- The Data Self (A Dialectic) (Nathan Jurgenson)

we cannot continue to view the Person as the temporal and causal antecedent and the Profile as something that is the subsequent result. We have clear evidence that the person is also being co-constructed by the Profile. Experience creates documentation and documentation creates experience.

- Off-Season Road Trip (Bill Glucroft)

The weather is nicer in the summer, but the country is cheaper in the late winter, and more interesting.

A nice little photo essay by a friend of mine. It reminds me of the time in college when I drove up to New Hampshire with my boyfriend at the time for a late winter weekend ‘away’. I don’t know what we were trying to get away from, what we thought we’d find further north: we lived in Boston, which should have had all the attractions a pair of 18-year-olds needed. But then again, we were 18, and playing at being grown-ups was almost as much fun as actually being irresponsible college students (it was, it turns out, certainly more fun than actually being a grown-up). Driving up to a hotel in the White Mountains as winter gasped its final frigid breaths, the snow still hard on the ground, the air still painful to the skin, seemed grown-up in a funny way. I don’t remember what we did or whether I enjoyed the excursion – we hadn’t planned on skiing and it was too cold to do anything but drive aimlessly around, looking at the trees, the tops of mountains – but I do remember the drive back, a detour along the coast, passing through a few funny seaside towns, all patiently waiting for the arrival of summer. And I wondered if they were any less empty in summer.

- On (Not) Learning to Code (Alan Jacobs at the Atlantic)

So let’s go back to Daniel Jalkut’s definition of “literacy”: “learning the basic tools to get a job done.” Is there a kind of literacy — knowledge worthy of that name — that stems not from being able to use the available tools with any degree of skill, but rather from being able to find out who can use those tools and then making good use of the experts’ abilities? I’d like to think so.

- ‘Stop the Clock!’ (Roman Krznaric at the School of Life)

we are colonised by clocks, on our bodies, phones, computer screens and the walls of our homes.

I was thinking about this the other night. I’d wandered around the corner to a yoga class (a particularly gentle yoga class, as it turned out, which was probably good for my muscles but which gave me altogether too much time to think). As we lay listening to the instructor say meaningless things in that soothing yoga-instructor voice (“really feel the ebb and flow of your breath”) I became aware not of my own inhale-exhale-inhale rhythm, or the soles of my feet pressing into the grey mat, but of something else in the room: the ticking clock. As the instructor fell silent, asking us to lie there, with our bodies and breaths, savouring something, “living in the internal world”, the ticking clock went on ticking. Why have a ticking clock in a yoga class? Marking every second made the hour feel urgent; I couldn’t wait to move on to the next thing, the next posture, the next part of my day. (This was shortly before my mobile phone began buzzing away in the corner, which some might say is a much more tangible distraction. I pretended I didn’t know whose phone it was, of course.)

- Eden (Kristin Hersh)

My band also carried a very low price tag: the World didn’t value our world. Not enough people cared enough about our music to allow us to play it for a living any more. This was confusing, as our band was ubiquitous to us. It was like someone telling you that your left arm wasn’t cool enough.

- Why the Places We Live Make Us Happy (Kaid Benfield at the Atlantic)

I find that it provides empirical strength to those of us who believe that “the environment” is concerned not just with traditional pollution or land conservation (both of which remain important) but also with what and where we build; and not just with parts per billion of this or that but also with the quality of human relationships and well-being.

Interesting thoughts on people’s relationship to place.

- On my best (greatest) skirt (Jean Hannah Edelstein)

Every time I wore it I thought, this is a skirt that I earned from writing. I am a writer. Even though by now I’d worked out that most people in England did not dress like Mitford sisters.

- Writing Rules (Open Culture)

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing

Henry Miller’s list is just beautiful.

- The Memoirist’s Notebook (Julie at Cuaderno Inedito)

Will the books that are sitting on the coffee table–the books that cement an image of her as intellectual and worldly–eventually have some significance? Is she even reading them or are they her husband’s?…Soon, my notebook is divided into two distinct sections- the notes about what she has said, and the notes about what she hasn’t: the objects in her environment; the places in her home that I’ll ask to see eventually but for which we haven’t yet developed enough rapport; the people whose contact information I’ll ask for months from now.

Short but thoughtful piece on being asked to help someone write a memoir. I’m interested in the division: what she has said, what she hasn’t. What we end up writing about.

