It’s 2012 now. I didn’t do my usual end-of-year post to mark the transition. I started doing this a few years ago. I didn’t intend to make a habit of it, but I make habits very easily, by accidentally doing the same thing over and over again, and so it became a habit. I thought about it this year, after we’d had our nice Christmas with family and I had eaten a lot of turkey and nibbled at the Christmas pudding and taken naps and baths and read so many books in a short space of time that I was getting them mixed up in my head and was feeling ready to get back to making things again. But everything seemed too small to bother writing about, and simultaneously too large to even comprehend, too large certainly to fit in a few paragraphs – “time passed, or maybe it didn’t,” as Geoff Dyer writes. Last year, while time was passing, or maybe not passing, I worked. I went to Scotland and wore espadrilles in the rain and they didn’t dry out for weeks. We re-visited Wales, we re-visited New York. I left my job – “without one to go to!” as they say, biting their fingernails, but of course that was the point, to leave without having a clear sense of what came next. And I’m going have a book published this year, as a result of what happened last year when I had no clear sense of what comes next, and even so I still have no clear sense of what comes next, though that feels right somehow, that feels okay.

Anyway, instead of a chronological list of things we did last year, or things that happened to us, here’s a random assortment of things I (think I) learned last year.

- Everything takes longer than I think it should.
- Related: I'm nearly always at least ten minutes late.
- I like stuff (clothes, clutter, knickknacks, bric-a-brac) a lot less than I thought I did.
- Making food! Awesome!
- But chopping things quickly? Still a struggle.
- Being on the radio is fun!
- I get annoyed by the internet.
- But I'm also pretty good at shutting stuff off. I like leaving my mobile phone in a drawer upstairs and ignoring it. I do this on an almost daily basis, and often not deliberately.
- Decisions: still difficult!
- London isn't entirely evil.
- Oxford can be a cruel city, too. But I still like living here.
- Reading is necessary for a healthy mind and body.
- So is swimming.
- Walks, wilderness: also good.
- Other people's advice doesn't really matter.
- Except when it does.
- But trying to get somewhere using someone else's route is the surest way to get nowhere at all.
- I don't hate Christmas pudding as much as I thought I did.

I probably learned other things too, and I probably didn't really learn all of those things last year (I mean, decisions have always been difficult, and remind me about the third point next time I tell you how much I want a new pair of boots), but there you go: an assortment. That's all, an assortment.

p.s. The photo is from the walk we took on New Year's Eve - through the mist and the slippery hills in Cumbria, with some friends. Later we drank a lot of champagne and made little pigs out of lemons, pennies and matchsticks. It was nice.

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I. Christmas cards

This year, some are hand-delivered. At the farmers’ market, I run into some friends; they pull a card out of a coat pocket, but it gets lost amongst the leeks and the potatoes and I never end up taking it home, let alone opening it. Oh well, they say, when I tell them the fate of their offering. It was just a Christmas card; it said Christmas card things – and besides, I think, we’ve seen each other six times since; all the card contained, I suppose, was the representation of a relationship, while here we are, living that relationship. Later, drinking wine at a friend’s house late at night, she produces a card, and I’m vaguely ashamed to have nothing to offer in return, but then, I’ve never been good at this; even the cards I send to my family, back in California, arrive embarrassingly late if at all, little attempts to disguise the distance between us that only serve to magnify it.

Others arrive through the post, personal but to the point. Let’s see more of each other in the new year, one of them says, which I like; it’s an active card, an invitation of sorts. But people of my generation, maybe people in general, don’t send those long letters that my parents used to receive at Christmas – round-robins, sometimes, but not always, full of life updates: how little Susie is doing in middle school and how Howard is considering Harvard but he’s not sure he’s got the SAT scores for it and how even though Tom lost his job earlier this year because of downsizing or company restructuring or whatever the fashionable reason to lose your job is, they’ve picked themselves up, are doing well, even managed a family trip to the Grand Canyon this summer!

This kind of correspondence served conflicting purposes – to highlight both the banality of everyone else’s lives (they’re human too, just trotting along at the same speed as the rest of us) and the magnificence of everyone else’s lives (they’re doing all kinds of amazing things that I’m not doing!). Who didn’t feel a pang of jealousy, knowing that acquaintances were traveling further, making bigger decisions? Who didn’t, also, know that these kinds of details, the cheery attitude, the photo of the smiling family lined up on the edge of the Grand Canyon (the edge of the abyss!), were just fragments? Those notes contained nothing more or less than a series of clues, designed to add up, when pieced together by detective-friends, to a life grander than the life actually lived.

II. Curation

Now we don’t need to send end-of-year updates. We’re busy constructing and tending to our grander selves all year round. We broadcast the bits of the truth we want other people to see every day, primarily online, combing our public image, curating our personal histories.

