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A review by jonscott9
It Chooses You by Miranda July
3.0
Intriguing premise. Novel interviews. Constantly enjoyed it.
"I doggedly asked each PennySaver seller if they used a computer. They mostly didn't, and though they had a lot to say about other things, they didn't have much to say about this, this absence. I began to feel that I was asking the question just to remind myself that I was in a place where computers didn't really matter, just to prompt my appreciation for this. As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
"I don't mean that I really thought this, out loud; it was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immeasurable, how would I notice? It's not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse — but there was only one world and it really did have every single thing in it. Domingo's blog was one of the best I've ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally.
"Scientifically, my interviews were pretty feeble, as questionable as 'The Missing Movie Report,' but one day soon there would be no more computerless people in Los Angeles and this exercise wouldn't be possible. Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered."
"I doggedly asked each PennySaver seller if they used a computer. They mostly didn't, and though they had a lot to say about other things, they didn't have much to say about this, this absence. I began to feel that I was asking the question just to remind myself that I was in a place where computers didn't really matter, just to prompt my appreciation for this. As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
"I don't mean that I really thought this, out loud; it was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immeasurable, how would I notice? It's not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse — but there was only one world and it really did have every single thing in it. Domingo's blog was one of the best I've ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally.
"Scientifically, my interviews were pretty feeble, as questionable as 'The Missing Movie Report,' but one day soon there would be no more computerless people in Los Angeles and this exercise wouldn't be possible. Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered."