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Slot machine players in particular seem to crave what the cultural critic Michael Crawford terms ‘automaticity’ – or a state of pure passivity in which they are at one with the machine, reactive, responsive, but no more than that; the whole of their sensorium shrunk down to a tiny forcefield. Press the button, or don’t. In such a state their gambling qualifies as ‘play’ only in a twisted fashion, in relying on an absorption born not of focus or concentration but its opposite: an alienation so profound they can no longer connect to the world. Once unplugged they empty themselves of everything.
They don’t care about the money any more. They know it’s hopeless.
I believe that losing, in this sense, triggers a kind of emetic impulse, a desire to vomit up one’s fears about the uncontrollable nature of the world and to purge oneself of deeply lodged hurts. In losing there can be tremendous relief, even rebirth, in that only once you have lost everything can you walk away and start over, or start again, living out the mundane reality of your life until the tension once more becomes unbearable. Winning is far more problematic, because there is responsibility in the win – what to do with all that money! It’s the opposite of release.
You want to lose. Out of what writers Frederick and Steve Barthelme, accounting for their own haemorrhaging losses at the tables, call a ‘unique despair’.
The thought is so powerful that it winds me. The gut punch comes from the way that gambling at full throttle turns losing into a species of self-harm. I think of my father and his roulette compulsion, and I wonder if behind his dapper and gregarious front he might have secretly reached the end of himself, too: the point at which however much luck he believed he owned, he had given up on hope. [...]
I didn’t write poetry or perform anything publically about my deafness for years because I didn’t think there was poetry in it. Deafness was something I was trying to look away from, something that stained my humanity. It didn’t deserve language, it didn’t belong in the ‘Perfect Species’ or the story I was trying to tell about myself. I didn’t know it could be written or asserted on the stage, and if it did, wouldn’t it be a self-pitying ploy? A novelty? How would I centre something about myself that I was actively resisting?
i like this
Time is meaningful – think of it that way. Generations define us, perhaps not as strongly as other identities – class, religion, gender, profession, politics, nation – but in ways that may be among the most fixed. ‘He tore me away from my generation, but I was not part of his,’ Annie Ernaux writes in Le jeune homme, in which the narrator has an affair with a man three decades her junior. They share working-class origins, the signs of which are remarkably durable across time. ‘His gestures and reflexes were dictated by a continual, inherited lack of money,’ she writes. She notices his ‘hickish’ mannerisms – wiping his mouth with a piece of bread, covering his wineglass to signal no more – tics ‘I knew I’d once had in me too.’ But their separate passages through time make for differences in the quality of their emotion. Much of the woman’s feeling is vicarious, much of the man’s is inaugural, and there’s no way around it.
cool
Materially, the Silents were on much closer terms with agricultural realities, as well as manufacturing ones. Silents often know how things are made. As children, they were left to wander through the wastes and scrapheaps of the post-war moment. To this day, they inspect food and mechanical objects differently. Many of the most celebrated Boomer pop figures are in fact Silents – Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez – as if the consumption craze of the later generation had to be supplied by a cohort of indefatigable harvesters. Tonally, the Silents are distinguished by their assurance and will toward objectivity, as well as their talent for hammering at fundamentals. It is difficult to imagine an author of a different generation writing about photography like Susan Sontag, who takes to the task like Aristotle, first taking care to tell how it differs from painting, etc. The Silents at their best are simultaneously vernacular and oracular, with a weakness for loftiness. You can feel the decisiveness of the typewriter in their prose, the balm of the cigarette.
(1930-1945)
The trajectory of some Boomers from would-be establishment wreckers into effusive caressers of farmer’s market vegetables was bound to feed the cynicism of the generation below them. The first thing Gen X learned in school was not to talk to strangers. Christian Lorentzen has described his levy – with his Gen X smirk and tossing of the hands – as the generation that will never have to suffer one of its own members as the American President. Zadie Smith has done some quick moral accounting for her cohort: right about trying to get men to do childcare; wrong about the internet. If the Boomers flattered themselves as the chief protagonists of post-war culture and history, Gen X marveled at the hypocrisies of the generation above them – the way the Boomers had cast off their most signature accomplishments, from anti-war coalitions to independent cinema. Gen X was the last generation for whom Selling Out meant something (an attitude which Millennials like to suggest is luxury masquerading as principle). Gen X’s signature lit mags were the anti-establishment Baffler, McSweeney’s, which was a way of selling out by other means (inviting New Yorker writers into your upstart magazine, sometimes under pseudonyms), and the early n+1, when it prioritized author’s voices over mappings of social movements. It was a generation for whom ‘Victory for the forces of democratic freedom’ was less a credo solemnly scrawled on placards than something David Foster Wallace’s ‘hideous men’ compulsively spurted out during orgasms.
