Notebook

Yesterday C. surprised me with a birthday trip into the mountains, and I spent most of the flight gazing out the window, wondering how I could have ever taken this view for granted: the tiny winter trees and miniature snow-covered houses, the rivers of headlights and taillights. The mountains out there in the dark. A car drifts down a highway like a ghost, and there’s a perfect pool of light from a lone sodium lamp in a parking lot. I find so much peace in the electrified grids of cities. From this altitude, our civilization looks so safe and orderly, even sane.

Nine years sober today. There were times I couldn’t even dream of nine days. Or hours. Proof there’s such a thing as grace. If you’re struggling, please reach out to someone. (I’m here.)

Grey skies and light flurries with dangerously cold temperatures on the way. The sun sets at 5:45pm, and there’s a waning crescent moon.

I need a word for the slightly hungover sensation after a bout of clicking and scrolling. A word for shaking off the digital residue. Maybe it’s like sand: a fine grit that gets into everything: our eyes and ears, our teeth and nerves.

Meanwhile at the library, a middle-aged man is jabbering into his computer. It’s a bold move, having a full-blown conference call in the midst of students studying, readers reading, and writers brooding. He’s draped across his chair, dressed like a toddler in sweatpants and sneakers—just another person treating public life like their living room. He’s been braying about his spreadsheets for twenty minutes now. Nobody says anything. I don’t either. The last time I fancied myself the lone defender of civilization, I nearly got into a fistfight and caused more noise than I’d hoped to silence.

So I crank up my headphones and return to rewriting my novel, where a priest stands in a parking lot watching a superstore burn, and there’s madness on his face because God has just moved through the world, rearranging the lives of everyone in earshot. Except for him. God has spoken, yet he heard only silence. I’m curious to see what he will do next.

Writing about the loss of faith is so, so much easier than finding it.

Last night I watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a film I hadn’t seen since my days in college. I remember it filling me with a particular and nameless kind of dread, and this mood has been on my mind lately: the overlapping of global calamity with the tragedies of our private lives. Released in 1959, Alain Resnais’s film is ground zero for French New Wave and perhaps the wellspring for most arthouse tropes. The camera lingers in dark rooms. Lovers speak in monologue and monotone. They thrash and sulk in shadows. They repeat themselves while gazing into the middle distance of the emotionally detached.

Much of the film is about recreating and relitigating the recent past. A French actress comes to Hiroshima to play a nurse in a movie about the atrocity of August 6, 1945—which occurred only fourteen years before. (Try to imagine, say, a film called 9/11, My Love released in 2015.) Her lover is a Japanese architect, and they discuss their private lives while surrounded by actors caked in makeup that resembles the burns from a nuclear blast. Tea rooms and cocktail lounges evoke bygone eras and far-flung locales, culminating in a tropical speakeasy called “Casablanca”. Along the way, the lovers move across tatami mats and stern Modernist lobbies, history collapsing as their desire to rekindle the first blush of youthful romance melds with the fallout from the bomb.

The French actress tries to attach herself to apocalyptic destruction, hoping to stave off indifference towards a new atomic age by narrating its horrors over a montage of destroyed bodies and post-blast footage. “You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” her Japanese lover repeatedly reminds her.  

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a profoundly fucked-up film that may not withstand the lights of 2022. But I can’t think of many movies that go after such big game by conflating the historical with the personal, the horrific with the romantic. It plumbs emotions unique to cinema, the ones beyond language or conscious thought—such as the dark urge to give our lives meaning by attaching ourselves to tragedy and violence, hoping to make an impression when we tell people we could have been the next victim, that we were just a few blocks away from the shooting or the blast site.

Ohio. A snowy Sunday afternoon with temperatures dropping into the teens and an inch or two of accumulation. The sun sets at 5:40pm and the moon is in its final quarter.

With each passing year, the tension becomes more pronounced between the new and the unfinished. More and more, I feel the weight of decision: create new work and pursue fresh ideas—or devote my time, which dwindles by the minute, to refining, completing, and sometimes relitigating my half-finished projects from the past. All those drafts and fragments, the notebooks filled with half-legible scribbles and pages scrawled when waking from a dream—I could spend the rest of my life tending to them.

Perhaps there comes a time to draw a bright line, stuff the past in the trash, and trust these old ideas will live on in whatever comes next. It’d be nice to feel a little lighter, to live free from the muck of stalled manuscripts and half-laid plans. But I’ve learned by now that the clean slate is a fantasy, and the tabula rasa is the domain of zealots.

