Twenty years a-growing on CT

Wow. Twenty years. I’ve recently (perhaps not so recently) aged into the demographic who recall events from twenty years back, even though those events occurred in an already reasonably established professional life. That still seems wild to me. I learnt quickly that saying things to the youth like ‘Well, I’m old’ doesn’t yield reassuring denials. The states you think of as temporary and contingent turn out to be long phases of life or even permanent conditions. And it’s good. It’s all good, really. Given the alternative. Mostly I feel guilty about Crooked Timber, about not writing often enough and not figuring a way to be less essay-ish and highstrung about it. Also about giving so much of my time and thoughts away to billionaire trashfire content-farms. But a twenty-year anniversary is a moment to go, wow, this thing lasted, and what a bunch of people to have seen out those years alongside, both fellow writers and commenters. I’m perennially grateful to my fellow bloggers who keep CT going, especially Chris, whose Sunday photo is occasionally the only post all week. And I feel bad for not getting to know our new bloggers well. I hope time will fix that! But especially, I really, really, really miss our friends who don’t blog here any more. Reading their pieces made me feel part of a gorgeous collective, a joint endeavour. Also, they’re great humans with interesting things to say. But change is inevitable and we’re incredibly lucky to have found people who want to keep doing this thing going.

In a shocking turn of events I’m writing most of this on the actual day of CT’s anniversary, so it’ll be a loose set of musings and recollections. But I should get this out and front. Crooked Timber made me into a writer. First I was a reader, then a blogger, then a writer – all cumulative callings. And in all those identities, I’m a little sister. So, yes, I’m an adult woman with a reasonable set of autonomies and accomplishments. But I also feel like a person who got to make herself in a beautiful, generous and stimulating set of spaces and experiences my older brother made for me. (In fact, all six of us Farrell siblings are in a constant dance of making and remaking and for an absolute certainty constantly remarking on each other, but Henry was the one who started it all.) Henry made the fizziest, tastiest possible lemonade out of the boarding school he was sent to, away from our very small town in 1980s Ireland. (To know what it was like for good, but also for a lot of bad, Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These’ recreates the obligations and unfreedoms, and the smell, taste and feel of that life to utter perfection.) Henry found science fiction and brought it back to us, and later books by Borges, Calvino, and he explained to me the earth-shattering idea – TBH it still rocks my world today – that novels aren’t just the story they tell, but can be saying something else as well. And you can learn to read it. When I was a smallish toddler recovering from a nasty virus that carried away a chunk of my sight, Henry’s delight and mastery of the written word made me insist on learning to read when I could still barely make out letters. He opened up to me and my siblings, as children and teenagers, whole worlds that we wouldn’t have discovered for years, if ever. And we grew up in those worlds. So when, as adults, he got into blogging and decided to start one, he asked me, too, and opened up that world to me.

I’d recently moved to Paris, after a hardscrabble few years in London. Now I look at the years it all happened, I realise I was about 6 years into M.E. and beginning to be able to do just a bit more than barely survive, financially and in terms of energy. Henry was then in Washington, I think. Or maybe Cologne/Bonn on his post-doc? He’ll be along here in a minute to remind me of the name of our two-person blog, named after an old term for Irish travellers abroad. He wrote that blog for the most part, and I contributed the odd piece and became acquainted with several of the people who decides to join their blogs together into a super-blog, as we thought of it at the time. Back then, many US bloggers seemed to be doing it to get mainstream media gigs, but CT was just a place for academics (and me, Belle and Daniel!) to write about things they knew and cared about but without their discipline’s formality. I felt like the weakest link to begin with, and put impossible pressure on myself to come up to the mark. But Henry carried me through. The first book event I took part in was about Susannah Clarke’s ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell’. (I re-read it last year – it’s still WONDERFUL.) But I got myself in such a knot of nerves and performance anxiety about it that, long after the deadline, I lobbed one or two thousand words over the parapet at Henry, saying I couldn’t finish it or make it make sense. So he did.

