The other day I stepped out of a café and got a face-full of snow. Yesterday the sun came out and we walked along the river and sat outside at sunset drinking cider, admiring the serenity of the slow evening rowers, pretending that it was warm enough to behave like this, and it almost was.

- On Packing (Molly Beer at Vela)

This problem of weighty, freighted things terrifies me utterly. I do not want the burden of either the object or its implicit value. One I have to carry, the other I will inevitably lose: Crusoe’s knife, after the journey, won’t even look at him; it is a dull, dead thing. What objects, I wonder, will bear my history along some dusty, wrong-sided road? My grandfather’s compass? The leather-bound diary? A sarong (read: table cloth, dress, satchel, curtain, mosquito net, bed sheet, towel)? And what will I cast aside as dead weight?

- Cities of Sleep (Pico Iyer at The New York Review of Books)

The content of my dreams has long ceased to interest me; but their proportions, the way they rearrange the things I thought I cared about, the life I imagined I was leading, won’t go away. Why do I almost never see my mother in my dreams, although, alone in her eighties, she fills my waking thoughts so much? And why, conversely, do I return again and again in sleep to Paris, a city I haven’t visited often in life, as if under some warm compulsion?

- First Love: Memories of an Elusive Boyfriend (Lena Dunham at The New Yorker)

Here’s the thing, or at least a thing, about me—I hate offending people. Even though I love the feel of something vaguely offensive on my tongue, I guess I want to have my cake and tweet it, too.

- “Felicity” And The Joys Of Decent TV (Ben Dolnick at The Awl)

The things that I take pleasure in exhuming are the works of reasonable quality, created in at least relatively good faith. I’m talking about the books and movies and shows that did their job—causing some number of minutes of your life to pass with a minimum of fuss—with a certain soldierly sense of responsibility. Someone once took care to construct a plausible plot by which the character of Ben Covington could make the turn from an aimless slacker to an aspiring doctor. Some group of (deeply misguided) people once sat around a table and decided that, beginning with season three, “Felicity” needed a a new theme song and credit sequence. This care, this effort poured into something so soon forgotten, is oddly moving to me, in the way that watching monks work on a sand mandala is moving.

- Maps (Ben Lytal at The Paris Review)

What an act of love, I hoped, to have transposed these kinds of walks abroad back onto my hometown. As a teenager I guess I had sometimes half-wanted to slow down my car, to get out and walk around downtown Tulsa. But I never did. Tulsa was a table of facts, laden with buildings. I only got sentimental when I went way up in elevators and looked down. I couldn’t always quite understand what I was looking at; the topdown perspective didn’t match my experience driving through it.

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I’ve been struggling through a fog this week (and some of last week, too). A changing-of-the-seasons illness; a bright, mild fever, days spent oscillating between the couch and the bed, bouts of frustration and depression broken by periods of relative pleasure, as the rain came down outside and I was all wrapped up inside, with no obligation other than to myself, to make myself better. I’ve consumed innumerable kinds of soup, swallowed pills, kept my voice to a whisper. And I’d like to say that during all that down-time I read voraciously and smartly, made a dent in my ever-expanding list of things to “read later”, but the truth is: yes, I read Jane Eyre for the first time, and I’m most of the way through Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, but I mostly lay around watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, marveling at how well the women’s lipstick seems to adhere to their lips, even during 12-hour surgeries or passionate trysts.

Today a heavy snow is falling (or a snow is falling heavily), reminding me of a St. Patrick’s day blizzard we had one year in Boston; the weather had just begun to warm up, so it was a great disappointment to wake and realize that we had taken one step forward but about a hundred steps backwards. That afternoon my roommate and I took a bottle of André up to our rooftop and made a snowman that more strongly resembled a bowling pin. Later some friends and I went to a bar on Boylston street and sat around feeling almost grown up, because we really were almost grown up, in the sense that we were approaching the end of our college education.

Anyhow are are a few things that reached me through the fog:

- On (Un)organized Consumption (Cheri Lucas)

at the end of the day, we’re all going to miss almost everything.

Cheri being timely and elegantly spot-on, as usual.

