All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Trump Kitsch Putsch

plague journal, ,

Saturday morning, January 9th. I am bewildered by the insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. It seems at once both completely bonkers and also the logical apotheosis of Trump’s political trajectory. That this was always going to happen doesn’t make it any less shameful.

From the images, articles, tweets, sounds, video, there is a paradoxical portrait of the day. It seems absurd, a kind of playacting. I myself previously compared the QAnon folks to Live Action Role Playing participants. There was an aura of a video game come to life, but at some point during the march to the police-lined fences around the Capitol, the actions crossed the Rubicon from online and peer group projection to actual crime, seditious action, destruction of property, assault, etc. They crossed into reality. And as more details manifest, the insurrection appears less like a camp gesture of disaffected whites and more like what it was: a failed but nearly successful domestic terrorist event. Both elements were present. There was the shirtless Daniel Boone Viking helmet guy and the Delta Force extra, kitted out with his zip-tie handcuffs. The event is both revolutionary kitsch and violent putsch.

Jamelle Bouie has helpfully pointed out that this bothness is often present in white supremacist groups. The Ku Klux Klan wear the ridiculous, pointy hoods and use the designation “wizard” unironically. It’s almost as if extremist efforts must begin as practical jokes that go too far, begin to take themselves seriously. And as others have pointed out online, these domestic terrorists reaped the benefit of not being taken seriously as a general rule.

Sunday afternoon. The relentless gaslighting has begun. Turns out, seeing is not believing. The believers themselves crossed into reality on Wednesday, and their reality and the apostate reality was briefly shared. But now that reality is being transformed into something else, a complicated mass hallucination. Only the blind can truly see: Antifa, cancel culture, big tech monopolies quashing free speech. The believers call for unity but not for responsibility.

Review of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation,

Originally published in issue 47 of The Quarterly Conversation

Novel Spirits: George Saunders Goes Long

In her latest collection of essays, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics and Other Literary Essays, Cynthia Ozick discusses Lionel Trilling, who despite being recognized as an esteemed literary critic of his time — a “figure” is Ozick’s word — had written to himself in his journal that he felt under-accomplished and that the road to a lasting literary contribution to the world was simple: it was the novel or nothing. Ozick deems The Middle of the Journey, the one novel Trilling did complete before his death, a good but not great book, an honorable beginning, but what puzzles her is how Trilling was haunted by the Novel, as a literary category in America. To succeed at the novel was to achieve true success; everything else was just pretending.

Ozick herself has been the victim of similar curses. Before publishing her first stories, before embarking on her career of literary essays for which she is one of my favorite living writers, she labored for seven years on a novel never published, Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. She then labored for another seven years on a novel that was finally published — Trust — about which she self-laceratingly brags not one person has actually read all the way through. It was only after getting over this multi-year, multi-novel hurdle that Ozick started to become the writer we begin to recognize today, who did, it must be said, go on to write “successful novels.” But it was the novel as gauntlet, the novel as totem, that cursed her, and seems to curse her still.

We’ve moved past all that, right? We’ve got micro-fictions and flash fictions and autofictions and lyric essays and confessional literary criticism about dildos. Sadly, no. Despite all our new-fangled literary categories, which are often just new names for old things, Parkay for Oleo-Margarin, American literary culture is still haunted by the Novel. It is the monolithic literary form of this country, the category against which all other kinds of writing are measured — a strange thing, because aside from “a prose work of a certain length,” it’s basically impossible to define. There is the persistent myth of the Great American Novel, a book expansive enough to encapsulate our country’s unique breed of idiocy and promise, a collectively envisioned cartoon of what a novel should be. And like American Exceptionalism or home buying as a path to wealth, some myths never die, no matter how crude.

All of this baggage is particularly problematic for the short story writer. I should say the “American short story writer,” since there aren’t many other kinds. The short story, with the requisite Irish exceptions, hasn’t prospered in the same way anywhere else, at least not to become its own codified arena of literature, so that we have several Great American Short Story Writers. Why this form has thrived here and not elsewhere is an interesting topic, but one for another essay. And yet despite this history of success, and despite the infrastructure of support for story writers (and poets!) that exists via the American creative writing complex, the history of the American short story is littered with great writers who aggravated their natural talents by cranking out a novel to satisfy the culture. One can skim the bibliographies of celebrated story writers and see these novels peeking out bashfully, mixtures of literary tokenism and self-imposed self-improvement, as if writing a novel really were like running a marathon — so many hail mary bids to win respect from an absent cultural father.

Novels by short story writers (let’s pretend for a moment that these categories aren’t porous) often feel too long, yet not long enough. One type is like John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, a collection of linked narratives that aren’t independent enough to be stories yet not connected enough to accumulate into a cohesive narrative. It feels like a bag of marbles rather than a marble sculpture. The other type of story-writer novel is the overbuilt birdhouse: a structure with an extreme amount of planning in which not much actually happens.

Which brings us to George Saunders, arguably the preeminent American story writer of our day. This post of pre-eminent, living story writer is like the Presidency. Only one person can occupy it at a time, and sadly that person is usually male. The requirements of this office are not just writing good stories. And make no mistake, Saunders writes excellent stories. This person must be iconoclastic. He must have imitators, and boy, does Saunders have imitators. This is not his fault. He is very successful at his own shtick, but that shtick contains enough easily identifiable characteristics that younger writers — willingly or not — can imitate him. It’s to Saunders’s credit that vast swaths of contemporary American writing look like Saunders’s discards. Many writers have made entire careers out of being Diet Saunders. I’m not going to name names. Just throw in an absurd premise set slightly in the future, a premise that seems to comment somewhat ironically on our late-capitalistic quagmire, throw in some lightly magical phenomena that function as heavy-handed metaphors, and maybe a pinch of moral allegory, all wrapped up in a heart-on-sleeve-be-kind-rewind sincerity, and you’ve got yourself a sub-Saunders story. And I say all this as someone who finds Saunders’s aesthetic terribly alluring, as someone who has written these stories myself. I’m not blaming people who write like Saunders (or not too much, at least). They might have come to it all on their own. Perhaps Saunders is merely the current apotheosis of a certain angle of approaching the world. Or maybe he’s not. But either way, you don’t have to pull a muscle trying to uncover Saunders’s overwhelming influence.

And this influence is not just on prose style. Saunders is thought of somewhat generically as a saint, as someone who exudes a Jesus-like kindness, about whom Joshua Ferris says, “He seems in touch with some better being.” Tobias Wolff says, “He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.” I have no wish to dispel these excellent thoughts about Saunders’s character, but it’s a little weird how our literary culture turns excellent male writers (again always male) into gurus. Saunders isn’t just the best American writer currently writing stories; he’s the Gandhi of grad school.

But all this adoration aside, Gandhi still hadn’t written a novel. And short story writers who haven’t yet written a novel are treated like spinster women in a pre-war patriarchy: Why won’t they get with the program? What is wrong with them? And so here we are at the beginning of 2017 with Saunders finally walking a novel down the aisle, whether by cultural compulsion or authorial ambition no one truly knows.

Lincoln in the Bardo covers approximately the first 24 hours after the burial of Willie Lincoln, the president’s third son, from typhoid fever. Upon his death, Willie enters a “bardo,” traditionally a Buddhist state between your past earthly life and your next reincarnation. The bardo at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown is a crowded place, full of dead souls who won’t admit to themselves that they’re dead and fear moving onto the next plane; whether this next plane is specifically heaven or hell or Buddhist reincarnation is left mysterious. Willie’s eventual realization that he’s dead and that he should move on from the bardo is facilitated by three ghosts — Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and The Reverend Everly Thomas. These ghosts are our heroes in triplicate and function as narrators of the novel, though narration isn’t quite the right word.

