Speaking into the Dark

Speaking Into the Dark

A Thank You

I want to thank those who’ve consistently supported and encouraged me over the years. I’m not going to put up a list of names—because I know you probably don’t need or want me to do that—but I’m very aware and you have my gratitude.

Nobody can write consistently (and, by that, I mean decade after decade) without some form of support. If you doubt this, try an experiment: every night for a week, sit in a dark closet and speak for 90 minutes, imagining there is someone listening on the other side of the door.

I only ask that you try this for a week because I doubt most people could get to the third session without going a little crazy. Now imagine trying to do this every night (and feeling like a total imposter and failure anytime you miss) for 20 years. That’s what it’s like to be a writer.

The illustrious Chuck Wendig puts it like this:

And the writing life? The publishing world? Definitely not a realm of pure kindness. The writing life isn’t cruel to be cruel, but there exists a lot of ambient cruelty built into any system based on envisioning art, producing it, and trying to earn an audience for it. Further, writing is an often isolated and isolating act—you’re planting yourself in front of a notebook or computer and writing one sentence after the next for weeks, months, maybe even years. And then once you’ve finished that part, you’re holding it out, asking the universe to love it. No one part of this is actively or personally cruel, but it can sure feel lonely. It can feel desperate, too. It’s easy to lose focus and lose hope—and it only gets worse when someone (agent, editor, audience) takes that story you’ve worked on forever and tells you, “Meh. Nah.”

This is the truth. But Chuck isn’t complaining and neither am I. I think we’re trying to get at the same thing: speaking into the dark is hard. And it’s always dark. It gets significantly darker when you “make it,” when you become a marketable brand and you’re surrounded by businesspeople who want to see you excrete more salable units, forever.

There’s a lot of irony embedded in writerly success, but I haven’t experienced that sort of thing—what passes for fame and status in the highly self-conscious and pathological publishing industry. But I’ve been close to a few writers who have and I’ve seen how brutal “success” can be.

If you want to publish me, grand! I’ll take it. Send me a check and put my face on a website. Still, I’m not so naïve that I believe there’s an end to this or that someday there’s going to be a parade in my honor where everyone will love me. I’m not in this for love or money. I’m in it because I’m addicted to it.

So the best thing for me is just to be able to continue. And expressions of support along the way, the sense that sometimes, perhaps unexpectedly, there actually is someone listening out there, are important.

Now I will stop writing before this seems even more like a metaphor for sitting in the confession box. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 35 years since my last confession . . . or about 10 hours, depending on how I want to think about my writing habit . . .

Eating

Everything eats. That’s not the problem. The problem starts with what lies beyond that fact. And there’s no solution: what we don’t consume has no value. What has no value does not exist. Consider the cafeteria. I’m sitting in it with my friend, Hector, facing the conundrum of life over mashed potatoes and meatloaf for him, a boxed ham sandwich for me. Who are we to complain? It’s not horrible food. It’s edible. Kind of stiff. A little stale. Somewhat undercooked. But don’t cry for me, Argentina, it’s a campus lunch. If it goes down and stays put, I’ll bow in gratitude to the bounty of celestial providence.

“That’s a dry sandwich,” says Hector.

Yes. I know. I’m eating it. “Those potatoes look runny.”

He nods slowly, regarding his mashed potatoes the way one views an autopsy subject. Damn shame, such violence. But at least it’s not a dry sandwich out of a plastic box. He got his meatloaf and potatoes from the food line, ladled out of a metal tray like in every prison movie right before the commissary riot. Greasy steam rises from the food-line entrées and they never smell good. Runny potatoes. Feral carrots. Dubious peas. Condemned meatloaf. Overcooked bok choy in a forlorn soy sauce. Bricks of peaked mac and cheese so dense they have to be chipped off with the tip of the spatula. I’ll suffer the dry sandwich, thanks.

Hector and I meet in the campus cafeteria about once a month, ostensibly to discuss the renovations being done to the building where I work, but in reality just to insult each other’s food choices and make disparaging comments about the students.

“Look at them snakes,” he says as two undergrads dressed like ice cream cones float by. Not actual ice cream cones; though, I’ve seen that and many comparable absurdities on this campus, but looking like they just went nuts at a discount white sale in June. Something out of the director’s cut of Zardoz—new age Egyptizoid background extras in a dystopian shopping mall, while Sean Connery runs around in a red diaper shooting people. The one wearing a huge amethyst pendant glares at us.

The gun is good, I think to myself, but I don’t say it because Hector won’t get the reference and anyway he’s still going on about them snakes.

“We didn’t see snakes like that when we were in college, am I right?”

Hector’s a large man, completely bald, and, as far as I know, has been faithful to his wife for 25 years. But he talks like he’s still working on gen ed requirements and an internship. College females are “snakes.” College guys are invisible. The university is “this shit,” as in, “This shit wants me to supervise over Christmas to make sure the HVAC gets in. Can you believe it?”

I can believe this shit.

“Snakes like that—it’s the social media, okay? The TikTok.”

“Chinese spyware.”

“China don’t care,” he says. “Look at them robes. They look like Stargate. Leisure studies majors. You think China cares about leisure studies majors? That ham’s killing you by inches, brother.”

“China wants me to eat this ham.”

He frowns at my sandwich, cuts into the meatloaf slab with his plastic fork. “That’s not even ham.”

I came to this job over two years ago because I was starving. Let’s not say, “starving.” Let’s say facing the prospect, such that boxed cafeteria lunches came to seem like mana from on high. My old life got invalidated by a bat virus doing what it was engineered to do—eat. The freefall unreality of the pandemic, where going to the grocery store felt like dicing with death, ate my finances. I didn’t like how broke I got, how politicized everything got, didn’t feel like the virus cared much about feelings, opinions, theories, or rent.

All I knew was that, when I got Covid, it was the worst flu of my life. I hallucinated conversations with dead people, ancestors, goddesses, spent a few weeks in a delirium where I thought I was probably going to die, then managed not to. After it cleared up, I found a job on campus—not the university teaching job I’d always wanted, but still. Still.

“That meatloaf looks more loaf than meat.”

“Cute. This fantastic repast is straight from heaven.”