- Meaghan O’Connell answers a question from a college student

But also I will say that college is your last chance to not worry about making a living — not that that’s always the case, but if it *is* the case, then it’s your last chance (well, uh, unless you are independently wealthy or marry someone who is? in which case, you won’t have to worry about money but you will still worry about your life, believe me) — so if you like reading books and talking and thinking and writing about books, do it while you can! It’s very hard to find a way to do that and also be a person in the world at the same time (and when you’re in college you’re not quite yet a person in the world, except for the people who are activists in college, who i do not mean to offend).

- What’s the point of running? (Mark Rowlands at the Guardian)

This experience is found in other sports too: an absorption in the deed and not the goal; the activity and not the outcome. This is play in its purest form.

I don’t run, or run much anymore – I have a mystery ailment that tends to prevent me getting more than a mile from the house before I have to limp back, and I’m too cheap (or, probably more accurately, too afraid) to see a physiotherapist – but I know this feeling anyhow, since it is, as Rowlands says, “found in other sports too”. I like the idea that this feeling of absorption – absorption in the practice, not the result – is play. I’ve been writing about this sort of thing recently, and Rowlands’ article seemed particularly apropos.

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- John Lanchester Rides The London Underground (John Lanchester at the Guardian)

But Londoners do act out versions of themselves in public, and wear uniforms, and signal that they belong to particular tribes. Not all of this activity is conscious, but quite a lot of it is, and even when it isn’t, a lot of it is easily legible. You can stand in a queue at a Starbucks and see in the line in front of you a City boy, a Sloane who has a job doing something arty, a guy working on a screenplay, a mother just back from the gym, three tourists and two policemen (mind you, they’re the easy ones to spot, since they’re literally wearing uniform). Everybody stays in character. The city spaces are performative spaces: people are acting out versions of themselves.

It isn’t like that on the underground. Londoners treat the underground not as a stage set, a place where we’re on display, but as a neutral space, one in which we don’t overtly direct our attention at each other. People sneak glances at each other, of course they do, but the operative word is “sneak”. They don’t look openly, in the way they would elsewhere. The main focus of people’s attention is inward. They go into themselves. Or they go into the world of whatever entertainment they’re carrying.

- How Augmented-Reality Content Might Actually Work (Caterina Fake interviewed by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic)

I think we are gaining a new appreciation for the here and now, for the place we live, for the people in our neighborhood, for groundedness. [...] You see the early indications of a return to the local.

The computers people have are no longer on their desks, but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world. So your location is known. It used to be that you would search for a florist in Bellingham, Washington, and get the most popular florist in the world. But now the computer knows where you are; it even knows what block you’re on.

- Wes Anderson’s Worlds (Michael Chabon at the New York Review of Books)

The box, to Cornell, is a gesture—it draws a boundary around the things it contains, and forces them into a defined relationship, not merely with one another, but with everything outside the box. The box sets out the scale of a ratio; it mediates the halves of a metaphor. It makes explicit, in plain, handcrafted wood and glass, the yearning of a model-maker to analogize the world, and at the same time it frankly emphasizes the limitations, the confines, of his or her ability to do so.

- Thom Yorke profiled by Tim Adams at The Observer

Sum up the music industry in five words:

“Hungry dog chasing its tail.”

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There’s a bit of snow floating aimlessly, but it won’t settle. The evenings are a little lighter but the air is so cold it hurts my ears. I have pre-birthday anxiety (there’s nothing useful or profound about thinking ‘Oh God I will never be this age again when I’m no longer this age’ but that never seems to stop me thinking it). A few stray green things have started to appear in the garden but they still look a little unsure.

- This is How You Healthcare: American Death in London (Sarah C R Bee at NSFWCORP)

The main things that keep me sane are the airy beauty and peacefulness of the hospital building, messages from friends and family far away on earth, the mundane magnificence of the staff: and the knowledge that all of this is free and taken care of and I do not have to fill in a single fuckforsaken form or bust one precious braincell worrying about how I might have to find money to pay for the futile care of my dying deadbeat dad.