- HBO (Isn’t) Filming The Corrections at My Parents’ House: TV and Fiction (AJ Aronstein at The Millions)

And when we say that literary fiction is “character-driven,” we mean this: our private interactions with texts depend as much on the associations and imagination of the author as on the associations and imaginations of the reader. Our desire to know them — and to know them on our own terms — drives us to read.

- “I am a lousy copywriter” (Letters of Note)

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

David Ogilvy on being “a lousy copywriter, but…a good editor”.

- Leonard Cohen: ‘All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience’ (Dorian Lynskey at the Guardian)

Cohen, who at 37 knew a bit about failure and the kind of acclaim that doesn’t pay the bills, frowned at the question and replied: “Success is survival.”

When I was little my mother had a tape with four different versions of “Famous Blue Raincoat” on it. We used to listen on the way to and from school, his words in the background of our own conversations.

- GPS, Smartphones, and the Dumbing Down of Personal Navigation (Sarah Goodyear at The Atlantic Cities)

I’m worried that the same filter bubble is at work in our cities, that the grand tradition of flâneurism is being eroded by a rote navigation system bounded by maps and apps.

Serendipity and navigation again.

- Notes on Memory and Context (and the Decontextualization of Travel) (Mary Anne Oxendale)

I once sent home a series of now famed mass emails, detailing the glittering wonders of London at Christmas, with the lights of Oxford street and the loveliness of the decorations and the parties. Not one word in those exuberant emails let on the fact that I was in the middle of a rather horrific break up with my then boyfriend and had spent many days crying my brains out. I cannot be trusted to record my own memory.

- P.G. Wodehouse’s American Psycho (Rhian Jones, McSweeney’s)

Now, we Batemans are perfectly accustomed to taking the rough in life with the smooth, but even so, this seemed like a serious misstep. I supposed I stood in no small danger of arrest and imprisonment, not to mention finally having my allowance cut off.

I wiped my hands on Owen’s discarded dinner jacket and thought the thing through. There was nothing for it but to get Jean back on the case.

Just for fun.

As I was moving from one study to another last week I started thinking about how dependent I am on the support of a certain set of books. It’s not that I can’t work without them, just that if I am working, I prefer to have them within arm’s reach. It isn’t even necessarily that I’ll need to refer to them (though I might) – more that they’re part of the comfortable scenery, reminders of my own intentions and ambitions (and conspirators in procrastination: if there’s something else I should be doing, you’ll quite often find me flipping through one of these books).

Here’s what’s on my desk:

- The New Oxford Book of English Verse. 1972 edition. Lime green jacket, blue lettering. Chosen and edited by Helen Gardner. Purchased for £4.50 in Hay on Wye a few years ago, during the literary festival, our annual pilgrimage. Once belonged to someone who signed their name (illegible) on the 5th of August, 1978. Some previous owner – maybe the same one – also pedantically (or appropriately?) added “D.B.E., M.A., L.Litt – Prof. of Eng. Lit. Oxford” after Helen Gardner’s name on the title page. I’m not always very good with poetry but it seems important to have some to hand, and I have a sentimental attachment to this particular bulky, out of date volume, because this is how I discovered Louis Macneice: flipping through my new purchase on the train from Hereford, the sun setting outside, the carriage cold, I found “Snow“: “I peel and portion/A tangerine and spit the pips and feel/The drunkenness of things being various.”

- Louis MacNeice’s Selected Poems is, of course, also on the desk. It has soft pages and smooth edges; my mother bought it for me one summer day in Bath and just to hold it, let alone to read it, is comforting.

- Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer.

- Zuleika Dobson. An old orange Penguin paperback (“This edition published…in celebration of the Author’s eightieth birthday, 24 August 1952″) that I bought in Boston, at a used bookshop in Brookline, one hot September night shortly after arriving back from Oxford for the first time. I was using it for research for a while, so it’s marked up and peppered with post-it notes bearing cryptic notes like “‘Mainly architectural…’ + femininity in Oxford” that could, out of context (or even in context) be interpreted to mean almost anything you want. The post-its were bought as a joke from Urban Outfitters and all have obscenities written along the edges, like “Ass” or “Balls” or “Fuck”, so that my attempts at scholarship cannot be taken too seriously.

- The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I have practically written my own book in the margins of this copy so I hope I never lose it, though in a way to read it fresh (without my own subtext) would probably be a good thing for me.