I’m thinking about this when I come across this post by Cheri Lucas on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Facebook Timeline. I’m struck by the connection Lucas draws between Lacuna, Inc. and “my curation of my own history” and am prompted to write my own rambling mini-essay in the comments:

“Maybe what’s interesting here is the collision between two kinds of curation – the curation of personal memory and the curation of one’s public self, or one’s public image, anyway. The former has always occurred – not as drastically, as literally, as it does for Joel and Clementine, but in little ways (misremembering the last months of a relationship, forgetting certain things, placing private but heavy emphasis on others, say). I know when I tell people I meet now about relationships I’ve had in the past, I’m not telling a whole story, or even a true (in the sense of factually correct) story – but I am, usually, at least telling a story which is emotionally true for me, based on my (curated) memory. But now, as you point out, “I am able to highlight what is important in my life—or what I want others to view as important—and fill in missing details”. We can not only present (and broadcast) a certain version of ourselves; we can also edit it, for an audience, we can do on paper (or Facebook, anyway) what we’ve always been able to do in our minds forever. I don’t know if this is a ‘bad’ thing, if any of it can be quantified, but I think it’s certainly raising questions about memory and identity that are fairly unique to our era.”

III. Casual Correspondence

I wrote a month or two ago about how the question of whether or not correspondence – in its grand sense, its life in letters sense – is dead, or dying, because of technology, doesn’t interest me. But the art of staying in touch – well, now, that’s different, that’s a rare art indeed these days, and “rarity…is the precursor to extinction,” as Darwin writes.

For me, casual correspondence is too difficult these days. Why write to someone (or even – the horror! – ring her), for no specific purpose other than to make contact, when you can track her movements (however heavily edited) online? And if she doesn’t broadcast any aspect of his her online, you hesitate: perhaps it’s deliberate, perhaps she’s hiding, perhaps your friendly advances are unwelcome. My inclination anyway, in an environment where we’re saturated with the details of other people’s lives, is to assume that the dissapearer has disappeared for a reason, has gone underground in order not to be found.

So we forget how to make contact, how to say hello, how are you, what have you been up to? There are plenty of people I want to say that to, but not only do I feel disinclined, I feel I lack the vocabulary – and also the medium – with which to do it. I don’t know how to say let’s stay in touch, but more than that, I don’t know how to stay in touch.

I do know this: staying in touch – or, rather, the art of staying in touch – is interactive. It is is not adding someone as a friend on Facebook so that you can passively observe; it’s not consuming the fragments, the breadcrumbs. It’s talking about the fragments and the breadcrumbs, filling the spaces in with conversation.

You could look at something like Facebook and think, how efficient! It’s saving so much time; people don’t have to write a million letters and emails anymore; all the necessary information is in one place; it’s never been easier to stay in touch! This is true, on the surface; but what it ignores is the possibility for different selves, different levels of revelation. I worry (probably needlessly, nearly all of my worry is needless) that if everyone sees precisely the same thing, we’ll forget how to tell different people different things – not in order to mislead, but in order to tailor relevant information, to revisit shared history, to retain a sense of dignity. And we’ll let this art, this tiny art, shrivel and become extinct.

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For the past few weeks I have been trying to capture the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window on video. This is harder than it sounds; they come off in bursts, because of a gust of wind, and by the time I realize it’s happening it’s already happened. This is like Autumn itself: I always think how much I love it, the way the leaves glow and the air goes crisp, and how much I’m going to take advantage of it this year, really go for walks, really explore and enjoy it. And then one day I am at my desk, trying to capture the last yellow leaves as they come down, and I realize that I’ve missed it! Again! Already the tree nearest me is bare, save a single red leaf on the tip of a single branch, and soon the cherry trees too will be naked.

So I still have no satisfactory video footage of the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window. I do have lots of short video clips of nothing happening. Someday I will find them and wonder why they’re there. I will wonder this for about ten seconds, and then I will delete them because they’re taking up space, and who wants ten short video clips of the view they see every day?

***

Trying to capture on video something which I cannot capture on video is just one of a number of things I’ve been distracting myself with lately. (By the way, is that the correct phrase – “on video”? It seems curiously analog for a process which involves nothing more than tapping the screen of my iPhone). The problem is that I do actually have something I need to be concentrating on (namely, writing the book which is actually going to be published). I don’t mean that I can’t concentrate (I can concentrate, I sat in the same chair for several hours on Sunday and read Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam in its entirety – not a long novel, but certainly an act which requires a certain degree of concentration). I just mean that I can’t see the connections between what I’m concentrating on very well. So on the one hand I have the thing that I’m mostly working on, the thing where all of my attention should be but isn’t, quite. (Is all of anyone’s attention ever on just one thing? At least part of mine is always on worrying about whether or not I’m paying the thing I need to pay attention to enough attention instead of the thing itself.) And then on the other hand I have these other things on the fringes, which are infringing on my ability to think clearly about anything.

