- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

I spoke from my (ongoing) experience writing this book, and I suspect the talk would have been different if I was writing in a more straightforward genre – if I was writing a biography of a band, for instance, rather than this series of essays that use them as a focal point but attempt to explore a set of much broader questions about the logistics and love of making music (or making anything, really). But even very broadly, I think the way we represent music and musicians on paper is interesting, and I tried to refute – or at least address – the old adage that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. Anyway, here’s the text I based the talk on, for anyone who’s curious:

On Writing About Music

I’m going to be talking to you about writing about music. Supposedly I’m qualified to do this because I’m writing a book about music. But I’ll tell you what: I’m not sure I’m that well qualified to write a book about music. For one thing, I’m not a musician, and I never wanted to be a musician. I played the violin for a few years, but I played it so badly that a man once paid me not to busk. I’ve always enjoyed listening to music, of course, but this is really the extent of my relationship to it: as a listener. So I can only write about it – and read about it – from that perspective.

Anyway, the first time I ever felt any desire to write about music, I was 17. I was on a plane to Boston, going away to college. I was reading a copy of the New Yorker; an article about Bjork. And I got to the end of it and I thought, I don’t even like Bjork that much, but I wish all music writing was like this. I want to do this. About an hour later I’d forgotten all about the article, and about my ambition. Over the next four years I discovered sex, keg stands, and Foucault, but I don’t think I wrote a single word about music.

And now here I am, writing a book about music.

It turns out that the Bjork essay was written by music critic Alex Ross. A few months ago someone gave me a copy of Ross’s book Listen To This, which is an anthology of some of his writing. It includes that essay on Bjork, which I’ve now re-read. And the funny thing about it, I think the thing that initially left such an impression on me, was that it isn’t really about music at all. It’s about Bjork, and Bjork is a musician, and her music is the reason the essay was – and remains – relevant, and it sort of underpins the whole thing. But the interesting parts of the essay aren’t the parts where Ross describes Bjork’s music. Occasionally he does try to describe the sounds. He uses phrases like “a misty mass of overlapping lines,” “lurching rhythms”, “craggy, medieval-sounding melodies”. And these phrases sound nice, I guess. But what do they mean? I don’t know – to you they may mean something. To me – as a non-musician, mind – they mean pretty much nothing. I can’t hear the song in my head or understand what “craggy, medieval-sounding melodies” are meant to make me feel.

No, the reason Ross’s essay is so good is that he’s not just writing about music; he’s writing around it. The more myopic a piece of music writing is, I think, the less resonant it becomes. When you try to transpose the notes of a song into words in a sentence, it comes out sounding a bit flat.

Which is why, to a certain extent, I can understand the notion that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. Elvis Costello said that, or maybe it was Martin Mull, or Steve Martin – there’s some disagreement about this. Anyway, I think a certain kind of writing about music is probably like dancing about architecture: abstract, poetic at best, but ultimately futile. But writing about music certainly doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, Alex Ross opens Listen to This by mentioning and then refuting that very quote. “Writing about music isn’t especially difficult,” he says – which of course is exactly what I want to read, as I’m slaving away at my laptop, struggling to write about music:

Whoever coined the epigram “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” […] was muddying the waters. Certainly, music criticism is a curious and dubious science, its jargon ranging from the wooden (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with three Gs and an E-flat”) to the purple (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with fate knocking at the door”). But it is no more dubious than any other kind of criticism. Every art form fights the noose of verbal description. Writing about dance is like singing about architecture; writing about writing is like making buildings about ballet […] So why has the idea taken hold that there is something peculiarly inexpressible about music?

I think one possible answer is actually in his Bjork essay. At one point, describing a conversation with the musician, he mentions that “Bjork often uses the second person to close the distance between herself and others.” I think, at its best, music does this too. So maybe the perceived problem with writing about music is that it seems to reintroduce the distance closed by sound and memory: when you listen to a song, there’s very little standing between you and the performer, but when you read about that song, there’s at least one other person (the author) standing between you and the performer.

