I started reading Sally Rooney’s new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You last night π. I made it just under half way through.
This isn’t an original thought: Rooney is exceptionally talented. She has an “easy virtuosity” and dialogue, especially, shimmers off the page. It helps that the gift of the gab is an Irish thing, and in my mind she just absolutely nails the voices she is working to create. I find, when reading Rooney, I think to myself “I should try to be a writer”. She makes it look easy.
Who am I quoting up above, you may be wondering? The answer is myself, in a dream I had last night.
I dreamt that I was sitting in a university lecture hall listening to an honourary lecture given by a professor I had several classes with when I was in undergrad, Julian Patrick. Unsurprisingly Professor Patrick’s lecture was focused on the Rooney’s novel.
He made the case that Beautiful World, Where Are You concerns and is concerned with fragility. Rooney’s characters recognize but cannot escape the pressure the world puts on them, large and small. Their fragility within this context is notable, Prof. Patrick argued, and provide an interpretive lens through which we can make one sense at least of the text.
And then, after kind of wandering over in my direction (I was sitting in the front row) Prof. Patrick leaned in towards me and whispered, “Got anything else?”
So in the dream I thought for a moment, cleared my throat, and started talking. I distinctly remember the feeling of uncertainty and surprise that the rest of the audience expressed at that moment: we were less than five minutes into the lecture, and it was unusual for an audience member to being speaking at this point without any indication that we had moved into Q&A or a more conversational mode for the session.
And here’s what I said, more or less, as far as I can remember it: It is true that there is a strong element of fragility in how Rooney constructs her characters. They think about their position within a fraught and unjust social order; they struggle under the expectations placed on them by family, friends, the market, themselves; they navigate intimacy with uncertainty, sensitive to the different ways that interpretation could change the fundamentals of how a particular interaction with another might be understood. They struggle with sadness, feelings of inadequacy, being overwhelmed, moments of hypocrisy, and constant major or minor assaults to their mental health broadly speaking.
But balanced against this fragility is something else, I said (in my dream, to an audience that was now listening carefully): fun. They have and are fun, in many respects! They have deep friendships with each other. There is lots of playful banter. They are young and enjoying themselves, at least some of the time. Certainly the sex is often good, both for the characters involved and in the way Rooney writes it. The main characters seem to be living with some degree of authenticity to their own vision of their lives (however fraught that ends up being). They express their views confidently and seem to enjoy the back and forth this creates with the people around them.
The point isn’t that fragility isn’t important; rather, that Rooney balances that fragility with indications of another way of living, a fun and lively way of interacting with the world. The novel, I argued in my dream to my dream audience, is less about either side and more about the balance or between the two. And that balancing between paired elements is reproduced throughout the text. Friendship and romance; success and failure; faith and rationality; familial bonds and gulfs. The letters (emails?) exchanged between Alice and Eileen throughout are the perfect vehicle for expressing this: at once social, written for another, audience in mind, and at the same time deeply interior, reflective and crafted with and through introspection.
Granted, I’m only half way through (I was only half way through in my dream as well). But what emerges is the sense of making do, of navigating through extremes with some level of grace, relying on those around us to the extent we are able, finding meaning as honestly as we can, being sensitive to difference and to inconsistency but also to patterns and structure in how we are with others. I’m not sure this made it into my impromptu lecture, but in my mind (or the mind of my dreaming, lecturing self, which I am struggling to separate from what I actually think about the text) Rooney rejects both a pessimistic acceptance of fragility as the defining feature of how we live now, but also isn’t staking out a position that what we need to cultivate is antifragility in Taleb’s sense. There’s some path between the two.
It was an interesting dream. I’m interested to see whether my dream take on the novel holds up as I continue reading.
An every 10 year birthday present (more or less) π
Saturday morning π π·
For about twenty-five years I have been copying sentences into the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using, using mostly for other purposes…. Of course there are sentences elsewhere in these books: even the briefest, most telegraphic, verbless note is a sentence of sorts. But the end-of-notebook sentences are different, even if someone them come from books I’m reviewing and so on. Unconnected to duty or deadlines, to projects per se, they compose a parallel timeline — of what?
I suppose the word is: affinity.
From the first chapter of Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence, describing a practice that I’m emulating, to some extent, here on this blog. Again, closer to the end of the chapter:
So, not a treasury, then — something closer, I hope, to a kind of commonplace book, product of haphazard notation, ad hoc noticing.
Leylah π¨π¦ vs Emma π¬π§ is, for me, a can’t lose match. I’m excited for both of them and delighted regardless of outcome. It’s a rare and awesome feeling!! πΎ
The September 6 issue of The New Yorker has re-prints of two phenomenal pieces by Zadie Smith (from 2013) and Anthony Bourdain (from 2000). Highly recommended! π
I’m excited about my library holds list. Should be an excellent autumn for reading :)
Beautiful world, where are you - Sally Rooney
In praise of shadows - Jun’ichirΕ Tanizaki
Leave Society - Tao Lin
Morning Star - Karl Ove Knausgaard
No one is talking about this - Patricia Lockwood
Something new under the sun - Alexandra Kleeman
There’s no such thing as an easy job - Kiukio Tsumura
The biggest bluff - Maria Konnikova
Essays in idleness and HΕjΕki - KenkΕ Yoshida
Fake accounts - Lauren Olyler
Suppose a sentence - Brian Dillon
Remote work mostly destroys the ability to appear busy, other than having a full calendar. Being on lots of calls does not actually have an output if you’re just on them to waffle on about some bullshit, and bosses no longer have the mechanism to appear busy other than doing work.
