By webmama on March 13, 2011

  • Does it matter if future generations don’t understand the pop cultural references embedded in today’s TV  shows? At Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz ponders the enduring question of timeliness versus timelessness in light of TV’s current mode, “Reference-o-Rama.” Shows like The Simpsons and 30 Rock, he writes, are “footnote shows” (meaning, they’ll need to be accompanied by endless footnotes and explanations when viewed at a distance): “amusing and perhaps hilarious right now, but likely to be dated in five years, quaint in 10, and borderline impenetrable in 20. Or inadvertently poignant. Or chilling.”
  • The million-plus members of the Facebook group “I Want My 90’s Nickelodeon Back” are beside themselves with joy at this announcement: “TeenNick will dust off old faves like Rugrats, Kenan & Kel, Pete & Pete, The Amanda Show, All That and Clarissa and air them in a new midnight-to-2 a.m. programming block dubbed (appropriately enough) The ’90s Are All That.” And MTV is bringing Beavis and Butthead back for new episodes.
  • Sarah McLachlan has come to terms with the fact that Lilith Fair is over: “[B]ringing the same thing back last year really didn’t make any sense, in retrospect, without due diligence being done on how women have changed. Because in 12 years, women have changed a lot. Their expectations have changed, the way they view the world has changed, and that was not taken into consideration, which I blame myself for….It lived in a time and place and it probably should have stayed there.”
  • The Times talks to Andi O’Connor, a Colorado blogger who has had two of her homes burn down–once when she was in eighth grade, once at age 50–about how losing everything gives you a strange and ambivalent kind of clean slate:

I was talking to David Barrett, the architect [of her new home], the other day and I said, “You know, I collect sea glass from beaches, I’ve been collecting it for years. Maybe we could do some of that in the bathroom.” And then I stopped and I remembered. Oh, that’s gone. I don’t have a sea glass collection anymore. It’s been months, and, like my mother said, every day you reach for something that isn’t there. Every day you wake up and you remember something.

  • On the occasion of the release of the Topher Grace-starring 80’s nostalgia movie Take Me Home Tonight, Mary Elizabeth Williams would like the remind you that the 80’s kind of sucked:

[C]ould somebody even try to make an ’80s period piece that doesn’t just whip the entire decade into one Rubik’s cube-shaped blender? The film’s opening scene takes place in a Suncoast video festooned with posters of Madonna’s 1984 “Like a Virgin” album and 1985’s “Back to the Future,” and features a prominent rack of Relax shirts. Relax, for Christ’s sake. Nobody would be caught dead Relaxing in 1988. You might think that sounds nitpicky, but when they make the movie about 2011 and the characters are talking about Friendster and dancing around to “Milkshake,” you’ll care, Millennials. Oh, how you’ll care.

She also points out that of of the most popular movies in 1988 (the year in which Take Me Home Tonight is set) was Dirty Dancing, a movie that was itself awfully (necessarily?) simplistic in its portrayal of 1963 (though it was and remains awesome).

  • Alden Ford writes about what it’s like to watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High for the first time, in light of a personal high school experience that was not much more than “a benign, slightly uncomfortable blur…sort of pointless to define, let alone romanticize.” For him, that movie (and others like Clueless and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) are obvious fantasies:

I like that these movies exist, because it gives me a vicarious taste of what I never experienced, seen from a perspective that, in the case of Amy Heckerling’s films, has the proper proportion of nostalgia and irony. And Fast Times is a perfect example. Classic rock, muscle cars, cute girls, pot, sex and fast food jobs. I had none of those things in high school (and wouldn’t until literally years later), but it’s entertaining to watch anyway.

  • Is the loss of the mercury thermometer worth mourning? Sam Kean wonders. On one hand, mercury is a neurotoxin! On the other, “People grew up using mercury thermometers, and damn it, they want to keep using them.”
  • Apparently this is enough of a thing to merit having something of a name: “Looking into the past” pictures, where a photo of a place is in the past is held up against the backdrop of the same place now, and re-photographed. Buzzfeed collects a bunch, and whatever you call them, they are transfixing.
  • Sloane Crosley gets a peek at her old apartment just a week after she moved out, opening the door onto a construction zone: stripped walls, missing kitchen appliances, protruding wires and piles of bricks. It was just a coincidence that she had the chance to witness this firsthand, but since she did, she reflects, “Everything in New York seems to merit preserving. If it’s not historical, it’s personal. If it’s not personal, it’s cultural. But you can’t. You can’t save everything. You just have to pack it up in your brain and take it with you when you go.”

