Opening Remarks / The List

I walked home today, of all days. A pounding rain and the NYTimes hitting me with tornado warnings, I had just watched the storm approach for the last hour from the 25th floor of a Brooklyn waterfront, the front cresting Forest Hills, encroaching, as I explained to my student occlusions and depressions and the differences between a meterological cyclone and a coneyislandogical cyclone.

I got outside and felt swarthy. Barometrically drunk. I came to a ferry and tried walking on, because everything is free until proven otherwise. I was stopped, I was asked for my papers or he might’ve said QR-code and I had to say no, I had to turn around back into the storm until homie said it was okay to board, gratis, just this once. He must’ve seen the storm in my eyes.

I left the house with an umbrella but happened to see the person it belonged to, and I returned it because I always pay my debts before leaving the country. This time next week, I’ll be in Vienna. I wanted to stand on the deck but they don’t allow this on water ferrys, or at least not during tornado warnings.

I stood instead by the only window without gaudy advertisements blocking the view, held my book open to page 94— Credenza for Schneidermann, Fugue State Press, 2007— and watched the water like a noob. Our ship swelled in soulful bounding leaps, we nutmegged three bridges each its own testimony to selective human ingenuity. Behind me in the hold were commuters. A cutie who I shared a smile with was now eating the mouth of a much older woman. Lady Liberty loomed leeward and we pulled into Dumbo but I remained aboard. I needed money, and the next stop was Wall St.

Downtown I hopped from scaffold to scaffold, pausing on each corner just long enough to dry out before stepping back into the maelstrom. My outfits have been slowly ebbing into the drab, the business casual, and I was chuffed to find that I had become indecipherable from the financiers around me, but for my adidas sneakers (wet, striped callow with blue and white). Everyone was clean but no one was hot. I am almost 30 and dream only of renting a house upstate. I want a lawn but more importantly I want to awake to the sound of birds.

The title of this essay. It is a theme, underappreciated, that haunts post-Bronze age art. Weird ass writers keep yelling from their rooftops: avoid the messy confusion of populated areas. It is Man vs. Society, and it stands in the literary canon right alongside Man vs. Man, and well above Man vs. Nature.

We love to joke that Henry David Thoreau lived a block from his mom but we all live way closer. I visited his cabin last week, and you have to cross a four-laner to get from Emerson’s place to his. In the 1965 novel Stoner, protag Will Stoner leaves his father’s farm to attend college a five hour walk down the road. It’s his father’s idea, and Stoner soon finds his feet moving without even knowing why. Ahead sits the world as we all know it. What he walked away from is a life, a consciousness, lost to all of us.

In Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin has epilepsy, and spends his adolescence hiding out in a remote village in Switzerland. He finds out he has some money coming to him, so he hops on a train back home. He leaves the edenic alps for Society, and Society lays in wait to devour him whole.

Madame Bovary hides magazines in her dresser with descriptions of the Paris Ball Scene, which she knows she’ll never be invited to. She longs for it so deeply it drags her small village of Tostes closer to the capital. The City taunts her, it pours poison down her throat.

What are we to do? Don’t go to the City, young man. They’ll kill you.

I made a list of novels and songs with this theme. I’ll put it here, so that people who came for a list can leave, and the rest of us can hang.

Literature:

1. Stoner— John Williams (1965)

2. The Idiot— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1869)

3. Sula— Toni Morrison (1973)

4. Ask The Dust— John Fante (1939)

5. Madame Bovary— Gustave Flaubert (1857)

6. The Christian Bible— Saul of Tarsus (65)

7. Silas Marner— George Eliot (1861)

8. If He Hollers Let Him Go— Chester Himes (1945)

9. Things Fall Apart— Chinua Achebe (1958)

10. Colored Television— Denzy Senna (2024)

11. Some Do Not…— Ford Madox Ford (1924)

12. Siddhartha— Hermann Hesse (1924)

Music:

1. Destroyed By Hippie Powers— Car Seat Headrest

2. I Was A Stranger— Bill Callahan (also: Let’s Move To The Country)

3. Leaving LA— Father John Misty

4. Turning Wheel— Spellling

5. Painter In Your Pocket— Destroyer (also: The Bad Arts, and pretty much his whole discography

The Young Man

How does the theme go? William Stoner goes to school and studies agriculture but is seen to be bright in a special way. A crotchety old professor sits him down one day and tells him he may not know it yet, but young Stoner is a man of letters. Young Stoner is also a simp— a passive and quiet soul. Emerson’s perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies in the soul and in matter. He is ripe for abuse because Stoner will never fight back. It is easier than not to use him to get what you want.

The City gets his hooks into him. He has fallen in love with big ideas and there is only one place to get them. The City has already won because it has the thing it taught Stoner to want. Everyone around Stoner is a quiet victim of the same calling— some had designs on it early, some were placed there against their will. But all of them continued to will it.

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden has his crisis first, and then decides where to have it second. He breaks down in the country, but heads to the City for the full, unrestrained experience of a psychotic episode. The City was a decision, it was the means to his end. This version of the narrative gets a lot of us.

Sula is grateful for the City— it is the only place she could learn to be free. It is in leaving the city, in returning to the country, that she is destroyed.

In Denzy Senna’s 2024 Colored Television, the City is a dream for sanctity in the midst of the chaos. She wants comfort, but only if it comes on the border of danger. The protagonist has been marred by Los Angeles, and far less than wanting to write novels she wants to be seen. She wants to be safely seen, but mostly, she wants to be seen.

Rock Beams’ Idiology is the story of a man who squares up to the City and shakes his head in disappointment. The world owes him more, and he knows how hard he’s going to have to work to make up the difference. He’s fine with it, he’s just disappointed.

[There are movies about this too but movies are fake. There are sculptures about this and sculptures are sick, and sculptors are sick. Sculptors are so cool except they never tell anyone they’re sculptors. It’s like someone made them feel embarrassed about being sculptors. We all want to donate to the sculptor’s Patreon, but the sculptor refuses to make a Patreon. There is a frozen gatorade in my freezer and I’m going to grab it while you read this list of films. A frozen gatorade being such a distinct experience.

Films:

1. Conclave (2024)

2. Three Colors: White (1994)

3. Poor Things (2023)

4. The Brutalist (2025)

5. Past Lives (2023)

6. Seven Beauties (1975)

7. Mad Men (2007 — 2015)

8. Boogie Nights (1997)

]

The City

Everything goes wrong for William Stoner. The world steps on him at every chance it gets and Stoner just lets it. He insists on saving himself, and doing it quietly. He has enemies who don’t deserve him— who don’t understand him in the slightest. And Stoner doesn’t understand them either, but he gets to be the hero because he always “loses.” They belittle his principles, and punish him for having them because it makes them look bad. They forbid him from caring for his child. They send the one true love of his life packing to the next City over, and prevent him from seeing her ever again. If William Stoner opened up to you at a bar, you’d tell him to quit his whining. After three nights of this you’d tell him to goddamn do something about it, then. This is why William Stoner doesn’t open up at bars. He holds it in, and it destroys him. Destroys all of him except the one part he was determined to keep.

You hate him. So do I. We are all the City to someone else, and we all accidentally find ourselves digging our hooks into the William Stoners of the world. Sometimes we are the Stoner, but rarely. When we are we hate it, we feel belittled and debased. We vow to never be the Stoner again, and we’re even willing to do some stoning to assure it. Then, once again, we are assigned the role of The City.

When we get to be Stoner, for a few hundred pages, we are desperate for him to win (whatever that means for him). Sentimentally but crucially: when we get to be anyone for a few hundred pages, we want them to grow and we want them to win. For some reason, we don’t do the same with the people we meet in the world. This is why art exists.

Myshkin loses a part of him that cannot be rebuilt— the part that believes unconditionally in his fellow man. Silas Marner is forever scared and forever scarred, and will never leave his hut again. Bovary is dead. Denzy Senna is finished. In Things Fall Apart, the world quite meaningfully comes to an end when the missionaries arrive in Pre-Colonial Nigeria. Speaking of missionaries, look what Rome did to Jesus (though it pales in comparison to what Jesus did to Rome).

When the City is done with you it spits you out into the corner of its cave. You lie there for years, in great pain, and then one day grow moldy. The city walks over to you and bends down. It fixes you up into a neat little pile— a sculpture. It puts googly eyes on you and calls you a friend. It uses you to get into parties. It is the same City that it always was but now you’re more a part of it then you’ve ever been.

Closing Remarks

Prince Myshkin is destroyed by the City. For nine thousand pages he is pummeled, pot-shotted, torn down and denigrated. He retains his magic-Dostoyevsky-powers, but he’s a finished man. He is forever ruined. You know this will happen the whole time, because it is Russia, but you wonder why he doesn’t see it coming. You wonder why he doesn’t flee, take the money and return to Switzerland, live in a small village and make everyone rich and make life wonderful and meaningful, in all possible ways.

But that’s the rub. The word City comes from “Citizenry.” Meaning, it is unavoidable. Wherever you go, there they are. And we are not only the City to everyone else, we are the City to ourselves. And the child within you cannot just die, it must be murdered. Luckily, like Stoner, like Myshkin and all the rest, it will not put up any serious fight.

Prince Myshkin cannot simply return to Switzerland, because all he will find there is more City. People will be people wherever they are. Your City is not important, it is the same as all the others. Those Swiss bastards will rob him for everything he’s got and he’ll give it away with a smile, and they will get bored and greedy and bitter, and will go to be the City somewhere else.

You cannot avoid it. Your answer is not to bitch about how exhausting it all is. I don’t know what your answer is, but it can’t be that.

Fiction / Literature

• The Secret History — Donna Tartt

• If He Hollers Let Him Go — Chester Himes

• Shadow on the Grass — Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

• Post Office — Charles Bukowski

• Sweet Thursday — John Steinbeck

• Oscar Wilde (Oxford Authors collection) — Oscar Wilde

• Sputnik Sweetheart — Haruki Murakami

• Vigil — George Saunders

• Sula — Toni Morrison

• Super Sad True Love Story — Gary Shteyngart

• Cathedral — Raymond Carver

• The Awakening — Kate Chopin

• A Wrinkle in Time — Madeleine L’Engle

• The Theft + The Actual— Saul Bellow

• Book-Ends — Michael Chabon

• Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes

• The Catcher in the Rye — J. D. Salinger

• Red Pill — Hari Kunzru

• Everything Now — Rosecrans Baldwin

• Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro

• I’m Losing You — Bruce Wagner

• The Days of Abandonment — Elena Ferrante

• Big Fish — Daniel Wallace

• The Emigrants — W. G. Sebald

• The Trial of Lady Chatterley (edited by C. H. Rolph)

• Ethan Frome & Summer — Edith Wharton

• Poems — Erica Jong

• Crying in H Mart — Michelle Zauner

• A Year Without a Name — Cyrus Dunham

• Less Than Zero — Bret Easton Ellis

• Colored Television — Danzy Senna

• Every Night Is Ladies’ Night Michael Jamie Beccera

• A Harlot High and Low— Balzac

• The Running of the Tide

• The Anthropocene Reviewed — John Green

• On Bicycles — Amy Walker (Friss)

• Washington Square— Henry James

• Accordion Crimes — E. Annie Proulx

• Ulysses — James Joyce

• I Used to Be Charming — Eve Babitz

• Factotum — Charles Bukowski

• The Odyssey — Homer

• Fleabag: The Scriptures — Phoebe Waller-Bridge

• The National Road — Tom Zoellner

• Red Azalea — Anchee Min

• A Theft — Saul Bellow

• Cleanness — Garth Greenwell

• Me and You and Memento and Fargo

• The Buddha in the Attic — Julie Otsuka

• Eve’s Hollywood — Eve Babitz

• The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion

• Orlando — Virginia Woolf

• Lord Jim — Joseph Conrad

• Music for Chameleons — Truman Capote

• Calypso — David Sedaris

• Go Down, Moses — William Faulkner

• My Name Is Red — Orhan Pamuk

• All About Love — bell hooks

• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy

• The Essential Pinter — Harold Pinter

• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain — George Saunders

Drama / Screenwriting / Acting

• The Tools of Screenwriting — Howard & Mabley

• The Vermont Plays — Annie Baker

• Crafty TV Writing — Alex Epstein

• Five Screenplays — Preston Sturges

• The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act — Isaac Butler

Nonfiction / Essays / Reference

• Teaching Composition: Background Readings — Johnson (editor)

• Ocean’s 11 (screenplay/book adaptation)

• The Top of His Game — Bill Littlefield

• Not This Time, Cary Grant! — Shirley Eder

• Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t — Steven Pressfield

• The Bible

• Dictionary

• Abbott’s New Card Games — Robert Abbott

ENDSTAGE COMPOSITION

Finishing a novel is hard. Magnitudes harder than beginning one, and a little harder than overcoming the “uh-oh, this doesn’t really work” crisis that I tend to hit around the 30% mark. Around 90%, the book is “done,” and resembles the structure and story and tone of a final version. The two main problems are:

1- there are central flaws which I can’t fathom fixing without the entire superstructure tumbling around it,

and 2- there are thousands, tens of thousands, of individual word choices that I have to verify.

The first one is classic and obvious and has gotten plenty of lip service on how to overcome it (my favorite comes from Annie Dillard: “Aim past the wood, through the wood; aim for the chopping block”).

The second one I could not have prepared for. In the early stages I make so many decisions which are allowed only because I tell myself “I’ll go back and fix this later.” The big, obvious flaws— logistical errors, certain proper nouns, provisional lines of dialogue— get fixed on the second or third draft. The smaller ones— a choice of adverb, a reference to a song or movie which might be anachronistic or tonally inconsistent— get addressed on the fifth or sixth draft.

I have read through and “touched up” every line in this book at least nine times, and I am now encountering a much finer, much smaller category of problem. I realize here that I can only vouch for the excellence of about 15% of my sentences. The rest can be better, and it takes a notable amount of time per sentence to decide how.

Also under #2: I’m learning that this is the stage where the individual has to really become an artist. The distinction I’m drawing is that it’s time for me to make my own decisions about my work. I have to decide how I feel about certain bold choices, which got flagged as “difficult to stomach” in revision. I’ve gotten plenty of notes, plenty of feedback, and I have a strong sense of what other people think needs to change. I can see their point, and I can of course also see mine. I have gladly accepted the obvious notes, but some of them come down to the elusive concept of taste. And while I’m founding my artistic career on my own instincts, there are so many tiny decisions about where to give in, where to cede my attempts and experiments for things like clarity, accessibility, the principles of dramatic structure, the universally acceptable parameters of ideas like “identity,” or “time,” or “change."

FOOTNOTES

Anyways, it’s hard and frustrating, and I’m avoiding it as much as I can. Today I sat down with the non-negotiable intention to edit, and but I don’t want to make any of those tiny decisions right now. Instead, I added footnotes. As if I was an editor fifty years from now re-publishing this novel for Norton, I started from the beginning and put small explanations of every reference in the book. In the first two chapters, about 15 pages of text, I have 133 notes. Here are, without any context, a few of them:

Prologue

[1] A nod to a line from T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” A later quote from the Four Quartets is pinned to Orla’s childhood bedroom wall. Eliot is obsessed in this Quartet with the nonexistence of anything outside the present.

[4] From Job 38:5, God uses this analogy to rebuke Job’s frustration with his fate, after Elihu has tee’d him up asking “who teacheth like Him?” This is a challenge to our divine Responsibility, our management of what we were given: the divine construction and divine beauty that is ours by birthright

[11] Reference to Mil Potrero Highway, along the San Andreas Fault

Chapter 1

[16] The inspiration for Orla’s house can be found at 15 Ayers Lane in Dover, NH

[18] A distinct impression from my summers in New London, NH, 25 miles west of Dover. The Finches live in Saco Valley, beneath the Chocorua [from Chapter 1 of Moby Dick— “But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco”]

[19] Orla’s father had always been incapable of perceiving a world without himself at the center.

[25] Crucial to Orla’s upbringing is the tension between a protestant father who believes each man should learn for himself and a Catholic mother afraid of asserting anything resembling confidence or expertise

[26] These non-hyphenated constructions were stolen from John Dos Passos

[30] Much will be made of the way parental figures hold mugs

[35] A begrudging reference to the influence of Malkmus

[37] A begrudging, surviving M-Dash, which stands lonely amid the graves of thousands others

[41] Until recently, this screech would’ve been misidentified by most New Hampshirites as a Fisher Cat. Orla’s father, however, would not have made that mistake

[42] Let’s say Georges Lefebvre’s Quatre-vingt-neuf (English trans., with the original French on the sinister page)

[44] Kerosene

[54] The only line from this chapter that M singled out as impressive

[57] Begrudgingly un-italicized

[58] A gentle allusion to Don Quixote 2.25 (and thus to Farriella’s Meadowlanders)

[62] I later read a very similar sentiment from Leo Naphta, which I guess is where her father would’ve gotten it (though her father is really a confused Settembrinist).

[64] The only instance in the novel of her imbibing alcohol

[67] There’s a theory (probably spurious) that America lacked wildflowers pre-Columbus. In that vein, this further represents the intrusion of a “developed” (read: adulterated) reality upon the (illusory) “wild.” Orla eventually sees through the misleading concept of the “pure” or “Natural” quite clearly, though also loses access to its essential worth

[72] They really aren’t. But I couldn’t resist the image.

Chapter Two

[80: “He sotto voce’d the details of their genetic curse”] My own construction, off the Latin for “intentionally lowering the volume of one’s voice for emphasis.” Wikipedia: The speaker gives the impression of uttering involuntarily a truth which may surprise, shock, or offend. Galileo Galilei uttered “Eppur si muove” (”And yet the Earth moves”) sotto voce, after begrudgingly recanting his heliocentric supposition

[81] Reference to late pre-Lutheran Christians such as John Goose, who struggled to stomach the flagrancies of Rome (chief amongst them, the “triangulation” of God, the trinity)

[82] Can’t recall exactly which incident this was. Seems like the Milwaukee, which Sank near Grays Reef on November 29, 1895 after a collision with the schooner J. H. Tiffany, while bound from Milwaukee for Buffalo with wheat and flour. But Fay’s ancestor’s account is modeled more off the following incident, related by the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary: “In late September 1894, the schooner barge Ironton was traveling light from Cleveland to Marquette and under tow by the steamer Kershaw along with schooner barge Moonlight. The wooden freighter Ohio was steaming from Duluth to Ogdensburg, New York loaded with a cargo of grain. The three ships were heading north when they encountered Ohio in rough conditions, 10 miles north of Presque Isle. It was during this critical moment, with the vessels about to pass each other, that Ironton’s towline parted. The vessel broke free, veered off course and collided with Ohio. Both sank in half an hour. Sixteen crewmembers of Ohio got into lifeboats and were later picked up by schooner Moonlight. Another passing vessel, the steamer Hebard, picked up two of Ironton’s crew. Lake Huron claimed Captain Girard and four other Ironton crew: Mate Ed Bostwick, Sailor John Pope, and two unidentified sailors. [one of which would be ours].”

[83] The geology throughout this text is pretty sound

[84] Flagrant nounification

[85] Supposedly the Great Plains YMCA in Weatherford, OK

[89] From the word-of-the-day calendar above my toilet

[90] Ibid

[93] Midwest Emo is a subgenre and scene of emo that emerged in the Midwestern United States during the 1990s, which shifted away from the genre’s hardcore punk roots and drew on indie rock and math rock approaches

[95] This Social Security number accurately places the bassist as born in Indiana, 1974

[100] Silver Jews, Pet Politics: “She was shiverin’ so hard / It looked like there were two of her”

[104] Anachronistic, unfortunately. Elephant 6 saw its heyday in the mid-to-late 90s, and by this point in history they would be well-established, and declining in relevance. This error sort of deflates Phil’s authority, and confuses the timeline w/r/t the imminent Circulatory System reference. It’s possible this is an offshoot scene in Athens (Brad Postelthwaite’s Snowglobe is a workable alternative), but in general there is a confusion here which gives me plenty of consternation

[115] Public housing development in Chicago, Illinois, known for its high-rise buildings and significant challenges, including crime and neglect. Most of the complex was demolished between 1995 and 2011, leaving only the original two-story rowhouses. This concert was not, but could’ve been, real.

[116] Lyrics by James D. Weatherly, 1973: “L.A. proved too much for the man, so he’s leaving the life he’s come to know / He said he’s goin’ back to find what’s left of his world, The world he left behind not so long ago. He’s leavin’ on that midnight train to Georgia / Yes, said he’s goin’ back to a simpler place and time / Oh, yes, he is, and guess who’s gonna be right by his side.” Fay’s experience in Athens will only bring further reversion, but a sort that’s closer to the ideal blend between the natural and constructed worlds.

