Not long ago, a job interviewer scanned my resume and skeptically pointed out that I seemed to have a bit of wanderlust. The implication was that I wouldn’t take the job, or stay long, because I wouldn’t know how to handle the settled life of the office worker. I was immensely annoyed. I told him that all my hopping around was a result of circumstance. All I wanted was to stop hopping. And it’s true: I hate travel. I hate moving. All the most miserable periods in my life have immediately followed or preceded a move. How frustrating, to be accused of chronic unsettledness, when I wanted so badly to settle!

I was annoyed above all by his use of the term “wanderlust,” which I have always associated with idiots. It’s a word used by people who think they are better and more interesting than others because they have disposable income for traveling, U.S. passports that grant them freedom of movement, safe homes guaranteeing that their wandering would only ever come from lust rather than from need. The word rankled.

I assured the interviewer that I had no wanderlust. I got the job. I went to the office every day. After a few months I was forced to admit that I, an American passport holder with freedom of movement and a stable place to which I could return, had wanderlust. Because “lust” is the right word for it—though I had previously, privately, thought about my longing for new places in terms of cravings. It’s the same metaphor: food in one case and sex in the other, but in both cases the longing is a physical, bodily one that surpasses both rationality and my own emotional intelligence.

When I feel an urge to pick up my life and move it somewhere else, the urge is sensory and pre-rational. Usually the urge has to do with light, although I don’t usually think of myself as a very visually oriented person. Today I keep thinking about the wet wind on London’s South Bank, the blue dark at 4:30 PM in late winter, picking up my things from a museum coat check. The heavy fabric of my coat slipping over my long sleeves. Stopping for a coffee before getting on the tube, the dark surface of the coffee, the dark outside. It doesn’t matter that I actually hate the cold and the dark. I can know this intellectually, but the wish is a bodily wish, circumventing what I know about myself, just like you can lust for someone who is bad for you, or crave a food that gives you diarrhea. People talk about “catching the travel bug.” This is also annoying. And this, too, I reluctantly identify with: the analogy frames movement as a transmissible ailment, something that belongs to the territory of the body.

I’ve learned from long experience what I didn’t understand when I was younger—the cravings aren’t some course correction, guiding me from an incorrect place to a better one. They are not, god forbid, my “gut” suggesting to me that I might sort my life out if I just lived it on another landmass, like an intuitive eater trying to follow their cravings to nutritional peace. I suspect that my own snobbery prevented me from understanding this. I didn’t want to be a wanderluster. Surely my impulses were more consequential and serious than those of the mere tourist. But getting older is a process of understanding that you’re pretty much like everybody else. Now I understand that there is no destination. Like the person who gets a bigger kick out of seduction than sex, my lust is for the act of movement itself rather than for any specific place.

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The act of movement is what I crave, but it’s also exactly what I detest. I wasn’t lying to the job interviewer. I believed every word I said. I do hate travel, for the same reasons that I love and crave it. I do want to be settled. I’m writing this in an airport. I’m only going on a short trip. The trip is to a familiar place. I’m visiting some family for a few days and then coming back home. Still, on the drive to the airport—looking out the car window at some nonbeautiful stretches of student housing I’ve passed probably tens of thousands of times in my life—I was gripped by the melancholy of departure.

In fact, I am always horribly sad on the ride to and from the airport. When I moved to London, I suffered from what I can only describe as a full-on, multiday breakdown, prompted by a vicious hurricane hitting home precisely at the moment I set off. My meltdown started in the Houston airport (there weren’t any direct flights from New Orleans, and in any case they would have been cancelled, what with the hurricane). I recall, vividly, weeping into a glass of wine while a few snacking nuns peered dispassionately from within their habits. On my interminable climb out of this meltdown, burrowed in bed in my strange new apartment in my strange new city, I made my husband promise me that we’d stay in London for at least a few years. I had never been so unhappy. But I was at least self-aware enough to know that I shouldn’t try and fix it by turning around and leaving right away. London was not the problem. The movement was the problem. The draw, but also, undeniably, the problem. Leaving, getting a move on all over again, would only prompt another round of meltdown.

“The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diaries. I always feel that my emotions about and impressions of a place can only fully expand when I am not there. Perfume enthusiasts talk about going “nose blind.” When you wear one perfume a lot, you lose the ability to smell it on yourself. You might even start to overspray it, needing more and more to get your fix. You can hardly smell it on yourself, but the people around you are choking and coughing on your fumes. When you are in one city for too long, you go place-blind. Even as you get more immersed, develop more commitments and obligations and attachments, you stop noticing your surroundings. After a couple of days I am just a person in space, and the Place has faded to irrelevance. It applies to smell as well, an urban version of nose blindness. Eastern European cities smell overwhelmingly like bonfires and diesel, but only when you’ve first arrived, and you only remember it when you get the heavy gasoline whiff in some incongruous American spot years later. You can only smell your house’s unique smell after you come home from a trip, and only for a few minutes.

When the nose blindness happens, I begin to crave a change of scene. It’s easy to mistake the nature of this craving and think that you are craving some especial place, but that’s not the case. Rather, you are missing Place, writ large. I want to experience scent, light, weather, color, texture—period. The grass is always greener on the other side, not in the sense of “better” but in the sense of literally greener. Places have more being, more sensory weight, on the edges: the moments when you are about to leave them behind, or else have only just left them behind, or else are newly-arriving in them.

Right now, writing this essay, I only really want to speak about London, because of all the cities I really love it’s the one from which I now feel the greatest distance. It has had the most space to expand, to breathe and become, in Woolf’s parlance, “realized.” I have written a lot about New Orleans, but I have mostly written about New Orleans when I am elsewhere. When I go from London to New York I always initially feel that New York is somehow more raw, sharper, colder, and brighter, as though a gauzy film covers everything in London and has been suddenly ripped off. But the impression lasts only a few days. So, conversely, does the impression of roundedness and sheen and layered diaphanousness I always have when I first arrive in London.

I am not an observant person. People around me are often shocked when they realize how little I’ve picked up about the spaces around me: “How do you not know your way around this hotel we’ve stayed in for five days?” My default state is one of sensory inattention. If you ask me to close my eyes and tell you the color of my next-door-neighbor’s house, or describe the rug in my living room, I won’t be able to. I tell people that I have a bad sense of direction or poor spatial reasoning skills, but it’s worse—an unwriterly lack of interest in my environment. Maybe this immense personality flaw makes me susceptible to wanderlust. An observant person can mine their surroundings for amusement and intrigue, can find the beauty in the everyday, etc. I don’t know how to do this and so I demand novelty on a grand scale like an ungrateful child throwing a new doll aside on Christmas afternoon and tearing open another toy.

Maybe that explains the lust, but why the disproportional disgust and sadness? Why the melancholy on the way to the airport for a weekend trip? I think it’s that, while I drive to the airport or train station, I begin to see the place I’m leaving from a distance, as though I am already far-off. An urban landscape that has died off into the background comes back to life in my rearview mirror, and looks all of a sudden, once again, like a specific and conspicuous place. I notice again the color of the neighbor’s house, the particular quality of the light in that place at that time of day. I have a real sense (one, I imagine, that a more intelligent or empathetic person-a more rooted person, a superior writer-might have all the time) that each of the houses I pass is inhabited by real people, with entire lives of their own.

As Woolf writes in the essay Street Haunting, describing a more micro form of travel and return (arriving home after an evening wander) “The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” Woolf is right: movement grants you keener perception, but it’s inextricable from vulnerability and exposure.

When I head out from someplace and break open my soul’s shell and become an enormous blinking exposed eye, I am overwhelmed by regret. I am departing a place precisely at the moment it has come alive—become “realized,”— to me. If only I could stay put. This time around, I’d be able to really see it! If only I had one more chance! This is why it’s such an uncanny and wonderful thing to have a flight get suddenly delayed, so that you’re forced to spend one extra night at home, or at your sister’s after Thanksgiving, or on vacation, even a vacation you weren’t enjoying. Since you aren’t supposed to be there, you are granted supernatural powers of observation. The objects and sounds of the world shimmer with presence as though you have microdosed shrooms or as if you are a very small child. You’ve found a loophole in the rules of perception, and here the grass is greener, and for once you’re on the green side. You tell yourself that you’ll hold on to these capacities. If you were allowed to stay a little longer, you think, you’d continue to see things in their full presence. But it isn’t really possible. The loophole lasts maybe twenty-four uncanny hours, and then habit grows back. Place atrophies. And you know, too, landing in a new city, that its exquisite here-ness will decay after a little time, curling up and back like the lips of a dead thing.