The novel is split unevenly between two modes. One mode consists of occasional brief chapters of historical quotations, creating an assemblage of primary sources. These historical clippings give a window onto the context of the time: the depth of the Lincolns’ grief over the death of Willie, the fact that a state dinner was held at the White House on the night immediately preceding Willie’s death, and the growing national rage at the carnage of the Civil War. These historical bits are mixed in the much larger soup of the second mode: Willie’s time in the bardo alongside its many infuriated guests. This portion of the novel, its majority, is rendered like the dialogue of a play, where different ghosts show up and tell their stories or comment on the action (Bevins, Vollman, and Thomas being the most frequent participants). Of course these ghosts, in fine Saunders fashion, are a bit wacky, and are in states that reference how they died. For instance, Vollman, who died the day he was to finally consummate his marriage to his much younger wife, wanders around the bardo with an enormous erection, while Bevins, who committed suicide after being thwarted by his illicit gay lover, is a constant mushroom of sprouting jealous eyeballs. Etc. The result is a goofy parade of souls, each inflamed by the injustice of no longer being alive and eager to tell his or her story. There’s Eddie and Betsy Baron, the foul-mouthed worst parents ever; Lt. Cecil Stone, a racist, antebellum Yosemite Sam; Thomas Haden, a dutiful and docile slave during his life, now consumed with rage at his complicity with his own subjugation; and the Bachelors, a set of three men racing about enjoying their freedom and raining down hats of all styles on anyone who gets in their way. The result is a kind of Richard Scarry’s Busytown of the Undead.

Here’s what happens. The just-deceased Willie arrives in the bardo and is discovered by our three main ghosts as well as many others. Later that same day, the day of Willie’s funeral, Abraham Lincoln returns to the cemetery to see his boy’s body one last time. Frustrated that his father is talking to his “sick-form” rather than him, Willie enters his own dead body, and hears the words his father utters through his tears. The ghosts, when they enter the bodies of the living, can’t quite “possess” them in this novel, but they do feel all of their sensations, as well as the entirety of their past. It’s during this exchange that the elder Lincoln tells his son that he will return again to see him, which is why afterward Willie refuses to move onto the next plane. This is particularly bad because children were not meant to remain in the bardo, even more so than the adults, and Willie is soon ensnared in a concrete-like carapace composed of the faces of grievous sinners (baby killers, incest committers), from which our trio must repeatedly free him. It’s difficult to describe because it’s not entirely clear what’s going on.

Word comes that Lincoln is still on the cemetery grounds, so Bevins and Vollman race off to find him, enter him, and try to convince him to return to the chapel where Willie is interred, which will somehow persuade his son’s ghost to move onto the next life. Finally reunited in the chapel, Willie enters his father and realizes that he’s actually dead and announces this to the ghosts surrounding him, much to their shock and dismay. It’s the one thing none of them wants to admit. With this, Willie moves onto the next realm, the arrival of which is always described the same way: “Then came the familiar, yet always bonechilling, firesound associated with the matterlightblooming phenomenon.”

The result, as you might have intuited, is one extremely goofy book. The novel isn’t bad per se, but it’s a decidedly lumpy reading experience. In part it’s highly enjoyable, a kind of Saunders-does-Dante romp. The book, with its copious white space and snappy dialogue and hardly any detailed narration, reads quickly enough, though it seems to take forever to get anywhere. The gears never really catch to achieve that coasting downhill feeling.

The most effective parts of the novel are when we see President Lincoln grieving over his son. Perhaps my reaction was a little too personal, but as the father of small children, I found these sections almost intolerably moving. Here’s a moment of such grieving from when Bevins and Vollman enter Lincoln in their attempt to persuade him to return to the chapel:

          First time we fitted him for a suit.

          Thus thought the gentleman.

          (This did the trick.)

          First time we fitted him for a suit, he looked down at the trousers and then up at me, amazed, as if to say: Father, I am wearing grown-up pants.

          Shirtless, barefoot, pale round belly like an old man’s. Then the little cuffed shirt and buttoning it up.

          Goodbye, little belly, we are enshirting you now.

          Enshirting? I do not believe that is even a word, Father.

          I tied the little tie. Spun him around for a look.

          We have dressed up a wild savage, looks like, I said.

          He made the growling face. His hair stuck straight up, his cheeks were red. (Racing around that store just previous, he had knocked over a rack of socks.) The tailor, complicit, brought out the little jacket with much pomp.

          Then the shy boyish smile as I slid the jacket on him.

          Say, he said, don’t I look fine, Father?

          Then no thought at all for a while, and we just looked about us: bare trees black against the dark-blue sky.

          Little jacket little jacket little jacket.

          This phrase sounded in our head.

          A star flickered off, then on.

          Same one he is wearing back in there, now.

And here is the moment when Lincoln first visits the chapel and Willie becomes so frustrated that his father can’t see him that he enters his own dead body:

The lad threw one arm familiarly around his father’s neck, as he must often have done, and drew himself in closer, until his head was touching his father’s head, the better to hear the words the man was whispering into the neck of the —

Hans Vollman

His frustration then becoming unbearable, the boy began to —

Roger Bevins III

The lad began to enter himself.

Hans Vollman

As it were.

Roger Bevins III

The boy began to enter himself; had soon entered himself entirely, and at this, the man began sobbing anew, as if he could feel the altered condition of that which he held.

The Reverend Everly Thomas

As the quotation illustrates, when Devins, et al., speak, it’s sometimes their speech and sometimes straight narration, and at other times even reported speech of other characters present on the scene and presumably capable of talking on their own. The effect is something like a Moises Kaufman play, a collage of voices, and while this can be quite powerful on stage, here the device often makes for awkward reading. Who is speaking and why? Plus, the way the attributions are handled, with the speaker’s name given after what’s been spoken, and the rapid back-and-forth between our three narrators — though not so much between each other as between themselves and the reader — render the who question mute. It doesn’t seem to matter, and this reader let the individual narrators bleed together in his mind with no apparent side effects.

Another effective part of the book is the mass possession of Lincoln’s body, which is an attempt to keep him from leaving the chapel. Our three heroes call for help and the ghosts, excited by the presence of a living being walking around, jump into action. “What a pleasure,” Bevins says. “What a pleasure it was, being in there. Together. United in common purpose. In there together, yet also within one another, thereby receiving glimpses of one another’s minds, and glimpses, also, of Mr. Lincoln’s mind. How good it felt, doing this together!” This moment of joyous unity — this “serendipitous mass co-habitation” — removes the remaining scars from their recently departed lives. (Vollman loses his erection; Bevins has a normal number of eyeballs, etc.) In a way the bardo, outside of Lincoln’s body and its magnetizing purpose, is a kind of libertarian hellscape, a compendium of self-interested ghosts spouting their self-justifying narratives.

At the end of the book, the specter of history infiltrates the narrative, more so than the contextual primary source quotations sprinkled throughout. Lincoln’s final visit with his son’s ghost and his possession by the bardo’s other ghosts imbues him with a sense of resolve regarding the Civil War and how to win it. He walks away realizing it’s a fight that must be won at all costs, despite its guaranteed, immense bloodshed. Willie’s death in a way represents all of the young soldiers who have died. This moment of resolution ends with a great huzzah to the optimistic promise of America, worthy of an Obama speech, where “all of that bounty, was for everyone, for everyone to use, seemingly put here to teach a man to be free, to teach that a man could be free, that any man, any free white man, could come from as low a place as he had . . . might rise, here, as high as he was inclined to go,” as opposed to “the king-types who would snatch the apple from your hand and claim to have grown it, even though what they had, had come to them intact, or been gained unfairly . . . and who, having seized the apple, would eat it so proudly, they seemed to think they had not only grown it, but picked it, and invented the whole idea of fruit, too.” I didn’t intend to finish reading this novel on the last day of Obama’s presidency, but that’s what happened. There I was, the day before King Baby was sworn into office, reading about liminal states and the need to face one’s fear and go into the light, children. But by the time you read this review we will all have jumped the fence of that particular bardo, where no Tangina can save us.

Despite the novel’s echoes with our current national trauma, I miss the humor of Saunders’s earlier work. There are no zombie grandmothers screaming “show your cock!” here, and the moments that are obviously intended to be humorous come across as mostly goofy. This also might be a personal preference: funny writing is great; goofy writing is not as great. There is a fine line between them, one that I’m not wholly capable of defining. I apologize for lapsing into know-it-when-I-see-it-ism. In the Saunders’s stories, the jokes have teeth. But this feels more like an extended Saturday Night Live skit, characters paraded onstage one after the other. They’re amusing but they’re not bruising. 

In hindsight, Saunders’s main talent — of his many talents, let’s be honest — is how he reduces his worlds via (paradoxically) ramping up various twenty-first century phenomena. He’s able to do so much with so little because it’s grafted onto our shared experience. His stories are only slightly off from reality. And while the predicament of the ghosts is interesting and occasionally moving, one nears the end of the novel wanting them to get on with it.

Finally, despite Saunders’s enthusiasm for the bounty and potential of America and the felt resonances between his historical novel and our present time, I feel a little cheated by his retreat into the past. One hates to trot out Henry James’s old imperative that the novelist deal with the “present, palpable intimate,” but we’ve had plenty of writing about Lincoln. What we need is eyes on the now. Now that he’s satisfied the cultural obligation to produce a novel, perhaps Saunders can return to focusing on his satirical short stories. Lord knows we need to see what kind of story Saunders will write when life itself has turned into a Saunders story.

Review of ‘B & Me’

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in issue 39 of The Quarterly Conversation

B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal
By J.C. Hallman

There’s a conspicuous history of books that simply should not work: books that, when described, sound like surefire failures, or simply bad ideas, books that any sober acquisitions editor would shake his head authoritatively over. There are also books that should simply not work at the conceptual, blueprint level. Something about their intellectual architecture just can’t be right, simply cannot provide support for the proposed building. But then of course these books do work, and then one spends the rest of the afternoon walking around delighted and confused.

Books like U & I by Nicholson Baker, a book-length exercise in “memory criticism,” where Baker traces Updike’s influence on his own writing life while studiously not actually re-reading any of Updike’s books. Or books like Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s book that procrastinates away from writing a book about D.H. Lawrence, which then of course becomes a very funny explication of and homage to D.H. Lawrence. Now we must add to this trickster pile J.C. Hallman’s B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal, which reads like some gene-spliced combination of the two, a description which, I confess, makes the book sound like no fun, but if you can quit raising your left eyebrow long enough and get a few pages in, it’s about the most fun reading you’ve experienced in years.

And thank the good sweet lord for it. Please no more post-apocalyptic allegories about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of environmental catastrophe, or historical epics depicting moist, psychological tenderness inside the trenches of WWI, or memoirs of conveniently Aristotelean personal transgression, or thousand-page landfills of prose written by and about sexy Nordic men who are never not photographed not smoking. Give us something messy and unfilmable and weird and slightly embarrassing. Give us J.C. Hallman. Instead of some artfully rendered enactment of cultural sensitivity that flatters my own sophistication, Hallman has written a book that’s both enthralling and unnerving. Praise be.

Instead of tracking Baker’s influence upon him as it has accrued throughout his life, which was Baker’s modus in U & I, Hallman tracks his interest in Baker from the moment he begins reading him. “What needed to be done, I’d been saying, what no one had ever done, was tell the story of a literary relationship from its moment of conception, from that moment when you realize that there are writers out there in the world you need to read, so you read them.”

The result is the lifecycle of readerly affection, from first covert glance, to first date, to first consummation, to the inevitable blown-out elastic of routine. And these romantic/sexual metaphors are not mine. They’re all Hallman’s. In fact, the crisis that precedes Hallman’s interest in Baker is a depletion of his enthusiasm for literature as an endeavor — as something to write, or to teach, or to read. He’s worn out from his teaching job and lost his mojo, and he feels intuitively that Baker might hold some funky tonic that will rejuvenate him once again.

One of Hallman’s complaints with the teaching of literature is how it’s an inherently artificial approximation of the readerly event — sexual discussion as opposed to sex itself, which leads him to a book-long extended metaphor of reading as intellectual arousal, which sounds a lot more outlandish than it is. What he’s doing, on the one hand, is returning “creative writing” back to its original, life-giving, Emersonian grind party, where reading is a randy Whitmanesque erotic throwdown. What he’s also doing, more cleverly, is tying this Emersonian idea to Baker’s writing, specifically his “sex books,” the trilogy of novels consisting of Vox, The Fermata, and House of Holes, which some critics consider essentially porn and a waste of Baker’s talents and which others consider a whale of a time. (I’ll confess that I’m in the talent-waster camp, though Hallman has made me reconsider my position mightily.)

One of the amazing things Hallman does in the book is tie all of Baker’s work together at the microscopic, or Bakerian, level. For instance, he shows how holes have been a pivotal motif throughout all of Baker’s book. (Holes!) He does the same thing for washing machines, or anything with a centrifugal force, as well as sunbeams, and music, and stopping time, and punctuation. If you’ve read Baker, you know that much of his alien charm is connected with his ability to stare at everyday objects with a mad intensity and report that intensity back to you in language that defamiliarizes the mundane. He’s like a roving MoMA exhibit in prose. Escalators simply aren’t the same after you’ve read Baker — same with drinking straws, vinyl records, footnotes, sprinklers, ereaders, peanut butter jars, radio dials, liquid crystal displays, spoons, metrical poetry, etc. What Hallman does by reading Baker chronologically and supremely intensely is annihilate all categories from Baker’s oeuvre and see it as a complementary whole.

The result is a multifarious critical biography of Baker, who comes across as a shy, nervous, fundamentally happy author who is hijacked by two intellectual crises, both born from civilization’s inability to appreciate detail. The first crisis is the duplicity of unnecessary technological innovation at libraries (with its concomitant amnesia toward history and willfully blind bureaucracy), which culminated in the polemic Double Fold, about the conspiracy of libraries around the country to move from technologically secure paper books to dubious and buggy microfilm. The second crisis, both personal and literary — the distinctions here also annihilated — is the Iraq war, and the awakening of Baker’s latent pacifism, which leads both to Checkpoint, the novel-in-dialogue of one Baker-like stand-in convincing another Baker-like stand-in to not assassinate the president. Hallman convincingly argues that the book is an argument on behalf of pacifism, despite the fact that most of the reviewers at the time wildly misread the book in a rose-colored jingoistic rage — “a kind of high-water mark in the history of reviewers getting it wrong.” The other book that comes out of Baker’s aroused pacifism is Human Smoke, which is a collage of quotations taken from primary sources that purports to show that WWII was not inevitable, that the persecution of central Europe’s Jewish population was not a surprise, and that this war, despite the hazy mists of nostalgia, was in no way a “good war” waged by the “greatest generation.” 

But this book is not just an explication of Baker’s work. The literary analysis is embedded within a narrative of Hallman’s own journey as a writer, from one location to another, all in the company of his partner Catherine, who is his lover, his confidant, and his foil. The book chronicles the arc of their love as well, sometimes in visceral detail. His love for Catherine mirrors his love for Baker; the two arousals are intertwined. There is no separating bookish love from romantic love or sexual love — they are all hopelessly mixed — and in showing the reader this hopeless mix, Hallman re-solders literature to the fuse of life. Hallman doesn’t just analyze Baker or explicate how the books work. He dramatizes his reading of them and his discovery of how they work, how they are all connected. Book marketing jacket copy is always claiming some new novel is a “literary thriller,” but what Hallman has written is actually literally a literary thriller: it’s a thrilling depiction of him chasing the rabbit of his interest through Baker’s books. How will he put it together? How will the next book rub against the grain of his lived experience? Hallman has covertly written one of those “this is why we read” books, except you will actually want to read his version, because rather than arguing that literature is good medicine or a token of cultural prestige or even just a whole lot of fun, he convinces you that literature is a fundamental facet of life, as requisite as sex, and he convinces you by showing you. “That’s what we should be when we read,” he says at one point, “a precise point of prolonged and intense sensitivity, caught in time and reading.”

If I have one complaint about the book it’s that even though we get plenty of biographical data about Hallman and Catherine, I still feel oddly uninformed at the end. There are moments where the details of their sexual goings on are amply offered, but their relationship remains opaque. The result is a paradox, which has become a frequent trope in much current creative nonfiction. That is, there is a shameless sharing of information, usually sexual activity, and yet there are wide elisions of character. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets had the same mixture of sexual frankness and utter opacity. Reading these books I feel like I’m watching some premium cable Sunday evening program: plenty of distracting flesh but very little inner life. For instance, Catherine awakens in a rage one night over the prospect that Hallman isn’t staying on his side of the bed. She seems hysterical and the relationship feels as if it’s at a boiling point of aggravation. Just what is going on? Hallman escapes to surreptitiously read Baker. But this nocturnal provocation never bears fruit. It just sits there, narratively inert. Likewise, the couple moves from their urban apartment to a former bed and breakfast located in some unspecified rural location because Hallman has acquired a new teaching job, and the general impression is that Catherine hates it there. But why exactly? (Is she teaching there also? What specifically about the place is so bad? And just where on earth is this place? And why so sketchy about seemingly pertinent details?) And at the end of the book, they decide to move to Brooklyn. (Brooklyn!) It seems as if Hallman has given up teaching, but it’s hard to say because the biographical details taper off rather drastically, and so there’s no narrative explanation to why they are moving, what has happened with their careers, and how their various inchoate psycho-romantic complications have resolved themselves, if at all. Are they now equitably sharing the bed? They seem happy at the end of the book, after visiting Baker in person; in fact they seem happy as a consequence of seeing Baker, an apotheosis of their Baker-fueled love — and an apotheosis for the book we’re reading. But, aside from a convenient metaphorical parallel, one doesn’t really understand the true nutritional density of their happiness.

I’m not trying to be hopelessly literal here, but I feel slightly cheated by all of the biographical build-up throughout the book. Perhaps this is one reason why the parts where Hallman is reading and interpreting Baker are vastly more interesting than the biographical bits, even the sex parts. (Perhaps this says more about me than about the book under consideration, but after the initial impressive Emersonian metaphor, the harping on the sex stuff gets slightly boring.) In short, it feels like a cheat, like a tease, like the personal information from Hallman’s life is used as a decoy, as a hook into the analysis of Baker, and then discarded, which is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that some of the information is deemed worthy of communicating to the reader (e.g., their bowel movements in Paris) but other information is not. It raises the expectation that we should care about these characters as people, and then all of the detail that we feel we are owed narratively is withheld from us. In the end, Catherine is opaque, and Hallman, for all his forthrightness, still seems selectively inclusive, which is fine. I mean, these are people out in the world. They have their own lives. They don’t have to tell me everything! And yet, I was given the false impression that they were telling me everything.

My own narrative greediness aside, this is a wonderful book, a brave book, which would still succeed even if you’ve never read Baker. To read Hallman read another writer, to participate in the arc of his infatuation, is a delight: it’s what dissertations should be, or as Hallman has it, literary criticism should be “a public display of affection.” In losing his manners and displaying his affection, he makes reading thrilling and necessary. Nick should be proud.

Grudge Dynasty

plague journal,

One benefit of the Trump era is that it has conveniently encapsulated every behavior I find abhorrent. What might be the most immoral behavior in any given situation? Well, What Would Trump Do? The man is a human superfund site. 

One example: the relentless sorting of humans into winners and losers. 

Here he is on the 15th day of December, the day after the electoral college certified the presidential election for Joe Biden:

The closest Trump has come privately to admitting where this is heading, the source added, is to say, “If we don’t win, I don’t say lose. I say ‘I don’t win.'”

It’s not just that he doesn’t say lose. He can’t say it. It goes against his own mental programming. Life is a constant sorting machine of winners and losers and he decided long ago that he was a winner always and so he cannot conceptually recognize loss. 

But loss is a way of life. Is it loserish of me to say this or a mere recognition of reality? Games, contests, and yes, even elections, have winners and losers. They actually are binary structures that sort their competitors into camps. Not everyone gets to win the tennis game, etc. Some people can verifiably run faster than other people, etc. But life is not a game. Typically people are shaded into large pools of ambiguity. No one life is purely pancakes all the way down. There is always some rain delay, some grit of disappointment, some betrayal, some collapse of circumstance. Otherwise you’re a robot or lying to yourself or a psychotic. 

One change I’d like to make in the new year is to think about Trump less. He’s too much on my mind. I even think about his poor and horrible children. Horrible because they’ve gone from being absurdly fortunate civilians, ostensibly adjacent to an elected official and worthy of ignoring, to becoming cannons in the culture wars, machines in the discourse factory. Of the two most prominent children, one has become an unelected and unqualified White House advisor and another has become a television screamer. If you agree with Trump’s behaviors, then his children are satisfying sequels, I guess. Perhaps it simply comes back to my disagreement with the father. But I also feel sorry for them. 

Here is a brief excerpt from “The Real Story of Donald Trump Jr.” by Julia Ioffe: 

When a Brazilian journalist asked Don in 2010 whether there was much pressure being Donald junior, he replied, “There probably shouldn’t be. But there is for me, because you want to please someone like that, and he’s a perfectionist. There’s definitely always that shadow that follows you around, like how is this guy, the son of someone so good at what he does, going to act?”

According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody. It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. “You can’t do that!” Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana’s memoir, Raising Trump. “What if he’s a loser?”

Don tells his own story about coming into the world on December 31, 1977. “I like to joke that my dad wanted to be able to claim me as a dependent on his taxes for 1977,” he once told Forbes, “so he told my mom she had to have me before midnight and, if she didn’t, he’d make her take a cab home.” (Ivana wrote about her labor being induced by doctors.)

There are two curses contained here: the child as tax-avoidance device and the ruthless paranoia of that child being a loser. The first is the purely instrumental view of fatherhood. Does Trump love his children? I guess. Probably? But this aside, told here as a joke, and perhaps apocryphal, speaks to a subterranean truth: Trump’s view of other people is purely transactional. What can they do for me? What’s the most they can do for me? His rage at the Governor of Georgia for not calling a special session of the legislature to reverse the outcome of the election in that state has the echoes of a dissatisfied customer. The nomination of Justice Barrett had the same eerie, place-betting vibe. These individuals are investments, he seems to think, that will earn him a return. And when those investments don’t mature as expected, don’t pay him back, he’s enraged. From his point of view, it makes a vicious kind of sense. Why else would he have stumped for that Governor? Nominated that Justice? In this light having children for him is mostly downside. 

What if he’s a loser? The statement is such a blatant explication of so many eons of procreative struggle that it’s overwhelming to see it so baldly stated. It took Faulkner nearly 400 pages to write Absalom, Absalom! and Trump boils it down to a haiku. Props where they’re due: the man possesses a kind of idiopathic genius. He’s the most transparently self-interested animal in existence. My dog exhibits a more developed sense of decorum. It seems that Trump Junior has decided that the best way to outrun his father’s shadow is to be even grander, more father than his own father, his father’s disposition distilled into an even more corrosive substance. His whole existence is subsumed by his father’s presence. It must be a horrible way to live. 