Meanwhile, the snow outside my window is melting as soon as it piles up, and there might be a lesson here.

Blank skies, single-digit temperatures, and the sun goes down at 5:38pm. Spent the afternoon at the Department of Motor Vehicles, trying to figure out how to legalize a car. It takes a lot of paperwork to be a person. While explaining myself to the grumpy clerk behind the glass, I realized I have no idea where I legally live. Ohio for a few more weeks. Maybe Nevada in a few months. Perhaps we’ll wind up back in New York. But I need to make a decision so I can be taxed appropriately: another small reminder of the fiction of states, the collective hallucination of nations and borders.

Here in the Middle West, I’m filling the quiet with books and music, absorbed by text and sound in ways I haven’t felt in years. I’m midway through many books at once, which is unusual for me. I tend to doggedly read one book at a time, grinding it out until the last page even if I’m not enjoying it. I like to believe I have faith in an author’s vision and should see it through—but really, I just don’t want to admit I’ve made a poor selection. 

Right now, I’m midway through a few books, and I’m enjoying all the ways to tell a story while I continue to work on my own. After discarding a few buzzy new novels that were rants and op-eds masquerading as fiction, I’m settling into Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, a dreamlike series of vignettes about calamity and grief. And I’m looking forward to getting deeper into Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy, a patchwork of desert weirdness, scattered histories, and technological speculations. 

At night, I fall asleep with Bring Up the Bodies. Although I’m not terribly interested in the Tudors, Hilary Mantel’s prose is so lyrical, dense, and wise that it feels like learning to read—and write—again. I drift off with Tomonari Nozaki’s Waves looping on the hi-fi: 54 minutes of ambience that pulses and breathes.

This month I’m playing Dedekind Cut‘s entire discography for days at a stretch: a suite of releases that fuses the quiet with the dreadful, occasionally erupting without warning into growling synths and manic percussion. (I recommend starting with Tahoe and American Zen.)

Ohio. Clear skies with highs in the mid-thirties, sunset at 5:34pm, and it finally snowed last night. Not a lot of snow, but enough to soften the world a little. Enough to remember childhood winters and even recall a sense of wonder at all this strange material falling from the sky.

After admiring the snow, I navigated the rat’s nest of modern living. Caught in a reverse Voight-Kampff test, I spent nine minutes quarreling with a telephone robot who refused to deliver me to a human until I successfully answered its increasingly existential questions: Is there a disruption in your area? Are you experiencing technical difficulties? Is your connection intermittent?

As I waited to be connected, I caught a glimpse of a cold future, a binary world in which all of our services and transactions are brokered by robots—1 for yes, 2 for no—leaving no room for the grey zone of being human.

Anthony Rother – Destroy Him My Robots

Redlight District | Elektrolux, 1998 | Bandcamp

A grey Sunday with the possibility of snow. They’re calling it a Saskatchewan Screamer, this weather system moving northeast across the Tennessee Valley. In the meantime, I’m trying to sort myself out. Will I ever untangle the stories scattered across my notebooks? What am I doing with my time on planet Earth? What do I stand for? But I’m not going to figure myself out today. It’s a lifelong process, I know, and I can’t imagine many of us walk around feeling certain about ourselves and the choices we’ve made. At least not without being an absolute jackass.

Looks like C. and I are going to London next month for a residency, coronavirus be damned. But first we must contend with the paranoia of nation-states and institutional logistics. Yesterday we got fingerprinted for an FBI background check, and I was surprised by my anxiety as we awaited the results. Maybe they’ve figured me out; I certainly haven’t.

I braced for surveillance footage of myself doing something awful, maybe a print-out of my search history or photographs of my strangest dreams. But I’m clean. A search of the fingerprints provided by this individual has revealed no prior arrest date, said the report. This does not preclude further criminal history at the state or local level. I admire how they’ve hedged their bets in case I’m causing local problems.

So these are days of waiting. Today I’m waiting for the snow to arrive on this Sunday afternoon in the long middle stretch of January. The year is no longer shiny yet it has not fully started, its rhythms only faintly heard. There’s a thrum in the atmosphere just before the weather changes, maybe something to do with barometric pressure that I’ve never understood. The forecast has been downgraded from six inches of snow to only two, and there should be a word for this: the specific flavor of disappointment when the weather fails to perform as advertised.

I went for a short ugly run to get out of my Sunday funk, and I stopped to admire a streak of white against the grey clouds: the contrails of an airplane—jet screams, I called them when I was small—and it neatly divided the sky in two. For a moment, I wanted to assign it cosmic significance.