KLAXON

Yes, my first proper essay on CT was actually edited and made into a coherent something by Henry. And he made it look so good! It’s the only time anyone ever did that for me (the editors I’ve worked with since, professionally, have been much more hands off) and, you might say, bad girl, letting someone else finish your homework. But reading what he managed to bring out of my tumble of ideas and strivings after connections gave me an encouraging boost and a deeply practical view of how you work from the shitty first draft to something decent, that says what you want to say better than you could express it if you were talking a mile a minute to a very obliging listener. He showed me how it could be done, and that it could be done. That really lit the torch-paper for me. It’s counter-intuitive in some ways – but seeing at a sentence and paragraph and thought level where I was and where I could get to, and by someone who knew what I was trying to say and who loves me, well, I don’t know what to say. That just did it for me. From then on I felt at home here, like I could contribute, even though I wasn’t an academic. So, as well as saying thank you to my fellow Timberteers – both writers and commenters – my most heartfelt and wondrous thank you on the twentieth anniversary of this beautiful, daft endeavour, is to you, Henry. You helped make yet another space for me to become someone I wouldn’t have found a way to on my own. I wish everyone could have an older brother like you. Ninety-nine out of a hundred older brothers brought up as you were with all the praise and expectation of being the family genius would have turned out slightly shitty and definitely autocratic, but you somehow took your delight at everything you learned – fossils! Science fiction, post-modern literature, history and political theory. Walter Benjamin! Benedict Anderson! – and set it all out for Remy and me like the loveliest picnic imaginable. Yum. Fizz.

Memory is so weird. I still think of John Q as a relatively recent addition, but actually he joined in the first year or so. The blog has a way of freeze-framing people. Going back through Eszter’s posts, I realised I still absolutely picture her as she looked in 2005. Amazing to think we’re all middle-aged now. As we still are somewhat in each other’s orbits from reading and being read by each other, it still feels like we can pick up a conversation when we – increasingly rarely – meet up in person. For a while we hoped to organise a proper get-together, but funding and logistics intervened. Anyway, it would have been far less fun without the commenters.

So many of our commenters are in heart and mind as I write. A few who were kind and committed in the early years, and who I’d always hoped to meet in person – I may even have harboured romantic feelings about one or two – have fallen away. But so many have been part of this blog for the two decades it’s been going. I’ll feel shitty for not remembering and mentioning everyone, because of course this is being written with too little time and preparation, but knowing that JanieM, Bianca, Meredith didn’t just have my back but shared so much, in every sense of the term, has meant more than I can say. Or rather, it’s meant I could say more things I otherwise may not have. We’ve all been doing this so long together that I feel like DougK, LFC, Neville Morley (a friend of both CT and of course Chris Bertram), Chris Brooke (an IRL friend now, thanks to Chris B) novakant, J-D, faustusnotes, bruce wilder, Metatone, Ronan, TM, bobmcmanus, oldster, Jim Henley, Emma in Sydney, Alan White, Bruce Baugh, Laura, Russell Arben Fox, Tim Worstall, jim, bad Jim, and people I’ve forgotten to mention (sorry!) are kind of sort of friends. We’ve had shitty commenters, too. I think I zapped it, but I’ll never forget one man who wrote from a Californian university to say I was a tax burden because I didn’t have kids, and shouldn’t really get to vote, either. But apart from deleting really unpleasant comments, and intervening firmly to stop derailers, I learnt early on that other CT commenters would do the needful. CT is a good teacher of how you don’t individually need to say everything that needs to be said.

One thing I feel guilty about is that when I write something personal I can participate in comments for the first few hours, but then disappear from the thread. For me, writing about painful stuff is probably the opposite of cathartic. (And that makes sense, because I think technically catharsis is experience by those who read the piece, see the play/film etc. not the people who make it.) It makes me feel wrung out and skinless, and exhausted of both energy and substance. I’ve never found a better way to think and feel about the experience of writing this stuff. I think it just is what it is. You don’t feel good about writing it, but wouldn’t feel any better by not doing it, when the urge strikes. And those pieces do come pretty much ready-written, taking at most a couple of hours to spill out. And commenters are almost uniformly kind and generous. (To the point where I also have a thing where I feel, damn, they said it was beautiful again. I both tried to make it that way but also feel bad that they have to say that, and what is writing that is beautiful, anyway? Surely it’s something that happens in the person who reads the thing, not the one who writes it? And do people always feel they have to say that, i.e. am I making them feel they have to reassure me? Hell’s bells the whole thing is just emotional spaghetti with no olive oil anywhere.)