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By webmama on February 11, 2011

  • The Times Style section discovers reproduction vintage clothes. “Many devotees of reproduction vintage clothing said ‘Mad Men,’ the AMC television show set in the 1960s, as well as movie classics like ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Rear Window,’ had kindled their interest in fashions of the past. Says Becky Biesiada, 34, a day care provider and student in Muskegon, Mich., ‘To be a woman in today’s world and stand out, I feel it requires some of the charm from the past.‘” Interesting: These retailers report that their sales have been up 25 to 30 percent annually over the last four years, contrary to industry trends.
  • In the Financial Times, Adam Haslett dares to question the authority of Strunk and White:

Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists.

  • Here’s perhaps an unnecessarily long article about parents who don’t hesitate to throw out most of their childrens’ early artwork. “Ultimately, when parents save the treasures of their little artists, they are stocking a hope chest of the imagination. In less poetic terms, someday Mom and Dad will try to give the junk back.”
  • Related: The Times recommends an expensive portrait session for your beloved objects before they hit the trash. “It seems everyone I talk to has something from a trip or a family member that’s meaningful to them,” [the photographer] said. “But they don’t know how to showcase it, so it’s stuck in a closet or drawer. This is a modern way to preserve that memory.”
  • Emma Straub writes on The Paris Review’s blog about the indelible Rayanne Graff of My So-Called Life, a show I feel as passionately about now as I did when it first aired.

Just as every person is the central figure in their own tale, I’m sure that all my Rayannes had Rayannes of their own—earlier versions of the bad girls they would become, all of us mirror images of one another in our dark lipstick and waffle tees….My first high-school Rayanne, from whom I learned to inhale, wasn’t a virgin, and when she was drunk, her Southern accent got stronger. When she was bleaching my hair in her bathtub, we laughed so hard and so loud that her younger sister told us we needed hysterectomies. I had never been happier, more fully in love with the very moment that I was living, even with a head that smelled like ammonia.

There’s also the uncomfortable experience of “having to watch Claire Danes age into a sinewy ballerina of a woman, her even skin and taut limbs offering no proof that she was ever a teenager at all. It’s like watching a dear friend—your sister, a twin—wear a diamond ring the size of a lighthouse, move to the suburbs, and vanish forever.”

  • In the Guardian, Laura Miller looks at how fiction writers deal (or avoid dealing with) specific technology references in their work, and what this has to do with literary “timelessness”:

Writing historical fiction is the easiest way to escape the Now; to avoid dealing with the internet, you only have to step back a decade or two. If you’d prefer to write about characters entirely innocent of TV, you’d need to retreat as far as the 1940s; then you get the second world war and the Holocaust, subjects that, despite their historical specificity, are understood by everyone to be unimpeachably Timeless.

  • The Pew Research Center looks at gadget-ownership by generation. Guess what? “Millennials are by far the most likely group not only to own most of the devices we asked about, but also to take advantage of a wider range of functions.”
  • At The Millions, Lydia Kiesling writes about Beverly Cleary’s two memoirs, reminding me that I’m pretty sure I read A Girl from Yamhill during my years of Cleary obsession (which included writing her a multi-page starry-eyed fan letter that I was unable to send because I was chewing so intently on my pen that it burst and bled green ink all over the whole thing).
  • Meghan Daum sings the (familiar) praises of snail mail. “[A]s the Postal Service continues its slow fade into history, something will be missing. Not written communication — indeed, it’s only multiplying — but the small comforts that come from waiting for it, handling it and smiling whenever you pass the table you’ve placed it on. For that, nothing beats the U.S. mail.” So does Walter Kirn, for whom the ye olde post office is the post American thing there is.

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By webmama on January 29, 2011

The wood sliced for these names had darkened with age so it paled against the bark like the dessicated flesh of a yellow fruit. She ran a finger along the fretted letters, her eyebrows drew together and filled with a stern feeling, she wished  suddenly that not a single one of them had ever been born to fit a blade in their hand to make vain impermanent markings on living things.

From All the Living by C.E. Morgan, a novel that sucked me in for its 199 perfect pages of lonely souls and Kentucky farmland and difficult love, and still hasn’t let me go.