This reminds me of my old note about Jeb Bush and his helpless aside four years ago about disappointing his own father. Yet another problem of political leadership consisting almost wholly of dynasties is that America has to weather these Oedipal storms. Would George W. Bush have begun the Iraq War if Saddam Hussein hadn’t attempted to assassinate his own president father? Probably. But it’s impossible to know for sure and there is the queasy Shakespearean undertow, the addressing of generational grievances, sons jockeying for favor. It feels slightly less than productive to think of major American foreign policy mistakes in terms of generational grudges handed down, but that’s where we are — a dynasty of grudges, a family tree of resentments. We the people merely live in its shade. We don’t have a royal family in this country but our collective Id seems to want one desperately, so we have all of these mini royal families with their chins and wealth and tragic vacations. Do we have to keep watching this show?

It reminds me of those new Star Wars movies, which I watched recently with my own children. There is a brief moment of dramatic freshness in The Last Jedi when Rey is informed by Kylo Ren that she comes from nothing, nobody, that her parents sold her for booze money, this abandoned child who grew up in the ruins of old Empire weaponry, like so many in the audience. The trick of the earlier movies was the discovery of course that Luke Skywalker was the son of Darth Vader, that he was the correction of the mistakes of his father. The father redeems himself by saving the son and, thus reborn, dies in true tragic fashion. Big, hearty themes, heavy enough to call a moving company. But now we have the sequels to the prequels and of course Kylo Ren has to be Solo and Leia’s son who’s gone and pulled a Vader on them. I appreciate the thematic echo as much as the next middle-aged nostalgist, but combined with the repeating Death Stars, I’m starting to fear a general lack of innovation. One can re-microwave the same leftovers for only so many nights. The charm of the earlier movies was that they showed us new worlds. Now the movies just filigree the franchise. And so the big question: who is Rey and why is she important? Ren’s sister, lover, something else? Turns out she’s a nobody. But then the next film in the series arrives (The Rise of Skywalker), and we learn we’re wrong; we’ve been tricked. She’s actually Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter! And Emperor Palpatine’s not dead! He’s back and he looks just like Mitch McConnell! And there are a bunch of Star Destroyers somehow stored under the surface of some planet! Beats me!

It’s a bad movie but perhaps a better representation of what life is really like: the bad guys never really die, their children are out there making the same mistakes as their parents, we keep re-fighting the same wars like amnesiac soldiers, we keep uttering the same tired jokes, unable to devise new punchlines. In the endless cineplex of modern American society, we are all losers. As another movie from my 80s youth had it: The only way to win is not to play. 

Blogroll Thanksgiving

literary lint, plague journal,

I still love reading blogs. At this point in internet history, that’s like grinding one’s own wheat, but still. They’re so reliably idiosyncratic. 

I first started reading blogs in the mid 2000s, back when lit-blogging was in its hey day. Most of those blogs are long gone, which is fine. Nothing gold can stay, etc. As blogs went out of fashion, that same impulse-to-post migrated to other modes. Every now and then someone writes an article saying “Blogs are back!” but these strike me like the occasional articles saying “Short stories are back!” It’s probably not going to pan out, and that’s okay. It’s still worthwhile even if it’s not a pillar in the media-social-entertainment-streaming mega church. 

“Knitting is back!”

I liked Medium when it came out. Its writing interface was so pleasantly smooth it felt like the Ferrari of web applications. But reading on Medium has only gotten worse. Sometimes I am allowed to read articles, but sometimes the machine wants me to sign in, and I lost those credentials long ago. Sometimes the articles are part of magazines-within-Medium, which is confusing because on Medium everything looks the same. Somehow Medium gave users a template via design deprivation, and the result is even more seamless and generic than all those old blogs that used the default, blue banner WordPress theme. (This is coming from a person who is using yet another WordPress theme, so I’m all for design decisions that call for the least amount of motion.) It all looks nice but it feels a part of the same big box store. This claustrophobia is only exacerbated by the articles, which read like self help. Seven things you need to do every morning to win your career and beat depression. It’s LinkedIn with better taste. 

A kind of blogging manifests itself on Twitter, but it’s disjointed and comes with all the problems of Twitter, previously whined about here. I feel like no one admits how tweet threads are a terrible reading experience. It’s the writing equivalent of temporary housing, put up after a natural disaster, and people go on living in them for decades. Twitter seems best for jokes thrown into the stream, but because the stream is endless and unknowable, it’s the worst place for jokes. Perhaps one day Twitter will simply be press releases and anger. 

I subscribe to some newsletters, the most blog-like blog substitute. It’s handy having them delivered to your in-box, but they feel like work. They’ve already posted again? For some reason, having posts line up like a To Do list in an RSS feed reader is a pleasant accumulation, but a list of unread emails is a job. I don’t know what this means. It probably says more about my ability to manage time and tasks than it does about delivery mechanisms. 

After all this time and all this reading, what even is blogging? I used to know. Like so many topics, I used to have strong feelings about it, and now I shrug and make a sandwich. It’s simply public writing. Anything more categorically detailed than that is up to the individual author. These blogs interest me for the same reason why any writing interests me. Part of it is the communicated information, the nutritional content. Part of it is the range of topics covered. But more often than not I just like the sound of that person’s voice.

So here are some blogs I like: 

Kottke. My First, My Last, My Everything. Consistently the best part of my internet. If there is ever an Academy Award-like award for internet writing, they should name it the Kottke. 

Scripting News. Dave Winer, developer, outliner, opinion haver. Your smarter uncle, who knows much more about the internet than you do and is not going to put up with your BS. An indefatigable blogger. 

MacWright. Written by Tom MacWright, a software developer in California. Much of the technical discussions go way over my head, but he has so many interesting projects, using the web, illustration, and music. An inspiration.

Maggie Haberman’s Twitter feed. Okay, I am breaking my own rules. Sometimes I feel like I am in a submerged house and the water outside my windows is the News of the World. At some point you’re going to open a door, a window, a doggie door, etc., and your house is going to flood with the News of the World, but you get to choose which windows to open and how fast you’re going to flood. The best way I’ve found is to open the Maggie Haberman mail slot. A lot of water is going to come in the house, but it’s reliable water, it’s run-through-the-treatment-plant water, it’s not going to give you dysentery, and it will take longer, relatively speaking, for your house to completely fill with the News of the World. 

Marginal Revolution. Don’t read the comments. Run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two academics. I immediately shut down whenever I see posts that include graphs, but otherwise an interesting view into how the other half lives, that half being the Economist Half. Remember it’s called the Dismal Science. From time to time I feel it necessary to aerate my own views with non-bananas opinion and info from different neighborhoods. Don’t read the comments. 

Freddie deBoer. Bracingly well-written. These days the focus is mostly on his new book The Cult of Smart. 

Subtraction. Written by Khoi Vinh, who used to be the web design guy at New York Times and now works for Adobe. I think? I don’t know. What is this, LinkedIn? It doesn’t matter. He has interesting stuff to say about design and technology, though these days the posts are mostly about movies and domestic life in Brooklyn. 

BirdFeed. Written by Tom Cleary, a pianist/composer/professor. Illuminating discussions of jazz piano and music theory. He often writes songs that pedagogically parody other jazz standards, which is highly informative to me, a non-good piano player who likes to walk around pretending he’s some nascent Ahmad Jamal. 

Craig Mod. Another smart person with projects. Mostly I read him through his newsletter. He just wrote a book about walking the Japanese countryside and toast. He makes me want to go to Japan. 

Emily Gould Can’t Complain. Another indefatigable blogger, though her most recent form is via this newsletter. I’m a sucker for details of domestic life in Brooklyn. Please tell me about your bodegas, your parks, your stoops. I like it best when she reviews the movies she watches with her kids. 

Do the Math. By Ethan Iverson, formerly of the jazz trio the Bad Plus, now a solo musician with multiple projects. He’s been writing for years, interviews, music criticism, philosophical notes to his students, ruminations on crime fiction. I love all of it except for the book stuff. Crime fiction isn’t my bag. Really at this point in my life the main topics I am excited to read about are jazz piano and Brooklyn parenting. A piano in a brownstone with kids’ drawings scattered all over it would basically be my ideal social vector. I don’t think Iverson has children, but for a while there, earlier in our pandemic year, he was posting daily reinterpretations of TV theme songs while various stuffed creatures lounged around his piano. Pure sugar.