People talk about travel as a way to expand your life within the limits of mortality, a trick to squeeze in more experiences. Personally, traveling makes me think about how I am going to die. I become depressed, sometimes desperately, by the realization that the conditions of my life are totally contingent. The things that seem so massively important in one place are in fact revealed as games and shams when your plane touches down in another. Visiting a city where you used to live is the worst of all. Nothing makes you think about your own death like looking for somewhere to crash in a city that used to be home. You understand ghosts with their little protests: knocking around vases and slamming doors in their old houses. How can it be, that someone else is living in your house, where you vomited and threw parties and chopped onions? How can it be that you’d be a trespasser there? You become like the archetypal young adult returning to their childhood home and finding their room has been turned into a gym. You are made suddenly aware that the world will carry on when you are dead. You think about this ungratefully, even while your friends make you tea, clear their schedules, inflate their air mattresses for you. Every time I visit New York or London, I think I have to move back here—not because I’m having a good time visiting but because I’m having an utterly terrible time visiting, and never want to do so again.

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Is there something wrong with me? I ask. Actually, that isn’t true. I say: Is there something wrong with us? Because I’m asking my husband, and whatever is wrong with me is wrong with him too. We sometimes joke that we’re both unable to commit to anything, except to one another.

Lots of young women think of their lives as a binary between commitment and experience. Marriage and hoeing out, love and independence, whatever. The week of my high school graduation, when I knew little writing and even less about men, I swore to myself with teenage melodrama that I’d never let a man get in the way of my writing. I remember squeezing my eyes shut to recite the promise in my head, committing it to memory. I was going to go to college and write, be independent, be brilliant, sleep around, and finally, when I least needed or expected it, fall hopelessly in love. The promise worked, in the sense that I did indeed fall in love when I least needed or expected it. I didn’t even last until college orientation. Just to my summer job as a camp counselor. Jonah was going into his sophomore year, at the same college I was due to move into come August.

If you believe in God, this was a divine lesson to teach me about hubris, or maybe about irony. Just because I was smitten doesn’t mean I forgot my promise. Quite the opposite. Jonah and I had all kinds of tortured conversations, in his twin-XL bed, about how on earth to deal with the menacing reality that we liked one another. Possibly, horrifically, we even loved one another. We struck a deal that we would only spend time together when I had absolutely no potential social plans, so that I wouldn’t be prioritizing our relationship over my glorious new grownup life. This promise was obviously absurd, since, in college, one always has at least potential social plans.

I got married before I even managed to graduate from college. This was somewhat humiliating, but at least we didn’t do it for love (though we did love each other a lot): we did it so Jonah could get a visa and move to a tiny town in a rapidly-shrinking Eastern European country with me. If you want a metaphor for “compromise between love and adventure,” this does the trick pretty well. We went to city hall, and I wore my best friend’s navy blue jumpsuit. It was too small. After college we moved five times in as many years, lived in three different countries, even slept around a little. The love/independence commitment/experience binary, I thought (pitying my eighteen-year-old self, so paranoid over nothing) was a false one. Find the right person and they don’t reign you in: they spur you on, or give you the refuge required in order to feel you can go off into the world securely.

Only now I’m not sure. Sometimes people talk about the fear of a Y2K collapse as a stupid panic. They always get corrected by someone else who says no, you’ve got it backwards: the only reason it wasn’t a disaster was that people worried, and then panicked, and then prepared. I think this might have happened to us, in a way. We were so spooked by our own early-onset romance, so afraid of sinking into the ease of long-term commitment, that we overcompensated, forcing ourselves into movement and adventure and a near-comical level of constant change. So successfully did we compensate that our fears of settled coupledom seem, in retrospect, faintly insane. An old friend told me recently that I was “the only woman she knew who hadn’t gotten any less fun in a relationship with a man.” She’s prone to a certain loving hyperbole, but frankly, Jonah and I often do get told that we’re “fun to hang out with as a couple,” that we don’t make it awkward for the third wheels, etc. If it’s true, it didn’t come naturally. It was the product of many years’ neurotic overcompensation.

When I was eighteen, I looked over my shoulder constantly for some other, single, more-independent, better-feminist doll of myself. This alternate life loomed like a threat, or like a golden-child sibling: why can’t you be more like her? I no longer look for that doll. But I do see other alternate selves, ghosts of people I could have but didn’t become, in places I could have but didn’t settle down in. I see myself in that 4:30 PM late winter blue on the South Bank, and in the pricking brightness of a New York summer morning before the heat gets bad, and in every other kind of light. But in all of these alternate lives and all of these alternate lights, I’m with Jonah. In all the wildest imaginations of my wanderlust, we’re together. Isn’t that the cliche of every bad pop ballad and romance novel? I’d Choose You In Every Lifetime. I’d Still Love You If You Were A Worm. In Sickness And In Health, for Richer Or For Poorer: all the ands and all the ors covered for good measure.

You get only one fraction of one lifetime with the love of your life, even if you meet young, even if you meet embarrassingly young. Meeting young, to a degree, just puts a finer point on how finite it all is. In imagining all your unlived lives together, you loan yourself some escape from that finiteness, while at the same time poking at the wound. The horror of traveling (the sense that you have failed to see your surroundings, the dull realization that your life is small and contingent and that all the spaces you fill can easily be filled in by somebody else) is the same as the horror of being in love: namely, you have to face the fact that you are going to die, and that you are going to die while having mostly failed to be attentive, mostly failed to remain alive to the thing before you—which in this case is not a city or country or street, but a wonderfully strange human being, an unplumbable, infinitely bizarre assemblage of nerve and blood and neuron. You are going to die without really getting it, even though It is right there, in your house, in your bed, in the garden. Even during the course of your already-short time together, you will manage to take this person for granted. You will fail to see them for what they are, and will often, instead, allow a kind of mental model, a shorthand symbolic avatar cobbled from memory and preconception and projection, to substitute for the real live conscious human being.

In an era of easy Botox and cosmetic surgery, some women talk about aging as a privilege. Life is a process of amassing wrinkles and sags and stretch marks, which only show that you have been subject to gravity and emotion. I have begun to think about all my alternate places and alternate lives in the same way. Growing up is a process of collecting unlived lives, which accumulate whether you stay put or madly dash around, submitting to the craving. It’s a privilege to amass these ghostly selves, waking up and padding to the kitchen to make coffee in a terraced Victorian in North London, a shoebox in New York, an old Soviet-style block in the Eastern European city we always longed for a stint in, a lushly creaking shotgun in New Orleans. It is a privilege to mostly and devastatingly fail to see the other: the other city, the other person, the other person walking beside you and getting slowly sunburned in a city that has started to smell like nothing at all.

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My Commonplace Book series is a digitized version of a longtime habit: scrawling and pasting and copying all manner of found quotations and passages willy-nilly into a notebook (usually waterlogged because I always forget to close my water bottle before putting it in my purse), and then annotating or juxtaposing these various quotations/passages for my own amusement.

This month’s loose, stream-of-consciousness theme is something like “the relationship between the internal world and the external world,” and also “cities,” and also “cities as the link between internal and external worlds.” The theme is also “stuff I read in June.” Become a paid subscriber to Wicked Tongue to get access to this series, and various other things I didn’t feel like showing everyone.

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Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.”

-The Serpent In the Grove, winner of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

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It’s fashionable, on Substack, to act a little bit above-it-all: to present your work on the platform as a series of tossed-off afterthoughts from a glamorously cerebral, fabulously busy mind. Oh, this old thing? Into which I’ve directed hundreds of hours, hundreds of thousands of words? It’s nothing!

