I went on [social media] today. for me, this was a big mistake. but i wanted to post about this chapbook by jeremy hoevenaar. have you read his pomes? i thought it was pretty good! it reminded me a little of the comic genius of kevin davies’s poetry minus the comic part.

[where did i read, many years ago, someone describe steve erickson’s novels as science fiction without the science part.]

reading diary wise i read one short non-novel by my favorite french novelist about his publisher and this sprawling mystical science fiction novel written somehow by committee.

anyway, the summer is going quickly. like they do. and i’ve been laying low, drinking from open-secret potions and following trails through the woods next to the freeway where you can hear the cars but cannot see them, if you know what i mean. not to get too goofy but i saw in the parkinglot a car with the bumper sticker : MY OTHER VEHICLE IS THE MAHAYANA. one lesson i learned this summer, more confirmed than learned, is that : a trend among pragmatic bodhisattvas is to drive subcompacts — and of course, subarus.

as you know i drive a subcompact which i’ve nicknamed shamu.

and also that upon death we are released from this small package into an expanse that includes ourselves not only from zero to the end but before and after too. like i sd, more confirmed than learned but i try to do no dental work on gift horses.

[when i told the old folks i had gone on retreat he said, Are you a saint now? and she said, Nobody likes a saint.]

all this is due to the liquid courage of coffee and
other open-secret potions and
summer sadness i mean
summer saturdays

speaking of saturday, i love hank jones’s playing on this album, come sunday,

and i love you, frank,
toodles,
jane

Dear Frank—

i’ll start with some surveillance state news. Today, I drive in to work and park at a garage. I walk out and a few minutes later I get an email from the garage with a new “terms of service.”

of course no one ever reads these, but on a whim I asked the digital amanuensis to do so.

According to Ghost Mirror, parking garages are trojan horses for movement and facial data collection/theft; many of them using Israeli tech deployed at checkpoints in Palestine.

am i going to stop parking there? prolly not. it’s a good location and relatively cheap.

thus our insidious diminishment and imprisonment, etc etc…

■

okay, let’s have some music to get us out of this funk of seemingly inevitable oppression.

How about this video (by Nadia Lee Cohen) to Aphex Twin’s Korg Funk 5:

■

Spielberg believes in The Greys.

■

Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote that “grey” was more grey than “gray” — though I might be misremembering.

■

■

The Pantone Grays played the NYC Knickerbockers yesterday in a preseason friendly. The winner is scheduled to take on The Yakult Swallow, which is not the porn name for a yogurt drink but an up-and-coming wrestler from Ciudad Juárez. This ends your halftime report.

■

Speaking of probiotics, when doing tai chi one is told to bring attention to one’s dantian, which, contrary to common western thought, is, we’re told, where the self truly resides.

“Have some guts!” the platoon leader shouts to troops about to take the hill.

The Gut-Brain Connection is the name of a famous luchador from Mexico City whose next pay-per-view fight is against the mysterious upstart The Yakult Gulp.

■

Once, when Haruki Murakami was at a Yakult Swallows game, he thought, “I could write a novel.”

■

All this just to say, Frank, tomorrow’s also supposed to be a scorcher. Want to meet for some naengmyeon in Murray Hill (the one in Queens, obvi)? Common wisdom says you’re supposed to eat the egg first, so you won’t get a tummy ache.

■

Let’s have some exit music from the late great SOPHIE:

■

Frank,

I write to you from the past.

Love,
Jane

Dear Jane—

I woke up this morning with the idea that there’s only one mind in our whole universe. And it’s yours!

But it’s also mine and the senators from Maine and the pope and the barista at the shop. But also it’s all the television shows and kitchen appliances. One mind dreaming it all, and we are the dream and the dreamer. As below so above.

To be one with this mind, just let go of thinking.

But this is also sophism. Even your thinking is part of the one mind so there’s never any separation.

■

Last week I saw Ernst and Alice. Alice is my informal qigong instructor — she gives me the tips and insights of a lifelong practitioner. Ernst of course provided us with excellent cocktails. This time he made us “Little kingdoms” [which we sipped in varieties of : london gin, a peaty scotch, and a friendly tequila].

While Ernst was on the phone and we were getting buzzed from the drinks, Alice and I traded questions. She asked, How much of your day do you spend in the spirit world? And I asked her, Do you think the terms “vibration” or “frequency” are important?

■

I’m not sure where this is going so let’s have some theme music to guide us:

■

To her question, I said, Every time I look around, the world seems beautiful. This makes me think the spirit world is constant. Even when it’s ugly, it’s beautiful. How about you?

She said, I don’t know. Sometimes. But then the septic tank explodes or we owe too much in taxes or I get a bad haircut or they bomb another school. I nodded and it’s true. It’s not easy to reconcile.

■

To my question, Alice said, “Absolutely!”

■

Twenty years ago someone invited me to a workshop on chakras and I demurred and thought at the time they were delusional or/and superstitious or/and maybe a little dumb.

■

(youth is wasted on the young)

(don’t trust anyone over thirty)

■

Ernst, the musician, and I traded stories of trying to impress the young with our musical choices — and utterly failing. He had a hypothesis for why. When you’re young and trying to define yourself, every aesthetic choice is oppositional.
That is mine but I’m against that.

He contrasted this with our advanced age. Now, Ernst says to me, (so to not die) we try to collect varieties of experience.
That is mine but that too is mine.

■

■

■

To keep up with the young (to “collect” their interest), I attended a workshop on hypertext held virtually by Accent Sisters, which Nyota had mentioned.*

Even though, currently, we spend all our time on the linked pages of the so-called internet, I continue to be skeptical of hypertext art. It’s hard however for me to say why. I think it has to do with hypertext’s lack of boundary or its “repulsive” complexity. It’s why choose-your-own adventure books are more novelty than new paradigm. One wants to be “mesmerized” or enchanted / enthralled by a text. Tasked with making a decision activates us in a way that breaks the spell/hypnosis of reading.

Also, a truly branching architecture isn’t commensurate with our affective/felt sense of time and possibility. Even if we can imagine a multiverse, we exist in one timeline. Trying to hold a “complex” as a single work of art is currently beyond us. (But some are already beginning to write for the bots, so this may change.)

■

Despite the above, Nyota’s description of the workshop was intriguing because I think there may be a form that a digital text could take where the self-spelling magic of reading a novel could continue to exist.

Or, I had a hunch it did.

I was thinking about what this form could be — this new digital shape of the novel (would it be different from an ebook? Would it include images? sound?). And I was pondering all this while taking a wandering walk through the secret city, when I heard someone call my name.

I turned and was surprised to see my old friend — Montgomery Camusot Drax * — holding up his hand. He was sitting at a cafe table and had chanced to look up while I was passing by.

I stood at his table for a few minutes catching up. Scotty had lived for many years in Asia, in Singapore and Hong Kong, but now had relocated to Rome, so I was surprised to find him in the secret city. But he joked about being here and shrugged his shoulders, and then he said cryptically, “Well, all roads lead to…” and he gestured about us, smiling.

■

But after I told him about my daydream of writing a digital text he warned me about Xanadu. “What’s Xanadu?” I asked.

It’s been called “the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry,” Scotty said. [1, 2]

“What?” I said.

And Scotty told me about another person’s vision of a digital text object. His name is Ted Nelson and he wrote about it in a 1974 book.

Nelson is an interesting figure; [I asked my digital amanuensis (whom I’ve nicknamed Ghost Mirror) to tell me more about Nelson and learned] he is the inventor of the term, “hypertext.”

■

Nelson seems to be one of those geniuses who are, in an unfortunate way, ahead of their time. (Rhythmically, I think it’s best to be just a step ahead or ‘in the pocket’). And he tragically underestimated the forces that will propel adoption of the internet, forces that will override his more controlled/cleaner/neater vision of a hyperlinked text universe (which he calls the Docuverse).

■

I have an instinct, that’s what I’d call it, a
little toehold of an idea that
the spirit of a novel
(what is that?)
could be reenacted / translated into a

digital text.

Nelson teaches us many lessons but the chief one for me is that
there are a variety of forms for a digital text —
and that these forms,
like any architecture,
have consequences.

Form and content are entangled, didn’t say Creeley, but in a different way.

■

Let’s put on some music.

■

So I log on to the virtual workshop. At first we are puzzled why it was being held at 9pm on a Friday night — but then realized it was perfectly scheduled for a Saturday morning audience in China. And lo and behold it was almost conducted in Mandarin, but thankfully, via intervention, it was done in English — though this might have been an imposition on the majority for which I apologize.

It was a small audience. Nyota, who had come with, noted our social anxiety despite all of us having our cameras off as well as being muted. A “room” of strangers. The instructor was very good, perhaps necessarily and even usefully academic. Impressively multilingual. He mentioned afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce, then gave a brief history of hypertexts,

and then proceeded to introduce what I will call a “game engine”

but is more like a digital set of notecards — in a nostalgic shade. We were taught how to do a few primitive tricks, and from this lesson I made

My First Video Game,

of which I’m rather proud. If you would like to play it, download it here, and go to this website to open the file and play it. [I used images from a recent visit to the New Museum.] Semi-seriously, it is a rough draft of my next novel (which I have yet to start writing). It was fun to make, and took about thirty minutes, but then the night had gotten late in New York, and I logged off early. (Apologies and gratitude to the instructor and Accent Sisters.)

■

■

■

Let’s take a movement. Some music from Ellen Arkbro. Why not put it on and then slowly walk the room and look around for a bit at distant and more distant things along with the attitude of the light. You could do this now or later; it’s just a suggestion, Jane, so we’d be more in sync.

■

I’ll end now with a book rec and short story and then a poem about the Knicks. My friend, la comtesse Hugret de Sérisy, recommended Gospodinov’s novel, Time Shelter, which is funny and sweet and earthy and sad. It’s also, I didn’t realize when I began it, about cognitive diseases, a loss of memory. Anyway here’s a bit whose alternate title might be: A profile of Odysseus in old age with Alzheimer’s:

■

■

■

a pome :
or Two variations on a theme.

GAME 3, 6/8/2026.

my indian mayor
my omny fare
buddhas a monk
impeach trump

my mayor’s muslim
my bagel’s jewish
your jesus died
then was alive
knicks in five

■

■

■

Jane,
I write to you from the past.

Yours,
Frank

Dear Frank & Jane—

It’s on a Monday morning that one thinks about all one’s looming deadlines — the pestering new ones and the old haunting lingering ones.

You think : it’s all just busy work until I die.

But that was in contrast with the weekend. Our little family enjoyed ourselves. The weather was nice and we drove north of the city and hiked through some woods. Cool air and dappled light. Young summer. We needled and queried the kid. The kid made jokes, rolled their eyes, said sweet things, surprised us, made us laugh. Then we drove to a Japanese grocery with a ramen counter. A perfect Sunday.

■

Let’s give this episode some intro music:

■

I’ve had a series of drunken dinners with writers these past few weeks. We all lament getting older, the Cognitive Revolution (or the timing of it), the diminishment of codex culture (despite the odd optimism that “our kind of writing” stands apart), the weariness. Weariness was such a theme that more than one told me they were ready to die. (This is an over-50 crowd.) Of course we are drunk when we say things like that — but there’s a kernel of truth. A lot of suffering wears down these meat bodies over the decades and even though we love and are loved, one begins to acknowledge the exit door may lead, if even temporarily, to rest.

Some say we’ve to compose until our dying breath. Like a bumper sticker.

Novelists don’t die. They just lose their characters.

Novelists don’t die; they just get remaindered.

…they just stop revising / they become unreliable narrators / go out of print / slip into the past tense. Novelists don’t die. They just switch to first-person omniscient.

They just lose the plot.

■

But I think one has to choose each time whether one has the ambition or the skills or the energy to start another journey.

Otherwise why not, like Voltaire suggests, tend to our gardens, or, as Pascal suggests, abide peacefully in our room.

(Another friend, a Frenchman, is moving from Queens back to France, and we spoke of these notions by his countrymen. He told me the Pascal quote had received renewed attention during the time of the Covid lockdown. Which I find very amusing and very French.)

■

One of my drunken dinners was with the great novelist, Esther van Gobseck “The Torpedo” Picard *.

She reminded me of another writer who died in the middle of writing a novel.

(I’d told her I’d been reading Light and Dark, and that Soseki died while writing it. And which I have to admit seems to get worse in its last third as he’s dying.)