“Send it back. Make god eat it.”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

And now, a new life of blasphemy and snakes. As Dante wrote in La Vita Nuova, “If I bethought myself to seek out some point at the which all these paths might be found to meet, I discerned but one way, and that irked me; to wit, to call upon Pity, and to commend myself unto her.” Those of us who lived through the pandemic will never know why we did while others didn’t. All we know is that chance or fate took pity on us so that we could sit on college campuses and watch self-conscious children glare and parade around in costumes.

“If I tabulate all the money I’ve spent on bad campus food, it’s like I’m giving back my paychecks.”

“That’s what you do,” he says. “They give you money. You give it back. They give you things. You eat them.”

On that note, we do. Perhaps, as we consume our vital sustenance, we ask ourselves what we’re feeling. Perhaps, as we are sensitive individuals, in touch with our emotions, we turn inward as we eat, content to probe the range of personal meaning inherent in the act. Or maybe we just shovel it down as quickly as possible. I set the last quarter of my ham sandwich aside. It is truly dry and I didn’t get anything to drink.

“Linda says she thinks she might be a lesbian.” Hector stares across the cafeteria, through the beige wall, over the landscape, beyond at least one ocean, at an image in a distant land that holds the truth of that statement. Maybe a better meatloaf. He puts the last chunk in his mouth and chews.

“You getting a divorce?’

“Maybe. She said don’t worry, though. Right now, it’s just a thought she’s having.”

Two boys with skateboards sit at the table in front of us. They don’t have any food. And I wonder why they’re here, why, of all places they could go, they’ve chosen a space that smells like rancid creamed corn and burned toast.

“Thoughts are just thoughts.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly.”

I look at the scar that runs up his right forearm, perfectly dividing the sun tarot card tattoo surrounded by cherry blossoms. I look at the red-and-white Aloha shirt and the heavy gold chain he wears on the outside of his black undershirt so it will stand out in the “V.” And I think sometimes I must not be the loneliest person on campus.

Hector and I are both 30 years older than these students. We’re in the gray area, marked “staff.” We’re not on the academic food chain. We don’t consume. We are not consumed. We merely facilitate the consumption. And that which is not consumed cannot exist. We’re ghosts.

A couple dressed in skin-tight gym wear starts to make out at one of the central tables and everyone in the cafeteria stares, but only for a moment. It’s a new life, I think, a new world. It intersects my old, dead middle-aged life that barely sustains, that nobody wants, that tastes like something from a cafeteria food line. Hector stares a little longer then looks over at the last of my sandwich.

“You gonna eat that?”

I tell him no and he picks it up with two fingers, puts it in his mouth.

“Peace,” he says, still chewing. “Stay healthy.”

I wave and watch him move toward the door, a foot taller and two wider than everyone present. No one looks at him. He’s not an entrée.

I sit there for the remainder of my lunch, empty plates in front of me, watching young love in action. The outer part of me wants to feel contempt for them doing that in public, but when I ask myself what I’m feeling, I have to remember to be grateful. I’m alive. I’m still here, for what it’s worth. I still get a boxed sandwich, a little more time, and a table off to the side.

Baksheesh

The world is insane and we are living in the end times. It’s true and I believe it. Reading this, you are probably thinking Davis has lost his nerve, has lost his mind, and has finally become so disinhibited that he’s now taking dictation straight from his Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Maybe he’s blown a synapse and has embraced Third Wave Christian Fundamentalism the way we always felt he would—the retconned hillbilly sci-fi apocalypse version, replete with heavily armed cyber-trucks, food riots, red sky, and the Beast of Revelation.

You would, of course, be wrong about everything. See, by “end times,” Davis is really just talking about the publishing industry. And by “publishing industry,” he’s really just talking about the MFA industrial complex. And, by that, he just means, “things that have never so much resembled airborne feculence of a certain incendiary variety,” which is to say, shitfire, but flaming shit simultaneously as an abstraction, a pungent metaphor, and a distinct and tangible possibility aimed directly at your face.

Yes. It doth burn, my son.

As the Bard says: everybody cool until someone find a way to light the toilet on fire. And it is only then that you will see the truth, wherefore it flusheth not. And flameth. And flyeth. Do I over-analogize and mixeth my metaphors? Do I protest too much? I do. But then again, the more I think about it, I do not.

So these are the end times. You know it and I know it. The Seven Seals have been opened: plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, and plop, like little corks in a fancy restaurant, where none of the wines come in the screw-top variety—i.e. none of the sort that I could normally afford. No one said the apocalypse came cheap.

But why, Davis, you ask, is someone with your prodigious vocabulary and piledriving wit reduced to cheap-wine analogizing and end-times prophesizing on an obscure writing blog nobody reads?

Because, dear reader, the world is off its nut and therefore I can say what I want.

Because I cannot be cancelled.

Because you may put a bullet between my eyes but these words will still travel around the world like 1950s TV Superman, faster than a locomotive and a speeding bullet.

Because maybe I don’t care anymore

— about desperate creative writers snapping and barking for scraps at the literary publishing table (consider: extreme levels of desperation can be a prelude for mental illness, and my brother in Christ, let me remind you that no one is more desperate than a disenfranchised literary fiction writer without, perhaps, even an obscure writing blog where he could relieve such burning feculence as might arise and converge);

— about the ambient cruelties of the “process,” the writing process, as if it were some arcane monolith out in the desert that we only had to discover and teach ourselves to read in order to possess the writing success formula of Akhenaten the Great. And this must be conflated with the dominant publishing-and-marketing process because we all know that something we can’t successfully monetize is merely a hobby;

— about all the bad, ignorant, often deranged advice that accompanies this;

— about getting ghosted by a magazine because, after accepting one of my stories, someone decided that my writing was too “cis het” for their aesthetic (yes, one of the editors told me that and all I could do was laugh—at myself for submitting a story to them); shame on me;

— about the status anxiety and paranoia of the MFA creative writing students running said magazines and the slightly former MFA students still convinced that the “personal” and, by extension all art, must be “political.” And they are therefore afraid to read Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, or Flannery O’Connor because some inherent taint of uncoolness might rub off on them. Someone on a slick magazine I no longer read made a list of “red flag novels you should avoid” (as if this were Soviet Russia: I have not read, yet I condemn . . . ) and I couldn’t believe To the Lighthouse was one of the red-flag offenders.

