga (“Gaga and the Death of Sex”, 12th September 2010). I can’t actually link to the article, of course, but maybe you happened to read it. Supposedly it’s about how Lady Gaga is “an asexual, confected copycat who has seduced the internet generation.”

It’s not actually about that. It’s also not really about what Paglia dramatically calls “the death of sex”. It’s not even what it may seem on the surface: a sort of petulant rant that the stars of 20 or even 80 years ago were far superior to the stars of today (Madonna, in particular, fares well – she was “on fire” in her youth and even on her way to the gym impresses the author by being “brutally honest about publicly showing herself in ratty gear with no make-up”).

No, it’s actually just a tirade against an entire generation of human beings unlucky enough to have been born Post Golden Age.

The implication seems to be that no one who is part of the “internet generation” will actually read the article because a) it’s too lengthy, too academic; b) it can’t be accessed for free online; and c) they wouldn’t know how to respond, anyway. They just wouldn’t get it.

So without fear of dissent, Paglia lets loose:

“Generation Gaga,” she writes, making the assumption that “the internet generation” (undefined) and “generation Gaga” (also undefined) are the same thing:

doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions. They’re not repelled by the choppy cutting of her videos (in febrile one-second bursts) because that’s how they process reality – as a cluttered, de-centred environment of floating bits.

It’s a beautifully written and utterly damning piece of criticism, and there’s no going back. Having worked herself up into a sweat, Paglia goes on, now frothing at the mouth, wild-eyed and unable, it seems, to stem the flow of hurtful words:

“Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically correct educators.”

And there you have it. “America’s foremost cultural critic” has spoken.

II.

Or there’s this piece, posted by Richard Lea. For four paragraphs (the piece is only five paragraphs long), Lea manages to maintain the illusion that his article is actually about the proliferation of present-tense novels, what it means, and whether or not Philip Pullman was right to call it a “silly affectation”.

Are you surprised to find out that it isn’t about this? “The internet, mobile phones, Twitter,” Lea writes – and my heart sinks – “all gnaw away at our capacity to reflect; all push us to experience life as a series of unconnected moments. As we blog our lives away to the accompaniment of the 24-hour rolling news, can it be any coincidence that novelists are reaching for the present tense?”

Lea ignores any questions that his statement might raise – can a blog, for instance, not be a reflection? Presumably Lea regards his own post as reflective, after all, although it was published on the Guardian’s Book Blog. But one supposes his word count, and therefore his argument, was limited by both the medium of the internet and the alleged attention spans of the half-wits likely to stumble upon the piece.

III.

Then there’s this.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention…” begins the angry piece on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Quite possibly it’s very funny, with its reference to Ginsberg’s “Howl” meant to signify the cleverness of author Oyl Miller.

But, look. You know what this piece actually is? It’s not clever, it’s not funny, and it’s certainly, despite appearances (or perhaps intentions), original. It’s just another way of saying OH MY GOD THE SKY IS FALLING BECAUSE THE INTERNET HAPPENED.

The best minds of Miller’s generation, apparently, “bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes.” They “texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge”. “Recession wounded and directionless,” they, “sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes.”

The atmosphere of loneliness is palpable. I picture an updated Edward Hopper painting: two figures, back-to-back in a lit-up café, MacBooks open, eyes shut, Red Bull on a plastic tabletop, no traffic outside because we were all too busy being shallow to bother going anywhere.

Okay. I get it. We’re missing out on real life because we tweet and we blog. Now can we all for the love of God find something else to write about?

IV.

Of course you might say I’m only writing this because I feel I’ve been personally attacked. And you might be right. I am, undeniably, of the “internet generation,” whatever that actually turns out to mean. Of course, I’m not supposed to have a voice, or even the attention span to write a blog post this lengthy (but actually, I can hear a niggling voice suggest, the intertextuality is really only a crutch for laziness, hyperlinks only a symptom of patchy education!). And yes, I do want to stick up for my generation. I like being part of the internet generation. It’s the only generation I know of that doesn’t identify itself by age group. I know old people and young people who identify with this depraved group. We’re all blogging our lives away together, marooned together in the technocracy. We’ve created a community in the black void.

And are we really starved emotionally? I don’t know. It depends. It depends, frankly, on what that actually means. Like the death of sex, it sounds like a big important thing – emotional poverty! – and might actually be a completely empty phrase. Maybe I’m an exception. I left home early, I support myself (it took me awhile to get there, but I do), I have the capacity to be both trite and reflective using the same medium. And I feel emotionally charged, ridiculously alive. All the time, I feel that way.

