/reader

Here’s my cynical take about the current state of things: when a website can generate books upon books of slop, and when that slop is celebrated as a triumph, what can my writing really offer? It makes me want to store all my notes offline, to keep everything locked in a vault just for myself. I feel as if the bar for writing has been raised astronomically—in a way that’s unkind to short missives, notes, microblogging—because any model can, and now always will, beat me at half-finished thoughts and pure, raw speed.

But there is a hint of an answer here: if my writing doesn’t make sense to be fast, fast, fast then perhaps what’s valuable to invest in now as a writer is slowness, taking weeks and months and years to work on something, to polish the writing into a fine sheen instead of the click-clack-go! way I’d been treating words prior to all this.

This reminds me of what Robin says about art and stubborness:

I suppose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the important ones. And I suppose I think the standard for art is that it doesn’t just play the game, but invents it. On an internet crowded with creators eager to obey each platform’s demands, follow its Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.

So as I’ve been working through these feelings of artistic stubborness, I’ve stopped publishing altogether. Instead, I’ve returned to books to slow way down and readjust my relationship with writing.

First up on the book pile is Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren. My big question going into this book was this: what’s the difference between a dialect and a language? I’m from the UK, I speak English, but my dialect is part Westcountry, part “janor”. In the UK there’s an unspoken hierarchy of dialects where you reveal so much about yourself by speaking: the region and background where you grew up, maybe your income, maybe your parent’s influence, and almost certainly how expensive your education was.

As a kid I remember being worried about my Westcountry accent and I’m sure the countless American movies I watched smoothed it over in the same way they did with the Arctic Monkeys’ discography. My accent today has zoomed off in some alternative direction from my family and where I’m from, away from where I grew up, but now I don’t really sound “from” anywhere, ya know? And isn’t that kind of...sad...to lose a dialect?

Anyway! Gaston Dorren writes lovingly about language and words and in this book he talks about that hierarchy of dialects. Gaston has this profound way of looking at language which I can’t stop thinking about, too:

A language is a dialect with an army.

This little sentence floored me honestly and I still can’t describe why. I suppose because it perfectly captures the overlapping mesh of cultures and languages and dialects in the UK. And how the dialect backed by the Kingdom’s military has treated other dialects elsewhere.

I know this reveals that I’ve become a Real History Dad but I have to admit I was entirely entranced by Checkmate in Berlin by Giles Milton. It’s a wonderfully researched book about the devastation wrought on Berlin after World War 2—a story left untold by all the pageantry and parades of the Allies winning the war. That story, the end of World War 2, is a story about the good guys beating the bad guys but almost everything about this book questions that narrative to some degree. You can win the war and still be awful! You can beat the bad guys and still lay wreck and ruin on a city, plunging its inhabitants into a nightmare.

The book doesn’t feel like a heavy, boring history tome though, even if Giles is unflinching in his criticism of the Allies whilst also explaining that what the Red Army did to Berlin was nothing short of genocide. Instead, the book is written like a novel, explaining the characters on each side as they descend upon Berlin, and then slamming into each other like spinning tops.

My new job has me traveling south out of the city and my commute forces me to confront the two great continents that live on the peninsula. The trip back and forth reveals two entirely separate ecologies: San Francisco is all wind and fog but thirty minutes south by car is an entirely different country made up of freeways, perfectly clear skies, and almost-but-not-quite-desert landscapes.

And on that shuttle back and forth I’ve been reading Worn by Sofi Thanhauser. It’s a book about cloth and fabric manufacturing with each chapter split up into the various types of fabrics that make our clothes. Every moment of the book confronts colonialism and labor rights—great movements of people and objects across the Earth—but the book also focuses on women’s struggle for liberation, as that’s historically been tied to clothing in one way or another.

It’s really very good!

One last note: about a month ago I had LASIK because I worried for years that I was losing my patience for reading—only the bombast of explosive action video games could hold my fragile attention. Instead, after a trip to the opticians, I found it was short-sightedness as the lenses in my eyes were falling to bits a decade sooner than they typically do. So LASIK hasn’t repaired them entirely today but it’s made reading possible again which is genuinely life-changing.

Unrelated, but: as I was leaving the eye clinic someone at the front desk stopped me and said: “You know, you and your wife are going to have very funny children.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about how lovely that compliment is! I doubt we’ll ever have kids, but the thought that you can grant humor to someone’s future kids is so very sweet because who cares about fame and fortune? Who cares about how smart your future kids might be?

Jokes is what really counts. Oh, and books, too.