[125] Probably thinking of Diogenes right here

[126] “nice” — Paul Beatty

[132] Synesthesia is often associated with a rejection of formal education

I knew the song before the book. I played all ten glorious minutes of it for a Greek neuroscientist I was trying to convince to love me. I’m not sure if it ever worked, but she appreciated the song, and asked if I had read the book. I didn’t know it even was a book, I told her. This, presumably, was a point against me.

[Father John Misty’s So I’m Growing Old On Magic Mountain]

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is one of those books which, once you finish, you feel compelled to blog about. Because of how good it is, because of how few others have read it, because of how many are curious about what’s inside. Which is? Is it too much to say that everything in a young life exists in this novel? That it can be simultaneously read as a eulogy to the classical world, as well as an allegory of European dynasties at the turn of the century, which Mann seems to have somehow known would lead to a great rupture, WWII? It’s not too much. Der Zauberberg delivers all of this and more.

The phenomenon of Big, Serious Tomes is that people never really know how to describe them. There’s no one-sentence description of this story that gets at the truth of this book. You would have to spend thirty pages to merely introduce all of the ideas, all of the weirdnesses inside. The experience of reading any B,ST is one of surprise. You often don’t believe that this is the book people have been talking about the whole time. The best of the BSTs feel so unbelievably personal, so written for you that can’t fathom why anyone else bothers to read it. The Magic Mountain plays this game, for sure, but Mann wrote it so specifically as a book of the past, with such a consistent shoving of the narrative into a box that most of its delights are well beneath the surface.

A brief description is in order. Any summary of TMM has to rely on its dramatic elements— a young man, Hans Castorp, visits his cousin at a sanatorium in the Swiss alps. A day’s journey away from the nearest city, the Berghof is an antiquated establishment for the European elite to restcure from tuberculosis. His visit is meant to last three weeks, after which he will return to the “flatland” to begin a career as an Engineer working in a shipyard. It is 1904, and the reader in the year of its release, 1924, knows exactly what it means to be a German engineer in the first quarter of the century. Young Hans Castorp may have been fated to build the U-Boat which sunk the Lusitania. Except.

After a couple of weeks Hans meets a woman named Frau Clavdia Chauchat, a rude and lazy Russian heiress. His cigars start tasting weird, as he adjusts to the dry mountain air. He partakes in a strange ritual of sitting on the balcony in the freezing cold with a specially designed blanket wrapped around every inch of his body but his eyes and his nose. After a hike leaves him with a cough, the head of the Berghof finds a “wet spot” on Hans’ lungs, and suggests he take a room and stay a couple of weeks longer. Two months later, he is still being treated. His cousin leaves to join the army, but Hans remains. A year later, his cousin returns. Two years later his cousin is dead. Four years later Hans has lost all sense of time and society, and remains in a state of stupor up in the Swiss alps. And the clock continues to tick.

The protagonist is intentionally a simple man. He is not susceptible to deep thought, he is not an artist, nor a philosopher, nor does he see himself as special in any way. He is phlegmatic, equanimous, imperturbable. Surrounding young Castorp are a few mentors who vie for influence over the engineer’s soul. In one corner is the secret hero of the novel, Ludovico Settembrini. An Italian revolutionary and humanist who embodies the Enlightenment ideals of personal freedom and rational thought, he ferociously insists that Hans flee the sanatorium and return to the real world to contribute to society.

In direct opposition to him is Leo Naphta, the Jewish-born Jesuit who argues for a Christian-communist, totalitarian world. These two are roommates, and perform for Hans the bitter fight of the 19th century, between progress and conservatism. They are the dual forces on a young developing mind— the Remus and Romulus, the Locke and the Hobbes within all of us, who ask: Should the individual seize or cede control? Hans pretends to idly survey their disparate worldviews, and refuses to admit the immense control they have over the direction of Hans’ ideas.

Towards the end of the novel, there is a third contender: Mynheer Peeperkorn. He is Clavdia’s lover (and thus, Hans’ natural enemy) and a capital-p Personality. Mynheer astounds Hans with his indirect and flourishing rhetoric, his enigmatic command over a room, and teaches him that ideas will always be secondary to charisma. It is prescient for what is coming in Germany, when a rhetorical madman who stands for everything Germany has opposed will steal the hearts of young men. Two of these mentors commit suicide, and all become irrelevant as Hans drifts into adulthood and trades thought for numbness. I don’t mind spoiling anything, because this is an exhausting book, where what “happens” is not of huge concern. This is because Mann started from the thesis that “only the exhaustive can be truly interesting,” as well as his insistence that any reader who makes it to the end must read it a second time.

I started reading Der Zauberberg five years ago, on the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday. I was older than Hans when I began, but by the time of my finishing it, we were the same age. The Josh Tillman song at the beginning of this essay gets at a central theme of the book with the lyric: “These days the years thin, until I can’t remember what it feels like to be young forever.” For Josh, Der Zauberberg is Los Angeles. Written from a house in the Louisiana country-side, the song paints Los Angeles as the place he lost his mind and years to participating in a culture which was unrewarding, a culture that devoured his youth and left him numb. When I read the first two hundred pages, a half decade ago, I couldn’t hear Mann’s message. I was ensconced in that culture, utterly embroiled in its dramas and the feeling of significance it lent little, insignificant me. I couldn’t imagine then the ways in which time gets enveloped in the fog of youth.

[Alan Hovhaness’ Mysterious Mountain, Andante Espresivo. The symphony is not officially an allusion to Mann’s novel, but in my mind they pair perfectly. There weighty, New World sentimentalism, their large themes, their balance between the ominous and the flighty.]

The weather at the Berghof is eclectic, heaping snow in the summer and 85-degree days in the middle of winter. This barometry blurs the senses, and prevents residents from noticing the passage of time. Anniversary celebrations are forbidden by Herr Behren, the leader of the sanatorium, in order to ease patients into accepting their fate. Months are eaten up like days, and you begin to sacrifice your selfhood in exchange for anonymity. I thought, like Hans, that thought or creation could be an antidote to this blurring effect. That if I struggled heroically against the fading and dying then I could defeat time. I wonder if any of us are different in this quixotic dream. What is for sure is that time comes for all of us. Mann asks the reader if “the pastness of the past is profounder, completer, more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls?” Is all we know that which just happened? Is everything away from that scope just a blurry re-imagination? Castorp begins to fail to retain an imagining of his selfhood. He loses his own narrative, and begins to recede into the landscape.

I’m not sure if my Zauberberg was West Virginia, grad school, the literal Blood Mountain I hid out on as I wrote my first book, or my youth and twenties writ large. I suspect that Mann was concerned more with Germany’s locum-avoidance than Hans’. But the prior of this novel— the idea of nations as heroes, struggling on a mountain-top for the fate of the youth— seems quaint now. Mann wrote this book once as an ode to nationalism. Even midway through the war he chastised his brother for publicly speaking ill of Germany. When the dust finally settled, he took stock and re-wrote. Settembrini, the humanist, became larger than life. An ideal. Naphta, the ideologue, blows his brains out because no one else will. Mynheer, the Personality, the charisma, takes his own life when he sees his powers fading. Mann was not yet able to fully see, but soon would, the way War is Money. The way this Money rules the world, not with seducing young minds but by forcing them into their roles as buyers and dyers.

I’m sorry to say that the last 150 pages of this book are the undisputed best. It is an admittedly painful read for most of the way, full of philosophical discourses fifteen pages long. In my translation (there is a much-needed new one on its way), the pivotal scene where Hans and Clavdia finally meet, 350 pages in, is entirely in untranslated French. But the ending is where Hans’ final and most lucid attempts at salvation brutally fail. It is where he comes directly against the washing power of time, and where we watch our hero falter before disappearing.

Share the mouse-car moment

I’m sitting in WSP trying to write an article about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for absolutely no one. I’m trying to think of really brilliant things to say about the passage of time. I rode a Citi Bike from 140th to 4th in 44 minutes and entered the park for shade. When I first walked in, there was to my left a kid’s birthday party, with a man dressed as Olaf playing an acoustic guitar. To my right was a man with a guitar wearing all black and covering an Elliott Smith song. Ahead was the hero of this piece, a young lady reading Franny and Zooey while drinking a Pacifica tallboy. I moved towards the center and chose a bench far enough away from the jazz band that I could still think. The place is bustling. Some guy offers me money to move to a different bench and I stare at him until he asks the woman next to me the same question. She can’t speak english and confusedly walks away, and the man proceeds to stage a young couple on the bench and set up a camera. Across the small courtyard is a stand set up with painting supplies. A lady has rented their equipment and draws on a piece of paper attached to a clipboard. She watches me while she draws. I return her stare for a few seconds, then look away. A wiry gentleman comes up to me and says that if a guy in a red tracksuit asks me questions about Palestine, I should ignore him. That he’s apparently trying to trick people into looking dumb on the internet. The cameraman hands the couple a coffee cup with a mic taped to the back and tells them how to hold it while speaking. They conduct a three minute interview about dating, something about how dating should take up 10% of your life. They staunchly defend this idea, saying that other social relationships are important to uphold. The lady with the clipboard is still staring at me. I write this line in my Thomas Mann essay: “Is all we know that which just happened? Is everything outside of that scope just a blurry re-imagination?” A man in a red tracksuit traps three young men in an interview and tries to get them to locate Israel on a globe. He counts down loudly, 5, 4, 3, 2, but then they successfully find Israel. It reminds me of a dream once where Israel was in Colorado. Everything else about it was the same, but it was just in the middle of Colorado. The young couple next to me finishes the 10% interview, and the cameraman tells them that the jazz was too loud, and that they’ll have to start over. The jazz is very loud. The lady with the clipboard continues to stare at me. The Pacifica girl is gone. The wiry gentleman and the red tracksuit guy are now arguing with two police officers. Red tracksuit’s cameraman captures the whole thing. I see a woman who reminds me of my Middle English professor, but then remember that my Middle English professor died during Covid. I am holding a cigarette but am afraid to light it, in case it bothers anyone around me. I presume I am in the shot with the young couple, who are now on the second take. This time, the woman in the couple is speaking loudly about how her last relationship was abusive, and took up all her time, and that she lost all of her friends during it. Her current relationship is three years. Her boyfriend is silent. The lady with the clipboard has stopped drawing but still stares directly into my eyes. I see the Olaf guitar guy slap a woman dressed as Elsa on the ass behind a tree. The cameraman feeds the young couple a line, “In my opinion, a relationship should take up 10% of your life.” They keep messing up the delivery, and the cameraman keeps saying, “I know, I know, it’s retarded, but you have to say it just like that: “In my opinion, a relationship should take up 10% of your life.”” The painting stand has packed up and left in under a minute, and the clipboard lady is gone. Red tracksuit stalks with his globe looking for another victim. He has a severe underbite and offers everyone a chance to win cash. A black couple accepts his challenge and a man next to me brown-bagging a 40 gives me a knowing smile. The young couple from the 10% interview gets a free polaroid of them for doing the interview. Elliott Smith guitarist has presumably killed himself. I coin the term “locum-avoidance” for my Thomas Mann essay, and pause to consider whether anyone will get it or if it will hurt the integrity of the piece. I chuckle at the thought of integrity. The black couple wins the Palestine game and are handed a $5 bill. They tell red tracksuit guy that he said it would be $10, and there is a lot of confusion until he reaches into his pocket and gives them $5 more. Red tracksuit guy sounds just like Tucker Carlson. I abandon my Thomas Mann essay out of a deep sense of hopelessness in the world. I have been on the bench for fourteen minutes.

I’m back on Blood Mountain.

I first came here four years ago, in what we’ll call the nadir of my emotional existence. I was literally hiding. There’s no service up here, so I didn’t have to deal with emails from my landlord asking what was going on. It was miserable. It was the most beautiful possible place to be miserable. I felt like a millionaire waiting out a pandemic in the Swiss Alps.

In reality I was shoveling horse shit, and that is what brought me back. A little while ago, Glenn and Kat told me they’d be in Ireland for a couple weeks, and asked if I wouldn’t mind looking after the horses while they would be away. “Of course,” I told them, stuffing several pens and a third draft of a manuscript into my duffel.

On day two I received terrible personal news. The kind of news that brings your whole sense of self to its knees. On day three I got really fantastic professional news, the kind that makes you text your parents. It’s day five now, and all a wash. External influences on my psyche have canceled each other out to moot. I’m left here once again to ask myself the question— the question I am terrible at asking myself anywhere near the confines of a metropolitan— “How’s it going?”

Fifty miles away away I can see the peak of Mt. Washington. I’m staring at its hook nose atop the presidential range right now. I’ve climbed it several times, but never as an adult. Once I went up it in boxers. Another time I walked while reading the Bible. I was maybe a weird kid. I am possibly a weird adult, in the body of a normal adult. These things are so difficult to know.

What do you think about when you look over a vista? What happens in your mind? Do you think about how small you are, or wonder how long is appropriate to look before you can turn away? I stared for a while, wondering what I was supposed to wonder, and kept hearing waves of breezes rustle the leaves above me before feeling them paw at my back and then continue on, leaving a ripple of shaken branches move slowly through the valley below me. I could feel sunlight leak through a gap in the clouds, strike my crown, and fade again into shade. I watched that splotch of sunlight speed down the mountain, cross a quick gulley, and then slowly climb the opposite knob. Ten minutes later, I could see it spilling yellow light onto a hilltop a few miles away.

Glenn has a page-a-day calendar much like the one I have at home. But while mine has daily definitions and etymologies, his has quotes. I hate quotes. I never find them profound, and the ones I do like, I can never summon in the perfect moment. I turned the calendar onto its face so I didn’t have to see the dates— one of them reminded me of an event I was missing; the next was the birthday of an ex— until finally my heart started breathing, and I could look at a calendar without having a mild breakdown.

Staring up at me was this:

“Writing Fiction is like remembering what never happened.” — Siri Hustvedt

Do you see what I mean? The drivel they push on us?

First of all, who is that. Second, is this quote only meant to apply to people who write fiction? That seems like too small a demo to write a quote for. That’d be like saying, “installing a bathtub is like creating a bath for someone in the future.”

The sound of a branch breaking brought me back to the valley. I’m responsible for driving Glenn’s pickup through the woods to look for trees to take down for firewood. The city-dwelling conservationist in me worried about deforestation, until I figured that if one man takes down two hundred mature trees per year, you only need twelve thousand trees to remain net neutral. I started counting the trees on Glenn’s mountain, and soon noticed that the amount of trees exceeded what I could hold on to in my mind. I decided the forest was fine.

But I kept counting. I started forming little patches of trees, and then multiplying the figure I counted within the patch by the amount of patches I could see. I would do it once and get something like 36,000 trees on this side of Blood Mountain. I’d do it again and get 120,000 for the exact same stretch of land.

Before I started counting the leaves on each tree, I became aware of a tick in my brain: I was getting distracted. This is bound to happen, but my distractions were all in the same direction. They were all future-oriented. I kept imagining myself in situations I might one day be in, and what I would say in that situation. Some of these felt likely to occur— I’d imagine greeting Gene tomorrow morning, when I go to his farm to buy a half gallon of milk. Some of them were ridiculous— a conversation with an old friend who I haven’t seen or talked to in years. But this division is misleading. Both of these— my very likely conversation with Gene and the ridiculous argument with the lost friend— are illusory. They are future-oriented illusions. AKA, fantasies. I lost my count of the trees, but I think I was getting somewhere.

What is this obsession I have, with pre-imagining interactions? I don’t think this is the norm. I bet there are plenty of others like me, and plenty of others whose “distraction land” is a very different place. Some of you might get lost in memories. Some of you might have your eyes or ears caught by something in the physical world. While avoiding the boring labels (ADHD, Autism, all that jazz), I’m guessing that what we call “healthy” is probably a pleasant mix of several of these options. “Healthy” probably also includes not getting distracted much at all in the first place, except for the amount which keeps abstract thought alive.

I can tell something has just changed, barometrically. Two of the three animals sitting beside me just came to my lap at once. This includes Cosmo, the cat, who in very few circumstances will find a reason to approach me. I’m noting this in case you believe in barometry and its effect on thought as much as I do, in which case you’ll want to know, for these last few paragraphs, that a small front is now carrying a southeasterly wind, and there will likely be a brief sunshower in the next twenty minutes.

I know this because I’ve been sitting out here, staring at this forsaken valley, for five days. Something I learned from road tripping is that midwest and northeastern climates come in three-to-five day personalities. Each of these brief systems have patterns and tendencies which you can start to read if you pay attention. I’ve been reading this system all weekend, and I’m pretty attuned to it. This is the sort of shit the human brain is adapted for. This is productive thought. So what’s all this other bullshit? Why do I keep planning small talk with Gene, down to the most inane detail? Why am I imagining myself telling a friend which door I’m gonna leave my boots outside tonight, so that they’ll be there in the morning? And what does it mean that my “distraction land” is so petty, so desperate?

At this point you might get concerned that the ending here is gonna be like, “we should remain more present.” Because that’s beneath the mouse-car, isn’t it? I’d rather say something confusing and unsatisfying than be so trite1. This shit is about me, and, according to footnote 1, about you. Because I can’t chalk it up to living in a complicated social network (we all do), especially since I haven’t talked face to face with a human in almost a week. And yet it remains the focal point my brain tugs me to— plotting interactions so to maximize their safety, their profoundness, the way they’ll preserve an image of myself in the minds of others (Quixote) and the way they’ll allow me to externalize my inner experience (Narcissus). Anything besides being, ahem, present.

Cosmo was right. A brief shower tickles the titanium roof of my porch, and is gone as quickly as it arrived. I will be able to watch it unfurl onto the Green Mountains for another few paragraphs.

For the last decade, I would take thoughts like this and run to the page. I would turn them into fiction in a way that produced some decent, wondrous, beautiful moments. Mouse-car moments. See but the problem was— is— that the second I convert my fantasy into prose it dies. And now I’m left editing scenes of a novel that were written two years ago, and which have ideas about the world that I can’t quite claim as beliefs. I did not hold these ideas for very long before pressing them into ink. My mind didn’t have time to mull them, for them to ferment. Like this very idea, of this very essay, proves: I have become compensatorily deft at syncing my revelations with language. I am able to have thoughts about as quickly as I can pen them.

But shit. I haven’t spent any time with those thoughts. It’s very possible that I’ll have written this quicker than it takes for you to read it (minus the leaf-counting diversion). This is not an idea I’ve been sitting with for weeks, years, before composing. Writing Fiction for me has not been, Siri, “like remembering what never happened.” It has been planning an elaborate party, an elaborate moment, for people that don’t exist.

In twelve minutes I have to go shovel shit. I will post this essay before that happens, and like all good labor, that shit will save me. This shit has been saving me. Bill Callahan talks on his new record about how he started making music as a way to communicate. “As time wore on,” he says, “I found myself increasingly turning to my guitar instead of other people in times of loneliness and sorrow and confusion. Which is the exact opposite reason of why I got into this in the first place. I started to wonder: is this creativity, or pathology?”

In the refrain he tells himself “it’s important to not treat your lifeboat like a yacht.” I’m down to nine minutes. I’m nothing if not punctual with my obligations. After I shovel the shit into a wheelbarrow, I’ll cart it outside the barn and dump it a few yards away. My mind, as you can guess, is already in the barn. And already I can feel what brought me to the page slipping away. Like that splotch of sunlight coasting down the valley, I will soon lose sight of it. Soon after that, I will forget exactly what it felt like. The way it hit my right temple, and forced my right eye to squint. I’ve staked so much of my self worth on being able to get it down before it's gone. I have committed myself to a life of desperately grabbing onto ideas before they’re carried off by the wind. I’m mostly pumped. A small part of me, though, knows what I need to do. I need to remain more present.

There’s a Tolstoy quote, from his essay What Is Art?, that I make a lot of use of. In one section, he blames the existence of counterfeit (shitty) art on 1) artists getting paid too much, 2) art criticism, and 3) schools for the arts. I can proudly say to Tolstoy that I am only guilty of one of these crimes.

In discussing #2, art criticism, Tolstoy says:

“Critics explain!”

What do they explain? If the art is good, then the feeling expressed by the artist transmits itself to other people.

All interpretations are superfluous. If the work does not infect people, no explanation can make it contagious. It cannot be interpreted. Had it been possible to explain in words what he wished to convey, the artist would have expressed himself in words.

Tolstoy is referring to painting and music. He’s saying that if a painter could have just told you what to feel, he would’ve. But language is fallible, and so he had to spend months perfecting the image on the canvas so it would make you feel how he intended. The phrase, “If I could’ve conveyed it with words, I would’ve used words,” does not seem to apply to literature. Literature uses words. Lots of them. Most writers would even tell you “if I could’ve used less words, I would’ve.” (This has always been boring to me. Keep your abridged texts, give me your director’s cuts.)

My argument is that this does apply to literature. That, in fact, we actually don’t use words.

It’s an argument that no one has agreed with yet. It usually annoys people, especially writers. This happened a few hours ago, and it’s why I’m writing this essay now. But while I understand a layman for criticizing this theory for its surface silliness, I think artists are missing the incredible freedom (and challenge) that it offers.

It goes like this:

There are two types of Rhetoric. Let’s call them the Nominal (in name only) and Poetic (or, evocative). Both forms of Rhetoric use figures (letters) which coordinate to sounds (words) in order to signify meaning. The difference lies in the “Signify.”

Nominal Rhetoric includes the words we see and hear and produce all the time. Included in this category is conversation, instructions, the names for things and “Exit” signs and most other instances of words.

Literature does not use this type of Rhetoric. It uses the other— the Poetic. Poetic Rhetoric is the deployment of these figures, these symbols called letters, to evoke. It is meant not to label the world around us, but to summon meaning from within the listener or reader.

The link between the two is tenuous, and it ends after the “sound” phase. Meaning, the characters you see on a page of literature do summon up the same sounds in your head as the words you see on a “Slippery When Wet” sign, but the connection ends there. The role of literature is to make the appropriate sounds in your head for you to feel significance.

AKA— literature does not really use “words.” It bears little resemblance to language apart from, unfortunately, being comprised of the same figures and making similar sounds.

I’m making an intuitive argument. Ideas like this are addressed on philosophical terms by linguists, and especially by the enigmatic and polemic Jacques Lacan. I am lightly familiar with how these arguments go— this is ‘sign’ vs. ‘signified’ shit, for those in the know— even if I don’t understand them completely. I’m not commenting on that argument. I’m making a different one, with far less research and credibility.

It’s an intuitive argument, and it hinges on this idea of “Evoking.”

Evoke vs. Insist

To evoke is to produce a feeling in someone else. But it also means to pull something from their subconscious into their consciousness. It is a summoning, produced from this ‘putting’ and ‘pulling.’

A tired trope in literary instruction tells the writer: show don’t tell. This phrase is officially gauche and will soon fall out of even ironic use, until it comes back around once the next wave of writers move through the graduate world. Basically: don’t write the simple explanation of what happened; use sensory language which allows your readers to experience it.

Why is this instruction dated, and derided? Because of course you’re allowed to tell us stuff. Of course your work doesn’t have to be a bath of colors and sounds. Sometimes, cutting through all that purple with a direct statement is the most powerful way of delivering information and effect.

My variation on the trope focuses on Evoking vs. Insisting. Neither above the other, just two modes of story telling. Are you summoning a feeling of significance from the reader’s consciousness, or standing between the story and the reader, begging them to believe what you say.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. The passage is mainly evocation, with a few sparse pieces of insistence that I’ve bolded.

With some difficulty, for others tried to insist on accompanying him, the king excused himself from court and took the giant dog Mik for a romp outside the citadel gate. Circuitously, he made his way into the woods to a spring he knew. There, he fell to his knees and bent close to the water, as if to drink. Smothered under a swirl of cloudy mixtures, his reflection only spasmodically came into focus. Yet, among the bubbles, twigs, and jumbled particles of light and color, he saw it once more: a hair as white as the snow that a swan has flown over. It spiraled from his right temple.

If you only read the bolded words, you get a concise understanding of what happens. A King walks out of the city to a stream, sees a white hair in the reflection. The rest of it, the evocative part of the passage, makes us feel other things. The lack of freedom of the King’s life. His desperation at finding a white air. Even the reliability of nature to present us with truth. In the spiraling hair, we see the way the King feels separated from his mortality.

Poetic Rhetoric is made from the combination of these two. The final product pairs meaning with its context until we feel something significant between the page and our mind.

The Notes We Play

Let me take this argument from a different angle. A writer recently told me that it’s a shame that our craft can be done by anyone. From the second grade, everyone knows how to write. Meanwhile, a musician has to spend years learning the technical side of their craft before they can play it competently. Then, if they have artistic sensibility and intention, they can elevate that technical aspect into something we might consider “art.” The writer’s technical practice is something anyone can do. We can all write a few sentences on a piece of paper and call it a poem, whereas we cannot just pick up an oboe and compose a song.

I disagree. On one level, I think we can all sit down and compose a song. We can hum it. That, to me, is the equivalent of a person who doesn’t consider themselves a writer writing a poem. No one would buy the vinyl, but we’d all agree that it is, technically, a song.

The equivalent to spending years learning the oboe is spending years learning to write this Poetic Rhetoric. To write literarily. The instrument that writers play is not the same as the words non-writers speak or text in. That sort of writing, the one we learned in second grade, is the equivalent of humming.

Literature has an added layer of difficulty, because not only does the writer have to learn how to play the instrument of Poetic Rhetoric, but they have to somehow tear it apart from something which looks very similar but is actually completely different: the Nominal. It’s like being a concert violinist in a world where everyone is taught to play the violin in Kindergarten. The true artist would insist that what they do is transcendent, is different in a meaningful way. But everyone around them would just say, “oh yeah, I can do that too, if a little worse.” The concert violinist would argue that it’s completely different, but we would say that it’s only a little different. That there is only a small magnitude of significance separating our playing.

Most of us know the feeling of transcendent literature. We’ve been floored by at least one poem or book, have witnessed what happens when an artist can operate masterfully in the realm of Poetic Rhetoric. There is a constant threat for a writer to fall back, to use Nominal language and fail to evoke a thing but still create a product which looks, technically, like a book.

But it ain’t literature.

In an English lesson last week I asked my student to explain a line in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees. The line read: “he got a girl in trouble, and so they got married.” I’ve worked with plenty of fifteen-year-olds who could instantly tell me “she became pregnant,” and far more who couldn’t.

This is what we mean by Media Literacy. The term gets thrown around a lot these days, and the discourse has progressed to the point where it can mean “the ability to understand messages in media,” “the ability to understand political ideas,” and sometimes simply “to know what’s really going on in any given moment.” Media is the latin word for ‘middle,’ and identifies “the things between all of us.” It now bears the weight of anything in culture that projects: news media, TV and film, literature, and social media, which used to be the projections of people we know but is quickly becoming more like the others, more projections from a stranger. It comes down to communication, and it feels accurate to say that when we bemoan the “loss of Media Literacy,” we’re identifying a communication crisis.

I don’t have a degree in English, but I’ve read a fair amount of Fiction. I’ll say right up top that this is probably the quickest solution to any ML crisis, since it would be hard to get through more than 10 well-written novels without realizing that there’s something happening beneath the surface. I suspect that you could get through a lot of films without doing so, and much more TV. I have witnessed people I love watch a lifetime of cable news and never suspect that there are intentions underneath what is being said.

This essay is an attempt to understand what people mean by this term, but it will go deeper as well. If Media Literacy is slipping, then it’s worthwhile to ask what we might lose along the way. To wonder what the world will look like with considerably lower rates of people understanding the manyfold layers of Media. We’ll discuss the shared blame between Creators of Media and Readers of Media, and then, pedantically, I’ll offer some suggestions on how to read. This will annoyingly end up as a discussion about contemporary literature. Besides the title and this sentence, there will be no mentions of Labubu.

What is Media Literacy?

The basic definition I’ll work with is: “the ability to read into the many layers of meaning in Art, cultural projects, and interpersonal communication.” If literacy is the ability to read words, then Media Literacy is the extent to which you understand them. The discourse online talks a lot about Television shows. This week, the term has been heavily associated with the HBO show “The Pitt,” which from what I can tell is about doctors who treat wounded Isis terrorists in Pittsburgh. The word Pitt refers to the city of Pittsburgh, the nickname for the ER at a Pittsburgh hospital, a music festival called Pitt Fest, and possibly a main character named Pitty. I don’t think Brad Pitt is in it.

The discourse has been muddy, but the basic idea is that the show’s first season dealt stealthily with cultural issues (Covid, fentanyl, terrorism, etc), and that people put a lot of pressure on season two. They wanted this show to help explain the complicated state of the world, and were confused when it didn’t address every single issue across the ballot.

Apart from the problems around this one show, there is a deeper cultural blindness at play which is only exacerbated by several confusions:

1. A misunderstanding of Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message,” ie, that what is being said is less important than how it’s being said.

2. The muddy spectrum from high to low art, and what to expect from the different gradations along it.

3. AI-learning, and students being asked less and less to do the hard work of interpretation.

   1. And within this, the year-long break many young people had from the education system which tries to encourage people to learn how to think.

These are tired points, and competent discussions of them litter the internet. I’m more interested in understanding what happens if this sort of literacy fades, and how to protect yourself against it. I’m also interested in the role of the producer in this dynamic. Because on one level, the creator of media might be worried that people will misinterpret their “words.” To a TV writer, this represents a fear of being associated with bad ideas. The joke goes that a TV show needs to pause every once in a while to remind the audience that what the anti-hero doing is bad, and should not be misunderstood as good, and that even though he says something, it doesn’t mean that anyone should hold the idea as an ethically sound way to think or live. For the artist, it’s a deeper fear. That what they’re saying, in heavy italics, isn’t being heard.

On another level, this mis-apprehension is ripe ground for manipulation. There’s no better case study than Trump, who can spew lies as needed in any situation and trust that his followers will digest them as truth. Who needn’t fear that his base will wonder whether he has ulterior motives, because of, I optimistically assume, a willful Illiteracy of his “media.”

The Creator

From the production standpoint, it’s worthwhile to mention that even creators need constant reminders to write interesting and complicated characters and storylines. It’s easy to get knee deep into a novel or TV show and completely forget that there should be multiple things happening at any given moment. That a character’s actions should be informed by what they’ve experienced up to that point, but also by other, sometimes unseen, motivations. A first draft is often vague on this front, and simply moves forward based on vibes or necessary moves so the writer can get to a desired ending. As they rewrite, they realize certain things from these decisions. They realize weird psychological influences underpinning certain actions which they either have to cut or lean into. They realize that different characters had completely different ideas of what was happening, and then have to rework that character to justify or alter their perspective.

This web of influence is often hard to disentangle. Why does Anna Karenina cheat on her husband? Should we consider the answer: “Because her husband is boring and bureaucratic and does not love her passionately” to be a sufficiently Media Literate? Or do we have to go deeper, and say: “she was exercising the natural progression of ideas from the new practice in Russia of allowing women agency when choosing a husband”? Or perhaps Tolstoy was just on his ascetic grind, and the answer is that “Vronsky was sexy and proved himself to be more of the Nietzschean ideal than Karenin.” Maybe that’s all meaningless, and the answer is the simple: “There is no because. She just did, because that’s what people do sometimes.”

Now we’re a bit lost. Now we start craving an answer, which feels necessary for moving forward and understanding the ending. We want to “get” Tolstoy’s message. This is the classic depth of the problem. Because Tolstoy was interested in speaking (at this point in his career) to a pretty small number of people at the top of Russian society, who spoke French at dinner parties and debated marriage rights and moral customs and who knew what the conversation was that Tolstoy was, brilliantly, entering.

What we’re calling Media Literacy is ancient, and its concerns go deeper than the Twitter discourse around a TV show. There’s a degree of media illiteracy that comes from reading a Russian novel as an American. Another degree from reading it in translation. Consider the fact that we essentially need translations of Shakespeare (as in, No Fear Shakespeare line-by-line rewrites into simple, modern language) even though it is written in recognizable English. Another murkiness arrives, when you consider if a novel from 1980 needs to be translated so that the cultural touchpoints match today’s. Then you might ask if the themes need to be updated, since the world has changed from that era. Then you might fairly wonder if it’s the same book, if any translation is the “same book.” Uh-oh.

Before moving on to identifying the importance of ML, the stakes, let’s pause here and understand the rub. There is a distance between creators and perceivers, just as there always has been. That’s precisely why what we’re discussing is called Media, the “middle.” It’s the stuff that exists between us, if, perhaps, a hell of a lot closer to the creator than the perceiver. This is what the end of this essay will discuss, but on our way there we should keep in mind that there is no Perfect Literacy. You will never perfectly understand a piece of media, and neither will the people who made it. In that way, this is not an issue to saddle onto Gen-Alpha, but a ladder that we should all be constantly climbing.

The Worst-Case Scenario

What does Media Illiteracy look like? Here’s an anecdote from a sociologist who entered the Russian steppe in the year Lenin imposed forced literacy across the USSR:

The sociologist tried presenting the illiterate shepherds with syllogisms. ‘In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?’ Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones described as ‘barely literate,’ could easily answer. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.

The advent of the printing press came with a spike in the occult. Suddenly gifted with the concept of abstraction, people began to play all sorts of games with this new, perceived if not tangible, reality.

With Zero Literacy, the idea of abstraction seems ridiculous— the thinker exists pre-liminally, as in, they understand only the Ones and not the Zeros. There is only lived reality. Which sounds kind of nice. This mind deals only in absolutes, living by its sensory reality. In the case of Russian shepherds, I’m not so terrified. Sure they might not develop advanced ideas of social protocol, but they probably have a connection to nature that we couldn’t begin to appreciate. But, in the case of a 14-year-old Wisconsinite gooner who will one day work at his father’s insurance firm and eventually run for state representative…. I’m concerned. How easily will a figure like this be provoked or scared? How likely will they be to sacrifice their needs for the sake of another’s? To reflect upon their motivations before acting? This fear is heightened when you consider that the lived reality their ideas come from won’t be the incline of a slope they walk their sheep up, but a constant stream of AI-generated post-reason memes.

I observed a textbook case of this literacy gap just last night— I see it a few times a week in my career as an English tutor. A student and I were discussing diction, a literary device you might remember from high school. Diction is “the specific choice of words, phrasing, and style used by a writer to convey meaning, tone, and characterization.” My student was having a hard time understanding it as more than “the words on the page,” rather than the deeper layer of “why the author chose the specific words they did.”

I asked him to give me two words to describe an apple and he said “red” and “yummy.” Then I told him to pretend that there were two different characters in a book, both looking at an apple. One says Red and the other says Yummy. I asked him, then, what the difference is between the two characters. He told me he doesn’t know— he doesn’t know anything about them, so how could he say? He was the shepherd, telling me that he had not seen the bear and could not say what color it was. I refused to accept this, mainly because shepherds on the Russian Steppe don’t give Christmas bonuses to their tutors. I told him there’s a whole world he can draw from these two distinct words. A whole essay he could write on the apple scene in this imagined book. I told him that an author would not have chosen two different words, would not have put the apple there in the first place, if it didn’t draw some boundaries around the two names on the page that we call “characters.” The fact that we’re able to accept that these names on a page are human beings in the first place means most of the abstraction has already been done. The next step— that the Red guy is maybe more analytical and the Yummy person more optimistic— is the essence of what we read to learn.

How To Read

Take Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, a text which, in the spirit of this essay, I’ll say openly and unequivocally that I disagree with. What Nietzsche is pretending to do is present a historical analysis on the origin of values. He’s a simple historian, poring through ancient texts to try and place a finger on where the ideas of Pity and Selflessness originated. And yet, no one who reads the book should assume that this is his actual project. There is another layer right beneath that, layer #2, which says: great men have been tricked into thinking they’re lowly because the lowly have convinced them so; they should rebel, and own their nobility.

Okay then, this is a pretty standard Nietzschean reading. Should we stop here? What would that mean? That Nietzsche is speaking to the very few “ripened fruits” on the tree, the select and small community of excellent, noble men? Probably not— this wouldn’t sell many copies. All of his rants against the “miserable swine” and the lowly, ugly masses have to be read in their context. We should probably assume that Nietzsche is speaking to them as well, even if he discounts them in every sentence. What is he saying to them? Layer #3 might be: that these lowly masses should aspire to the heights of greatness. Is there a layer #4? Certainly. You don’t get to be relevant for hundreds of years with only three layers. I’m not smart enough to get to layer #4 yet, but, crucially, I assume it’s there. That doesn’t mean I automatically accept it (I don’t accept the other three), but I’m open to it being the reading of this book that would actually get me to agree with Nietzsche. As I read with the other layers on my mind, I am constantly searching for the man behind the polemic, what he really wants to say.

I’m searching even further than that, and staying open to the possibility that he has said something even he didn’t intend. That his words + two hundred years = a different truth, one that he couldn’t have predicted. No artist can be presumed to know anything entirely— including his own motivations. This is always obvious when you’re in a workshop with 10 developing writers presenting first drafts. You understand intuitively that there are meanings to their work which reveals things about them (and thus, the world) that they did not intend, or may not be aware of. As the drafts go on, as the years roll by, these artists will ideally become aware of some of these meanings. The text, then, will also become aware. These ideas will be folded into the work, reflected upon in the work.

This doesn’t mean a protagonist will stop and say to another character: “This moment perhaps represents my inability to conform to modern youth culture.” You wouldn’t want them to. What it might look like is a prose diversion where the author talks about the generalized confusion of the young. In an even subtler text, it will appear in the form: each time the protagonist is beside a younger character, the prose may become choppy, unclear, distorted in some way. The weather or the protagonist’s movements may begin to signify anxiety (dark clouds, fidgety fingers). If it is an ironic text, the author may spend pages and chapters extolling the virtues of new ideas, until perhaps crashing out at the end and leaving the protagonist broken.

Media Literacy, at the advanced level, is being able to read these layers into a text. It is exactly the same as reading a person. When a friend says something rude, the competent person doesn’t react harshly and walk away. They pause, consider what about that friend’s day has caused the rudeness. They analyze their dynamic and wonder if anything has shifted recently, which might cause this new development. The healthy person can separate the rudeness from their own sense of self worth. The person with boundaries can decide what level of rudeness they can handle before deciding the friendship is no longer nourishing. The artist, at their best, can strengthen each of these skills in their reader. Great works of art can teach us how to read the world and our roles in it, in a safe and controlled environment with low stakes. Now imagine the Media Illiterate individual, how exhausting their day would be as they read everything on the surface, and react to each piece of datum they poorly perceive.

How To Write

Something Nietzsche calls out in his Genealogy is the role mentioned above, the role of the artist. David Snower once said, in a study on Bob Dylan, that modern artists get it all wrong with “write what you know.” That this idea, in its basic, illiterate understanding (to write down what happened to you and how you felt about it and voila, you’re an artist) is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Namely, we should be dissolving our ego into a universal awareness. We should be calling on the canon before us and the trends and ideas we see circulating society and pinning them down into our work. As Nietzsche put it,

We should avoid the confusion to which the artist is only too prone, out of psychology, of thinking he were identical with what he can portray, invent and express. In fact, if he really had that same identity, he would simply not be able to portray, invent and express it; Homer would not have created Achilles if Homer had been an Achilles. A perfect and complete artist is cut off from what is ‘real’ and actual for all eternity;

Nietzsche here is referring to our inability to understand Inner Experience, that gooey mess of perceived knowledge which is distinct from the observable world around us. He goes on to say what happens to the artist who can’t do this, who can’t ignore the surface for the layer beneath:

on the other hand, we understand how he can occasionally be so tired of the ‘unreality’ and falsity of his inner existence that he is driven to despair– and that he will then probably try to reach into that area strictly forbidden to him, into reality, into real being. With what success? We can guess . . . it is the artist’s typical velleity.

Veilleity is the “weak will,” the desire that doesn’t have the strength to become action. It is a great enemy in Nietzsche, and to the artist who thinks that to create, they need to remain embroiled in the confusion of their self.

A Crisis Of Narration

So of course this essay, like any essay I write lately, becomes about what artists should and should not do. I’m almost out of grad school, folks. I promise I’ll come back down to earth real soon. But what we have now in literature is a crisis of narration that is missed by most people as a crisis. It gets written off as “there’s too much first-person auto-fiction,” and the standard line is that these young writers are so obsessed with themselves that they don’t write about anything else. This is where I become annoying. Because there is plenty of great auto-fiction, and absolutely nothing inherently wrong with first-person. First-person is an investigation of consciousness, and can be a quite pure presentation of a human soul, using the artifice of rhetoric.

Great writing should do this, and first-person can do this, perhaps better than third in many cases. It is not a new invention, but more than likely a return to the origins of storytelling1. But what we have today often doesn’t bear this burden: it fails to convey something universally profound about the soul, but instead offers a case study in one human iteration. Perhaps this is where ego comes in. Perhaps some of these artists are not concerned with the universally profound nearly as much as they are with telling their own tale. But I think many actually are trying to do the former, and merely slip into the latter because they are haunted by Nietzsche’s veilleity— they are too confused of their inner life to dive deeper into it, past the “perceived self” and closer to the core which isn’t a singular thing at all, but a nebula of everything. A swarming cloud where all distinction disappears, and everything known and observable exists within us. We are aware of this on the molecular level and yet we remain antagonistic to it on the psychological.