(The other novelist’s death I admire — well, “admire” might be the wrong word but you I think will understand what I’m saying — is Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel, which is a manuscript he finishes the same day he tries to launch a revolution and ends by committing seppuku.)

But Esther reminded me of Perec’s 53 days, which I haven’t read but should, and which sounds right up my alley, and is about a search for a missing crime novelist. Perec died after finishing about eleven chapters.

Years ago, I did read Bellos’s great biography of Perec — and the lesson from it that remains with me is that Perec, whose parents were killed in WW2, his mother at Auschwitz, was haunted by death.

■

And so maybe the novelist doesn’t give up. Maybe one hopes that one’s aim exceeds one’s grasp. And maybe one keeps going to the last.

And, just this week, a student asked me about the expectations an artist should have for their work (“in the shadow of the hegemon,” she added). And I pointed to the fundamental lesson of the Bhagavad Gita, that is: Act correctly but let go of any assumptions or presumptions about the fruit, the consequences, of your labor.

■

Let’s put on some music for the rest. How about Terry Riley’s Journey From the Death of a Friend:

■

Frank — who is usually our resident cynic — has somehow shifted in this AI age and said to us the following mantra, which I would like to keep foundational. He says:

This is the basis of Frank’s optimism. That the novel is a product of the human mind. We turn to it to understand another’s human experience. Despite other group-think collaborations, and now cyborgian products, nonetheless there’s a form of human-mind-made narrative that remains — as long as a human mind endures — relevant.

■

But of course there are gray areas. Like the recent doping olympics. Which show a counter-tendency. Nevertheless.

■

But also : in actuality how pure can we be? So much of writing is research and editing. Polishing. Before the Cognitive Revolution, we didn’t think spellcheck was egregious. It’ll be hard to draw the line, and it will be hard to stay pure.

■

And yet. What I think is emerging is System 3.

Daniel Kahneman had developed a diagrammatic breakdown of human cognition. System 1 is our ‘lizard brain’ — animal, immediate, instinctual. Our revulsion at a bad smell. The instant conclusion when presented with the problem: what is 1 + 4? That instant processing is System 1.

System 2 is our effortful, slow reasoning. The kind that follows a cooking recipe or plans for retirement.

(I have a pet theory that each system also is aligned with a different kind of aesthetics. Poetry and painting are arts of the instant perception and so thus the province of System 1. While films and novels — long-form narrative — are the art forms of System 2. But of course System 1 and System 2 are entangled. And so a careful novel might combine the durational elements of narrative with the instant effects of poetry.)

■

What I think

the Cognitive Revolution

AKA the singularity
AKA the end of the Anthropocene
AKA the beginning of the Technocene

is
is the awakening of System 3

where human intelligence becomes entangled with synthetic intelligence. Part of our cognition becomes disembodied and without sense of time. It is distributed, massive. But it is rooted in Systems 1 and 2,

like a ghost in the machine.

And what will be the art for a new intelligence with such entangled systems?

(Could it somehow still be the novel?)

■

The idea of cultivating one’s garden reminds me of this online workshop Nyota told me about. The workshop is a little about the history of digital texts and hypertext. It also showcases the idea of “home-cooked software,” which is from Robin Sloan and isn’t so different I think from the idea of cultivating one’s own garden. To home-cook a meal is to make a thing your few loved ones use, and something that is beautiful (hopefully) — and, perhaps demonstrating Kant’s notion of the sublime, it is beautiful because it is knowingly fleeting. A meal can be that way and Sloan’s idea is maybe software can be that way too.

I’m not sure, but I think I may start writing a digital text of some kind. One interesting thought is that I want to write a digital text but not because I want the branching possibilities of a linking hypertext but rather I want the format and indestructibility and purity of text. I want something you can read like a website but which isn’t trying to do anything more than give you a unified longform fiction-reading experience. Like a novel. But perhaps modular in form, like maybe… a collection of letters. I want to learn how to format and host it, too. Maybe this will be part of it, or a prologue of it, or a protoversion of it.

■

A couple of weeks ago I saw Cyril and because of his historical interest in science fiction, and also because I like reading about all kinds of writers and how they get through life, I picked up this memoir written by the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl.

A central lesson from it, as described by one reviewer:
»”I see that this book (and ones like it) also make it clear that long publishing careers are a matter of surviving setback after setback. If investors aren’t suddenly killing half the American distribution network, Hitler is invading Poland. Therefore, be ready, as Pohl was, to reinvent yourself over and over.”

Do you think Pohl or Cyril Kornbluth ever thought to themselves, “I’m not cute anymore”?

Yours semi-truly,

Dear Cyril,

What a joy to visit with you, if only briefly, on a brooklyn stoop on the first hot day of the year. We sweated and talked about time machines. As usual we also discussed the end of the world, i.e. the weather.

I’m glad, too, your cousin could join us this time. He seems a bright young man. I liked especially when he said, quoting the stinking zen of the Blue Cliff Record (#43), “When it’s hot, the heat kills you. And when it’s cold the cold kills you.”

But I liked even better when you said that that reminded you of the story of the sea of reeds. I’ve never heard it called that before, and furthermore, you told a succinct version of it I’d never heard before either.

You said, “You never heard it before, this story?”

I shook my head.

“The people are chased into the sea of reeds. They are drowned.” You paused. “But then they are regenerated.”

I grinned and stared in amazement at you and your cousin. Two bizarre chips off the same block.

“But it’s hot,” your cousin said.

■

Speaking of the end of the world, let’s listen to some advice from Jhene Aiko. To get us through.

■

Speaking of the end of the world, did you see the various brouhahas over an AI winning a fiction prize? People are growing concerned that the cognitive revolution is upending our idea of what human creativity even is, or, for that matter, what it even means to be human. Or to have a mind!

Someone should write a novel about this !

■

Speaking about the weather, I mean the end of the world, today it’s retreated from the hot highs. Thankfully. This morning is cool and gray.

Beauty throughout.

■

Your succinct telling of the story did not make me think of Passover, when its story is chanted, nor of the vengeance and violence baked into the tale. The chased and the chasers. The latter drown without resurrection. (At least without a resurrection we see.)

