The End of Nostalgia

I walked by a car wash yesterday. A Tesla jumped the queue, to the great ire of a BMW, and I thought, well, sometimes there is no good answer. There was a big sign saying HAND CAR WASH. Which in my imagination involves scantily clad American co-eds by the side of a highway, trying to raise money for new lacrosse sticks or mouth guards or pom poms. The sun is shining, there are supersized soapsuds everywhere, the line is filled mostly by pickup trucks, and Journey is always playing. The reality, in London in March, was a handful of bearded men in their 30s brandishing towels and looking grim. And so I wondered: What on earth is the point of that?

I used to love the car wash when I was a kid. Our sports teams must have done the wet-hot-American-summer kind, but we always went to the mechanical one next to Burger King. You know, where you drive the car oh so slowly through as the big swishy hula skirt slaps across the windshield, and the rotating brushes come at you from both sides, and it’s as close as you want to get to a horror movie – just enough thrill, but not likely at all to follow you home.

In the brief period I owned a car (my dad’s hand-me-down), I never once washed it. Why would I? It got me where I wanted to go. (Until the one time it memorably didn’t, when I was driving from Boston to New York in the middle of the night, having convinced my parents that it was a much nicer drive if I left at 11pm, and around 1am a cloud of black smoke began pouring out of the hood and I had to pull into a truck stop and call them on a pay phone, undoubtedly collect. (God, remember that? When a phone call meant finding a machine and keeping track of quarters?) When my dad answered I said, “I know.” I sat at Dunkin Donuts and ate a blueberry bagel for the first and only time in my life, and drank a cup of coffee, and when he showed up he said, “I don’t have to say it, do I?” And that was the end of the car, and of me driving across states in the middle of the night, and someone came and towed the stupid thing and I drove us home and three hours later we woke up again and went to Disney World.)

Someone once told me that people washed their cars for aerodynamic reasons. This was before the age of Google so I didn’t check it, and as I fully intend to live the rest of my life sans car, I likely never will. Anyway I can’t believe it made that much of a difference. I exceeded the speed limit, but not to the point where milliseconds counted.

The only thing I can come up with is that, it being the Northeast, it made sense to wash the salt off after a long winter. And to be fair: My mom parked the Little Green Car to go grocery shopping once, came back and climbed in – and the bottom fell out. I was quite young, but I imagine that could have been why I remember regular car washes later in my childhood. The odd thing, given my (negative, very) feelings on cars, is how fondly I remember them. But that’s how nostalgia works; logic is irrelevant.

Take school lunch. I hardly ever had one; we were a packed-lunch, brown-bag, cheese-sandwich-on-brown-bread-with-mayo, two Fig Newtons, 100%-juice box, maybe an apple kind of family. But school lunch was A Thing. In my mind it consisted entirely and solely of square soggy pizza and pale french fries and cartons of milk with pictures of missing kids on the side. My parents derided it, I never bought it – and yet I can taste that pizza now. Did I save up my allowance and secretly buy it? Did I trade with Fig-Newton-deprived friends? (Acquaintances, more likely, friends being rather thin on the ground.)

All I know is that I know the taste. Terrible pizza. Unconscionable that they made children pay for it. But somehow… It was good. So this becomes the central question of nostalgia: Is it good because it was part of one’s childhood? Or is it actually good, despite not being, in any way, what we adults with all our grownup sophisticated taste buds, would call good?

Certainly the first part is true. Thing you liked in childhood + time = fond memory -> nostalgia. Entire industries (see: toys NIB on eBay) are built on this fact. Things do not have to be good to be remembered fondly. Remembered as good, even. It’s a sort of doublethink: You can love a thing without claiming it is Good.

Some of it is that kids have no taste. Rowan loves all kinds of crap that is, objectively, No Good. Foods, films, dance moves. She has no taste at all. That’s fine. Taste is acquired. My favorite movie in second grade was Care Bears 2. You like something as a kid, so you have positive associations with it, and then you grow up and your taste has changed but the associations never do. (I tried watching CB2 as an adult and I can tell you it is Not a Good Movie. But still, #darkheart4eva.)

Snobbery is learned. Call it taste, call it experience, whatever. You grow up and you can now identify bad pizza from good. You have a whole pizza ranking system, starting with John’s of Bleecker St and going all the way through Japanese cracker pizza with mayonnaise and sweet corn down to our old friend square soggy school pizza. Children are indiscriminate but you are not. You know, and you care, and you will expound on it regardless of whether anyone else does.

But. What if that whole adult construct is just that – a ranking system your adult brain has created to convince you that you are, in fact, an adult, and therefore wise and learned and ready for the responsibilities that you cannot avoid? What if… Soggy square school pizza is, actually, still, always… good?

Not the same kind of good, perhaps. But good in the sense that… you like it. If you allow yourself to.

Or take my grandmother’s macaroni and cheese. Which was actually macaroni in a thin tomato sauce with a layer of melted cheese on top. I can’t imagine she followed an actual recipe. Or what about the mac and cheese from a powder where you just add butter and milk? Terrible, both. But… good. If you let them be.