This understanding, I argue, is a victim of Dented Literacy. Completely competent and well-read people are lightly, if at all, trained in reading deeply into art. We are distractable, and have infinite wells of disposable culture to catch up on. We refrain from the hard work of going beyond the first or second layers, of trying to interpret what their is to gain from a solid understanding of a representation of ideas. I suspect a reason for first-person auto-fiction’s popularity is that, in this second layer, it is quite fun to play the game of “what is true about this story?” This idea was addressed in theories of literary criticism of 20th century, when we arrived at the concept of the “Implied Author.”

Unreliable Narrators

The theory of Implied Authors comes to terms with the distance between a text and its creator. By the 20th century, the concept of Celebrity was firmly entrenched, and the practice of publishing texts anonymously, which was standard before the concept of Individuality took Europe by storm, was only used for protecting one’s interests or creating mystique2. Theorists like Wayne C. Booth stepped in to acknowledge that, no matter what, we are aware that our texts were written by a human being. This notion is inseparable from our reading of these texts, and it will exist whether we want it to or not.

As is the case every time we see anyone anywhere, any time we see any trace of a human (as in, in every building, every sign, every piece of gum on the sidewalk), we will naturally read assumptions into them. We will interpret the evidence for traces of identity, intentions, or judgements which add up to a perspective. In short: we will read these signs for personhood. When we read a text, we can feel a human being on the other side, and we contend to varying degrees with how that person feels, what that person is trying to tell us.

This is what stops a lot of talented people from creating art, and what stops a lot of talented artists from deep honesty. They are reasonably concerned with how people will reflect their work onto them. They are worried that people will think their ideas are nasty, or that the artist believes every word said by a character. This concern is valid today, when many people read only on this second layer: not what is literally happening, but how it exposes the individual behind it.

When we read a first-person story, it is very hard to not think: what happened in this writer’s life for them to create this. The author is hyperaware of this, and responds either boldly: “I don’t care what you think, I’m gonna tell it like it is;” or anxiously: “I’m going to conceal the truth, so y’all don’t think I’m weird.” My tendency is to write first-person accounts which vary so much from me, Ryan, that no one would assume it’s me. Twice now, I’ve written a character named “Ryan” into a novel, in order to serve as a lightning rod for the reader’s investigation of “which character does this author see himself in.” This is all cowardice, but so is accounting, so fuck off.

The term Unreliable Narrator now means “a first-person voice which is lying to us,” but it was first coined to mean something much more complicated. The idea was that the Implied Author, the guy we can feel behind the text, is placing a distance between himself and the Narrator or Character inside the book. When Huckleberry Finn says “I’ll go to hell” for helping a slave escape, we know that Mark Twain doesn’t agree. There is a distance between them, and to miss that distance would completely change the book’s reading.

The Swamp

The discourse around Media Literacy represents a fear from creators, that someone with such Dented Literacy might read Huck Finn and think it’s a book written by a guy who thinks you go to hell for freeing slaves. This is easy to spot from a vantage point of 150 years, but if someone were to write an incisive and subtle novel today about gender dynamics, they would be hard pressed to say the thing in a way which slips past all the barriers we have raised in our minds. They would struggle to put it plainly, because written plainly it would seem like more slop on the pile of opinions, and would be easily written off, rather than dealt with delicately. The work might be reduced to “one man’s opinion,” which is something no one needs right now, and not “a representation of the world as presented by someone who has worked really hard on stepping out of the frame.”

This might be a reasonable assumption by the reader, since stepping out of the frame is a quixotic, perhaps impossible, task. We used to not think so— Nietzsche surely didn’t— but perhaps that European Individualism has done a number on what’s possible.

With such a heightened focus on layer #2, the distance between the author and their work, the first-person auto-fiction novel has become popular because it operates on the level that people can comfortably live in. I get that sense that modern readers read modern books playing the game of “what is this artist saying about herself, her own world, what happened to her.” If you’re like me, you flip to the photo on the back every once in a while, and wonder if that’s the true person behind the simulacrum of the main character. The really thoughtful writer has to contend with this before they can even begin to perform those other layers— those profound universal truths we’re so eager to get to.

The Answer

There isn’t one. I mean, there are several: you can read more, and better, and closer. You can take way more time with your art, spend hours or days digesting every movie you see before seeing another, before going on to Instagram to see what others thought about it. For the artist, you can just try to get closer and closer to that profound, beautiful, and elusive thing until your work’s proximity to it is undeniable.

We can also tout success stories like the Mississippi Miracle, where an adjustment to the curriculum resulted in a sharp spike in literacy rates amongst students.

We can also try grabbing the shoulders of everyone we see on the street, and yelling in their face “CAN’T YOU SEE THEY’RE LYING? CAN’T YOU SEE THERE IS MEANING TO EVERYTHING? CAN’T YOU SEE BEYOND WHAT YOU CAN TOUCH?”

But the cynical take is that this will get worse. That AI will tank ML rates further and further, that politicians and corporations will continue to take advantage of our generalized and growing inability to see past their marketing, and that the world will descend into a pragmatic nightmare. We will be buried in our observable categories— male vs female, white vs black, strong vs weak— and will be incapable of perceiving and aspiring to an alternative, better reality. We will not understand ourselves or others, and this will terrify us with that sharp fear of child in a supermarket separated from his mother.

If there is a point to this essay it’s to stay conscious of these developments. To look for its signs and remain as aware as you can. To appreciate your ability, if you’ve gotten this far, to spend time with ideas.

Check out the link to a video essay I made for a seminar on Los Angeles. Due to some footage that could be incriminating for the people involved, I had to make this one private.

For the link, click t…

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I’ve been thinking about science, lately. Or I guess I’ve been thinking about how we don’t think about science that much anymore. Did you know there’s a NASA rocket going to the moon tomorrow, for the first time in fifty years? Probably not. Who cares?

I was at an event last week hosted by the Library of America. Joshua Cohen and Michael Cunningham, two Pulitzer strapped heavyweights in the publishing world, were discussing 19th century short stories. We’re talking all the Sophomore-year English class requirements: Rip Van Winkle, Young Goodman Brown, Bartleby, The Scrivener. This might seem like a snooze-fest, but in the literary world it’s rare to see modern giants discussing the classics. It seems possible that fewer and fewer have actually even read them.

They talked about the budding sciences of the time. A 19th century writer, or at least one who wanted to survive history, had to engage with some combination of Darwin, Marx, and the budding field of psychology. We like Young Goodman Brown because it’s one of the earliest accounts of a dive into the subconscious. Bartleby is a legend because he represented a watershed in our conception of the “laborer.” These writers— Hawthorne, Melville, Irving— had that blend of smarts and luck which we call genius. This allowed them to lionize these new ideas in quasi-fables, which impressively remain the best artistic representation of them to this day.

The Contemporary Struggle

So what are today’s ideas? What is the artist in 2026 suppose to be contending with? Does it not feel like the current labor struggle is still, with a few tweaks, Marxist? Isn’t our theory of human origin and the laws of progress basically Darwinian? Do we have a new enough conception of consciousness to write Freud off as outdated? History is designed to swallow up any artifacts which have become irrelevant (speaking of Darwin…). It’s where that sneaking suspicion comes from, that high schoolers will continue to read The Scarlet Letter long after A Visit From The Goon Squad is out of print. But what ideas are there for the contemporary artist to chew on, as the processing extension of the Human Species that they’re meant to be?

Cohen’s answer to this question was poignant. He said that the ideas of the 19th century— the Marx, Freud, Darwin of it all— were ideas in prose. These thinkers were writers as much as they were theorists, and they initiated these history-shaking concepts in paragraphs for us to digest. Today’s ideas are different. Quantum, String, Neo-Liberalism, mRNA, Gene Editing in general, Stem Cell, Massive progress in Dark Matter studies— these are all proved in complicated, thousand-page documents filled mostly with numbers. This is a very difficult thing for a sculptor to engage with, much less digest for the public of the now and the public of the next century. There’s no quippy phrase like, “survival of the fittest,” that can sum up String-Theory.

But we shouldn’t let the sciences and the arts grow too far apart. There’s a reason they need to dance in concert, and when we look at the part where they started to diverge— let’s say, around the atomic bomb— we get a sense of why they should remain entangled. If the arts (and thus the processing arm of humanity) kept up with computer science, would we have the AI dilemma we currently have? Maybe. But maybe we’d also have a clearer sense of how to handle it, how to regulate or free ourselves or… who knows. It’s alternative history, because coders and avant-avant-garde poets have diverged so completely that they each seem laughable to each other. This seems like an obvious state of being, but let’s remember Ada Lovelace’s poetry. Let’s remember that Goethe is regarded as a naturalist almost as highly as he’s regarded a man of letters. Let’s not forget that Isaac Newton presented his idea of gravity first in a poem.

To be specific about what I mean here, I’m not talking about books about science stuff. There’s enough AI-doom lit, going back to Asimov and Vonnegut in the 1950s, to fill a data center. Young Goodman Brown isn’t about a guy in therapy being asked about how his subconscious is doing. It’s a subtle story about a man on a stroll— and it just so happens that its author was deeply engaged with the ideas being newly expounded by the budding field of psychology. It was a story which could be read in any age, which suddenly reads very differently because of the new context it has entered. This is partially why it survives so well. In the 1920s, it could be read as a story of the perversion of social relations— a perfect allegory for the power-struggle that led to WWI. In the 1960s it’s about free love, and today it’s about the elite-class meeting on islands to commit heinous crimes. It can be all of these things because it is rooted in a theory— the subconscious— which also survives. As long as we understand human action and darkness through the lens of Freud, Young Goodman Brown will be relevant.

Are These Quiet Times?

Cohen made a side note to his response: he said that today’s scientific ideas can be engaged with on the artistic level, but that they need to be filtered. Filtered into prose. That filtering is often done by the descendent of the poet-scientist archetype I mentioned earlier. This is the non-fiction writer. Michael Pollan just released a book on the Consciousness debate, with all the necessary developments post-ChatGPT. There’s the one-two punch of scientifically-minded writers with two different approaches: Benjamín Labatut explores 20th century scientific progress from the angle of Sanity, while Maria Popova does so from the angle of Love. These two have done more to help me understand the new world of the sciences than any article I’ve read in Scientific American.

All to say that perhaps these new ideas are a’coming. Which is reasonable— the rapid rate of development in our understanding of the world, spawned by Heliocentrism, let’s say, could not have sustained its Enlightenment-era dizziness. While science has made unbelievable strides since then, they’ve all really been under two umbrellas: Energy and the Movement of Planets.

There are only a few groundbreaking theoretical ideas which push forward a field every generation. The task of finding that small handful of people wouldn’t be easy. What I think is really lacking is an all encompassing, systemic idea or discovery from which those will come from. Our generation’s “survival of the fittest.” These usually come from space first, and then trickle through our conception of consciousness and into governments (ie. Heliocentrism→ Individualism → Parliamentary Democracy). A lot is happening with dark matter and the rate of expansion of the universe these days, which certainly affects our conception of our place in the cosmos. But that’s relatively small potatoes, because we already knew Dark Matter existed, and we’ve only adjusted our understanding of the universe’s age by about 2x (~15 to ~30 billion years old). This isn’t enough to rock our idea of what humans are, at least not in any fundamental way.

Perhaps some objective confirmation of Simulation Theory‚ which is not at all off the table, would spawn a completely new way of thinking about the world, and thus, would drive forward new ideas in the Arts to help us contemplate the implications. It would be as shocking to our autonomy and species to find out we’re in a simulation as Heliocentrism was to the 15th century Christian peasant. Perhaps one day, AI will be regarded as the first major leap in that field.

But in the end, do we want that? We may think we’re “not destined to live in quiet times,” but that’s all tired bullshit. Zoom out enough and you’ll find that, indeed, we are in rather quiet times. We’re pretending they’re not while replaying old ideas into a slow and predictable destruction. It’s boring, really. Boring is okay. But the art of boring times doesn’t stick around. And maybe that’s okay too. Maybe the people whose ideas have “stuck around” would rather have been happy, and safe, and bored.

Maybe.

Most of the time I’m a man of the people. Friendly, agreeable— a sip of lukewarm chamomile on a humid summer day.

But these three opinions, each more objectively true than the last, always seem to rub folks the wrong way.

Anywho, here are the three most transgressive and nauseating things I believe:

3. The Dry-Brush

Teeth should be brushed, at least preliminarily, dry. That means you put the toothpaste onto the toothbrush and go a solid minute brushing before turning to the sink and sudsing it all up. This is the mark of a psychopath, I’m told. This is a deeply unnerving human experience, it is said. But I disagree. Teeth are naturally lubricated, first of all. It’s not like rubbing a bone-dry bar of Dove onto a plank of wood— there is natural moisture in there, people. The dry-brush assures complete contact between brush and tooth. It also verifies that you’re not missing anything, since a sloppy wet brush will fill the mouth so completely with suds, that it’d be hard to say which areas you have and have not hit yet. Also baked in here is a sub-opinion, also quite controversial:

3b: soap is more effective pre-sud. Because what is sudsiness but hydrated soap. Those pleasant white bubbles are really just watered down cleaning solution. When you drench your toothpaste before scrubbing, you’re effectively removing all of the chemicals that do the cleaning, aka, you’re being nasty. Whereas I am clean. And just to double down on this whole experience, here are two even more infuriating caveats:

3c: it’s not a full brushing experience without mouthwash, and

3d: when you finally add water to finish up the brushing experience, the water should be warm, if not hot. That’s right— an arguably even more infuriating and psychopathic take, but what else would you ever clean using cold water? Nothing, that’s what. Warm = Clean.

2. Photography is Not Art

Ooh boy. I already feel bad about this one, at the thought of all my wonderfully talented and creative friends who are also great photographers. This is not a personal attack. Allow me to defend myself:

Okay so this guy Stanley Cavell writes an article in 1965 called Music Decomposed. It asks about the philosophical justification for the creation of modernist art, and the ways in which that justification has become inseparable from an understanding of the art itself. He criticizes the practice in modern aesthetics to leave the artist’s remarks regarding their own work to “psychologists or sociologists, confining philosophy’s attention to the ‘object itself,’” and rejects that an “artist’s intention is always irrelevant.” Cavell insists that when he has a direct experience with a piece of art, it matters that he was meant to have it— that these things have purpose, a purpose which ought to be regarded. Dismissing the straw man proposal that an artist can be consulted and asked about her intentions, Cavell believes that the role of a critic is to ask (at the right time) why something in a piece of art is how it is, and to provide an answer which is justified within the work and its context. This is Cavell’s concept of intention— the recognition of art as a celebration of the ability to intend life at all; an object willed into existence with aspects which can be investigated by the thoughtful perceiver.

But then these guys come along, Monroe C. Beardsley’s and W.K. Wimsatt (B&W), and write The Intentional Fallacy, arguing that the “design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of art.” Basically, that it doesn’t matter what the artist meant or didn’t mean. It doesn’t even matter if the artist can’t understand a critical take about her own work, or if she’s a chicken with Runting and Stunting Syndrome. These guys ask how a true intention, this “design,” can ever be figured out. They believe art has the ability to communicate itself adequately, and they believe in the Tolstoyan idea that “if it was possible to explain in words what he wished to convey, the artist would have expressed himself in words.”

So Cavell thinks intention matters, B&W think art is “detached from the [creator] at birth, and goes about the world beyond his power to intend or control it.” Here’s the thing though— Cavell’s ‘intention’ is completely misguided as a mechanism for forging a meaningful connection with a piece of art. And questions of purpose usurp art’s inherently ‘suspended’ place in the world— that is, the way it exists in a vacuum, within which is only the art and the perceiver’s soul.

So what happens once art leaves the studio, and comes into contact with the world? And how should the critic and the public stand in relation to the artist? It’s notable that both Cavell and B&W accept that questions directed towards the artist regarding the meaning in a work are more accurately directed “to the dramatic speaker,” as in, maybe, the character or the narrator, or the sculpture or the subject of a painting, rather than to the artist. As Cavell puts it: “to the object itself, not to Shakespeare or Beethoven.” Think of Johann Winckelmann’s practice of “listening” to a sculpture.

The B&W caveat to this is that, if any answers are to be sought in the life of the artist themselves, it may be in their biography. That is, we may consider the lived experiences of the artist, but only in the context that we can relate them back away from the artist, to a larger, more universal community. If an artist’s mother was addicted to grape soda, and the art she creates is a distillation of the emotional experience of watching her mother’s teeth turn purple, we may interpret this in the shared terms between that experience and ours: the feeling one gets watching their parents deteriorate, perhaps.

This supports the idea from Rene Welleck that “a piece of art is not a singular, distilled experience, but ‘a system of norms extracted from every individual experience.’" If the art has any relevancy in the world beyond the instant of its creation, it is because it has spoken from and to a collective human experience— and ought to be acknowledged by the thread which it weaves between us and others. “The poem belongs to the public,” say B&W. “It is embodied in language (the peculiar possession of the public), and it is about the human being (an object of public knowledge).” As Tolstoy put it, “art is a means of communion among people. Every work of art results in the one who receives it entering into a communion with the one who produced or is producing the art, and with all those who, simultaneously with him, before him, or after him, have received or will receive the same artistic impression.”

Now, okay, you might say that Tolstoy was on the verge of insanity when he wrote this. That he was in the process of being excommunicated, of giving his land away, of becoming a radical pacifist… and if you think that’s insane, then that’s fine. You’re a victim of capitalism, and so are we all. But also, isn’t it not insane? Isn’t Property Law kinda insane, and war? So maybe the avoidance of an author’s intention, the belief that a piece of art exists in no relation to the artist, is the anarchy of the art-world.

How are we even to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, say B&W, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then fuck that poem. (Also, fuck most poems). And fuck photography. It’s like cooking, in that it is not a willed creation but an arrangement of ingredients. It is a capturing of a moment (as Schjeldahl once put it, the murder of a moment), and any interpretation of a photo or a meal is merely the perceiver’s reflection on those ingredients. It is a craft, and one which requires a strong eye to be any good.

One of the best photographers and best artists I’ve ever known, the author of BeamsWorld, once explained to me why his photos were so incredible. “Because I only take photos of what I love.” This comment reminds me of passions, crafts, trades, but not art. If asked the same thing about his music, I don’t think Beams would ever say it was good because he only writes about what he loves. That sounds like the words of a musician none of us want to listen to. He’s drawn by curiosity, truth, hatred, obsession, malaise, and a thousand other things alongside Love.

Photographers are, perhaps, notable perceiver’s. They notice, just how the poet notices, a certain portion of the world which deserves further attention. They then seize it, “kill” it, in order to show it to others. But the poet then lives with that reflection, works it through their own worldview, experiences, rhythms, and then wills a new thing into the world. Where there work begins is exactly where the photographer’s ends.

1. Hawaii is not a state

Self-explanatory.

Last summer I traveled on a research grant for 19 days, down to Georgia, across to the Great Plains, and then back east through the Great Lakes. This post was written from an Applebee’s parking lot, somewhere in Iowa.

I’m waylaid by a squall in Chickasha, Oklahoma. I was able to watch the storm from the road for a good while, before the streaks of lightning were no longer portraits on the horizon but all around me. I flicked on my hazards and turned Big Mama Thornton as loud as the radio would have her, having a good time with an honest-to-god Great Plains storm. Then I saw a road sign torn up from the ground, and decided to pull off at the next exit, into the ascendant village of Chickasha (chick-uh-shay). In an eerie moment of silence the rain halted, and the sky became significantly brighter. The storm above me was in a pincer shape, like a horseshoe, and I was right in the center. Two minutes later the winds returned with a doubled ferocity.

It’s hard to say the word ‘Oklahoma’ without doing an Oklahoman accent. The name walks you right into the lilt, leaving you at the front door of the Sooner State with a “thanks for coming.” This morning I pulled out of Chicken Creek Campground without paying, as I have a bad practice of doing. Most of the folks at these places plug their RVs into the electrical port, stay for days, swim, use the trash and facilities. I’ve never thought the fee really applied to me. I roll in around midnight, have a quick fire and a nap and then I’m gone before sunrise, leaving no trace of my presence. A few miles later I turned around and dropped cash into the dropbox. This is what the grant money was for.

Once you’re a couple miles off the interstate, the license plates stop saying ‘Oklahoma’ and begin to read ‘Choctaw Nation’, not so subtly indicating that you are now a foreigner. Cars with out-of-state plates stay well under the speed limit, and Lighthorse officers in white pick-ups post up at every third block in town. When the squall hit, these distinctions disappear. Everyone hugs the center lanes, creeping along and hoping that a branch ripped off its trunk will go over or around our cars.