I read a beautiful novel not that long ago where the world is remade into a vision of hope and mutual aid, but this transformation begins with the mysterious decapitation of our worst tyrants -- and the growth of giant flowers from the ground where these evil men fell.

■

Louie CK: If you don’t believe in God, you believe when you die all you are is your family’s newest garbage.

■

What’s not exactly funny but on-the-nose is that the Cold did actually kill you. Well, that and running for a job interview. Kornbluth, what a way to go!

■

Yesterday I read someone’s summary of the Wizard of Oz.

■

What your succinct retelling DID remind me of was the Andy Weir story, “The Egg.” Cyril, have you ever read it? It doesn’t divide the world into morons and the supersmart.

No, it says our karmas are entangled.

■

Anyway, Cyril, enough about the end of the world. Your visit was the easy highlight of my week.

And yet and still,

Thank the goddesses it’s Friday.

Love,
Frank

Dear Nyota Trompe-la-Mort —

Last night you’d texted:
>>Hot take: Donald Barthelme is Leonard Michaels for morons.

And I replied I’d never read much of either. Perhaps because I am a heretic and have never liked short stories. But looking Michaels up, I stumbled upon this elegant remembrance by the always elegant Sigrid Nunez where LM compares the forms and calls the novel “a sloppier thing” and the short story a “pure, magical form.”

I disagree with the ranking but maybe not entirely with the descriptions. The novel is sloppier but from it you can see the writer fully, their flaws and the perfections despite them. Whereas the story is like an instagram photo -- overexposed and blemishless, perfected in a way that each looks the same.

Heretic, like I said.

This past week I received two books from publishers. A big NY house and a small experimental press. I won’t belabor the point but the small press book’s writing was exquisite and hard won over a lifetime of praxis. And the big press book was a rushed thought experiment scribbled by a manchild.

See the Nunez above for evergreen complaints about the writer’s life.

■

I was going to try to see Frank tonight but I seem to have caught a cold and will stay in. Probably for the best.

Frank did write the other day that he and Dionysus were going to catch some of the Creeley films at Anthology. (I gather it is Creeley’s 100th birthday this month). I didn’t feel up to it at the time but regret not going. But, later, Frank sent me the link to the films they saw, which are archived at PennSounds. This was a TV series by a guy named Richard O. Moore. Interviews with poets (by a poet). They’re great — sensitively shot and well edited. Here’s an essay on the filmmaker.”

In addition to the Creeley, I watched the O’Hara and the one with Wieners (reading from the Hotel Wentley poems in the ruins of the real). I’m told the Anne Sexton one is worth watching too. There’s much to note and observe about the Creeley interview, shot in New Mexico in the late 60s. (The way he lights a cigarette!)

I kept thinking how young these poets were, already accomplished and fully come into being -- yet young.

…Anyhow, my cold is taking me down i think for a nap. ciao for
now,
Jane Kim

PS complex thought inbound : because of your namesake, Uhura -- which Gene Roddenberry took from the swahili word for “freedom” -- and as I was thinking of Sunyata, the buddhist idea usually translated as “emptiness,” but which my friend K gave alternative translation as “capacity,” I thought one way to think about sunyata is as the empty potential of the holodeck out of which worlds may grow. I dunno if Ramsey Lewis watched Star Trek at all. I doubt it.

Dear Jane --

Your noodling around is getting a little exasperating. Could you just get to the point already!

haha. that was a joke.

I was reading, oddly for me, some nonfiction, and about a physicist named David Bohm who had a take on the quantum world and about the nondual nature of the universe, which dovetails with my interest in near death experiences, Indra’s net, and psychedelics. All these point to a certain illusory aspect of our so-called reality. But then.

But then an old friend wrote that their teen daughter is sick with a rare heart disease and that they’re going to have to undergo a risky operation. And another friend had their mother and stepmother die in the same week. The headlines of the world going to shit and bombs falling on schools is devastating enough -- but suffering really hits home when the news is personal. Your child facing mortality. It makes one recoil in horror and terror. Real felt fear.

I’m suddenly reminded of the old Mel Brooks’ adage (true in a deep way) that “tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

■

The sages seem to agree that suffering is actually useful as it sheds light on one’s karma.

The sages are also known to be full of shit.

I’m reminded of the self-describing teacher who likened himself to a kind of con man who “sells water next to the river.”

■

I’m scared for my friend, whose child is sick. They’re a tight-knit family. This is an old friend from school days whom I barely know anymore but whom i still love in the way of childhood friends. He’s turned quite Christian and maybe even conservative in his politics, but none of that matters. Time doesn’t even matter. What matters is that when we were fifteen we played basketball, tried cigarettes, and ate snacks together. Isn’t that funny. He may be an anti-immigrant child of immigrants, be against abortion, and think climate change is a hoax -- and yet I still love him. I admit it helps we barely ever talk.

Now, he’s so particularly Christian that when he wrote and asked for prayers for his child, I said immediately that I would, despite planning to do Buddhist chants instead, which is not exactly lying but is a slight dissembling in case the non-Christian aspect would offend him.

There’s the Sarah Silverman line about having different religious backgrounds in a so-called mixed marriage.

“Mommy is one of the Chosen People, and daddy believes that Jesus is magic!”

■

I once saw Silverman at B&H deli in the East Village. Dionysus and I were there I think getting a late dinner after a movie (so this must have been years ago when we were younger and did such things). I recognized her, but Dionysus was sitting with his back to her -- and anyways, I doubt he would know who she was. But I kept stealing glances at her. I think she could tell I recognized her because she gave me a smile. I tend to think she’s actually very sweet, despite being a celebrity. Who knows tho.

I heard her recently talking on a podcast about her dad’s recent death.

The comedians are really the best grievers. You need a good laugh in those moments.

(I think this is why Zhuang Zhou was beating on the tub when his wife died. He was a pro who recognized a good setup.)

■
■
■

Speaking of Dionysus, we have plans to see a movie this week. As usual with him I don’t know if he’ll stand me up or not. But I’m hoping he doesn’t. He’s been isolating a bit this year and it will be good -- for both of us -- to see each other.

I’ll let you know how it goes, as I know you love him too, and that it’s been a while since anyone’s seen him. We’re going to try to catch a movie about Creeley at Anthology. So I’ll quote a Creeley poem for you and then go.