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welcome to the human brain

By webmama on January 27, 2011

When you are starting a new job in less than a week, you’re dealing with at least two lists. There’s the long errand and shopping and chore-focused to-do list (get dress tailored, do laundry, buy black boots, sew buttons on cardigan…), and then there’s the more abstract list of things that would be fun or smart or healthy for you to do while you have the time, so you can at least tell yourself that you took advantage of the last few days of this period that gets dramatically and not entirely accurately referred to as “freedom.” If you live in New York, topping the list of things you always want and mean to do, but rarely manage is: Go to a museum. Miraculously, Alice had free passes to the Museum of Natural History. Even better, she was willing to play hooky from work to go with me.

In the special exhibit about the brain, I learned that if neurons were marbles, each of us would have enough to fill the New York Public Library. Some of the text in the exhibit was hilariously matter-of-fact, like, “Just when you’re trying your best to be reasonable, your emotions can lead you astray.” There was also this: “By the time you reach your twenties, your brain is functioning at its peak. After that, little by little, the number of neural connections declines.” We played games designed to test your memory and reaction time and various other things we all hope to be good at: trying to trace a shape while looking in a mirror, reading names of colors printed in other colors, attempting to learn the Braille alphabet in a couple of minutes. Then we went to the museum café and each had an $11 panini.

Since it was snowing and a weekday, there was hardly anyone in the butterfly conservatory, so we got to walk around in the humid little tank for as long as we wanted, pointing and exclaiming at the butterflies flying around (The giant shiny blue one! The lacy orange and white one! The one with transparent wings!) and getting a little delirious from the sudden heat. Being in that place is perfect therapy for wintertime; it makes you giddy and melt-y and prone to hugging your friend and telling her how happy you are to be right there with her.

Later, we listened to Whoopi Goldberg narrate a “journey” into space. We watched a strange IMAX movie about aquatic dinosaurs. We went up to the fourth floor and walked through room after room (or “hall” after “hall”) of those dinosaurs and their relatives, skeletons and reconstructions and missing pieces. We went to the Hall of Ocean Life and looked up at the giant whale and at the dioramas that are my favorite, favorite thing—so carefully staged and gently glowing—and then traipsed through the North American Forests and New York State Environment sections, clearly the least loved and restored parts of the museum, with their dated signage and general quaintness, on our way to the hall of minerals and gems, where we wanted to go because we are girls and we like sparkly things. Or really, because I used to be obsessed with rocks.

I used to be obsessed with lots of the things the museum is preoccupied with, which is maybe why I have more affection for it than I do for the Met. The Natural History Museum feels more personal, making me think about how fiercely I used to love dinosaurs—how all kids love dinosaurs, and always will, and how mind-bendingly cool they are to people of all ages, whether or not they want to admit it (the array of dino-themed merch in the giftshop testifies to this, and while I’m on board with a dinosaur-shaped ladle and an ice-cube tray that makes ice in the shape of dinosaur bones, I could do without the pink kiddie t-shirt emblazoned with a sparkly dinosaur and the words “Prehistoric Princess”). All these dinosaurs remind me that, at one early point, I vaguely wanted to be a paleontologist (who didn’t?). The oddly straightforward and therefore semi-uncomfortable histories of various peoples remind me that I wanted to be an archaeologist. The meteors and big hunks of crazily colored rock remind me that for a little while, I really, really wanted to be a geologist. Or an environmentalist or some kind, testing rain with little ph strips to find out its acid content. Or some other profession that involved catching salamanders and subjecting them to a series of random, gentle tests. The trappings of science have always been a real stimulant for me, probably more than art, even though art is technically where my loyalties lie. Science sucks me in with its taxonomies and patient explanations (even if I don’t understand them; Whoopi’s narration in the planetarium was enthusiastic, but it didn’t make it any easier to process the idea of space or dark matter or how a star is born), its objects lined up and labeled behind glass.

