From The New Yorker:
On a recent afternoon, I went to see the writer Dubravka Ugresic at an apartment on East Seventy-sixth Street, in Manhattan, which belongs to a friend of hers. Ugresic lives in Amsterdam, but she was in town to promote “American Fictionary,” a collection of essays that she wrote in the nineties, after living for a while in New York City. Ugresic sat across from me in her friend’s living room, on a floral-patterned couch. She is an energetic conversationalist who speaks English with a lilting Croatian accent and nimbly moves between personal anecdote and cultural analysis. How had New York changed since the years when she lived here? “There was more life on the streets before, you know—classes, races, faces,” she said. Now she got the “feeling like authorities are just making it nicer and nicer, but at the same time I wonder where are all those people—I mean, all those drunks from Washington Square.”
Ugresic has long had an affinity for those who fall on the rough side of history. “I’m with the losers,” she writes in her book “Europe in Sepia.” In September, 1991, she left her home, in Zagreb, to meet with her publisher in Amsterdam. It was meant to be a one-week trip. But, as she followed the news about the war reshaping what was her native Yugoslavia, she decided that, rather than return home, she would go straight on to the United States, where she was to begin teaching, that winter, at Wesleyan, in Connecticut. She published an article while she was in Amsterdam, and a Dutch daily asked her to write a column. The essays that came to form the collection describe her peripatetic life shuttling between Middletown and New York, which she visited on weekends during the semester, and also her time in Amsterdam and Zagreb. “It’s a nervous book,” she said.
The word “fictionary,” for Ugresic, connotes the slipperiness of language. (“When it is this earthquake experience, when the world is falling apart, then nothing is real. Then you find yourself in such a mess,” she said.) Her U.K. editor balked at putting that word in the title, so the book was published there, twenty-four years ago, as “Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream.” In a postscript to the new edition, Ugresic notes how the phrase “Have a nice day” rings differently in the ear a quarter of a century later. The “cadence of the phrase in America,” she writes, “has become darker and softer. That exaggerated yodel at the tail end of the phrase, which had always ended on an upward flip, now has dropped, crestfallen. The phrase is uttered today more evenly, more directly, with far less feigned enthusiasm than before.”
We discussed other things that have changed since then, and Ugresic lightly lamented the absence of newspaper stands and telephone booths. “Industry forces you to adapt,” she said, “to buy the iPhones, to behave, to find the streets not anymore on the maps. How it was fantastic then to open your map!” she said, spreading her arms. I demurred on the joys of reading a paper city map, but I sympathize with her broader concerns about the future of print. Ugresic told me about a friend of hers, a retired literary critic who has become popular on social media. “Why is he popular? Nobody knows,” she said. But he recently shared photographs of his much-younger wife and their baby, she told me, and the newspapers in Croatia published his pictures with comments like “If such and such can do it, then . . . ” She let her words trail off. “Is that normal for you?” she asked, I believe rhetorically.
Ugresic has thought a lot about how the Internet has changed our relationship to art, and everything else. In another of her essay collections, “Karaoke Culture,” she writes about fan fiction, outsider artists, and mediocre YouTube stars. She has a highbrow’s scorn for watery aesthetic values muddying the difference between amateurism and expertise, but it is tempered by sympathy for the human drive to connect with one another. When I mentioned the alleged epidemic of loneliness that’s overrun our technophilic world, which she writes about in “Karaoke Culture,” she leaned forward in her seat and told me that “every communication, if it is a real one, demands responsibility, demands energy, demands all sorts of things we do not have anymore.” Nowadays, she added, we use technology as an excuse “to avoid pain and communication. Friends will say, ‘Oh, I didn’t get your mail.’ ‘Oh, you must be finished in spam.’ You can imagine a lonely person with that sense of power,” she went on, proceeding to imagine it. “I’m going to answer you. No, I’m not going to answer you. I’ll delete you. I’m God.”
Link to the rest The New Yorker
I was too tired for this at 06:00 Mountain Time.