Category: The Dish

David Mitchell explains how he imagines worlds of what’s to come:

[W]hen you’re writing about the future, you simply try to work out what people in that future point will be taking for granted. In The Bone Clocks, there are two future sections. 2025 one is only about 11 years away—there’s just a few gizmos about the place and we’re basically there already. In the 2040s, however, more dramatic changes have taken place. There’s no more oil—or very little oil left. So you think about what people at that point will be taking for granted about travel, about the ability to hop on airplane and be hundreds of miles away in an hour or two. Or to have a conversation like this one, to speak across a continent—which, in the context of human history, is a profoundly bizarre thing to be doing. Animpossible thing to be doing, an unthinkable thing to be doing! We can take a device out of our pockets and speak to somebody in Auckland on it. And the miracle is that we don’t we see it as a miracle. We’ve only had this skill—to take out a smartphone out and call anywhere on earth—for 10 years, maybe 20. But, already, we take it for granted. It is part of what it means to live in our time.

When there is no more oil to power the system of power stations, which power the electric grid, which we power our devices on—we will no longer take it for granted that we can do it. It will be something that our grandchildren will marvel at—my grandfather lived in a world when you could phone someone in Auckland, my god! So that’s how you project yourself, narratively, into another time. You work out what people will be taking for granted, and what not.

In an essay recounting her experience volunteering as a Big Sister and then as a court-appointed advocate for foster children, Meghan Daum shares her reasons for wavering on biological motherhood:

They ran the gamut from “Don’t want to be pregnant” to “Don’t want to make someone deal with me when I’m dying.” (And, for the record, I’ve never met a woman of any age and any level of inclination to have children who doesn’t have names picked out.) Chief among them was my belief that I’d be a bad mother. Not in the Joan Crawford mode but in the mode of parents you sometimes see who obviously love their kids but clearly do not love their own lives. For every way I could imagine being a good mother, I could imagine ten ways that I’d botch the job irredeemably.

More than that, I simply felt no calling to be a parent. As a role, as my role, it felt inauthentic. It felt like not what I was supposed to be doing with my life. My contribution to society was not about contributing more people to it but, rather, about doing something for the ones who were already here. Ones like [children in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program] Maricela and Kaylee. I liked the idea of taking the extra time I had because I wasn’t busy raising my own child and using it to help them. It also helped that if anyone, upon learning my feelings about having children, lobbed the predictable “selfish” grenade, I could casually let them know that I was doing my part to shape and enrich the next generation.

Probably not as much as Jack London – though the rest of your day may well be more productive than his. From James Camp’s review of a new biography of the writer:

Jack London’s writing routine was the single unchanging element of his relatively brief adult life. From the age of 22 until his death at 40, he wrote a thousand words every day, a quota he filled as a rule between 9 and 11 a.m. He slept for five hours a night, which left him with 17 hours of free time. But in his writing hours he was prolific: he produced short stories, poetry, plays, reportage, ‘hackwork’ and novels, many of them bestsellers. In 18 years, he published more than fifty books. ‘I’d rather win a water fight in the swimming pool,’ he said, ‘than write the great American novel.’

In his off hours, London ‘wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew’, as he wrote in John Barleycorn, his ‘alcoholic reminiscences’. He was a child labourer in Oakland at 14, a Bay Area pirate at 15, a transcontinental hobo at 16, an able-bodied seaman at 17, a New York State prisoner at 18, a California ‘work beast’ at 20 and a Yukon prospector at 21. He escaped penury at 23, when after a frantic apprenticeship he began selling short stories. The bulk of them were set in the Yukon or in the South Pacific and drew on the life he’d left behind. The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, made him a celebrity at 27, and subsequent additions to his CV – candidate for mayor of Oakland, no-good husband, doomed sea captain and arthritic debauchee – were a matter of public record. London’s life had a mythic quality in the eyes of his contemporaries. Earle Labor, his latest biographer, who was born in 1928, sees him in this way too. ‘The careers of few writers,’ he writes, ‘mirror so clearly the American Dream of Success and the corollary ideal of the Self-Made Man.’

(Hat tip: Micah Mattix. Photo of London in his office via Wikimedia Commons)

In an engrossing account of a thalamic stroke she had at age 33, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee shares what she’s learned from seven years of recovery:

So much of memory, I … learned, is connected to emotions. That which makes me happy bypasses the process for short-term memory. I understand why it is I remember the intense events of my childhood. Why that day in the snow, being pelted by snowballs and not any other day. Why that Halloween, listening to my parents scream at each other, and not any other holiday. Why that plane ride leaving NYC for California and not any other. Why I forget all the names of all the doctors except for my neurologist, Dr. Volpi. Whose eyes were kind. Who was the first specialist on scene in the ER. Who was the one who told me I’d had a stroke. That moment.

So much of memory, I learned, is scattered in modules. Over the year, I tried to tell stories, anecdotes — and I could start a story, but I could not continue or end the narrative. Sometimes, when someone piped up and prompted me, Didn’t such and such happen next? I remembered the next part of the story.

I learned stories and memories are pieces of a puzzle, pieced together most likely by the thalamus. This means I couldn’t lie. Because I couldn’t lie, I couldn’t write fiction. But later, knowing this is how stories are told — knowing firsthand that stories are segments woven together — helps. It helps.