Which leads us to the question of perspective – the question of the author, really. There’s a bit in the preface to Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful, which is a book about jazz – a book I haven’t actually read, by the way, I did try, I spent a solid half a day in January trying to wade my way through. I made it to page 22, and it’s been sitting optimistically on my bedside table ever since, gathering dust. I did read the preface, though, and the afterword, which I only read for the purpose of giving this talk. Anyway, the preface and the afterword are actually very good; and in the preface Dyer describes the process of writing the book. “Throughout,” he says:

my purpose was to present the musicians not as they were but as they appear to me. Naturally the distance between these two ambitions is often very great. Similarly, even when I appear to be doing so I am not describing musicians at work so much as projecting back onto the moment of the music’s inception the act of my hearing it thirty years later.

I always think of music as being circumstantial. You might have two people listening to exactly the same recording of exactly the same song, at exactly the same time, feeling – hearing – different things. So it makes sense that writing about music is circumstantial, too. To the extent that listening is about an emotional rather than a rational response, it’s tricky to write about: the way we affix memory to song will cloud our judgment of it and therefore our interpretation of it. For instance, every time I hear “Stars of Track and Field” by Belle and Sebastian, I have a very visceral reaction; I feel fear, I can actually smell what it was like to be on my high school track team. I used to listen to that song over and over again as a way of convincing myself that I wanted to be a runner. And it’s kind of hard to capture that as a simple description of sounds. On the other hand, there’s a balance to be struck: music can act as Proust’s madeleine, but the author needs to remain aware that the music is still there. Otherwise you just have a story about how a 14-year-old girl didn’t really want to be on the track team – which is, frankly, kind of boring.

I feel like there’s a good analogy here. In December I went to a gig at the Rotunda – Gaz Coombes was playing, Little Fish were supporting. If you haven’t been there, it’s a little tiny round two-storey venue. And it was the first time I’d been there, and I was so taken with this idea that you can go upstairs and stand not just above the performers but behind them. It’s like I could see exactly what they could see, but not in exactly the way they could see it. So I stood up there for the whole night, half paying attention to the gig and half worrying that I was about to spill my mug of mulled wine on someone’s head (which, luckily, I didn’t).

Anyway, I think writing about music is like that. You can be in the audience, staring the musician in the face, or you can stand above and behind him, looking out at the response – but either way, you’re situated in the story too, and you have to be aware of that.

So I guess what I’m suggesting is that when we write well about music, we’re not really writing about music. If all goes to plan, I’ll have written a book that is kind of about music, but is more about ambition, disappointment, change, love, money, ordinary human interactions. What I’m looking for is not a way to accurately represent what something sounds like, but a way to begin to identify a mysterious internal driving force, the thing that compels musicians to keep going, and to reconcile that internal driving force with the harshness of the external world. What makes a band keep ticking, even after so much struggle and adversity? Why play music at all?

The book I’m writing is centered on an Oxford-based band, Little Fish. About a year or so ago, they actually asked me to write them a new biography. Band biographies are sort of tricky – so often they seem to follow the same weird pattern, you know, like, “Hailing from,” – that’s a big one, why do so many band biographies start with ‘hailing from’?” – they’re always things like, “hailing from Oxford, Little Fish sound like a cross between the Velvet Underground, the Spice Girls, and the mating call of a kakapo.” Anyway, I went to interview the band for the purpose of writing this biography, but even so, it was actually really hard to write a biography that didn’t sound like that, because it’s hard to decide where an ongoing story should begin and end. Little Fish’s story starts with a girl picking up a guitar and writing a song, but everything is still happening, they’re still evolving.

And then a few months ago, Ben, who plays the Hammond for Little Fish, showed me some liner notes from an old Velvet Underground album. The liner notes included an essay by a guy called Elliott Murphy. And Murphy starts his essay by saying, “I wish I was writing this a hundred years from today. Then, I’d be writing about music made by dead people. There’d be a beginning and an end.”

