The Internet Personified: Where is my mind?
Last night, I woke up to a flash of lightning in the mirror. Our bedroom is full of mirrors, if this was a horror movie, it would be a Very Bad Idea, can you imagine it--an evil little face tracking you from room to room? Just as you turn your back, there's something next to your reflection? (I just managed to spook myself utterly. However, I take comfort in the fact that as an atheist, I believe in science, as someone who believes in science, there are no somethings in this world, just the stuff we see, and the stuff we know about.) (Is this a very arrogant way to look at the world? Perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle felt the same way about fairies, they have to be real, he'd argue, slamming his fist on the table. Bring me proof they aren't!) (I have gotten VERY distracted from the opening sentence of this newsletter, but! The scariest ghost story I've ever read--spoiler alert: involving mirrors--was by Gerald Durrell of all people. It's called The Entrance and it's the last story in The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium. Have you read it? Isn't it INSANE? If you do read it--remember to do so in bright daylight, and, um, preferably outdoors.)
Anyway--the lightning. It began to storm pretty hard, huge claps of thunder, like bombs, lightning that crackled, I began to do that thing where you count between the flash and the boom? You know, to see how far away the storm is? And then, in my half asleep thinking, I realised why people gave storms a god-like status, it's pretty awe inspiring, all that violence in the sky, and even lying in my very modern flat, in very modern days, firmly present tense, I was a little shaken by all of it. We're so small and the world is so big and anything could finish us off at any minute. On that cheerful note, I realised I had to pee, so I got out of bed, and the cats meowed to be let out, and then I went back to sleep, hoping the split AC unit outside wouldn't get hit by lightning or something.
By the way, I spelt it "lightening" those past few paragraphs, until I thought to go look it up, and it turns out LIGHTENING with an E is "a drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis." That is really not what I meant, but hey, there's your new word for the day!
This week in the writing life: Kavitha asked me on Twitter to do a newsletter on the loneliness of writing books. I have started a new project, it is why my writing isn't full of updates like where I went and what I bought, I did go places and buy things, but that is not as interesting to me as this space in my brain where new people are springing to life. This is what I tell people when they ask me what's up. I've started writing a new book. Then, since they're all nice people who wish me well, they'll ask follow up questions: what's it about? and oh, how interesting! and then we are done with that conversation, because I can only tell you vaguely what I'm thinking, the book is still only threads on the little spinning wheel in my brain, it's not fully formed yet, it's just colours, and names, not a story.
If I had a "real job" one with business cards and a PF and a job title and things, it would be easy to talk about new projects. I'm redoing the books section in the Sunday magazine, I'd say, and everyone would know what to ask me, it would be a concrete actually happening thing. I just got a promotion, I got a raise, even I got fired. You understand that, it is the human condition, but when you stand outside of the race, and you're looking inwards and attempting to write about people in the race, there are no goalposts in your life. Sure, you wrote your first book, but then you wrote your second book, and your third and before you know it, you've submitted the manuscript for your seventh book, and you know how it's going to go. You'll wave it around on social media for a bit: hey, look at this great review! But people have read reviews of your work before. People are bored of you brandishing about a book in their faces. Eh, so she wrote a book. Maybe if you accepted a great new position at a great new company to do great new things. Maybe if you participated more. Maybe if more people could get at what you're going for this entire while.
Even in writing about it I sound vague. My life is vague--I can't help it. I spend most days in thought--reading or writing. How was your day? Oh, you did three surgeries? I lay on my sofa and read a writer's biography which made me think about a certain sentence that I could restructure so it sounded more specific.
There aren't that many people you can talk to about this kind of life, when every single rung of the ladder is a rung only you know about. In my head there are two ladders side-by-side, one that everyone else is on, and everyone else knows about--the one that brings you X amount of money in Y amount of years, and where your title changes as you clamber upwards. Then there's your ladder. You're alone on that ladder. Not even other writers are on the same ladder as you, because they do not write like you. You're the only person who could have written your book.
Here's what makes you pleased: You met your word count! You tidied up your writing room! You figured out what motivates a character! Well done you!
Anyway, we are all hashtag-blessed to be doing what we want to do with our lives and eke out a living from it, somehow, but there are days when we are lonesome and need approval for the shit we do, so please take a moment to pat your nearest writer on the back and say, "Well done." We're our own bosses, you see, and we're all pretteee shitteee bosses. (Too demanding, never pleased, hyper-critical.)
This week in poems I have discovered reading this Paris Review column:
Relax by Ellen Bass
Excerpt:
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Praise House: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Excerpt:
The man with dreadlocks
and a perfect green shirt walking home
from work. One cold beer
before I drink it and get sick.
How peaches mold into compost in a single day:
orange to gray to darkness into dirt.
Her ankle’s taste. The skin
right under the knob, delicate
as a tomatillo’s shroud. All the animals
that talk to me. That I finally let them
talk to me.
Gate 4-a by Naomi Shihab Nye
Excerpt:
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies – little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts – out of her bag – and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament.
Winter by Chen Chen
Excerpt:
I mean, one winter night I got sick & pooped the bed.