My various science-y aspirations pretty much ended when I got to middle school and realized I couldn’t wrap my brain around carbon dating or isotopes or even fractions. It’s a little sad, mostly in retrospect, and mostly because it lines up so neatly and misleadingly with the abilities girls are and aren’t supposed to be confident about at that age. It’s depressing to think about how I much I used to love experiments, until I had to do them in a classroom with an accompanying worksheet or lab report, and grades. But I don’t think I was ever really going to be a scientist. The way I love all this stuff now is the same way I loved it as a kid, based on emotions and aesthetics. I’m romanced by it in a way that doesn’t require real understanding or expertise, and in some ways depends on the lack of exactly those things. It’s enough for me to look at everything laid out so carefully, the volume and detail of it overwhelming, and to let myself be amazed by big things like time and extinction, and little things like the birds painted into the background of a diorama, and the way stars looked on the curved ceiling of the planetarium. There’s the memory of a field trip here to see “Dinosaurs Alive” when I was in second grade, two Rainforest Alliance galas held in the shadow of the giant whale, tumbled rocks in the gift shop that my fingers are still drawn to. And now this quiet, perfect, snowy day in a museum with a good friend, right before things change again.

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i want to be a part of it?

By webmama on January 13, 2011

I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which I’d been dying to read. It was romantic and star-studded and captured 1970’s NYC in an enviable way, and I got pretty wrapped up in the day-to-day details of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and the lives of two talented people on the verge of something great that they couldn’t quite picture yet. But I didn’t love it as much as I thought I would; it felt a little heavy-handed (if in a way that was sort of authentically Patti Smith). I wish I’d counted how many references there were to pieces of ribbon and lengths of exotic cloth; it started to feel like she must have been swimming in fabric remnants all the time. Still, it was definitely worth reading, if only for the casual way Smith writes about all sorts of notorious New York figures: She’s always running into Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Alan Ginsberg, and Andy Warhol is always lurking somewhere. That New York is such a looming, mythic abstraction, it’s a little shocking to read such a blasé account of what it was like at the time. Of the drag artists Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, she writes movingly, “Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn’t live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.”

At first I thought New York magazine’s issue on “The Greatest New York Ever” was just another drooling lovefest detailing why this city is TheBestEverOMG, or another mostly pointless exercise in figuring out the absolute best of everything in a given genre. But it was a little more interesting than that. Trying to determine the greatest ever may be silly, but it has the benefit of forcing people to look back in time. So the argument isn’t about whether Black Swan is a greater New York movie than a contemporary like…I dunno, Date Night (I know that’s a random and terrible comparison, but I do love the fact that there is a Wikipedia page for “List of films set in New York City,”which includes a separate category for films that show the city being destroyed). Instead, the argument is about whether Bonfire of the Vanities captures or represents the city better than The Age of Innocence, Sweet Smell of Success better than Working Girl, the New Museum building better than the Chrysler Building, A Chorus Line better than West Side Story—and in the most literal encapsulation of this, whether 1898 was a better time to live here than 1978. The magazine is pitting years and historical moments and aging reference points against each other, and seeing what comes out on top. It’s an unusually literal war of competing nostalgia (as well as, yes, another bit of somewhat redundant self love, and ultimately kind of meaningless).

And so Philip Lopate champions 1898: “Of course, there was vast misery in the tenements and sweatshops; tuberculosis, syphilis, and alcoholism were rampant, the rivers polluted with sewage. But even this gave rise to the reformist activism of Emma Goldman and Jacob Riis.”

Daniel Okrent advocates for 1947: “New York is never perfect…But the Wonder City, as some contemporaries called it, had never been, nor ever again would be, quite as wonderful as it was in that postwar dawn. Penn Station still soared. Harold Ross still edited The New Yorker. And one of that magazine’s treasures, E.?B. White, would soon write, ‘No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.’ In 1947, the luck was here for the taking.”

Francine Prose argues for 1963: “New York was feeling the revved-up heat of something just beginning, spiked by the thrill of watching the past recede in the rearview mirror. A vapor trail of postwar optimism lingered. The Dodgers had left us, but the Mets had arrived, and even if they were a joke, you knew they’d step up. The city was changing, growing up, getting sleeker and cooler but, like a child with a blanket scrap, clutching onto its grubby past…. New York was beautiful in a way that a city can be only when no one’s thinking how quickly the moment will pass.”

Making a case for 1978 is Kevin Baker: “It was a terrific interval. The preoccupation with the suburbs had peaked, and people were flowing back into the city—often young, creative, interesting people. It was possible to have entire conversations that did not involve real estate or bedbugs. The fiscal crisis was just past, recreational drugs were easy to get, and everyone was having sex all the time.”

And because someone has to, Michael Cunningham talks up 2011 with his own list of reasons why the city is more extraordinary than ever, topped off by the fact that it’s simply our own era. “You could be time’s widow. You could grow old insisting to younger people that they should have been there then. When you breezed into Studio 54 in a pink mohawk. When you headbanged at CBGB. When people could still afford a goddamned apartment. The past is made up of golden ages….Reminiscence, however, is never a good idea here. If you don’t welcome the new, you miss the point of New York.”