And I most emphatically do not care about 20-something housecats with studio MFA degrees mean-girling me on social media after seeing my profile picture. For they are domestic and furry and harbor a deep love of kibble and do not read the books I read. No. This is Black Mirror. This is Tesla with machineguns. This is dystopia. This is not a bowl of Friskies, your clumpy sandbox, and a warm loving stroke-job from your beta readers. I’ve never had beta readers. I barely have alpha readers.

Instead, dear reader, in this time of dread and perdition, I’m asking for REPARATIONS.

Hear me out. On my dad’s side, given my Irish and Welsh ancestry, I figure the British Crown owes me at least a few million pounds for generations of colonizing, rape, murder, and impressing my ancestors into divers forms of servitude including, but not limited to, indenture and outright slavery. To say nothing of the fact that this eventually caused my people to flee to Canada, something which, in itself should add at least another million pounds sterling to the tab.

And then, naturally, there’s my mother’s Armenian heritage, which includes those ancestors fleeing Constantinople with whatever they could carry to escape an actual genocide—not the hyperbolic, figure-of-speech kind referenced on the internet along with “micro aggressions,” but the real thing. Henceforth, I’ve written a very firm letter to President Erdoğan, specifying certain payments that shall be made directly to me by the government of Turkey (the closest we can get to the Ottoman Empire—we’re all doing our best here). I have allowed for installments if he finds that necessary. I’m not an unreasonable man, which I’m sure President Erdoğan appreciates.

In my estimation, the reparations due to me for various forms of historical persecution visited on my ancestors by at least two world powers should be enough for me to purchase a small turret in Scotland, doff myself Lord Davis of the Moors, and declare prima nocta for as long as my reign shall last.

Davis, you say, you’re insane. To which I retort: NO! The world is insane. I just want my baksheesh. And if you don’t want to be “problematic,” you’ll stop with the micro aggressions and pay up. Everything that rises must converge. That means you, your wallet, and me.

What? You don’t have any baksheesh to make merit for the sins of your fathers against mine? You say this is crazy because it all happened generations before you were born and you don’t even know those assholes? You say you went to an expensive master of fine arts writing program, but all you got was a stupid T-shirt and “good luck” and an invitation to have dinner with the chair of your thesis committee while his wife was out of town? You say you’re broke? You were too cis-het for small-magazine fame? Bummer. No baksheesh for you, either. Perhaps it’s time for you to fall back on your trust fund. Surely, someone with your amount of privilege . . .

But I was talking about the end times, about the Seven Seals (plop!) and the horrifying Lovecraftian spectacle of fecal matter travelling through the air at speed. Phosphorescent fecal matter, no less. As in “banned by the Geneva Convention but still used in certain third-world proxy wars.”

Hallelujah!

Hare Krishna!

Give me your stinkin’ baksheesh that I might cleanse it and admit you to paradise!

You know you want it.

We went away from there and stopped at the Fountain of the Virgin. But the water was not good, and there was no comfort or peace any where, on account of the regiment of boys and girls and beggars that persecuted us all the time for bucksheesh. The guide wanted us to give them some money, and we did it; but when he went on to say that they were starving to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in throwing obstacles in the way of such a desirable consummation, and so we tried to collect it back, but it could not be done.

—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Digging to China: Utopias Always Become Nightmares

One of my favorite Johnny Cash songs is his cover of Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind.” The refrain goes like this:

How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money,
I could do things my way

But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind.

It’s very country and it rests on the country music genre cliché of human relationships being more valuable than wealth, status, and power. It also makes me think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Richard Cory,” from Sounds of Silence, which was the first time I encountered the idea in music outside my uncle’s self-produced country albums. Richard Cory has everything, then shoots himself, yet the impoverished speaker in the song continues to envy him. They’re both good songs. They both carry a timeworn message in popular music: money can’t buy love.

Still, as a cynical friend of mine has pointed out more than once, it may be true that money can’t buy love, but it can buy travel, leisure, interesting rich-person adventures (vs. the poor-person variety), politeness, serenity, entertainment, granite countertops, educational opportunities, good food, access to the gifted and fascinating, and quality healthcare, which in the aggregate starts to look a lot like love. Love of the world. Love of life. Love of fate. Amor fati.

It’s easy to love what your life has become when you can do things your way. Oh Allfather Zod, I don’t often pray to you (because why? I have a shit ton of money), but I’m here at your subterranean temple of fire and perdition on Zodsday, just like last year, to recite my only prayer: DON’T CHANGE A THING. Amor fati, you know? I’m good. You do you.

The rest of us will have to sacrifice two blocks of insect-soy protein at the altar of the Allfather on a regular basis or our paranoid, sadistic deity will smite us. We may ask ourselves why the Sam Bankman-Frieds, Martin Shkrelis, and Anna Sorokins of the world have millions (ostensibly there are many, or at least some, of these individuals who have not yet been indicted), while we labor in Zod’s gulag, but that’s asking the wrong question.

The real question is whether we are about to own nothing and be happy, which is to say, whether we are authentically mentally ill (as opposed to performatively “mentally ill” as part of a curated online identity). Think of Elon Musk declaring that he was just going to live with friends for the rest of his life instead of owning houses—because friends are the spice of life, no? I wonder what sort of friends Elon has. Sure, take the fifth wing. Yeah, kitty-corner from the spaceport and the athletic complex. Stay as long as you like!

Amor fati, brother, amor fati.

If the definition of mental illness is, to a certain extent, mediated by culture and indicated by transgressions that show deviant behavior (i.e. behavior that indicates deviation from cultural norms), then Elon’s version of owning nothing might qualify. Klaus Schwab’s utopian vision of the post-pandemic “Great Reset,” in which every human culture, corporation, nation, and industry must immediately “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions” likely also qualifies.

Klaus Schwab, at the World Economic Forum, envisioning utopia.

