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.
All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com
The Crying of Lot QAnon
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
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
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
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.
Who’s Zoomin’ Who
Barely a week into online school and my children have done more video conferencing than I have in my entire life. Though I try not to leer in the background as they fire up another session, I can tell they’re already adept. Heck, they already know to mute their line when not talking.
At least we have the internet, I thought the other day, while staring at a bird hop blamelessly from branch to branch. That’s the first time I’ve been actively grateful for the internet in ages. I don’t feel comfortable making predictions in any direction regarding what life will be like Afterward. But since adults have complained since time immemorial that what students learned in school wasn’t directly applicable to “real life,” this sudden lurch into online shoestring interconnectivity means that the kids have rapidly surpassed even the most utilitarian parents’ wildest dreams.
Not long ago I remember a school administrator discussing typing skills. He said he felt a little sheepish teaching middle schoolers typing when they would just be speaking into their computers within a couple of years. I was shocked. Surely not. The future is great and everything, but surely the kids cannot surpass typing, my most cherished adult-level skill.
Typing is almost pure pleasure, the closest physical analogue I have to thinking itself. The only other activity that is nearly thought-adjacent might be walking. But then of course it’s difficult to type while walking, so you have to walk back to the house quickly in order to get those already fleeting thoughts down. Writing by hand is also pleasurable, to be sure, but it’s more physically difficult. And then you are left with such a mess. The almost instantaneous amalgamation of near-coherence that one gets from typing is decadently profound. Even crap drafts look good. And it’s not just the physio-mental activity itself that’s pleasurable. (Apple committed hubris when, in an effort to increase its laptops’ thinness, it introduced the butterfly keyboard, which frequently broke. It made typing — on a laptop! its primary mode of input! — more difficult.) Thinking in written language is fundamentally different than thinking in speech. I don’t want to belabor the idea that writing-thought is stronger than speaking-thought (though it is), but that these are two different skills and lead to different kinds of thought. Literature changed, of course, when the typewriter was introduced and then again when the word processor (still such an odd phrase) was introduced, and it will change yet again when our speech can be instantaneously transcribed. (Cue up ye olde anecdote about Henry James’s late period.) I don’t want to stand across the river of language and yell stop, necessarily, but I do want to recognize the private constructedness baked into the very act of writing prose, as opposed to the performative expectations built into the speech act. Perhaps it’s simply quieter, with all of the epistemological complications. Besides, people who talk aloud to themselves are rightly thought nutso.
I agree there are benefits to all this instant video chatting. My kids can see their teachers and buddies quickly and at scale. For a generation that never really made phone calls, they seem useful. Perhaps this social lacuna we’re experiencing will bring back the old-fashioned phone call, long thought outmoded, but like typing perhaps still useful. I remember phone calls in 8th grade that consisted entirely of me and my interlocutor listening to each other breathe. This was called flirting.
I was on a video chat the other day and I became distracted by the small pane filled with my face. Is this what people see of me every day? This guy with the giant forehead and pore-ridden nose? Is this how I appear? One benefit of a day without video conferencing is that I go through vast stretches of time without being confronted with the burden of my own face. That’s not to say that I’m not vain, self-conscious, peacockish when given the chance, a gaping wound of ego constantly starved for attention. It’s just that I’m a little less these things when I’m not confronted twice an hour by my own face.
We’re besotted with faces already anyway. The emotions of entire nations tip on the demeanor communicated by the national equivalent of a conference call. Speaking extemporaneously in an entertaining manner is no way to run a country. And hopefully school won’t devolve into a CNN panel discussion, the teacher just an emcee, a sheep in Wolf Blitzer’s clothing. Prose is a more efficient means of information transmission. It’s more difficult to create. (So much easier just to talk and talk and talk.) But it blesses the reader with perspective, time, and silence. And it weeds out some of the bullshitters.
I heard my son talking to a computer the other day. “Google Silver Surfer,” he said.
“Type it in!” I hollered from the other room. “Practice your spelling by typing it in!”
When I made it around the corner he looked at me like I was crazy.