Since Covid, I started writing more about chronic illness. That felt weird! And very naked-making. BUT. I know from comments and messages it helped quite a few people. Because God knows illness is isolating, and I’m grateful beyond expressing that being able to articulate some aspects of it made some readers feel less alone. Which, I suppose, is much of what writing tries to do. AND! I know from a few friends of friends that some people were able to take the exhortations in my stuff about post-viral illness and the importance of resting and put them to work. We’ll never know, but perhaps some words on this blog helped a few people to walk around the trapdoor so many of us fell through.

Reading back through some of my own and many of my co-bloggers’ pieces has felt like a mini-biography. Eszter’s posts from the early 2000s are a reminder of how open but also how worrying internet technologies then were. Ingrid’s made me realise – stupidly belatedly – how a whole life’s project unfolds over years. And her posts of her own poem and her son Aaron’s striking and gorgeous flower art are lodged somewhere deep and precious. I miss Kieran’s humour, and Daniel’s. It’s also been illuminating over the past few days to see what readers we contacted via other platforms picked out as their favourites. I’d forgotten so many!

CT made me a writer, gave me an ongoing concern with my beloved big brother, and has been the source of many important and I hope lifelong friendships. Soon after the Red Plenty seminar, I noticed Francis Spufford would be at the Edinburgh festival, so I nervously emailed saying I’d come and say hello after his talk. That tea and cake turned into a friendship and – at last – a PhD at Goldsmiths. I’ve only ever met two people who ‘recognised’ me in the wild. One was Andrew Brown, who writes brilliantly about many topics including religion, and tapped on my shoulder when I’d asked a typically pungent question at a tech event in Cambridge and asked; ‘Are you the Maria Farrell from Crooked Timber?’ The second was, delightfully, my accountant.

I’ve been writing on here as I lived in four different countries and six different cities. My pieces have marked experiences from finding love to losing old friends, fertility treatment, military deployment and Milo’s revolting habits. (He’s still alive and well! One knee replacement behind him, and I’m hoping he outlives the need for another.) A whole cluster are about being in the UK pre and post-Brexit, during ever-worsening Tory misrule. I’m glad I finally got around to writing that shaggy dog story about debating Ted Cruz. I think my favourite piece of mine was also a reminiscence. Freedom of the City was about walking in Jerusalem at night, and the risks women aren’t supposed to take. I hadn’t realised till just yesterday that it’s a memory of the relatively short period of adulthood when I was well. Commenters rightly identified what I’d not noticed as I wrote, the utopian quality of walking fearlessly. Being well was another kind of freedom, too. Sorry, this is all very solipsistic (hello! It’s a blog!), but as I write this, I realise I always thought in the back of my mind that some day I’d be well again, that there’d be a happy ever after. And of course there isn’t, and of course the illness is not as bad as it was, not nearly as bad as many people’s, and I can hide it so very much of the time. But it’s funny to bring that unconscious, magical thinking out into the open. I always thought there would be an ending. But, like so much else, including twenty-year old blogs, just going on and on, changed but essentially the same, is a win all of its own.

p.s. I forgot the time I wrote about Russia’s invasion of Georgia and CT briefly went viral on Russian state television, roundly condemned as the imperialist running dogs we clearly are. Good times!

pps I just want to squeeze this in as I’ve included or shared with Chris only a couple of my favourite other posts. This one by Aaron Swartz, whose memory is ever a jolt and a blessing, on leftist politics:
Toward a Larger Left by Aaron Swartz, August 4, 2009