And yet I have to confess to a certain Substack-oriented fantasy. Sometimes I imagine that some illustrious editor will email me, begging to compile my surprisingly clever tossed-off afterthoughts in some shiny hardback. Here’s a modest advance, the editor says, in my fantasy. Go off and polish all your little afterthoughts to your heart’s content. In this fantasy I gain not only great money and glory, but also the privilege of getting edited. Never mind the fact that mainstream publishers keep pumping out nonfiction they haven’t fact-checked and have perhaps barely even read, letting slip AI hallucinations and all manner of less-sensational but still embarrassing oversights. This is, after all, my little fantasy, and I can share it with you exactly as I like, because I have no editor. And in my little fantasy, the powers of the Big 5 (or, better yet, those of a well-resourced but arch-literary indie) convene to make over my little ugly duckling of a blog and transform her into a sleekly edited swan. “Your definition of an allophone is confusing,” the assembled editors will say. “You’ve dishonestly conflated alphabetic writing systems with writing as a whole,” I imagine them telling me. Or else: “this tangent doesn’t make any sense, and feels like you just threw it in because you were annoyed about something someone said on the internet.” Etc. In she goes with her acne and glasses, and out she comes with contacts, a blowout, white teeth. If you work in publishing and you’re reading this, I present to you my humble blog. Please, pluck her eyebrows.

I am not interested in rehashing years’ worth of Substack discourse about the value-or-lack-thereof of editing, but let’s do a quick review. Editing almost always improves a piece of writing, unless the editor is bad at their job. When people on Substack claim that this isn’t the case, they are often either making the best of a bad situation in the literary economy, or they are a literary egomaniac (the worst kind of egomaniac!), not-so-subtly claiming that an editor could only ever stomp all over their misunderstood genius, probably out of envy/mental frailty.

On the other hand, it can feel as though a chorus line of much-awarded literary greats have been taking it in turns to pop up and denounce Substack for rewarding shitty, unedited writing—I’m looking at you, Lauren Groff. This is annoying, and unsurprisingly comes off as akin to literary lords enforcing literary laws, policing the few hard-earned possessions of their undeserving serfs.

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Publishing, journalism, and media have traditionally functioned well as jobs for rom-com protagonists because these career paths signal intelligence and creativity and idealism without the loss of structure—and I mean structure of both personality and of setting. On the level of character, these jobs assure us that our protagonist is hardworking and deserving: an editor or architect enjoys the implied sensitivity of a poet or abstract painter, without the alarming potential vices (pretentiousness, drug use, self-absorption). And on the level of setting, these jobs place us in the narratively fertile office. In an office setting, clashing personalities must converge day after day whether they want to or not, and norms of professionalism can be strained or broken to comic, romantic, or compellingly cringeworthy effect. Sheer degenerate bohemianism works fine for something like a musical or a sprawling novel. But it’s a poor fit for the formulaic world of the rom-com, which, like the office setting, is itself compelling within the stifling space of its own secondhand formulas. Similarly, while college is more fun than high school, high school makes a superior setting for a TV show: the autonomy that makes college fun is exactly what makes it a tough narrative sell.

To the detriment of both the mid-budget comedy and liberal democracy, these culture industry jobs are now near-complete anachronisms. A twenty-something with a promising career in legacy periodicals might as well announce a new job as a chimney-sweep or switchboard operator. Book publishing is clinging on relatively well, I guess (and you’re probably less likely to have to deal with blatant sexual harassment a la Bridget Jones), but a movie about clawing your way forth in the tough-but-meritocratic world of magazine journalism is total fantasy now. The rom-com and light dramedy have always had an element of the fairytale to them: the heroine’s humble apartment is a cozy prewar on the Upper West Side, not a squalid dark basement, and her relatability is conveyed with graceful flyaways and mismatched socks rather than, say, cystic acne. But, for the reasons enumerated above— structure and compelling constraint—the media job cannot be a space of total nostalgic fantasy. It has to be the rule-bound meritocracy within which our ingenue struggles.

And so I assumed that The Devil Wears Prada 2 would be something of a period piece. This is the only path forward for a movie universe so completely grounded in a death-rattling professional world, other than, perhaps, Miranda Priestly turning to the camera and announcing that she is the very same type of Marxist as you, and that runaway greed and wealth concentration have exerted a complete stranglehold over all that we hold dear, stifling the things that make life worth living for no cause other than the relentless and planet-killing pursuit of money by those who already have so much of it that they are becoming quite literally psychotic as a result. It turns out that the movie actually opts for the latter path.

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I think that writers benefit from working out, not just as human beings with bodies, but specifically as artists. This is a ridiculous belief coming from me, given that I am (even by writerly standards) neither naturally athletic nor particularly into working out. I go to Pilates a couple of times a week. Pilates is good for your back, and I like the ju…

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Teenagers have the most fantastic bedrooms. You’ll be in a family’s house or apartment, which may be modest and may be grand, may be tasteful and maybe tacky. But it will be one thing, a single unified structure. Then you step over the threshold of the teenager’s room and it’s like walking into some magical fiefdom. You feel a need to blink, like you’ve walked out of the summer sun and into a candlelit church. I have always loved miniatures, stories-within-stories. These bedrooms, odd-one-out nooks, scratch the same itch. They’re uncanny in the literal, Freudian sense of unhomely, an alien appearance inside the domestic.

These rooms are gilded cages, beautiful and weird because their inhabitants are old enough to know what they like but too young to shape their lives around that knowledge. What they have is their little square of space, which assumes a talismanic status: it’s an externalization of the person they are hoping to be. Grownup bedrooms are usually uninteresting, because grownups get to make their own choices and to decorate their own homes (or to collaborate on it as equals with partners and roommates).

I always shared a bedroom as a kid, so my fiefdom was more of a democracy. What I had instead, though, was a series of ridiculously heavy and somber-looking leather-bound notebooks. At one point I misplaced one of these notebooks somewhere in my high school. Luckily, I’d written my name and phone number inside the front cover. A school administrator found me at lunch. “We found your bible,” she said. My bible??? But she was kind of right. Into these biblical tomes went absolutely everything. I copied out, longhand, passages from books. I drafted my own stories and essays. I pasted in clippings from magazines, paint chips, notes from friends, whatever came my way. It was, I guess, what people call a “commonplace book,” an all-purpose receptacle of a notebook.

Gradually, I lost the habit of keeping these commonplace books. I got an iPhone and a computer, which meant I was doing more reading on a screen. And the rest of the world had gone digital, too. It’s hard to make a clipping of an online-only magazine. I was doing a lot of surreptitious onscreen reading (at work), and pulling out a big, overspilling notebook in the office felt like it would be unduly conspicuous. And in any case I wasn’t a teenager any longer, and didn’t need to focus my energies in these narrow ways. There was no weird threshold between my personal realm and the wider world.

Still, I’ve missed that feeling of collaging and collecting. I worry that my reading life has gotten too passive, without all the copying, the record-keeping, the involved annotations and illustrations, the play of contrasting two unrelated passages simply because they happened to get scribbled on two corners of the same page. So I’m starting a series right here, opening my hermetic teenage habits to all of you (well, the ones who pay: I’m not letting just anyone read my diary).

April commonplace book below.

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Later, when he was the talk of France, there were rumors that he walked on four legs like a beast. That wasn’t true. When he crept out of the forest one early morning in the winter of 1800, and walked into the village of Saint-Sernin, the boy appeared to be physiologically normal. Twelve or thirteen, on the edge of puberty, and entirely bipedal. From wh…

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Act natural: you are being watched. You already know this. You already spend all your conscious time pretending not to know you’re being watched. Which isn’t easy, but what’s the other option? Are you supposed to go through life all stiff and frozen, peering warily at the cameras and snuffling backward from the lens in fear? They’ll just zoom in anyway.…

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The transplant is a vexed figure, a favorite punching bag of city dwellers. The transplant is an effigy of everything wrong with your city, from the political (runaway capitalism hellbent on squeezing every penny out of residents) to the aesthetic (weird clothes, ugly houses). If you are yourself a transplant, the transplants who got planted after you are more annoying than you ever were yourself. I used to bitch about transplants in New Orleans. And then, when I moved back home this year after some time away, I resolved not to find them irritating any more. This was because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite, politically or personally or even aesthetically. The reasons for my new, proud pro-transplant stance were more or less as follows:

• It seemed silly to be pro-immigration, not to mention opposed to ethnonationalism, but turn into a raving nativist on a local level. Either you think individuals generally should be at liberty to go where they like, or you don’t. You can worry about things like housing shortages without feeling angry that a person is exercising that liberty.