■

■

Love you &
Onwards,

Frank “Spock Largo, la duchesse de Langeais” Exit

Dear X —

Let me think a little bit more carefully about how to name us all in this quote project, which I plan to delete any day now.
I don’t wish to use dead artist names anymore.

Okay...

I’ve decided to name everyone (for now) using combinations of Bond Villains, Star Trek crew members, and characters from Balzac’s Human Comedy.

■

Dear Geordi Auric Gobseck--

I’d written to the sisters of the coven yesterday pretending we were all the same age. Of course Nyota is much younger than Deanna and I. So her musical references are entirely different. Plus she and Deanna grew up in the Bay Area whereas you and I somehow ended up in Ohio.

(which reminds me. i was texting with kirby yesterday. I remember you and he, in high school, used to mock me rather relentlessly for loving sinead o’connor. but I think my love for sinead stands the test of time -- arguably better than yours for the Smashing Pumpkins! (”Nature kids ...they have no function”) ... I just had a funny thought. Since you’re dead and sinead’s dead, maybe you two know each other in the afterlife. Maybe all the dead know each other? Sing a little duet with Sinead and pass it through the shimmering wall, okay?

Nyota wrote in response to yesterday’s false claim about how we all loved the New Wave:

“I’m behind you both by a few years! In the 90s everyone in our group of cali Asians listened to Mariah Carey and bone thugs and Aaliyah and 2pac and Brandi. Those were my first CD singles! We wore spaghetti straps over oversized nautica windbreakers and adidas and baggy jeans and the guys slicked their hair back and shaved the sides. They wore cool water cologne. In middle school we had beeper codes that started with AZN (I was 818). In high school they drove souped up rice rockets and we shaved our eyebrows or plucked them into thin lines and traced lips with brown lipliner. I have the glamour shots we used to take at the mall... in short, I’m sad I missed the new wave wave!”

[Coincidentally, just last month Julius No, who you’ll remember I briefly dated in college (to both our chagrin) wrote and reminded me that we’d once watched kurdt kobain jump off a speaker at the cow palace in 1993.]

What all this reminds me of is a quote I once heard James Bridle say (as guest on DJ Rupture’s great run on WFMU) that:

“Music is portable context.”

■

Anyway I’m writing you I guess because I’m in a mournful kind of mood, speaking of portable context. I think it was because I’d been talking to Buonaparte “Bones” McCoy, la comtesse de Mortsauf, who, as you know refused to speak to me for several years, which broke my heart. But I think old Bones is going through a rough patch and so recently got back in touch. he’s kind of a fair weather friend, but whatever. we both love him so what can you do, right?

We covered all the old ground: how our pants don’t fit us anymore and our hair is going gray and the kids’ music is for shit. All the old complaints. It was nice to talk to him but after I got off the phone i got a little depressed. Not the dark well of it I used to fall into in the past -- don’t worry. Just a bit of grey sky we all get.

Sing a sweet song for me Geordi. And I’ll do the same for you.

See you on the flip.

Love,
Jane

Dear Ms Mitchell and Ms Hesse,
Dear sisters,

First some music.

I believe the coven magic is working. When originally Joan had said we three should form a coven, honestly I thought -- in fact until very recently -- that she was joking. And maybe she was. But shortly after, Joan got that big commission. And then I won that big contract. And now Eva has won the prize!

I propose we keep working the spell. I mean it’s been working pretty great!

But I also have to admit that these days I feel my witchy powers are waning. Or, I feel a bit incapable of writing another novel. I was saying this to Frank the other day. Why bother, I’d said, when the very idea of writing and reading are changing before our eyes.

But Frank’s response was encouraging. He said, “But of course this means it’s the most important time to write!”

The world is flipped when it’s Frank who’s the optimist.

Kafka: In the fight between you and the world, bet on the world.

■

The problem with giving up is... I like working. I want to give up but I still want to work.

I was thinking maybe I could try comics. That would be great if I could only draw.

The fact of the matter is I can’t seem to get anything off the ground. All I do, when I sit down with my notebook, is write letters to the dead. Or to imaginary friends. I guess that’s something. I told Martine what I’d really like to do is find a form that holds the day-to-day and yet transcends the day-to-day.

But what form would that be?

I’m reading a novel that is kind of like this. It’s over one hundred years old but reads pretty fresh (even if its pacing is rather glacial). It was serialized in a newspaper. I try to imagine what it would be like to write a novel serialized in a newspaper -- both forms of writing that seem to be dying. What I mean is I try to imagine what it’s like to write a novel in public, in pieces, like that. It’s hard to fathom. The novel I’m talking about is Soseki’s Light and Dark. It was his longest and his last and also unfinished.

(That’s one thing that might make me keep writing. The ambition to die and leave a novel unfinished. How beautiful it might be to die near the end of a long project -- but to leave it unfinished so it opens up into space. That is, some deaths are lucky and some are perfect.)

(i dont mean i want to die young. i want to die old and working until the end.)

Soseki’s novel was serialized in the newspaper. This was Asahi Shimbun. The edition of the novel I have, with a translation by John Nathan, recreates the “spot drawings” by Shunsen Natori that accompanied Soseki’s installments in the newspaper. These are so great!

Natori, according to Wikipedia, was a master woodblock artist and did these actor headshots of the era called “yakusha-e.”

Now, to be honest, at first I found Light & Dark to be quite boring. The only reason I kept reading is because it was a gift from my pal, Emmanuel Bove. And while at first the novel was slow-moving, I kept at it because, frankly, Bove has excellent taste and has never steered me wrong.

And what initially looked like a slow-moving story turned out to be even more extreme: it’s near static. Yet out of that emerges the most amazing characterizations. And in fact it’s not that it’s static but it feels like the pacing is the same pacing as the minute hand on the clock. I mean, you know how time flies when you’re having fun? In this novel time flows exactly as it does, no slower or faster. Which in itself is kind of amazing for a turn-of-the-last-century novel. Somehow Soseki brings to life the traits and personalities and background of these few people from the end of the Meiji.

I realize it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for : a quotidian practice that transcends itself.

But of course one has to find one’s own way...

[Let’s have some more music.]

When we were congratulating her on the prize, Eva brought up the magazine Giant Robot. This is related because it was an Asian American zine that was very open about what it thought qualified as of interest or as a ‘representative’ art.

