As a teenager these novels moved me; they move me now. At their best, these novels awaken in me each time I read them a sense, and then a conviction — that my hunger for beauty and my longing for transcendence are linked, that there is a moral and ontological reality that lies beyond the everyday world in which I lived, and that the breathless sense of enchantment that the realm of the aesthetic offered can help me see it better. And yet, as an adult, reading these novels against the background of an even more secular world — no less pessimistic, no less disenchanted, but no less, perhaps, hungry for something new and rich and transcendent — these novels simultaneously attract and disturb me.
Looking back, this is the part where I can’t quite understand my actions. Why didn’t I just call Chris and ask him what was going on? Here’s my best attempt at a defense. The night before, I’d been up several times, tending to my nine-week-old son, and never finding my way back to true sleep. I started on coffee sometime around dawn. When these e-mails came, I was a quivering zombie, incapable of real thought, looking only to move forward, dealing with whatever came up until the next time my son slept, when I could try sleeping, too. I was in no condition to think, only to do.
Not long after I sent the Word manuscript to the .co address, my phone rang. It was Chris. He’d been offline for a few hours, he said, so he was just now seeing that I’d sent him my manuscript twice that morning. Why, he asked, sounding more than a little bit stressed, had I done that, when he hadn’t asked me to?
I’m in the ballroom of a Boston hotel, trying to play it like I deserve to be there, when someone decides that we will go around the room and introduce ourselves. Thud, the dread hits first in my chest. I am a stutterer, and this is my worst-case scenario. I’m the lone PR rep among a hundred New York investment bankers dressed in slick suits competing to take my superhot tech client public. They begin, their effortless, pedigreed voices piping up one at a time. My throat tightens as each person speaks: first name, last name, firm name. Am I seeing stars or is it the jarring yellow of this room? Gold carpet, gold walls, gold words, gold everything except for the white tablecloth underneath my hands. The introductions creep closer, an unstoppable wave. I have no plan, only a desperate hope that my lips will allow the words to pass. When my turn comes, the entire room looks at me, my boss to my left, my client CEO next to her. I open my mouth: nothing comes out. I am twenty-nine years old.
British folk tales have undergone a renaissance in recent years – witness the success of communities such as #FolkloreThursday on Twitter, the presence of folkloric tropes in the work of writers such as Andrew Michael Hurley, Sarah Perry and Sarah Moss, and the rediscovery of classic novels by Susan Cooper, Alan Garner and Robert Holdstock. In Mischief Acts, Gilbert has created a novel that is part of this movement and entirely sui generis. Weaving together prose and poetry, myth and history, the past, present and future, it’s a work of extraordinary ambition, brilliantly realised.
Claire Kohda’s debut is memorable for the refreshing perspective of her conflicted heroine: a vampire of mixed ethnicity and recent art graduate. Lydia struggles to accept the demon inside her and yearns to love, live and eat like a human. Her father, a successful Japanese artist, died before she was born. Lydia has committed her mother, a Malaysian-English vampire in declining health, to a home in Margate and accepted an internship with a contemporary London gallery known as the Otter.
Although the essays in what is arguably her latest act of service to that questionable project — Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative — are all personal narratives themselves (as opposed to straight-up craft essays with clear dos and don'ts for the aspiring or practicing writer), they also provide practical and philosophical arguments for the expansiveness that such narratives allow and for their power in the world.
Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s new book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity, argues that we are leaving all of this behind. “Today,” they write, “people are increasingly speaking, dressing, and acting as if a video of them might, at any moment, be uploaded for dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions to view.” Contemporary identity is concerned less with roles and masks; it takes as its archetype the “profile,” that public representation of ourselves that is searchable online, time-consuming to craft, and addressed differently to different audiences. Not only social media profiles, but also dating profiles and résumés are “carefully curated to appeal to the general peer.” The authors call this new identity regime “profilicity,” which, in contrast to sincerity and authenticity, takes the existence of “mass narcissism” and “concern with one’s self-image and profile” as a reflection of “the social proliferation of second-order observation.” The phrase “second-order observation” refers to our instinct to filter what we observe through the eyes of others. It comes from systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, who claimed second-order observation to be a distinguishing feature of the modern world. It seems that we can hardly avoid sustaining this double vision. “Nothing is posted without a concern for how one is seen as being seen,” the authors write. Second-order observation has become second nature.
Synonyms for the verb “to walk” are plentiful – promenade, hike and trudge, amble and ramble. Where My Feet Fall, a new collection of essays both sprightly and ruminative, illustrates all these ambulatory attitudes and more, exploring the delights – and challenges – of that most essential of human activities, the placing of one foot in front of the other.
Footfall in the long hallways above us,
painted stars on the ceiling, real stars from the balcony.