Notebook

A sunny Monday in the Middle West with unremarkable temperatures, and it’s one of those days when it feels like the world’s got its hands in my pockets. Spent an hour on the phone haggling with health insurance, then car insurance, and I lost both arguments. It takes so much work to be a person.

Meanwhile in strike land, where The New School spends only 14% of its budget on the part-time professors who make up 87% of its faculty, the university’s lawyer is trying to bust our union by forcing a vote on a contract that pits those with health insurance against those without. Amazon, Walmart, and Starbucks use these hardball tactics. Not higher education. This could set a chilling precedent.

This afternoon I ran beneath an overpass with faded graffiti that read like a vanished wish: planet over profit. But some happy news: I’m enjoying Mastodon. I found Michael Donaldson over there, and he turned me on to a nice sludgy Joy Division cover, which is the whole point of social media. 

Tonight I’m making motions toward packing for our road trip. So far, I have two items on my shopping list: ice scraper and nicotine gum.

A brittle Sunday with temperatures in the 20s. The part-time faculty strike against The New School continues, and the administration has hired a union-busting law firm. This afternoon I phone banked and attended online bargaining meetings, and all I can say is our union leaders are doing the Lord’s work.

Last night I managed to find my way onto Mastodon. I didn’t think I had the appetite for another social media channel, but when my friend O. mentioned it had the same spirit as the early 00s information superhighway, I decided to log on. It was heartening to find some familiar avatars in a space blessedly free of advertisements, promotional horseshit, and the other grift mechanics to which we’ve become accustomed. Mastodon feels oddly wholesome, perhaps even too wholesome, as if a non-commodified space like this shouldn’t even exist nowadays. It’s like some mythical creature from the past has wandered into the middle of a twelve-land expressway. I’m not sure what I’ll do over there, but here I am.

This week’s edition of Sam Valenti IV’s Herb Sundays series features Veronica Vasicka, a diligent archivist of jet-black 1970s and 1980s synthetics and the founder of one of my favorite imprints, Minimal Wave. If you’re not familiar, start with the Minimal Wave Tapes, then dig into the Lost, Found, Hidden, and Bedroom tapes.

The soundtrack has been sorted for our 2000-mile drive in three days. Now C. and I can focus on packing.

Went for an ugly run in a ten-degree wind chill. I cursed loudly, frightened passersby, and my skin was angry and red beneath my wooly sweater. Ten degrees might be my threshold unless I invest in a special outfit.

Meanwhile, a childlike billionaire is grinding Twitter into the dirt. Whether this is intentional remains unclear, but I think he’s on the right track. Grind it to dust and salt the earth. I loved Twitter back when it didn’t matter, circa 2008-2015. Its pointlessness was the point: an ambient network of people eating breakfast, talking junk, and finding delight in the mundane. Then some nitwit slapped a scoreboard on it and transformed us into cult leaders with followers (rather than readers) who chased the virtual currency of hearts. We convinced ourselves our tweets were important, newsworthy, career-making, or, god forbid, agents for social change, and it made us crazy. Myself included. I tapped out six months ago when I finally admitted I was writing and thinking in a way I did not enjoy.

An advertising platform that teems with voices stripped of complexity will never improve the fabric of public life. But as they say in recovery, the persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Addiction feels like the right metaphor: on a social level, we know the outrage mechanics of social media aren’t good for us, and yet . . . so here’s some wishful thinking: I hope the childlike billionaire shuts the whole thing down and announces this was his plan all along. He would save face, and history will judge him kindly as the man who removed the poison from the well.

Went to the cinema and saw The Menu, another entry in the eat-the-rich genre (Triangle of Sadness, Parasite, Ready or Not, Knives Out, The Hunt, etc) that works as an exercise in capitalist-angst-ventilation rather than imagining an alternative. The first half was a near-perfect escalation that flirts with the surreal; the last act needed a point of view. But it was worth the price of a matinee ticket for the taco night scene, and I’m a sucker for people behaving poorly in glossy architecture on a remote island, e.g., Ex Machina.

Tonight C. reminded me today would have been my mom’s birthday, thanks to an automated reminder in her calendar that she never deleted. Strange, these new digital ghosts.

I’m no longer hyper-attuned to the dates of my parents’ births and deaths. Part of me feels negligent; the other part thinks this is progress: I can carry them with me without fixating on beginnings and endings. My mom would have turned seventy today. And now that I remember, I’m unsure how to observe the date except to say a prayer and be grateful she was my mom.