As a proud recipient of the Sarah Cole 2024 Travel Grant, there’s a bit of weight on this trip. Folks who’ve been with the mouse-car moment for a bit know that I’m not in perfect standing with authority, nor accustomed to towing company lines. True, when the grant money hit my bank account it was gone in three days. This is on them, I figured. They should never have let me hold the cash— they should have paid for the trip directly. What were they thinking, giving a man in debt a check like that? This is why you can’t give cash to artists. We’re bums, every one of us. Crooks.

The Sarah Cole Travel Grant is designed to “support innovative projects that require travel as the artist moves forward with their work.” There was an acceptance letter from Ms.Cole herself, followed by a check in the mail. That was it. No follow up, no checking in. The language in the proposal didn’t even ask me to finish the project— they only hoped I would “move forward.” Art school is such an exquisitely crafted regimen of bullshit, designed to make you laugh to the verge of tears and then go really, really broke, that I mentally and emotionally bailed on the trip as soon as I received the money, thinking that at least some remnant of an outlaw spirit would wind up in my work, “moving it forward.”

I spent twenty-four hours in one of my least-favorite states yesterday. It’s not that Arkansas isn’t pretty, or that the folks aren’t nice. It’s just so in between all the things you do want to do, and so unfriendly to any license plate without a diamond on it. I lunched in the Strawberry Capital of the World, Marshall Arkansas, which boasts zero commercial strawberry farms.

I was pulled over twice and had the best peach of my life. Still no verdict on Arkansas.

The next day I pulled out of Oklahoma City to the sound of thunder. Someone told me there was a game happening in the city that, the NBA finals. The traffic outside the metro was at a halt, the squall was on its way. At a bar in Chickasha I ask a blue eyed waitress in denim capris, “How do you pronounce the name of this place?”

“Chicken Shit.”

I arrive to Mt. Scott, the central player in a novel I’ve been writing for nearly two years. This is why I’m here, technically. When I pull into the nearby campground I see a tarantula on the ground in front of my car. I’ve never seen a proper tarantula. Hairy, large as my palm. I’m terrified of spiders, and am pretty quickly put on high guard. I find a spot in the campground, get a fire going, pull some tics off my arm and settle back to begin writing a book.

The whole thing is just about done, there’s just an Oklahoma-sized hole right in the middle. I never knew what would happen in this section, and put it off until this moment— when I could properly sit on the top of Mt. Scott and figure it out. This is the layer of honesty in my work, which is made up mostly of lies.

I get settled in, start a fire, watch a long sunset. The ranger drives by and asks for my reservation.

“I don’t have one.”

“Well you need one.”

“Can I just pay you now?”

“No. You need to reserve beforehand.”

“Can my presence be my reservation, in this completely empty campground?” I did not include the second part.

“Sorry, you’ll need to register. You can drive to Crater Lake, bout ten miles down the road.”

“Is there another campsite there?”

“No, but you can get service and reserve this spot for tonight.”

“What if it’s taken?

You’d think the recipient of the incredibly prestigious and exclusive Sarah Cole 2024 Travel Grant would have thought— since the trip had been planned for several months, and its entire purpose was to see this one spot— to book the $12 campsite ahead of time. That may be the way the other, previous recipients have played it, but it’s not quite the style here at the mouse-car moment.

When the ranger leaves I sit back down, enjoy the rest of the fire, then pack up and leave. About twenty miles out of the campground I find a bar on the edge of the plains. A guy named Hayden wants to be in the novel, and says he can grab his guitar from his car. He yells to the bartender, “Mari, turn off the music, I’m gonna grab my guitar.”

OKC leads the Indianimals by 15 points.

That night I write two chapters watching the moon rise over the plains. A storm lingers off to the north. I have two hours before hiking up Scott for sunrise. I’m leaving out the best anecdotes, here. Those I have to save for my book. As for Hayden, he can settle for a blog post.

The next day I see one of the fellows from the bar. He tells me he’s heading to his grandmother’s funeral and I tag along. We wear sunglasses in the back row.

I leave Mt. Scott, and travel north through Oklahoma. That day I meet two Donnas. Donna #1 keeps mixing up the year 2007 with 1907. She tells me about Bison breeding, and I ask her what they do with the ones that aren’t up to genetic code. She patiently explains their origin from a New York Zoo, and her co-worker cuts her off to say, “we donate them to a local tribe.”

“I was getting there,” says Donna #1.

I leave the Wichita Mountains, and thirty miles later turn off into a three-block town because of its name, which is the exact name of the protagonist of my book. There’s a woman on her front lawn, and I ask her if there are any buildings around that have the name of the town written on it, like a post office. This is Donna #2.

“Oh sure, we got a post office. Right on the other side of this,” she said, pointing to her house. “And of course the school, which shut down in ‘67. But we bought the building from the State."

“What’s it now?”

“Old folk home. Only a few people in there, though.”

Two corn-fed grandsons pull up on a side-by-side and give me a look. Donna #2 introduces them and asks how her other grandson did at the rodeo. One of the boys says something like, “Bucked after five seconds. He alright, though.”

There’s another storm that night. It blows out my fire and pushes a heavy log fifteen feet across grass. I walk in the blinding rain to the edge of a lake, which was calm just hours earlier but now has two-foot swells crashing onto the shore. I’m shirtless and yelling something to or about God, I don’t really remember. A massive bolt of lightning lights up the horizon, and a few hundred yards away, across the lake, I see a massive tornado. It shuts me up quick.

I leave Oklahoma, leave Nebraska, leave the plains altogether. Without knowing exactly what it was, yet, I knew I had gotten what I came for.

The last time I visited Brookside Landscaping they told me RTR was dead. This made sense. He had massive hernias jutting two inches out of his stomach. My man had extra knuckles and a famous stench. He had come up to California from El Salvador, and we used to talk in my broken Spanish about the trips I’ve taken down to Tierra Blanca. He was the mechanic, and had a classic exasperated shake of the head every time I brought in a broken machine.

Conversations with RTR, a shortening of Artiaga, were sparse. My nickname was Güero and his was Guapo, and I remember his tendency to stare into the sun to tell the weather for the next few days. In Pasadena, this was fairly easy. He died three years ago, but I’m thinking of him this week after reading a story from Charles Mingus’ legendary biography. In it, Mingus describes (in infectious third person) the time when he had to syphon gas1 as a gang initiation.

Mingus drops off the running-board with the can and Crosby’s right behind him as the lookout. Buddy cruises on at normal speed. Nobody’s around. The parked car is under a tree, shaded from the overhanging street light. It’s good and dark. Wow! A healthy tank! Charles puts the can under the bumper. It doesn’t even show. He adds a rubber band to each end of the hose to make it stick tight. He sucks a mouthful of gas and spits it out. He thumps the hose to make sure the gas is flowing.

He and Crosby catch Buddy on the run at the corner of Grape Street, two blocks away. They drive around awhile waiting out the time. Crosby comments approvingly on the rubber bands.

Mingus admits that he didn’t know what he was doing until the guys taught him, and I realized that in exactly one respect, I had more street cred than Charles Mingus. I knew well how to syphon gas, because RTR had taught me.

I always forget this fact about myself. Maybe that’s the effect of syphoning— it kills the exact brain cells which help you remember how to syphon. Even though gas prices in LA were over eight dollars in those days, that’s not why I had to learn. I had stupidly loaded a Sidewinder (pictured below) with diesel, and if I tried starting it, RTR told me, it would’ve exploded. This seemed unlikely, but whatever happened wouldn’t be good for the engine, and my place in the crew was precarious as it was.

What do we do, I asked RTR. It was just him and I at the shed. He walked to his bench and came back with a clear plastic tube and a bucket. He handed them to me and pointed to the machine.

Nahh, I told him. I was used to being fucked with and thought I was spotting another prank. He shrugged, as if it were the only option, and I studied the plastic tube. What do I do, I asked, and he mimicked sucking on the tube and then placing the other side into the bucket. Once the flow begins, I knew, it would keep going. You just have to get it started.

I kneeled by the gas tank and stuck the tube in. The other end I held up to my mouth, and watched RTR for any last minute signs that there was, in fact, an easier way. He just stared back.

The first few sucks on your first syphon are going to throw you off. You’re inhaling straight petrol fumes, and you have to suck much harder than you think. The science of syphoning is murky. It was thought for years that gravity and atmospheric pressure were at play, but in 1914 it was proved that you can syphon in a vacuum, so the updated idea is the Cohesion Tension theory. Either way, Bernoulli is at play.

I sat back on my ass and caught some oxygen. RTR was laughing his ass off. Fuck man, I said, this is hard. He shrugged.

I kept sucking. I started seeing the gas move up the tube, but it wasn’t far enough to exit the other end (the one in my mouth). I had some idea that I could get the gas just short of the exit and then plop it into the bucket. This came from an interesting place. I went to University, I figured. I came from a good family. I was born into and I had lived the sort of life in which you’d never find yourself with a mouth full of gasoline. On the other end, I chose to be an artist. I chose poverty and rugged experience. It made perfect sense, but the Connecticut boy in me was still unprepared to leave his middle-classery back East. I was in Pasadena now. I was the only white employee in a landscaping crew. I was writing a novel about working class liberation and needed to live the life of a working-class simp. I needed to sacrifice a portion of my self to protect a company that underpaid me from unnecessary damages. Otherwise, I would lose my job. For being a coward.

This is what you think about when you’re sucking on a tube, watching diesel rise towards your mouth. I nearly passed out, but on a Herculean suck I finally felt that gush of dry diesel hit the back of my throat. I gagged, twisted over to spit it out, and stashed the mouth-end of the tube into the bucket. The liquid started flowing, and RTR kept laughing.

I stood up, handed him the tube to hold while I went to wash out my mouth. I was in the bathroom for a while, mixing water with soap and gargling it, trying to drink some but spitting it back up. I could feel it trickle down into my stomach, and couldn’t help but laugh at the image in the mirror. There was an artist in there.

When I walked back out a few of the crew had gathered. Some were impressed, some thought I was being a bitch. When I got back to the machine to see if the tank was drained, RTR was sitting on the ground by the bucket, staring up at me. The bucket was nearly empty. “Sorry,” he said. He had lifted the end of the tube too high, and the flow stopped flowing. I grabbed the plastic and started to suck again.

Rest in peace, big man.

Three Movies, Three Takes on Wealth

From 2019-2021, three movies from three different continents were released with the same general story: a poor person gets one over on some wealthy. Parasite, Knives Out, and Triangle of Sadness all tell the same tale about a group of ultra-rich individuals who are thrust into chaos, threatening the safety of a poor individual or family.

1. Parasite shows the way in which the poor will never win, and how any glory they might briefly achieve will be subsumed by the value-system of the elite. As far as they are able to get, they will be destroyed if they ever make a move towards trying to become what only the wealthy are born to be.

2. Knives Out is the optimistic, American version of this story (written by a wealthy man), and says that the rule of order and reason will step in. Benoit Blanc shows up to award kindness to the poor (Rita) and banish the wicked (the Thrombeys get kicked out of their own home). It will be rational, swift, and even a little cheeky. In the end, the poor will stand on the balcony of the mansion and sip tea, waving to the dethroned as they squabble for scraps. The especially wicked will be taken to prison in woven white sweaters, and the keys will be yours. You do not even have to speak— Ana de Armas actually wins in the end by not playing the game. She gives her secrets away, falls for everyone’s traps, and trusts in the general goodness of mankind. The world-weary but stylish Benoit Blanc handles all the pesky little roadblocks, and delivers you into success.

3. Three years later we get the dark twist on this archetype. Socialist Sweden’s Triangle of Sadness teaches us that only chaos and senseless warfare will deliver the poor into the seat of the throne. When they get there, the throne will be nothing more than a shit-stained washed-up life raft. AND, that while you are there, you will become just as demented and power-hungry as they were, with far less noblesse oblige, or style. It insists that all of us are rotten scoundrels, and it is only the seats we sit in which we are ruled by. This strain runs through the father in Parasite and, expectedly, exists nowhere in the American version of the story. How dare you suggest such a thing, we seem to say.

Grocery Store Economics

While the poor Grocery industry has been dragged through the muck these past few years, there is a vastly overlooked aspect which bears attention. Grocery store music sucks. It’s trite to say, but it’s boring. Worse, it is boring on purpose. It is patently and pathologically unoffensive. In L.A. it is top 40. In Connecticut, it’s Celine Dion. In West Virginia it’s country. I’m not talking Erewhon, which probably plays Echo Park trance-wave. I’m talking the Vons, the Piggly Wigglys, the Stop & Shops or the Food Lions of the world.

Except in Harlem. On my block are three stores: Foodtown, Food Emporium, and Fine Fare. The classy (and expensive) one, Foodtown, has working electric doors and aisles where two people can pass each other. Plus, an incredible playlist. We’re talking R&B, Duke Ellington, a live radio DJ and no ads.

The one with dust on its cereal boxes, Food Emporium, plays the absolute worst type of stuff that’s ever been created. Like, Cake By The Ocean. My perception of the place is that it just keeps playing Cake By The Ocean again and again, but the songs are so generically awful that I think they might just all sound exactly like Cake By The Ocean. Food Emporium happens to be the one that’s less than a hundred feet from my front door, so I’m there at least twice a week.

Then we have the wildcard, Fine Fare. Gated doors so you can’t leave with the cart, check; robust produce aisle, also check. Cheapest cold cuts this side of the Mississippi. What do they play? It’s hard to say. That one song, the one we all know the hook to but never heard the full thing, that plays a lot. Then, like, classical? Then just white noise for a few minutes, then a weather report from Cook County Idaho, then Marvin Gaye.

The point is: Harlem is different from every grocery scene I’ve witnessed elsewhere for one, beautiful reason. These grocery stores don’t care to lose you. They are alienating, and that’s a good thing. They can alienate because they are distinct. They draw some shoppers in, and push others away, all while slapping a “Manager’s Special” sticker on every item in the store. The name on my club card, and this is completely true and I have no idea why, is Sulky Matthews. Was this a joke the cashier played on me when I first registered? Is this the Harlem version of John Doe? Was this my cashier’s name? They, and for that matter I, do not care. These places thrive by their own rules, simply because they don’t give a fuck about you.

That is the ideal relationship I want to have with my supermarket. I don’t want it to give a fuck about me.

Check out this album, which is what every store should be playing:

Someone recently told me that they “listened to one of my pieces on a run,” which is first and foremost very kind, since reading my work at all is an act of generosity. Secondly, however, it was confusing. Apparently Substack has an “AI Reader” function, which allows you to listen to a voiced recording of articles, dictated by a robot. I’m not an AI doomsdayer or anything, and think this is a nifty feature. I haven’t listened to one to check the quality, but I assume it’s solid.

That being said, I also took some umbrage. I would complain about Substack not alerting me to this new feature, but I don’t check my emails, so maybe they did. What bothers me is that there’s an ahuman entity reading a tone into my sentences— my poor sentences— which I have to presume, for the sake of my very expensive writing degree, is inaccurate. I assume this because I’ve put a decade of effort and experimentation into sentences, and consider mine distinctly designed for interpretation. This is pretentious af, but its my prerogative as a writer, and especially a writer who makes nearly zero moneys off my writing.

Without dwelling too much on the issue, I feel compelled to say that I write tonally. I value the sounds of my words over their meaning, and certainly over the sum total of “what happens” in any given piece. This is another choice— there are plenty of writers who choose not to do this, and who instead opt for clarity, humor, thrills, philosophy, etc etc. This doesn’t mean I neglect those qualities, but it does mean that any instance wherein they come head-to-head with my sounds, they will be subducted.

All to say…

I figure it’s a good feature to have the option to listen to, rather than read, my articles. But if you think I’m gonna trust AI to get my precious sounds just right, you got another thing coming. What I’m saying is, I will begin to include an audio transcript1 with all of my articles. I will also try to slowly backlog the articles I’ve already posted (which will take a while, since there are nearly 100 of them).

These audio files occasionally include me making live edits to my work, critiquing my own grammar, and pausing to light a cigarette. Spending two hours reading my own work out-loud was a very odd experience, and I hope it’s helpful for people.

The first few I’ve done are:

My latest piece about The Tanakh, which no one really fucked with.

Detox From Myth, which people were very sweet about.

and What This Means, which only truly works in written form but was still fun in certain ways.

Ironic Endnote

I decided to not do an audio transcription for this article, which I don’t really consider an article but more “business.” Which begs the reader to wonder if this should really count towards my 7-week stretch of posting on the mouse-car moment, to which I answer that it does. Fuck off with that shit.

The Tanakh is an ancient text sometimes incorrectly labeled “The Old Testament.” In reality, there are 15 additional, “apocryphal” books in the Christian Old Testament which are not included in the Tanakh. What the Tanakh really is is an acronym: TNK, which stands for Torah (the Way), Neviʾim (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). I’ll be talking about the T, the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch. I guess when you stick around for a few thousand years, you start getting multiple names for the same thing.

These books are also sometimes called the Books of Moses, as they suggest that they were written by a historical figure, Moses, who spoke directly with (one of the) Gods and dictated the creation of the earth, the patriarchs, the Israelites enslavement in Egypt and their subsequent escape to the land of Canaan, a promised land which flows, quite notably, with milk and honey. Why milk and honey? Because grazing was a shameful practice in Egypt, because cows meant land and sustenance, because honey meant sweetness, quality of life, etc. But I’m getting several hundred years ahead of myself.

Before diving in, I’ll mention a few things:

• Everyone born under any Abrahamic religious system should probably read these first five books. This is as obvious as it is rare to actually do. The text itself is pretty well-preserved, and very unfamiliar in its literal contents. Most of what you hear from modern practitioners is heavy with interpretation and elision. This exercise, from the perspective of a person heavily influenced by the Catholic church, is both illuminating and empowering and in other ways, disheartening.

• This book is still relevant. It’s easy to find discourse about whether or not the Tanakh provides a legitimate basis for current political and militaristic maneuvering. Billions are still indoctrinated under these stories, which have merit and are occasionally beautiful and hilarious.

• It isn’t boring. This comes with a caveat— you have to know how to read it. You have to learn to skim the genealogies (long lists of who begot whom), and to read the laws selectively (many are interesting, most is very repetitive). There is little to no interiority, and that can often be frustrating. These stories are eminently more interesting within their political context, and I’ll try to provide the most crucial bits of that below.

• Moses did not write the Torah. The reigning theory is that there are four chief sources: J, E, D, and P1. What’s important to clock here is that a) this is a schizophrenic text, with four different authors, sometimes alternating mid-sentence. b) they definitely did not agree on the nature of the universe and “God,” and lived centuries apart from each other. c) they each had motivations, sometimes clear and other times very confusing. d) these motivations tug the text in different directions, and make it very complicated (and, to bad actors, convenient) to build a coherent religion around the text.

• The Tanakh is very meaningfully an adaptation. This means it was not a wholly new text without precedence. From its opening lines, it is a reformation of old stories, twisted in very meaningful ways. More on this below.

• This article is not a step by step, it’s just the things that I found most surprising on this second read-through, away from the bubble of Catholicism. I open with some context that gets bogged down in technicalities, which will be interesting for literary and political purposes, but you can also skip to “The Patriarchs” for the more fun stuff.

Creation

The first thing to note here is that the opening lines would have been stained on the hearts of anyone who read/heard early version the Tanakh. They come from a story called Enûma Elish, “When on high,” which some scholars have argued is a better translation than the classic, “In the beginning.” They were from the Babylonic origin myth, and told the story of two gods, Tiamat and Apsu, who were forged out of a primordial ooze. They begot a bunch of other gods, a series of battles took place, and out of it came a pantheon of Babylonian gods who ruled for centuries. Here is the first groundbreaking move from the biblical writers. They begin with the same ooze, but Genesis quickly swerves. A figure appears, separates the heavens from Earth, and says, mysteriously, that “it was good.” No war, no struggle, just goodness.

Here is the spark of thousands of years of thought which has lived on through billions of humans. There is no “meta-divinity,” no pantheon of gods. This strange new figure can not be overtaken, has no authority above it, and is pure goodness. Aka: there is no primal evil. Any awfulness brought to earth is done so by flawed humans.

This figure creates the cosmos and the earthly topography, which in the book is a big half-bubble around earth which keeps the heavenly waters from the earth. When it feels like destroying it, he pokes holes in the bubble and heavenly water, not rain, fills up the bubble.