We might ask why utopian visionaries, who seem to know the truth and have a final solution worked out for the world, always end up as Robespierres. Moreover, why do social movements dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” tend to devolve into bitter gestures of intolerance, over-compensatory bias, and exclusion? Well, money. It’s the economy, stupid. And pandemic dread really seemed to fuel that sort of white-knuckle utopianism. It goes without saying that any future vision according to a tight group of political and economic experts will not stay very bright.

Utopia nearly always leads to the dys– version. Utopian visions born out of pandemics and other global traumas seem the worst. As the British sci-fi roleplaying game, Carbon 2185, put it: “Carbon 2185 has a highly detailed economy with reference tables and charts to help you instantly know how much a bowl of street ramen costs.” I tried playing this game by post with some friends during the pandemic and we gave up. According to the rules, a bowl of street ramen cost more than my monthly take-home and we had to rent all our guns. I’ll pass on the ramen, thanks. Bring on the insect-soy. It was depressing. Someone proposed D&D instead. Someone said, “Fuck that.” We didn’t talk for a bit.

Why lean into cyberpunk dystopia when talking about the future? Why put a frame of Max, from Elysium, visiting his parole-officer bot, who asks, “Are you being sarcastic and / or abusive?” at the top of this piece? Why call it, “Digging to China”? Am I implying that, in the Monbiot-Thunbergian horseshoe irony of the post-pandemic near future, we will be eating processed insects and living in the pods of a grubby rental economy, where the CCP and the USA have arrived at the same socio-economic terminal? Am I now going to start referencing the episodes of Black Mirror that made me the most depressed because they seemed the most likely? Am I committing tone crimes and microaggressions in this paragraph? I’ll spare you.

Instead, I’ll propose that there has never been a better time to stop monetizing your hobbies (or your art or your body). The impetus for such a proposition comes from Colleen Doran’s excellent, “How Long Does it Take to Draw a Comic Book Page?” on Colleen Doran’s Funny Business. I love Colleen Doran’s newsletter. She’s a wise professional who’s been around long enough in her industry to have a few things to say about creativity, money, and staying sane.

At the same time, the way she tracks her time (“I tried to stick to an eight hour day for awhile, but it is impossible for a working cartoonist to work only 8 hours per day.”) reminded me of how I’ve been tracking my fiction words-per-day and how stressed I’ve felt (for decades) about staying productive. Where does this stress come from? From the same economic imagination that envisions being priced out of a bowl of street ramen. From illusions like “upskilling” which seems to borrow logic from the old trickle-down economics that clearly worked so well. And the self-publishing option is no consolation for a working writer. You have to grind. You have to write more or nothing works. You have to monetize everything and keep a straight face. No sarcasm permitted.

Yes, there have been some slot-machine winners in the self-publishing game (read their work and the slot-machine metaphor will begin to make a lot of sense). There have also been slot-machine winners in social media influencing, self-managed parasocial porn sites, and various forms of crowdfunding. And I have no doubt that some of it is good (Chuck Wendig’s writing comes to mind along with the band, Scary Pockets—no comment on OnlyFans and its clones). But mostly people seem to have been lured, at least for a while, into another self-exploitation gulag.

The self-publishing platform (Amazon, Lulu, etc.) now stands in the place of a traditional publisher, only with non-existent gatekeeping. Sure, buddy, you’re an author now. Good luck with that . . . another utopian vision gone westward to seek its fortune while the company takes its cut.

As a writer, you will eventually eat the bugs. You will own nothing. You will labor to pay rents to monolithic inhuman organizations with AI customer service—economic entities that conflate sarcasm with abuse and practice zero tolerance toward any microaggression that may question their mission statements. You will prostitute yourself from your temporary pod. And you will be happy.

I’ve learned a lot about how my body and mind get monetized by scrupulously tracking time spent working on various projects. I think Colleen Doran and my many creative friends are right to pay attention to how they’re spending their days. But I also think, absent a trust fund, time and grind eventually converge violently in you. The personal sacrifices, the mental illnesses, the continual self-betrayals in the interests of time, money, and productivity point more to the cruel altar of Allfather Zod than to some glorious worker’s paradise.

How to Be Good

Black Swan is Midsommar. Stop talking, Winston.

Hollywood has never seemed more Orwellian in its insistence that it is the repository of everything admirable in culture and that it represents the right side of history. We know Hollywood will hold its own mother down and pull the gold out of her teeth with a pliers, but it prefers to pretend otherwise. And no one wants to dwell on this as long as the entertainment keeps coming. With streaming, the rapaciousness of the entertainment center of the world is even harder to see. Hollywood says it’s your friend. In reality, it’s INGSOC conformity and you’re awful if you disagree.

Streaming technology is as 1984 as it gets.

The tragedy of streaming content is that it never goes away. It’s in your house, up in your perceptual field, at all times. Even when you’re not watching, you’re getting emails reminding you to log back in. Back in the halcyon days of Blockbuster Video, a pretentious, emotionally manipulative stinker might show up on VHS, but there was a bit more personal agency involved in renting and watching it. It wasn’t accessible unless you physically sought it out. It was a tangible thing and you weren’t quite such a passive blob of content consumption—seeing the movie demanded that you get up, at least temporarily, from the couch.

You also didn’t have the same plausible deniability if you found yourself watching a lousy film. At some point, from the rental store to the final credits (if you made it that far), you had to remind yourself that you put down good money for the thing and brought it home. You did it to yourself, friend.

In the worst cases (Tree of Life? Vanilla Sky? The English Patient? Legends of the Fall? Crash? Life as a House?), you may have admitted that you were powerless against the overwhelming pretentious hype-suction and were thereafter drawn into a vortex of melodrama against your will. Then you may have made a searching and fearless moral inventory and resolved never to relapse again. Sometimes, bringing back drippy garbage from Blockbuster could be a cathartic, healing experience, like going out with the guys while on Antabuse. The best lessons are the ones we teach ourselves.

But now, with streaming television and movies, everybody’s on the juice 24/7 and done learning. You can now quietly demean yourself with bullshit Hollywood affectation and faux-political posturing every month for a discreet subscription fee. Nobody has to know. You don’t have to look the Blockbuster cashier in the eye and say, yes, I want to rent The Fountain. You can violate yourself, from beginning to end, with all the pungent streams you desire in the privacy of your home. Draw the curtains. Click on I Am Love. It’s okay.