My bedtime programming hums with the static of insomnia. All the President’s Men. William Gibson. The history of medieval Europe. Cassette tapes of a Buddhist nun. But I’m learning to enjoy the extra time to brood. Acceptance is the answer.

This afternoon I finished migrating this internet station—and eight other websites—from the world’s worst hosting company to a new home. It feels zippier here. Untangling my nameservers, redirects, feeds, forwarders, and security certificates felt much like the jittery fever logic of insomnia: the knotty plumbing below the surface, the systems that work only when they go unnoticed.

Five days until C. and I drive into the desert. Illinois and Indiana look like fangs. I should go to bed.

Ohio. An uninspired grey November day. Cold weather without snow feels like an insult, a lost opportunity. Dragged myself through a five-mile run and ninety minutes of novel editing. The most important thing I’ve learned over the years is to show up, especially when I don’t feel like it. Repetition is key. Repetition is where things get interesting. A shift in the light on the running trail. An unexpected connection on page 172. This journal is part of that repetition too.

There’s liberation in giving myself over to routine. I used to burn up so much energy worrying about when, where, what, and for how long. Add this quote from André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto to the mix, and the daily grind becomes downright exciting: “Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.”

Ester Brinkmann – Maschine

Totes Rennen | Supposé | Bandcamp

Ohio. Grey skies, temperatures just below freezing, and a few glorious minutes of snow while I ran around the pond. This week’s running soundtrack is Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box, a record that sounds like prophecy forty-something years later.

Today I noticed two of my favorite blogs come from Prince Edward Island. Over the past few years, Peter Rukavina and Clark MacLeod have become welcome presences in my feed that epitomize a relaxed, more personal internet of yore—and hopefully the future. I have no idea if one referred me to the other or if they even know one another. I also realized I had no idea where Prince Edward Island was, so I looked it up this afternoon. It looks beautiful on the map: a squiggle tucked in the bottom of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, its arms cocked northeast toward the coast of Newfoundland and the frozen cadence beyond: Labrador Trough. Baffin Bay. Cumberland Sound. 

I’ll bet the winters are first-rate on Prince Edward Island. I love the cold and the dark; I fantasize about living near a frozen sea someday, which leaves me wondering why I’m hellbent on living in the Mojave desert, where it’s very bright and two hundred degrees. In the meantime, it’s nice to have a new place on the map to romanticize, and I hope Peter and Clark will share lots of pictures of snow. 

The Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Some joker named a cold body of water after a man who was roasted alive. There’s some low-key synchronicity here because I’ve been thinking about the Catholic saints lately, particularly the strange relationship between aesthetics and suffering, e.g., Titian’s painting of Saint Lawrence’s last moments. The paintings of Saint Sebastian riddled with arrows have always made an impression on me, but it wasn’t until today that I learned he survived these wounds. A widow named Irene nursed him back to health. Two years later, he heckled the emperor Diocletian, who clubbed him to death and tossed his body into a sewer. 

A Catholic pun: the Dominican order of priests took the name of Saint Dominic, whose mother had dreamt that a dog leaped from her womb with a torch between its teeth and set fire to the earth. The Dominicans ruthlessly pursued heretics and became known as “the hounds of the Lord”: domini canis.

I’m slowly working through The Peripheral, with its dense sci-fi visions of keratotic skin, floating cities, and ceramic androids. But William Gibson has nothing on the Catholics.

A properly gloomy autumn day with cold rain and a heavy sky that looked like it might crash. I often imagine my writing sessions should be quiet and humble, like those stern Dutch paintings of solitary women making lace in solemn bands of light. Maybe someday. But not today.

While working in the library this afternoon, Richie Hawtin and Pete Namlook’s “A Million Miles to Earth” surfaced in my headphones. I’d forgotten how perfectly this song captures a flavor of 1990s techno-optimism that now sounds nostalgic. But my audio file was missing the cover art. When my search led me to Wolf’s Kompaktkiste, I made a loud happy noise that turned the heads of my fellow library patrons. Since 1994, this website has been a staple for double-checking track titles and release dates, and its continued existence nearly three decades later feels like a cause for celebration.

A few minutes later, I opened the New York Times because of some dumb muscle memory. An explosion in Poland. A deadbeat clown running for president again. Next to these stories, a headline asked, “What Does Your Favorite Restaurant Reservation App Say About You?” I should start a new habit: keep a book next to my laptop and, whenever I feel the urge to check the news, read some fiction or philosophy instead. There would be less screaming.