Disaster Reading
The first book I read this past week, the week when the world seemed to change, was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. It was another one of those paperbacks forgotten on my shelves for years, bought somewhere along the road of bookworming life. I fully intended to read it, but unless one hops into a book immediately after purchase, the book has to ferment for a while, until the right circumstances of life obligation, mental weather, and raw will power coalesce to make the endeavor appear attractive again. And for some reason, this week was the week for Empire of the Sun.
The novel is a fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a child during WWII, his idyllic life in the international settlement of Shanghai disrupted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the settlement’s subsequent invasion by the Japanese army. After spending a couple of months scavenging through the wreckage of Shanghai, separated from his parents, Jim, the protagonist and stand-in for Ballard, is apprehended and sent to live in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, where he stayed for the next three years until the war’s end.
The book, soaked in death and deprivation and the rapid dissolution of civilization, is paradoxically a delight. Despite everything he has lost, Jim is rarely sad, rarely anxious. He is constantly resourceful and wily in his relationships with the grownups around the camp but also genuinely compassionate. He is somehow both entirely ruthless in his quest for another sweet potato and genuinely altruistic toward others. Perhaps the most morally interesting aspect of his character is how he admires the Japanese airmen, hoping to be one of them someday, and how by the end of the war he has become rather good at existing within it. He is entirely apprehensive about the end of the war because he has come to enjoy it. This echoes one of the central lessons of Tim O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried, which is that war is horrible and yet also the most exciting experience possible, so that regular civilization afterward is a nourishing boredom. Perhaps it’s because of this competitive excitement that all war literature (and especially all war film) ends up being pro-war, no matter how noble its original intentions. Anything that dramatizes war helplessly glamorizes it at the same time. In this way someone like John Updike is one of the strongest anti-war writers because of his lifelong refusal to narrate it. He refuses to grant it his attention.
I began reading the novel thinking it was a barely fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a boy, a belief that grew shakier with each subsequent paragraph. After some Googling, I learned that the novel really is much more fictionalized. Though Ballard spent time in the camp at Lunghua, he never lost his parents. This is not a small revision. It’s Jim’s orphaned status (he is reunited with his parents at the end) that is the real inciting and exciting premise of the novel. All good children’s stories begin by eliminating the parents. It’s the doorway that leads to true adventure.
This much wider fictionalized margin results in a more interesting book. It’s a novel that feels life-like. That is, it contains the almost random tugs and diversions of real life. It doesn’t communicate its architecture or themes overtly. It’s much more rangy than the movie version. Naturally, one might say, since most movie versions are much more structurally clearer than their novel source material. But still, for a novel it feels looser, almost journal like. There are even parts that are plainly dull, where the sense of adventure fades, where the plot, such as it is, circles back on itself. The reunion with his parents, his one goal throughout the novel, one which seems more and more unlikely, is oddly anticlimactic; they don’t appear on stage to do anything at the end. The plot satisfaction that their return might deliver is obscured by Jim commanding his old chauffeur, now re-employed, to drive him out to Lunghua one last time. The most convenient narrative tying up of loose ends is Jim’s quick reunion with Dr. Ransome. Ransome had been his chief mentor in the camp, in competition with Basie, the amoral and interestingly effeminate trickster figure who first takes Jim under his powdered wing near the funeral docks of Nantao. Their quick reunion, as Jim returns to the camp after wandering around the outskirts of Shanghai prior to the full arrival of American troops, is the most conspicuously convenient portion of the narrative. But even this is not given the full strings treatment. Paradoxically, where the plot would seem to yearn for Spielbergian rushes of music, Ballard draws back, skates on, moves to more interesting territory. It’s a strikingly unsentimental novel.
Yes, yes, yes, but why now? Why this week, a week in which I have been unable to concentrate on anything more fully formed than the latest disaster headlines and the accumulating vapor of my own anxiety? Why read this novel now and read it with a sustained attention I’m rarely able to summon for anything else?