***

One day, convinced that nothing in the world could compel me to do good work, so why bother, I watch an old episode of Silent Witness over lunch. I’m still at my desk, which makes it seem like I haven’t thrown the towel in quite yet, or at least, I haven’t thrown all of the towel in, I’m still clutching on to one corner, like it’s a lifeline. Last week was particularly busy, I tell myself, so I deserve this hour (which turns inevitably into three). But for how long can you honestly say you ‘deserve’ something like that? When has the debt been repaid?

Anyway, watching old episodes of anything is a dangerous game for me. When I’m in the throes of a TV show obsession I am worryingly unable to cope with real life. And as a matter of fact I’ve been spending quite a lot of time watching old episodes of Silent Witness recently. After that first sneaky hour a number of others follow, until they are not sneaky anymore. I am watching an episode at lunch, an episode after lunch, an episode before dinner, an episode during dinner, an episode after dinner. I could pretend that I’m trying to find something relevant in it; that any distraction can actually be warped by willpower into something tangentially but unmistakably useful. I’m studying character development, storytelling through cinematography, whatever. But in the interest of being honest, I’ll tell you the truth, which is that I mostly watch it for the pretty faces.

Last night (or maybe this morning, at about 2 am, just before I fell asleep and had fitful dreams about solving a crime which culminated in two exactly identical bodies lying on the mortuary slabs – not twins, just two versions of the same body) – it occurred to me that I also actually just like the show. There’s no shortage of unrealistic television dramas about people who solve crimes and cut up dead bodies and do vaguely sciencey shit – CSI, the other CSI, the other CSI, and so on – but this one, for whatever reason, is my favorite. It doesn’t make me squeamish, which it should (paper cuts make me squeamish, let alone fake autopsies). It doesn’t frighten me, particularly. It walks a fine line between being too ridiculous to be worth watching and representing very finely some aspects of the human condition – elements of the soap opera combined with elements of an Ian McEwan novel, perhaps.

Between episodes, I spend some time thinking about what it means that there are so many of these kinds of shows out there and so many people watching them. I’m not qualified to speculate on this, of course. I’m sure someone somewhere has done a study on it, or written an article. But in my concentration, I don’t think to look it up. The crime element explains some of the apparently endless appeal (a number of these kinds of series have been running for over a decade) – we’re drawn to mysteries, aren’t we, they’re easy to make compelling even in an hour-long slot. But beyond that is the question of whether it is morbid or wise to surround ourselves with all of these fictional representations of mortality all of the time. These shows may not be subtle, they may not be what astute critics would sneeringly call “good television”, they may stretch the limits of our willingness to suspend disbelief, but at the core is the simple truth of life ending in death. Blah blah blah.

But yeah. Basically what it comes down to is this: I like the show because when Tom Ward and Emilia Fox smile at each other over a microscope or a corpse, it makes me smile, too.

***

To try to trick myself into thinking about the thing I should be thinking about (that’s a retrospective excuse, of course), I start a side project. Or, at least, even though it isn’t fully formed as an idea in my head yet, I describe the latest thing that’s distracting me from the thing I really need to concentrate on as a “side project” in order to validate it (everyone needs a hobby, right? So why can’t the side project just be my hobby?). I try not to make it seem too concrete, because the point at which it becomes concrete is the point at which I need to acknowledge either that it is A Thing I’m Going To Run With or A Thing I’m Going To Put On The Back Burner or, worst of all but probably most likely, Not Really A Thing At All. I try to use words that are so ambiguous that stringing them together adds no meaning: loosely speaking, I say to myself, it’s about death, depression, anxiety, memory, and purpose(lessness). It’s really very funny to me, but I don’t know why. I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint precisely what it is that makes me laugh about this.

Then, of course, I find this piece about how to write funny by Steve Almond. “As a rule,” writes Almond, “the sadder the material, the funnier the prose.”

That’s it, that’s the thing, the idea that’s distracting me, or at least that’s the idea that happens to be distracting me in the moment I read it. Take Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which for an unrelated reason has been heavily on my mind lately. No matter how many times I read it (I’ve lost count, I’m afraid to say), it always makes me laugh. That’s a good sign: if its jokes (which seems woefully the wrong word here) relied solely on something theatrical, circumstantial – misunderstandings, Shakespearean situations – surely their funniness would, gradually, start to diminish. One can generally only be delighted by an engineered joke for so long (wordplay is another matter). But the funniest bits of Vile Bodies are the saddest bits – and the book is a tragedy, really.

