On making sense of the world.

- A Letter to My Thirties (Sarah Menkedick at Vela Magazine)

I remember seeing the swaying tops of the ficus trees and thinking, my life is going to get narrower at some point, inevitably, and perhaps that is not a bad thing. And that is when I saw you peek a mischievous eyeball over the apogee of my Twenties, and giggle.

How to make peace with this narrowing, its shape and structure and very inevitability, is the issue haunting all of my friends right now.

I am not quite on the cusp of my thirties yet and I am not so peripatetic, but that makes this essay seem no less pressing, no less relevant.

- The importance of ambiguity (Pico Iyer interviewed at the Economist)

The problem is that you can only make sense of the world by stepping out of it. More and more, in our age of acceleration and scrolling headlines and breaking news around the clock, we’re standing two inches away from the world, able to see what happened ten seconds ago but not able often to put it in a wider context or to see its long-term implications.

- How Smart Phones Are Turning Our Public Places Into Private Ones (Emily Badger at the Atlantic Cities)

Smart phones, in short, have given users the impression that they move through communal spaces as if in private bubbles. “They feel that everywhere they are, they have their privacy,” Hatuka says. Smart phones have created, the researchers say, “portable private personal territories.”

“The whole idea of public/private as binary is becoming much more complex,” Hatuka says. “Instead of thinking about public and private, we have to think about the private sphere becoming more dominant in public. For the smart-phone users, they’re totally, constantly engaged with the private sphere, and it’s reducing the basic roles of public space.”

I’m really interested in this, though I think I’d be even more interested to see the same findings addressed or presented without such a clear value judgement (e.g. “This is not a good thing). “The ubiquitous smart phone may even degrade the way we recognize, memorize and move through cities” – I’m interested in how it changes the way we recognize, memorialize and move through cities, but equally interested in the assumption that this is a degradation, not, for instance, an augmentation.

- The Lonely Ones (Emily Cooke at The New Inquiry)

Solitude is a problem for writers generally, who spend so much time alone rehearsing a form of ideal communication.

- Circle of Presence (Michael Sacasas at The New Inquiry)

The insertion of a tool like a cell phone into our experience reconfigures the “intentional arc.” The phenomenon is neatly captured by the expression, “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” How we perceive our environment is shaped by the mere presence of a tool in hand. And this effect is registered even before the tool is used.

Merleau-Ponty might analyze the situation as follows: The feel of a hammer in hand, especially given prior use of a hammer, transforms how the environment presents itself to us. Aspects of the environment that would not have presented themselves as things-to-be-struck now do. Our interpretive perception interprets differently. Our seeing-as is altered. New possibilities suggest themselves. The affordances presented to us by our environment are reordered.

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In defense of autobiography, the critic as memoirist, outgrowing oneself. This week it’s all about me.

- Filed Away: On Pinterest And Dreams (Cheri Lucas at The Equals Record)

In a way, I was doing something. And yet the more I pinned, the more I felt further disconnected from doing itself—a step in the opposite direction from the image, the idea, the what-if I had pinned.

- My day doing everything the internet told me to (Benji Lanyado at the Guardian)

I have spent £40 on a book about sex, some Lego and a magazine subscription. I have four new friends on Facebook, have “Benji likes Inside Volvo UK” at the top of my timeline, and I am worrying about whether my brother-in-law likes me. I have also needlessly pestered a senior editor at work, who now thinks I can’t spell.

- Outgrowing Oneself (Rob Horning at The New Inquiry)

Anyway, I was prompted to these bathetic thoughts this morning by reading Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams while having breakfast at a diner counter near a radio blasting a classic rock station. “Dance the Night Away” by Van Halen was playing, and next came “Mysterious Ways” by U2. The transition was seamless and unremarkable, only I can remember when I was in high school, when listening to U2 and not Van Halen was of intense social importance, when the difference was glaring, and it dictated how one wanted to perceived and whom one felt comfortable hanging around with. It seems incredibly silly now, but growing up in semi-rural, semi-suburban Upper Bucks County, the discontinuity between Van Halen and U2 created a space in which to exist, and a hope that one might turn out to be something other than what the suburban environment seemed to promise. You could listen to something like the Beastie Boys and think your friends were the only other people who got it — them and maybe some idealized people out there who also would have been your friends if you weren’t so isolated. The special few who would redeem the future.

- In Defense of Autobiography (Jennifer Miller at the Millions)

I spent years feeling like a failure before I’d even started writing, all because I was terrified of producing a cliché. If only I could have written a World War II epic with a chose your own adventure twist.