Do I think our current situation and the outbreak of WWII in the Pacific are comparable? No, I don’t. And I think that’s in part why the novel was so alluring. It’s an escapism into the pure Known. All of the disaster that Jim witnesses and experiences is so visible, so easily comprehensible. Hunger, the loss of one’s parents, the constant threat of death by hostile forces — all terrible, but here, in this book, it makes sense. Whereas current American life does not make sense. We are living through an absence of sense, of concrete detail, of a stable narrative or narrator. We are in the land of as if. We are in a gap space of waiting to see what might happen, or at least at what scale events might happen, how bad it might get. And that unknown void is filled by the imagination (or, at least, by my imagination), and the result is horrifying. Each morning I awake and experience an ever shortening splinter of time where I am unaware of our new unreality. And then I remember. And then in the time it takes me to rouse myself and do some proactive domestic chore, I imagine all the horrible events that might happen: who might go to the hospital, who might die, how long this island-like life might last, what epoch-like economic tumult might transpire, what unvisited tributaries of calamity exist downstream. The mind is a terrible weapon. Anxiety is a kind of auto-immune disorder of the imagination. The ability to envision what might happen is mercilessly accelerated, so that one is paralyzed by all the proliferating mental possibilities. In fact, so much of my life doesn’t happen, because I am terrified of what might happen. I spend my days swinging between feeling utterly ridiculous and utterly terrified. In between I wash my hands.
Notes on ‘Moonglow’
I’m happy to report that I have a review of Michael Chabon’s latest novel Moonglow in the inaugural issue of the Hoxie Gorge Review.
The review is the result of a friend recommending the novel to me. Somehow I had gotten into my 40s without actually ever reading Michael Chabon, despite his work being semi-ubiquitous. For a short period, it was almost a kind of literary cultural truancy to have not read any Wallace, Franzen, Lethem, and Whitehead.* (Rough guess: this moment perhaps ran from around 1996 until 2008.) But now I’ve finally broken the seal. Here are some leftover notes.
I was intrigued by how WWII and the Holocaust were used as a device in this novel. I have another friend in a book group and it seems that all of their novels have something to do with WWII and the Holocaust. That is, the novels rely on WWII in some large expositional way. The books get their narrative or moral momentum somehow from the war, even if the books aren’t otherwise about that historical event or time period. I am of course generalizing massively and will shirk the duty to cite actual books here. (This is just a general feeling, dig?) Sometimes I have the snarky half-thought: It would be interesting to read a contemporary American novel that didn’t use WWII as a source of exposition.
Freud and WWII: one could argue that these are the hidden engines in the postwar, American novel, the first as an explication for any character’s motivations, and the second as history’s Big Bang: the atrocity from which all characters and family histories spring. I am exaggerating, naturally. I fully well realize that WWII was a cataclysmic historical event; I am not trying to diminish its actual historical importance. But the way it is used as an Allen wrench of explanation in so many contemporary novels is astonishing. It steadily drives past the main street of historical dutifulness and enters the suburb of helpless reflex. It begins to feel like a curse of contemporary narrative — a hex key indeed.
Regarding the overwhelming narrative legacy of Freud, see contemporary children’s movies. No one character is ever intrinsically a jerk. They are a jerk as the result of some childhood trauma. It’s a device that’s used jokingly but taken seriously, perhaps the most dangerous type of device because it means that screenwriters — if that’s who we could pin this on — believe in it. Humorous use of backstory is recognized as a device, hence the jokiness, but it’s still routinely, desperately deployed, as if it’s the only explanation for why people misbehave. Turns out Iago was once left out of dodgeball. Furthermore, these explanatory backstories often become movie sequels themselves. It’s a kind of narrative cancer, these endlessly replicating tentpole explanations. Stories never finish. Nothing is ever whole. Each new movie simply a software update.
The surprise in Moonglow is that the grandmother is not simply a Holocaust survivor but someone who appropriated the biography of a Holocaust survivor. The grandmother is a grand trickster figure. She tells the young Michael stories while shuffling a deck of tarot cards — grandmother as fortune teller/author.
While I had my quibbles, I definitely think this is an interesting use of WWII/the Holocaust. It’s certainly not invoked one-dimensionally, though, to be sure, the scenes where the grandfather is in the battlefield strike me as the most generically filmish. They remind me too much of Wes Anderson. The details seem chosen too much for their innate quirkiness. (For example, as the grandfather makes his way through post–D-Day invasion France, he’s attacked by a man with a bow and arrow. And the preacher who provides him shelter just happens to share all of the grandfather’s non-invasion related astronomical interests, etc.) All the details seem cute in an overly symmetrical way. Rather than existing as artifacts from the world of these characters, the details seem chosen to alleviate some inner need for alignment within the mind of the creator. I realize this can be a legitimate artistic mode, but it tends to leave me cold and it seems to suffocate the possibility of actual drama. Perhaps my disagreements with Chabon’s choices for the WWII bits are a consequence of simply having seen too many films and TV shows about war, so that unless I am confronted by a raging hellscape of verisimilitude, I don’t really believe any of it. Or perhaps this narrative trail is just so well worn that it’s hard to make the sites look interesting again.