Dean Hurley – Edge of the Known

Anthology Resource Vol. II: Philosophy of Beyond | Sacred Bones, 2019 | Bandcamp

Cloudy skies, still no snow, and a high of 43 degrees. 

There’s an old Roman maxim that fear gave birth to the gods. The historian Will Durant elaborates: “It was fear that made the gods—fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer.”

How else could our ancestors explain thunder? But our fear of nature might be more frightening today because we know what’s causing all this drought, fire, flood, and plague—it is us. Meanwhile, the old gods have grown feeble. Our sites of worship were not equipped for today’s heat and speed. The church and the temple, the faith in free markets and human reason: it all feels a bit creaky. What new gods will today’s fears create?

Dedekind Cut – Fear in Reverse

$uccessor | Hospital, 2016 | Bandcamp

Clear skies without any snow, temps in the low forties, and the sun went down at 5:28pm. There’s a waxing gibbous moon and omicron everywhere.

Ronnie Spector died today. Sometimes I find myself listening for answers beneath the crashing waves of an old Ronettes single: big heartbeat drums and an even bigger voice, so reverberated and haunted, carrying the fever-dream of American history. Ronnie and her seminal beehive, singing “Keep on Dancing” back in ’64, a song so perfect that Phil Spector refused to release it for years. Several years ago, I’d jotted down a quote from her that reads like a religious vision: “Everything was quiet, then all of a sudden I heard a low rumble, like there was thunder coming from every corner of the room.”

Another frigid and atmospherically pointless day without any snow. The sun goes down at 5:27pm.

My brand new cassette tape arrived. It cost me seventeen dollars, but it was worth the money just to hold it. I haven’t held a cassette in years, and I found myself unwrapping it slowly, ritualistically, like a pack of cigarettes. As I peeled back the shrink-wrap, the effect was anticipatory, almost like returning to smoking: the familiar weight in the palm, the hum of possibility, of returning to better days.

It’s just a piece of plastic with a spool of magnetic tape, but it contains entire worlds. I remember solitary high school nights spent crouched over a Panasonic boombox in a metro Detroit apartment near Interstate 75, traffic hissing through the walls while my finger waited to release the pause button the moment the Electrifying Mojo played Kraftwerk or Cybotron again. You had to release that button just right for a clean segue between songs without any ugly clicks.

The reassuring kerchunk of buttons. The hum of machinery you could see. Punching out the plastic tabs on the top of the cassette if the recording was good. Or plugging them with paper if the tape was needed again. This was the tactile world of limitations, the parameters of a physical thing rather than a never-ending stream. Was my creative life any better then? Or is this just the nostalgia of a man settling into middle age?

I’m recording my little loops to cassettes because I crave the constraints of linear time. Maybe I simply want to return to a known way of being. There’s a fork in the road when it comes to reckoning with the 21st century: walk away from our increasingly humiliating and disorienting technologies, or make a cognitive leap and embrace the mess. But this is nothing new. In 1895, William Morris said, “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” Then came the Futurists and Constructivists and the rest of the Modernists. So much for that.

Cybotron – Clear

Enter | Fantasy, 1983 | More

Wind chills in the single digits and still no snow. The sun sets at 5:27pm tonight.

It took some time to humble myself and write yet another draft of this novel I’ve been working on for years. But at last, I’m settling into a steady writing groove for the first time in months. I write in the library for an hour or two each morning, which is terrible because I’m a night owl in my bones. But I’ve learned the hard way that I need to write fiction before I let the world into my head and start doing things for money. As much I dislike these early hours, I’m beginning to savor the routine: Brewing a thermos of coffee while last night’s dreams evaporate. Warming up the car in the January cold. Taking a seat in the far corner of the Quiet Room. 

I do my best to write longhand for an hour before looking at a screen. But how do you measure progress? It’s easy to applaud myself for spending an hour or two each day on my draft, but when does this end? I need to get back to counting words. Tonight I made a spreadsheet with a reasonable daily target of 500 words. I’m a slow writer, but I should be able to hit this no matter if I’m in Ohio, London, the desert, or some state of emergency. It also outlines the task for the day, and there’s a spot for me to note how many words I actually wrote to make sure I’m not kidding myself. (Maybe my reliance upon counting words is hardwired; I used to count how many words I spoke each day because I was so shy.)

I can keep rewriting the same story forever. If I’m not paying attention, I can push commas around for hours or lose a whole day deliberating between that and which. Years ago, I came across an excellent Finnish word for someone fixated on the unimportant details: pilkunnussija, which means “comma fucker”. Yes, that’s me.