He creates a bunch of things: plants, whales, etc, all “after his kind.” He creates two “adams,” which is not a name but the word “earthling,” both after our kind and in his image. Implying a) some assortment of other heavenly creatures, which we’ll meet sparingly, and b) some sort of awareness. I’m encroaching on David Snower’s territory, so I’ll move on. This earthling is vegan, and in charge of naming all the other stuff, and then… the book resets. We get a second creation myth, and this time there are two trees: a tree of knowledge of good and evil, and a tree of life. We’re told not to eat from the first one, but no mention is made of the second. Was this figure (which I can’t yet call “Yahweh” or “God” because he hasn’t been named yet, and is still way more reminiscent of Babylonian and Canaanite gods than any new thing— he is literally “Elohim,” which was the name of the reigning Canaanite God, El) saying that we could access eternal life, but not some other thing, some “knowledge” ? Was he warning us against, perhaps, consciousness? Once again, talk to David about these things.

On a small and fun note, it’s worth mentioning that Eve was not present when this figure told the first, male earthling not to eat from this tree. When she is later tempted, she misquotes the original warning, and adds that they can’t even touch it. Was she misinformed? What did the first guy actually tell her? Time to lay off womenkind for ruining everything, is all I’m saying.

Okay so they eat and get punished, blah blah blah, and then Cain kills his brother which, by the way, they weren’t told not to do, and plus, in Cain’s defense, he kept trying to bring “God” a bunch of fruit baskets and God had “no respect” for them, and so what was the guy to do? Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell, and so he slew Abel. And God had to be like, woah, not cool, and also where did you learn to do that? And so he does something remarkable. He changes the rules. He says first, no more killing. That means even if someone tries to kill you, Cain, they’ll be punished with seven times the fury. Second, I guess you guys can eat meat, since you seem so bloodthirsty and cruel. Just don’t eat the blood, that’s life and life is mine.

This is huge. El, Yahweh, whatever you want to call him just did something no other known god has done before: he changed the rules. He updated his programming in order to accommodate the complicated evil of mankind. He was flexible, and proved that he has the ability to learn and grow based on what we need.

Then the book says “there were giants in those days” and then moves on like that’s not insane. The giants comes back later, like, four hundred years later, when Joshua is looking over the promised land and planning his big invasion.

The Patriarchs

We move into a series of guys elected by God to carry his idea through history. The most striking feature of these men is that they are not awesome, perfect dudes chosen for their piety, but merely chosen. This really stuck with me. Yahweh does not choose based on characteristics, but on some other quality that he does not reveal. The early ones all live for hundreds of years, which was normal and fine before the Flood. The world starts filling up with people and they suck. They try to build towers and God’s like, no, don’t build towers. Don’t even talk to each other. They are very wicked, indeed, their “imagination and thoughts were evil continuously,” and so he pokes the aforementioned holes and floods the earth. But not before he picks his first patriarch.

Noah

Noah was just and perfect and “walked with God (still: Elohim),” and God tells him to build a boat. He says:

Make all living beings go up into the boat.
The boat which you are to build,
its dimensions must measure equal to each other:
its length must correspond to its width.

Oh wait, sorry, that’s from The Epic of Gilgamesh. Genesis says:

make yourself an ark of cypress. The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you

That’s better. This marks the first covenant, which establishes Noah’s reign as the father of all future life. When the water stops, God apologizes, says he’ll never destroy humanity again, and tells Noah to get busy multiplying. Once again, God has changed his mind and updated his strategy. He makes a second promise (after telling Cain he will avenge his death sevenfold), and this time seems to want to commit to his project.

Abram

Next we get Abram, who doesn’t become Abraham until they make their own pact. What to say about this dude except that his wife was barren (as most of the matriarchs were), and he pimped her out to the Pharaoh. He is famous for his immense faith, but also pushes against God’s plans when God seems to act up. Once again, God is flexible. His brother, Lot, is also kinda decent except lives in a city of sinners, and Abram convinces God to let him go. Lot’s daughters then seduce him and beget some children and those children become the Moabites, who were contemporary enemies of the Israelite writers of the Tanakh, about seven hundred years after the events described. This book is not above propaganda and libel, when convenient.

Abraham has a first kid with his maid, Ishmael, which would be fine until God makes Sarah fertile and gives her a kid, which they name Laughter (Isaac). And therein you get the divide between Islam and Judeo-Christianity.

Isaac

Isaac is the quietest of the patriarchs, probably because of the PTSD he has from his dad almost sacrificing him. He basically digs a bunch of wells and never talks except for when he pulls the same trick as his dad, and convinces a King that his wife is actually his sister so that the King tries to seduce her to which Isaac is like, Aha! Tricked you! Now you owe me a bunch of land.

He has twins, Jacob and Esau, and even though Esau is first-born and generally pretty awesome and competent, God decides to build his legacy through the second kid, Jacob. Who sucks. Jacob tricks Esau twice, the first time getting him to give up his inheritance for a bowl of lentil soup, and the second time by covering himself in Ox-fur to make the blind Isaac think he’s Esau and promise him his inheritance. Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, loves Jacob way more and helps him the whole time.

Jacob

This guy… is not my type of guy. Besides the above-mentioned duplicity, Jacob goes off to Canaan and tricks a guy into giving him his best cattle and two of his daughters to marry. He returns home with an army and dreams about a ladder and then wrestles with God or an angel throughout the night (gay) until the God or angel touches him in the hollow of his thigh (?) (gay), and his name changes to Israel.

He has twelve kids, the youngest of which is Joseph, who sucks even more than his dad.

Joseph

Joseph rats on all of his brothers and starts wearing this stupid jacket of many colors that his dad knit for him, and he starts having dreams and annoyingly tells his brothers about them, saying “I had a dream where you all bowed down to me,” and they’re reasonably like, you’re the twelfth-born son, fuck off. They overreact and throw him in a ditch and then change their minds and dig him out of the ditch and sell him into slavery.

Joseph goes to Egypt which is occupied at the time, and proves his worth as a dream-interpreter and gets a cushy job with the occupying force until his boss’s wife falls in love with him and tries to sleep with him several different times, and in Joseph’s defense he refuses. Unfortunately she grabs his jacket and Joseph escapes, but now this woman has got his jacket and tells everyone “whoever’s jacket this is raped me!,” and the moral of the story is don’t wear a stupid fucking jacket made of many colors when the King’s wife is in love with you. So he goes to jail and meets a butler and a baker, who are “sad,” and Joseph interprets their dreams because he can’t help it and they become true, but the sad baker and the sad butler forget to tell the King about how good Joseph is at interpreting dreams and so he stays in jail.

Then two years later the Pharaoh regains control of Egypt, and now it’s his birthday and HE starts having crazy dreams, and the sad butler is like, Dude, I know the perfect guy, and they pull Joseph out of jail and Joseph interprets his dreams and now he’s back, this time with the Egyptians, in Egypt, and things are good.

This is when he really starts sucking. He tells the Pharaoh that there’s going to be seven years of abundance and seven years of famine, and that the Pharaoh should buy up all the grain during the abundance and sell it during the famine. Price-gouging, market manipulation, etc. Immoral stuff but he’s chosen, remember, so who cares. No word on the whereabouts of the jacket.

The famine strikes and now Joseph is loaded, and he starts selling the grain back to the neighboring empires at crazy rates. He also, for some reason, takes everyone’s gold and buries it, effectively tanking the Egyptian economy and creating the economic conditions and xenophobic sentiments which will be very inconvenient for the Israelites forty years later. And then guess what: his brothers are starving and have to come to Joseph for food. But he changes his voice (?) and hides his identity and tells them he’ll give them food in exchange for their youngest brother, Benjamin, which is a dick move, and he waits like two years before telling everyone that surprise, it’s me, and then they all get to live like rich men in Egypt.

This all works out for a minute until Egypt gets occupied again, and now Joseph is on the outs and the new Pharaoh looks at the books (which are not looking good) and looks at the Israelites and is like, why are you guys so powerful? And who is this weird God you pray to and why do you practice shepherding, which is “abominable,” and why do you keep multiplying? Nah, fuck this, and the new Pharaoh tells all their midwives to put any male babies into the river, and says “y’all slaves now,” and Joseph dies at 110 years old and his legacy is that he made everyone in Egypt hate him by tanking the economy and wearing a stupid jacket.

Moses

Moses is kinda the GOAT and deserves his own post. I’ll pick this up in a few weeks. Thanks for tuning in to the mouse-car moment, please share, subscribe, etc.

When you raise the possibility of burning books, folks laugh. Well-intentioned, educated and cultured folks, at least, refuse to believe the idea is not ironical, that you perhaps mean it. Their minds conjure images of Texan Superintendents brandishing copies of The Bluest Eye on Fox News, telling an impassioned audience of concerned parents and liberal defenders that there is no need to ‘fill the minds of our youth with these ideas.’ They think of Fahrenheit 451, of Nazi’s trying to suppress sympathy and McCarthy black-listing harmless ideologues. They go home and kneel at their shrine to Johannes Guttenberg, then sip brandy while wistfully despising the Church for holding on to all that knowledge for so long. When you tell it to a group of fiction writers, they laugh nervously, seeing their flimsy prospects engulfed in flames.

When you raise this possibility, you are rarely heard for what you are asking— what I believe Miguel Cervantes was asking and what I hope all writers of fiction ask themselves, once or twice along each juncture of their careers. The question can be posed most simply as: Should we be doing this? To avoid it is to admit uncertainty in the response. It is to turn a silent ear to both Plato and Tolstoy, who raised the question themselves and were met with side-eyed glances before their concerns were buried in footnotes. I hope with this investigation to stand alongside Cervantes in asking it, and looking unswervingly into the answer returned.

The Core Grievance

One hardly needs to search between the lines of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha to find Cervantes’ proposal of the concern. In the final paragraph of the text, Cervantes writes that Don Quixote was born “for him alone, and I for him.” He claims, without mincing words in his layered fashion, that his “only desire has been to have people reject and despise the false and nonsensical histories of the books of chivalry, which… will undoubtedly fall to the ground.” Four chapters before this, as the maiden Altisidora recalls her time in hell. she notes that outside the gates were demons, juggling books “full of wind and trash.” Consider other mentions, the very first words, perhaps, where Cervantes refers to us as “idle readers.” He describes not being able to notice his work’s defects— like a father blindfolded to his child’s flaws— before removing himself from the role of creator entirely, and claiming to be the stepfather, a mere middleman between the original scribe, Cide Hamete, and the public. Through this excision from responsibility, we are witness to Cervantes’ own grappling with the burden of creation. Following this, he describes a conversation with a friend before the publication of the book, where he is advised to spice up the text with meaningless literary references to imbue it with authority. His friend reminds him to keep the mission in mind: to “demolish the ill-founded apparatus of chivalric books.”

The text then begins with a humorous ode to the writing of fiction, where the supposed author warns against “pull[ing] the loaf untime[ly] / from the fire, and go careen[ing] / into the hands of the dim.” A complication is thus introduced— the distance between an artist’s intention and the public’s ability to comprehend it. There is an insinuation, articulated later by the canon on the road to La Mancha, that “the number of simple-minded men is greater than that of the prudent.” The canon lays down his pen and stops writing his book, one-hundred pages in, out of not wanting to “subject [himself] to the confused judgement of the presumptuous mob, who tend to be the ones who read these books.”

At risk of gilding the lily, a particular mention must be made of the core of these novels’ narrative. Alonso Quixano— a man of great intellect, strong will and character, ardent heart and unflappable determination— is undone by literature. In the very beginning and for the totality of the text, until perhaps Quixano’s final days, we are observers of the corrupting power of literature on a keen and impassioned spirit. Quixano is tortured, brutalized, mocked and degraded for the influence which he has allowed poetry to have over him. We are sympathetic to his plight— verily, just as he is Cervantes, he is us— and we must endure his pain as kindred, quixotic souls. Just as Kafka insisted that his work must be burnt upon his death, so did Quixano insist that his delusion should be eradicated from his legacy. He asks, in his penultimate sentence, for forgiveness from Sancho for “the opportunity I gave you to seem as mad as I, making you fall into the error which I fell.” Namely, the error of believing everything he read; over, even, the pleas of his fellow man.

These instances were pulled from the extreme ends of the book to articulate how thorough Cervantes’ goal was. This is not a sidenote, nor a secondary aim. It is his express concern in the creation of this book; enlivened, but not instigated, by the release of an apocryphal “Part Two” while Cervantes was imprisoned. It is laid out so distinctly, that to ignore it as a humorous irony is to disservice the text. Recall that the entirety of this book has been received as a ‘humorous irony,’ at first and throughout its history. The bevy of critical analysis surrounding The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha would be moot if we were to receive the text as it has been historically misrepresented— as a piece of entertainment, to delight not only our senses but our wit. It has been ignored enough as a comedy of foolish errantry, that I refuse to disregard its core grievance. Cervantes has accomplished too much with this tome to have a central theme written off as a playful artifact. I hope in this paper to listen, and to play the thought experiment which is so clearly posed to the reader.

A History of Grievances

As noted, the main supporters of banning literature fall into two camps. The loudest is the multitude of conservative reactionaries, who have throughout history stifled literature in the name of public decency. This crowd includes Diocletian, the Roman emperor born in rags who on the Feast of Terminus, February 23^rd in the year 303 AD, ordered all Christian scripture to be burnt. This suffocating of information and expression extends for centuries in either direction— around 200 BCE, leaders of the Qin dynasty irreparably erase documents of Confucian doctrine. In 1957, City Lights Bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao and founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti are arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, as a part of District Attorney Ralph McIntosh’s crusade against salacious materials. There is a difficulty in exploring this topic without aligning with the regressive values of these authority figures. Hopefully, by a study of the words of the second camp, I will demonstrate the significance of this line between erasure and prudence. Before doing so, however, a note should be made as to why the above actions are rightfully considered despicable by our most thoughtful contemporaries.

The disappointing contemporary argument regarding the banning of literature has on one side its outspoken supporters, who decry materials they consider ‘obscene’ and call for them to be removed from schools and libraries. On the other is the rest of us, who laugh at the former and simply reply, “no.” I witnessed one of these arguments two years ago at the West Virginia Capitol Building during their 2024 Legislative Session. House Bill 4654 was introduced to the floor as “the removal of Librarians from the list of exemptions from criminal liability, relating to the distribution and display to minors of obscene matter.” Paula Sheridan took to the microphone to read a passage from Jesse Andrews’ 2012 Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, which included her, a septuagenarian with a thick Appalachian accent, shouting the word “pussy” nine times in under a minute. Sheridan concluded, “this is not what I want my kids and my grandkids to find in libraries. I want my grandkids to know how to do math, writing, and arithmetic. Let’s get real here.”

The other side of the argument was recently expressed in Richard Ovenden’s 2020 Burning The Books, in which he explores the history and present of a “worrying trend of attacking libraries.” Amongst his arguments is the presentation of libraries as ‘storehouses of knowledge,’ and the ‘heart of development in society.’ The role of the library, according to Ovenden, is to preserve knowledge and benefit the individual. He would argue that Ms. Sheridan is not appreciating the threat of a silenced discourse. That to allow librarians to be prosecuted for the ideas on their shelves is to instill fear and distrust in society. Both Ovenden and I take these to be axiomatically evil. In the introduction to the book, Ovenden quotes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Winston Smith muses that “there was truth, and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.’

I mean to illuminate further how Ms. Sheridan’s views and mine differ, but that will come later. For now, I want to clearly express that I don’t believe Cervantes, Plato, or Tolstoy would support the arrest of librarians for keeping any book— obscene or otherwise— on their shelves. The perceived ‘humorous irony’ that people read into Cervantes’ incendiary stance towards literature becomes complicated to parse in cases such as this. He was no stranger to the silencing power of authority, being a first-hand witness to the flagrancy of the Inquisition. He was delayed himself from his work and his life when he was imprisoned, between the publishing of Parts 1 and 2, for the “irregular lives of his sister and daughter.” Cervantes himself was found by the authorities to be entirely innocent. So then how should we balance these two complicated truths? That Cervantes both stood for the liberal expression of ideas, yet clearly wanted to raise the question of authorial prudence? This will hopefully be illuminated by exploring the ideas of that other camp— those who called for the banishment of poets.

The Other Camp

I won’t dwell on the most well-known (yet derided) call against the poetic arts. In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates states that the ideal society would disallow poets. The grounds for this are twofold, and well-trodden. The first concerns the argument against imitation, and says that art is a copy of a copy of the ideal form. Richard Lewis Nettleship summarizes neatly that, “true knowledge, according to Plato, is of abstractions; not with the beauties of poetry, but with the ideas of philosophy.[1]” Better suited for an essay on mimesis— for which Don Quixote would also be a fantastic springboard— it is not the concern of this investigation except to note the necessarily obscuring function of reality that artwork provides.

The second gripe against poetry is on ethical grounds. For context, young men in the Greek tradition were raised on a study of poetics before entering the Academy or joining a school to learn pure philosophy. Socrates, via Plato, saw this as morally dubious, especially on a few notable grounds. First, that poets “tell lies about the gods,” (Republic II), which, for a child who cannot parse between allegory and reality, is dangerously misleading. Humphrey House, in a 1952 series of lectures delivered to the Honours School of English at Oxford, notes that Plato’s concern here is not the lies themselves, but “the possible effects of stories on young children’s minds.” Consider the themes of lust and deception, rife in mythological tales, and mothers’ use of shapeshifting gods to scare children into behaving, “making them cowardly.” We are not concerned with children in this essay, since the version of Don Quixote which children are given is itself a simulacrum, a playful mirage of the text itself. It is the mythos[2] minus the language, the interruptions, much of the highly tuned and subtly shifting dialogue and all the other elements which allow this book to be discussed as high literature. But there is a parallel, in Cervantes’ world and in ours, which I believe calls for equal concern. Plato describes them as the “common people,” who allow desire and appetite (epithymetikon) to rule their soul. They are the same commoners that the canon bemoans in chapter 48, when he refuses to finish his book: they are the “presumptuous mob.”

The second gripe, along similar lines, is noted by Plato in Book X: “Poetry feeds the desires and feelings of pleasure and pain… when they ought to be starved. It makes them control us when we ought, in the interest of our own welfare and happiness, to control them.” To this point, Aristotle responded with his career. In his own school he re-introduced the teaching of Homer to young students. He agreed along many lines of Plato’s thought— that poetry is imitative, that it rouses emotions, that it is pleasurable and painful, and even challenges our capacity for reasoning. On his way to agreeing, however, he draws fine distinctions which justify his study and teaching of poetry. “Though these tales about the gods may be untrue,” says Aristotle, “and though they may not be the better thing to say, they are in accordance with opinion” (Poetics, XXV). Further, they may illuminate the sensations which teach those Truths that live outside the realm of logic. Aristotle seems to have taken a lesson from Don Quixote (if in reverse), from his letter to Sancho when he finally gets his governorship: “Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas[3].”

Aristotle’s argument for the value of pity and fear may sound familiar— for two millennia it has dominated the realm of critical theory. It seems to have justified all artistic endeavors until Alexander Baumgarten revitalized the study of aesthetics, and once again there existed a language to determine whether or not a piece of art was worthy of the title, or deserved to exist in the first place. This conversation rages on today, through the New Critics of the mid-20^th century and into our modern era, and has devolved in that time to a game of classification. In this contemporary paradigm, to mock the low arts is elitist, and to disparage the high is to admit foolishness. Midway on the journey of this discussion, between Baumgarten and TikTok, Tolstoy enters.

Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? was published at the tail end of his career, after his disavowal of the precepts of literature. In this time of creative career he favored works which extolled moral virtuousness rather than ones which delighted the reading public. A case-study in how to differentiate between censorship and authorial prudence can be found in the preface to this piece of provocative criticism, where Tolstoy speaks of being censored himself. This was a lifelong struggle for the man, from his early Sevastopol Sketches to his polemical essay on capital punishment, I Cannot Be Silent, which had to be published outside of the nation he was addressing. In a particularly appropriate anecdote of these censorships, Tolstoy describes a line in the original text of What Is Art? where Christ goes to the cross “for the sake of the truth He professed.” In the hands of a Spiritual Censor— “one of the most ignorant, venal, stupid, and despotic institutions in Russia”— the line was substituted for Christ going to the cross “for the Redemption of mankind,” which Tolstoy considers to be “one of the most untrue and harmful of Church dogmas.” Herein lies the perfect allegory for our discussion. Where an artist (Jesus / Tolstoy) meant to stake his credibility, reputation, and freedom on the value of his teachings, he was subsequently expurgated by authority figures (the Pharisees / the Spiritual Censors), and his message was insidiously altered. This was horrified Tolstoy, who believed that “all compromise with institutions of which your conscience disapproves… inevitably lead you not only to acknowledge the institution you disapprove of, but also to participate in the evil that it produces.”

