To feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

I read this at a time when my routines are ruptured, and I want to smash the systems within which I've been forced to live. I read this at a time when I am seriously considering what it means to opt out, or to start over. What's the difference between the fevered lifeless zombies infected in pandemic proportions and the zombies we are in our late-capitalist lives, our daily commutes, our pointless jobs?

Severance, by Ling Ma, is a post-apocalyptic road trip, office culture commentary, and immigrant story rolled into one, with some romance thrown in for good measure. It's also a takedown of the bullshit economy. It's about following your passion and barebones survival. It's everything a good pandemic should be.

The victims of the fungal infection have lizard brain function only, without consciousness, such that years of muscle memory reproduce the same old actions — loading the dishwasher, driving the bus route, folding and stacking sweaters at the shop — until the flesh falls off their bones. Candace finally leaves an abandoned, crumbling New York City and joins a community of survivors heading toward Chicago. They raid homes and shops; they survive. But the zombies are mostly harmless; it's just that the civilization we've built doesn't quite fully function without their active participation.

Severance is thus also a meditation on routine — and the beauty of its banality. How can you tell between those on autopilot, and those who stick to routine on principle, for its structure and purpose?

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

The word "severance" occurs four times in the novel: three times regarding payout upon termination of employment, and once in relation to the narrator's father. "It was only after having officialized his severance from China that he felt free to speak openly of his life there." It's only once you're removed from a situation that you can see it clearly.

Before the fever grips the world, Candace's boyfriend Jonathan, an aspiring writer, chooses to opt out, leave the city. Candace chooses to stay, to play the game, because she sees money as freedom. Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street movement takes hold.

She keeps the office running for a while, until she realizes that her role is not vital. She uses her new-found time within the structure of her office day to document the pandemic on her once-defunct photography blog.

We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn't go to brunch instead. [...]

Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful sided pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn't get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.

Once the city is empty, again Candace opts out, but only because what else is there to do. When the survivor community shows signs of rupture, she opts out of that too, driving off alone, connecting to her past and believing in her future.

This novel predates our real-life Covid pandemic and the Great Resignation. It imagines how an airborne infection might disrupt society, even when it's a gig economy and a workforce primed for quiet quitting.

I am profoundly struck by the need felt by writers (and other artists) to document, whether it be their own lives, our natural world, or our social structure, whether the minutiae or the big ideas. I am coming to see writing as curation and commentary more so than creative work. Han Kang's garden journal. From Renata Adler's Speedboat to Ed Park's memoir. The story is incidental. The story is in our bearing witness.

I remember Occupy Wall Street. It was born out of a simple call for protest published in a Canadian(!) anti-capitalist magazine in February 2011, but it was never called out as foreign interference. We, the 99%, are everywhere. But what did it accomplish? Is it even history?

This month a Russian lab technician died of pneumonic plague. Ebola has spread beyond the Democratic Republic of Congo to Kenya.

Last week it was announced that the death sentence of the man who killed thirteen people at a Texas military base would be carried out by firing squad(!) and would be publicly livestreamed. The broadcast has since been canceled, but I want the future to know that this happened. Protests initiated by Paris students over underfunded schools have spread across France; more than half a million people are demonstrating about the cost of living. A cyberattack targeted supermarket refrigeration units in France, causing mass spoilage. A robot controlled by two young men sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl. Yesterday a Montreal police officer was suspended for urinating on homeless people.

What the hell are we working toward? We need another call, for world revolution. 

Excerpts 
Prologue 
Chapter 1 
Chapter 17 

Sometimes you just need nothing

She looked the way I'd always imagined women were supposed to look. At peace. Relaxed. A part of nature, like a stone or a stream.

The Lamb, by Lucy Rose, is a horror-filled coming-of-age story. It's not a spoiler to say adolescent Margot and her mother Ruth feed on the strangers who lose their way in the woods and come knocking on their door. (The details are gruesome.) One stranger makes an impression; Eden stays and infiltrates their very way of being. 

Told from Margot's perspective, it is revealed that they do not live in total isolation. Margot goes to school. The school bus stops outside of their house. But Margot is not well socialized. Her mother admonishes her to keep a low profile. Also, the household is provisioned, does not rely solely on what can be foraged in the woods. These particulars call into question why such a lifestyle would be undertaken and how it would be maintained; but somehow I bought into it and came to see how the story is an extreme if unrealistic manifestation of underlying trauma.

Ironically, once the "action" begins in the last quarter of the book, the story drags, but on the whole this was an original and engaging read.

