Time was, if you read books, you’d be hard-pressed to escape the Jonathans. Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer: white American men hewing to a midcentury model of novelist as public intellectual. Jonathan Ames, despite being named Jonathan, is not a Jonathan. But Michael Chabon is a Jonathan, and so is Jeffrey Eugenides. Franzen is the über-Jonathan, most apparently concerned with protecting the citadel of fiction from populist encroachment. The books the Jonathans published between 1999 and 2003 occupied that rarefied sliver of the market where literary fiction and huge cash cow overlap. This sliver is smaller now. The demographics have also been shifting, though not as dramatically as you might imagine. One reason must be that publishing is the most hidebound and retrogressive of all culture industries. The other reasons are even more depressing.
The bright spot amid all that gloomy indulgence was music — not just listening to it, but the rituals of listening, as well: the bespoke CD-R mixes I spent hours concocting for myself; the nights devoted to spelunking the murky, never-ending mineshaft of LimeWire; and, of course, reinforcing the electrical tape on my Discman knock-off so the hatch wouldn’t pop open randomly during playback.
At 18, these music adjacent routines began to coalesce around one record, specifically: Vespertine. Björk’s fourth studio album (her most critically acclaimed, if we go by aggregators like Metacritic) was released on August 27th, 2001, the exact day my freshman semester started. It couldn’t have been a happier coincidence. As it turned out, listening to Vespertine—not just the how, but the where—would lead me through one of the darkest periods of my life.
I was very blue for the weeks running up to my sixtieth. I suppose I was triste. I couldn’t explain to myself why I was so low. When I wasn’t researching and writing or sorting out my daughter’s university accommodation, I trawled the flea markets and vintage shops collecting stuff for my unreal estate in the Mediterranean. So far, I had found a pair of wooden slatted blinds, two linen tablecloths, a copper frying pan, six small coffee cups, and a watering can made from tin with a long spout. I was collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made. In a way, these objects resembled the early drafts of a novel.
Whether you consider corpse technologies innovative, exploitative, or both, what humans do with their dead tells us something about what we believe — about our identities, our bodies, our place in the world, and about the definition and limits of life itself. Troyer’s book “asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways,” and, despite its historical limitations, it succeeds.
Sasha, a quiet drunk, an esoteric, a poet,
spent the entire summer in the city.
When the shooting began, he was surprised —
started watching the news, then stopped.