Easily Distracted. Written by Timothy Burke, history professor. An oldie that I still visit. Back in the day, I read him because I was an aspiring academic. Now I read him to feel the force of his prose. Academia and politics mostly. 

Gin and Tacos. I don’t even know who this guy is, and I don’t remember how I found him. Smart, well-written, humorous. Sometimes the river of garbage gives you another gem. 

James Fallows. Is it still a blog if it’s for the Atlantic? Who cares. I have broader issues with the Atlantic as a web publication, but I always enjoy Fallows. His notes are pithy and informed. His series on Trump as he was cruising toward the election way back a thousand years ago was a helpful historical documentation of wrongs perpetrated, norms destroyed, etc. Sometimes he posts photos of interesting-looking beers. There was also a parody Twitter account run by a “Fames Jallows” for a while that was (altogether appropriately? somewhat paradoxically?) also informed and adept and worthwhile. The internet is a weird system.

Seasonal Affective Disorder

plague journal

Where I live it never gets cold, not really, not life-threateningly cold. But it’s all relative. Wherever a person lives becomes a range of normal, and the fluctuations within that realm, meteorologically, psychologically, politically, become variations around the mean. Finally it’s non-hot here, a sunny morning in the 50s. Walking the dog I was reminded of what I think of as winter light, a brighter, brassier version of sunlight. The sky is a deeper blue. The nearly translucent, still-green leaves are yet somehow greener. The light echoes off the windshields of passing cars, an almost blinding brightness. It seems a brightness borne from the seasons. It strikes me in its occasional arrival as a kind of coded providence. There was an invisible line somewhere between early adulthood and middle age where I could no longer withstand the cold without complaint and a constant feeling of doom. I don’t just get cold; I feel threatened. It’s coming for my neck. It’s somehow greater than discomfort, though not quite existential. Obviously. But the winter light is the forgotten gift, the season’s lagniappe, special dispensation. I am not religious, and yet. In the cluster of gray days and clammy cars, you can warm yourself in a temporary rhombus of sunlight. I feel like an idiot talking about the weather, and yet. It’s like a blues song for the middle-aged, trying to cheer oneself up with found change. Small joys, low noise, morning sinuses clear. One shouldn’t need permission to feel happy, and yet. Nameless sparrows playing in a pothole of leftover rainwater. Relief briefly floats through like misremembered lyrics to some camp song from boyhood. I’ve got peas like a liver in my stool. And yet the song still sings. I hope there’s sun on the other side of Tuesday.

The Crying of Lot QAnon

plague journal, ,

Life is an asteroid field of memes, allusions, bad jokes, true controversies, fake controversies, new celebrities, movie reboots, etc. It’s too much to understand, and as I get older, I have to mete out my attempts. I held out for a long time figuring out who Jordan Peterson was, and I feel better for waiting. One can avoid a good deal of discourse garbage just by maintaining indifference. 

Such was the case with QAnon, which I had told myself to avoid. Maybe it will quickly go away, I said, like fidget spinners. Nevertheless, it persisted, and it hit enough planets in my internet reading galaxy that I finally felt compelled. To attempt to summarize it as briefly as possible: QAnon is a conspiracy theory that posits there is a coordinated deep state, Democrat-run ring of child-murdering pedophiles, and President Trump has been picked to reveal and destroy this cabal. We are able to glimpse into the clues regarding this cult via “Q drops,” cryptic messages authored by “Q,” an anonymous government operative with extremely high security clearance. Followers of Q amplify and explicate these messages, and it has become a large enough cultural force that a couple of Q supporters are on the verge of being elected into seats of Congress. 

Periodic disclosure: I dislike the current president. Further disclosure: Reading up on this particular asteroid was painful. It hurt my brain to conceive of people going through such interpretive calisthenics to find something to believe in that somehow exonerated their support of Trump, a retconning of the most brutal sort. But perhaps this is what all apostates say. 

It actually reminded me a lot of when I was in high school and getting into Phish. There are a handful of songs that the group used to perform that were part of the guitar player/singer’s senior thesis. Back then, without the internet, my friends and I were constantly accumulating bits of information and gossip about which songs were part of this prog rock cycle and what it all meant, etc. (sort of a mix of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia). Of course when you’re an adolescent, this is what you do. You learn about the world by building an analogous one and piecing together knowledge about other built-out worlds. Wrestling, prog rock, comic books. You have to put in the work to become a member.

The QAnon phenom functions as a kind of interactive interpretive game, another version of a Live Action Role Playing game, but here the people who aren’t playing are simply the uninitiated, the ones who haven’t done the research. The Q drops don’t add up, of course. That would be too easy and that would solve the quest too succinctly. 

Another view of the phenomenon is that it’s a kind of internet-facilitated coping strategy for part of the population that feels, rightly or wrongly, left behind by the transformations of the country. I don’t know enough about the topic to know if it’s solely made up of downwardly mobile white people, but so much of the Trump era feels ripped from a late Faulkner novel, the revenge of the Snopes — the disgruntled, the demoralized, the demographically dispossessed. 

It also shares an aura of projection, like Trump’s own insults against his enemies. If there is any deep state-like coordination going on, it seems like it’s occurring amongst the Republican Senate majority, who have collectively entered a suicide pact, so that there is effectively no daylight between them and the president. If there is a secret government conspiracy occurring, perhaps it’s the administration that attempted to collude with a foreign government in 2016 and seems just as eager to more successfully repeat the process during this election. If there is a coterie of people who are subjecting children to nearly incomprehensible cruelty, perhaps it’s the administration that intentionally separated children from their parents at the border, parents who had abandoned their old lives in order to create new, better lives for the very children they were bringing with them. (Imagine the level of evil one has to be to enact such a policy. Imagine the kind of internal moral callousness one would have to harbor to be aware of these incontrovertible facts and still support that administration. There are limits to imagination.)

And if one needed to tie this all together somehow and charge the Democrats with the most horrible, inflammatory offense known to civilization, why not reach for the readymade one — the anti-Semitic blood libel trope, centuries old? It’s a tale as old as time: the truth’s out there, man. 

Finally, what it reminds me of more than anything else is a bad parody of a Thomas Pynchon novel. I remember in grad school when a professor told me to read The Crying of Lot 49. He could tell that my notions of what fiction could be were entirely too provisional. (They probably still are.) So, being the dutiful student, I went to the library and read the short novel and finished feeling partly amused and mostly baffled. Sometimes I think that postmodern literature is a brand of humor, one that you either find funny or not, and for whatever reason (hopelessly suburban? chronically conventional?) I find it only mildly humorous. I went back to my professor and asked, what happens next? Does the novel imply that Oedipa will finally find the solution to the Tristero whenever she finds out who will bid on Inverarity’s stamp collection? And my professor said, No, I don’t think so. She will simply find the next thing, which will lead to the next thing. The book was too open ended, too nakedly conspiratorial (by design) to fit my hemmed in mind, and the QAnon situation feels the same. Each bit of intel just leads to another bit of intel and if these bits don’t congeal into a stable narrative, well, then that is on purpose, in order to throw off the literal-minded such as myself. And if the identity of Q is potentially revealed, well, can that really be the true Q, since by its very nature Q is both everywhere and nowhere all at once? 

Just because people don’t go to church doesn’t mean the religious impulse has completely disappeared. Perhaps a salutary function of the church is that it disciplines this religious impulse, this rage to find order, into generally more constructive ends. The Q stuff feels like a disparate group of people struggling to build a church, assembling a text, and casting for a prophet, and looking for more believers. If it all added up, you wouldn’t have a church. 

