Dear Iowan readers of Emily Magazine, or people in neighboring areas who might be able to make it to Iowa City by tomorrow night if they got in the car right now: I am reading in Iowa City tomorrow night, at Prairie Lights, at 7 pm! Curtis Sittenfeld will be there as well to introduce me. (!!) On our way to this reading Ruth and I have been making a scenic tour of the Midwest, which you can read about in part here. And for people who will not be able to come to the reading but would like to witness it vicariously, it will stream live on the Internet here. Please note that 7pm CST is 8pm EST, a change that results not in crippling jet lag but in a slight sense that things are off and you’d like to go to bed a little early.
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When I was a teenager I would do this thing with my dad, who is a musician, where I would play him whatever Helium or Superchunk or Tori Amos or Pavement song I was currently obsessed with, to see what he thought of it. Typically this took place in the car. I would push the tape or later CD into the car stereo and cue up my favorite song in the entire world at that moment and we’d listen, and then he would say something like “That sounds just like the Beatles, s/he really ripped that off from the Beatles [the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Van Morrison, etc].” These conversations always ended with my making a silent promise to myself that I would never stop listening to new music in favor of just listening to the albums that I loved when I was young over and over again. Last night I went to see Tuscadero with Marisa and with Bennett, who has been my friend since before either of us had armpit hair. The last time we saw Tuscadero together Bennett and I were too young to drink legally. This time, we were almost twice as old as we were then. It was impossible to turn and look at B last night without thinking about our teen selves, how they would have felt about our adult selves. It’s hard to tell whether we feel more or less old than people in their late 20s have felt in previous eras. We keep hearing that we’ve lived through the profoundest cultural paradigm shift w/r/t how information and art are disseminated since the invention of the printing press, but also a lot of stuff is the same as it was when we were teenagers. This is my very brief and Internet-friendly explanation for the ongoing explosion of 90s nostalgia, and why people have such complicated responses to blog posts that seem, at first glance, to say nothing more than “remember when?” The Information by Martin Amis, which I’m reading for the first time right now, was published in 1995. It’s about a writer in early middle age named Richard Tull who is kind of a failure and his friend Gwyn Barry who is a bestselling author of drivel, and all the inventive and sad things the former does in order to try and torment the latter (none of which, so far, work). Obviously the question of “isn’t it so unfair that people would much rather read cutesy-pootsy bullshit books than good books” is enduringly fascinating to me, but more than that I am fascinated by how many of the pranks Richard tries to pull on Gwyn have, in the last 15 years, become impossible to pull off because of technology. For example: Richard sends Gywn a copy of the enormous, many-sectioned Sunday LA Times with a typewritten note reading “Dear Gwyn, Something in here to interest you. The price of fame! Yours ever, John” Which is brilliant, right? Because it means Gywn will have to spend hours combing through every single page of this HUGE newspaper in search of some negative item that isn’t even there. (Of course what actually happens is that poor hapless Richard has overlooked the Classified ad someone has placed ISO a first edition of one of Gywn’s horrible, insanely popular books and Gywn’s eye happens to alight on it first thing, but still: genius.) To recap: huge newspaper, classified ad, searching for hours, finding information quickly and having that seem like miraculous good fortune — none of these things are possible anymore. At first I imagined that a great modern-day equivalent of this prank is to send someone an email that says “Hey man, I saw the post about you. It’s hard not to be nostalgic for the world as it was 15 years ago, especially because at first glance today’s world seems so similar, and because it is so different. Underneath, everything is different. The biggest difference is that the sources of underlying difference — everything underlying everything, really, information itself — seems more available now. All veneers seem easily peel-back-able in a way they didn’t, in 1995. Are they, really, though? Or are we just more willing to accept the first result, the easiest answer? The members of Tuscadero must be in their early 40s now. But in the red stage light last night, they looked just the same as they did in 1995, when I heard them sing this song live for the first time. This song is their biggest hit, I guess? It’s about being mad at parents who’ve cleaned out the attic (which is rhymed, hilariously, with “emphatic”). It is maybe even a little bit about feeling nostalgic and knowing it’s irrational but feeling that way anyway. “You threw out my Nancy Drew books, my model horses from Massachussetts, all my Barbies and all my Kens, my stuffed animals, my childhood friends … I feel so unsteady, oh Nancy, I miss you already.” PS I crossposted this from my Tumblr because I like how Tumblr does audio posts better but realized too late that it’s way too long for Tumblr, and that it kind of belonged here, and I was tired of that post below being on top … After I wrote this column about Facebook I found I had extra bonus thoughts so I decided to put at least a few of them here. When Gawker Media announced that all employees we were required to have Facebook profiles, in 2007, some of my coworkers were decidedly un-thrilled at this encroachment on their private lives. Others shrugged; they’d already been on Facebook for ages. I was somewhere between the two camps — I’d lived through the heyday of Friendster, I didn’t feel a pressing need to publish a list of my favorite bands again — so I put up a perfunctory profile, leaving lots of information fields blank. I didn’t even start posting status updates or playing Lexulous (then Scrabulous) til that summer, when I changed my relationship status to “single.” By the