Every winter I think I’m going to move somewhere warmer. Back to California maybe or to Marseille. I worked at a downtown museum gift shop a few years ago with huge floor to ceiling windows looking out over the Hudson River. It was always freezing inside. We sold a lot of gimmicky expensive artist stuff like this t-shirt that had heat sensors to make it light up. One of my coworkers was trying to show me how it worked but whenever I touched it my hands were so cold that nothing would happen. That’s probably why they laid me off eventually.
I saw Vivian Gornick (my spiritual mother!) speak in 2019 and she said that the novel of ideas is dead (along with romance). Everything is too obvious and everyone is too alienated. There’s no mystery to modern life. Everyone has phones and find my friends and probably BeReal (this is me interpreting, Vivian Gornick did not say this). Pankaj Mishra writing in the New York Times in 2015 was slightly more optimistic. He proposed that the shock of the …