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.
As below, Haley Barbour’s dreamy nostalgia for pre-civil rights Mississippi is not “false nostalgia,” but it is a rather insidious false memory–the kind of misunderstanding of history that should probably bar one from becoming a serious presidential candidate, but probably won’t. (An editorial in the Times calls it “the faulty memory all too common among those who stood on the sidelines during one of the greatest social upheavals in history.”) It is kind of amazing to watch as Barbour realizes that he shouldn’t admit to “remembering” things this way, and recasting the era as “difficult and painful” where he’d just claimed, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”
“Memory has long been the mutable clay of the South, changing the meaning of the Civil War and now the civil-rights era,” the editorial concludes. “But the memory of Mr. Barbour’s personal history will not soon fade.” Or will it?
I’m not much of a Weezer fan, but the fixation on their early output versus the band’s historic disdain for it–and their recent realization that it’s better if they just embrace it–is kind of interesting. Vulture and the Times report from the band’s current Memories Tour. Of the “alt-rock time machine, Jon Pareles writes, “For the grown-up Weezer, the boldness and fragility, the instability and impulsiveness of ‘Pinkerton’ are now memories. Getting ‘back there’ would be a feat.” Amos Barshad’s piece is headlined “Weezer Is Excellent at Pretending Like It’s 1994.”
Predictable, yes, but I will probably be seeing this:
At The Awl, Josh Kurp writes about what VH1’s shows “I Love the 80s” and “I Love the 90s” did for our memories of those decades—basically, he argues, they undermined and falsified and replaced the truth of what we actually experienced. Revisiting them recently, he also discovered that the shows had less actual content than he thought they did: [T]he talking heads aren’t so much telling jokes as they are explaining the film/show/album/whatever, and then either singing or quoting from the material. There are virtually no jokes; the show is simply for people who say, ‘Hey, I remember that!’”
I didn’t remember Tron, because I’d never seen it. But I felt like I did. Likewise, I spoke about ‘Til Tuesday as if I had heard “Voices Carry” constantly on the radio in 1985, which I did not. My friends do the same thing, for things for which they weren’t actually alive—and it’s not like we’re talking about the Beatles here, we’re talking about MTV VJs and Pound Puppies. Our memories of things we couldn’t possibly remember were brought to us by VH1, and they’ve stuck.
His take on how those shows served as bizarre kinds of backgrounders on the relics of one’s own generation is pretty spot on, but I don’t think nostalgia is “false” just because it’s directed at a movie you haven’t actually seen. A movie couched in a particular time—sure, like Tron, which I haven’t seen either—is rarely just about what’s actually playing out on the screen. The memory of it is about everything surrounding it, and that’s as much what VH1’s joking decade experts are riffing on as anything else. Secondhand nostalgia isn’t necessarily any more “false” that genuine nostalgia—whatever that is. The slipperiness and uncertainty of memories has everything to do with what nostalgia is, and it’s part of why people get so defensive about it in the first place.
Meanwhile, at Capital Gillian Reagan declares 2010 “The Year of 90s Nostalgia,” full of reunions of 90s bands, a few zines being published, vintage glasses, lots of plaid, beards, awfully familiar political struggles, 90’s-centric Tumblrs and of course, Tavi Gevinson.
“Roughly speaking, the 1970s had its ’50s obsession, the 1980s had its ’60s, the 1990s had its ’70s, and the 2000s had its ’80s,” she writes. “Our nostalgia is right on schedule.” Her verdict is more positive and hopeful than Kurp’s: “It is easy to pine for the past, and ignore its ugly chapters, instead of figuring out how to make a future in which we want to feel present. The fear of repeating ourselves is just like nostalgia itself: cyclical and universal.”
Some repairs to the bathroom revealed these cross-sections of the many, many layers of paint that have been applied to the walls over the years. I think they’re kind of beautiful.
(Um, apparently I took the month of November off?)
Jack Shafer looks at how Boomers dominate the media, and when this might shift: “By sheer force of numbers, boomers quickly toppled the martini-drinking, WW II generation and substituted their cultural references. In recent years they’ve repelled the next generations—let’s call them the post-boomers for lack of a satisfying rubric that encompasses Gens X, Y, and Z—from taking cultural control.”
Surely the twenty-somethings behind the new Millenials Magazine will weigh in on this eventually.