• Sometimes, people will try to resolve the above contradiction in a loosely left-wing style by arguing that transplants are causing gentrification. But gentrification, housing instability, and high living costs aren’t the fault of individual renters.1

• I myself have been a transplant several times over, both within the U.S. and internationally. I know how irritating it feels to be judged simply on the basis of being new in town, having an unusual accent, etc. I also know that it’s pretty much impossible not to be annoying as a transplant. In other words, they can’t help it!

• I’ve spent lots of time in New Orleans as an adult, but the fact is that I’ve barely lived here full-time since high school. Am I not myself a little bit of a transplant, relative to, say, someone my age, who moved here right out of high school and stayed put?

  • Of course, many New Orleanians would say, furiously, no. New Orleanians are famously tribal. It’s a truism that we ask strangers “where did you go to school?” and by this we mean not college, but high school. The fact that I went to high school here, and was born here, and that my parents are from here, and at least a couple of my grandparents and great-grandparents, etc. does indeed insulate me from accusations of transplantedness. But I personally don’t consider this a valid way of thinking. I don’t deny that family history has an influence on one’s relationship to home, but I don’t think that blood and ancestry should be understood as inescapable determinants of one’s place in the world, nor do I think that rootedness is inherently more virtuous or authentic than mobility.

Maybe above all, I resolved to love the transplant because I love cities. Cities are, definitionally, places in which people from elsewhere converge. My friend Anna and used to often send each other TikToks in which native New Yorkers would rail against transplants, not even for any particular tendency (slow walking, eating Instagram-famous baked goods) but just for moving to New York. “We’re full!,” the comments scolded. As if New York, and every other city worth inhabiting, hasn’t been defined by centuries of influx from every corner of the earth.2

All to say: I landed back home in New Orleans convinced I’d ascended to some higher plane, able to see systemic problems for systemic problems and to blame individuals only for the defects of their own personalities, which are unrelated to the place of their birth. But if moving around a great deal has taught me anything, it’s that one’s own supposedly quashed defects are often not so much quashed as escaped: you go back to some old home and the parts of yourself you thought you’d outgrown come back with a humbling speed. You’re forced to reckon with the fact that you’re not really very complex at all: that you really are a kind of plant, lush and green in a sunny room, shrinking away in the shade. In foreign cities, transplanted, I conveniently had a great deal of patience for the sins of the transplant. Back home, no longer a transplant myself, I watched helplessly as my empathy drained off.

A transplant, as far as the term is used in common parlance, exists toward one end of a spectrum of human mobility. We can think of this spectrum as including the tourist on one far end, and the refugee on the other. A tourist becomes mobile entirely by choice, in an impermanent way, and doesn’t need to be highly invested in or knowledgeable about their destination. A refugee becomes mobile by necessity, and by necessity has a very strong investment in their new home. After all, they can’t return to where they came, at least not imminently. “Immigrant” is a broad category, but connotatively it hovers a little closer to the “refugee” side of the spectrum: the word suggests that someone is moving permanently and that they are putting a lot on the line. Even a migrant worker, who isn’t moving permanently, is forming a kind of high-stakes, long-term relationship to their temporary place of work. Transplants, on the other hand, are somewhat more like tourists. (So are expats: people use the word “expat” instead of “immigrant” to suggest that a person has moved in search of personal fulfillment, adventure, or happiness—that they are exercising more agency than other types of migrants. A transplant is a domestic expat).3

The transplant/expat has come by choice, usually in search of some sort of self-actualization or adventure or fun, and they are liable to leave when the sheen of adventure wears off or when the challenges of the place outstrip the delights it offers or just when they get homesick. In principle, it’s all well and good that somebody should move in search of adventure rather than in search of safety or survival. I would like to live in a world where people can pick a home because they like the place, rather than end up there because their previous home was rendered unlivable by poverty, war, climate disaster, or ethnic cleansing. But in the event that many people move to the same place for the same freely-chosen reasons, you are likely to get an influx of people who are similar to one another, not just demographically or sociologically but also personally.

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In every year and in every city, a cohort of people arrive for basically circumstantial reasons. Some have immigrated to the city because it’s where they have family or where they can find work. Some have arrived eve more circumstantially, just by virtue of being born, through no agency of their own. To the extent that a baby can be born with a personality, we can assume that these babies will have a diverse range of personalities: some will be risk-taking runners and climbers while others will be cautious, some will cry at a loud noise while others will enjoy it.

When I think about myself and my childhood friends and schoolmates (all either born in New Orleans, or brought in, non-volitionally, from other cities/states/countries) we all had vastly different personalities. Of course we got acculturated. These personalities were subject to similar sorts of pressures. In New Orleans, I think, the pressures could probably be summarized as something like: Be outgoing and spontaneous. Don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s more important to be interesting than successful. Hierarchies are informal but ultimately firm.

Of course, people don’t respond to these cultural pressures predictably. A culture isn’t a mold, producing thousands of stackable, interchangeable copies. You can be a rigid, type-A striver in New Orleans, or a curmudgeonly introvert, but you might be defining yourself against the culture at large. You might find yourself disliked for these traits. On the other hand, you might find that you are rewarded for your countercultural ways, and that people find you refreshing, funny, intriguing. I know New Yorkers who are blunt and unflappable and jaded and worldly, a total New York native stereotype. I also know New Yorkers who are by nature kind of sensitive and innocent, and who want to spend their free time gazing at the surface of a tranquil pond or listening to bird calls. The whole point of urban life, the thing that makes it distinct from other forms of existence, is that one is surrounded by a multitude of unlike people in close proximity. So the pressures of culture are real, but they don’t act uniformly on every person, and the babies born in a given year in a given city grow up with a diverse set of preferences, personalities, worldviews, ways of expressing themselves, attitudes about the environment around them.

Transplants, I think often admirably, choose the place upon which they will converge. They don’t stay where they were born or where their parents landed. They select a place in which the dominant values, cultural tendencies, and social pressures feel in keeping with their own preferred values and way of living. This is true even when people choose to transplant to a place just because it’s safe, well-run, has a low cost of living: they are choosing the values of safety, prosperity, and predictability.

I have lived in a lot of places as a transplant/expat (which in and of itself certainly says something about me), and in each of those places, I have discerned a certain dominant personality type among my fellow newcomers. In Bulgaria, where I lived only briefly, I encountered a larger class of semi-permanent American residents, and found that they were on the one hand adventurous but also, frankly (and I mean this as neutrally as possible), a little weird: people for whom the blunt impersonal awkwardness of social life in a small country a world away from home plausibly underwhelmed the more exquisite, sharp awkwardness of social life back home.

I moved to London for what seemed to me like practical reasons, but I think I was also open to those reasons because of London seemed sort of like a literary place, a place where you could enjoy a life of the mind without cloistering yourself in an ivory tower. And not surprisingly, I found myself stereotypical of a certain kind of American in London: bookish but bougie, basically, both genuinely interested in spending the whole day reading at the library and also, honestly, delighted by the idea of looking sexy and cool at the library. Living in London really was the very best thing that I could have done for my own development as a writer, partly because it really is a city that takes literature and letters more seriously than most of the U.S., and partly because I was able to have a little of the main character syndrome that you need to have in order to write: it helps to be a total outsider, free of familial and social obligation, ignorant of the competition, egotistical enough to actually think you deserve to spend time writing. Nevertheless, can you imagine how fucking annoying, albeit benign, I must have seemed to the people around me? Swanning around to wine bars with my American accent, whipping out a Fitzcarraldo Edition while waiting for my friends to turn up, more and more of my wardrobe slowly going plaid?

This process is arguably more conspicuous in a place like New Orleans, as opposed to somewhere like New York or London, because we don’t get the convenience-and-prosperity arrivistes. We don’t have good jobs or good schools or a low cost of living relative to salaries. People often move to New Orleans because they don’t care about those things, which means they’re already a little bit idiosyncratic. New Orleans transplants are in many cases attracted to the city’s values of quirkiness and creativity and spontaneity and extraversion and sensuality and artisticness and the rest of it. This means that they tend to be a specific sort of person, often delightful on their own but incredibly irritating en masse, so that the transplant-heavy neighborhoods of town feel heavy with a miasmic vapor of main character syndrome.