"I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. You can have too much nice food and too much good music. Sometimes you just need nothing."

Housekeeping

I'm listing here some of the blogs I have previously sidebarred but that appear to be no longer active. Because I don't want to completely erase them, I have a fondness for many of them, and there they still are in the ether, occasionally still inspiring the direction of my reading and writing.

Asylum 
Bookpuddle 
Caravana de recuerdos 
Maud Newton (moved to Substack, but not so recently active) 
MobyLives (still out there, man, but evolved into a more polished marketing vehicle with a slightly different flavour) 
(Oh, TypePad blogs are no longer.)
Pages Turned 
Pechorin's Journal 
Robert Pinsky Poetry Forum (a beast of a different nature that possibly never belonged here) 
Tony's Book World    
Waggish  

I loved you all. I'm delighted to find others still active. You used to be my every morning.

As if it was something slightly separate from yourself

He realises that the things that are so important to him — the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again — they just aren't important here.

Those things have no reality here. 

That's what it feels like.

So it makes you feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside you, when they seem to have no reality here.

The more I heard about this book, the less interested I was in reading it. But then one day my library hold came in and I couldn't put it down.

Flesh, by David Szalay, is a strangely compelling novel about a man with little agency and almost no interiority. He is not particularly likable, but the novel makes the case that he is deserving of sympathy. István is certainly a victim of circumstance, the consequences of which he never processes. But surely it's on him that he fails to achieve any self-awareness, that he fails to value the potential outcome or even the effort of looking inward. Surely he fails to take meaningful decisions or active responsibility for virtually any aspect of his life. 

As a teenager, István is groomed by an older (married) woman in the apartment complex where he lives with his mother. She kisses him, and days later he remembers it differently, he recalls that they kissed, and when he sees her again he believes that he had kissed her.

He is forever unformed, malleable flesh. His mind, his soul if he has one, is unknown to us. Momentarily I believe he is withholding his opinions, either to preserve himself from the judgment of others or because others aren't worthy of hearing them, but ultimately he seems to hold no opinions whatsoever. It's never clear whether he cares. About anything.

A girl at the bar tells him, "Don't pretend to be a nice person." Not that she has much basis for this reading of his character; maybe it's a default expectation, maybe the men, the boys, who work there typically aren't nice. Maybe she believes that all men pretend. "He said you exemplify a primitive form of masculinity." I wonder, perhaps all men are actually like this.

He has this feeling, with women, that it's hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn't feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake. There's often this feeling of — Yes, I like you, but I like other people as well. It's not even that I like them more. It's just that I don't like them less. So to be with any one person feels like an arbitrary feeling has started to undermine any lingering sense that there might be a particular person that he's somehow meant to be with.

Is this an indictment of men or a formal apology of masculinity? Perhaps István should be viewed as a role model. He allows himself to be buffeted by fate. It is both admirably zen and infuriatingly docile. 

He spends a lot of the evening thinking about it.

And also about his own life at that age, or slightly older.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen.

About the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.

At that time even his dreams were about his own physicality, about his physical body and what was happening to it. He remembers dreaming of these black things like fat stalks of graphite erupting from the centre of his chest at about the time that the first fine hairs appeared there, remembers waking up afraid and disgusted.

And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you're left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you're having are universal or entirely specific to you.

Perhaps it's at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants. Although actually at first there seems to be no reason to deny it what it wants, whenever it wants it. 

A sort of equipoise of contradictions

And so, a year and change later, on a particularly damp night in May, I was slumped on the the living room couch, where I typically landed when I found myself working too long. Whenever I had kept the bass thumping for hours, with the analog graphics dancing across the screen eventually looking like nothing a but a bundle of jerking, tousled striations, like a lie-detector needle gone wild — that's when I'd drop down there to rest. Sinking into its leathery depths, which comfortably embraced the whole of my body, felt like connecting to a brain-clearing machine; I got a soft calming sensation that let me review the fruits of that day's work, then joyfully, even impatiently, greet the prospect of doing it all over again upon waking the next day. 

But this time, I was there to temper palpitations brought on by too much coke. 

— from Superstars, by Ann Scott.

Sometimes I wonder about the '90s. That decade coincides with my 20s. I drank a lot. Although many of those years are a blur, I didn't quite achieve the carefree abandon I strove for. I lived alone and asserted my independence (until I met a man and settled down, and didn't). I started to travel (until I met a man, and didn't). I had a government job, until I quit because I thought I could do something more interesting, like I deserved something less soul-sucking.