- The Critic as Memoirist (Mark O’Connell at Slate)

As an academic critic, I’m obliged to take issue (dryly, objectively) with the claim, but I do agree that one thing academic criticism does tend to kill is the academic critic—at least as a palpable personal presence in his or her own writing.

- Social Media: You Can Log Off But You Can’t Opt Out (PJ Rey at Cyborgology)

Is it really possible to opt out of social media? I conclude that social media is a non-optional system that shapes and is shaped by non-users.

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Sort of a weird week. But plenty of good stuff to read.

- Anatomy of a Dissection (Miranda Trimmer at The New Inquiry)

The squid was unsurprisingly strange: all tentacles and ooze and sets of sharp hidden teeth. But the dissection was strange, too. The longer I dissected, the less clear my agenda seemed to be. I poked around in the squid with a flagging sense of purpose and the nagging feeling that I was missing something important.

I read this and I thought almost immediately and effortlessly of the book that I’m working on. There was a point early on in the week where I had the sense that I’d pretty thoroughly dissected something, but I no longer remembered what the animal had been before I had taken it apart, why I was deconstructing and painstakingly examining it, or what I was meant to do with either the knowledge I’d gained or the remains. The trouble comes with thinking too much about something (like saying a word over and over again until it stops making sense, I guess); but of course, it’s hard to write anything unless you think a lot about it. Suspended between vacuity and the vertigo of too much is a tightrope that’s very hard to walk.

- The Art of Fiction No. 21 – Ernest Hemingway (The Paris Review)

INTERVIEWER

How much rewriting do you do?

HEMINGWAY

It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

INTERVIEWER

Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

HEMINGWAY

Getting the words right.

- Science fiction no more: The perfect city is under construction (Will Doig at Salon)

Cities are more than the sum of their parts because it’s not their parts that make them great. It’s the thing in between those parts — if you live in a city, you know what I’m talking about. “Cities built from scratch have generally failed because they don’t become cities that people evolve through,” says Shepard. “Quite often, it’s the productive friction these places produce that make them dynamic.”

- The Mutability of Truth: An Interview with Patrick Flanery (Malcolm Forbes at the Millions)

To “reflect” a country’s social or political situation suggests that there is one coherent narrative of what that situation might be, and also that it is the job of fiction to be “reflective.” Absolution tries to destabilize such ideas, to argue that there are many simultaneous, competing narratives, not only about traumatic events of the past, but also about the way in which the everyday life of a country unfolds.

- The Current Rage In Branding: Fake Authenticity Is Now A-Okay (Michael Raisanen at Fast Company)

The common denominator in this trend seems to be a yearning for the “authentic.” Interestingly, things don’t need to actually be authentic as long as they feel authentic. In fact, they can be completely fake. In fact, they can be completely fake. Take Hipstamatic or Instagram, apps that let you simulate the look and feel of different types of old film photographs right in your iPhone, transforming your life as seen through Twitter and Facebook into a French new wave cinema storyboard. People have the ability to edit and broadcast their lives, and a lot of them are choosing to do so through an idealized analog retro filter in which they candidly appear as if they weren’t aware of being watched.

Perhaps a postmodernist would call this inauthentic authenticity.

But is inauthentic authenticity more than a mere nostalgic trend? A cycle in the speeding pendulum that swings between the futuristic sportswear made of high-tech fabric and the retrospective L.L. Bean limited-edition wood-and-canvas canoe? Or is there something real in the zeitgeist: Are people reacting to an overproduced reality in which Hollywood fake is held up as an ideal? I think it is too early to tell.

Interesting that this has become an aesthetic (related to – but bigger than, or also distinct from, the faux-vintage aesthetic). I think in some ways it’s a very political idea. I immediately thought of something I read as an undergraduate, in a book called Thinking Points by George Lakoff. Lakoff uses President Ronald Reagan as a case study for political success of a certain ilk. “Reagan connected with people,” Lakoff writes. “he [...]appeared authentic – he seemed to believe what he said.” As a consequence: “voters identified with Reagan; they felt he was one of them…because they believed in the integrity of his connection with them as well as the connection between his worldview and his actions”. I was struck then, and remain intrigued, by the inherent disagreement in the phrase “appeared authentic“. Isn’t there something funny about that? Voters trusted Reagan as a leader not necessarily because his beliefs and background matched theirs but because he gave the impression of honesty; he seemed to embody his own values. But appearing to be a certain way does not necessarily mean you are that way; you can appear just as you are, but there is also no reason why you cannot appear as you are not. To appear authentic is by no means to actually be authentic.