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One

Let’s begin with something cute, a little riddle.

What do each of the following nouns have in common?

• Christmas

• Bears

• Fairies

• Rhyme

Each denotes something serious, something with a formidable history. But connotatively, they’re all redolent with a certain childlike sweetness.

When cultural forms shrink from importance, they do not usually disappear. Instead, they become cute, which means they become inherently infantile and unworthy of serious consideration. They become the purview of children, who function as a weird priestly class, guarding monasteries full of rare, antiquated texts and ideas.

What does it mean to us, as people and especially as readers, that so many genres and concepts once taken seriously in the broader adult world have now been relegated to the status of kid stuff?

Two

We can start with animals. Bears are fearsome predators, but they’re reimagined as sweetly bumbling babies in everything from Fat Bear Week to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. The process is even more exaggerated for domestic animals. My husband and I talk about our dog, Ollie, as though he is a child. Actually, like many pet owners, we ventriloquize Ollie by speaking on his behalf in a voice we have chosen for him. Puppet-Ollie is a sort of sweetly oafish toddler. He addresses us, worshipfully, as “mother and father.” Our dog is (if one performs a quick dog-to-human-years conversion), older than us, and his sense of smell is so vivid as to transform a walk around the block into an olfactory odyssey beyond the reach of our human imaginations. This is a lot to contend with. So, rather than attempting to negotiate with the fact that an alien subjectivity is eating from a bowl on our kitchen floor, we imagine our dog as a very stupid baby.

In addition to imagining that animals are themselves children, we imagine that animals are for children. Animals were once “with man at the center of his world,” John Berger writes in “Why Look At Animals?”1 But the human conquering of the natural world has exiled nature, and therefore animals, to the margins. As animals graze around the edges of adult consciousness, they only grow more central to the lives of children.

Once, kings created menageries, caging magnificent beasts to demonstrate their power and strength. Today’s equivalent, the zoo, is for kids. “Children in the industrialised world are surrounded by animal imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals,” writes Berger. Up until the nineteenth century, he writes, animals featured in children’s toys and decor, but only as one of many available motifs. Representations of animals were usually loose and symbolic: consider the pre-nineteenth century hobby horse, a rough head on a stick, in contrast with the nineteenth-century rocking horse, “painted realistically, with real reins of leather, a real mane of hair, and designed movement to resemble that of a horse galloping.”

The more animals shift to the fringes of adult culture, the more important it becomes for children to observe them, depict them, memorize the sounds they make. Children, themselves sometimes strikingly animalistic, are preservers of the fraying link between humans and animals.

Three

Or Christmas. This is a sacred religious festival celebrating the birth of a messiah, but (to the dismay of the Keep-Christ-in-Christmas minority), it’s mostly about toys and candy and Santa, himself a kid-friendly reimagining of a saint. As organized religion becomes less important in the Anglosphere2, festivals like Christmas evolve from public carnivals and turn inward. They go domestic, child-centric.

The exceptions to this trend prove the rule. Down here, Mardi Gras is getting into full swing: a completely public, out-in-the-streets, all-ages upside-down, a civic festival as well as a domestic one. This kind of public celebration is rare in the modern English-speaking world, to such a degree that it has become a major international tourist attraction.

Meanwhile (speaking from experience) one of the weirder things about growing up Jewish in America is the sense that your cultural traditions have somehow missed the cutesification process they were intended to undergo. There we all were, beating our chests and atoning and dirging in a minor key at interminable Yom Kippur services while our friends got elves, jaunty tunes about snowmen, the Easter Bunny. I was shocked to learn that Easter is about a gruesome execution and resurrection. The tonal juxtaposition between getting crucified (on the one hand), and gorging on a basket of pastel-coated candy from a massive anthropomorphic bunny (on the other) remains bizarre and totally enchanting to me. I suspect that American Judaism has by and large resisted this cutesification process because it was always diasporic minority culture. It never really became marginal, because it always was marginal.3

Infantilization is one available stress response to the bizarre experience of watching something powerful and important become irrelevant. Not ready to say goodbye to that which was once “at the center of [our] world,” we send our antiquated tchotchkes to the best preservationists we have: children.

Four

I am most concerned, predictably, with the question of literary and narrative form. When reading older poems, I have often been haunted by the unshakeable feeling that they are cute, with their AABB rhyme schemes and end-stopped lines. You are really not supposed to say this in a literature class. Admitting that you find a great work of literature cute is much worse than admitting that you find it incomprehensible, confusing, or offensive. Cuteness is at odds with serious inquiry or consideration. As Sianne Ngai writes, cuteness is aestheticized powerlessness. Moreover, cuteness is an instinctive, bodily categorization: you feel physically that a baby or a puppy is cute, in a process that bypasses intellect. It’s the opposite of close-reading.

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“The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism,” writes Jonathan Crary in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. “Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.”

A pantheon of great natural cycles once lorded over our economic lives. In preindustrial agricultural economies, the changing of the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun created an unpassable threshold separating work from leisure and rest. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” says the book of Ecclesiastes (and The Byrds), “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” You have to let your fields lie fallow. You have to wait for the sun and the rain to do their own work. You have to sleep when it’s dark and wake up when it’s light again. These things are non-negotiable.

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Industrial capitalism created both the means and the imperative to kill these cycles, creating an endless rush of temporal sameness. “Artificial light emancipated the working day from its dependence on natural daylight,” writes historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Thanks to the advances of the Green Revolution, it is always time both to plant and to pluck up that which is planted. Advances in medicine even make it easy to flatten the body’s internal cycles. You don’t have to have a menstrual cycle if you don’t want to. Now, even the seasons themselves are out of wack. All time is one time.

“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once,” the cliche goes.1 If that is true, then time is hanging on by a thread. Once we learned to dominate the cycles that once ruled us, time became uniform and uniformly commodifiable. If your aim is to increase capital at any cost, and if you have the ability to do so even in the dead of night and in the dead of winter, then you must increase capital by night as well as by day, and in winter as well as in summer. You must stay open 24/7. “In the factories, night was turned to day more consistently than anywhere else,” Schivelbusch tells us of the Industrial Revolution. Any length of time not commodified—not used for either consumption or production—becomes wasted time.

In a digital economy, meanwhile, private leisure time is no longer a break from consuming and producing but instead an opportunity to bring it into the domestic sphere. “Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange,” writes Crary. Sometimes I watch videos of girls who live in cottages and perform elaborate bedtime routines. Cotton pajamas, herbal tea, serum, moisturizer, clean sheets. Even the process of going to sleep, if you know what you’re doing, can be transformed into economically productive time.

Preindustrial night was dangerous. Well, you say, night today is dangerous too. Before you leave the house, your roommate or partner chides you to share your location, stay in well-lit areas, etc. You have to keep the illuminatory and communicative tools of the 24/7 world close at hand, because, out in the still-dark hinterlands, dangers can hide. But for pre-twentieth century Americans, night wasn’t just an empty repository for dangers (though it was that, too). Rather, nightitself was corrosive in an essential way, ridden with disease-causing miasmas. “It was a common practice throughout the nineteenth century to retreat to indoor safety after dark,” writes historian Peter C. Baldwin. The anti-night air sentiment outlasted the viability of miasma theory, so that “until the twentieth century (Americans) still were being scolded for their superstitions.” Baldwin doesn’t include electric light on his list of causes for the eventual embrace of night air, but the timing is certainly suggestive: America’s major cities installed the first forms of electric street lighting beginning in the 1870’s and 80’s, and embraced incandescents in the first decades of the 20th century. As the industrialized city began to stay open late, night air lost its edge.

Now, with the 24/7 economy always pumping behind and between and inside us, the dark space between our houses and cities burning with light, night is barely even night at all. It’s hard to sleep when there’s always something to be bought or sold. Actually, it isn’t that it’s hard to sleep, exactly: more that it feels illicit even as we know we’re supposed to do it. We lie in bed, scrolling, putting money (and data) into some pockets somewhere.