In a way Chabon’s use of WWII is a recognition that the war functions as a narrative trope. There is a John Barthian or perhaps Paul Austerian black hole in the center of the novel: the grandmother is not a clean embodiment of 20th-century horrors but a kind of narrative mirage. Part of my beef with the novel is that the narrator’s discovery of this mirage doesn’t seem to have any consequence, so as a reader I am uncertain what to make of it. Is it one of those self-referential gestures who’s central point seems to be It’s all make believe! or Isn’t make believe wonderful? or Aren’t we all tremendously silly for believing such a thing as this very novel?! I have always hated gestures like this — not self-referential moves in and of themselves but moves that seem to exist for the primary purpose of calling attention to themselves.
For me of course the ur-text of self-referentiality is “Duck Amuck,” the cartoon where Daffy Duck argues with and is tormented by his creator, who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. The cartoon starts as a joke, turns into a riddle, and ends in a black hole. The joke is that Daffy has beef with his creator. The illustrator is a cruel master preventing Daffy from doing his show. The fundamental revelation of any kind of self-referential move within a narrative is to remind the audience that all of this is chosen, placed, controlled and not in any way natural. The riddle is the revelation at the end of the cartoon that Bugs Bunny is the illustrator — the master of Daffy. This makes a kind of cosmic sense, since Bugs is the central trickster character in the Looney Tunes cartoons and slyly controls all of the other sub characters, who are always made into fools because they think they can control their own destinies. The black hole part is the infinite mirror reflection inherent in the idea that all of the animated characters are the projection/illustration/creation of another animated character, that the entire series is occurring within Bugs’s mind or as the result of Bugs’s controlling, artistic will. But then, who has created Bugs? Who is the illustrator’s illustrator? Once you have peered downward there is no end to this spiral staircase.
I realize that I have strayed a bit too far into bong-logic turf now, but such is the consequence of self-referentiality within any kind narrative art. To this artistic impetus, one wants to say, we get it. It’s make believe. We accept the premise that this is all happening in a book (or a movie or up on a stage or in a painting). We understand the invisible handshake inside the transaction. Repeatedly underlining this point, no matter how eloquently, will only grow tiresome. (See, e.g., the endings of most Nabokov novels).
In Chabon’s defense, Moonglow doesn’t go Full Referential. But it’s far from straight mimetic realism. For that I am grateful, and it’s that middle-distance aesthetic ambiguity on this self-awareness spectrum that has stayed with me the longest and has given me the most to think about afterward. Now on with the show.
*Full disclosure: I regret to say I still have not read any Whitehead.
Heat Passes
It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity, Mary Karr jokes in The Liar’s Club. This cleverly updates the commonplace trope uttered by myself, uttered by everyone, here in this godforsaken hellscape of the modern South. It’s the heat and the humidity and the stupidity. I’m writing this on October 1, where the high temperature in Jackson is forecast to be 97 degrees. The humidity has slackened somewhat over the past couple of days so that it it’s not as face-punchingly hot as it has been, but it’s still terrible: no rain, no wind, a Lynchian stillness, a kind of weather paralysis that lasts way past sunset. Even the bugs are too stoned by the heat to make much racket. The only sound is the intermittent industrial donkey kick of compressors. It feels like a kind of plague — a heat that passeth all understanding.
The internet is for complaining and here I am complaining about the weather.