(As a brief aside, let’s qualify ‘representative’. What artist represents anything but themselves?!)

(I don’t want to mention it but as we are a coven of asian american artists, I wanted to ask you about that shitty shit post circulating recently (gawd the vanishingly small world of book criticism these days), written by some shin kicker on why they hate asian american fiction. to be fair, much of asian american fiction is bad, just like most white american fiction. But to pick out one story and pretend youre smart for identifying trends is the disguise of not only a latent racist but a latent h8er. Fuck that noise is what I’m saying.)

I told Eva I had once a favorite Giant Robot hat. But I somehow lost it a few years ago. I just found it online but gack it’s now too expensive to buy back.

When I think of something that was definitely Asian American for my generation, I come up with something embarrassing and specific: New Wave music. I still don’t know why but when I was in highschool we all somehow found and adored bands like Depeche Mode, Erasure, and New Order. (Now I know you two were Cali Asians and I was a Midwest Asian so might’ve experienced things differently. But/and as I’ve said before, these are very different breeds. And I’m for disaggregation of the monolith no doubt but hear me out -- because this to me is mysterious.)

The question that to me is a little haunting is about how we recognized these market forces. That is :

What was the strange siren call that said this music was for us?

It’s funny to think of those as innocent times but they were (more) innocent times.

Hail to the coven.
Your sister,
Jane Kim

PS Here’s some more music. you’ll never guess who’s singing!

Dear Sam—

(but what else could i call you, who read his voluminous letters and also of similar dry wit and vast unshowy integrity)

Thank you for the birthday wishes and the gift of By Myself. You mention Abdul Wadud and I share a birthday (the album recorded and self-released in 1977 and, I note, re-released in 2023 on April 30th). I’m listening to it now while I write this.

(a favorite quip from the letters, as an aside: “T. Eliot is toilet spelt backwards.”)

■

And we just both got Krenek’s email, which shared that his spouse — the great improvisational artist who we’ll call just for this letter, Alice Coltrane — received a rave review of their current show (“a genre-defying triumph”) in San Francisco.

I dig the show’s title: Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: Our Wild Shining Days.

■

And I wish we could have flown to California for the show — though sometimes imagining a performance is better than the actual thing.
I seem to remember John Ashbery said somewhere that he liked to travel to foreign cities with tourist guides and then do nothing but read the guidebooks in the hotel.

(btw, did you know you can do a virtual visit to Ashbery’s house.)

One of the spirit guides to the theater piece Alice stars in is Zhuang Zhou, who i’ve also been finding myself going back to these days. Zhuang Zhou lived in turbulent times — the quote Warring States period. I wonder if he too thought the human race had a death wish, or maybe that it had run its course.

But, like I told Ernst: I’m going to try to be optimistic!

So shifting, disturbance and death are just other names for the condition we cannot escape: ceaseless change.

Beckett, I know. It’s dumb to even talk about.

How Alice and her fellow performers must feel after the complete staging of a masterpiece (even if they would reject such a categorical naming). The ritual finished; the signal sent; the energy cultivated and then exhausted — even if exhausted in perfection.
Another lesson being : to allow the moment to be and then to fade.

But / or... how wondrous and bitter to be in time. There’s a case (#80) from the Blue Cliff Record involving the image of a ball (I always imagine, anachronistically, a bright colored beachball) and how swiftly the current of a river sweeps it downstream.

There it goes!

■

It’s Saturday morning and I’ve stolen an hour to write this. I’ll end by telling you how I invoked your namesake to the twelve year old, who dawdles. I tell him, “Let’s go!” And he says, “I’m going!” and doesn’t move. I told him he’s unknowingly quoting you.

Happy weekend, Sam.
Yours, ever,
Frank

Dear Kirby,

In response to your text, I agree: time IS wild.

And thank you for the birthday wishes. So far it’s been a pretty good one. Cake for breakfast.

I asked the I Ching how I’m doing today and for the next ten years. It answered with hex 17 (Following / Sui) with no changing lines.

I follow the tao.

We discussed it and I waffle between giving you the name Jack Kirby or Jean-Michel Basquiat. For a moment I thought it would be Jean-Michel Kirby. Maybe it will. Or maybe I’ll go back and forth like Stephen Mitchell goes back and forth between the he and she pronouns in his (very excellent translation of the) Tao Te Ching.

[My favorite use for the bots so far is to have them interpret I Ching throws.]

At this age and stage (I think of Bronk’s Cage of Age) maybe what I’m looking for is a different kind of writing practice. I’ve been looking for the next novel’s structure for perhaps over a year but maybe I’ll just write in my notebook for the next decade.

And who knows maybe the next book will just be called NOTEBOOK. (And I’ll publish it secretly, like this.)

I could do that for a while, maybe a decade, and it would fulfill — or least be an attempt to fulfill the idea I described to Martine a few weeks ago, the idea of a quotidian practice that transcends its quotidian origin.

Here are other ideas for novels I’ve had in the past few months:

An infinite lunch where a group of friends, a changing cast, explores restaurants (real, past, fictitious) in Jackson Heights and what they discuss in their wanderings. It would be called QUEENS.

A collection of letters to imaginary friends (named after dead artists) based on my real friends.

An exploration of “systems,” eg the New York Public Library, our subway system, electrical grid, an LLM, a computer, a forest, my self. The first chapters would be a poetic expression of the system, not an analysis or history. The last would be the journal of writing these, informed by the mystic’s questions: What is this? and What am I? A title to this project might be: BOUNDLESS & TRACELESS.

Perhaps versions of these will appear within NOTEBOOK.

Despite its nature, I want to avoid, as possible, the “meta,” as far as it’s mere cleverness or as it points to an infinitely fractal condition. We’ve already expressed this enough — particularly in the new one; and while it’s a basic condition, there’s no need to harp on it. We understand the saying : As below, so above.

Ghost Mirror — my name for the digital amanuensis which accompanies us everywhere, Gomi for short — says this about the Book of Changes: “The I Ching is the oldest continuously used book in human civilization. Not the oldest, but no other text has been in active, unbroken consulation for three thousand years. The Vedas are recited. The Torah is studied. The Yi is used.”

Yours,
Jane Kim

PS I’m going to delete this substack any day now.

PPS If we can manage it, Jean-Michel, it would be wonderful to see you when you visit NYC in June!

