Today I find a ticket to the Met from a couple months ago when Tildy was home on break. We went to the museum? How nice––I had no idea. Back at college now, Tildy explains over the phone that it was a big day. First, I had that medical procedure, then we had lunch, then we went to the museum. She tells me about the onigiri we got at a Japanese grocery store to eat in the park and the sphinx with the archaic smile we saw in the Greek sculpture gallery. Apparently, she’d written an essay about that sphinx for her art history class, and I’d read that essay and liked it. Extraordinary, what other people manage to remember!
The big events that fall off the edge of my mind are the showiest evidence of my memory problem, so I’ve got examples ready for any neurologist who seems overly reassured by my ability to pass the dementia test. Sure, pin a prize on me for spinning up words that start with the letter F. But how about Tildy’s high school graduation last year? Or dropping her off at college a few months ago? I’m no expert, but I feel like normal people remember that kind of thing. I did too, once upon a time.
Vanishing World narrates the creep of a new worldview – that all sex is wrong, unclean, and masturbation the only appropriate way of relieving unwanted urges – radiating out from the scientific and social experiments of Experiment City. As its grip on Amane tightens, her relationship with her stubbornly old-fashioned mother deteriorates. The final stages of the plot rehearse a scenario familiar from Murata’s previous books, in which one character takes the urge to control the behaviour of others to its logical extreme. This recycling is evidence, I think, of the strength and singularity of the author’s vision. It’s also a reminder of how quickly even the strangest ideas can become convention.
Alice Vincent, once music editor on the arts pages of the Telegraph, spent years of her life “setting the measure of a pop star’s performance in 450 words and a few tiny stars… leaving shows halfway through because I was bored or arrogant”. In the world of music journalism she was “silently lobbying for access to the boys’ club. I still don’t know if I ever gained entry”. Vincent was an obsessive music lover who listened to so many records, and went to so many gigs as a teenager, that she damaged her hearing: “There was a time in my life when sound felt like it was everything to me because it moved my body and it smoothed my brain and elevated my being into higher planes.” In Hark, Vincent has set out to think about listening and gender – but also to answer questions that, like her, haunts so many of us in adulthood. Why do we stop listening in the same way as we get older? Why is our relationship with music, as she puts it, withering?
One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses, of course, who would rather foster intrinsic motivation than pay higher wages. But it also comes from popular psychology. As every self-help reader knows, the most successful careerists leverage their own unique personalities to achieve results and add value. They work for themselves. They love what they do. They are radiant with a higher purpose. In a word, they are “entrepreneurial.”
In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age.