And when I read this, I thought, Yes! My life would be so much simpler if I had chosen to write a book about Mozart! But instead I’d chosen to write a book centered on a band for whom change has been a central theme, particularly recently – they left their label, they lost their drummer, they’ve recently added two members to the line-up, right now they’re on some crazy tour of China. And I thought, yeah, it’s easy to write about music made by dead people – not because they’re dead, but because once they’re dead they can’t keep changing, though our perception of them might. Trying to write a sentence about a band that’s still very much alive and kicking, let alone a book about them, is a crazy idea, because just when you think you’ve started to understand something integral about them and who they are, something’s shifted.

But then again, it’s not always so easy to write about music made by dead people, either. As Alex Ross points out, “the difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe sound but to describe a human being. It’s tricky work, presumptuous in the case of the living and speculative in the case of the dead.”

So maybe even the dead are not done changing, not done saying new things. There is no beginning and no end; just what we choose to extrapolate from our own encounters with a sound or a song. And I guess the answer, if there is even a question here, is that there is no answer. In a way, there’s no such thing as music writing; it’s all just a variation on fiction, on speculating (or presuming) what moves and motivates people.

1.

“[An image] is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved – for a few moments or a few centuries.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing)

I’ve been sifting through the paper record of my existence. I’m in the process of renewing my visa to live in the UK and am required to prove various things – that my partner and I live, for instance, in “a relationship akin to marriage”, that we have lived together for at least two years, that the marriage our relationship is akin to is a genuine one – “not like a marriage of convenience”. These are trickier things to prove, as it turns out, than they sound. There’s plenty of evidence that I exist – bank statements, letters, a birth certificate. There’s evidence that he exists. But how much documentation is not here, has no corporeal form! Somewhere I read that it can help to include photographs of yourself and your partner with your application – proof, of a sort, that you’ve been in the same place at the same time many times. But the hard-copy photograph has been a casualty, at least for me, of convenience. I spent $900 shipping books across the Atlantic when I moved here, but felt fortunate that I had no photo albums to fret over. My pictures are on laptops or online; all of the images of the two of us together are in iPhoto, mostly unseen and thus forgotten; or else on Facebook, tagged, organized into neat albums, depicting holidays and long summer nights.

I do have a handful of hard-copy photographs, accumulated over the years, residing in a small envelope. Now I see them in a strange light: I consider each one, ask myself, what does this photo prove? I realize that none of them prove anything. None of them mean anything except what they mean to me. I dig through drawers, excavating my own study. There is a photograph of my partner holding a friend’s (then) newborn baby. That baby is now a wild-haired creature of two and a half, who leads his parents by the hands out of a café, proclaiming, “let’s go for a walk!” The photograph is a record, but seems not to represent a real thing: I can remember my amazement at holding such a small human, but that amazement has been replaced by my amazement at how that small human is bigger now, can express himself. Is the photograph of the baby or the evolution of our amazement?

On my computer are hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs. These photographs, suspended as they are in a kind of virtual space, have no narrative other than the one that context can suggest: you see what, chronologically, came before, and what came after. You see the photo you took hours or days before and the one you took hours or days or perhaps only seconds after. But each captured moment is whole without these dubious clues, too; each image is self-sufficient – like what you would see if you were to walk around with your eyes closed and then, at irregular, distanced intervals, open them, for just an instant.

“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory,” writes John Berger in About Looking. “It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

2.

Facebook bought Instagram. I don’t know what this says or what it will mean, least of all from a business or industry perspective. And I don’t think I need to speculate on it, because everyone with a brain and a blog has already done so – a perfect illustration of how difficult it is to keep up these days. Already what I’m writing about is old news, even if it’s something still ongoing; everything moves too quickly; it’s impossible to settle into one moment or one issue.