Life circumstances put me in the Midwest last weekly for a brief 24 hours, and it was blissful: 73 degrees with low humidity and a breeze. Though my meager anecdotal memory is no significance in light of the statistical evidence and projections for climate change — or what we called in my childhood global warming, which was never considered a hoax — it does seem hotter now here in my homeland as a middle-aged adult. When I was growing up, summer was of course a brutal slog, but there were regular afternoon thunderstorms. The humidity went somewhere, was up to something. The heavy clouds rolled in every afternoon, a cumulative resentment, and waited until about three o’clock to enact their revenge upon the morning. A dry August was a rarity. But now it’s a regular occurrence, and the pestilence drags on through September, half of October. It’s a song that never ends until, perhaps, November. What this means for future inhabitation in the ArkLaMiss is a question for people smarter than I. I know all the azaleas and hydrangeas and Japanese maples are going to die. The prospect of a well-watered lawn will become that much more extravagant. Perhaps it will turn to desert. In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin talks about the wisteria vine outside Miss Coldfield’s house blooming for the second time that summer. But now nothing blooms for the second time. It just hangs on, wilted, desperate for a little axial tilt.
Meanwhile the interiors of the buildings hum along at 72 degrees. It’s a class distinction universally applicable throughout the South that the more prestigious and wealthy a building and its inhabitants, the more intensely cold the air conditioning will be inside. This is always most conspicuous on college campuses, where the business schools Yeti out in their super modern digs while the English departments grow mold from all that trapped wet heat. They’re always the buildings slated for renovation one day. (Separate but related: At one school the English classes were held in rooms where the acoustical ceiling tile hung bulbous and stained, allegedly supporting decades of guano. In another, the science departments were literally underground, kept out of sight like a weirdo uncle.) I am of course grateful for air conditioning, but I still keep a sweater handy year-round.
I keep thinking I will adapt, that I won’t walk outside and panic at the level of heat, and scuttle quickly to my car, moving from one industrial oasis to another. But each year I must work through my shock, collar strangers at the post office, try to talk out my anxiety. Some intensely serious daily heat we’re having out there, huh? It seems like as one enters middle age, one should be less concerned with the weather, not more. And yet I’ve got three weather apps on my phone, and I’m eyeing a fourth. I keep thinking I should get one of those special radios. Don’t even get me started on tornadoes, which at this point in the distended summer would offer a welcome breeze at least. Even without the apocalyptic premonitions of global warming, I am a weather worrier. What will the next change be, and for how long, and should I have cleared out the gutters more thoroughly? But here, now, instead, in the roadkill days of summer, the lack of change is its own kind of terror, a kind of heat feedback, an overhead hair dryer from hell. It feels trivial to discuss yet there it is, everywhere and always.
Notes on Didion’s Notes
There is a genre of writing one might label “Sneering at the South.” A Charles Simic essay, first published in The New York Review of Books years ago, is exemplary. A writer who is from and lives elsewhere visits the South, rides around for a few days, writes down what he or she sees. Typically, they see a lot, but it’s a kind of invisible sight. There is precious little activity, but within the lethargy there is the amber-frozen freak show of the South, site of moral decrepitude, site of the country’s sins, left to fester and skew, where Puritan religious signage grows like weeds and the self-rationalizing monologues function as a kind of witnessing. The narrator of this journey is a quietly appalled reporter. The underlying rhetorical question is, “Can you believe this place?”
Joan Didion’s book South and West is one such book, though it’s an odd book to be sure, not really a book qua book, but an agglomeration of notes. The first section of 107 pages contains notes she made during a visit to the South with her husband in the summer of 1970. She thought that it would lead to something, but it never did (except this incidental volume). The second, much shorter (and much less interesting) section is about California and the environment surrounding the Patty Hearst trial. (This second section is less interesting mainly because there isn’t enough of it.) In other words, it’s a non-book book, or the kind of book that only famous writers with long distinguished careers get to publish — a book of scraps.
But these are quite interesting scraps. Previously, in my younger years, I was awfully defensive whenever one of these sneering at the South pieces arrived. I was put out for years — years — over that Simic piece. Don’t even get him started. But either I’ve mellowed or the Didion scraps are really that good, because I found myself genuinely enjoying her notes. Does she say anything particularly new about the South? Not really. She hits all the points that everyone else seems to hit — the relentless heat, the seeming absence of anything to do, the hair, the sports, the weird voodoo billboard religion. She captures the post-integration mindset of the white middle class in a couple of wonderful monologues, where she just lets people go on and on.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
“He had the smooth, rounded face of well-off New Orleans, that absence of angularity which characterizes the local genetic pool.”