I sidestepped the grunge scene. Instead, I explored my roots and listened to Polish crooners. I explored the world and listened to fado, ranchera, gypsy, klezmer. I explored inwards and listened to Leonard Cohen and Carlos Gardel. I sidestepped the Spice Girls too. Occasionally, we smoked pot.

I went to just one bonafide rave (it was early days still, was it even actually 1990 yet?), boarding a bus to a secret warehouse location. But house parties with DJs (acid house parties?). And somehow, I knew what clubs to go to. (Even in Lisbon, in Paris, somehow I knew what clubs to go to.) And still, I went to shows: from Psychic TV (1990) to FM Einheit (1998). 

At decade's end, I was working in advertising. We drank martinis in lounges and listened to Moby. It would be another 20 years before I tried MDMA.

I feel like there was another 90s, a secret 90s, a bigger, fuller, sexier 90s, I caught glimpses of it through the grunge, but I didn't give the right password, I couldn't find the right door.

Maybe now, the 2020s, maybe this is my rave era. The books and the movies. I want to rave in sunlight on THC. I want to rave with Harry Styles (DJs don't dance no more, they sit) and with Bjork during an eclipse.

Superstars, by Ann Scott, (published in French in 2000,) recounts the rave days of turn-of-the-century Paris through the eyes of a 30-ish-year-old electronic DJ, who sometimes regrets having set aside her rock-and-roll bass-guitar days and the boyfriend around which they revolved for a queerer lifestyle. It's a litany of unoriginal bad girl behaviour. (It came as no surprise to learn that Ann Scott once shared an apartment with Virginie Despentes.) 

A shattering burst of Aphex Twin's laughter exploded once, twice, and then abruptly dropped out, catching everyone by surprise, a tremendous surge of percussion, with a single cry rising from the crowd, the sudden realization that this was going to kill. The strobes came back, accelerating the movements all around me, instantly altering my perception of how far I was from everyone else. My feet were keeping time, my head following the sound. Loops overlapped, unfolded, weaved all kinds of structures, infinite trails, and my brain wanted follow them all, one after the other. One second the accent was up, and the next the accent was down. The inversions jolted me, twisted me around, brought me back up. On giant screens, spirals morphed to match the sonic whirlwind. I looked at my undulating hands as they opened and closed. My arms were now extensions of the rest of my body, first up and then down and then up again, whipping like cables, and my eager eyes were soaking it all in. Everything around me seemed a little clearer, a little more dazzling. Twinkling eyebrow rings, nose rings, earrings, beads of sweat on foreheads, water drops from drinks pearling on chins, gazing deeply, unbridled, into all their faces. All ecstatic to be there, in this strange place that they'd invaded for one night only. All transported by the magic of Total Music, by the lights and the crowd,

There's a lot of drugs. There's a record deal advance, so even more drugs, and other financial irresponsibilities. A lot of petty jealousies and emotional immaturity, all heightened no doubt because of the lack of sleep, and all the drugs. The characters spend more time anticipating the raving and enduring the aftermath of raving than actually raving (maybe this is how it is in real life). It's mostly chaos and self-destruction.

It took me a long time to find the rhythm of this book, to care what happened, to get past the unlikeable narrator. I was well past the halfway point when I gave myself over to it — like when you're dragged to a party with no way home, just have a drink and enjoy the music (of which there was very little). Although the narrator, surprisingly, demonstrated some emotional growth, the end could not come quickly enough for me. Superstars documents a precise moment in space-time with a particular drug-fuelled energy, but it's not stellar prose. 

(Ann Scott in interview sounds set in her ways, with some archaic views on sexual consent, and definite opinions about the boring state of literature in France. Millennials aren't writing books, she says. Maybe it's true. However, literary experimentation is dead thanks to capitalism, she says — this I believe.)

Behind, above, around: enormous now, the supremacies of sound had risen up, giant machines, bigger than a person, that shot thunder through to his insides. He looked up, nodded, and felt like an idea borne of the boom-boom-boom of the beat. And the immense boom-boom said: one one one —

and one and one and —

one one one —

and —

cool cool cool cool cool...

He saw Hardy and Leksie, faces and eyes, hurtles, scrambled, shoved, shaken in the midst of the rhythm. Saw broken and blessed, trusting and tender, myriad signs, quick, terse, plain, each blotted out by the next in waves of sympathy. He looked and danced and saw beauty.