- The Elements of Style. I only keep this on the desk because I feel I should. I had a professor in college who said we should all own a copy, so I went out and bought one, and I have hardly looked at it since. Still, it lends gravity to the line of volumes, and I do like E.B. White’s essays.

- Graham Greene’s In Search of a Character. Stolen (or rather rescued) from a school library. It’s a slim book but I haven’t read the whole thing; I keep it there because of the introduction – “Neither of these journals was kept for publication, but they may have some interest as an indication of the kind of raw material a novelist accumulates. He goes through life discarding more than he retains, but the points he notes are what he considers of creative interest at the moment of occurrence” – and the first line of the Congo journal: “…All I know about the story I am planning is that a man ‘turns up’, and for that reason alone I find myself on a plane between Brussells and Leopoldville.”

-Brideshead Revisited. We have at least three other copies of this in the house but this is the original, bought at a book sale in Santa Ynez, printed in 1945, with its unmistakable Brideshead smell. In the back is a National Express ticket from January 2009, from High Wycombe to Oxford. I have never been to High Wycombe, so this is a complete mystery to me. Over the years this book has come to mean less to me than it used to, but it’s still inconceivable that I could ever sit at a desk and write seriously without it being present.

-The Origin of Species.

- An uncorrected proof of Isolarian by James Attlee, which I read during my first summer here. I guess in a way I think Attlee has written the book that I would have liked to write. At first I was sniffy about this, because I wanted to write it, but now I find it rather soothing, because seeing the book there reminds me that I don’t have to write that book, – the burden has been lifted! – that I have another book (or other books, I should say) to write instead. Also, it’s very good.

- Heart of Darkness. I remember reading this in my last year of high school. I got really into it (some of my notes and essays from that first reading are tucked in the back of this flimsy copy), and I think I mainly keep it visible to remind me that I know how to read, if you see what I mean.

- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I think if Kirsty Young asked me what book I’d like on my desert island in addition to the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, this might be it. I don’t know why but I can’t seem to grow tired of reading it; the delight intsensifies with each re-reading. The book begins to smell worn and right, the pages stained with sunlight.

- Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan. Because the tension described by this line: “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” is at the heart of (a lot of) what I think and write about.

- Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage. For this line and a million others:

“So I went from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean I went from not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of this to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either book. All I did was switch between two – empty – files on my computer, one conveniently called C:\DHL, the other C:\NOVELand sent myself ping-ponging back and forth between them until, after an hour and a half of this, I would turn off the computer because the worst thing of all, I knew, was to wear myself out in this way. The best thing was to do nothing, to sit calmly, but there was no calm, of course: instead, I felt totally desolate because I realised that I was going to write neither my study of D.H. Lawrence nor my novel.”

- Vile Bodies. There’s a chapter of this book written entirely in dialogue. It’s hilarious and devastating, hilariously devastating, devastatingly hilarious.

- Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. I know this book pretends to be a detective novel, but it isn’t; it’s a love story about Oxford. I can’t remember who, but someone once told me it was “the best of the books about Oxford”, and I’m not sure I could honestly disagree. In any case I do remember that Wodehouse wrote of Sayers that, “It is extraordinary how much better she is than almost all other mystery writers”.

- The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton.

- The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

- The Facebook Eye (Nathan Jurgenson at The Atlantic)

“Facebook fixates the present as always a future past…We have a different attachment to our present when we are not concerned with documenting.”

- Stories to Live With (Philip Connors in Lapham’s Quarterly)

“The ambiguity I preserved in the story of my brother’s life became the story of mine too: one minute attentive and the next minute distant, one day hungry for intimacy and the next day desperate for freedom, one week exalted by the energy of the city and the next week oppressed by the weight of all the longing played out in the towers and the streets, in the privacy of little rooms.”

- In Search of Serendipity (Ian Leslie in More Intelligent Life)

“When the internet was new, its early enthusiasts hoped it would emulate the greatest serendipity machine ever invented: the city. The modern metropolis, as it arose in the 19th century, was also an attempt to organise an exponential increase, this one in population. Artists and writers saw it as a giant playground of discovery, teeming with surprise encounters. The flâneur was born: one who wanders the streets with purpose, but without a map.

Most city-dwellers aren’t flâneurs, however. In 1952 a French sociologist called Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe asked a student to keep a journal of her daily movements. When he mapped her paths onto a map of Paris he saw the emergence of a triangle, with vertices at her apartment, her university and the home of her piano teacher. Her movements, he said, illustrated “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives”.