& he just got up with me.
Helped strip the sheets, carry it all to the washer.
I kept saying, I’m so sorry, shivering, I’m so, I’m sorry. But he said, What? Hey. I love you.
A Poet's Poem by Brenda Shaugnessy
Excerpt:
If it takes me all day,
I will get the word freshened out of this poem.
I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second,
and now it won’t come out.
This week fortnight because why pretend I'm on any kind of schedule with this newsletter in stuff I wrote:
My book recommendation column for the month is all about families, my favourite sort of reading material.
Excerpt:
Half The Night Is Gone, Amitabha Bagchi’s gentle, sorrowful book about two families — one, of a writer who has lost his only son, the other a large business family in pre-Independence India — is that rare literary novel that has appeal for everyone who reads it. There’s history, there’s the literary life, and woven through it is the theme of the Ramayana, as the various characters define themselves through Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, and use it as a way to live their lives.
Stuff I loved that I read on the internet:
What if Anthony Bourdain went to Narnia?
Excerpt:
The next morning, I do not feel like visiting the Marsh-wiggles. I don’t feel like doing anything but lying still, preferably with a cold cloth over my face and a cool glass of the hair of the dog that bit me close at hand. Instead, I’m woken up at the crack of dawn by the beaver, whose name is Alderwood. After a quick but excellent breakfast of bacon, eggs, kippers, black pudding, sausages, and bread, all fried together in a huge cast-iron pan, we reluctantly head out, and trudge through miles and miles of snow. Eventually the snow turns to an unpleasant brown-green slush, and then to a marsh of gray-green slush interspersed with partially iced-over ponds.
Oh hey, you may not have heard but IKEA opened their first India store.
Excerpt:
Given India’s lower income levels, the store features hundreds of products — from dolls to spice jars — priced at less than 100 rupees, or $1.45. In some cases, Ikea is selling a product in India for less than it charges elsewhere. In other instances, the company is tailoring it for local tastes. For example, most Indians do not use knives to eat and primarily want spoons, so the company ditched its children’s plastic cutlery packs and instead sells four spoons for 15 rupees, or 22 cents.
Tourists are destroying the places they love. (Already happening in Goa where the locals move inland and leave the beaches to the hordes.)
Excerpt:
Thanks to low ticket prices, travel has almost become a universal right, just like buying cheap T-shirts or shopping at a discount supermarket like Aldi or Lidl. This has also meant that a weekend trip to Berlin or Barcelona was suddenly seen as a viable alternative to an excursion to the local lake -- with dramatic consequences for the places and cities that were being visited. Barcelona, for example, has gone from being an insider tip to a mass destination, and budget airlines now have a market share of almost 70 percent in the city. At Berlin's Schönefeld Airport, budget carriers are responsible for almost 90 percent of all arrivals and departures. In the past 10 years alone, the number of passengers at the airport has more than doubled, from around six million to almost 13 million travelers.
We have a lot of junk. I have a lot of junk. And we can blame online shopping.
Excerpt:
Shopping online also feels good. Humans get a dopamine hit from buying stuff, according to research by Ann-Christine Duhaime, a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. “As a general rule, your brain tweaks you to want more, more, more—indeed, more than those around you—both of ‘stuff’ and of stimulation and novelty —because that helped you survive in the distant past of brain evolution,” Duhaime wrote in a Harvard Business Review essay last year. Online shopping allows us to get that dopamine hit, and then also experience delayed gratification when the order arrives a few days later, which may make it more physiologically rewarding than shopping in stores.
Ten writers and their cats.
It seems fitting that Flynn, who has written about riveting female villains, serial killers, and deadly Satanic cults, keeps a black cat as her feline familiar, but she eschews the spooky stereotypes. Roy (pictured) is one of four black cats Flynn has called her pet since she was a child. “I have been a big believer that black cats are the best: affectionate, laid-back, and sweet,” she told me. “Roy is a cat-dog. He trots to the door when we come home. He lolls on our laps the second we sit down. You can hear his purr coming for you from three rooms away.” And if you’re wondering who crafted the most tense parts of Flynn’s gritty psychological thrillers, it was definitely Flynn’s sharp-clawed writing partner: “Roy has ‘helped’ me with my last two books and all my screenplays. He prefers to sit on the keyboard, so he can type things like GY*T^&$$^R^&h&&G!!! Now that I work on a tread desk he sits by me, watching. He’s a very sweet sentinel.”
And finally--what's going on with India's mainstream intolerance?
Excerpt:
This was a story I’d already heard in Bisada; several people complained that Akhlaq had become “too big for his boots.” The Thakurs—both landowners and farm laborers—depended on agricultural income, and in recent years, because of the farming crisis, erratic rainfall, and drought, that had been less reliable. Akhlaq’s was among the few Bisada families, and certainly the only Muslim one, to have a professional income to fall back on. Urmila Devi, whose sons were detained with Vishal, noted bitterly, “He didn’t have a scrap of land, and he was better off.”
Have a great week!
xx
m
Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of six books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Forward to your friends if you liked this and to that one person who uses the word "mommy" unironically on social media if you didn't.