So yes, maybe I’m an internet generation anomoly. More likely, we all need to get over the idea that the internet can be blamed for everything on this earth which is vacuous or scary or different than it was twenty years ago. Maybe journalists and cultural critics are just uneasy because the earth is continuing to spin under their heavy feet even though they are getting older and they think they’re in danger of losing their jobs (they’re not in danger of losing their jobs).

And meanwhile, internet users, particularly young ones, are scared. They’ve got shouty people telling them how shit they are all the time, and scary sexless ladies gyrating on screens in the other room, and they’re being constantly gagged and bound and put on display like apes and then set free again to run in the wretched wild of tangled wires and glowing screens. Guess what? That gets old really fast. Because in case you hadn’t noticed (or is this what’s actually scary?), we’re all grown up now. We can (most of us) read, and write. We earn livings, we pay taxes, we meet up in the pub for a few beers, go out to restaurants and talk to each other one-on-one like everybody else. We fall in and out of love in the same way that people have done for centuries – without grace. We have families, want someday to own a house, know we’re crippled by finances and yet continue to imagine that everything is somehow possible.

“There are no dreams in the New Immediacy,” Miller writes, which sounds nice and means nothing. No dreams? You think we have no dreams?

Frankly you can go fuck yourself.

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I.

This weekend I went on a treasure hunt in the study. I looked at all the books which are not ours, which might be the landlady’s, or a previous tenant’s. All the stacks of paper on the shelves which I had never before dared to investigate. These things have always been here, they’ve been here longer than us, and in a way I thought of them as furniture, or perhaps walls – immobile, flat.

But they are not like that at all. This house is telling other people’s stories all the time, if you listen. We need a box labelled “other people’s memories” to put in an empty room. The house is like a womb for the enigmatic, the wisps and shards that get left behind when someone has lived somewhere and then moved on. These things mean nothing to me, but they mean something to someone who does not even know that they are here.

Things like this: two copies of the same photograph, found in a copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Four people at a table in a strange wilderness. One of them gesturing.

Or the lecture notes for a conference on “The United States in the 1980s: The Reagan Years” (this house has always been a haven for academics). On one of the sheets of paper, a shopping list of sorts. “Roses. Wrapping paper.”

The manuscript, with the letter tucked inside, sent to this address, dated 26/7/91. Whatever became of this woman, her book? I could look it up, but it seems more poignant not to. I like the open-ended nature of it this way; anyhow, reading her letter (such a transgression! and such a thrill to read something which was never, could never have been, intended for you), it strikes me that the act of writing the book was closure enough for this woman (it “has done so much good,” she says in the letter), and it shouldn’t matter what became of it, or her.

So I’ve lived here for nearly three years and all the time these little (things? clues? stories?) have been here, like hidden emeralds. This is the thing. Wherever you are, however long you’ve been there: there’s always a journey you can take.

II.

Also there is Magdalen College. I have heard the bells ringing out and the choir singing from the tower on May Morning, but it is one of the Forbidden places in the city. Half of Oxford is Forbidden. That’s the thrill and the tragedy of it. There is a whole city here which we never see; the city, of course, that’s always been most written about, the city of college gardens and quadrangles, of cloistered walkways and great halls.

I’ve been in colleges before – a christening at Christ Church, for instance, or a dinner at New College during which I accidentally became so drunk (with wine, with admiration and fear) that I got lost on my way to the toilet and had to be retrieved by one of the kitchen staff who found me floundering in the larder. But it always amazes me that I can feel so intimate with this city and yet have seen so little of it.

And so after years of cycling past its entrance, I finally saw the cloisters of Magdalen College, the quadrangle and the gardens, the gentle path alongside the river, the deer all asleep under a tree. The hall, dark and empty, its entrance roped off, looking grim without the cheer of loud, gowned students and serious-faced academics passing port at the high table. I leaned against a wall; a couple passed, she was saying, “…and if you were a local resident here…” and I don’t know what the end of the sentence was, but I thought, that’s just it! and then didn’t know why I’d thought it. That’s just what? I am a local resident here. And yet I’m as enchanted by this place as the tourists, with whom I stand in sunlit admiration, and a kind of solidarity, watching the stones turning golden.

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