31/M/still hate my hometown
In theory, I should love Simone Weil. Her interest in attention, decreation, and rootedness speaks to my aspired set of values—the remedy to my peregrinations, narcissism, and internet poisoning. I look at the title of The Need for Roots and think, Yes, we do have a need for roots. But then I think back to my parents’ house situated in the vast emptiness of the plains, the summers spent hiding in the basement during tornadoes, and the slow tedium of church, and I can’t love liberalism more. Thank you for destroying the family unit, local ties, and spiritual rootedness! ✌️
I also listened to a lot of pop punk during my formative years, so I dreamed of leaving my hometown before I even had a reason to.
The town I currently live in, a thousand miles away, is best described as sprawl. As far as I know, its biggest claim to fame is that a top-ten Substack writer grew up here, and its only personality is the result of its limited gentrification efforts, which have, to be fair, resulted in some pretty great restaurants on Main Street but exorbitant rent. Straight out of a Twitter communist’s wet dream, during the summer the homeless people who hang outside the soup kitchen hold free rainbow totes they pick up during the local pride parade. Considering that most gay people in town are closeted Italian men with girlfriends, the parade is basically a tribute to Richard Florida. Granted, the town owes its very soul to him.
From my observations and the people I have met, I’ve learned that many young people graduate from the schools in town, go to colleges within driving distance from their parents’ houses, and then return to settle for themselves in town. When I was twenty, I couldn’t imagine a greater sign of personal failure, and even now, I’m mystified. Why would you want to return to a town whose biggest attraction is a Chipotle? How do you feel attached to or even nostalgic for such a non-place? What memories do you have of your hometown besides being caught in traffic? Have you never heard of Blink-182?
During the pandemic, I reread Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and tried to cultivate a sense of rootedness by developing contexts for what I saw around me. I went on long walks and looked up the names of plants and trees. It came to feel, however, that detail was a poor substitute for profundity. The succulents on the rock wall were black princes. The coffee I bought from the roaster down the hill had undertones of strawberry, blueberry, and chocolate. In my journal, I would trade the word bored for tedious; tedious became mundane. It was all mundane, and yet this new precision, which guided my eyesight, which deepened the particularity of this moment, was, or at least felt like, the only change I could enact on the world.
I don’t believe this town is a place, but I know the rhythm of the traffic lights between the gym and the apartment, which I’ll hit and which I’ll pass. I don’t know my neighbors, but I have names for the stray cats and know that a fat man who likes getting skull-fucked through a ski mask lives 620 feet away from me. What could make this place more of a home?
Ph.D. v. RV
Class escape is a strange thing. I considered reaching out to my college roommate during my holiday travels. I haven’t seen him since graduation, though we spoke once a few years later. By that point, it felt like we had reached the terminus of our friendship, and necrosis had already started to set in. But there isn’t a way to revisit him now that I have gotten my Ph.D. that wouldn’t in some way humiliate him. Not intentionally—just by dint of what I have accomplished in his eyes, how I speak, how stable my employment is, how tidy my life narrative. I don’t necessarily value these things, but no amount of self-deprecation can put them into perspective for people who envy and loathe you for them.
I’ll tell you the truth whether you accept it or not: getting a Ph.D. is simply one way of spending your twenties—a comparable but less noble alternative to living out of an RV.
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Cycle articulates these ambivalences of class escape for me like nothing else has. In one scene, Lenù listens to a group of revolutionary university students decry The System—the very thing that has allowed her to stand in the room with them. Their communist politics notwithstanding, many of them come from money and good families, and they have experienced movies, art, sex, alcohol, and many other experiences that Lenù, by virtue of her poverty, couldn’t. Even those without money had more freedom than Lenù in a sense because they weren’t tied to their schoolwork. Lenù feels torn, because she, on the one hand, now has the sort of money that can make up for the experiences she missed but also, on the other hand, is afraid that her self-discipline has undone her capacity to have spontaneous experience:
I was now too cultured, too ignorant, too controlled, too accustomed to freezing life by storing up ideas and facts, too close to marriage and settling down, in short too obtusely fixed within an order that here appeared to be in decline.
It doesn’t take a Twitter communist to parse out these feelings, to extend, universalize, and contextualize them; I’m not sure I’d be persuaded by the resulting analysis anyway. Because the damning part about class escape is that I’d far rather talk to people of my own class about literature, politics, and the pieces we read in The New Yorker more than I would talk about anything with my grandma.