From the margins came legs and light, feet, flashes, paces and bass, surfaces and murmurs, equivalencies and functions of a higher mathematics.

He himself was the music.

Then there was a quick cascade of steps, almost tumbling, somehow, from within the  rhythms and sounds.

A cascade of nouns,

pertaining to the curtailment and velocity of thoughts correlated to music, with that feeling of contrary facets in aggregate, with the total mental perspective in this moment of simultaneity and the solace of the automaticity of internal processes.

In this direction there would —

A sort of equipoise of contradictions, which without —

And overwrought —

So time, processes, remained intact then. And the conceptual union of opposites: like how before the creation of the world, the so-called spirit of God...

But that, alas, is unthinkable.

And he saw that it was good.

— from Rave, by Rainald Goetz. 

In contrast, Rave, by Rainald Goetz, (published in German in 1998,) feels like drugs. Not in a "can't put it down" way. Goetz's prose magically mimics the experience of being on drugs. It is not always a pleasant experience, it is often confusing and overwhelming, an overstimulating barrage of words that are simultaneously noise and texture and philosophy. Time passes and stands still. It's a testament to his craft, I would stop midsentence, midparagraph, and let it roll over me, I would roll in it, I was rolling, in awe.

Rave was exhausting and beautiful, but possibly pointless. Interestingly, I found there to be more familiar cultural markers in Goetz's German setting than Scott's French one. Rave's narrator is self-reflective and philosophical, aware of the context he finds himself in, alert to the cultural moment.

The difficulty was a fundamental one: how would a text about our lives have to sound? I had a sort of inkling of sound inside me, a bodily sensation that writing had to articulate.

a kind of: Ave —

[...]

You couldn't get the text by just starting with the meaning, it had to be conceived differently, through prayer, through the endless iterative pronunciation of the words with the mouth, becoming as it were part of the words oneself by speaking.

The language is playful; situations are funny, and how the drug-addled mind processes them is funny. The critique of Kraftwerk's stage presence is funny. This review indicates layers of sonic references and suggests why a reunified Germany might be ripe for this musical subculture. "The others were dancing their acid-truth-dance on the alp."

Rave excerpt. 

Reckless as it might have been, at the same time this experience was yearning to understand itself. And yet wanting at the same moment to forget itself again, to destroy understanding, to have some new experience reveal that understanding to be nonsense invalidated through novelty, tumult, coolness.

I approached both of these works more as artefacts than as entertainment. Part of me hoped for some insight into the what life looked like for a handful of acquaintances and peers who hail from Western Europe. (How mainstream was rave culture? Do I gravitate toward hedonists?) Mostly, these novels have confirmed the rave experience as something distant and foreign and not nearly as cool as it ought to be.

Below, the men sit and smoke. Above, the young women stand there with their faces.

Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline

On days of heavy snowfall, I used to extend my coat sleeve to watch the flakes settle on the fluff on its dark fabric and dissolve. It make me dizzy to consider the innumerable combinations of coruscating hexagonal crystals like the ones I'd seen in the book that made up each grain of snow. For days after, I had woken from sleep and, while my eyes remained closed, imagined it was still snowing outside. I had seen snow drift down around me indoors while I lay sprawled on the floor, working on some tedious holiday assignment. Flakes landing on my hand, from which I'd just removed a hangnail. Flakes landing on the loose hairs and eraser dust strewn across the floor.

The strangest thing, snow, I recall Inseon saying. Had she been picturing scenes similar to the ones I'd imagined? How does something like that fall from the sky? she's said, eyes directed not at me but at the window, as though she were quietly disputing someone outside, someone invisible. As though she found it difficult to accept its beauty.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, is a haunting novel, lyrical, dreamlike. Lulled by its beauty, I was blindsided by its grimness. Nightmare-like.

The novel centres on events concerning the inhabitants of Jeju Island and the massacres beginning in April 1948 and continuing through 1949. the military hunted and killed residents, including children and infants. The ruling government body at the time? The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), and then Syngman Rhee elected as the first president of the Republic of Korea (having previously served as president of the Korean Provisional Government, until he was impeached; see Ed Park's Same Bed, Different Dreams), who escalated the eradication of "rebel forces." 

On days when American reconnaissance planes dropped a blizzard of propaganda leaflets, leaflets that said anyone who turned themself in wouldn't be punished, my aunt would whisper to my mom that he might give himself up after reading the message. That since he was slight and looked younger than his age, he probably wouldn't be shot on his way down from the woods. 