So you may already be sick of reading about how Facebook bought Instagram, sick of reading about any associated topics. But 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 these days. Manipulating time, prolonging the present, connecting with the past or the future or both, “viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past“, as Nathan Jurgenson writes in his essay on “The Faux-Vintage Photo”:

The momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past. In fact, the phrase “nostalgia for the present” is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that “we draw back from our immersion in the here and now […] and grasp it as a kind of thing.”

In a recent essay on “techno, dancing, and the augmented self,” Cheri Lucas writes:

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.

When I started to write this post I thought it was going to be about photography, about the faux-vintage aesthetic and what it means. But as I began to write and read, I realized it was not about that at all, or at least, not all of it was about that. It was an essay on time, of course, and it was reading Lucas’ piece that convinced me of this. The quest or compulsion to interpret “what now looked like” is increasingly complicated. We can now reside in a “now” padded as heavily with what has been and what might someday be as we want, and yet in a sense “now” itself is obsolete. Already we’re moving on, even as we arrive. We’re nostalgic but not really looking backwards; we’re manufacturing the impression or representation of nostalgia, aware that we should or do feel it, but unable to pause long enough for breath to transform that awareness into anything constructive (or destructive), to let it sink in, pull us down or lift us up.

3.

So what about the faux-vintage aesthetic? “The cosmic significance of Hipsta/gram is not physical,” writes Matt Pearce in his excellent piece “Shoot Hip or Die”:

It ages digital photos for distribution in a digital world. But nothing really gets older online; the only aging of things here comes from the erosive force of changing human sensibilities. The black of that North Face jacket looks just as black, but the point of wearing it has faded a little. Here there is only the appearance of getting older because everything else has gotten much newer. The pixels do not outwardly become worn. They are like grains of sand. If one is destroyed, it’s too small for us to know it’s been annihilated. And there is so much sand.

Interestingly, both Pearce and Jurgenson allude to a supposition that “Hipsta/gram” (Pearce’s amalgamation of Hipstamatic and Instagram) is transient, a temporary aesthetic – a fashion, perhaps. Maybe they’re right; Instagram users, irked by Goliath’s purchase, are already lamenting the inevitable decline of the service – but maybe this resentment is really a mask for a more general change of heart. As my friend Ben Walker put it, “I was starting to get bored of the faux-retro photo style anyway (real retro photos are another thing entirely), and the new iPhone camera takes higher quality photos that don’t need retro filters to look good.”

Walker goes on to write of his own impending fatherhood, and of a corresponding attitudinal shift. “There’s so much great stuff on the internet, but very little of it is to do with what’s going on right now,” he writes. “These days […] I’m less and less worried about missing out on new stuff (new gadgets, apps, social networks, bands, memes) and more excited by finding and maintaining old stuff (organs, pianos, old gadgets, piles of wood). All of which sounds suspiciously like I’m getting old.”

Even to acknowledge that “I’m getting old,” as we all are, is to slip out of the rope-binds of the constant present, to evade the lure of online perpetuity. Nothing gets older online; the North Face jacket, as Pearce points out, never fades. But meanwhile I see wrinkles under my eyes that were not there when I first moved here, and a part of me is pleased when the Instagram filter obscures such details, casts a weathered sheen over a new image, makes it (by projecting it simultaneously into the past and the future) timeless. Why are we drawn to the evocative falseness of “Hipsta/gram”? For the same reason we may be about to reject it: because I am getting old, and you are getting old, too.

4.

“During the course of the play the table collects this and that, and where an object from one scene would be an anachronism in another (say a coffee mug) it is simply deemed to have become invisible. By the end of the play the table has collected an inventory of objects.” (Stage directions for Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia).

One of the photographs I encounter on my journey through the small envelope in my study is of my 12th grade English class in 2004, just before graduation. There are five of us, including our teacher; one student is missing, so in his stead we have written his name on a roll of paper towels and placed it in the center of the table. We lean forward slightly, to fit into frame. The photo was taken on my old Minolta; I know this because I can see the lens cap on the table in front of me, and because it’s in black and white. I used to use only black and white film – partly because it meant I could develop photos myself in the dark room and partly because the incongruity of it appealed to me, in the same way, perhaps, that now I tint my photographs with Instagram filters or manipulate them with HDR software.

I think of the tension between the accumulative nature of memory – the inventory of objects that collect on the metaphorical table – and the way an image seems to isolate a moment even as it binds it to either what is being represented or who is viewing it (or both). In another photo – one of my favorites – a good friend, wearing a formal black dress, empties bath salts into a tub at midnight in an expensive hotel. It was taken just after we had graduated from high school, and my memory of that evening is composed of linked-but-isolated episodes: sitting on the night-blackened beach with a few friends, gulping red wine from a lone bottle that had miraculously materialized just as we were about to give up any hope of finding something to drink; eating apples next to a swimming pool; watching a few disconcerting minutes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And yet the photographic evidence of the evening reflects none of this; it reflects only the spaces in between the memories.

The photos I have from that evening are, in a sense, the frame or foundation for a structure of memory built to evoke nostalgia; I took them knowing full well that someday I’d be sentimental, and I knew this because part of me was already sentimental. As soon as you remove yourself from a situation, even if for an almost-unmeasurable instant, just to press a button, you give yourself the opportunity to see what “now” looks like from a different vantage point. What if I’d had the option to pre-fade the photos, create them with the scars and scratches that time has now given them? “Instagram enhances the narratives we weave by mimicking the materiality and randomness of old photographs,” writes Laura Fettig:

The hike you took, the latte you drank, the sunset you saw, that day at the park with your friends – these events become subtle markers for the kind of life you lead. Instagram isn’t just about sharing photos or networking: it’s about starring in your own movie. It’s about making sure your life looks beautiful, and not leaving it up to chance.

At the end of her essay, Fettig describes finding “fistfuls of crumpled and faded photographs” at her grandmother’s house. “I laid them out in good light and took a picture of each of them with my phone,” she writes. “50 years from now, or 100, or 200 – who will be able to tell the difference?”

5.

In Croydon, after a long period of waiting on glistening red chairs while children, in various states of hysteria, run screaming or laughing past us and a disembodied voice calls ticket number after ticket number to counter after counter, I’m invited to submit my application for further leave to remain in the UK. I have curated a large selection of documents that I hope prove all of the things I need to prove; I slide folder after folder across to the woman on the other side of the glass.

“Are these personal photos?” she asks me, holding up a folder that says, “personal photos”.

“Yes,” I tell her. I have gone through the special trouble of having them printed out, directly from Facebook, with URLs, dates, comments from friends and family members, still visible. I worry maybe it looks like I’m trying too hard, but in a sense, this is all the real proof I have to offer, even after five years of co-habitation. I know what a farce it makes of proof, but I also know that in all the implied moments between these photographs is everything they could possibly need to know.

“Oh,” she says, smiling soothingly. “You can take these back. We don’t look at photos.”

6.

Berger again:

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.

- 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?

- As Fenway Park Turns 100, Remember That It Almost Didn’t Make It (Anthony Flit at the Atlantic Cities)

One downside, as my Boston Globe colleague Bob Hohler points out, is that it is an experience increasingly out of reach for middle-class families. The Red Sox lead the league in actual average home ticket prices at $151.10, followed by the Cubs ($108.70), the Phillies ($100.71), the Yankees ($90.21) and the Nationals ($88.24). It’s hard to say how much the cost of all the renovations and improvements at a 100-year-old facility factors into this – the major cost being the payroll for the players – and harder still to imagine that a brand new ballpark wouldn’t trigger this same kind of impact on fans. But historic preservation is always costly.

I lived, for a bit, just around the corner from Fenway Park. In the summer, if the apartment windows were open and it was a still night, I could hear the crowds roaring. But I only saw the Red Sox play once. My boyfriend at the time had been given a pair of tickets by a woman who approached him in the street on his walk home from class and asked if he wanted them. It was a sticky September night; the vendors on the street were selling “Jeter Sucks A-Rod” shirts and the air smelled of things about to happen, or about to change. Somehow the serendipity of the evening and the way the grass looked under the floodlights made it seem like it didn’t really matter who won or who lost.