(That’s very sweet, but New York is basically built on the act of reminiscing, regardless of whether it’s a good idea.)

All of these writers point out specific things to love about their chosen year, while admitting that there were drawbacks even in their ideal frozen moment. Their entries get less nostalgic as their arguments get more specific. Things get blurry and simplified the further away we get, but choosing an ideal year requires you to take a real position and defend it, rather than resting only on feelings and fleeting, fading impressions. Maybe if someone went through the issue and figured out the year every artwork and event and idea that’s held up as superlative belonged to, we could get to a real verdict—one arrived at collectively, by way of several dozen highly contested individual choices. Or we could decide that these gestures at decisiveness we already have are enough.

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memory objects

By webmama on January 12, 2011

My mom was in Toronto last month, dealing with the deeply sad task of figuring out which of my grandmother’s painstakingly assembled photo albums to keep intact. For most of her life, my grandmother put together an album after every trip she and my grandfather took (and there were many). She admitted that it was sort of a pain to do, but knew it was worth it to have an album to look through, rather than piles of unsorted photos in the back of the closet. She also believed it was important to label places you’d been while you still remembered their names. The albums were beautiful, but when she died and the condo she and my grandfather lived in was sold, there wasn’t room to keep them all.

In sorting this out, my mom’s solution was to keep certain albums that were particularly elaborate or carefully done (those dedicated specifically to family photos among them), but otherwise to pull out the photos of my grandparents themselves and toss the rest. What got thrown out were photos of scenery—not so meaningful to the people who hadn’t seen it firsthand, except that the images preserved (sort of, if one’s prone to this kind of thinking) the way things had looked through her eyes. I can’t imagine how hard this was to actually do; I’m not sure I could have managed it. And yet, going through personal effects has to involve getting rid of some. It’s important. I think it’s also brave.

I thought about this while I read Rob Walker’s excellently (and eerily) titled cover story in the Times Magazine last weekend, “Things To Do in Cyberspace When You’re Dead.” The article raises questions about privacy and legacy and technology and entrepreneurship—but of course, I’m most interested in what Walker explores about memory and (by extension) nostalgia.

The article points out that when it comes to preserving our “bit-based personal effects,” we’re stuck between two defaults: saving too much (everything) and too little (nothing). We need to find some middle-ground, and think about making real choices about what we hold on to, where we keep it, and why. Walker quotes Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, who points out in his book that “forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy.”

If it’s difficult to wade through physical stuff, it’s arguably even harder to sort the remnants of a digital life, and those who don’t understand it tend not to bother at all. And since there aren’t systems in place for allowing surviving family members access to their relatives’ email and Flickr accounts, they often don’t even have the chance to make the choice to do nothing. Even if there was a procedure (and it seems clear that it’s important to land on a solution to this relatively soon), there’s no easy way to differentiate between what’s important and what’s not. Online, we’re all kind of hoarders. With huge amounts of storage space and information piling up all the time, there’s not much incentive not to be.

Stacy Pitsillides, a grad student researching “digital afterlife issues,” explains: “If every object you’ve ever owned was a memory object…and we gave that to a family member and said, ‘You have to remember this person by all of these objects,’ then what position would we be in, and how would we ever remember everyone?”

Still, Walker cites a recent corporate study that “identified ‘chief memory officer’ as a kind of unofficial role take on by someone (often mom) in many families–the person who is paying attention to the idea that there may be no physical scrapbook or set of journals to hand down to future generations and the bits-and-bytes memory objects need to be preserved somehow.” Someone has to be in charge of this. Though if no one is, we won’t recognize the loss until it’s too late. Walker again:

In real time, we can record and distribute the most important moments of our existence, and some of the least. For the generations growing up in the Web era, this mode of being is more or less taken for granted. But the tools we use privilege the moment, not the long term; they also tend to make everything feel roughly equal in importance and offer us little incentive to comb back through our digital scribblings and sort out what might have lasting meaning from what probably doesn’t. The results are pretty much the opposite of a scrapbook carefully edited to serve as a memory object but could end up serving that function by default.