But eventually, sleep comes for you. You can drink coffee and Red Bull, you can push yourself past the point of exhaustion, you can consolidate your sleep into one block instead of enjoying the once-common practice of segmented sleep. You can reduce your sleeping, to a degree (we sleep fewer hours a night, on the whole, than our ancestors did). But sleep is non-negotiable. It is the last natural cycle. And when we sleep, we dream. If sleep is a weird, out-of-place remnant of premodernity, clinging by its fingernails onto the side of our economy, then it means that dreams are runty, tough survivors. They are non-commodifiable narratives, stubbornly pointless in a rising tide of IP.

Dreaming is a fit of activity, but it is not economic activity. People often seemed distressed by the notion of fictionality, pushing stories towards didacticism or insisting that they are “urgent” and “vital” in order to avoid the truth that they are probably no such things. Dreams are the worst fictive offenders of all. When we dream, we don’t consume and we don’t produce. I almost never have good dreams myself. It isn’t that I’m plagued by nightmares—I almost never have what would be conventionally deemed a nightmare—but every dream leaves me, the next morning, uneasy. I feel frustrated, out of control, out of step with clock-time. A lot of my dreams involve being late to something or indefinitely pushing off my arrival somewhere. I wonder, after reading Crary’s book, whether I actually feel uneasy while I’m dreaming, or whether my waking brain, ashamed of the unproductivity and general uselessness of dreaming, guiltily reinterprets these dreams as having been uncomfortable. That is, maybe the dreams themselves feel fine, but I feel awkward about having wasted time by dreaming.

Inevitably, all this ends with the attempt to instrumentalize sleep and dreams.

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Baby talk takes a lot of rhetorical beatings. Some parents claim that they speak to their own kids exactly the way they speak to grownups. They suggest that other parents might boost their children’s SAT scores by a few points if they, too, ditch the cutesy shit. Generally, when I feel an urge to express any opinion related to parenting, I repress that urge as quickly as possible. I have no children, and talking about these matters when you do not yourself have children is a guaranteed way to make everyone angry. But here I’m breaking my own rule, because I believe that the question of baby talk is relevant to every speaker. Opinions of baby talk are reflective of broader ideologies about what it means to authentically express oneself.

But first, cold hard facts. There have been quite a lot of studies on baby talk (sometimes called child-directed speech or parentese by linguists). These studies collectively indicate, relatively unambiguously, that baby talk is good for children. When adults use baby talk with their kids, the babies pay closer attention to what the adults are saying. They also pick up new vocabulary faster than their non-baby-talk peers. The babies who display language delays are the ones whose parents don’t baby-talk with them. In the end, it’s probably all splitting hairs anyway. Babies are ridiculously good at learning to talk, even if it takes them a little extra time. If they don’t learn to speak, it’s not because their parents did or didn’t use enough baby talk with them. But the idea of self-righteously telling parents that they’re harming their children because they call a duck a “duckie” is just ridiculous, a way to brandish superstitious paranoia at people who are already stressed out and sleep deprived.

But people will continue to deride baby talk out of a belief that an idiolect—an individual person’s dialect—is like a Social Security Number. Everybody is supposed to have one and only one, and if yours looks different in different contexts, then you’re committing some kind of linguistic fraud and should be viewed with suspicion. Few individuals are judged more harshly than those who take on a new voice: those whose accents shift, whose vocabulary borrows, even those who simply speak in a way that seems at odds with their exterior. Zadie Smith, in her essay “Speaking in Tongues,” locates this judgment specifically in the British psyche.

“Voice adaptation is still the original British sin. Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases. If you lean toward the Atlantic with your high rising terminals, you’re a sellout; if you pronounce borrowed European words in their original style-even if you try something as innocent as parmigiano for parmesan — you’re a fraud. If you go (metaphorically speaking) down the British class scale, you’ve gone from Cockney to “mockney” and can expect a public tarring and feathering; to go the other way is to perform an unforgivable act of class betrayal. Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular.”

This suspicion of multi-vocality, or linguistic flexibility, extends past the British isles. In fact, Americans are particularly dismayed when one of their own begins to pick up Britishisms, viewing it as an unforgivable act of pretentiousness. If there’s anything worse than deliberately making yourself sound dumber and less sophisticated (baby talk), it’s making yourself sound smarter and more sophisticated (British talk, which, for reasons of longstanding American anglophilia, is marked as especially fancy). When I lived in London, I observed that Americans who lived in the UK for a few years tended to pick up a new cadence. Their American consonants and vowels began mapping onto a British prosody. I once went up to a supermarket employee and said, with a cadence (and an apologetic attitude) I never would have used in America, “Hello. Do you know where I might find the ordinary flour?” I spent the next several minutes burning with embarrassment. I was delighted when my husband reported to me in passing, after years in the UK, that I inexplicably sounded “yattier”—that is, more New Orleanian—than I had ever before.

“Find your voice,” our self-help gurus and wellness influencers tell us. To find your one authentic voice is to find yourself. Snobs like me are not exempt. What goal, for a writer, is more vaunted than the hard-won, sweaty retrieval of your own inimitable voice?

The suspicion of multivocality takes on a politically benevolent cast in the excoriation of the linguistic appropriator. Accusations of language appropriation suggest that the voice adaptor is acting from a place of greed and entitlement. These oppressors have already taken so much, the thinking goes: now they can’t be satisfied with one voice, and have to go skim off the top of someone else’s? I am sympathetic to these resentments, and, frankly, often feel this way myself. My personal politics mean that, while I find it easy enough to endorse baby talk, it’s still my instinct to judge certain kinds of linguistic flexibility as a kind of petty colonization, born of entitlement and greed. But there are many kinds of voice adaptation, not always so easy to pick apart, and a puritanical judgment of the supposed appropriator is just as lazily essentialist as the appropriative act itself.

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This is the second in a three-part project about dreams and art, inspired by dreams sent to me by my Substack readers. In the previous installment , I wrote about the way dreams get shared from dreamer to another.

When you have a really weird and vivid dream, you have an urge to spread it, describing it to others it in a way that’s more like transmitting a germ than conveying a narrative. A reader named transmitted just such a dream to me, and now I am going to transmit it to you:

a man and a woman, a married couple (neither were me) found themselves in an unfamiliar house on a rocky, deserted cliff. the coastline was full of jagged rocks and the water was freezing. the waves were too rough for swimming. they realized over time that they seemed to have been teleported into a strange pocket dimension where they wouldn’t be harmed but they also couldn’t leave. they didn’t age or become hungry or thirsty. in desperation, they tried killing themselves in the hopes that it would somehow reset their situation and allow them to leave-- throwing themselves off the cliff and cracking their skulls on the rocks, drowning in the deep water, cutting themselves and each other with the knives in the kitchen. whatever system trapped them there wouldn’t allow them to leave. it would knit their wounds back together or somehow fish their body out of the water when they weren’t aware, and they would be in a lot of pain, only to wake up the next morning whole and new inside the house on the cliff.

eventually they realized the only way for them to die permanently (and thus escape) without leaving a body behind (nothing to be resurrected) was to eat each other, so that their gastric juices would break down the material of each others’ bodies. when she cut off his arm and ate it, he did not wake up the next day with the atoms that originally made up his arm reconstituted and attached to his shoulder-- it seemed like that part of his body had broken down too far, or maybe it had just become part of her, the way all food becomes a part of the person who eats it. he ate her ear and it didn’t grow back, then a piece of her neck, et cetera. they spent a long time calmly butchering and eating each other this way little by little, neither wanting to be the last one left alive, all alone and mutilated in the house on the cliff forever with no one left to digest them. i woke up before i could see how it all ended, but the last thing i remember seeing before i woke was the woman setting a dish down on the kitchen table after another long day of butchering, skinning, and cooking. the man’s arm was a healed stump (it had been months since she chopped it off with a cleaver) and his chest cavity was exposed. his lungs were pulsing as he breathed and his heart had been cut out. he was sitting quietly on one of the wooden chairs at the table, unafraid.