What Is Art? explores the complicated task for modern aesthetics, which tries to define art by “that which is beautiful.” He traces the progression of this word through history, from its Greek origins as ‘that which is good,’ though in 19^th century Russia only meant ‘pleasing to the eye.’ Meanwhile, in Europe, the other five senses claim authority over the word, and what might have once been incomprehensible— “beautiful” music— becomes a standard way of appreciating what one person deems to be valid art. He quotes aestheticians who attempt to re-attach a useful definition to Beauty. That which aligns with nature (Baumgarten), or what we’d call verisimilitude. That which extols moral perfection (Moses Mendelssohn), meaning art that fosters moral development and individual reflection. That which represents the union of Subject and Object (W.A. Knight), which secures art as whatever delivers to the individual an awareness that they are one with nature. The flaw in each of these conceptions of Beauty, according to Tolstoy, is that each assumes it is a received pleasure, existing in and of itself. Thus, Beauty is an indefinite and disinterested passion, received and deemed so by us, which lives as an ethereal state to be desired, not emulated.

With the anecdote of confusing “tasty food” as “good food,” Tolstoy warns us that pleasurable art is not necessarily good. He boils down the preconceived notions of art into a maxim: modern art, as it strives towards pleasure, “is an activity out of sexuality and a propensity for play… accompanied by a pleasant excitation of nervous energy” (Chapter V). This confuses what Tolstoy believes ought to be the goal of an artist— “a means of communion among people.” He describes a powerful piece of art bringing together the artist and the receiver, as well as the receivers with each other. In accordance with the Aristotelian line of thought, he says that art ought to teach feelings the way philosophy teaches truth, so that “the activity of art is based on the fact that man, as he receives through hearing or sight the expressions of another man’s feelings, is capable of experiencing the same feelings as the man who expresses them.” Thus, just as we have the history of words to thank for all we know and all we are able to teach, we have the history of art to thank for all we feel, and all we are able to express about our feelings to others. Without it, we would be “savage, hostile, and divided.”

This becomes crucial in our investigation of Cervantes’ bonfire. Tolstoy does not mean to excuse all artistic endeavors so long as they aim to emotionally inform. He says that the appreciation and creation of art is necessarily encamped within our “religious-consciousness”— our perceptive function of the world we live in— which allows us to decipher feelings within a framework. As art approaches this perception, we deem it good. As it moves away, we deem it bad. This system results in the perceiver only seeking to re-confirm what they already believe. This skews along history’s arc, which Tolstoy believes has moved away from Christ’s teachings and towards a pagan worship of hierarchy. He blames this on the movement of the church away from the common people— that presumptuous mob— into a system where power is retained by the elites. The art of modernity is restrictive, understood only by the elite, and reliant on the institution of slavery. It holds “honor, patriotism, and amorousness” as chief values, and remains inaccessible to most people[4].

Thus we enter into the world of Chivalric Romances— the ‘canon’ at which Cervantes was aiming his discourse. Cervantes works within the above context— from Aristotelian pity and fear to Tolstoyan authorial prudence— to criticize the writing of fiction on a twofold precipice: between censorship and criticism, and between criticism and creation.

The Burning

The question of authorial prudence courses through the entirety of this novel, but in two specific scenes we are particularly poised to track Cervantes’ qualms and arrive at an understanding of his potential solution. These are: the discussion with the canon in Chapter 48, which will provide the most straightforward argument against fiction, and the more complicated burning of the books at the beginning of part one.

The burning in Chapter V is perhaps, apart from the storming of the windmills, the most heavily cited passage of Cervantes’ oeuvre. In a text which takes seriously the question of morality in the writing of fiction, we are left wondering why, at the center of that debate, we must bear witness to such a harsh demonstration, made harsher by the very literal burning of heretics themselves at the time this book was written. To be certain that Cervantes is against religious persecution and the stifling of thought via the erasure of knowledge, and yet keen on posing the complicated question of an author’s responsibility, is representative of the “hall of mirrors” that is Quixote— where nothing means one thing, where we are constantly presented with distorted images of what we expect to see[5].

It’s worthwhile to take a close look at this scene, and especially at the means by which the priest decides whether or not to ‘condemn’ a book to the flames. The first mention of burning comes from the niece, who piggybacks off the housekeeper’s suggestion that the books which have apparently destroyed their master’s mind should “go straight to Satan.” The niece brings this further, saying that the only way to cure the man is to “burn all these wicked books.” It is not until these two— metonymic representatives of the young and the uneducated— that the idea is placed into the priest and barber’s minds, who quickly pick up on the suggestion and adding to it the flare of a “public proceeding.” While the group represented by the two women wish to burn the entire catalogue, the educated gentlemen want to make a thorough investigation, lest any books are found to be worth saving. The books found to be “innocent” are texts which are 1) progenitors of their form, 2) the paradigm of their genre, 3) exceptionally well-written, or 4) written by an author who the priest considers a friend. By these virtues the priest condemns around two-hundred books to the fire, and saves around twenty-five. It is important to note that the standard here is to burn, and the exception only arises from the four qualities listed above.

The character of the priest must be understood in the context of the Inquisition, which at this time gives religious figures the authority to carry out the laws enacted by the Pragmática. This decree declares that “all books printed in or imported to Spain must be licensed by the Consejo de Castilla.” The punishment for not complying was, indeed, either burning or expurgating. The priest becomes more complicated, however, when we hear his commentary on the library. Certain opinions of his— his tirade against translation, his emotional connection with books that provoke “a wealth of pleasure and gold mine of amusement”— closely parallel Cervantes’ own, at least in so far as they’re repeated several times throughout the book by Don Quixote, secondary characters, and the narratal voice itself. Once again, we are left with a character not easily reduced to a mouthpiece; yet another reflective surface in this hall of mirrors. And amongst all of this, we must also wrestle with the fact that the priest is a dear friend of Quixano’s. He is invited at the end to join Alonso as a shepherd, and the two playfully come up with ‘noms de staff’ for each other. Throughout the book he goes out of his way to look out for Alonso, to bring him home and cure him, to make sure the ‘sorrowful’ man escapes his madness. He knew there wasn’t much money in it for him, as he had just watched the Don sell off most of his goods in the quest for knighthood. He is, in this moment, not merely a stand-in for the inquisition, nor merely a selfless friend. He is, more than anything else, a misguided ideologue who believes he is doing his best.

Georgina Dopico Black, in her 2001 Canons Afire: Libraries, Books, and Bodies in Don Quixote’s Spain, stresses the significance of the historical context in which Cervantes writes this scene. She traces the lineage of Cervantes’ Spain to the ninth-century city of Cordoba, capital of the Umayyad dynasty, which “boasted more than seventy libraries which attracted scholars— Islamic, Christian, and Jewish— from all corners of the world.” The secure nature of a place to store and share information helped the city “become an important center for the study of Islam, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and medicine.” Dopico Black recounts how the library was dispersed in the fall of the Umayyid dynasty, and how information failed to find a significant foothold in this corner of the world until the invention of the printing press. One of the first books printed? Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramática de la lengua Castellana. One of the first grammar books of any vernacular language, the text opens with a dedication to Queen Isabel stating that, “the project of imperial consolidation was as much a matter of linguistic and cultural acts as it was of military and political ones.” Nebrija’s preface admits the power which language holds, and points us towards a potential fear of Cervantes and all socially-concerned writers: that their work will be used to justify things by which they cannot stand.

The world into which Cervantes placed this scene— and his seeming detachment from the values he ought to be disavowing— has led to criticism of the author’s “disengagement from its own historical circumstance,” which Dopico Black says is “often expressed in terms of quixotic idealism.” The question has circulated whether Cervantes cared or not about the political circumstances of his time, or, to be more generous, whether he thought it was his role as an author to address them in a straightforward way. But I believe Cervantes was asking a much larger question, and representing a much larger solution, than any prescient social matters occurring around him. Perhaps, as he looked around at this new world— where information was moving at hitherto unimaginable speeds, being used by one faction for “imperial consolidation” and by the other to entertain “presumptuous mobs”— Cervantes decided a much larger question deserved asking, and answering.

The Canon

Towards the end of part one, in the originally intended ending of the book, Cervantes takes up the discourse on the righteousness of literature in a conversation with a man, a canon, who overtakes Don Quixote & company. The Imperial Guard have locked our hero in a cage so that his friends may drag him back home to cure him of his madness. I should note that “canon” cannot, unfortunately, be understood as a play on its modern, secular stance as the “catalog of approved authors” (Bloom). It can, however, serve other uses. From the Greek kanon, it originally meant a straight rod which can be used as a standard of excellence. Between 1400 its usage moved from “the accepted books of the Gospel” (for which it is still applied today) to “a standard of judging.” The canon himself is an honorary member of the church, who lives communally as a part of a sect and according to ecclesiastical rule. Succinctly, he is a church figure, but one who Cervantes specifically does not refer to as a priest. He is thus a figure who confers all the dogma of church doctrine without the lifestyle vows which priests must adhere to.

When asked if he knows the books of chivalry well, the canon responds tellingly that he knows “more about books of chivalry than [he does] about Villapando’s Súmulas,” a logical treatise on the work of Aristotle. He refers to himself as a reader with “false and idle tastes,” and admits to never finishing a full chivalric novel. The canon then goes on to list his grievances with baroque, Milesian writing, which translator Edith Grossman notes are sensual and decadent. He complains, Tolstoyanly, that these works “mean only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales which do both at the same time.” Their failure to teach is due, according to the canon, to their “excessively foolish elements.” Via the canon, who we can suppose by the following excerpts is a devout Aristotelian, we get a straightforward account of Cervantes’ possible values of what makes a novel worthy. He defines Beauty as “proportion between parts and the whole,” and says both of these must “engage the minds of those who read them, by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility.” In short, by “enthralling the spirit and allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace.” It is “verisimilitude and mimesis which together constitute perfection in writing.” He decries chivalric novels as “fatiguing… incredible… lascivious… clumsy… long… foolish… nonsensical, and, finally, lacking in intelligent artifice.” His conclusion: “they deserve to be banished, like unproductive people, from Christian nations.” When the priest fills him in on the books they’ve burned and the ones they saved, the canon laughs, saying that one redeeming value is if a writer is able to display a “good mind.” Namely, stylistic excellence.

Here is the argument on which Cervantes rests his case regarding Chivalric Romances, novels in general, and the bar an artist must reach in order to justify their work. It is no small coincidence that the canon references ‘banishment’ here, and especially that he mentions it in an untrue context. He is referring, of course, to Aristotle’s response to Plato’s suggestion in the Republic: allowing the poets back in to the Academy and, thus, the ideal society. But further, in the canon’s call to banish books, he is either incorrectly assuming that ‘unproductive people’ are already banished from Spain, or, he is already living in the ideal society, delusionally so, in his mind. He is then saying, similarly to Plato, that it is in a perfect world these books should be banished, just as in a perfect world the presumptuous mob would be eradicated, whether by education or exile.

The priest’s solution to this is to “enact at court an intelligent and judicious person who would examine each play before it was performed,” saying that this system would provide safety to the writers (safety not from prosecution, but from standing by ideas and words which are imprudent). This is the feared and over-simplified response to this argument, and the decision which the Church has historically leaned towards. But the canon does not co-sign the priest’s ideas. He instead opts to speak with the victim of literature, Don Quixote, himself. “Grievous and idle reading,” he tells the Don, “has unbalanced your judgement.” Lovingly he tells him that these books have the ability to “perturb the minds of judicious and wellborn gentleman, and have brought you to the point where it is necessary to lock you in in a cage! Come, come, Señor, take pity on yourself!” Don Quixote replies with a litany of un-truths regarding knights errant of history, before coming to the crux of his argument in defense of literature:

“Read these books, and you will see how they drive away melancholy if you are so afflicted, and improve your spirits if they happen to be low. For myself, I can say that since I became a knight errant I have been valiant, well-mannered, liberal, polite, generous, courteous, bold, gentle, and patient.”

The Don always wanted to be these things. It is literature which allowed him to do so.

This is when we learn that the canon has tried himself to compose a novel— a task which Cervantes will nine years later compare to the difficulty of blowing a dog up with air until he is perfectly round. The canon passed his unfinished manuscript around to his friends— intelligent and ignorant alike— and was met by all with approval. And yet, he stops. The canon has violated two cardinal virtues of the writer: to not share a work before it is completed, and to never stop writing. He is, in this instance, no more than a frustrated artist. The man who thinks he’s got a book up his sleeve, who feels that he has the Tolstoyan “inner need to express an accumulated feeling,” and yet who is stymied. We are left to ask, by what? Principle, or laziness?

Ask Thyself…

This is a weighty thing we do. Miguel Cervantes knew it, and spent most of his life without an audience for his ideas. This presents the opportunity to grow outside of public scrutiny, but it’s also a chance for an artist to become bitter. Cervantes had plenty of time to ponder the ethics of creation, and plenty of opportunities to answer in the negative and stop writing. Considering prudence in my own work, and in the work of my peers, I’d like to briefly introduce Harold Bloom’s thoughts on poetic interpretation, as outlined in his 1975 A Map of Misreading. The text opens with an epigraph from 2nd-century tannaitic sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, which reads that “as wine in a jar, if it is to keep, so is the Torah, contained within the outer garment. Such a garment is constituted of many stories; but we, we are required to pierce the garment.” Let us pierce the garment of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha together. Let us allow ourselves, as Bloom calls it, the “misprision one poet performs upon another.” Bloom calls for each poet, in interpreting the work of the canon before them, to “find his own original relation to the truth… to open received texts to his own sufferings, or what he wants to call the sufferings of history” (Bloom, 4). He participates in the Lurianic dialectic of creation, which interprets the creative force as a war between poets in “the strife of Eternity that is poetic influence.” It is a three-staged interpretive/constructive process: the withdrawal of the poet to leave space for a creation that is not himself, followed by a “breaking-apart-of-the-vessels, a vision of creation as catastrophe,” followed by a restitution or restoration, wherein the artist may ‘contribute to God’s work.’ I hope to have formed this process throughout this piece— to have constructed the question of interpretation sans-Ryan, then to have pulled apart the planks of the works which I am compounding towards this end of authorial prudence. And now I am left to restore; with the goal of combining this piece, my work en masse, and the question of the righteousness of creation.

In the gap left in the abrogation of religious texts and their authority, the critic and poet is left to turn to new champions of thought— other thinkers with their own systems of philosophy, perhaps pulled from errant sources and compiled in the soul of the creator. As René Welleck put it in his Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art, a piece of art is not a singular, distilled experience, but “a system of norms extracted from every individual experience.” A collection of experiences speaking to a collection of experiences— strenuated by distinct perceptions of both the artist’s lived reality and their (mis)interpretation of their influences. These new leaders— who are not new at all, and whose legacy can be traced back to Homer’s presence in pre- and post-Academy curricula— have constructed their own mythos (plot) to be incorporated into the paradigms of thought of their successors, i.e., me. This I interpret to apply twofold to the mission of this investigation— it not only allows me the agency to pull from Cervantes whatever I can, in good faith, claim to interpret from his work; it also places a tremendous responsibility upon the author who intends to be incorporated into the souls of their successors. A true artistic endeavor becomes laden by this hallowed precept.

I believe, if my efforts have not been in vain, that we have reached a deeper understanding of the question at the core of this book. It is a large question, one that feels trite or ironical in the social context, and perhaps heretical in the academic. It belongs to that highest realm— which the artist must visit, often but with caution— of the soul. It is a question which requires a lifetime to answer, and in Quixano’s case, a lifetime to even ask. It is a potentially stultifying question, a question which threatens tenets on which we build our careers, our perceptions, and our fictive identities. It cannot be answered here, just as it couldn’t be answered in Cervantes’ 940 pages. It asks, should we be doing this?

The Answer

And we return: yes. And when asked why we may balk, we may tiptoe, we may ignore or answer blithely or bellow back that we must, whether or not we ought to. The only answer which I believe satisfies this weighty demand is that we simply do, simply because we can. Amongst all of these works we have pieced together there is a singular defining thread. Tolstoy raised the high bar of religious consciousness, which rejects the vapid striving towards creations which merely aim their sights at bottling beauty. Socrates calls us to seek Truth, rather than imitation, and Aristotle answers that we may teach that which cannot be reduced to Logical axioms, with the employment of pity and fear. Ms. Sheridan and the conservative reactionaries ask us not to be obscene, and Ovenden calls us to be the heart of development in society— to contribute to the storehouse of knowledge. Cervantes himself, who decried the man from Tordesillas and the many attempts at greatness before him, surely strung this thread. He strung it through his own work and through the work around him— through those harmful tomes of lies, the “mirrors of nonsense, examples of foolishness, and images of lewdness” (416). This singular defining thread, incumbent to any call towards a higher, more worthy mass of what Tolstoy calls the “spiritual organ of human life which cannot be destroyed,” is to do it well. Cervantes did, because he could. The canon couldn’t, and so he did not.

[1] Richard Lewis Nettleship, “The Theory of Education in the Republic of Plato,” 1897

[2] In the Aristotelian sense of the word, which in modern translations is often called “plot”

[3] “be a friend to Plato, but a better friend to the truth.” Notably, Don Quixote writes this quote in Latin, assuming Sancho “must have learned it after becoming a governor.” It seems the Don himself has overestimated the very ‘presumptuous mob’ which inspired the canon to lay down his pen.

[4] This modern sensibility, which continues to afflict the artists of today, relies on four methods to reproduce itself cheaply: the borrowing of references from the canon, the dogged pursuit of hyper-realism to replace merit, maximalist and stark portrayals of the extremes of life, and intellectual puzzles to dazzle the witty reader. Their chief crime is not standing on “the highest world outlook of their time, transmitting true experiences” (Ch. XI). He says that so few pieces of art both “transmit religious feelings urging towards the union and the brotherhood of man… and strive towards the transmission of such feelings as may unite everyone without exception.” He calls for this false art to cease, since it is a dangerous means “of making people coarser and more vicious.” He calls the artist to much higher moral grounds than previously held, wherein “a real work of art can only arise in the soul of an artist occasionally,” only when the artist feels a significant “inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated.” He calls for art which introduces “a new feeling into the intercourse of life,” and which rejects “the filthy torrent of depraved and prostituted art with which we are deluged.”

[5] This ‘mirroring’ is reminiscent of Socrates’ own metaphor for art-making, where he characterizes the role of the poet by saying that one can represent the whole world, “none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round— you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in the mirror” (Republic, Book 10).

Boots lift from 8 inches of snow in New York’s biggest storm in ten years. That last storm was also, poetically, on my birthday. There must be a Latin verse out there about this, where an act of God coincides with a hero’s nameday. In the American tradition we have Mark Twain, born during the 1835 Halley’s Comet and dying during the 1910 Halley’s Comet. I lack any of the certitude that Twain had, that despite a life ravaged by poverty, gambling, and the loss of his wife’s inheritance on a bad investment, he would make it to enjoy the ripe certitude of 75.

In that last birthday storm, ten years ago, the streets of the village were shut down to all but garbage trucks. We sat on the back of them, throwing a football as they moved slowly through the 27 inches which had cancelled class. I now step around the corner from my apartment, past the courts where children build snowmen, and worry that my tennis skills will soften in the winter lull. My game has been strong, lately, despite the fact that for the first time in thirteen years I am utterly without a myth.

New York of my current iteration is a series of failed attempts at significance. Each lifeline I have tried to plant fades before my eyes, and I am left itinerant in a city I inhabit only nominally. My current block is small, and staunched on one side by the horizontal stripe of Hamilton Place. I circulate the block I live on in a perverted imitation of the oldest trope in literature— Nostos. A return home. This is the story of Odysseus, where angry gods prevent a hero from returning to his threshold. It is the story of Joyce’s Ulysses, where Odysseus’ decade-long journey is compared to the heroic effort of a single day in the life of a modern human: an adventure into the world, haunted and propelled by the complicated mess of returning home.

The oldest fossil evidence of a living creature moving intentionally, from the Ediacaran Age, shows the marks of a palm-sized creature in shallow water. The trail it left shows a series of hashes, 600 million years old, as it dragged itself across silt and towards stable rock. We once thought this was an attempt at reaching dry land, or a hunt for food or a mate. We now recognize it as a course correction: the small animal was dislocated from its home by currents, and was attempting to drag itself back. The first record of a living creature’s intentional movement was a return to the place it belonged.

On my second lap around the block the tennis court reminds me of one potential home from my past, Los Angeles’ Echo Park. A neighborhood I used to pray could be air-lifted into any other city in America. I bury memories like this into places, like spouses who store information about remote controls and niece’s birthdays in the other’s brain. The court was buried in Elysian Park, every inch of which I explored barefoot by day- and moon-light. Inaccessible by road, we’d leave the car on the top of Boylston and stare over the Dodger Stadium parking lot, full at that time with thousands of cars waylaid from the rental industry— an eerie display in those early days of Covid. We would hike down a steep hill, through a quarter-mile of Eucalyptus forest, and then scale the chain-link fence of the perennially locked court.