time I changed my Employer field to “self/none,” a few months later, a lot of other things had changed too; I won’t bore you with the details but boy are they ever available online. During this period I learned, the hard way, that people will disperse and twist any available morsel of information about you if that’s what they want to do. But I also learned that having more personal information available, not less, works as a defense strategy. If you’re consistent and transparent in your online and offline life, you have nothing to fear from exposure. It didn’t feel great to have transparency thrust upon me, but this was how I learned that being the same person across all platforms is actually the only sane way to use the Internet. I was reminded of this personal learning curve during the last few weeks, as “online privacy” once again became the controversy of the moment. Facebook rolled out new privacy settings last month and once again they were lambasted for making lots more data from their 500 million users more available than ever. Facebook has since revamped the settings in response to the chorus of panicky criticism, making it slightly easier for its users to figure out how to go into their profiles and tweak settings so that they can at least maintain the illusion that not everything they post is available to anyone who wants to see it (as a former gossip gossip reporter I know how easy it is to ferret out information from behind the flimsy wall of a limited-access online profile.) As the skirmishes between Facebook and its critics continue, I think the most interesting part of the debate isn’t whether Facebook has gone too far; it’s why people still care so much about “privacy.” Or do we care? A new site, YourOpenBook, searches the status updates of all Facebook users who’ve — purposely or unwittingly – left the new default public settings in place. “I’m gay” and “feeling horney [sic]” are the most popular searches, last time I checked, and the results they pull up would seem to indicate that more and more people care less and less about who knows that they’re currently masturbating. And only 30,000 people actually quit Facebook as a result of the privacy changes. But alarmist privacy panic is always politically useful, especially for conservatives who want to rile people who probably only use Facebook to remember their grandchildren’s birthdays: in the California attorney general’s race, where former chief Facebook privacy officer Chris Kelly is being attacked by his opponent for “releasing your private information.” Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers is mulling a congressional hearing on the matter, and other lawmakers have said they believe Facebook shouldn’t make users’ information public by default. For people who came of age online, keeping a username or avatar or online persona – “SmileyGirl323” “BigJimDorito,” etc. – separate from one’s meatspace self long ago began to seem natural. Well, sorry, Smileyetc, but now it’s time for those divided personality-halves to merge. It’s time to stop letting our online selves get away with things our “real selves” would never do. It’s time to stop posting photos we wouldn’t want everyone to see and typing things we wouldn’t want everyone to know we’ve said. If you want to keep a nasty thought or embarrassing anecdote private, there’s an easy, 100% guaranteed safe way to do that, and it’s not a new app or functionality — it’s Internet abstinence. If you’re not comfortable letting the world see what you’re really like, you shouldn’t be online at all. Certainly there’s a risk involved in being ourselves online. “What about my job?” I can hear you saying. “I don’t want my middle school students to know about my S&M hobby.” “I don’t want my wife to know how often I comment on Twilight messageboards.” “I don’t want my employer to know about the batty all-caps comments I leave on Salon articles.” I feel your pain, certainly. It was remarkably un-fun for me to have excerpts of my stupid, besotted secret blog published in the New York Post and the New York Times three years ago. But I’m glad it happened, because now I know that I need to make sure that everything I write and make available online is something I’d be okay, even if begrudgingly okay, with sharing with the world.
In situations like this I always find myself making a conscious effort to look around for something ridiculous because if I don’t focus on the ponytail and Jimmy Buffet shirt on the balding man in the row in front of me I will feel so awed by the goodwill and support surrounding me that I’ll start crying and not be able to stop. The last time I felt like this was when my Mom and I spent a weekend at Kripalu. On our third night there we were participating in this very, very cheeseball kirtan; all the songs we were chanting were in English and lyrically they were all second cousins to that rap about Hanuman that I posted on TIATIL. My book was about to come out and my mom and I were having very difficult interactions about the stuff in my book and how it affects her, all this shit that I had not allowed myself to consider while writing the book because if I had I wouldn’t have been able to write it, or anything, ever. I sat there singing these goofy faux-Hindu songs, feeling embarrassed and trying to pretend to myself that I wasn’t feeling embarrassed. Then we were told to hold hands during a song about “children, turn to your mothers” and of course I wept. I have been feeling like I ought to be prevented from writing at all during this strange book period, especially online, because I’m bound to say something that will offend someone whose feelings are, basically, “you are so lucky to be a published author, how dare you complain about any aspect of attaining that exalted status.” To this imaginary person I would say two things: A. I am grateful. B. I hope you write and publish a book someday. I’m not really sure what to do with my Powell’s guest blogging gig. After a couple of false starts I decided to just treat it exactly like Emily Magazine, for better or worse.
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Hope you’re ok! Fuck those bastards. Love, Me” but then Keith pointed out that the recipient of that email would just Google herself and think you were talking about whichever critical thing came up first, because inevitably there would be something, because there always is, about anyone.