Perhaps there is no such thing as bad mac and cheese. Or bad pizza. Or bad chocolate. Remember milk chocolate? Mini candy bars on Halloween? The outrage of blue M&Ms? Nowadays it’s all 70% cacao and halvah and sea salt. And while I will only buy the kind not made by enslaved people (that seems a basic requirement, no?), talking purely of taste: Dark chocolate is not better than milk chocolate. Tell yourself it’s all just nostalgia and you’ve grown out of it and you don’t need that Milky Way anyway but remember Roald Dahl, who ate milk chocolate every day of his adult life and built a career largely on a book dedicated to it. One Kit Kat a day, apparently. (And he fed his dog Smarties. So put that in your dog-care pipe and smoke it.)

There’s more to him than that, I know. The big flap last year about removing all the fat-shaming and ugly-people-are-evil stuff from his books. (Although he came by it honestly; see: Aristotle.) His anti-Semitism. But also, relevant to our times: Having watched his daughter die from measles, he was understandably extremely pro-vaccination.

So he has layers. He has complications. He has not been canceled. I have not canceled him, not even in his original form. I stock him in the shop and feel no guilt about it. I put his books into the hands of impressionable young humans and I do not worry. Should I?

There’s a lot to consider after all. I might need a flowchart – or possibly several overlapping ones. Does that exist? Because where does it begin?

I don’t know what order they go in, but these feel like the important questions:

Is the author still alive?

Is it their work that’s problematic, or their personal views?

Is it just their opinions I find distasteful, or has there been harmful action?

And then my response can take various forms:

Do I never read another word they’ve written?

Do I recommend them in the shop?

Do I actively warn people away from them?

Because I can’t change what’s gone before. I will have always read and re-read that scene in Charlie where he’s eye level with the nine coins and he just can’t stop himself from getting one more chocolate bar. I will have always had outraged feelings when they changed the ending of The Witches for the movie and turned the kid back into a human. I will have always been excited at the publication of Matilda – the first time I remember being aware that an author I liked was coming out with a new book. The love has already happened. The positive associations are already there. What’s done cannot be undone.

Especially true when you start tattooing literary quotes on your body. Neil Gaiman, I’m looking at you. I cannot unlove Sandman. I cannot remove this tattoo – or the nights I spent drawing Death eyeliner on goth boys with their long skirts and black nail polish and ankh necklaces, ready to head to the club and dance little-tree big-tree to Cruxshadows and the Sisters of Mercy.

But Neil is alive. And although his books are unobjectionable content-wise – the opposite, in fact – his behaviour is not. Thus after much listening to podcasts and chatting and wrangling I have decided: I can recommend him, but not in the shop. If you want to read him, go to the library. Money = support, and that I can no longer give, to him, as a person.

What that looks like in practice is… complicated. The other day someone came in and asked for a few Gaiman books, looking to start her daughter on him. Coraline, Stardust, as you’d expect for a 10ish-year-old. I found them for her. But as she was paying I said hesitantly… Have you heard about him recently? I didn’t get into it but I suggested she might want to take a look at recent news, and implied that yes, it was what she might expect these days when it’s not all men but for fuck’s sake it certainly seems like it is. She bought the books but, well, we’re all feeling our way forward.

Orson Scott Card is the other current Question that Matters to Me in My Head in a Big Way but Nobody Else is Probably Taking Much Notice of Even in the Shop. He’s old news anyway. But until I wrangle him to my own satisfaction, or until he dies, or I stop working in a bookshop, here we are.

Unlike Neil, his personal views are atrocious but he has not behaved in an illegal/abusive way. Unlike JKR (who needs to be mentioned in this context but let’s leave it at that), his platform is not such that atrocious personal views are damaging to a vulnerable population. Yes, the aliens are called Buggers, but, I mean, they are giant bugs. Nor do they remain, in the series, faceless evil. So his personal views, I’d say, are entirely separate from the work. A work I loved, that was crucial to me as a certain kind of person at a certain age. (Slight geek nod to my people, the Lonely Suburban Smart Kids.)

So isn’t that worth something? So OSC thinks the gays and the Blacks and who knows who else are coming for him and of course he’s a crackpot with a gun but also… He created something important. Shouldn’t that count? Shouldn’t he reap some appropriate rewards? Giving Neil support is a direct line to giving him power, which leads to him exploiting the power imbalance that has informed his history of abusive behaviour. Giving OSC money… buys him a cup of coffee which, all else aside since it can be put aside, he deserves. Let him rant to the ether in his bunker in Utah. Except he’s a Mormon, so he doesn’t drink coffee. (Or he was? The LDS church is apparently on the long line of people who want to punch him in the face.) And Neil was a Scientologist, and much of his family still is. All of which sent me – is still sending me – down quite the rabbit hole. This year’s required reading: stories from people who have left restrictive (insane? abusive?) religious groups. Please, send in your recommendations re: Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Hasidim, Evangelicals, et al.