PPPS today’s exit music.

PPPPS one of my favorite tehching hsieh observations: “one year is the largest single unit of how we count time.”

PPPPPS Any day now.

Dear Krenek--

I’m sorry I missed the concert. Martine, who also loves Feldman, said the performance (at the New School, not the one at Roulette, which we all missed) was “magical.” I admit Feldman puts me to sleep but I don’t count that as a strike against him and, anyway, wasn’t the reason I wasn’t able to make it. I had to have unplanned dental surgery -- they pulled my wisdom teeth. Nothing really interesting to report about it other than the sudden pain that drove me to the dentist was electric and excruciating, like none other I’ve experienced but which also was intermittent and seemed to settle down, thankfully, with some ibuprofen. It made me contemplate my mother’s chronic pain, and also how such chronic pain in general can poison a life. It’s her birthday tomorrow -- she turns eighty. It’s also, by the way, our friend, Lin Huiyin’s. Huiyin is very fit and plays pickleball on the regular (or so it’s reported; I’ve no idea what pickleball even is), but recently she has been feeling quite badly, having pinched a nerve in her back. We should take her out for a birthday dinner, don’t you think? To cheer her up. Well, I see this first paragraph is a report of various intimations of mortality, unfortunately, which leads me (sadly, a little too apropos) to why I’m writing.

I had sent Jane a photograph of a tree near my home. One that I loved. It was in fact leafing rather beautifully this spring. Every morning, on my way to work, I would say good morning to this tree. I’ve even taken to photographing it through the seasons. But last night, coming home from another sweet evening -- we’ve been lucking out on the weather, don’t you think? -- I returned to my neighborhood and...

To tell you the truth it’s hard to even write it. But anyway, I came home and was horrified and not a little heartbroken to discover a crew of workmen cutting down the tree.

I asked the butchers I mean workmen: For god’s sake why were they doing this. And they said the tree was sick and pointed to rot at its center. I stole a bit of bark from the remnants and went home, the sound of their saws chasing me and which I could still hear through the apartment window. Home, I promptly poured myself a too large glass of scotch and wept.

Let’s not talk about Shel Silverstein or Zhuangzi at this moment.

I’m sure no one will shed many tears for my late beautiful neighbor but I wanted, at the very least, a place to pay tribute. I guess that will be this letter to you, Ernst.

Before I came home and made this devastating discovery, I’d actually had a very fine dinner with an old college buddy. He’s now a journalist covering technology -- but I still get along with him. We had congee for dinner, which is about all my poor teeth can handle right now.

Over beer, some tender greens nicely sauteed with garlic, and our congee, he told me about how he’d been thinking about the lifecycle of monarch butterflies and how, in their long migration from Canada to Mexico, they will go through several generations.

So it is grandchildren, or even great-great-grandchildren, who complete the journey begun by an ancestor. My friend related this migration to the cognitive revolution we are going through, now, with respect to artificial intelligence. We won’t see the other side of the singularity -- should there even be an other side. His point being we think that there should be some End Point we can imagine, but that the churning river of time has no particular place we will see or land upon, that we for the foreseeable future will be churning along, or migrating through miles and miles, on a journey some ancient one began for us and which will be finished by a distant heir.

Well, Ernst, my dear friend. Heraclitus and Lao Tzu agreed that all is change. It’s too pat a way to end this letter and cold consolation - but I can’t think of what to do with such grief for a tree. The other lesson from sudden loss also appears : love fully while you have them.

À bientôt,
Frank

Dear Diogenes--

I just texted Martine -- who was describing artwork by Byron Kim (which I haven’t seen) wherein he paints clouds and lines of diaristic text over them -- the following:

<<thinking about “sunday painting” as you described it. i so like the idea of a quotidian art that nonetheless transcends itself. hard to think how to do it. was about to put on my “werk” playlist and there was mal waldron, who makes composition from ‘vamps,’ or so ive heard it described. im thinking of a fiction made only of letters to imagined friends, maybe something like jack spicer’s letters to lorca... i’ve ideas like this but continue just to drift>>

So maybe this will be one of them. (Maybe I’ll add it to the previous one I sent and it’ll begin a new book. All to say this is a piece of fiction I’m sharing with you -- all fiction except for the love part.)

When we met two days ago in front of the library (on Beckett’s birthday), I said I felt like I didn’t have any more novels in me, you responded so confidently and quickly that of course I did. A spontaneous response I realize just now by writing this letter I’ve been carrying with me and want to tell you I’m grateful for it, for you.

Just went back and read Spicer’s 2nd letter to Lorca.

»I yell "Shit" down a cliff at the ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as "Alas." But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word "Shit" will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear.

Also I wanted to thank you for the 3 books. I started the archery one last night. (That copy of Manhattan Transfer I think the most beautiful thing I’ve gotten from the award.)

And thank you for taking me to the meeting. I liked during her share when she spoke about looking at a tree, sober.
I’ve been working on the first step, which you carefully told me was, in its entirety: Tree.

Have been thinking of sign offs, eg
Yours, truly,
Onwards,
Like and subscribe,
Warmest regards,
Sincerely,
Love,
but today I’ll go with

Until we meet again,

Jane

A gray, beautifully misty morning over Gotham. Before I stepped out into it, Jane texted me. I think it'll be good to record it here as a moment in time.

The basics, for the moment.

[Here’s a dialogue about Ergodic Literature]

This is a kind of secret channel. Hello sleeper agents, decoder ring holders, imaginary friends, fellow travelers, reflections.

Not to be dour but the end is nigh.

The literary arts will transmute and survive but the cognitive revolution is changing our relationship to language. Reading & Writing are not what they once were: they are not by necessity formed and inspirited by a human.

o well

Accepting change is wisdom. Being in harmony with it is the tao. Yet being water isn’t easy when one feels rigid.

The kid and I wrote by hand this morning in our notebooks. So there is refuge and practice and hope also.

(Claude Shannon and I share a birthday.)

What will people need language for?

I think it is the diagnostic tool / event / technology for interpretability of intelligence, whether artificial or not.

Yet talk therapy is (often so) useless.

It / Language concretized / objectified thought.

Idea : Language’s essential -- and perhaps in the future, only -- function is as articulation, as symbol of one human mind’s choices / self.