This story is another chapter in the seemingly eternal battle between the hero Americans and the godless commie Russians (as the story has been framed for us westerners). I am stunned that the reviews are not directly addressing the subject matter of this novel and recognizing it as an indictment of American hegemony and interventionist politics.

She would recount what my father had told her about the torture he's endured at thte alcohol factory. How a man in a miltary uniform with no insignia who spoke the northern dialect had treated him. What the man said each time he stripped my father and tied him upside down to a chair. 

We'll slaughter every last one of you commie sons of bitches, wipe you clean off the face of the earth. We'll stamp the life out of you rats if there's even a drop of red in you.

Some estimates of the dead on Jeju number as high as 80,000. 

It's no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer. The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that's what it took to stop their communization.

It wasn't until 2003 that the South Korean government issued an apology, and 2019 that the police forces and defense ministry acknowledged their role. The United States government has been called to apologize for its role in the incident, but has yet to do so.

In the four years between the first time I had the dream and that early summer morning, I had parted ways with several people in my life. Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I'd fought the latter with everything I had. If, as various ancient faiths say, there exists in a celestial realm or a netherworld an immense mirror that observes and logs everyone's movements, I'm sure the last three to four years of my life as recorded there must resemble a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife's edge. A body desiring to live. A body pricked and nicked. A body spurning, embracing, clinging. A body kneeling. A body entreating. A body seeping blood or pus or tears.

I take the title to mean the dead never leave us, history haunts us, our family haunts us. Even the pet bird leaves traces. We are mired in the lives of the dead.

There's a great deal of ambiguity regarding the present day circumstances of the novel. Is the narrator's journey to Jeju real? Does she die in the snow? Is all of it a dream? How does her friend materialize here, she is in a hospital in Seoul, has she crossed to another realm? Is the bird resurrected?

Kang's descriptions of snow are otherworldly. I wish I'd read this a couple of months ago when we were still blanketed in white instead of during the spring rains. The snow here also serves many literary purposes: it hides and protects, it numbs, it purifies, it preserves.

Yes, this is a powerful book, with cinematic prose and highly metaphorical imagery. But honestly, can we just express some outrage about the fucking atrocity, and how the fucking United States persists in interfering: Haiti, Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and literally dozens of other countries to varying degrees. Could they just fucking stop?!

Each time I am lured into sleep like I'm being pulled toward a warm light, I force my eyes open with my hands. I can't tell if it's drowsiness or the thin layer of ice over my lashes that is keeping them sealed.

Faces appear to me in my fading consciousness. Not the faces of dead strangers but of people who are living, albeit far away on the mainland. They are exhilaratingly clear. Vivid memories play out before me. In no particular order, and without context. Like a thousand dancers spilling onto the stage at once to each perform a different movement. Their bodies, suspended in their poses, shimmer like crystals. 

I don't know if this is what happens right before you die. Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts anymore. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How this is possible, I can't say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.

Excerpt: Crystals

A density of sentences

Anyway, routine returns.

Every day I read one book of poetry and one novel to be recharged by a density of sentences. I stretch and strength-train and walk for two hours a day so I can sit at my desk again for long periods of time.

Light and Thread, by Han Kang, is a short book of nonfiction that includes her Nobel lecture, as well as poems, images, reflections, and journal entries — meditations on writing, on living while writing, or not writing. (The spareness of it calls to mind The White Book.) 

For someone familiar with Kang's novels, these snippets speak to how she fully embodies her writing: she researches deeply, thinks deeply, feels deeply. 

My favourite section is "North-Facing Garden," in which Kang describes her plot of land, and the subsequent journal documenting her struggle with to plant up and maintain a garden 180 centimetres long by 40 centimetres wide. 

The biggest challenge is to maximize light — she uses mirrors to ensure the light falls on all sides equally.

While in itself the garden diary is not of great literary value, it manifests practicality and calm. Every aspect reflects an author who acts with mindfulness and intention.

I am inspired to tend my own garden — observe it, document it, learn how to nurture it. I've had four years here to begin to know the rhythm of the light, and watch how the snails, birds, squirrels move through this patch of the ruelle verte. The construction next door will be complete this summer, and then the vehicles and debris will be cleared out. I'll take stock: one lilac tree destroyed, but one left standing; a raspberry bush trampled; I'll cut back the grape vine. And then, then I can sow the seeds of what is yet to bloom.

Excerpt

No matter how small a garden, it's still a garden, so it will require a good deal of tending.