The Anthropocene Reviewed(61)

* * *





A few months later, in the fall of 2008, an economic recession would sweep the globe, and Iceland would be among the nations hardest hit, with its currency declining in value by 35 percent in just a few months. As the recession took hold and credit markets froze, experts said we were experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction, although as it happened, the next once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction was only twelve years away. We should get out of the habit of saying that anything is once-in-a-lifetime. We should stop pretending we have any idea how long a lifetime is, or what might happen in one.

And yet, I strongly suspect that our long day in Iceland really was once-in-a-lifetime. On the chilly summer day Iceland secured their first-ever summer Olympics team medal, I ate a hot dog while huddled with my friends. It was the greatest hot dog I’ve ever eaten. It cured my multiday hangover and cleared the film from my eyes and sent me out into the Reykjavík twilight feeling the kind of close-to-the-chest joy that can’t last—but also doesn’t need to.

I give B?jarins Beztu Pylsur five stars.





THE NOTES APP



THE IOS NOTES APP DEBUTED with the first iPhone in 2007. Back then, the app’s default font looked vaguely like handwriting, and had a yellow background with horizontal lines between each row of text, an attempt to call to mind the yellow legal pads of yore. Even now, the Notes app has a slightly textured background that mimics paper, an example of what’s called skeuomorphic design, where a derivative object—say, an app—retains now-obsolete elements of the original object’s design. Casino slot machines, for instance, no longer need a pullable arm, but most still have one. Many mobile device apps use skeuomorphic design—our calculator apps are calculator-shaped; our digital watches have minute and hour hands, and so on. Perhaps all of this is done in the hopes that we won’t notice just how quickly everything is changing.

For most of my life, I took notes in the margins of whatever book I happened to be reading. I’ve never been the kind of person to carry a notebook. I want to be a person who journals, who sits on park benches and has wonderful thoughts that must be immediately captured. But I usually found that my thoughts could wait, and if for some reason I needed to scribble something down, I always had a book with me, and a pen in my pocket.

There is a grocery list in my copy of Song of Solomon, and directions to my great-aunt’s house in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. On page 241 of All the King’s Men, I wrote at the bottom of the page, “It rains for two days straight,” an idea I had for the plot of my first novel, Looking for Alaska. There are many other references to my stories in books I was reading. Sometimes it’s only a few words: FERAL HOG HUNT, scrawled in the margins of Our Southern Highlanders, became part of the climactic scene in my book An Abundance of Katherines.

Usually, though, my marginalia just baffles me. On page 84 of my copy of Jane Eyre, why did I write, “You have never been so lonely”? Was I even the you of that sentence? The note depends on a context I now lack. When I think back to reading Jane Eyre for the first time in college, I don’t remember being lonely or whatever else was happening in my daily life. I mostly remember Jane herself, how Rochester called her “my sympathy,” how Jane said the way to avoid hell was “to keep in good health and not die.”



* * *





I first got an iPhone in 2008, but I was slow to abandon my book-margin note-taking. I didn’t write in the Notes app until 2010. But not long after, I found that I was often leaving home without a pen in my pocket, and eventually I’d often leave home without a physical book in my hand. The problem of having neither pen nor paper was both caused and solved by the iPhone.*

Having a digital library and a note-taking device in my pocket at all times did not make my notes-to-self any more comprehensible. Why, for instance, did I write in 2011, “They’re painting the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum”? Were they painting the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum? Or did I think that was a good line for a story? I have no idea. But I can still parse some of the notes, and taken together they do form a strange kind of autobiography, a way into knowing myself through the lens of what I cared about. Beginning in 2020, I adopted a different note-taking app, leaving Apple’s Notes behind. The Notes app is now, like the marginalia in that old copy of Jane Eyre, a series of relics. Here is one note I wrote for each year of my life with the Notes app.



* * *





2019: “Send Manguso quote to Sarah.” More than a dozen of my notes are reminders to send Sarah something—a Donald Hall essay, the catalog for MOCA’s Kerry James Marshall exhibition, or a joke Henry James wrote about adverbs (“the only qualification I really much respect”). I don’t know how much of this stuff I ever actually shared with her, because things in the Notes app had a way of not getting done. I also don’t know which Sarah Manguso quote I was referring to, but it may have been a passage about life in a psychiatric hospital from Manguso’s book Two Kinds of Decay: “The ward was the only true community of equals I have ever lived in. What I mean is that we all knew we had already lived through hell, that our lives were already over, and all we had was the final descent. The only thing to do on the way down was to radiate mercy.”