The Internet Personified: Rants & Raves
A minor list
RANT: Greetings. Are we over greetings? Certainly I think I’ve run out of cute/creative ways to say hi to you. On the other hand, it feels like a Gen Z thing to do, to dive right in without saying, “Hi friends,” or whatever. Like, I’m an ELDERLY MILLENNIAL. I’ve WRITTEN ACTUAL LETTERS. With STAMPS. And people have WRITTEN BACK TO ME. I spent a lot of time choosing perfect stationary WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER. So maybe I can’t start a letter without saying, “Dear Reader, how are you? I am fine and here’s the weather where I am and also yesterday I went for a play.” If this dates me, then it dates me. 30 year olds are described as “older men” and 33 year olds are calling themselves “peak millennials”, so I think 42 must be practically one foot in the grave which means it’s ok for me to say. “My dear young whippersnapper.” On the other hand, I’m over it, so I’m borrowing from Gen Z (who, when I meet as a generation, I enjoy so much more than the quote-unquote Peak Millennial en masse, because they’re not getting all competitive and defensive because their ageing and maybe future irrelevance is staring them in the face) and diving right into it. (Ah no, thirty somethings are fine, some are my friends even! They were just born at the end of our very long generation so they have all the Millennial Entitlement with none of the Gen X ironic self awareness.)
RAVE: Found art. I’ve taken to putting all sorts of things in our little flat. (Hoarder alert?) But no, it’s amazing how far your creativity can go if you don’t stick to ideas about what makes a flat “adult” or “put together.” No one can accuse our house of being put together, but much like its tenants, I think its dishevelment is sort of charming. We found, ages ago, a functional shoe storage cupboard for the hall, which is unremarkable in every way except that someone had tagged it with a bit of graffiti before we took it off the streets. Since then I’ve been leaning into its theme, taking stickers I see on lamp posts or traffic signals or toilet doors and adding them to the front of it. My mum joined in when she was visiting and now I’m pretty close to covering it entirely. It looks very cool—in my own biased opinion—and a transformation from the IKEA life it once had. Another discarded IKEA set of drawers became a plant stand for our monstera. Every now and then I find fallen flowers under bushes and trees (I don’t pluck them, they look so pretty on the tree) and I have a little bud vase (again from the streets) which I put in the bathroom. The poor little found flowers which were so droopy and sad perk right up for being in water and give us pleasure for a week. Anyway I guess this is also a rave about not being a perfectionist, in fact, I think I’m a “just-okay-enough-ist.” This has also transformed the way I entertain, before I used to get really stressed out about having people over but as long as I’ve done some basic decluttering and swabbed cat vomit off the floor, I feel ok issuing spontaneous invites. “Come on over, I’ve cooked and have the end of a nice bottle of wine.” Oddly, so far NO ONE has said, “Wow what a messy house you’re the worst housekeeper I’ve ever met and this probably also means you’re a bad person.”
(This is a poster from an Istanbul club which I just haphazardly taped to the window, and then their little faces suggested something to me, so I added “Procrastidemons.” Looking at this photo also makes me see the speckle of mould (our flat is very prone to it) so I’m going to have to attack that with a special mix we buy at the drug store which smells like chlorine and reminds me of swimming pools and summer. This happens to me sometimes, I don’t notice something even if I’m staring at it for hours, and it’s only in a photograph that I notice details, like the mould in this case, or that one of my eyes is slightly bigger than the other one.)
RANT: Delia Cai of
has been curating a lovely selection of Hate Reads, where someone anonymous bitches about something you love. Which is all very well and very funny until it actually goes after something you love, which in my case, is Berlin and this AWFUL take about the city.This is a very American point of view, based on, it is likely, a person from the United States moving to a new place and expecting it to be exactly like New York except foreign. I was personally quite charmed by the CLIT graffiti (which has now stopped), much more mysterious than whatever English speaking person has scribbled “Die Cis Scum” all over the building walls leading to the train station on my street. I find Anglophone expat bubbles to be very insulated, everyone just wanting things to be exactly like home. Also it is a rookie error (an Americanism) to visit Berlin in the summer and decide to move here based on those endless days. (Maybe I’m jealous because I feel like only I get to write about this city.)
RELATED SUB-RANT: I haven’t read Lauren Oyler’s fiction, but she’s popped up a lot in book news these days because she has an essay collection out called No Judgement. Oyler is actually a pretty well-respected book critic, or at least she was and then this piece came out in Bookforum absolutely eviscerating the book. Everyone had a fair amount of schadenfreude all over the internet, but one thing that stuck out to me was that the author lives in Berlin and has apparently written an essay on not learning German despite her several years here. This intrigued me, because most people I meet tell me that learning German is the best and fastest way to integrate yourself into this city, and indeed, since I’ve started learning the language I’m able to not only order myself things at coffee shops and bars but also overhear snippets of conversation as I walk past people which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, one of the best things about living in a large place. I couldn’t find the essay excerpted online, but I did find an older article she’d written about the same theme. Look, German is a hard language to master, but sadly a lot of the city will be closed off to you if you don’t speak it, so it’s hard to understand foreigners who move here and never pick it up—it’s like you moved to a large new house and only use two of the rooms. Use them all! That’s why you’re here!
RANT: Speaking of bad reviews, the oddest one I’ve gotten so far about Soft Animal was one that basically said, “I hated it because I thought it would be a story about a woman adopting a dog and it wasn’t.” No I’m serious! And it was published in India Today! I’m linking it here because I know you won’t believe me. Another one I saw recently was actually a review of someone else’s book but the author kept going on about my books and how much she didn’t like them (and how, in contrast, this new book was great) while also being quite factually wrong in a few places. I know I should be all, “oh I don’t read my own reviews” but I totally do, I just have to be boringly adult and mature so I’ll subtweet (subnewsletter?) this instead. Gotta be thankful that my bad reviews are mostly obscure and forgotten and not going viral all over the internet.
RAVE: This is a great essay which says much more articulate things about the points I’m trying to make here.
RAVE: Talking to people about children’s books from their country of origin is actually a great conversation starter as well as a nice way to bond. I met a Finnish man the other night and we had a long chat about Tove Jansson, best known for creating the Moomintrolls. She was never a queer activist but quite out and openly gay, this in a country that declared homosexuality illegal till 1971. In 1992, she took her partner with her to a ball at the Presidential Palace, creating quite an uproar but all the more beloved for it. (I never realised there was so much queer symbolism in the books.)
We’ll end here with Tove Jansson. If your only experience with Moomintrolls is the stuff: cute umbrellas and tchotchkes and coffee mugs and whatnot, you must read the books. They’re surreal and vivid and without any backstory about the world itself, just like all the best kids’ books are. My favourites are Moominsummer Madness (the family gets flooded out of their house and finds a home on a floating stage) and also now as an adult, Moominland Midwinter (Moomintroll wakes up in the middle of hibernating and finds a strange solitary snowy world outside.)
x
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(Although if I’m phasing out the greeting, am I also phasing out the end?)
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
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