- How Our Brains Navigate the City (Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities)

“even though people had spent much more time navigating the city by memory than by map, their mental views of the city still seem drawn in a map style. It’s almost as if people use their experience to situate themselves in a city, then consult the north-pointing map of that same city in their minds to find their way”

- Back To Work #46: Not Counting the Mezzanine (Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin)

“The problem is not that you’re distracted by the internet, or you’re distracted by this background, the problem is you don’t care enough about the thing that you’re doing to just overlook the fact that there’s this other thing going on.”

Strictly speaking I didn’t read this, as it’s a podcast, but it deserves a mention and a little listen (though be warned: the full thing is 1 hour and 20 minutes long, and if you don’t know this already, Merlin Mann speaks at least four times faster than your average human being, so you kind of have to be paying attention. If you want to cheat, which is what I did, start at about 39 minutes in, where there’s talk of minimalist porn, William Burroughs’ laudanum, and some rather good stuff about Hemingway, masculinity and efficiency).

Last night, probably because there was something much more pressing I should have been doing, I started rearranging books. I get this urge periodically, but I don’t think it’s necessarily symbolic of anything other than an ordinary human restlessness – “we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper…our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread,” as Alain de Botton writes, and our house is wallpapered mostly with books.

I started to think a change of scenery might be nice. I spend so much time in my upstairs study, looking down on the frozen garden in winter, the lawn overrun with elder in summer. But the last month has been a period of intense unproductivity, and maybe, I thought, there was an unfortunate bedspread in the room, derailing my sense of purpose (also, the chair downstairs is much more comfortable than the chair upstairs). So I started the shift to the downstairs study – another periodic compulsion of mine, and an obvious luxury of space. It takes me a while to move from one study to the other, although ostensibly my only tool is a laptop, because I have to arrange the space with great care: I need to make sure I have all the books I might want to refer to, the irrational little display of shells and pens, the candle I almost never light, the box of wax matches from Kenya with which to light the candle I almost never light.

Anyway, as I was arranging my most crucial books downstairs, I looked up, at this towering shelf, floor to ceiling, 9 stories high, and I was overcome with a fear that it would come crashing down on my head if I worked here. At first I thought the fear was arbitrary: I worry about everything from whether my teeth are stained to whether the world will end in a series of nuclear explosions, so why not this, too, plucked at random from the infinite list of possibilities? But it had infected my consciousness, and now I was imagining all kinds of gruesome scenarios: what if I did light that candle, and the shelf collapsed and the books went up in flames and the house burned down? Investigation seemed not just prudent but necessary for survival, so I climbed up on a stool.

The shelves themselves are just slabs of wood, resting on small protuberances which have been drilled into the wall, and my investigation revealed that the protuberances holding up the 7th shelf had come loose. There did not seem to be any immediate danger of anything collapsing, but I was nevertheless vindicated: I had averted disaster! I removed the books from the 7th shelf, set them out in stacks on the mantlepiece and, when they began to overflow even there, next to the fireplace. And now I am literally surrounded by books and only a little less afraid that they’ll all come crashing down on me.

“The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.”

I read Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal a few days ago. I hated it. I think it’s fair to say that. I hated it, but I read it anyway. I found a copy of it on the shelf near the bathroom, the one tucked in the alcove at the top of the stairs, while I was excavating the thick stacks of books, searching for more Paul Auster (on the same shelf I uncovered two copies of Man in the Dark and a hardback copy of Travels in the Scriptorium, so not a fruitless endeavor). Anyway, The Dying Animal. An uncorrected bound proof. It was strange to find it in this state – it was published in 2001, why did we have this uncorrected proof, with its flimsy yellow construction-paper cover? I had never read any Philip Roth before. I know I keep saying that – I had never read any Paul Auster before, I had never read any this before, any that before – and if it highlights the enormous gaps in my literary education, let it also indicate a curiosity, a willingness to admit these gaps and then fill them. But I had never read any Philip Roth before and I thought, from the back cover description, that maybe I would like this one.