You might occasionally feel a twinge of self-criticism—why have I watched Babel 15 times and The Maltese Falcon only twice? What does this say about me? But there are certain politically coded stinkers that remain beyond criticism, no matter how fetid and endless their streams may be. Those are the films you are permitted to enjoy without needing to painfully reflect on why you are doing it to yourself. Or if you do happen to wonder, the Party has provided a simple thought-stopping idea: because I am a good person.

The Party tells me I enjoy Magnolia for its drawn out emotional exploration of human meaning and compassion in the San Fernando Valley, a concept which, in itself, is astounding. Thankfully, it’s streaming right now on Netflix. I watch Magnolia because I am good. It provides an emotional release and ultimately represents the best parts of me. I enjoy what is good because I am a good person. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Thank you, Netflix. I feel happy. Let’s watch it again.

What’s going on in my brain? Why is George Orwell haunting my laptop?

Ideally, a movie will go through a production funnel that starts with a compelling idea, and ends with a completed feature. Along the way, there will be setbacks and workarounds, windfalls and compromises. And as Rachel Ziegler, the most likeable actress in Hollywood, has so famously put it, “That’s Hollywood, baby.” * But we do not live in an ideal world, which means the “completed feature” can come into being before its concept. That, too, is Hollywood, baby. In fact, that’s even more Hollywood than Hollywood. **

A film is sometimes made and then the hype apparatus around it tries to make it into something. Is it a trenchant commentary on the state of race relations in inner-city schools? It could be. Is it a masterwork of ironic feminist critique? It could be. Is it a moving historical epic in which unrequited love is cast against a tapestry of chaos and war? It could be. Let’s see. And if we can’t “position” it—

A book publicist once asked me how I’d position my second short story collection, Cruel Stars. I said, “Wut?” She took a deep breath and said, “What are the books on either side of it in the bookstore?” Then I took a deep breath and said, “Well, the one of the left is, of course, my first collection, Gravity. The one on the right is the collection I’m just finishing, Living the Dream.” She nodded slowly at something over my shoulder.

—does it even exist? Art is nothing without the marketing because marketing is what communicates The Message, the values of the Party. It explains why you are good, why certain things should make you feel happy and sad, and why this should matter to modern audiences. And if such an explanation is impossible or requires too much scaffolding, the Party might want to delay the release or even consign it forever to the vault.

But those of us who are not Party members, who are not on board with what passes for the New York Times concept of the right side of history, may object that this seems untoward for everyone concerned—like pushing a baby back in so the birth might be restarted more strategically, in a more profitable and impactful time.

Most unfortunate. When something is created, you can’t uncreate it so it can hit the zeitgeist more advantageously. You can only change it. And generally the more post-hoc changes and delays you make to a creative product, the more it becomes a horrific golem, an accidental parody of a commercial concept, instead of a coherent piece of art. Put differently, one usually does not do a thing and then justify or position it without making a mess. No, no, I’m not criticizing the Party. Don’t look at me like that. I’m merely making a small, harmless observation . . .

This brings us to the example of Black Swan and Midsommar, which is the same horrendously pretentious, emotionally coercive movie.

Black Swan is now available again on Netflix. We might say it’s been raised from the dead one more time thanks to the always-already necromancy of streaming video. It’s definitely a film approved of by the Party: a break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character, Nina, is romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.

There are certain inchoate feelings loudly expressed. There is a certain amount of weeping and there are various episodes of emotional violence that we are encouraged to think must mean something. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) means you are good. You get the message. You are indeed on the right side of history.

Midsommar is the same break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character is also romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) also means you are good. Criticizing this Frankenstein’s monster of highly telegraphed political position statements means you are a counter-revolutionary, a subversive, not of the Party. You are bad.

To be fair, there are some hapless men who travel through the scenes of these movies like runaway spaceships soon disappearing beyond the rings of Saturn, behaving awful or squeamish or unreliable according to the plot-furniture needs of the moment. At least one of them is immolated in a bear suit, which might be interesting if we could bring ourselves to give two shits about him. Instead, we think, well, there he goes. He’s a crispy critter now, kids. Woo.

The reason Black Swan-Midsommar is a good example of Hollywood’s shallow, monosyllabic politics is that these films (or we might say, this film) are actually very overt in their need to seem right and to make you agree that they are. They’re the same yoked-up melodrama we’ve always gotten only now repositioned as edgy and essential, now back in our homes, telling us about politics and social justice, and not going anywhere.

They’re pretending to be one thing (folk horror) as a container for another thing (third-wave feminist critique) and are actually neither. They’re telling us that if we like this, if we watch it many times, if we digest it, if we approve of it, we “get it.” We’re in the know. We’re correct. And so we are good human beings. 2 + 2 = 5. Of course, this is abject bullshit.

Why is Florence Pugh having a hysterical meltdown throughout the movie? Stop talking, Winston. It doesn’t need to make sense. Just go with it and you’ll be safe. There is no need to think critically or make small, troubling observations. All you need to do is accept that she is sad. You may cry with her if you wish. That shows solidarity and that you are loyal. Yes, you are a true believer . . .

Unintentional Orwellian patterns are ubiquitous, especially in the pop-culture mediated by Hollywood, which is most pop-culture. Orwell wasn’t just concerned about totalitarian communism, his deeper project was criticizing thoughtless social conformity in general.

For example, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, one of his largely forgotten novels (perhaps because it cuts a little too close to middle-class status anxiety and the obsession with money), the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, gives up on art to make a modest living in advertising. What is art without marketing, the novel asks? In the end, when he discards his poems, Comstock concludes it really is nothing.

Ultimately, there is no accounting for taste. There is also no accounting for technology. And when taste and technology coincide, there is no accounting at all. Black Swan and Midsommar would have flashed through the pan with a lot less “positioning” had the big streamers not put them in perpetual rotation—unlike many far superior and less ideological films, which blink out of existence on streaming platforms all the time.

We hope Hollywood goes on a retreat in the mountains and finds itself, comes to terms with its pathological need to always be class president, and decides to stop bullying its audiences. But the aspidistra’s airborne and, let’s be honest, nobody knows how to land.

