Things I enjoyed reading online this week.

- 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.

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Things I found on the internet that I liked.

- 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.

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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

These things are good. Maybe you want to read them too:

- 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).

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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.

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