If you’re working a regular 9-to-5:30 gig that is WFH-able, I presume you’re exhausted. I am. I used to complain about the commute when it involved public transport. But that was some brain killing time. Also, I read that it was good reaping time for podcast people. Yes, the bus and rail killed my patience and I carried a backpack because I don’t like most men’s crotches being near my arse. (The first reaction to that move is rarely bunching up a fist and throwing. You jump like a goat.)
The excuse of the commute meant I could stretch out that office arrival teamaking. The desktop whirred, the programmes took their time to open, I might have restarted the machine just in case, oh look I need to request a password change, might as well make another cup of tea.
Now, I shower and sit down and everything works which means I work. Taking an hour for lunch in a home no one can leave may give someone the impression I’m not working and are free for tasks and chats. Because everything is digital, I get caught up in the nitty-gritty. Communicating through screens and pixels imbues words with more meaning than words ever deserve. I marvel at Zoom being The Product when it’s not even good. I respond to emails on a Friday night. Why the fuck not.
I am meant to be working on so many things in the evenings, but evening comes round and I’ve to go on my government-approved walk and ring my family and try to stop my head melting at Twitter comments and then I have to lie down and bask in the world we’ve made. It is a weird time to be against most forms of penal incarceration. It is a weird time to see the scars of austerity forgotten about and almost forgiven. It is a weird time to have grown up with the view that transparency is necessary for a healthy state. It is always a good time to remember the essay Who Goes Nazi?
My internet search history is my backwards map for these times. This is how I recount my movements. Did you know that the screenwriting team behind While You Were Sleeping struggled for years to secure a foothold in the industry, made the movie, essentially disappeared? Curious, sad, a mystery I would like you to solve for me. Watch Sandra charm the world on Disney Plus. The guy Christian Bale played in The Big Short is now on Twitter and let me tell you he is sowing some chaos seeds. The movie Contagion is strangely relaxing. That scene where Kate Winslet does the rate of transmission sums? I felt like a genius as I nodded along. Lorrie Moore upset and angered some of her fans and admirers, but she’s not on earth to be your pal. Having a literary hero or heroine or whatever you like to trip off the tongue or typewriter is such a weird nook to seek out. I don’t believe in heroes. I don’t believe in one person. I think I have one of her books somewhere, but I’ve not read it. Compared to everyone I see on social media I’m not remotely well-read.
I once interviewed a writer whose work I really like. Oprah’s approval has blessed her career and sales. She is the picture of security. I sat across from her in the Merrion Hotel and said that one of her books was a thriller. She hated that. She demanded I not quote her reaction where she tore into her lurid contemporaries. By the third question, knowing we had earlier crossed a line and the conversation could not be salvaged, I suggested we end the interview. She said that would be for the best. We walked towards the lobby and I asked her to sign a copy of her book to my mother. I said I loved her books but it was my mother who introduced them to me. She signed the book and in the course of me talking about my mother I mentioned how she wished I had tried to become a lawyer. You should listen to her, said the woman who writes good books which are not thrillers. She wasn’t there for my fandom, my literary theorising, my emotional dumping, my ambitions. I never published the interview because I was too young and inexperienced to have written it well. The PR, who was sitting nearby and heard everything, never chased. I told someone whose opinion I trust about the thriller comment and they told me I was right, it was a thriller in all but the marketing campaign.
Lorrie Moore can say what she wants. You can react how you want. I’ve spent the last four weeks reading stuff online from people I sometimes admire and going WHAT or muttering “so banal". There are arguments to remember everything people say during this and holding a commission after, and there are arguments that we declare an amnesty as the smell of Dettol leaves our homes with us. We’re all gone a little mad. Some of us have become too much of ourselves.
One objectively good thing Lorrie More does is in the New Yorker is recommend watching one of my favourite songs from a musical ever: This Nearly Was Mine from South Pacific. I prefer the Paulo Szot rendition, but each to their own.