—

* Interestingly, it’s the same when writing a novel, only you get to create all your own obstacles, betray yourself, meddle with your own story, make all the compromises, and know from the beginning that you’re not going to get paid.

** There is no point in arguing that a particular production “isn’t mainstream” or isn’t influenced by Hollywood in whole or in part. The global movie industry in general and streaming technology in particular has had an enormous centralizing effect on film. “Indie” is now a flavor. It is not a substantial alternative.

Laughter in the Dark

I have been plagued by anxiety and depression my entire life, since before I had words for it. And recognizing that these are highly idiosyncratic inner states—admitting that there is no general cure or perfect treatment that can always be prescribed for how anxiety and depression can link up with each other in the mind—I feel confident that avoiding medication has mostly been right for me, while it may not be right for others. I choose alternatives like exercise, diet, reading, and worst case, staying in bed and just riding it out.

Still, I have moments when I wonder whether it wouldn’t be preferable to take some heavy mind-flattening chemical that lets me shuffle dimly through my days, sleep soundly every night, and never feel upset or afraid. Because, in the end, every life must come to the same conclusion, whether one chooses to suffer or not. As the saying goes, at the end of the game, the pawn and the king go in the same box. But I don’t suffer constantly from anxiety and depression, only sometimes. And that’s what makes the straight-edge option viable.

The capriciousness of my mind keeps me wondering whether any given day might turn horrible without warning or reason. Living in that uncertainty was, for many years, its own kind of torment. It took me a long time to learn how to flow with my inner states, to recognize the onset of certain nasty, petrifying feelings arising seemingly out of nowhere, and say, well, it looks like today is going to be one of those.

Yesterday was one of those. Maybe today will be, too. Maybe being halfway through Blood Meridian made it worse. It certainly didn’t make anything better. McCarthy’s writing seldom does. It’s not something one reads for pleasure. At least, I don’t.

I read him because I have a certain abstract appreciation for phantasmagoria and beautiful sentences. But it’s not like reading The Sun Also Rises or Never Let Me Go. I never feel close to McCarthy’s characters. He doesn’t let the reader identify or care too much about the people in his books. Instead, there’s a cold distance, a stipulation that the reader detach himself from the narrative and view it through a thick pane of glass. And Blood Meridian seems more essentially this than any of McCarthy’s other writings.

This morning, I found myself on page 178 (of my third reading) of the novel. And I was having problems with it. I closed the book and thought, fuck this, trying to recall whether, in 2003 or 2009, I also said fuck this around page 178. I don’t know. But I do know the tendency to tell the book to go fuck itself gets strong at least once a read-through. I never felt like saying that about The Road or Suttree or All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men. Sure, they had the pane of glass, too. But there’s something about BM that gradually makes me feel as though I’m visiting the novel upon myself instead of merely reading it.

So I resolved to return it to the library. That’s it. Boom. Done. I’ve read the damn thing twice. Shouldn’t that be enough to say I’ve done my due diligence on McCarthy’s magnum opus? It should be enough. I have Maupassant’s complete stories waiting in a dual-language edition and by god . . .

But then I felt worse. As Donald-45 might put it: “So much worse. Sad.” And I started to laugh (actually laugh-cough because I’m at the end of the first month of The Cold I Cannot Kick). The ponderous weight of my unfortunate, Kafka-esque gallows humor reasserted itself. And I saw how much more Gregor Samsa I’ve become over this last year of sickness and dread.

I often feel like the world is knocking me around. Obligation is both the cause and the formula: I find myself obligated to do a certain thing and must therefore tolerate a comparable amount of abuse. Mo obligation, mo abuse. It’s that simple. And I’ve never had more obligations than I do at present. Maybe the reason I find Blood Meridian so hard to swallow is that, not unlike Gregor, I’m constantly taking my medicine (straight-edge option no longer available), constantly being force-fed bad-tasting syrupy obligation after obligation, and asking for more.

If I don’t maintain perfect discipline, if I don’t visit an outsized portion of responsibility upon myself and make sure everyone around me is satisfied and at ease, what then? Unlike the unbending, ruthless, willful characters in Blood Meridian, I might be undergoing a certain metamorphosis. None of them turn into giant cockroaches. Various other beasts and demons, maybe, but not into Gregor Samsa.

I am the giant cockroach of the Family and Consumer Sciences Department, sitting in my dark office at 6:15 AM (the lights go off if I’m too still—I have to remember to wave my arms every five minutes), worrying and ruminating, struggling with this novel, but really with myself, asking, “Where did I go wrong?” Because I most certainly did. And here I am, obligated and tolerant, feelers extended.

One imagines that cockroaches don’t read novels. Or, if they do, that they prefer works in the Tumblr-Tik-Tok genre of “dark academia”—Hogwarts without the magic and with double the soapy intrigue. Dark because cockroaches don’t like light. And academia because, well, have you been to college?

Yes, I feel sorry for myself and I probably shouldn’t. Blame the anxiety or the “evening redness in the West.” I feel kicked around by life. I feel anxious and depressed and inappropriately tolerant in the service of my many pressing obligations. But I also know that, in an hour or two, when someone knocks on my office door with an urgent dilemma that only I can fix, I’ll be courteous, friendly, and prompt. And I’ll smile, hoping they don’t look too closely at my face.

I try not to twitch in my ill-fitting mansuit; though, the metamorphosis seems just about complete. I know this because I will continue visiting Blood Meridian upon myself. I will tolerate the book to the end. Perhaps, instead of Maupassant, I’ll read some Donna Tartt next along with my other hive-mates. But, for now, I can console myself with the thought that if I stay very still when I laugh, it won’t turn on the lights.

Vexation of Spirit

Spring semester, 2024, begins tomorrow and I will be teaching another section of “Mindfulness and Skillful Living,” a hybrid class that combines a fairly demanding research and writing component with daily mindfulness meditation and journaling. On paper, it looks like a fluff class and, not surprisingly, the course is always full with a ten-student waitlist. In practice, it’s kind of ferocious. And students can often feel overwhelmed by its level of seriousness.