This dream is very much what might be described as “cinematic” or “novelistic.” These comparisons to narrative art aren’t, in this case, just ways of saying that the dream has cohesive narrative stakes or vivid imagery, though it has both: I read the dreamer’s account the way one reads a suspenseful short story. Rather, this dream resembles a book or movie in the sense that it has the quality of being third-person. I’m not externally assigning that literary descriptor to it, either: the dreamer wrote to me that “i sometimes dream from the point of view of somebody else, embodying people other than myself (a man, an animal, a child, an alien) and sometimes in a kind of third-person-omniscient way, seeing things from a bird’s eye view or bouncing between perspectives.”

In fact, the dreamer took pains to emphasize the extent of the third-person-ness:

“...maybe a psychologist would say both the man and the woman represent different parts of me, or something, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. they were both white, if that matters (i’m not) and looked to be in their thirties (i’m not) and they didn’t look like anyone i know…i didn’t really feel like i was experiencing my own memories or thoughts mixed together by my subconscious, which i sometimes do when dreaming... i felt like i’d been dropped into someone else’s world for a little while, and then i came back to my own mind when i woke up.”

I received several other third-person dreams from my readers. In a few cases, these dreams also had a metanarrative element. More than one respondent described dreams which begin as “ordinary,” immersive stories, but then “zoom out” to reveal that the whole thing is taking place on a movie screen in a theater. Writes one respondent ():

“Sometimes, before I realize it has happened, my dreams will have phased out from the typical first-person experience to that of watching the events happen in a film. I mean it literally too, there will sometimes be a literal cinema screen in my dream on which my brain continues to project the images, events and emotions that were previously perceived as ‘happening’ ‘to me.’”

That same dreamer, , recalls a kind of folk horror dream experience (they informally captioned it “weird lamb crushing movie dream,” which gives you a sense). I’ll reproduce it in full below:

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A note: a few weeks ago I asked you all to send me your dreams. I wound up with over 20 single-spaced pages of dreams. Writing down your dreams is a fundamentally impossible task (I’ll get into this more later) and sending them to a stranger who wants to write about them on her blog is a weird and vulnerable thing to do, so I appreciate every person who went to the trouble. I loved reading your dreams.

This essay is the first installment in a series exploring the relationship between dreams and works of art. Later installments will cover topics including metafictional dreams, point of view, artistic metaphors for dreams, censorship, and commercial exploitation. In this first installment, I want to begin with the very modest idea that dreams are less private and self-contained than we typically imagine them to be.

The night before she was executed by the Nazis, the student resistance leader Sophie Scholl dreamed the following:

It was a sunny day and I was carrying a baby in a long white dress to be baptized. The road to the church ran up a steep mountain. But I held the child tight, safe in my arms. Then suddenly a crevasse opened up right in front of me. I had just enough time to put the child down on the other side, then I fell into the chasm.

Charlotte Beradt, a German Jewish refugee who includes this account in her book The Third Reich of Dreams—an ethnography of dreaming in Nazi Germany, translated by Damion Searls—lauds Scholl not only for her moral courage but also for what we can only call her artistic clarity.

“Here is a transcendent dream, its symbolism shining bright, that the heroes of classical German drama might have dreamed when faced with a classical crisis of conscience,” writes Beradt. Scholl, in this assessment, is both author and protagonist of the dream, impressive not only for saving the symbolic baby but also for inventing the dream’s entire luminous symbolic vocabulary. Her dream, in Beradt’s interpretation, even represents a reclamation of German high culture from the Nazis: she is carrying forth the literary legacy of Goethe or Schiller.

Is a dreamer an artist? Are dreams cultural products the same way that clothing, music, and literature are cultural products? Can one exhibit artistic skill and clarity—or artistic cowardice and sloppiness—in a dream? Beradt writes that many of the dreams in her collection “qualify as contemporary literature.” The poet Dunya Mikhail, in a foreword to Beradt’s text, compares the dreams to poetry. If dreams are poems, they are also certainly works of fiction. Most people do not write down stories when they are awake, but they do compose wild and elaborate fictions in their sleep.

The publishing industry works in trends: romantasy is in, dystopias were the thing before, vampires before that. These trends are connected to nonfictional conditions and preoccupations, but they also create one another—the success of Twilight fueled an intra-industry frenzy for more of the same. Dreams can work in a similar way, passing motifs around in a way that seems to come from a self-contained cultural economy of dreaming. They get sorted into genres, each displaying recognizable tropes: the flying dream, the test-taking dream, the nudity dream.

We usually discuss dreams either psychoanalytically—the dream is made up of universal symbols drawn from the collective unconscious (Jung), or reflects our repressed desires and fears (Freud)—or else as a distorted but basically direct mirror of personal experience. But the dream is a socially constructed thing, a text influenced by both other texts and by the culture of textual analysis. At the first level we dream about our shared reality. At the second we discuss that shared reality with each other, which in turn affects how we dream about it. And at the third, we discuss our dreams, with those meta-discussions further influencing our subsequent dreams. Dreamers respond to other dreamers, just as artists respond to other artists.

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I have a big crush on you. I can’t stop thinking about the mischievous glimmer in your eyes, the sound of your laugh, your hands. I am not sure if you reciprocate my feelings. You text me every so often, and maybe you give me little compliments, or brush against me in a maybe-on-purpose way when we’re in a crowded place. The high of that hope keeps my crush alive. But you never give me real confirmation, keeping me ever-uncertain—and this, too, fuels the crush, preventing it from transmuting into a reciprocal and stable relationship.

I read omens into everything you do. When you text me back at 11:45 pm, I think, with hope, maybe I’m the last person you thought about before bed. When you look at my Instagram story, that’s a good sign, and when you don’t look at my Instagram story, I think, well, maybe you didn’t look because you don’t want me to suspect that you have feelings for me.

As a result, an odd thing happens. You are split in two. There is the You who exists on the outside, going to work and coming home and eating and sleeping, maybe thinking about me and maybe not thinking about me. And then there is an imagined, shadowy version of You who lives inside of me. This shadow exists solely to observe me. When I put on an outfit in the morning, I wonder what the shadow would think about it. When I smoke a cigarette, I try to do it in a sexy way for the shadow. When I order at a restaurant, I order something I suspect the shadow might approve of. I interpret you. I imagine you. To a degree I become you, filtering my own decisions through your (imaginary) opinions and judgments, until it becomes hard to distinguish my thoughts from yours. And all of this can be done without your knowledge, without even much interaction at all between you and me.

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There are a number of things going on here that distinguish my crush on you from an ordinary relationship of admiration or even love, shifting it into the obsessive state that the psychologist Dorothy Tennov dubbed “limerence.”1

For one thing, Tennov writes in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, limerence “endures as long as do the conditions that sustain both hope and uncertainty.” There we see that heady, painful blend, which combine to keep me on an emotional tightrope between indifference and love.

Then there’s the scrying of signs, with your most ordinary actions (or, in a pinch, inactions) turning into more fodder for my obsession. In limerence, writes Tennov, “you subject LO’s [the limerent object’s] seemingly ordinary postures, movements, words, and glances to incessant analysis in quest of ‘true’ meanings obscured beneath an ambiguous surface.”

Next, there’s that internalizing of your gaze: the refracted version of your consciousness that lives in my mind and influences my decisions even in your absence. Tennov cites one limerent subject who writes that “[The limerent object] is like a mirror that follows me about. I imagine him witnessing everything I do.”

Finally, there is the totalizing distraction: I am always either thinking of you or poised to stop what I’m doing and begin thinking of you. (Per Tennov, limerence is marked by “its intrusiveness, its invasion of consciousness against our will,” making it hard to focus on anything other than thoughts of the L.O.).

If we look closely at those attributes I enumerated above—the mixed hope and uncertainty, the interpretation of signs, the internalization of the other’s gaze, and the compromising of focus—it begins to seem as if limerence and phone addiction bear a particularly analogous relationship to one another. It even begins to look as though many of us have a crush on social media algorithms.

Both limerence and excessive social media use are regularly characterized as forms of addiction. This is a valid but incomplete assessment of their similarities. Other forms of addiction, for one thing, don’t involve this imaginative and empathetic element: you do not conjure up visions of alcohol as a conscious agent, or imagine how tobacco might perceive you. Moreover, limerence by definition involves an element of sexual desire, and usually some kind of effort to become more desirable to the L.O. I think that, increasingly, some version of this is actually present in many human/algorithm relationships.

