Catalogs

 
One of my fondest childhood memories is of having lunch at the breakfast table in the kitchen, thumbing through a catalog. I’m a pig mess when I eat, then and now, so you can always tell what I’ve read by the dried pasta noodles affixed to its pages. My mom got the Land’s End catalog—which, horror of horrors, I DO NOW TOO. That industrial control top long torso bathing suit they sell does the work, ok. I’d marvel at the names of the colors—never beige, but sand. Never purple, but raspberry. In high school, the Victoria’s Secret catalog started appearing in the mailbox and I coveted the body sprays as much as the visible hip bones on the quote unquote angels. The late nineties were rough on developing pelvises.
 
I promise this is not a reverie into nostalgia. Nostalgia, I think, is inherently mean because it excludes. Nostalgia is a Boomer guy who wants you to know he saw the Clash in 1982. Before you were born? Well, sucks to be you. Catalogs then were what the lunchtime scroll is now: something to engage your mind and eyeballs at the least challenging level, something that feels a bit escapist, an optimizing of self, wardrobe, and body available at your fingertips. Not as demanding as reading a real magazine, more dignified than zoning out in front of the TV, catalogs were as comforting as the grilled cheese (which, I shit you not, till college I thought were called “girl” cheese because my mom always made them for us and we were all girls) in my hand.  I could feel the cottony embrace of the charcoal pashmina of Land’s End, the sunshine on my imaginary midriff in a JNCO crop top from Alloy.
 
Flipping through a catalog wasn’t necessarily about looking for things you’d actually buy, but choosing what you would buy, were you the winner of some kind of sweepstakes and forced to decide. It was an exercise in developing taste. The SkyMall catalog was the alpha and omega. The game was to choose a thing from each page. Never the fake rock to hide your spare keys, always the world map shower curtain. Never the “self-massager,” always the heated towel rack. Perhaps the SkyMall catalog is the symbol of pre-9/11 decadence, a galleria in the sky full of shit nobody needed, to be perused in between a proper meal, included in the price of your airline ticket. I always thought about the person who could pick up the satellite phone from the seatback right then and there and place an order for the Rosetta Stone CD-ROMs to learn Portuguese.
 
Now we get fed things we don’t need via algorithm. Sometimes I think mine can actually read my mind, not just listen in on my conversations and see my Google searches. Lately I’m being served ads for stainless steel children’s plates (but apparently they don’t know me all that well because I would never buy something I can’t microwave); NuFace (I’m going to succumb eventually, would love any intel from other succumbers); shapewear; comfortable bras.
 
The best thing about catalogs, though, is that the things inside are not bespoke. Having moved and purchased furniture for a house in recent history, my mailbox is barraged by endless catalogs. I often leaf through them when I’m with the baby but can’t fully commit to feigning amazement at putting a Lego inside a box. And flipping pages is modeling reading??? And also- let him see my face scrunch in disgust. Never did I feel this horror more than confronting Crate & Barrel’s Holiday catalog. A CHRISTMAS in NEUTRALS?!?!?!? A moral offense. These understated taupe Christmas trees embody Marshall McLuhan’s maxim, “Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative.”
 
For this philistine, catalogs were crucial to developing my preferences. And you can only do that by seeing things you don’t like. I tell my students that the reading that they confront in my class that they don’t like is as important as what they do. And do try to figure out why.
 
Might I also draw your attention to:
 
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas: I realized I needed to return this to the library about two days before it was due and finished with 24 hours to spare. A perfect novel.

This is Going to Hurt: Worth the free seven-day Sundance trial subscription!!!
 
Going on a Group Trip with Brilliant Strangers: I recently celebrated a friend’s bachelorette party in Palm Springs and wow, not a dud in that group. Which may mean I was the dud???
 
The orange cardamom latte from Nerd
 
Go see my Pilates teacher’s dance against capitalism
 
Go see Melissa Coss Aquino, or at the very least order her brilliant book Carmen and Grace which comes out next week, truly one of the best novels I’ve read in ages