- The U.K.’s most depressing shopping centers, when they were new (Mark Byrnes at the Atlantic Cities)

“There’s always something fascinating about a previous generation’s view of the future — what makes many of the brutalist landscapes so interesting is that they were views of the future that were actually built and have decayed and degraded over our lifetimes,” says Gatenby. “The things I find and post are not about nostalgia, they’re about creating a momentary view of what things were actually like.”

- Surfing the Sahara (Nathan Myers at Matador Network)

I remember a local news reporter asking us why we’d come here. It’s a good question. I’m thinking, why is there a news crew here?

I like the incongruity of these photos, of the whole thing. When I was little I used to spend hours looking through my father’s back issues of Surfer’s Journal, not reading but falling into the photographs, alarmed and amazed in equal measure. Maybe that’s a story I’ve told here before, I can’t remember, but for some reason it’s left a big impression on me and whenever I see a story about surfing, catch a glimpse of a man or a woman on a wave, I get that same pleasurably vertiginous feeling I used to get. Chasing waves in the Sahara: why not?

- More Than $1K Worth of Clothes I’ll Never Wear Again (Emily Gould at The Billfold)

Who doesn’t need a leather vest? Oh wait, I know: everyone. Everyone doesn’t need a leather vest.

- The Berenstain Bears and the Tyranny of Timeliness (Rob Goodman at the Millions)

When we reward timeliness with the limited currency of our attention, we put ourselves in a tightly circumscribed place in which our intake of information is left up to the whims of the news cycle. And abdicating decisions about what we know to an abstraction like “the news cycle” is a lot like abdicating political decisions to an abstraction like “the market.”

- Why this huge Chinese mall is empty (Kaid Benfield at the Atlantic Cities)

The mall has 7,100,000 square feet (163 acres) of leasable floor space and 9,600,000 square feet (220 acres) of total space. Wikipedia reports that “the mall has seven zones modeled on international cities, nations and regions, including Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean, and California.” It has a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, another of the bell tower of St. Mark’s in Venice, and a 1.3-mile canal with gondolas.

- Cities are surprisingly menacing when you remove all the people (John Metcalfe at the Atlantic Cities)

Lucie & Simon[...]have used a digital scalpel and a special filter to excise the human flesh from city landscapes. They leave just enough evidence of our species’ presence – a lone woman in a blood-red coat in Madison Square Garden, for example, or a hoisted flag in Tiananmen Square – to make the mysterious, mass disappearance as eerie as possible.

More on emptiness. A theme?

- Umwelt (xkcd)

Not much to read here; I just really like this.

- Shoot Hip or Die (Matt Pearce at The New Inquiry)

The cosmic significance of Hipsta/gram is not physical. It ages digital photos for distribution in a digital world. But nothing really gets older online; the only aging of things here comes from the erosive force of changing human sensibilities. The black of that North Face jacket looks just as black, but the point of wearing it has faded a little. Here there is only the appearance of getting older because everything else has gotten much newer. The pixels do not outwardly become worn. They are like grains of sand. If one is destroyed, it’s too small for us to know it’s been annihilated. And there is so much sand.

I’ve written about my own tendency to (over)use my mobile phone as a camera (or is it my tendency to use my camera as a mobile phone?). I like some of the things that Pearce has to say about the way apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic “manufacture decay”, transform the smartphone into a kind of nostalgia machine. I’m not even sure I entirely agree with everything in this piece but it’s beautifully presented and highly relevant, and worth giving some thought and time to.

- The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Nathan Jurgenson at Cyborgology)

the momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past. In fact, the phrase “nostalgia for the present” is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that “we draw back from our immersion in the here and now [...] and grasp it as a kind of thing.”

Glad I finally got round to reading this – it’s been on my to-read list for a while now, and interesting to juxtapose with Matt Pearce’s piece above.