I’m reminded, too, of the beginning of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust: “The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneakers with a bandanna around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court” – an apt impression of Hollywood also captured by Wodehouse: “What looks like a tree is really a slab of wood backed with barrels. What appears on the screen as the towering palace of Haroun al-rashid is actually a cardboard model occupying four feet by three of space. The languorous lagoon is simply a smelly tank with a stagehand named Ed wading around it in bathing trunks.”

I have a feeling I have more to say about this.

- Augmented information and the reproduction of visibility (Mark Graham)

This may seem like a relatively trivial or uninteresting story. However, I think it nicely illustrates how geographic representations don’t just influence how we think about places, but also, in a very real sense, influence how we move through, interact with, and enact place.

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A time/nostalgia/writing-themed list, sort of:

- On Distractions, Briefly (Alexander Chee)

If you neglect your own writing, chances are something, or someone, or both, have given you the idea that your Freedom is missing. That you’re not free to do as you want. Surfing the internet feels a lot like being Free. So, you do that instead of your work.

Wise words. Reminds me of the Merlin Mann podcast mentioned here.

- We Danced to Become Machines (Cheri Lucas at Cyborgology)

In Generation Ecstasy, music critic Simon Reynolds writes that while techno can be performed live, it is seldom born in real time. Instead, it is programmed and assembled sequence by sequence and layer by layer, using synthesizers, drum machines, and other electronic instruments. Later, it’s the dancer who actualizes the sound in physical space, who translates electronic into corporeal and sensual. “Techno is an immediacy machine,” writes Reynolds, “stretching time into a continuous present.” The beats that drove us were quick and constant—a hypnotizing measure of time itself—and dancing was an intimate, often carnal, yet largely public interpretation of what now looked like.

I love how Cheri writes about time in this piece. Here’s what I initially wrote in response to this, and when I was done I realized it was meant to be an essay in itself – hence this post: “It seems to me (right now, in this moment) that technology – or, rather, our conversations about technology, our thoughts about it as a subject – is all about time. In fact it seems to me that our conversations and our thoughts in general – whatever subject we land on – are all about time. Manipulating time, prolonging the present, connecting with the past or the future or both, “viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past“. We can reside in a “now” padded as heavily with what has been and what might someday be as we want, and yet everything moves too quickly; we’re nostalgic but not really looking backwards, manufacturing the impression or representation of nostalgia, knowing we should feel it (even knowing that we do feel it, perhaps) but unable to pause long enough for breath to let the weight of that knowledge sink in, pull us down or lift us up. I say “we” here but of course I mean “me”, and maybe you, too, if you happen to also feel that way. I have a thing I’ve been wanting to write about this – a thing, in fact, that I started writing – but I hadn’t realized until I read Cheri’s piece that the thing I want to write is about time (I thought it was about photography, though I guess it’s a little of both).”

- Heroic tedium and anti-nostalgia (Rob Horning at The New Inquiry)

But mainly what keeps me playing the album is anti-nostalgia. Beautiful Vision, though clearly an indulgent nostalgia exercise for Morrison (“Down the mystic avenue I walk again” and so on), inspires in me no memories of the good old days when I used to listen to it, it invokes no glory from my past, borrows nothing from the melancholy of my lost youth. Unlike Morrison, I don’t want to go back. He can go back for me. I’m moving forward. Or maybe I’m mythologizing my present moment for myself through sheer repetition.

- Dividing the Kingdom (Pico Iyer at Granta)

We moved from north Oxford to southern California in 1964 – when I was seven – and suddenly I noticed that living in the future tense could be as treacherous as living in the past; it was ideal so long as you were young and on the move, but it could be exasperating if ever you wanted to lay foundations underneath your feet.

- Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167 (The Paris Review)

I didn’t have the financial freedom to be a writer and have always struggled with that, but I also knew I didn’t want to find myself sixty-five years old and ruing the moment in my youth when I became prematurely practical. I wasn’t at all sure whether I would be able to survive as a writer for the rest of my life. But I decided to keep going for as long as I could and let someone else lock me up for incurable insanity.

This interview made me physically uncomfortable. I kept wanting to stop reading it because I kept thinking, I like Lorrie Moore’s writing, I don’t want to hate her, this interview is making me hate her. But she redeems herself, a little, at the end, I think. Anyway I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter if I think this one interview from a long time ago makes her sound cold, aloof, unwilling to participate in the interview dance (and maybe that’s how you should be, as a writer) – I read it through to the end. Sometimes being uncomfortable is good for you.