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I go to about one movie a week with my friend Sandro. He likes to cut it sort of close with the timing and I always throw a fit because I like to watch the previews. This last time, I won, and I’m glad I did, because I got to see a preview for Hamnet starring Paul Mescal. Like any costume drama starring Paul Mescal, it got me thinking. Hamnet is an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel by the same name, which I read (well, listened to in audiobook form; they’re not the same thing) after I got a concussion from walking head-first into a “caution” sign at Euston station in London. It’s historical fiction about William Shakespeare’s life: the death of his young son, and the subsequent writing of Hamlet, which O’Farrell imagines as a therapeutic project of wrestling with grief. As such, Mescal is not just playing any old dead guy, but William Shakespeare himself. And, of course, an actor can’t simply play the part of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is more symbol than man to us today. He is an embodiment of the English language itself.

There is a big difference, linguistically speaking, between a work of written historical fiction (like O’Farrell’s novel) and a filmed period piece (like this forthcoming adaptation): the former doesn’t have to reckon with accents, and the latter does. The filmmakers and actors behind the movie Hamnet must decide how Shakespeare, the walking, talking, grieving effigy of English past and present, will actually speak.

And he speaks like an educated modern-day person from London or its environs, in what linguists call the Estuary accent. It’s the English accent of prestige today, a descendant of the stereotypically posh Received Pronunciation (which nobody really speaks any more: even the Queen, over the course of her life, traded in a lot of RP features for Estuary ones. If you watch her Christmas addresses over the years, picking one from every decade or so, you’ll see her accent changing alongswide that of the world around her). Shakespeare did not speak in an Estuary accent and neither, in his everyday life, does Paul Mescal, because Paul Mescal is Irish. The casting of an Irish-accented actor to play the English language itself onscreen offers a fascinating opportunity, a perfect convergence of events, through which to understand our own emotional attachments to the idea of our linguistic ancestry. Mescal is altering his speech, not to sound more like Shakespeare, but to sound more like our idea of Shakespeare, and therefore our idea of our own idealized linguistic origins.

While it’s hard to know exactly what Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded like, linguists agree that the closest contemporary equivalent is probably something like the West Country accent (you can listen to actor Ben Crystal read Shakespeare in an approximation of his accent here). In some senses, Mescal’s native Irish accent is probably a closer historical match to Shakespeare’s tongue than his fictional Estuary accent.

That’s because of his R sounds. Most American accents are rhotic, meaning that they pronounce the R in a word like “heart” or in fact “Shakespeare.” So are Irish accents. You can hear it straightaway in this interview, when Paul Mescal says “overwhelmed.” And so are West Country accents: listen to how Hagrid pronounces the word “wizard” when saying “you’re a wizard, Harry,” in the first Harry Potter movie. But R’s are a strange little sound, and they tend to have a weak hold on the mouths of speakers. The stereotypical Southern, New York, and Boston accents are all non-rhotic, and so are most English accents. For most Americans, non-rhoticity is the most prominent and noticeable feature of an English voice.

When Shakespeare was alive, the English accent was still generally rhotic, and it would be for generations to come. Many people assume that American English used to sound more British, and that the two accents parted ways after the Revolution, with Americans inserting the R back in. But that isn’t true. Both accents, by and large, were rhotic at the time of the American Revolution, and it was the Brits who dropped the R. So it’s not just that we depict Shakespeare as speaking with a contemporary English accent. We also usually see depictions of, for instance, American founding fathers with contemporary, non-rhotic English accents. The past, in today’s depictions, is a non-rhotic country.

All to say that, if anything, Mescal’s English accent in Hamnet is actually less historically accurate than his Irish accent. But only a joyless literalist would view the accent work in Hamnet as a straightforward mistake. In a costume drama, perfect fidelity to the past is usually not the point (and the exceptions, like some of Robert Eggers’s work, prove the rule). In most cases, a movie set in the past tells us little about the speech habits of the Victorians or the Medievals or cowboys in the Wild West, and, inadvertently, a lot about our own linguistic fetishes and fascinations.

Consider another Mescal-led period piece: Gladiator II. This one is telling because it takes place not in the English-speaking world but in Ancient Rome; it makes no sense at all to speak about historical accuracy unless the actors are going to do the whole thing in Latin. As a result, it functions as a kind of controlled experiment in the sociolinguistics of the costume drama. Even in Gladiator, Mescal speaks not in an Irish accent but in an English one. His character is from North Africa rather than Rome itself, so, if anything, it would make sense for him to speak in a different accent from that of his co-stars. But no: everyone knows that Ancient Romans are English, not Irish. Interestingly, Denzel Washington does speak in an American accent in Gladiator II. Some critics did wag their fingers about this, which I suspect is partly because he’s Black and partly because he has some regional NYC accent features. But he still does it.

So we get here a kind of informal ranking. In Ancient Rome, the default accent is 21st-century English. The second-best, riskier option is American, which is maybe ok provided you’re not playing a romantic lead. And then, hovering outside the realm of possibility, there’s the Irish accent. This, despite the fact that Ireland (as many have remarked before me) has a kind of astonishing national literary tradition, one that feels disproportionate to the country’s population size and that encompasses everyone from Beckett to Heaney to Joyce to Rooney.

We view an English accent as timeless and transcendent. It isn’t one way of pronouncing English: it is British English itself, good enough for Shakespeare. It was, in the popular imagination, there first. Every other accent and dialect emerged later, like a mutation: little bastard children dashing around in America, Ireland, India, etc. Sometimes, English people and Anglophilic Americans will even say as much, joking that Americans speak a bastardized “American” language rather than the real English.

Of course, lots of people have warm feelings toward the Irish and the way(s) they speak: I had a good laugh at this essay about the phenomenon of the “weeb for Ireland,” which does a good job of explaining why so many Americans are enamored with the concept of Ireland, a place they haven’t visited. Irish speech avoids the brutal mockery directed toward the accents of (native, fluent) English speakers in the global South. Instead, Irish accents have what linguists call “covert prestige,” the positive associations that can come with being part of a linguistic in-group (covert prestige, to put it simply, is the reason white suburban children are always trying to sound Black).

This covert prestige comes from a Romantic association of Irishness with embodiedness and rusticity. In this worldview the Irish are kind of like hobbits, if hobbits were hot and had dated Phoebe Bridgers for a while. Only recently, Ireland was wracked by violence and poverty. This past, which to outsiders seems both recent and impossibly remote, makes Ireland and its accents feel both safe and exotic. The abruptly peaceful and rich Ireland of the 2020’s is a culturally distinctive holdout in a globalized world, sweetly folksy, striking a nice balance between aspirational white Europeanness and cozy parochialism.

Thus Irish accents can be cozy or funny or sexy, but they cannot be the sonic system by which an actor conveys the core experiences of the human condition. If Paul Mescal were to utter the words of Shakespeare in his own accent, he would, to most people, sound hilarious. It’s not only that the Estuary accent has overt prestige, lending it gravitas in the ears of listeners all over the Anglophone world. It’s also that, when an accent or dialect has prestige of this sort, speakers tend to grant it the gift of history. Irish accents (and Indian accents, and Southern accents, and Caribbean accents, and Northern UK accents) belong to the mortal body. But the English accent of prestige belongs to the immortal soul. Only that accent can reach back through the centuries and emerge, plausible-sounding and serious, from the mouth of Shakespeare himself.

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P.S. On rare occasions, my double life as a “booktoker” grants me some kind of thrilling gift, and this week I received the best one yet: a link to N+1’s legendary bookmatch quiz. I came away with a ton of book recommendations I’m genuinely really excited about, not just because they’re thoughtfully chosen by writers and editors but because they get away from the marketing hype of the fall publishing calendar and focus on indie-press releases. Also, the quiz is a huge fundraiser for N+1, which honestly stands out for the intelligence, originality, and integrity of the work in its pages. If you want to live in a less stupid world, you should read/pitch N+1. Also also, I had a lot of fun answering the questions: it feels like a Buzzfeed quiz if Don DeLillo had been a Buzzfeed employee. Take it here.

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