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In this piece, Jessa really gets at the impossibility of reading the “right” books all the time:
The idea that as a literary person there are a certain set of books you must read because they are important parts of the literary conversation is constantly implied, yet quite ridiculous. Once you get done with the Musts — the Franzens, Mitchells, Vollmanns, Roths, Shteyngarts — and then get through the Booker long list, and the same half-dozen memoirs everyone else is reading this year (crack addiction and face blindness seem incredibly important this year), you have time for maybe two quirky choices, if you are a hardcore reader. Or a critic. And then congratulations, you have had the same conversations as everyone else in the literary world.
Yes! There are just too many things I’ve missed or glossed over or never gotten around to reading, and at a certain point you have to make your choices and live with them, and realize that you are never going to have read everything you’re supposed to. But I’m not sure I’m quite at that point yet. Which is why I am speed-reading Philip Roth.
(Just for reference, it is 12:28 a.m. and I am in a hotel room all alone in Hunt Valley, Maryland, and have had a little more wine than I meant to.)
- My favorite recent thing: The Believer’s amazing interview with Robin Nagle, who holds the enviable position of anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation. “My entry point is through things we decide are no longer worth keeping,” she explains.
Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. So we are surrounded by ephemera, but we can’t acknowledge that, because it’s kind of scary, because I think ultimately it points to our own temporariness, to thoughts that we’re all going to die.
- The Yale Daily News interviews the oldest typewriter repairman in New Haven (at 94, perhaps he’s the oldest outside that city, too?). “Typewriters you can own,” he says. “I think a computer owns you.”
- Reviewing the painfully-titled musical Power Balladz, Charles Isherwood asks, “Is there room enough in Manhattan for two loving tributes to the heyday of the hair band?” Basically? No.
- The Web series First Day is about a girl who gets 1,001 chances to do her first day of school over and get it “right.” Unfortunately, this just means getting the cute boy to notice her.
- Rebecca Traister wrote a lovely essay about her attachment to a 12-year-old jar of pickled dilly beans she made with her grandmother, still parked in the back of her fridge:
I cannot bring myself to throw the beans out, though I will never dare to eat them. I look at them crowding one corner in the back of an overstuffed fridge and think not that I made them, but that my grandmother did. They’re her beans grown from seeds she put in the ground. They’re in her once-sterile Mason jar along with her dill, grown on the hill that I haven’t climbed for far, far too long now….[P]erhaps, [if] I threw out the dilly beans, my grandmother’s empty body might mercifully follow.
- Also at Salon, Cary Tennis has some advice for a woman devastated by the sale of her childhood home:
I think you have to go to this home and walk around and spend some time there and say goodbye to it. You have to sit there on the lawn or in the backyard and sketch or take photos or write something, and put some pieces of this house in a container to keep. Maybe you can take some soil and some paint and some things, a favorite thing or two from this house. You need a ritual.
- And a not exactly groundbreaking piece by 26-year-old Emma Silvers about why, despite her generation, she’s just not that into e-readers.
- There’s also Alex Pareene’s razor-sharp takedown of a recent, particularly annoying Maureen Dowd column, in which her “trademark stupidly obvious, terribly out-of-date pop culture references” (like Al Gore’s mythical “earth tones”) go beyond insufferable and become irresponsible.
- Jezebel asks, “Are We Really Ready for Preppy Nostalgia?“
- I’m loving Lorin Stein’s guest blogging stint for The Atlantic: He’s arguing against so-called “beach reading,” pointing out that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom may be a masterpiece but is hardly a throwback to some bygone days of great literature, and shedding some light on the painstaking method behind the Paris Review’s amazing interviews with writers.
- And at Good Reads, Franzen tells Emily Gould, “People don’t have book-lined studies anymore; they have video game-lined great rooms.”
The last of the tomatoes are coming in now, wide and cracked, heavy with the captured humidity of passing summer, each one a Neruda poem shedding its own light, benign majesty. It is time to eat them, these sunsets of the season, then put away our flip-flops and face the fall.
Dear Sam Sifton: You are a wonderful writer, and yes, tomatoes are magical and delicious. But your editor should probably have reigned you in a bit on this one.
And now for today’s accounting of things that are dead or otherwise over: Paste magazine. Heeb magazine. Felicity Merriman, the Revolutionary War-era American Girl doll (once owned and beloved by my childhood friend Joanna, whose mother wouldn’t buy her a doll tied to a more recent historical period because it wouldn’t have been educational enough). Novelty shops. Books–again, or still (according to Ms. Harper Lee). And thankfully, the month of August.