The Magazine ran a related article about six months ago, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” more focused on privacy and digital identity-formation than digital legacy. “The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts,” wrote Jeffrey Rosen. He also quoted Mayer-Schönberger, and pulled out another choice quote from his book: “[W]ithout some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

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By webmama on January 7, 2011

Journalist Geoffrey Gray cuts right to the heart of what it means that Tom Robbins and Wayne Barrett are leaving (and/or being booted from) the Village Voice:

Our click-through economy no longer has time for institutional memory, or a way to reward the merits of mentorship, and our budgets reflect it. There are fewer desks to ambush, less gray hairs to poke for advice, and a lot fewer ways to figure out what the story is. That’s the story.

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By webmama on January 7, 2011

André Aciman writes beautifully about anticipating, and sometimes dreading, what he knows will come next in the life of his family:

[My son] liked rituals. I liked rehearsing. Rituals are when we wish to repeat what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what we fear might yet occur. Maybe the two are one and the same, our way to parley and haggle with time.

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By webmama on January 4, 2011

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By webmama on December 31, 2010

My favorite discovery of 2010 was Meghan Daum. Her first book was a collection of essays called My Misspent Youth, and I read it this year at once aghast that I hadn’t known about it before, and grateful to be able to come to it both fresh and late. Soon after, I sat on a beach in Maine, where the pretty scenery had a hard time competing for my attention with Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in that House, Daum’s wrenching, funny memoir of real estate obsession and a more undefinable search for that thing called home. When I got back from that vacation, I put off more pressing reading responsibilities in favor of Daum’s novel The Quality of Life Report, which I loved hard and got sort of stuck in my head. A couple months after that reading binge, Daum almost died when she came down with a rare case of typhus. I’m so, so glad—in that slightly embarrassing but wonderfully pure way that we tend to feel about people we have a sense of devotion and connection to because they’ve given us great writing—that she’s okay.

I found out about Daum, in part, because I was following the coverage of Emily Gould’s memoir And The Heart Says Whatever, a book Daum blurbed and which was positioned as a sort of heir of My Misspent Youth. I was annoyed by the New York feature that seemed to draw slightly lazy parallels between the two smart, pretty lady writers, but having read both their books, it was less far off than I wanted to believe it was. Anyway, I loved Gould’s book. I cried at the end.

Aimee Bender’s aching novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was probably my favorite fiction of the year, though I’ve been (a bit belatedly) wrapped up in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom for the past week, and am finding it as amazing and painful and funny and generally genius as everyone promised it would be. I’m  torn about whether to huddle up with the last 75 pages of it before going out to celebrate the end of 2010, or whether to savor it a bit into the new year. This year I also read Philip Roth’s absolutely incredible and in no way overrated American Pastoral, making it kind of a big year in my life for big books by Great American Writers about sadly falling apart families and suburbia and idealism and trying hard to be good and do right by the world.

I also really enjoyed Elif Batuman’s justly praised The Possessed, and Sara Marcus’s vivd, impressive history of riot grrrl, Girls to the Front. I read a lot this year, and wrote about a lot of what I read, but as I’ve been reading Freedom I’ve been craving more reading experiences like it—not more books like it, which would be unfair and impossible, but time spent absorbed in books without worrying about taking notes and forming serious opinions about them. It’s getting harder and harder for me to read without doing that, which I’m okay with, and mostly can’t stop myself from doing anyway—until I let a story take me away without feeling any responsibility towards it, and remember what it was like to stay in bed all day with a book when I was a kid, not worrying what would come next.

For many years, I loved New Year’s Eve. I made a habit/ritual of remembering where I was and who I was with and what I did every December 31st, and mentally, somewhat masochistically, running through it every year. I was also the unofficial repository for other people’s basic recollections of those occasions, sometimes called on to remind everyone where we’d been the year (or 2 or 3) before. At some point in college I stopped being able to remember (possibly around the New Year’s spent at Alice’s parents’ house, getting drunk and then sick from too many—but not really that many!—margaritas). But I cared about doing this so much that the habit of loving the holiday naturally carried over, after the night stopped feeling quite so promising and important, through several years of doing not much and then being disappointed when something magic and memorable failed to materialize. This year I feel like I’ve finally sort of reconciled with all that. I’m putting on a new dress and going out. It’ll be fun, but more because it’s Friday than because of anything truly meaningful. (Which, to be optimistic in a resolution-y kind of way, might be the healthier outlook.) But I will be pulling out my notebook later this weekend and trying to account for all the years I used to remember, because I still can’t quite help myself.

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