This time, I’ll be co-teaching it with the chair of the department, who originally created the class. We’ve made guest appearances in each other’s sections and we work closely together on a regular basis. So I mostly know what to expect. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the first day of instruction always gives me pause.

Despite all efforts to the contrary by university bureaucrats and dodgy malingerers coasting through tenure, nothing in academia ever stands still. If you want to be an effective teacher, you have to accept this and learn to move with the interpersonal, departmental, intellectual, and even biorhythmic currents of the semester. At the same time, you have to profess something, which does not mean you have to be agreeable or popular.

It makes me think of spinning plates. Let them start wobbling and you might as well prepare for death. As Martin Amis puts it in Money, “If you so much as loosen your seat belt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do?” Well, you can shut your mouth and get to work, for one. Keep your head down. Keep them plates in motion. Indiscipline was severely chastised in the university’s ancient monastic predecessor institutions. And so it is now. Brother Severus, do hand me the scourge.

Co-teaching is much harder than going it alone. It adds yet another spinning plate, the need to keep an open, deferential space for your colleague, who may (in fact, who should) have different ideas, reactions, and assumptions. As a co-teacher, you’re less like the captain of a ship and more like a highly engaged, small-time politician somewhere in rural Wyoming.

Sometimes, the course will seem like a town council meeting. Other times, like a church bake sale. Yes, we can do it like that, but have you considered this other alternative? Yes, certainly, I understand your concerns and I think we should definitely address that in week three. We’ve accounted for the issue in the workshop component at the end of the semester, but let’s bring it up at the meeting. No, that was not my intention, but I hear you and I like your idea. . . . Everything will be fine.

In my other job, the admin one, I spend a lot of time looking at CVs, syllabuses (let’s avoid the faux-Latin ending just once in our short lives, shall we), and schedules. It gives me double vision. I see what I’m doing as a lecturer and what other faculty are doing, have done, will be attempting in their courses. Often, I am dismayed, mostly at myself and my lack of pedagogical precision. Some professors have pristine, metallically sterile assignment sequences that run identically every semester like some kind of cyborg utopia, while mine are more like serendipitous Rube Goldberg machines that induce a strong belief in miracles.

Meanwhile, I’m a short-story writer, writing another novel, which often (maybe usually) feels like clawing my way up a rock face centimeter by centimeter. It’s the first plate to start wobbling when my multiple jobs, masks, roles, institutional Kabuki performances claw into my creative energy. It’s the central fear I carry every semester—that I won’t be able to keep everything spinning through the air or that the quality of my work will decline in spite of my efforts or that my comforting façades won’t be believable (I masquerade as a human, painfully aware that I’m actually a hideous alien space ghost).

Anyone who has tried to write a novel knows it’s a tremendous gamble. All those small hours need to add up to something more than just lost sleep, frustration, and bad nerves. All the things you’ve sacrificed or left undone to take those hours will eventually need attention. All the relatives and old high school pals on the internet, who resent your attempts, will still need to be kept on mute. The rent will need to be paid again. The neighbor dog will need pets. And you will admit you have human needs and are not actually a hideous space ghost, even if you regularly feel otherwise. But go on.

So it begins. And there is nothing I can do to call a false start or a raincheck or a postponement for bad weather. Spring 2024 will commence, all cyborg systems go, mayoral press conference down at the Bob Smith Agricultural Community Center to begin right on time, Alcatraz autopsy dungeon ready.

Nevertheless, I can’t help think of the ultimate lines from Ecclesiastes, “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

The Denazification of Substack

What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture? Are we to abandon that hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuit? The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world. I accept this as a fair criticism. I’d make two rejoinders nevertheless; first, revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream . . .

— Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, “Waiting for the Revolution”

I don’t dislike Margaret Atwood, her writing, or even her calculated political statements. I’m also no fan of naziism, fascism, totalitarianism, communism, a great amount of capitalism, and many other attendant economic, political, and social -isms that have historically resulted in murder, dread, and misery. Let me foreground what I’m about to write with these declarations so that I am less likely to be assaulted by the more popular online usage of the term “fascist,” which generally means, “this is someone saying something I don’t like.”

Well, nobody likes an online Nazi. Knowing this and apparently feeling like she needs to juice up her clout on the S.E.C.—if Hakim Bey has the T.A.Z., maybe we can also acronymize the Substack Echo Chamber of disenfranchised journalists, desperate content creators, thirsty influencers, publicist-operated celebrities, and unappreciated YA fiction writers—Atwood came out with “Substack’s Dilemma” two days after Christmas.

Goes like this in five easy steps:

1. Substack has terms of service that forbid accounts which incite violence.
2. “What does ‘Nazi’ mean, or signify? Many things, but among them is ‘Kill all Jews.’”
3. “Is Substack violating its own terms of service . . . by permitting Nazis to publish on it? I’d say yes.”
4. “You can’t have both the terms of service you have spelled out and a bunch of individual publishers who violate those terms of service. One or the other has got to go.”
5. Ergo, the Denazification of Substack.

Seems utterly reasonable, right? It doesn’t at all seem like a textbook false dilemma with a morally unimpeachable message offered by a midlist novelist, who got famous five years ago when her intersectional feminist dystopian novel got adapted by Hulu. It doesn’t at all seem like she may be worried that her 15 minutes are up. Denazification is, after all, a hot topic these days.

After reading Atwood’s syllogism, a cull seems very much justified, not just to hold Substack to account—since it was impossible to do that with Elon Musk, thereby offering a bit of emotional closure for all those who felt their blue checks on Twitter ceased to have meaning—but also for the common good. And we shouldn’t blame the author of The Handmaid’s Tale for adding a little indirect thematic fan service at the end: “So, one or the other, dear Substack. Tell us which. I am sure you mean well, but you are young and inexperienced, and did not think this through. It’s not too late! You aren’t doomed to the dystopian nightmare!”