Alive and well: Five of the dresses Vivien Leigh wore as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, after fans responded to a museum appeal by donating $30,000 to restore and preserve them.
Today’s best headline: “‘Cougar’ Trend of Women Chasing Younger Men a Myth.”
You don’t say.
The glut of 90’s-centric fashion has finally led the Times to an obvious source of influence: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, wearing all those poufy floral patterned dresses, often paired with jackets and boots. Writer William Van Meter thinks her look incorporated a range of styles, including “early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious zealot.” Of course, in it’s latest incarnation, “the layered floral/tough girl Elaine look is nostalgic.”
What’s weirder is how Van Meter explains the current embrace of this style as an amalgam of “this season’s trends of the early ’90s and the working woman” (love how those are both analogous “trends”). He claims many hipsters decked out in Elaine-inspired outfits “are too young to realize whom they are referencing”–dubious, since Seinfeld is in constant syndication–and quotes one stylist who attributes it to a backlash against the tight, short clothes women embraced not long ago: “This is a more covered-up look and looking like you have a brain. Elaine had a job. She worked at J. Peterman. She was a go-getter.” A career girl role model in blousy calico! Next up, Murphy Brown (or did I just miss that one?).
Elsewhere in Thursday Styles, Jon Caramanica plays Critical Shopper at Scout Vintage T-Shirts, a store full of “questionable pasts…a small warehouse of rejected memories.” He writes:
I pondered what made some shirts, once vessels of memory, acceptable detritus. Did people no longer wish to advertise that they had survived the 1989 Bay Area earthquake ($38) or the Wisconsin blizzard of 1982 ($28)? (True survivors — which is to say, true victims — probably didn’t buy commemorative T-shirts.) Did the Pulaski Academy Jogathon ($18) not merit a memento?
Good questions. And in the end, I have to respect the fact that Caramanica goes into places like this with clear boundaries: “I won’t buy something I, or my imagined self, wouldn’t have worn in its original time period. Clothes send messages, and I have no interest in looking like someone else’s yesteryear.”
Look, I love Mad Men. LOVE. And I’m willing to buy that Matthew Weiner is some kind of genius. But I’m getting kind of sick of reading interviews with the cast that repeatedly invoke the show’s creator like he is some kind of oracle, you know? It starts to seem like they are all brainwashed.
scratch and sniff
A few days ago, I went through a stack of back issues of The New Yorker, pulling out articles I wanted to read and tossing the rest of the issue (this is really the only way to deal with the relentless arrival of that magazine; sometimes I feel like it breeds in my mailbox…). Somehow I’d missed David Owen’s essay from the January 25th issue, “The Dime Store Floor,” about he and his sister very deliberately visiting their childhood haunts to see if they still smelled the same: the building where their dentist’s office used to be, an art museum where they went on many field trips, the titular dime store (“which had once been flavored mainly by dust, plus a sort of comforting over-scent that was related to mildew in the same way that cognac is related to wine” and was now “dominated by scented candles”). Visiting his childhood home in the midst of a renovation by the new owners, he notes the many things that had been changed along with the startling number of things that had not: “Each surviving detail was a pushpin holding the past to its easel.” And along the way, he looks back on things that aren’t places he can simply drive to and drink in for comparison’s sake—the smells that got snarled in his mind and formed the actual seed of his memories.
The essay ends with Owen reflecting on the indelible associations of things like shampoos and deodorants, how the smell of someone’s hair in high school can be the baseline of what you find attractive for the rest of your life, and how if you realized that time would inevitably move a particular product off the market, “you could have bought a few bottles and placed them on a shelf somewhere, for later sampling and contemplation—once each spring, perhaps, or during the final moments of life.” He buys, accidentally-on purpose, his father’s brand of deodorant, and “was almost knocked over by what I can only describe as a physical memory of my father.”
Owen (whose books include one about going undercover as a high school student, and one about the invention of the Xerox machine) is wallowing in the kind of naked nostalgia that’s usually seen as embarrassing and indulgent, old or aging men lost in the fog of their pasts. But it’s really different than Garrison Keillor’s arrogant, half-imagined approach to “the good old days.” Owen isn’t apologizing for lavishing time and words on the specific content of his memories; his approach is both forensic and romantic, largely (if unconventionally) evidence-based. His directness is sort of unnerving, and feels entirely earned.
Without a subscription, The New Yorker’s website only lets you access an abstract of the essay, which sort of hilariously reduces all its sensitivity and depth to what must be an automated (or intern-generated) summary: “Writer recalls the fragrances of his paternal grandmother, known as Gaga…Writer recalls the smell of cigarette smoke and the parties his parents threw when he was a child…”