In The Washington Post, Kwame Anthony Appiah predicts what future generations will condemn about our time, and finds three handy signs that suggest a practice is destined for the dustbin of history: “people have already heard the arguments against the practice,” “defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity,” and “supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit.”
“The most obvious explanation has to do with the economic morass. When a moment is as bad as this one, there is probably a tendency among voters to conflate past moments in the life of the country, on one hand, and the politicians who personified them, on the other. If by comparison the 1980s seemed so much easier and more promising to Iowa voters, then why not just go hire the guy who ran the state then? Surely he’ll know what to do.”
“…We tend to think of generational changes as happening all at once, like a door suddenly blowing open. In reality, though, there are probably hesitations at the threshold, brief moments when much of the country, having glimpsed the future, seems inclined to stay exactly where it has been. And perhaps this is that kind of moment, which is why voters and parties in some cases gravitate toward the last era’s politicians, candidates who seem comfortingly knowable and familiar.”
Back in October, the Internet freaked out when the news went around that Sony was ceasing production of the Walkman. It later turned out that they were just discontinuing sales of it Japan, but once the gates of reminiscing are opened, they cannot be closed! The LA Times noted that “the Sony site promoting the device, which sells for $29.99, says the player can be used to ‘enjoy your old cassette collection.’” Awww. (According to the company, there’s still “a consistent but small demand” for the device.)
After a dismissive opening–”Talk about ending with a whimper: Who knew that portable cassette players were still being made at all?“–Slate featured what turned out to be a nice obit that pointed out the ways personal listening devices really changed the way we listen to music, ushering in an age when people walk down the street, “enveloped in the self-selected private soundtrack of his or her life.”
Elsewhere, camera phones are pissing off musicians and killing live rock shows. “Generation gaps are a given in music culture, but age seems to have little bearing on the urge to gather gigabytes of concert footage,” notes the Wall Street Journal.
Pontiac is dead, at age 84. “They had a lot of glory years, but from the ’70s on, Pontiac just couldn’t meet the bar,” said Pontiac fan Larry Kummer. “It was always living in the past.”
Mark Craig saved all his answering machine messages for two decades and compiled them into a pretty amazing video.
Lane Smith has a great new picture book that introduces the young’uns to the very concept of a B-O-O-K. But somehow, college kids remember what a book is, enough to still prefer them over digital versions in some cases. The Times learns that while they could get digital versions of textbooks, the kids still “cling” to the kind with pages that can give you paper cuts. Comments from students following the article were mixed, but my favorite is: “Yes i Would. I Love To Listen Rather Than Read. But Most Of The Time If Your Listening To Something You Dont Pay Attention In Class…So Idk It Would Be Good In Some Ways But In Others In Not Sure.”
In this week where everyone on Facebook is creating “beautiful collages” of their statuses from the past year (not to mention looking back on where they were when John Lennon was killed) I learned that Ninuku Archivist can download all your Facebook updates and put them in a book for you to look through later. These things are both ridiculous, but they do point to a real desire to preserve these ephemeral things we do and say online.
Writing about Amanda Hesser’s Essential New York Times Cookbook, Jennie Yabroff notes, “Food writing is almost always infused with nostalgia. But when it comes to food trends, we have a recurring case of cultural amnesia.” The book “proves that when it comes to what we eat, there’s no such thing as invention, merely reinterpretation” and that “not only have our tastes changed less than we think they have, but food has always been a key indicator of who we think we are—and who we aspire to be.” And of course, “what’s sexy today may be cringeworthy tomorrow.”
Men in New York love old school barbershops, and “there’s been a surge of interest in vintage shaving, grooming and barbershop paraphernalia” on eBay. According to one customer, though, it doesn’t make much sense: “They cut great hair at Freemans…But what’s so funny about this illusion of old Main-Street America, where you pop in and get a haircut, is how it just doesn’t jibe with reality. The last time I tried to get one there I was told there was a three-hour-and-20 minute wait. And not only do I think there has not ever been a barbershop on any Main Street that had a three-hour-and-20 minute wait, I don’t know a single New Yorker who can afford to wait that long for a haircut.”
“Adult Chocolate Milk”: It exists. Not the most terrible idea, but the story of the company kind of makes my head hurt:
“Just like mom, the original formulas for these drinks were discovered in the home kitchen of Tracy – one of the company’s founders. After updating her Facebook status to “Tracy is enjoying some Adult Chocolate Milk,” friends began inquiring about the recipe and where they could get it.