I hated it – well, if not immediately, then almost immediately. The pleasure of the opening pages – promising! – was diminished by what came after, diminished by my irrational reaction to the white-haired professor’s young lover and her “cream-colored silk blouse”. Why should a cream-colored blouse matter so much to me? The repetition, I guess. Pages and pages of her big breasts and her bowlike lips and her startling self-awareness. None of it ultimately incidental, but all of it seemingly gratuitous. Why do I hate her cream-colored silk blouse? But no matter why: I do, and even so I read the book, the whole book, though I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t simply skimmed the last few pages, coming to the last lines breathlessly and excitedly. At some point during my reading I remembered that Roth had once been shortlisted for some sort of bad sex award.

But it’s this book, not its author, that I object to. And this line – extracted, as it happens, from its sexually explicit setting: “The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.” This I like.

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.

- I go to a gig. I’m too short to see the band so instead I watch their shadows moving on the ceiling. I’m with a friend who’s very tall. He can (presumably) see the band, but later on we go to get fresh bottles of beer, and then linger outside in the hallway, where it is impossible to see but much easier to listen.

- One afternoon, as I am recovering from a winter cold, I listen to the rain. I write this:

The front room was glowing yellow, because of the strange, smoggy light that the sun was managing to give off from behind its protective layer of golden clouds. It was raining, quite hard, but in the way it rains when you know it will only rain for a minute, or a few minutes, maybe ten – a summer shower, it had the sound of a summer shower, and people walking past were bent against the falling rain with the same surprised faces you see in summertime – women in skirts who left the house on the tricky promise of a blue sky. On the horizon, above the low roof of the shed across the street, the sky was bright. We went to the window to observe; the rain was actually hail, stones bouncing forcefully off the bins and the garden path. Sometimes when it really hails here the stones fall through the chimneys and bounce out into the house, melting, covered in soot. But soon the hail turned again to rain. The light went darker; the clouds were ablaze now with sunset-yellow, pinkish, purplish, almost bruised in their centers, but light on the edges, like a depiction of heavenly clouds in a Renaissance painting.

Then I take a long nap.

- I fall asleep sitting up at my desk, engulfed in sheepskin, reading something. When I wake up it’s black outside, but, surprisingly, I have no crick in my neck.

- Because my usual pool is shut over the Christmas period I have to go further afield. I cycle to Summertown one evening; on the ride home I have the city more or less to myself. I pass the blackened lawns, the buildings shrouded in scaffolding and mesh. I make myself remember this – the blackened lawns, the buildings shrouded in scaffolding and mesh – all the way home, even when I stop at Tesco, just before it shuts, to pick up lettuce leaves and avocado.

- Later that week I try a pool off the Cowley Road, across from the police station. I cycle there late in the evening again, the road wide and empty. I insert a pound coin into a locker, stash my shoes, my coat. There is almost no one else around – a woman, a man, and me. The water is cloudy and green; I imagine that it feels a little thicker than I’m used to, smells vaguely medical – iodine, disinfectant, the smell of waiting and worrying. There is a library nearby and so the sign outside says “Swimming Pool Library”. I wonder if anyone else finds it funny, if maybe it’s a private joke in Oxford, the Hollinghurst reference in Temple Cowley. I wonder if I’m being undeservedly pretentious: I’ve never actually read the book. Does just knowing about its existence – even knowing, loosely, what it’s about – qualify me to share the joke, or do I need some deeper understanding?

When I roll my head to breathe, I can half hear the Christmas songs, playing through speakers in the big room.

- I’m obsessively but irrationally repulsed by the Christmas shoppers, their laden-down shuffle, their vulgar worship of Things. I don’t want Things, I tell myself, I’m already mired in Things. I spend what maybe adds up to an hour every day looking for Things, Things which are always obscured by other Things. But then again I want a new dress, new shoes, this, that. I only don’t want these things when I don’t think of them: and when I don’t think of them I feel free and am not sure what to put in this new space.

- I can’t remember, or maybe I never knew, which state Yellowstone National Park is in. I look it up. Then I look up the distance between where I grew up and there: about 1200 miles. Then I look up the distance between where I am now and there: “We could not calculate directions”.

- I wonder about the veracity of this, from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad: “I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.” And regardless of its truth, the important question is this: do I want it to be true?

- “I don’t know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to do it.” – Paul Auster.

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.

“The careening interior monologues of Mrs. Dalloway serve as a prescient forecast of today’s hyperlinked, click-through culture”

- Buzz Poole at The Millions

I mean, I haven’t always loved Virginia Woolf, but I like looking at her from this angle.