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This is the time of year to love New York if you are going to love it. Springtime in this city is a cheat code, an overripe and irresistible metaphor. The light is all at once kind, the afternoons that float into evening are longer, carrying in their slow blue hours the memory of every past springtime that brought this same collection of streets and stairs and corners back to life. Days arrive like color flooding into black and white movies. The avenues announce themselves in old-fashioned photographic splendor, lined up in the patterns of classical art, beauty easy to find.
It is not that it is more beautiful here than anywhere else at this time of year. It is beautiful, generally, in the world, in the spring. If I lived somewhere else, I would think that springtime there was the most beautiful thing each time it happened. It would renew my belief that this location, wherever it was, still had something hopeful and generative and particular to offer. Finding beauty in New York, or anywhere, is a survival mechanism. We focus on the shiny parts in order to convince ourselves that the difficulties are worth it. Beauty is always one kind of propaganda or another.
aaaaah i just love her writing
[...\ The places in which your life takes place, the places you love so radically, belong to wealthy corporations, to a tiny handful of families with unthinkably old money, to the Sacklers and their industry of death, to the Catholic Church, to NYU, to Google, to Donald Trump. We are borrowing our lives from people who disdain those lives, to whom we are at absolute best an inconvenience. Each inch of sidewalk, each welcoming shadow of a grand building, the air itself as it softens around you and turns siren-like and loving in spring, all of these are possessions; someone owns them, but it isn’t you.
To live in a city is to carve a very small story out of someone else’s much larger one, burrowing our skinless and unimportant daily events, our losses, our triumphs, our jokes and heartbreaks and errands and arguments, cancelled plans and chance reunions, forgivenesses and grudges, bargains and failures, into someone else’s massive narrative of wealth. One comfort is that this is the way it has always been, the skyscrapers versus the ground. This paradox of an essentially rented life may actually be the thing that gives a city meaning, but it is also the thing against which the city struggles. How possible is it to live in the quiet story, and how long until those lives become largely untenable, until the loud story is all that is left?
[...] After the exuberant dance scene where Laurie meets the March sisters and then helps them get home, there are two paired shots of Timothee Chalamet as Laurie, first standing awkwardly in the March house as its numerous women tumble and talk over each other around him, everything the color of firelight except him, and then outside, in the banked and silent snow, about to begin the very short walk home to his very much grander house, turning to look back at the place he just came from, which emanates warmth out into the winter night so palpable you could nearly feel it coming off the screen. That was the point where I started crying, and I basically didn’t stop for the rest of the movie.
Little Women is a book about longing to get inside someone else’s family. Laurie is all the only children who spent our time in high school at the homes of friends who had bigger, warmer, messier families, the lonely kids who were always looking to shoulder our way into someone else’s family, for whom love was a means of inclusion in a warm room in which we were not naturally welcome, and perhaps did not wholly belong. One thing this film gets right is the part of adolescence that is about always trying to get adopted by someone else, trying to find a family who will actively chose you. It is a movie about other people’s houses, and about the friend you had growing up whose house was always warmer — literally, temperature-wise — than yours, and the feeling at the late end of the night at a friend’s house when you didn’t want to leave, the dullness of returning to your own chilly, empty home. It is a movie about how both childhood and family are fictions, our own and other people’s.
But this view of hanging out obscures the creative nature of indolence: creativity takes thought and thought takes time. What I’m arguing for here, then, is the reclaiming of time, which is both the essence of hanging out and its main ingredient, along with the reclaiming of the basic material components that are required for the so-called killing of time, by which I mean space. When we set aside time and space for hanging out, we assert our right to be non-productive, in the economic sense, and likewise our right to produce differently, by focusing on the work that is required for the strengthening of social ties. [...]
I know that I said this at the time because it’s something that I have often said, and often felt. In a world where every party is a Facebook party—meaning that it comes with expectations about the public advertising and dispersal of essentially private acts—the idea of self-promotion starts to operate with the pernicious force of routine. But, over the years, I have worked to understand and see that routinization as a side effect of what life in a hyperconnected world looks like, and not as a worthy or desirable end in itself. The point is not to work toward self-promotion but to discover ways to live within a system that favors self-promotional tendencies while still carving out a space for what feels genuine and real. This is what I was trying to communicate to my colleague who, apparently, took personal offense at what I was saying.
Between McCullers and Green, then, we have two snapshots of what it was like to party in the year 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, or the “Great Slump” as it was known in England. Though ostensibly quite different, and with a whole ocean separating their respective authors, these two novels engage in a simultaneous and historically specific contemplation of hanging out, something akin to what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling.” Williams uses this term to identify artistic works that express a similar historical worldview, or else encapsulate and respond to a shared set of “palpable pressures,” as he calls them. A structure of feeling unites two artistic works though the artists or authors in question may have nothing in common and no working knowledge of each other.
cool i dont think ive actually seen this term defined before
[...] These stories would spin out and hook up with others, like the one about the time when Paul got caught by a blizzard on I-89 and spent the better part of a day trapped in his car in the company of a bunch of his own graduate students. These were stories of other times and other parties, essentially, but they served to kindle a new and deeper kind of intimacy. They helped to make us see that this party, our party, was the offspring of all those past parties and thus connected in a long chain of faded social linkages.
cute
The novelist Rick Moody says in his wonderful Hotels of North America that blank spaces like hotel rooms—or, in my case, a friend’s apartment in a foreign city—help us to “see the horizon, even if there is no land to be witnessed there.” They promote introspection and mental adjustment, which is maybe what is so terrifying about them. A person is never so much themselves as when they are alone in a hotel room. The same thing, it turned out, could be said for being alone in someone else’s vacant apartment. I tried to remind myself that I was alone there only because I was waiting for the time to come when I wouldn’t have to be. But under the doubled weight of all that expectation and memory, the days lasted for weeks and the nights for years.
I owe much of what I’ve come to know about hanging out to both of my Pittsburgh bands, but especially to The Armadillos. It was with them that I gained, or perhaps gave myself, permission to revel in the kind of shared quest for meaning that is the privileged domain of youth. In the other band, the good band, I was the youngest. Everyone else in it had jobs and homes and kids and responsibilities. But with The Armadillos, it was different. If we had jobs, we hated and were trying to quit them. Our homes, meanwhile, were marked by similar conditions of contingency: they came and went, evaporating at the end of a lease or due to a sudden rise in the rent and, in some cases, proved even temporarily nonexistent.
We weren’t famous, but we were popular, at least in a limited, local sense. That meant we had connections. We hosted bands when they came through town and then asked and received the same favors, in turn. Each summer, we toured south to Asheville, North Carolina—Big Rock Candy Mountain as we called it. There, you could sleep out every night, if it was summer and if you had to, and the handouts really did appear to grow on bushes, just like in the song. In Asheville, an hour’s worth of busking usually got us a full tank of gas, plus a round of burritos and beers on the side. We were friendly with another band that was based there. Its three members lived in a tiny rented house that sat jacked up on stilts and fronting the Swannanoa River. It was one in a line of identical houses, all of them similarly filled with musicians and bandmates. It was a whole neighborhood of splashy, summery, musical mayhem, without a single guy downstairs in sight.
cuuute