Because if I can learn about these people, their worlds, then I can understand. And if I can understand – if I can make the ideas line up like books on a shelf – I will know where to find them and what to say about them, and which books to place in whose hands. I will have librarianed. The importance of which cannot be overstated.

I do not need a physical library. Books are objects; objects are transient. I move too much to hold on to them all. But the library in my head: that needs to be kept in order. And one of the ways I do that, is this, right here, putting my thoughts on the page. (What Nabokov called “my bitter, brief, insane salutations” that the rest of the world pays no attention to.) And part of it is lists.

I made a playlist of My Life in Music recently. All the songs, basically, that were meaningful at one time or another. The songs I associated with important people or times. It’s 7.5 hours long. It feels like a memoir. All of it is, I promise, Good Music. At some point I’ll do the same with books, with the same lack of apologies or caveats or cringe. Because there are a million reasons to love what you love, and all of it is you.

The songs:

Moonshadow - Cat Stevens Two Princes - Spin Doctors Basket Case - Green Day 7 - Prince Man on the Moon - REM Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedies Piano Man - Billy Joel Rift - Phish Fast Enough for You - Phish American Pie - Don Mclean Sequel - Harry Chapin Tom’s Diner (a capella) - Suzanne Vega Birdhouse in Your Soul - TMBG As Cool as I Am - Dar Williams When I Was a Boy - Dar Williams Fire & Rain - James Taylor Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears Pinball Wizard - The Who Winter - Tori Amos Silent All These Years - Tori Amos Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads Werewolves of London - Warren Zevon Flight of the Cosmic Hippo - Bela Fleck & the Flecktones Cecilia - Simon & Garfunkel Marilyn, My Bitterness - The Cruxshadows Bloodletting - Concrete Blonde Temple of Love - Sisters of Mercy White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane Crucify - Tori Amos Pictures of You - The Cure Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm - Crash Test Dummies Afternoons & Coffee Spoons - Crash Test Dummies Catch - The Cure Just Like Heaven - The Cure I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You - Tom Waits Only Happy When it Rains - Garbage It Can’t Rain All the Time - Jane Siberry Old Shoes - Tom Waits Enjoy the Silence - Depeche Mode The State I Am In - Belle & Sebastian She’s Losing It - Belle & Sebastian Origin of Love - Hedwig & the Angry Inch She Talks to Rainbows - Ramones You Said Something - PJ Harvey Skinhead on the Mbta - Dropkick Murphys Ring of Fire - Social Distortion Cure for Pain - Morphine You Look Like Rain - Morphine The Heart of Saturday Night - Tom Waits Zombie - The Cranberries Alison - Elvis Costello Benzedrine - Thea Gilmore Sk8er Boi - Avril Lavigne Hungry Like the Wolf - Duran Duran Anarchy in the UK - Sex Pistols Walk on the Wild Side - Lou Reed Fear of Trains - Magnetic Fields Papa Was a Rodeo - Magnetic Fields A Sorta Fairytale - Tori Amos Leaving NY - REM Hand in My Pocket - Alanis Morissette All the Umbrellas in London - Magnetic Fields December in NY - Thea Gilmore Life for Rent - Dido All You Want - Dido The River - Bruce Springsteen Road Rage - Catatonia Hey Eugene - Pink Martini New York City - TMBG Divorce Song - Liz Phair We Will Become Silhouettes - Postal Service Southern California Wants to Be Western NY - Dar Williams I’m Not Down - Thea Gilmore Cemetery Gates - The Smiths Redemption Song - Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros Ghosts - Laura Marling Sunday Morning - Velvet Underground Undiscovered Colors - The Flashbulb Empire State of Mind - Jay-Z Rolling in the Deep - Adele Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz Fast Car - Tracy Chapman Animal Life - Shearwater Breaking the Yearlings - Shearwater Everybody’s Talkin’ - Harry Nilsson I Guess the Lord Must Be in NYC - Harry Nilsson Polyester Bride - Liz Phair Poncho & Lefty - Townes van Zandt To Live Is to Fly - Townes van Zandt Sugar Water - Cibo Matto Transylvanian Concubine - Rasputina How We Quit the Forest - Rasputina Just Another - Pete Yorn It Never Rains in Southern California - Albert Hammond This Is Not a Test - She & Him What’s Up? - 4 Non Blondes Train - 4 Non Blondes Don’t Need the Sunshine - Catatonia Bizarre Love Triangle - New Order Cloudbursting - Kate Bush Clementine - Pink Martini England Made Me - Black Box Recorder The Art of Driving - Black Box Recorder The Sing - Bill Callahan Wild World - Cat Stevens Pink Moon - Nick Drake The Book of Love - Magnetic Fields Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen Accidentally Like a Martyr - Warren Zevon Desperados Under the Eaves - Warren Zevon Brutal - Olivia Rodrigo In My Mind - Amanda Palmer …to be continued.

Recipe: Creamy Macaroni & Cheese, not a bechamel in sight.