During the pandemic my attention span hasn’t exactly disintegrated, but it has gotten uneven. It waxes and wanes, sometimes day-to-day, sometimes within a day, often even minute by minute. One phase, I’ll read a novel for hours. Then the next day I hit refresh on my Twitter feed like a lab rat, getting those dopamine spikes.
I’d like to think I’ll recover my long-form attentional capacities as . . . as what, exactly? As “normal” returns? What’s that? Maybe this is permanent. This, all of it.
Even before Covid, though, I never had a great memory, so about a decade ago I started keeping a handwritten commonplace book. In other words, a collection of quotes I liked. It was a way to remember things—in pieces at least.
This notebook tapered out after a few years, but it’s still fun to open at random, and in that spirit I’ll turn this post over to five fragments that have been rattling around my brain lately. The last of them was actually written down by hand in that silly book. Cheers.
On Los Feliz are the well-to-do houses of the upper bourgeoisie with lawns, rubber trees, and magnolias. In my experience, most of these houses are owned by men who at one time were members of the Communist Party but who later went into law, real estate, or cars. Members of the Industry rarely move there, too square.
Eve Babitz, from “My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?” (1975)
But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.
James Baldwin, from “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” (1970)
A physical book is in this sense a box of time, and an e-book the virtualization of the same. It is a volume in which time has seemed to stop. Or, rather, it has been put on a kind of imaginary endless loop inasmuch as fictional time moving in sequence from a novel’s beginning to its end stands still until the reader is ready to reactivate its flow. This is also to say that, in the novel, time itself is commodified, made commodious. It is imagined as something that waits on our convenience and conduces to our existential comfort, which in the real world, the working world, it fundamentally does not do. Like all forms of therapy or self-care, the fictional supplement is taken in repeated doses, each of them a tiny upward tick in our accumulation of human experience, each of them a temporary reset of our mood. And, too, like many nutritional supplements, their actual value to the health of the reader might well be viewed with some skepticism.
Mark McGurl, from Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021)
More often than not the hierarchy of diffuse status characteristics overpowers any status characteristics that we earn. Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination, the intersecting planes of privilege and domination, still matters. If we read that oeuvre more deeply, attuned to the ways that capital and neoliberalism have inculcated greater incompetence for more and more people, we find that what black feminists promised all along was true: to know the most present marginalized oppressions is to know the future.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Dying to Be Competent,” from Thick (2019)
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
W.H. Auden, from “September 1, 1939”