Life of a Writter...

Kinds Of Writters

The foundations are common to most authors and readers: the writer is usually a well-educated person from a modest background who knows renowned and affluent people; the writer is an aloof visitor at their events. The writer has a sporadic schedule, requires a lot of alone to work, has a chaotic personal life, and isn't really good at anything except writing wonderful language. Even if money is short, the writer always lives alone; the landlord is constantly enraged, but the writer is never fully expelled. The author spends a lot of time in cafes with massive, peeling mirrors behind the bar, and even more time in lofts and attic flats with casement windows and creaky staircases.

The writer's flat in this vision is sparse and unadorned; the walls are unpainted plaster or peeling wallpaper, the heat is broken or absent, and books are heaped on the floor. Because it's Paris attempting to recover from the hardship and damage of a global war, or New York soldiering on through the Depression, living in the ruins of 1920s splendor, it appears this way. Because the cafés are warm and the flat is not, the writer spends hours in cafes working and drinking. This fantasy's aesthetic is eternally locked in the cities (and occasionally beach resorts near cities) of Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

The fantasy writer lifestyle is set in such a specific time and location because American authors who fled to Europe for cheaper rents during the interwar and postwar periods had a significant impact on the American conception of writing. Who else besides Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Baldwin cast a larger shadow throughout American literature and education?

Despite the fact that I had never purchased anything from Anthropologie, I received their catalogues for years. I obtained catalogues on their website and re-registered each time I relocated. The catalogues are lovely, and they gave me the somewhat skewed sensation you get as a consumer when you come across marketing that knows your wants and needs better than you'd want to admit. The supposition annoys you, but the material forces you to comply.

The Anthropologie catalog's heroines fly across a permanently shattered image of Europe, lounging in rotting colonial hotels in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. The conflict has always ended abruptly. In the background, stretched canvases loom. The settings are majestic yet run-down, implying that you, the average person, get access to them due to a quirk of history. The Anthropologie girls point to a destroyed terrace overlooking the Adriatic Sea and exclaim, "This ancient place?" "You may remain here for a song since it's going apart."

After World War I, Americans in Europe were confronted with this reality. It's easy to forget that Hemingway and his companions travelled to Paris because it was less expensive than staying at home, and that it was less expensive because the continent had just been devastated by a devastating war. Because these authors wrote so much about each other in fiction and letters, they unintentionally solidified a certain moment and place in the American imagination as the core of what it is to be creative. It wasn't only a location; it was also a specific economic system.

This element of imagination may also be seen in the Anthropologie collections. I dare you to go through these catalogues and connect the visuals with the idea of having a job in the traditional sense. You could now raise an objection. "What exactly do you mean?" Do you think they'll show individuals wearing the outfits while commuting? Cleaning the coffee machine in the breakroom? "Are you using a headset?" Of course, I don't. Consider the similarly impressive J.Crew catalogue as a point of reference. J.Crew also features attractive young ladies wearing their products, sometimes in stunning locations, but there are fewer location shoots and more photographs of models on white backgrounds, which the customer can easily transfer into her own daily life.