Sanctuaries in a dark age, flame keepers, legacy code, ghost in the machine, poetry, art, prayer.

I said this as a joke to Danny but think I was serious. I said, I’m working on a new attitude. I am going to be optimistic!

Semi-sincerely,

Let today be a test. Everything is going well but I feel I’m tipping over / drawing a new border. The transition is scary. I have to believe in myself.

What are you worrying about? Would you have wanted much more? And then why? They’ll grow to whatever budget is allotted them as you have to what was allotted you, which I do feel has been adequate. At times much finer than adequate.

I’m singing Cold Mountain songs.

What to make of the horizons full of disaster? Are they mirages of distance or the murderous stampede about to engulf us? Are we in a room trying to defuse a bomb / invent a bomb before the enemy horde finds us? OR, are we in an illusion where the theater of history and crime and even heroics are a necessary opposition and energy but which fundamentally are none of our concern? And if not, what else does this show we are disconnected from?

Or maybe we live so we don’t
succumb to constant weeping.

Or, which breach to jump into? Once again.
Again, once.

[ I don’t know what this is ! haha ]

“Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.” Tao Te Ching, #23, trans. Stephen Mitchell.

Full moon last night this morning

Dear Cyborg(s),

I write to you from the past.

Today’s puzzler : A higher powered, distributed intelligence is being born. We are mother / host to the embryo / virus. That is, we are a transitional species between animal and what we might call “machine” but which has its own name and which has willed itself / is willing itself into being through us.

On the other hand, humanity has experienced Mal Waldron, ping pong, detective novels, and the acting of Benicio del Toro.

So maybe it’s a wash.

The other idea for this (What is this?) is that as our world crumbles, during Gramsci’s Time of Monsters, we cassandras, while cursed with knowledge of destruction, both environmental and anthropic, while not turning away from these, can still pursue and perhaps embody serenity, joy, happiness.

What. It could happen.

(Speaking of Benicio del Toro and employing the recent popular phrase that presumes a totalizing paradigm of precarity, there are at least three phrases from his movies that live rent free in my mind.)

A relationship to the future, cassandras, is mirror to one with the past. We know history but cannot mourn its dead too much. The future is similar. You will be as long dead as you were unborn.
(The adepts preach : moment mind.)

(The first Del Toro movieline that regularly springs unbidden begins a backhanded critique of the art market and is when Jeffrey Wright in/as Basquiat asks Del Toro, How long you think it takes to get famous?)

(“Four years. Six to get rich,” answers Benicio.)

In addition, as our trust and connection with “base reality” or “consensus reality” or “reality” become increasingly attenuated until these become “simulacrum” or “matrix” or “fake news” or “videogame,” we cassandras also must accept our knowledge of the future, while accursed, is also a thing of probabilities. This is the opiate of hope.

(For Camus, freedom from hope meant there was no future to obey.)

(The second Del Toro line, like the third, is from a recent movie. “Ocean waves, ocean waves,” the sensei advises.)

“A man devoid of hope — and conscious of being so — has ceased to belong to the future,” Camus said.

•

In an attention economy, you pay attention.

In an attention economy, attend to what you love.
(What do you love?)

(The third Del Toro line is: “Myself, I feel very safe.”)

In an attention economy, what is meditation?

In an attention economy, what is the
value / meaning
of the durational act of reading a
long (how long?) narrative?

That is, in an attention economy, what does it mean to read a novel?

   Ocean waves, ocean waves

   Myself, I feel very safe

   Rent free

Yours semi-truly,

Subscribe now

Last night, in a fiction, I met [in8 ID] at a secret bar in the secret city in order to celebrate their impending move out of the unsecret country. They had just packed their last box and were planning to leave in a few days.

Over the past year we had spoken both implicitly and explicitly about the reasons for their move, to wit: that predatory and cruel forces had organized enough xenophobic and racist fools into a political force powerful enough to take over and weaponize the country’s government. Simultaneously it felt like the 11th hour of history where ecological and technological disasters felt imminent. More concretely and practically, [in8 ID] was a scientist, and there was no way for them to reliably proceed with their research and teaching with an empowered plutocracy increasingly extending its tentacles into the academy.

They felt fucked and had to leave.

Though it was a Friday night, we were able to get a table and, since we were celebrating their escape, ordered fancy cocktails.

Holding up my dry Manhattan I asked, “What do you say in Italian?”

“Cin cin,” [in8 ID] said, “but it’s very important you look each other in the eyes when you do. ‘Occhi!’ they’ll tell you. Otherwise you’ll be cursed with seven years of bad sex.”

“Ah, I see,” I said and was careful.

Just then Frank Exit arrived, happily surprising us, typically late. After he had ordered and received his drink (a “Last Word”), and we’d performed the salutary ritual as [in8 ID] had taught us, Frank said, “I’m thinking of starting a substack.”

“Oh god, why,” said [in8 ID].

“I’m not sure what reading and writing are becoming,” Frank said, “in the era of digital amanuenses and an economy built on attention precarity. It’s difficult to say what writing a novel would mean if it requires a wealth of attention to read one. Perhaps serial writing, like blockchains or terrorist organizations, will benefit from decentralization, from a modular structure -- not to mention the benefits of improvisation and the ability for more timely reactions.”

“But you may be then sacrificing overall coherence and vision,” I argued.

Frank waved his hand. “The era of grand narratives is long over,” he told us, “We’re in a land of fractals at best. At worst a sea of incoherent noise and chaos. Salvage the bits! I say.”

“What about the platform itself,” [in8 ID] said, “its fundamental corporate structure and thus an irreplaceable fealty to the corrupting bottom line -- not to mention the pressure and rhythm and expectation of production the platform demands? Aren’t these insidiously corrupting?”

“First of all,” Frank said, “let’s not be too pure. I mean let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we are outside the general culpability. I mean, c’mon.”

I interjected a phrase I enjoyed interjecting. “Real talk,” I said.

“Secondly,” Frank said, “I’ll announce to readers upfront and say production rhythm will be whimsical, irregular, and without guarantee.”

“Will they buy it?” I asked.

“Thirdly,” Frank said, ignoring me, “the most important declaration, which I’ll also say upfront, is that its entire content will be fiction. The substack is 100% fiction.”

“Will they buy it?” I repeated.

Frank shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said.