Atwood would know. She rose above the legion of other dystopian sci fi authors to be seen as the foremost dystopian nightmare expert, self-evident proof being that she’s now stinkin’ rich from the Hulu series. She seems to be, in particular, an icon of self-published YA dystopian nightmare fiction writers who’ve migrated from Twitter, WordPress, and fan fiction sites to Substack. And, wow, there really are a lot of them these days, creating beautiful, dangerous, misunderstood female protagonists with names like “Wicker Handbag” and “Callindra of Region Fifteen,” who ride against the windmills of patriarchy.

Of course, the slavering, yet incredibly zeitgeist-sensitive, hordes of Substackers, determined to add their voices to anything that promises engagement, have immediately reposted “Substack’s Dilemma” with all the usual Twitter-style sycophancy, bless them. It’s all so brave, so right. And it was truly something to see two days after Christmas.

Holiday Missive #172: Space is the Place

(The following is an exercise in first person voice. It’s not me saying, “Benedicat mihi pater, quia peccavi.” Note the difference. – M)

Today, I’m thinking about the 171 other holiday notes I’ve written over the years, ever since I started a diary in the fifth grade. Admittedly, it was more Dungeons & Dragons than daily observations. But in 1977, no one but my home-room teacher, Sister Evelyn, would have faulted me for indulging in escapism. Things were stressful at home and in the world. Not stressful like they are today, but stressful enough to encourage a quiet fat kid to consider magical flying lizards whenever possible. I think this was around the time I also started reading the news.

Voyager 2 launched, followed a month later by Kosmos 955. The first Apple II computers had just gone on sale. Soon thereafter, not wanting to be left behind, our school got Texas Instruments computers that no one had any idea how to use, especially not the Irish nuns who were our keepers—Are they calculators? Begob and begorra, for all that’s holy, don’t we already have a box of calculators in the teacher’s supply room? Meanwhile, Nazi war criminal, Herbert Kappler, escaped the Caelian Hill military hospital in Rome and New York City had a massive blackout that resulted in Snake Plissken levels of chaos and mayhem. Everyday there were dramatic headines about the Soviets, space, technology, political violence, and murder. Carter was President, if you can imagine.

On September 10, Hamida Djandoubi became the last person to ever be guillotined in France and the Sex Pistols released Never Mind the Bollocks. I read about these things in Newsweek, OMNI, Time, and The San Diego Union-Tribune when I wasn’t consuming pulp sci-fi novels, comic books, and HP Lovecraft. The world seemed like a movie to me, which is probably why I felt I should start writing everything down. And it still seems like a movie, but one that’s been poorly written for “modern audiences,” one which I no longer want to write about all that much.

I turned nine in 1977 and, two days before my birthday, the Petrozavodsk Phenomenon took place in the sky from Vladivostok to Copenhagen, but particularly over Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, where a glowing object cast streams of fire and celestial rays over the city. I recall a Union-Tribune op-ed speculating whether the perfidious Russians had finally released a superweapon that was going to do us all in before next Tuesday.

This was also a time of great fear, not unlike 2023. But it was a different fear. Maybe it was a more psychedelic fear with roots in the previous decade. In the ’70s, we certainly had all the Huxleian herd poison we can now enjoy just by looking at our phones: fear of the other, fear of losing control, fear of unworthiness, fear of failure, even the good old fear of communism, all of it lashed with social confusion, loathing, and strife. The same things we see on X, we saw in Letters to the Editor or heard on talk radio. The toxic sludge just moved at different rates through different channels.

I only took a little of this in at the time, being just as concerned about the adventures of Power Man and Iron Fist as Soviet balls of fire over Europe. Maybe 1977 was the sort of movie that might have been written by Sun Ra, whose Some Blues But Not The Kind That’s Blue also came out that year, an unsettling kind of futurism, a feeling that something was heading towards us whether we wanted it or not.

In the 170 holiday diary entries that followed, clustered around each Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, and Easter like darts around a bullseye, I could trace the progress of my life, if I felt inclined to think of each year as another step forward towards some apotheosis, some place where my pain might end and things might finally be handled. I don’t want to do that, obviously. It sounds too much like the finale of the Petrozavodsk Phenomenon, yours truly going up in a flaming sphere of light somewhere above Helsinki. I’ll stay on the ground, unenlightened, if you please.

There’s a grace in being nothing special. In memoirs, people love to talk about how precocious they were as kids—as if that validates them or the supreme indulgence of perpetrating an autobiography. But if they’re inventive writers, we’re usually willing to play along. As one of the instructors in my MFA program liked to say, “No adult reader is ever that interested in what a kid thinks. This is why you write Tom Sawyer.”

Ultimately, every kid in a story is somewhere on a spectrum between Tom Sawyer and Little Nell, and if you want people to get onboard with your narrative, you’d better emphasize the former. Still, no memoirist ever comes out with this much truth: I was slow-witted, alienated, dysmorphic, and not very clever. The teachers didn’t like me and I caught many regular beatings from older, angrier versions of myself. I didn’t understand anything. I read Newsweek.

So let me admit it once and for all: I do not miss 1977. Having read this far, I bet you can imagine why. I was no Tom Sawyer. I was not precocious. I was mostly a target for emotionally unhealthy people at home and at school, a sad kid who liked to escape into his imagination. Many decades later, the imagination bit is still true and I hope I’m at least proportionally a little less dense. But I’m still a sad kid.

This year, the sad kid is doing many things that would have astounded and perplexed his nine-year-old self. He lives in Hawaii and works full-time in the admin wing of an academic department, where he also teaches from time to time. He’s married to a lovely brilliant woman. He’s writing fiction every day (and actually finishing some of it). He’s studying a Japanese-Hawaiian form of karate. And he’s healthier than he’s ever been. He still thinks about flying magical lizards but, in 2023, everybody thinks about flying magical lizards. This is the flying magical lizard decade.

For this fact alone, Sun Ra would smile on us from space, which he was at pains to have us understand, is the place. After the pandemic, we know it is. But not in a Jeff Bezos glass-dome-on-Mars sense. More in a post-post-modern straight-edge Timothy Leary sense: Turn inward. Find the others. At least make an attempt before the next barnyard gain-of-function virus has its way with your respiratoriorum. And remember, just because a ball of fire in the sky is attributed to a communist satellite doesn’t mean winged fire-breathing reptiles don’t exist. Think about it.

Anatomy of a Domestic Dispute (Teaser)