There’s also Geoff Dyer, who’s at his funniest when describing – well, anything, but particularly those things which on the surface appear quite serious: anxiety, depression, aging, loneliness, ruin(s). Here he is writing about having a nervous breakdown in Detroit. It’s one of the saddest and funniest things I’ve ever read:

It was raining outside. Not a howling storm, just steady drizzle. The kind of rain that yields no sense of when it might ease up, that seems to be keeping itself in reserve so that it can, if necessary, keep going till the end of time. ‘It was raining outside.’ Gore Vidal derides someone for writing a sentence like that, feigning surprise or relief that it was not raining inside. But that day in the Clique I looked down and saw that it was raining inside as well as outside. My egg-smeared plate was becoming wet. Drops of water were falling on to my toast, moistening my eggy hash browns. As I looked it rained harder and I could not see. I was crying, not sobbing, just this steady leak of tears. And then, as I realized I was crying, I felt that I was in danger of sobbing. I got a grip on myself, stopped the leak, staunched it. I ate my wet eggs and looked at the rain outside, hoping that would take my mind off the rain inside. I’m having a breakdown, I said to myself, I’m having a breakdown while having breakfast. I said this to myself to calm myself down, to try to familiarize and render ordinary the extraordinary turn of events that had led to this internal rain. I stifled my sobs and ate my breakfast which did not taste any worse because I was having a nervous breakdown. When I had finished the eggs I wiped my knife with a napkin and spread butter and apricot jelly on the whole-wheat toast. I finished the rest of my coffee. I calmed down. I was no longer leaking tears but I was no less distraught now than when I was having a nervous breakdown, which I was still having even though I had, to a degree, managed to regain control of myself.

Why is it funny? You might ask that; I’ve asked myself that. But you might just as well ask why it’s sad. The tragedy is in the comedy and the comedy is in the tragedy. That’s right, isn’t it? Like Lorrie Moore (who Almond also mentions in his article). What makes A Gate at the Stairs so funny? Certainly not its wretched outcome – or maybe that’s precisely why it’s funny. Funny for not being funny, like everything else. When I was about six years old my best friend broke her arm trying to do a back handspring in our living room. For some awful reason I began to laugh. I ran into my room with our other friend, another witness, and we giggled inconsolably, behind a shut door. I did not find it funny that my friend was scared, in pain. But something about the inevitability of the situation, perhaps, something about the irreversibility of it, elicited an involuntarily hysterical reaction – like the scene in Outnumbered where Sue submits to a fit of laughter at a funeral.

“So why are these books so funny?” Almond asks, after listing his own favorite funny books – The Catcher in the Rye, Money, Birds of America. “To begin with, because their authors reject the very premise that suffering should be treated only as an occasion for sorrow. They view suffering as something more like an inevitable cosmic joke, one that binds us all…Their characters make us laugh because they tell us the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight. And because they continually violate the normal boundaries of decorum, by confessing thoughts and feelings the rest of us spend our lives concealing. We’re both shocked and gratified at their candor, and so we laugh.”

***

I wish I could connect this to what I started writing about here, but as I’ve said, the bit of my brain that makes connections between things isn’t doing its job. You could blame all the TV or the navel-gazing or the short days or the pleasantly dull routine I’ve settled into or whatever, but I don’t really think it’s symptomatic of anything; it’s just the way things are at the moment.

Anyway that’s more or less what’s been going on in my head/life for the last few weeks.

❧

On Thursday I was on BBC Radio Oxford, talking about the project I’m doing with Oxford band Little Fish. If you’re one of the two people I haven’t guilted into listening to it yet, don’t worry! It’s available online for another four days [edit: my bit starts at around 1:12:00). I haven’t actually listened yet, because every time I hear my own voice I cringe, but I enjoyed the experience. I arrived very early and I’d had too much coffee beforehand, which may explain why every other word out of my mouth is “exciting!” or “excited!”, but mostly it went well, and the Jo, the host, made me feel comfortable and even vaguely interesting. Yay!

In other news the leaves outside my study window are red, the ice cream truck is still driving around the block on weekend afternoons, I can’t seem to find a decent pair of jeans anywhere (but that might be because I can’t seem to bear being in a shop for more than five minutes at a time), I’m alternating between D.H. Lawrence and David Sedaris before bed, and I’ve had cheese on toast for five out of seven lunches this week.

How’s your October been?

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Punting, July. I remember this day because it was cooler than it looked, too windy for punting really. In the evening we sat around a fire drinking wine; the jumper I wore still smells faintly of woodsmoke, which is appropriate for the transition into Autumn.

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