In place of a sense of belonging, I transformed Echo Park in my mind to the ancient city of Uruk, the ‘great-walled’ home of Gilgamesh and, conveniently, the birthplace of writing. Where animalistic kings battled forest gods for immortality; where the advent of architecture spurred the inherent vice of property rights, possession, havers and have-notters. These two cities, separated by the entire written history of human thought, both boasted a population of 50,000, and at 2.4 square miles were the exact same size.

I could see its eponymous ‘great walls’ in the four boundaries of Echo Park itself. To the west, the 2 freeway and Alvarado, which in fifteen north-bound minutes transitioned into the Angel’s Crest Highway, a winding passage through the San Gabriel Mountains. To the east, Elysian park, the second largest woodland in the city, home to Dodger stadium and the 1932 Olympic Village, as well as Caesar Chavez’s revolutionary union movement. It was then the front lines of the Battle of Chavez Ravine, which wiped the vibrant Mexican-American community off the map to usher in the next iteration of the City Planning Department’s great white fiction. To the north is a cliff-side, looking down 150 feet over the bi-secting I-5. Beyond that, Mt. Washington, Eagle Rock, the snow-capped San Gabes and the southern tip of the Sierras, and the next forefront of the alt youth movement which has been slowly bounding east from Silverlake into Echo Park, and is currently veering north into Highland Park. The southern wall is the 101, carrying you from one of the northern-most tips of the US, along the Pacific coast, and depositing you into Los Angeles.

It is dark, and I sit on a bench that might actually be a sculpture of bench. It is in a hideous place, facing an industrial campus on one side and some tepid woods on the other, which slope down onto a particularly bland section of Hamilton Heights, or West Harlem. In the middle of the snow-covered lawn there is a spot shrouded from the city which reminds me of a place I knew in Vermont, where I worked on a farm for two months taking care of horses. The bend of the curve where I walked one freezing and pitch dark night to find Bella, who I was dog-sitting while the Mack’s were at a wedding. She had not come in after dinner, and I was worried she had finally met her match at the top of Blood Mountain. I heard her bark and entered the woods and walked slowly, flashlight off, listening to the occasional cry from an unfamiliar animal. I came to a pool of blood and followed its trail to the body of a chicken lying in a mass of brown feathers, impossible to distinguish from the brown leaves beneath but for the rim of red which surrounded it. I spent an hour carrying the surviving chickens back into their coop, steeping over the bodies of the five which Bella had massacred.

Mythologies are by definition fabrications, urged by foundational instincts in humans to imbue the spiritual into a meaningless reality. They live beneath the surface, are hardly recognized by those adhering to them, but are our only true shot at transcending time. Why should Uruk remain relevant, 6500 years after being buried by forty feet of sand? Because it constitutes a myth powerful enough to climb through that erasure and assert itself into alien civilizations that can’t even begin to understand what a moment was like for those ancient people. We are foolish, says Shelley’s Ozymandias, to believe in the staying power of humanity. And yet, Ozymandias lives, not for the splendor of his mighty works, reduced to ash, but for the story which his destruction tells.

The mythology of Los Angeles is strong. It has pulled in fiery spirits for over a century, adding them to a mountain of baristas and second ADs upon which only so few can climb. To leave that mythology, to step out of the eternal sunshine, is a frigid experience for a twenty-five year old—akin to stepping away from a flaming pile of trash and into a frozen tundra. Once the cold reaches your bones, you begin to miss even the smell.

I tried, desperately, to forge my myth. I walked the 23.6 miles of Sunset Boulevard, the path of a 1780s cattle trail from the Pueblo de Los Ángeles to the ocean. I made an attempt to visit every Mission along the Juan Bautista de Anza Trail. Five months into my time there, desperately lonely, a thick rain began to fall. In an attempt to connect this place to a lost Northeastern childhood, where my friends and I would stand during storms and watch the Pequonnock River surge, I rented a car to drive to the LA River basin, which I had only ever seen bone dry. I came to the edge of the massive concrete gap, sixty yards across, and stood watching as the ground at its center began to dampen. A cook from a nearby restaurant approached me with a PBR, and we watched silently as the dampness became a trickle. Within fifteen minutes, water was flowing with a decided strength. By the time I left, the entire basin was filled and raging with muddy crashes against the slanted walls.

Across the fence in my backyard, where the Hollywood sign was always visible, a man named Juan Manuel went on nightly rants, shouting for hours about the film industry, about how “if you want to sell your soul that’s fine, but I will not,” about how Monty’s vegan burger is a fraud but Padres across the street is not, about how he doesn’t own a gun, but if you do, he does not care. He yells “I am not a retard,” yells, “you will never make it as a musician.” My neighbor Daniel screams at him to shut the fuck up, that his two-month old baby is trying to sleep. Six months later I will give Daniel a haircut on his rooftop, and one month after that he will separate from his wife and live for a year in his car on the street outside of our complex. The surface of my life is glamorous, but I am suffering greatly. The myth is fading. I write one night that Juan Manuel is “a prophet of disbanded youth.”

LA was not my home. I remained incessantly aware of the tar pits beneath us, the birth of the city as a land of pirates avoiding the taxes owed to Edison for use of the film camera. I thought it a ridiculous place, perfectly summarized by the metaphor of the “Hollywoodland” sign, which lost its last four letters in a mudslide and decided to change the name of an entire neighborhood to accommodate the false reality. The city was to me like an optical illusion which you have unseen. I could no longer mistake the façade for what I perceived to be the truth it hid.

The sun is now down. The moon is a nail back in West Virginia, and has not yet graced the skies over California. The last time I visited was a tour through suppressed anxieties. The cacophonous map of the city, once scripture to me, was barely legible. I walked Sawtelle, wondering if it ran east-west or north-south. If those words even had meaning there, where the compass rose had been disregarded for simplicity. There was snow on Baldy. A Taylor Swift music video shot under the sign threatened to bring Franklin to a halt. And I began to wonder if ghosts see us corporeal and fleshy beings as ghosts as well.

I saw the next iteration of my cohort populating the streets, bearing subtly altered versions of our threads and opinions, eager to make the same mistakes and live the same glamorous narratives that we did. My own crowd had matriculated, spread east and west for one step closer to the heights which called them to this place. It does not resemble progress, but a subtle evolution. A brand of evolution most deadly to ego but, still, the most digestible reminder of impermanence one could hope for, if that’s one’s thing. Los Angeles of my nightmares became the shell of the beast it once was. The currency there was dreams, and it bestowed those in droves, without restraint, as if that’s all it knows how to do and will be able to do so forever. New beauties and new bros, exactly as artful and soulful as the ones before, here to be exquisitely distracted in ever more inventive ways. What does it all add up to? From the outside, everything. The west pole of the American magnet. Inside the vacuum: songs to beckon the golden hour still less enigmatic than the setting itself. Ever daunting to the aging dreamer, who has necessarily shed her preconceptions of artistry for the pro-forma dogma of a twinkling tundra. A land which refuses to tap you on the shoulder to let you know when opportunity has passed.

I still believe, still vouch (though it doesn’t need me to), that what happens there is historically significant. That the opinions and fads which have and will continue to define eras are at least trial-run, if not forged in that furnace. That the Taix Square flea market is ground zero for trends which will be shipped across America and then the world. That the most important bands of our culture must hold residency at the Echoplex. That these kids matter.

Heinrich Von Kleist suffered a crisis when he picked up a copy of a new book, Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. He began to see the catastrophe of life, which was “short on catharsis, and showed little relation between character and fate.” This was a crisis of myth. It was productive for him— he learned the craft of transforming facts into stories, of crimes into “fables without morals.” On my sixth lap around my block, the snow begins to transition into sleet, the day into dusk. I am trying for the umpteenth time in the last year to decide what is wrong, what is missing. There is a myth-sized abyss in my soul, and as long it is empty I will not understand a thing.

My home is neither on Greenbriar Ave in West Virginia, where I detoxed from Los Angeles for two years and developed an intimacy with solitude. Where I wrote my first novel and licked my wounds. Where I would daily speak to the 10,000 listeners of my radio show, and then be silent for the remainder of the day. Where I began to go to church, not for any vestige of my childhood belief in God but for the reason I suspect most people are there, for the sake of that moment when the pastor incites us to shake hands in a sign of peace. A brief instance of human contact which would have to sustain me for a week.

West Virginia did not need an origin myth— it was mythical enough to anyone who cared to look closely. I made one anyways. I had found this new home after a months-long drive around the country, where I ignored Check Engine lights and accrued parking tickets, where I was woken up often by the rapping of a cop’s flashlight on my window as I moved south, moved east, and found the America of my dreams to be nowhere. Where I found a nation of once distinct cultures reduced to homogenization, a national accent carried on the wagon of Fast Food and chronic internet. After bathing in the Elk River on a frigid December morning, I thumbed through a local paper and saw an apartment for rent at a reasonable price, in a state in which I knew not a single living soul. A state stuck in a highway-desert; a left-behind state, “Beautiful But Depressed,” in the coal-ridden dixie-land hill of Appalachia. That state you forgot, the one you have all wrong, the one that’s exactly how you imagine it but with a twinge of enchantment which you can’t understand until you’ve bled there, seen rain there, crawled through the mined-dry hills or dipped in the New River after a mid-summer deluge beside a town which was hit once by the loss of industry, once more by billion-dollar pharmaceutical Molochs, once more by floods, by brain-drain, by the passing ship of an unwanted modernity.

And despite my two years there, it was still not a home. Home is neither Connecticut, the land of my origin. Or, if home is there, it is only so when I am not. Home is neither New York, where I’ve only ever lived for the sake of education. Home is more predictably like the shell of a hermitic crab, constantly in search of newer shells. Home possibly only an aspiration. A place not for returning, but a place I aspire to build, but which I have resisted building for years. The fated condition of my artistic sensibility. That I am forever without a home, and forever trying to build one in a haunting awareness that each home I create in my work will never satisfy me in the way that I long for. In the way I hope it satisfies a reader, if only by reminding them of a brief and illusory place that they have access to only in spirit.

On the radio this weekend I heard a DJ talking about how much snow fell the night before. “We got 3 inches in some areas,” he said, “but as much as five in others, according to the forecast.” But that wouldn’t be the forecast, would it? The forecast looks ahead, not backwards. It reminded me of a years long struggle I’ve had in finding weather reports from the past.

I do this for a few different reasons. Sometimes I’ll be deciding whether I need a jacket, or if I can wear a long sleeve shirt, and I’ll see that the weather outside is, say, 60. I don’t have a strong sense of what that means, so I’ll check back over the last few days to see if I can compare it with a recent experience. I also have a really bad memory, and sometimes have to look back over the last few days’ weather to see what day something happened. Not checking the forecast, but the aftcast.

There have actually been developments in this over the past few years. I recently found timeanddate.com, which does a pretty impressive job at logging the weather of specific weeks in the past.

In writing a novel which takes place in 2007, I got the ridiculous idea to make it weather- and moon-phase-accurate. This completely unnecessary idea led to three days of me tracking down eighteen year old data for locations across twenty-five states. Here is a small snippet, but the sheet continues across 95 days, detailing the high and low temp, moon phase, and what time the sun rose and sat:

Why do we mostly not care about this? It’s similar to forgetting dreams, in a way. One theory goes that if we remembered all of our dreams, and if they felt the same as memories, we would be in a state of constant confusion. You would see your barista in the morning and yell at her, “don’t act all nice, I haven’t forgotten how you convinced the president of the Jack White fan club that I was selling black market dinosaur bones to children with cancer.”

We don’t care to know yesterday’s weather. It’s an illusion, yesterday, and the only thing that really matters is what it will be outside today, or tomorrow1. But the kicker is: the forecast is a prediction. It’s not precise. The aftcast is perfect. It’s history. It’s “true.” But that’s the one we don’t care about.

Peppers in Context

I’ve been buying bell peppers a lot recently, and find myself in the strange position of deciding which color pepper goes with which meal. Here is what I’ve come up with, based entirely on intuition:

Hash Browns: Green

Chicken + Rice: Yellow

Stuffed Peppers: Red (but ultimately, not a very good dish)

Raw: Green is best, then Yellow, then Red

Salad: Green, then Red, then Yellow

Dipped in Hummus: Red, then Green, then Yellow

On a Philly Cheesesteak: Red and/or Green

Quiche: Green

Fajitas: Green and Red

Butternut Squash Soup: Yellow

Sound off in the comments.

As is proper in a title, each word is capitalized.

There are three of them, almost uniform in length but for the unfortunate S at the end of Means. Let’s start there.

The word mean is a pesky flaw of American English, in that it’s a derivation of a derivation which has been overused out of any significance. “Significance,” since it was mentioned, is what the word mean means. The title of this piece might more accurately be What This Signifies, but that would change its impression entirely.

If a tutor were to train a foreign student in English, one of the many obstacles that would cause said tutor to shrug their shoulders and apologize would be the singular-S. We say the writers write, and the writer writes. The foreign student, in their precious naïveté, will often write the writer write. The tutor will kindly point out that they’re missing an S, and the foreign student will sweetly rejoinder that, “Actually, Ryan, an S is reserved for plurality.” The foreign student refuses to call the tutor his preferred title: Mr. Matera, Candidate for Mastery of Fine Arts.

“The Noun-S is, yes, for pluralization. Verbs conjugated in the present-simple tense, however, also receive an S, student.” The foreign student doesn’t have any titles, besides the one she had back in her homeland, Tengku, which is anglicized as “Princess.” The foreign student will often remind the Candidate for Mastery of Fine Arts of this anglicization.

“So: the writer writes?”

“Correct.”

“And the writer doesn’t writes? And the writer teachs poorly?”

Let’s step back. The word mean means signify, meaning to indicate, represent or denote. It can be understood as “has the meaning of,” as in, “carries within it the identification of a thing in which the thing being meant is exactly equal to the thing that thing is meant to mean.” Mean can also mean cruel. Means can also mean the ways by which something happens, as in that which is said to justify ends. Mean also means an average quantitative value, as in mean, median, and mode. Means may also mean the ability, financial or otherwise, to achieve something, as in: I’d like to stop tutoring, but I wouldn’t have the means to continue pursuing a Mastery of Fine Arts. Thus, if one were to glibly write off the cruel but traditional methods by which one acted, they might say: By all means, my mean mean means meant nothing.

What about What? What about it, indeed. What we should first understand is that the What in the title of this piece is not presenting a question, as whats often do. The title is not, “What this mean?”, in the colloquial, predicateless rhetoricism encountered in phrases like, “Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout Willis?”

But what were we talkin’ bout? Yes: what.

In the title of this piece, which will be concluded in 1300 words, we are not asking What Does This Mean?, but rather we— as in I, a Candidate for Mastery— are telling you What This Means. As in, we are indicating, rhetorically, that whatever follows will ideally explain what exactly this means. It is a “Wh-Noun Clause,” which poetically builds suspense towards a promised (and, I swear, intended) conclusion. It implies the fuller, “What this [piece] means [is …].” This becomes a heavy pronoun, as it bears the weight of this brief and pedantic piece of literature. The culmination of my life’s work, this this. You are now ensconced in this: this is it, the this-ness. Welcome to this. Does it feel meaningful, yet?

How about that conclusion I mentioned, the one which is 1300, now 1100, words hence? Will it arrive, you begin to wonder? The last paragraph suggested, perhaps, some hint of ability in the Candidate for Mastery whose hands you are now in. Some ability to twist language, to call it to new heights. Bear in mind, I am but a candidate upon writing this. I will not be a Master for many more months, when I will receive a diploma and a formal title to succeed my name, abbreviated: MA. Verily I say unto thee: the digital receipt which I’ll forever bear in my digital back pocket, the one which identifies me as a Master, does in no way mean that I can Pull this Off. Ask my colleagues in arms whether or not this diploma endows them, a priori, with the capacity for making sense via words words words of the madness behind the pasteboard mask. I will attempt to get us there. I will attempt because of the insatiable spirit within me to create, not for the sake of mine own nor my parents’ pride, not for gratitude, nor for the anxiety-inducing need I feel to be loved and accepted and needed, not for the money of which there is little, the glory of which there is none, not for the laurels they tell me mean nothing, nor to suppress the pain inherited from ancestors in an aching struggle to prove something Western in this Western context, not for you, but for because I am desperate. But for because it is all I can do, if even this I can. I will attempt to get us there but if you leave, if you are already gone, I will still be attempting to get us both there. But first, phonetics.

There are three standard ways to read a three-syllable foot. [Foot = the basic unit of poetry. In a sonnet, for example, there are five feet, a pentameter. English is considered an iambic language, meaning most of its words rely on an [un-stressed, stressed] pattern (denoted: x / ). In the phrase “I hope to help,” the words I and to are unstressed, while hoped and help are stressed— notice, as you mutter them aloud, the way the ho- in hoped and the hel- in help burst from your throat. I hope to help is thus “iambic dimeter.” Its /h/-sound is known as a Voiceless Glottal Fricative. Voiceless means it is produced without vibrating the larynx, meaning the /h/ is unlike other consonants in that it has no meaning outside of its context. This is not to be confused with the h in the title of this piece, which is paired with one of its closest allies, the t, to form a different sound (phoneme): the eth [ð]. This is the “Voiced” variation of theta [θ]. To get out of this pit, I’ll mention only that our title gallantly includes three distinct vowel sounds, from the most common of all of the English phonemes (the schwa, found in what), to the fifth most common (the /I/ sound of this), to the ninth most common (the /i/ found in means), making it a simple phrase. In phonetics, the title is written: [wət ðɪs miːnz]. English has nineteen vowel sounds].

The title is a three-syllable foot. The three standard readings of a three-syllable foot are: the anapestic, the dactylic, and the amphibrachic. With only 600 words left, I have concerns regarding my capacity to crescendo the underlying significance of this essay in a way that is satisfying and significant and yet somehow not overwrought. [Cross off “overwrought,” a bridge which has already been crossed]. I am especially concerned by the position I am in thanks to paragraph 13, beginning “How about that conclusion…,” and I feel compelled to explain that I am a “linear” writer, meaning I write in order and rarely turn back, which is why I can confidently state that it is paragraph 13 causing me consternation. That it will not become paragraph 12 or paragraph 14 after some light re-arranging, because I do not rearrange, and am horrified to admit that I don’t even think I know what people mean by “editing,” which, okay, now you’re laughing at and not with me— a prepositional cruelty which I’ve brought upon myself. This paragraph, too, I am adding to the list of the ones which trouble me.

Because now I’m wondering if I can avoid explaining the differences between anapestic, dactylic and amphibrachic feet without disappointing you. I wonder if I even care about that, since disappointing you would make me less alone in the camp of people disappointed by me. It is already a decently sized camp, with at least one putrid, self-pitying wallower. There are no less than four jokes in the last sentence which I feel compelled to explain, but won’t. “Won’t” is somehow the accepted abbreviation of “will not,” the tutor explains to the princess.

[An unfortunately timed but absolutely crucial note on a word I keep using, the word “piece,” to describe what you are now reading: See, my aforementioned and supposéd mastery [cut: aforementioned (redundant), cut: supposéd (pretentious), cut: paragraphs 13, 14, 1-12, 15-18 (annoying, pedantic, self-aggrandizing, self-mythologizing, off-topic, unreadable, insufficient, profligate, representative of a self which Workshops 1, 2, and 4 have suggested is unlikeable, charming but sebaceous, impossible to monetize, unlikely to reach a receptive audience, inconducive to a fulfilling life, unhelpful towards Author’s attempts at finding a loving partner to create ego-affirming offspring through whom Author can pass depression, death-wish, fear of being seen, melancholia studiosa and an unworthy attempt to represent man as audacis naturæ miraculum)]— aye, my aforementioned and supposed mastery is in the realm of what we have labelled in the empiricist mindset as Fiction. I am meant to lie. I was taught to raise the pasteboard mask— not to remove it. They will come for characters and arcs and find only an broken harp, harping that what is broken must be forced back together. And I am crestfallen that these facts will always get in the way of a good story, but I can only essai— I can only attempt. I’ve no idea what lies in the gap beyond this ledge but will still jump, shouting back towards the ledge whatever it is I find. Be it the pavement below, or another ledge from which to jump again.]

Anapestically, is how I meant for the title to be read. Unstressed / Unstressed / Stressed. [x x /]. Found in words like: understand, contradict, or overcome. I’ll say this: a Master doesn’t struggle with clarity. A Master doesn’t alienate readers. A Master doesn’t mince nor stumble— a Master stabs. By all means, my mean mean means meant nothing.