Galvanized in their youth by a financial crisis, the Millennials entered a world of short horizons, with political ambitions that had not been seen since the 1960s, but far fewer organizational vehicles at their disposal. Having come of age on social media, many mark themselves through the articulation of their opinions and identities. They are criticized for unwittingly serving the interests of their societies’ elites through their appeals to institutional authority, but their plight, as a generation twice removed from the spoils of the Trente glorieuses (until a small fraction of them inherit from their parents), may simply be an instance of a cohort making do with the weapons of the weak. Their mobilization of morality hits their Boomer bosses in a particularly sensitive spot; it threatens to withdraw the very affirmation that Boomers most crave: that they are on the correct side of history. As Anton Jäger writes in this issue: Millennials move in ‘a public sphere in which politics has clearly reclaimed its urgency, and collective notions of class have acquired a newfound plausibility. But the resultant posture is still fundamentally one of self-expression: a [Sally Rooney] character may serenade her cleaner’s proletarian credentials, another may declare she is a Marxist, but it’s not clear what Marxist organization she’s a member of.’
heh
[...] As I approached the hall, I saw several people waiting on the steps outside, the doors were not open yet so we had to wait, and waiting is challenging, especially in the cold; I wished for the time to pass quickly. We wish for time to pass quickly. We have one single life on this earth, a split-second of earthly existence in the endless expanse of time, and yet we don’t feel that it can pass quickly enough. Yes, I get it. It is hard to live your life in a way that matches that knowledge, perhaps it is impossible. [...]
heh
efore it occurred, the drama on the Piccadilly Line, I was one of those people employed to clean up the radio archives at the BBC. I’d written a book called Muriel Spark and the Comedy of Fact and was still smarting from the silence surrounding its publication. People talk such garbage about failure. They say it’s the attempt that counts, that failure is a great teacher. All I know is that success improves your life, and when it doesn’t come you’re left with a sense of premeditated injury. I joined a part-time MA in journalism at City University, where some of the students had tattoos, nose rings and pale blue hair. We yearned to report on the inner reaches of ourselves. All data was of course credit data. All reporting was surveillance. In good journalism you get to see what happened, but in the best you also get to see what might have happened instead.
great start
‘I don’t think so,’ the young woman sitting in front of me said. Professor Madoc behaved as if all opposition was enjoyable. You had the impression he kept his deepest professional experiences to himself, and that he doubted your capacity for reality. I admired him, perhaps more than I should have. I like the idea that minds improve by confronting difficulty, not by meeting reassurance.
hat does it mean to be a ‘millennial’ today? The generation born in the West between 1981 and 1996, first baptized with a semi-official term in 1991, has been routinely castigated as moralistic, incorrigibly literalist, and intolerant of ambiguity, in contrast to the allegedly post-ironic cohort of zoomers and the self-ironizing individualists of Generation X. Culturally, the differences are not hard to spot. While millennials grew up with the internet and observed its early evolutionary travails, zoomers seem blissfully born into it; while millennials publicly enlisted in generational battles (Occupy, the Great Wall of Gammon, etc.), Generation X had been conditioned to abjure any collective endeavor altogether; while boomers could live off the fruits of the trente glorieuses, millennials surfed on the artificial waves of the credit boom until the hammer fell on them after the 2008 crash.
Compared to other cohorts, millennials appear trapped: they enjoy neither the effortless asubjectivity of Generation Z, nor the historical arrogance of the baby boomer. Born with the promise of globalization in the 1990s, which liberated the planetary flow of goods and information and augured a new civil society, the post-1981 age group entered the new century with hopes that could hardly be met.