[Mona] remembered something she’d heard a while back from her friend Vlad, a sixty-something Russian novelist she’d met at Iowa during a prestigious writers' residency in the middle of Yankee Nowhere, at a time when Mona was still a newcomer to the circuit. According to Vlad… peace reigned in Iowa “only beacause we don’t understand each other’s languages, and our ignorance protects us.” To illustrate his point, Vlad told Mona he’d participated in residencies that included composers and musicians as well as writers — and that was real hell. Peace between musicians, Vlad continued, was impossible, because they could all tell who was a real genius and who was just a mediocre poseur. Music was a transparent field in which genius and mediocrity were self-evident truths — and this only ever led to hatred, distrust, and malaise. No doubt about it: not knowing each other’s languages was the key to conviviality, because if we were able to read what everyone else was writing, if we were able to understand it and feel it like music, the Russian calmly concluded, well, then we’d be murdering each other in our beds.
Phase 1, Skeuomorph : a remote organization will look to imitate the design, structure, norms, ebbs and flows of an office environment. The primary goal is to merely continue to operate the business, but remotely.
Phase 2, Functional: Entering Phase 2 is simple. It begins with leadership asking a fundamental question: “What if we didn’t do things the way we’ve always done them?” Companies in Phase 2 will begin to take advantage of technology to replace things which were manually done, or not done at all. For example, a company will begin to:
Record all meetings and automatically upload them, plugging knowledge gaps created by undocumented gatherings.
Attach a Google Doc agenda to every business meeting, writing questions, answers, and conversation down in real-time as the meeting transpires so that knowledge is archived for reference, and for viewing by attendees who are not able to attend live.
Converse about a work topic in a public chat channel instead of a private channel, so that more input may be gained.
Phase 3, Asynchronous: marked by a company’s comfortability in completing work without mandated synchronicity. Maximally efficient remote environments will do as little work as possible synchronously, instead focusing the valuable moments where two or more people are online at the same time on informal communication and bonding.
Phase 4, Intentionality: marked by an extraordinary amount of intentionality, particularly in areas that are typically assumed to need minimal guardrails. [For example] Measuring output (results) rather than input (hours). This requires a deliberate choice to not measure hours spent working, as well as a strong commitment to outlining deliverables and expectations that can be measured. This enables team members to work towards their goals in any manner they choose.
Camping essentials π· βοΈ
Helpful π·
Ben Evans, on the e500m fine France has levied on Google for “not negotiating ‘in good faith’ to pay newspapers whenever a link to their sites appears in search”:
The underlying reasoning is very simple and make perfect sense, if youβve never used the internet or thought much about how it works: βNewspapers have to be on Google and FB, but G&FB need them as well for completeless, and G&FBβs market power means the newspapers canβt demand payment for this. So, this is a competition problemβ. Sure, except that 1: no-one else pays to make a link either (I donβt, and I have no market power) and 2: why should it only be newspapers that get paid, and not the other 99% of links that show up in search results?
Even with the ancient Netscape web browser, even with data dribbling into your CPU from a telephone line, pumped in from the Bell telephone aqueduct by your dial-up modem, even with the pages taking a minute to unscroll themselves for viewing, often stopping halfway down the screen, the chemical payoff was already enough to flip your animal brain into a foraging jag. You’d focus briefly on the new thing you’d just clicked on, and then ipso facto it was no longer new. What was left was the dying remnant of the secret brain-excitement from the discovery, and the hunger for another hit of this waning thrill, which is to say, the desire to do it again. This sequence of novelty and then boredom and then hunting for more novelty - now neuroscientifically engineered in the platforms and apps that occupy our thumbs - was a basic fuel of mass engagement from the very beginning of the web browser era. The ease of access combined with the sheer number of things there were to click on, the in-effect infinite number of these experiences you could have, meant the tiniest discoveries could keep you clicking after these empty rewards. The evanescence and triviality were key to our deep involvement. Each click, being both a fulfillment and a disappointment, was its own reason to click again.
[The] absence of social feedback is the default experience in virtual communication, and was from the beginning. You write or post or email or text something and then… you… wait. Every communication you send onto the internet leaves you abysmally hanging. In virtual interaction you are alone in time, in a way that you aren’t in physical conversations.
Pretty much everything you do on the internet throws you into an unresolved future, where human feedback lingers in teasing deferral. For language-having animals like us, whose deep emotional tuning presupposes social nearness, this aspect of online communication means it’s perpetually filled with inner drama, and this inner drama translates into preoccupation, need, a compulsive interest in coming back.
From Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age π. While core narrative/argument of the book concerns parenting, I found the discussion Feeney develops on the internet to be insightful and applicable well beyond how I think about being a parent.
Saturday morning swim π·
Today I discovered I can hibernate my LinkedIn account. I deleted my Facebook account in 2009 and have been wanting to get off of LinkedIn since then, but I was always to scared to totally lose my professional network. Being able to hibernate feels good. Thanks LinkedIn; bye!