More breaking news: the union for part-time faculty at The New School declared a strike tonight. I’m furious a university that incessantly advertises its “commitment to equity, inclusion, and social justice” allowed things to reach the point where I must stop teaching my students. The New School has sadly become an excellent case study of how progressive jargon tends to mask more sinister motives. The top twenty-odd deans and vice presidents made nearly $2 million more in 2020 than all 1700 part-time faculty make in a semester. (Here’s a publicly available tax form.) We haven’t had a new contract since 2016, and our pay has been frozen since the pandemic due to “uncertain times.” Hopefully, the brass will recognize you need to practice what you preach.

Maybe one day we’ll reach a point when all possible frequencies have been recorded, every combination of words written. Sometimes I wonder if it has already arrived. A frumpy man in the elevator told me he needs to do some housecleaning. “My closets look alcoholic,” he said.

I still have vivid dreams that my mother is alive; I find her sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house by the sea, living under an assumed name. The house is always made of freshly chopped wood.

Voltaire believed “true prayer lies not in asking for a violation of natural law but in the acceptance of natural law,” and Kant insisted “morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.” And last night, a skittish young man with fantastic hair said, “God’s probably just some creep looking over us like a petri dish or some shit.”

Turned on the television so I could ignore it.

A cloudy Sunday with temps near freezing. Today I’ve been thinking about systems, some creaky and rotted, others still holding.

The Democrats held the Senate last night. Five days after the midterm election, our votes continue to creep through America’s rickety democratic plumbing, inching along narrow margins. But it’s heartening to know most Americans are still relatively sane and have no stomach for lunatics. And once again, we’ve learned that pollsters and pundits are useless. Imagine the blessed silence of a newspaper without opinion-mongers or a newscast without smug panelists.

Meanwhile, the company that has hosted this website for nearly twenty years has become a hostile wasteland after some faceless behemoth purchased it. The only way to reach them nowadays is through a well-hidden phone number, and I listened to a broken loop of sleazy jazz while a robot periodically told me she could not wait to exceed my expectations. After an hour, I hung up. Tonight I’m switching to a new hosting company. Hopefully there won’t be too many outages on this station while I untangle my nameservers.

Combing through eighteen years of digital cruft has led me down an unexpectedly emotional walk down memory lane. Twenty thousand photographs of various and mostly useless sizes. Dozens of abandoned projects. A cache of mp3s. Fourteen domain names purchased during brief fits of enthusiasm. It’s a stark autobiography.

I might go on strike tomorrow. The contract for part-time faculty at The New School expires at midnight. Our class sizes have grown since the pandemic, yet our wages remain frozen. Even though we make up 87% of the faculty, the university continues to nickel-and-dime its teachers when they’re not sending out self-congratulatory emails about their commitment to social and economic justice.

Ten days until C. and I head into the desert.

Yesterday it was in the seventies, and today the first snowflakes fell. Halfway through an ugly run, I paused beneath a highway overpass to enjoy the wonder of white material swirling in the air. Snow makes me sentimental. All the leaves are on the ground now, and the bare trees reveal new scenery, exposing windows across the street and offering new vistas when turning a familiar corner.

The story I’m writing includes a fallen priest who transforms old sitcom footage into a frightening new gospel, and I’ve been looking for a historical model to help me better understand how devotion can lead to murder. For weeks I’ve been grinding through histories of medieval Europe in search of a point of inspiration, even though I did not know what I hoped to find. The apocalyptic asceticism of Girolamo Savonarola has always captivated me, but he’s a familiar archetype, e.g., the High Sparrow in Game of Thrones. This morning I found my model in Pope Innocent III, who rewired the Gospel of Matthew to sanctify the killing of tens of thousands of fellow Christians, believing separating the wheat from the chaff would speed up the return of Christ. I hope the thing I’m writing is more fun than this. At any rate, I’m eager to inject some holy madness into the head of a fallen Las Vegas priest.

Low clouds and cold rain. Our summery November has come to an end, and I’m excited to see my breath again. 

Sleep has an oddly moral dimension: those with a clear conscience sleep like babies, and if someone behaves atrociously, we wonder how they sleep at night. When I tell people I cannot sleep, they ask what is wrong. Am I anxious about the future or haunted by my past? Am I eating poorly, drinking too much coffee, or watching scary movies before bed? No, I say, I’ve simply forgotten how to do it. Perhaps I sound like someone who claims they can’t remember how to walk.

The pulse of distant highway traffic in the rain is the most soothing sound I know.