I didn’t Do The Research, but I did some research. Here are my sources: 

An episode of Deep Background with Noah Feldman, where he discusses QAnon’s quest-like attributes with a game designer.

An article by Gregory Stanton where he argues that QAnon is quite simply re-branded Nazism.

Episode #166 of Reply All, where the hosts attempt a theory on the initial and morphing identity of Q.

A Slate article gloss of the same.

Tangentially related, here is Timothy Burke’s post about the core of unpersuadable brutalism lurking within our political conflict.

Institutions and the Individual

plague journal,

After high school I moved away for college, and on my first visit home at the end of September, I went back on a Friday night to find friends. I walked up to the football field just after the game had ended. The stands were emptying out, people drifting off toward their cars. I remember the feeling, a still-adolescent feeling: I was shocked that the place had continued to function without me. They’d gone ahead with the school year, the football season, the turn in the weather, even though I wasn’t around. Apparently, I was just another graduate, another electron spun off into the universe. 

Anyone who has worked for a large company has probably experienced something similar. There’s good old Ted, who’s been around forever, knows where everything is, can help with any kind of problem, is as integral to the functioning of the organization as a catalytic converter. Ted is a company mensch. He’s practically part of the building. But then you show up one day and Ted is gone, retired, moved, let go under hazy circumstances, and now in his place is Bill. And Bill is no Ted. Sure, he seems nice enough, capable even, but he doesn’t possess that calming mastery of the org chart that Ted did, until two weeks go by and you’re calling Bill for all the stuff you would have called Ted for. And then pretty soon, maybe not even a month later, you’re shooting the breeze at lunch, and someone says who was the guy in that cube before Bill? What was his name? You can almost see his face. 

An institution is an organization that’s learned how to outlive its people. Institutions are broad structures that human beings pass through on their way to whatever comes next. And they develop rules, traditions, protocols, cultures, ways of existing that are above the people who come through them. That’s how they manage to exist through time. The people change but the institution persists. 

And yes, they can be creepy and overbearing. Institutions evolve toward a Skynet-like self-awareness. There is always the potential for the culture to morph into a cult, where rules and procedures turn into a kind of ideology, and the only behavior ideology recognizes is submission. So they’re not perfect. Like anything touched by human hands, they get bent, smudged, look worse for wear, and aren’t nearly as luminous after real world use as they were in the abstract, back when it was all a daydream. 

I go to the post office every day for work. It’s one of those mundane but necessary tasks, because even though most of the work can be done sitting at the computer, there are still documents that need to be sent back and forth. So everyday I check the PO box, that little metal portal into another world. And though I, like everyone, have made fun of the post office on occasion, I am essentially fond of the Postal Service as an institution. I depend on it. Its disparate outposts are a signal of its relentless reliability. 

When news arrived recently of changes at the post office, instigated by the newly installed postmaster general, and if not the result of the current president then certainly congruent with his desires to inhibit voting by mail in the rapidly arriving election, I was filled with a variety of feelings. There were all the normal feelings about the integrity of the election and about how this seemed, once again, to be no way to run a railroad. But it also felt logical and predictable: our current president is a destroyer of institutions. 

I’m writing this on the eve of the 2020 Republican National Convention, and this year the RNC will forgo a newly written platform, a document expressing its objectives and principles. Instead, the RNC adjourned without adopting a new platform until 2024 and stated that it supports the current president and his America First agenda.* Full disclosure: I dislike our current president.

It’s not another brick in the wall but another brick taken from a wall. Each institution he infiltrates, he destroys or remakes in his image, which is an empty facade, a building whose contents have been blown out long ago. This is not because he wants to destroy things per se (though perhaps he does?), but because he is the ultimate individual; he cannot countenance anything outside himself, anything greater than himself. He doesn’t support institutions, because he doesn’t believe in them. He believes in himself. Anything that steps to that belief is denied, until it succumbs to his personality, until it bends the knee, like the RNC, or until it breaks down because of his malignant hostility, like the post office or a number of other institutions. He might be actively engaged in the destruction of various principles and institutions as an expression of some political motivation, though that suggests some larger agenda above and beyond his own will to power, which I doubt. The reason he doesn’t like the UN is because he can’t stand it. Its persistence and existence outside and above him is anathema. He doesn’t believe anything in the world has dominion over him. He doesn’t have to listen to anybody about anything, whether it’s masks or climate change or the Federal Reserve or manners or anything. He is the ultimate authority. The potential existence of other authorities is a baffling insult. He expects people to fall in line. What else would they do? He has no empathy. He cannot see past the boundaries of himself. He can’t comprehend the feelings of others because they don’t exist. Sometimes he reads aloud words written by someone that are meant to transmit a feeling generally similar to sympathy. But these statements are always zombie-like, worse than a student reading aloud in class under duress. There is none of the self-generated pleasure he gets from free-associating, cruelty performed as a joke. I think he genuinely enjoys hearing himself talk because it reminds himself that he exists, that he is king. He’s a man who has been rewarded for doing and saying exactly what he wanted to do at whatever moment he wanted to do it. He’s got the self-awareness of a gland. It’s no accident that his real estate empire consists mainly of him putting his name on buildings. He is nothing but brand. He burns himself onto everything he touches. There is nothing outside of himself, and anything that approaches the sanctity of his fortress of individuality is mocked, condemned, corroded. 

Institutions were made to exist beyond people. They were made to withstand people leaving, people dying, people retiring. They were set up so that they could persist outside these vicissitudes. There was discourse hubbub a few years ago when Mitt Romney, then presidential candidate, said that “corporations are people, too.” This was derided as idiotic and a sign of his robotic, managerial slickness. But it’s literally true! Legally speaking, corporations are treated like people. And reasonable people can argue whether or not this is a good thing, economically, legally, morally, but Romney wasn’t riffing. And the reason that corporations are thought of as individuals, in the eyes of the law, is so they are separate from the individuals who run them. They are companies that are trying to turn themselves into institutions. Did Apple die when Steve Jobs died? 

The relationship between institutions and individuals is always antagonistic. I myself am comforted by the existence of institutions, rather than challenged. Perhaps that makes me simply less of a man. The question is what does one do with all those people who exist outside one’s self. Do those people actually exist? 

It’s like the roadways in my town. Why are they laid out the way they are? Isn’t there a better way to get downtown? Probably. It’s idiotic that I have to drive three miles to the interstate and then head down that way. I should just be able to drive out of my driveway and plow through eight neighbors’ yards and a school in a straight line to my destination. But someone or a group of someones long ago laid out the roads. And if I’m going to participate in this society in a meaningful way, I have to refrain from deploying my freedom to drive through people’s yards because it potentially provides a more direct route. Could these roads be improved? Absolutely. To give up one’s own freedom, if just a little bit, for the sake of perpetuating an institution is to confess that other people exist. I will only get what I want through compromise. That’s the secret of society: everyone is at least a little disappointed. It makes the motor run. To improve an institution means you think it’s somehow worthwhile. By destroying institutions he is destroying the ingredients that enable society. 

It’s exhausting to have to say all this in sentences. It feels so self-evident, so freshman year poly sci, so Basic. I’d much rather moon about some novel or my feelings about humidity. Part of the reason I find the post office magical is because I believe that the world visible through that little porthole actually exists, and it’s sending me notes. Do people actually think that man can give them what they want? 

*The label “America First” is a lie. Trump’s agenda has always transparently been “Trump First.” Any actual benefits America the polity receives from Trump unambiguously pursuing his own self-interests are merely accidental. I hold this truth to be self-evident.

