Something you should write

It’s pinging around in my head, but I can’t get to it right now. Maybe James Franco can do it:

“20something” “authenticity” + moments of realness = The link between mumblecore films, Tao Lin, and bands featuring banjo-plucking earnestness (let’s say… Mumford and Sons? The Avett Brothers? Fleet Foxes?). Hint: it’s not that they’ve produced any masterpieces! Additionally: notice how when people recommend these works, it’s usually because “it had that one part that was so familiar.”

It’s fine, up to a point. It may move you if you are in the right spot. But where is the elevation, the artfulness? The very careful choices? And this is a hoary old saw, admittedly, because 24 in 1941 is VERY DIFFERENT than 24 now, but can you believe that Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at 24? What would he be doing if he was 24 in 2012?

Followup: Beyond the Muse: the role of female artists in this 20something realness tip.

Extra Credit: Why Lena Dunham and her relentlessly Female Gaze is an exception. *It is also not a coincidence, I think, that Lynne Shelton, Humpday director, has moved onto bigger films and the occasional Mad Men episode. I’m not sure where the Duplass Brothers fit in, though.

Hot tip: Writer who writes this piece is NOT ALLOWED to abuse the use of “scare” quotes.

“An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.”

— From the department of New York Times corrections, December 30th, 2011. Even better, a self described “adolescent with Asperger’s” pointed the mistake out, initially, in the comments.

(PS, crankily: FIRST.) 

Lush, “Ladykillers.” The best moment for the band, a heck of a moment for britpop.

My E-Reader, My Self

I have to admit that I’ve been a fierce luddite when it comes to the idea of E-books. For me, books are a physical thing, an object of beauty. They’re tailsmanic objects with their own energy.

I got an e-reader for my birthday. It was a lovely, thoughtful gift, something I’ve been expecting ever since they were released. It was also, in a way, something I had been dreading a bit. It took me years to get an ipod - thanks to being broke and in college, to being someone who thought that they may just write about music full time in life, so why partake? (This is a little funny because I am definitely a former music journalist, now.) The ipod was good, and with it, I slowly stopped buying CDs. The creep crept on, and eventually I stopped caring about music like I was a Nick Hornby character.

I had been dreading e-readers because to me, they’re a little bit the enemy. I have no doubt that the project I’ve been trying to flog has been languishing, somewhat, due to change within the publishing industry. Due to bad timing. (It just needs one agent and one editor to give me some notes and it’s gonna be a hit, I swear. I wrote for newspapers, I’m great at revision.) It’s been very typical for me. I graduated college thinking I’d be a newspaper journalist, mind you. Now I barely read the paper I grew up with. Modern times.

With e-readers, I know that they empirically make sense in my life, particularly when I’m traveling. I dragged 15 books with me to go to Stockholm for three weeks, with an eye towards leaving some of them there for my sister, who would have to pay 30 dollars in kroner for a paperback. Something ridiculous. I took my e-reader with me to New York last week and it was so easy and great. I have downloaded one book so far, and it was a slightly salacious “women’s novel” of the sort that would be sold as summer reading somewhere. I read it back and forth on the LIRR between doctor’s appointments and for once my back didn’t hurt. And nobody hit on me. (Recommendation: if you are in Boston, try reading Dostoyevsky on the T. The Brothers K got me chatted up so much.)

I feel leery, however, downloading more books. (Except for Emily Books books! I’m looking forward to getting some of those.) I’m not sure where to go. I’m a fast reader, and a re-reader, and I haven’t quite figured out the nature of my relationship with my e-reader yet. Don’t I want to cuddle with E.B. White’s essays for the rest of my life? Shouldn’t I buy those as a book? Don’t I need Moby Dick in print? And when it comes to more disposable, “fun” books, aren’t those worth a library spin? What book is worth the money on an e-reader, but also evanescent enough so I don’t want it as an object? There is something about the e-reader that makes me realize how fast I am at reading, how I can say, jeez, I paid this amount of money for something that took me this amount of time. Is it worth it?

I suppose the answer… is somewhere in the middle. The idea of Kindle Singles. Long reads. I like the idea of cuddling up with John Jeremiah Sullivan essays on my e-reader. (Even though I bought Pulphead, and loved it, and now would like to do something of interest so I could attempt a truly John Jeremiah Sullivan-esque essay.) Nonfiction, maybe? It just doesn’t feel like a romantic venue for what’s, for me, a truly romantic art, and sometimes I feel weird about that. I don’t want my relationship with writing and literature to go the way of my once intense, wonderfully life-defining relationship with music. Music just feels like an ex-boyfriend I once had.

A younger Elisabeth would hate me for writing the previous sentence. It’s funny, however, I can’t quite figure out if my likes and dislikes, and the changing quality of them, are the result of technology or “growing up.” Do I not define myself by music in the same way as a result of my age, or is it the result of the relationship that you have with music through an ipod? Technology has been keeping pace with my age in a way that’s rather creepy, so we’ll see. Hopefully somebody my age writes a good book about that back-and-forth someday. Nick Hornby’s too old for it, unfortunately.

What’s your relationship with your e-reader?

PS. Buy my e-book next year? I promise you’ll like it.

Surprisingly, I am less sure than this guy on Slate that independent bookstores are killing literacy.

towirr:

A gentleman named Farhad Manjoo just posted a proudly contrarian article on Slate explaining why independent bookstores are not only irrelevent but maybe even harmful. I work at an independent bookstore, so that’s an argument I’d be very very curious to see made well. Honestly, I know the failings of small booksellers as well as anyone, and it’d be good to see them articulated. But that’s not what this essay was. Let’s look at it. All of it. In detail.

I’ll be interjecting my thoughts into the text of the essay itself. I know that’s a pretty ungenerous way to go about it, but as you’ll see, Mr. Manjoo is kind of an asshat, so I’m not feeling generous.

Read More

I liked this response. The Slate piece was infuriating and contrarian, of course, for the sake of hits and talking. Ugh.

In my experience, bookstores are such a wonderful, crucial hub of community in a neighborhood. Even when it’s the boonies and your only option is Barnes and Noble. There’s still a sense of discovery to the place. Secondly, who would trust an online review of something, if that’s the only thing available? You really don’t want people’s taste to be reduced to algorithms and other people’s slipshod, unedited opinions with a lack of rhetorical rigor.

For example, I did time approving and rolling through Tripadvisor reviews, and it’s painfully obvious that somebody has to care enough about their experience with whatever to “community review” something, and that biases become very, very clear when you’re dealing with online community reviews (from Yelp to Amazon), and who knows if that actually results in the truth.

My favorite one was an epic tale of a woman who went to an all-inclusive resort for her son’s wedding, her ipod was stolen at some point, and she went to ask for help and stayed in the lobby, announcing the theft every 15 minutes. She ends this story by talking about how she made a fuss and then her hungover-from-his-bachelor party son disinvited her to the wedding. Obviously, there’s a lot of subtext here, and what that has to do with the experience that the resort supplies… well, that’s different. Was it the resort that sucked? Or was the lady crazy? And what was her relationship with her one and only son? He disinvited her from his destination wedding! Clearly, it could’ve gone both ways. And frankly, that’s not fair to the resort, in this case.