- Is There Hope for Pete Campbell? A conversation with Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser (June Thomas at Slate)

Kartheiser: With success comes a level of sadness. You think, “I’ll reach this goal, and then I’ll feel a sense of completeness, of wholeness. I’ll feel that I have accomplished something. I will see myself as a worthy man.” And it doesn’t really exist.

I’m not that fussed about Mad Men itself, but this particular quote about success – the thing that’s always just out of reach – seems staggeringly true to me.

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On loneliness and performance, primarily.

- Facebook as Rear Window: What Hitchcock and Gadamer Can Teach Us About Online Profiles (Michael Sacasas)

Leithart interprets Gadamer by reference to landscape painting. When a landscape is painted by Constable, its character has been altered, it is now a “landscape-that-inspires-painting.” When person maintains an online profile, they are now a person-with-a-profile. The landscape painting, Leithart continues, is an “event of being” because it is “an enhancement of the thing itself.” Likewise the online profile, although perhaps enhancement is not necessarily the best word to use here. Moreover Leithart concludes, “every encounter with the real landscape involves a moment of interpretation that is a ‘performance’ of the thing, and after Constable (even for many who are not directly aware of Constable) the interpretive performance is inflected by Constable’s work …” Translated: every encounter with a person-with-a-profile invites acts of interpretation that are inflected by Facebook

I love the comparison to Rear Window here. The passage above reminded me of this: “When we ‘see’ a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we ‘saw’ the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing)

- Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? (Stephen Marche at the Atlantic)

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

I didn’t read this piece immediately; I thought it would probably annoy me, and I felt like I didn’t have time to be annoyed, I didn’t have the energy for it. But eventually I read it, and it didn’t annoy me, not in the way I thought it might. There are aspects of it with which I disagree, of course – “using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another,” Marche writes, for instance, which seems to me utterly untrue (in fact, read Michael Sacasas’ essay above for an exploration of the rather more complicated way(s) in which offline/online experiences, profiles, and relationships coexist). But the exploration of loneliness itself is interesting, and I think there’s a sense in which what Marche writes here is true: “It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear.” And as long as we don’t get too bogged down in how a “friend” is not a friend and how connection is killing conversation (ahem, Sherry Turkle), I think it’s good to keep exploring.

- Is Bad Urban Design Making Us Lonely? (Nate Berg at the Atlantic Cities)

Bad urban design is one of the major causes of loneliness and asocial behavior in Australia, according to a new report [...] from the Grattan Institute, a think tank focused on public policy there. “Cities can help social connection, or hinder it,” the report notes.

- A Room of Everyone’s Own: The Writer as Public Fixture (Matt Lombardi at the Millions)

Coffee-house culture was vital to European literature of the last century, Ernest Hemingway , perhaps the patron saint of cofficers, not only wrote in public, but wrote about how he wrote in public (maybe even as he was writing in public). Hemingway was a great talent, but also a showoff who required validation, and in his youth liked to execute his art before an audience between shots of “rum St. James” and eyeing a pretty girl “with a face fresh as a newly minted coin,” as he writes in the first chapter of A Moveable Feast (a text that no doubt helped fuel the trend of Americans writing in cafés).

I hadn’t thought much about the performance of writing in public, really. But the truth is it makes me uncomfortable to write in certain public spaces (hipster-ridden coffee shops, say) because to do this is to invite interpretation. I have a fear of being labelled unfairly, which is aggravated by my general ambivalence about how, exactly, I would like to be labelled (“oh, she’s a writer“, someone might think, and I might want to say, “but not that kind of writer!”, but it’s hard to give the right impression when you’re still not sure what the right impression would be). But sometimes, when the stillness of home is starting to make me seasick and the view out my window starts to look like a nightmare-tunnel, the kind from which you can only escape by waking up, I like to take my laptop down the road to our local pub, which, true to its hordes of young, middle-class customers, has free wifi and a swanky coffee machine in addition to a selection of real ales and a decent wine list. I have rules for working here: I need a seat where my back faces the wall, so that passers-by can’t catch an inadvertent glimpse of what I’m doing (or, rather, not doing) on my screen. If I start to look too earnest, or spread too many books and papers out on the table, I need to offset the appearance of studiousness by ordering something stronger than coffee. But I’m only allowed a few beers before I have to call it quits: the window for productivity once you’ve begun your descent into evening laziness or loucheness is fairly small.

- You Say the Swimming Pool’s Half Empty, I Say the Swimming Pool’s Half Full (Geoff Nicholson at the Los Angeles Review of Books)

Is there nothing a swimming pool can’t symbolize?

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