“It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken.”
“Before the doctor came in a nurse took my history, and she seemed not to believe a word I said. While I waited in my white smock I began to see it through her eyes: A woman walks into a clinic, a stranger to Meridian. She has long straight hair, which is not seen in the South among respectable women past the age of fourteen, and she complains of an injured rib. She gives her address as Los Angeles, but says the rib was injured in a hotel room in New Orleans. She says she is just ‘travelling through’ Meridian. This is not a story to inspire confidence, and I knew it as I told it, which made meeting her eyes difficult.”
“In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”
“We had drinks, and after a while we took our drinks, our road glasses, and went for a drive through town. Mrs. Evans had grown up in Grenada, had been married once before, and now she and her second husband — who was from Tupelo — lived in her mother’s old house. ‘Look at all those people standing around in front of that motel,’ she said once on the drive. ‘That’s a cathouse,’ her husband told her. We went out to a lake, and then to dinner at the Holiday Inn, this being another of those towns where the Holiday Inn was the best place to eat. We brought our drinks and a bottle in with us, because there was no liquor served, only setups. I am unsure whether the bottle was legal. The legality or illegality of liquor in the South seems a complication to outsiders, but is scarcely considered by the residents. At dinner some people were watching us, and later came over to say hello to the Evanses. They introduced us as friends from California. ‘We were wondering where you were from,’ one of them said.”
“We stopped at Walker Percy’s in Covington, Louisiana. We sat out in back by the bayou and drank gin and tonics and when a light rain began to fall, a kind of mist, Walker never paid any mind but just kept talking, and walking up to the house to get fresh drinks. It was a thunderstorm, with odd light, and there were occasional water-skiers on the black bayou water. ‘The South,’ he said, ‘owes a debt to the North . . . tore the Union apart once . . . and now only the South can save the North.’ He said he had not wanted to see us in New Orleans, at Ben C.’s, because at Ben C.’s he was always saying things he would not ordinarily say, playing a role. [Ben C. is the well-off New Orleanian of the first quotation above. — ed.] Greenville, he said, was a different kind of town. He had spent some time in Los Angeles once but could not face it. ‘It was the weather,’ his wife said mildly. ‘The weather was bad.’ ‘It wasn’t the weather,’ he said, and he knew exactly what it was.”
She begins in New Orleans, meanders around the Mississippi Gulf Coast, wanders up to Birmingham, back tracks through Mississippi and the Delta. There is no plot, no argument, no newsworthy event. There are merely small towns passed, observations collected, strings too short to use. These really are notes. Perhaps my appreciation grows out of a change within me. Perhaps I agree with these sneering at the South pieces more than I did when I was fresh out of college. Or perhaps rather than full on agreement, the observations serve as thrilling little whippit blasts of confirmation. Particularly here, the condescension inherent in the sneering pieces is subdued. She’s not overtly judging. She is just glamorously, serenely observing. One can almost see the expensive sunglasses.
Perhaps it’s the laconic precision of her prose. One wonders if Didion, as a person, was a difficult travel companion — astringent, hyper-particular, compulsively judgmental when confronted with the flux of travel — because her prose, conversely, is so precise and controlled and chilled. There is a moment when she puts her clothes in at a laundromat and goes to buy a cup of ice, and as she chews on the ice walking back, I thought: this is the perfect metaphor for Didion’s prose. It hurts your teeth, but it’s oddly refreshing.
Even though she’s describing the atmosphere from the summer of 1970 — almost fifty years gone now! — much of what she observes would still be accurate. James Fallows has a series of articles in The Atlantic that talk about industry finally coming to Mississippi, a topic many of Didion’s interlocutors go on and on about. Things are always on the verge of getting drastically better. Another evergreen topic is a strange defensiveness about being from and/or living in Mississippi (not that I myself would ever participate in this defensiveness, heavens). One wonders how much has really changed, aside from the obvious — the internet and slight political progress. Reading this book often makes present southern reality feel not historically distant but more like Back to the Future II. It contains the same plot and the majority of the same actors but the costumes are slightly different. The shoes now lace themselves but the same old complexities remain.