- Los Angeles, 1860-1886 (The Retronaut)

I don’t know LA very well. I didn’t grow up very far away, but it struck me then (as it still strikes me) as an impenetrable place, a place that resisted being loved. “I think Californian scenery is the most loathsome on earth, – a cross between Coney Island and the Riviera,” Wodehouse wrote while living and working in Hollywood; I remember bridling when I first read that letter, but on reflection, I’m hard on it too, and I can’t see why anyone else shouldn’t have the right to be. Anyhow the thing that’s interesting about seeing these photos is that absent from them is the very thing I always think of as being essential to the identity of Los Angeles: the traffic, the freeways throttling the city. I’ve always felt it was populated not by humans but their vehicles; I couldn’t imagine it any other way, in the way that I can imagine London or New York or even San Francisco in the pre-car era.

- You’ve Already Forgotten Yesterday’s Internet (Philip Bump at the Atlantic)

The web creates new shared points of reference every hour, every minute. The growth is exponential, staggering.

- Mail Supremacy: The newspaper that rules Britain (Lauren Collins at The New Yorker)

As he spoke, his cursor hovered over an image of AnnaLynne McCord, a young actress, pictured in extreme close-up with some pimples on her cheek, around which Mail Online had drawn a big red circle.
I asked how he had decided to run the story.
“Well, we all just looked at the picture and went ‘Yuck,’ ” Clarke said. “Look, she’s an actress in ‘90210,’ and she’s spotty.”

- John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff Dyer in Conversation

Dyer: I came to the mobile phone very late. So when I got one I noticed that…
Sullivan: Your thumb was hurting?
Dyer: That’s an example of, the sort of thing—we began by talking about that embarrassing stuff. Putting in the little observation that rings true for you, and the chances are the more stupid that observation is, the greater the chance other people will have noticed something similar.

- On Writing a Book (Frank Chimero)

I’ll always look at this project and judge it by its potential. I’m foolish in the same way we all are with the things we make: I’ll continually chase my tail and believe that the thing I’m producing can be better. I’ll never let it go, because all it ever needs is just one more thing. And then again, then that, again, forever.

(Ben sent me a link to this after I posted this.)

- The ___’s Daughter (Emily St. John Mandel at The Millions)

Even leaving those variations out, though, and deleting any instances where the same book appeared more than once in the search results, the number of The ___’s Daughter books out there is truly staggering.

Once I went back over my spreadsheet to remove duplications, I was left with 530 titles.

But I don’t mean to suggest that five hundred and thirty represents the total number of these books. Five hundred and thirty was just the arbitrary point where I decided to stop counting, because the project was starting to take too much time. I was only on page 88 of 200 pages of search results.

- The Wisdom of Gandalf for the Information Age (Michael Sacasas)

Our problem is that we tend to think of the passage from information to knowledge and on to wisdom as a series of aggregations. We accumulate enough information and we pass to knowledge and we accumulate enough knowledge and we pass to wisdom. The truth is that we pass to wisdom not by the aggregation of information or knowledge, both of which are available as never before; we pass to wisdom by remembering what we do not know. And this, in an age of information, seems to be the one thing we cannot keep in mind.

- Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality (Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic)

Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal.

- Lena Dunham: from YouTube sensation to film and TV stardom (Emma Brockes at the Guardian)

The thing she took away from that first taste of fame on YouTube was “the discomfort that comes from being seen. Which is all we want, and yet, we want to be seen the way we want to be seen.”

I had never heard of Lena Dunham until I saw last weekend’s Guardian (should I have?). I read this over dinner last night. I thought it might annoy me, or at least make me jealous (is the fact that I’m not an über-hip young New Yorker who still lives with her parents holding me back?), but actually I’m just glad that people in their mid-20s are actually allowed a voice in the World.

- The importance of frustration in the creative process, animated (Jonah Lehrer via Brain Pickings)

Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach.

I’m generally wary of things that address “the creative process,” but I did feel, after Thursday, that this was a timely point.