I return to this miraculous fact many times a day, in exactly the same way that I return often to the little visitors’ bedroom, lock the door and curl up on the bed. The knowledge soothes me like clean sheets and heat.

Imagine, I think in the middle of the night. Imagine if I had to worry about that stuff. With what, exactly, would I worry about it?

Usually paywalled, obviously, but evidently (and wisely) accessible for free at the moment. So very worth reading.

Review of Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal by Al Alvarez (Kate Kellaway at the Observer)

Swimming is about living in the present and against the tide of age.

Carpet is a Class Issue (Meghan Daum, essay from My Misspent Youth reproduced at The Billfold)

The kind of class that I associate with wood floors is the kind of class that emerges out of an anxiety about being classy. People who must have wood floors are people who need to convey the message that they’re quite possibly better than most people. They’re people who leave The New York Review of Books on the coffee table but keep People in the bedroom. They’re people who say “I don’t need to read Time or Newsweek because I can get everything I need from the Times.” They’re people who would no sooner put the television set in the living room than hang their underwear to dry on the front porch. They buy whole-bean coffee and grind it in a Braun grinder. They listen to NPR, tell other people what they heard on it, and are amazed when the other people say they heard it too.

I am one of those people.

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Still winter, though sunny outside. I’m fed up with winter, so we stay inside, where it’s warm and the light’s collected in bright little pools. We have smoked salmon and bagels and bitter coffee for breakfast and I read Sophie Dahl’s The Man With the Dancing Eyes, which makes me want to buy flowers for some reason, even though I usually find buying flowers frivolous.

- Letter from Berlin: In the Cut (Zeke Turner at The Paris Review)

I got the idea that being in your early twenties was a great time to do incongruous things with your body. I’d spend the whole morning at the gym and the rest of the day smoking cigarettes with a break to go running with Louisa in the afternoon. I’d go for a long swim before a long run before a long night out that turned into a full day dancing in a club.

These things aren’t as different as they seem anyway. To run far with someone is to change your body chemistry together (to push each other towards a distant high while honing the very sinews of your body!); it’s not so different from the chemical-induced intimacy that comes with taking drugs with a stranger. Because you share one experience together, you get the illusion that you share much more. Sometimes you actually do.

- The Cult of Donna Tartt (Hannah Rosefield at Prospect)

The novel’s narrator is Richard Papen: 19, gawky, insecure and anxious to fit in. He’s an Everyman, or at least an Everyteenager. Like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, both obvious models, Richard is a vessel for the reader.

I’d already read The Secret History a few times before I realized it was a thing. Like Rosefield, the first time I read it I was 14. I very specifically remember that it was springtime in California, that I had acquired, or was in the process of acquiring, my first “boyfriend”, that I was listening to an EP by The Get Up Kids a lot on repeat, particularly the last song, “A Newfound Interest in Massachusetts”, and dreaming of an east coast life: of falling leaves, crisp air, sophisticated friends. My copy of The Secret History was borrowed from a friend. It looked a bit like a cheap airport paperback, and the cover had fallen off completely. I wouldn’t read The Great Gatsby until the following year, or Brideshead Revisited until the year after that, so in a sense Richard Papen was my prototype vessel, not the other way round: but interesting that these are all books that I return to again and again, books I feel a particular affinity with or affection for. (Later I re-read The Secret History as an undergraduate in Boston; I’d just moved into my first off-campus apartment, it was early September, warm, and I spent a whole weekend with it, lying on my low futon bed, with the windows open to let the fresh paint smell escape, listening to the rustle of the still-green leaves on the trees outside. My east coast life was not at all east coasty, in the Secret History sense; my friends were no more or less sophisticated than I was, which is to say, we were all as foolish as each other, we knew where to buy fake IDs, we had sensible plans to grow up and graduate and start Real Life – which made the book even sweeter, in a way).

- Annals of Mobility: On Youth, Adventures, and the Territory of Adulthood (Sonya Chung at The Common)

Should the restlessness of adolescence necessarily be scorned by the intelligent, moral-minded adult? Is the impulse to be in motion, to seek change and renewal, at any age, an “irresponsible” one?

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