Anyway, I sound too self-pitying. I have a tendency to jump ship when I write these newsletters, because I always get too shamefaced before I develop my thoughts fully. Who cares about being a rootless, guilty bourgeois? I’m not going to place it into a broader analytical context to make it seem somehow worthy of intellectual engagement—as though my banal feelings were a notable battlefield of the class war—nor indulge my own sensibilities so freely that I try to make them into a poignant literary account, à la Édouard Louis.
The best option, always, is to turn your feelings into the sort of pop punk lyrics where you remark on how everything sucks but luckily you turned out pretty cool. Not the pop punk lyrics you write when you’re thirty but still not over that girl from homeroom. Definitely not those.
Small town fiction
Say what you will about Sally Rooney, but Ireland has produced a number of major literary exports in recent years. Claire Keegan, Naoise Dolan, and Colin Barrett as well. The general advice, which I’m guilty of giving as well, for people who like contemporary fiction but find American fiction strangely flat is to read literature in translation, but I don’t think you have to go that far: contemporary Irish fiction has had some notable successes or, at the very least, fun reads. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s because even small towns in Ireland continue to have enough of a social culture (pubs, parties, neighbors, etc.) to provide a literary background, whereas in the US, these conditions are mostly present in urban areas with high costs of living, most famously New York. These conditions produce a certain sort of writer and a certain sort of fiction. And God knows nobody wants another fucking novel about New York City.
(I heard of a critic once who forswore reading all novels about New Yorkers. I more-or-less live by this rule as well. MFA v. NYC was a false dichotomy: they both suck.)
While waiting to hear back about an ARC of Barrett’s first novel, I reread his debut short story collection, Young Skins, set in an imaginary small town in Ireland. Barrett has two master’s degrees in creative writing, and his fiction has that quality. He refuses to write banal sentences about the weather in the banal language they warrant. The skies are azure; the clouds are cumulus. The effect is sometimes more thesaural than vivid. Greg Jackson’s Prodigals—a high point in millennial-authored fiction—shows a much better mastery of language and applies it more sensibly to characters on the other side of the class divide. Can’t recommend Prodigals enough, especially its final story.
But I feel churlish for even pointing out such shortcomings, because I find something so real in Barrett’s work—the way its characters try to claw apart yearning and hopelessness. It’s the feeling of thwarted casual sex, which happens quite a lot in the stories. The fantasies that abide even after they’ve been dialed back, made impossible.
Digital escape
Google alerted me recently that a blog I apparently kept for a week when I was in middle school was scheduled for deletion. I take a neurotic approach to deleting my digital footprint, so I was puzzled how this blog escaped my previous campaigns. The posts were mostly banal diary entries. The highlight was when I was upset that my crush’s boyfriend changed his MSN profile message to I’d die for her when I was pretty sure he wouldn’t. I then contemplated whether I’d die for her, and concluded that I would. I’ve always been loyal. Ladies take note.
Back in those days when I lived in the middle of nowhere on the plains, too far from even my friends to see them outside of school, I experienced the internet as a sort of escape—maybe even a class escape. I chatted with people from different cultures, cultivated new aesthetic tastes, and discovered sensibilities that were distinct from anything I’d encountered before. I wouldn’t say that unrestricted access to the internet during my adolescence was a good parenting decision, but the internet, despite its frontier lawlessness back then, wasn’t nearly as algorithmically pernicious as it is now. I didn’t have a means of buying anything online, so I wasn’t even a good consumer. I was just a resident, setting up homes, meeting new neighbors, and testing out different cultures.
Of course, now the internet can provide class escape, and you see young people jump at the possibility. One viral video can turn into a brand, a product, a partnership. It strikes me as very different from what I experienced and sought after when I was fourteen in my parents’ basement, drinking Dr Pepper at midnight, writing a public blog about whether I’d die for my eighth-grade crush, and waiting for PostSecret to update. It’s strange to be nostalgic about the internet, like it’s your hometown, now gentrified and populated by people you don’t recognize, but in some ways, I can’t shake that feeling.
Anyway,
Three newsletters in one month—I may as well turn this into a career and become the second top-ten Substack writer this town has produced. (I can’t stress how much I’m kidding.) I can’t seem to write in my journal lately, despite how much I’d benefit from summarizing a month of diffuse feelings into a wry sentence and moving on from them. Writing these posts has been therapeutic in the meantime.