Writers Are Depressing

plague journal, ,

It’s true. It was always true. But it’s even more true now that we are in plague times. I follow several writers on Twitter, and for the past three months they have really been excelling in the depression department. I realize that there is plenty to be depressed about in these unprecedented times, but this is a layer above, a top spin on the already sad news of the day. Perhaps it’s a consequence of imagination, of a need to project into a fictional future. Perhaps it’s just the tendency to push rhetoric forcefully unto its limits. Perhaps it’s the ability to pluck out the most alarming/rhetorically forceful detail from a news story. There is one writer I follow, R, whom I really enjoy and whom (in this fantasy of friendship) I get along with splendidly. But R possesses a golden eye for the most disturbing snippet of the most disturbing news story of the day, an ever escalating stream of alarmisms. Turning over one of his quotations in the daily leaf pile that is Twitter is like being bitten by a sleeping snake — in the eye. 

Certainly I’m not depressing to be around. You either, dear friend. But in general writers are depressing, anxious, inward curling, and yet highly strung, excessively verbal, overly self-conscious. I am generalizing recklessly, but hopefully I’m not wrong, or not entirely wrong. I went to a writers’ conference once; it was simultaneously a thrilling experience and also a black hole of insecurity. Everyone needed a hug but no one was spiritually able to accept a hug. At least theater people are entertaining. 

A smarter person would have gotten off Twitter years ago. 

I reconnected with an old friend and discovered that he’d never signed onto Facebook. It was like finding someone who had never done drugs. How refreshing! What a naive, healthy blessing! Then, a couple of months ago, he signed up. Why would he do this? Why would he weather the social pressure of that platform’s plateauing domination? Why get this far only to succumb now? I think he’s still off Twitter but I’m too nervous to ask. 

I used to think that the main problem with Twitter was that its signal-to-noise ratio was broken. That is, everyone links to the same junk over and over. That is, entire conversations manifest in a private language of meme exchange. But instead Twitter is all signal, overwhelming signal — everyone signalling constantly with nuclear force. Every tweet is overburdened with meaning, overt or implied, a rhetorical peacockery. Everyone was insufferable on Twitter already and a slow-moving global catastrophe has only made this worse. The human quality previously known as charm now has the half life of your sourdough starter. To follow a person’s Twitter stream with any granularity is to become convinced they’re growing progressively unhinged. Unfortunately, this is also the only way to understand a person’s Twitter stream.  

And this is not to imply that these Twitter writers aren’t genuinely upset or don’t have legitimate reasons to feel upset. Lord knows they do. Perhaps all this note is is an admission that I can no longer stand the unrelenting broadcasting of their anxieties, and yet, paradoxically, I am seeing exactly what I’ve chosen to see. I have both clamped my own eyelids back and begun the unending scroll of horrors.

Another writer I follow — S — says that no one should be writing during this time, and that people should especially not write about this time. This is the same person who chronicles her life in graphomaniac detail, a fractured diary years in the making, a serialized hot mess. (It is wildly entertaining.) Her point is that this writing will surely be bad, which is probably true, though I don’t know what metric she’s using to determine what bad means. I think she resents people being performatively sensitive, which, okay: noted.

T is yet another writer I follow, one I admire to an almost painful degree. I don’t believe in writely perfection, in terms of prose or persona or general gestalt, but if I did, he would be it. And this ongoing calamity has turned T into a puddle, linguistically speaking. The reason you follow someone in the first place is you admire their prose and the way their sensibility filters through that prose. But in the context- and editor-free agglomeration of tweets you see that same personality and that same prose in all of its backstage, make-up-smeared freakyness. But it’s not backstage. There is no backstage anymore, at least not online. There are only additional trap doors of performance. 

A couple of other writers I follow (I know, I know: get off Twitter) have disappeared from the platform entirely over the past two months. They’ve obviously gone into hiding. They know when to hunker down, go dark with their verbs. The tweeting-writers who continue to thrive are the ones that dish out generalized, feel-good, you-got-this cheerleaderism. It’s a kind of tweet-hug, and I’d accept it if I were able. 

I feel like Twitter is a kind of live action role playing, but whereas other LARPing activities have separate characters and plots that move alongside life, Twitter LARPs with the same ingredients of actual life. It’s like a laminate of language wrapped over the coarse plywood of everyday activity. It feels apiece with the real thing but it’s actually a veneer upon the real. Within the scroll, it feels the closest thing to life, but when you’re simply walking around the real world (back when you could do that), you are confronted with real people who don’t know you’re playing the game and who can’t catch your signals. 

Why I’ve spent countless hours reading these unhinged fragments thumbed out by strangers is a question for a licensed professional, or God. But perhaps the better question is why do I feel compelled to follow anyone at all? Besides, no one can withstand that much unaccommodated attention — even happy people.

These Little Town Blues

plague journal, ,

New York City is once again the center of the United States. I say once again, but really it’s always the center. It’s always been the true capital: if not the seat of government, then the seat of culture, money, the capital of Capital. It’s always been this way. In fact, New York is the true avant-garde of the country: it gets everything first. And it’s as if the city contains a karmic paradox where, for the price of its centrality to the nation (and to our imaginations), it must suffer first the psychopaths, the opportunists, the terrorists, and now the virus. 

In American literature, this leads to a kind of provincialism. Writers like Paul Auster or Jonathan Lethem can set novel after novel within the five boroughs and still be considered tackling a universal subject, while someone like Willa Cather or Faulkner or Welty or Jim Harrison are considered regional writers. New York is not a region. It is the region. 

Despite these relatively rural gripes even my black box of a heart was warmed by the appearance of the USNS Comfort ship plowing into New York harbor last week. I had read that it was headed that way, but I had no idea what it looked like. I didn’t know it would be white — like a giant metal robo-nurse. My heart swelled at the prospect that perhaps our techno-militaristic stockpile will somehow save us. If we could only breathe through bombs. 

Sometimes it’s beneficial to live in the sticks, relatively speaking. When the social distancing procedures came down, I thought glumly that these measures wouldn’t be that difficult to enact in my own life. Outside the three individuals in my immediate family and the three individuals in my office, I have to go out of my way to incorporate other people into my daily existence. I have to make plans. Any time except for a worldwide contagion this would be a recipe for depression, but now strangely it’s just slightly helpful. 

New York is the dream of rednecks everywhere, according to Saul Bellow. I too once wanted to go there. I applied to its MFA programs but never made it. The very next fall, 9/11 happened, and I breathed a (guilty, shameful) sigh of relief for continuing to ostracize myself down south — to be once again in a place where nothing ever happened. I have been to New York a couple of times, purely as a tourist, and I was amazed at how big it was, the sheer magnitude of people. Not to overplay my country mouse hand, but it’s overwhelmingly larger than my current life. All large northern cities are, but New York exponentially so. The universe of individual consciousness located within just one tall apartment building. Redneck leans head out of cab window, mouth open in wonder like a dog. 

Earlier this year — before all this — I was on a gig where I played “New York, New York” for the first time. I should have played it years ago, but somehow this was my first. One strange twist of fate was that the bass player on the gig was an older friend, and when I was a young whippersnapper, I used to hang out at another one of his straight-ahead gigs, and I would sneak up behind him and shout out a request for “New York, New York,” and without looking up to see who was heckling, he would say, “100 bucks or no dice.” Here in the land of “Margaritaville” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” one had to have some distant threshold of pride. But now we are playing it. 

When preparing, I was struck by how angry Sinatra sounds as he’s singing it. There’s contempt in his voice, bitterness. Surely that predates our own bitterness at playing the tune. Though, to be honest, I wasn’t bitter playing it. I was just glad I got through it without embarrassing myself or steering the band astray as I chopped out rhythm guitar. To be bitter, to really resent “New York, New York,” or NY, NY, one has to experience it more. One has to live it. Perhaps that’s what Sinatra was projecting in his recorded performance of the tune, both an admission of the city’s dominance over him (the implied narrator of the song), and also the song’s eventual dominance over him (the legendary performer), and its dominance ultimately over the culture. Have a city and a song ever so perfectly embodied one another? I don’t know. It’s a hell of a lot heavier than Kansas City.