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.

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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 Do we have a new enough conception of consciousness to write Freud off as outdated?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.

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:

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).

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.

Decent year for book’ing— I read one more than I did in ‘23 but ten less than I did in ‘22. Although, five of the books from this year are over seven-hundred pages, and only three of them are under 150. The list pretty much follows the trend that I enjoy longer books much more than shorter ones, which probably has to do with the amount of time spent with them as much as a selection bias.

The most glaring revelation here is that books released post-2000 are all at the bottom of my list, and mid-20th century stuff is all rated the highest. I guess I don’t have a very high estimation of contemporary lit.

Recommendations

Fiction

Looking for a romp with literary value? A road-trip novel with larger-than-life characters, adventure, and sex appeal? Try Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get The Blues.

Looking for a delicate and moving story with some high-precision prose? Check out Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.

Want a quickie? An incredible story with a critical lesson? Toni Morrison’s Sula is the book for you.

Non-Fiction

Perhaps the book I recommended most this year is Maria Popovich’s Figuring. Mentioned here.

Another great piece of lyrical insight is For The Time Being by Annie Dillard. Story about love and archaeology and more sand facts that you could ever have asked for.

Stats

• Most read writer: Tie between Ishiguro, Morrison, Faulkner, Woolf, and Robbins

• Most read decade: the 2000’s (5)

• 21^st Century (42%)

• 20^th Century (48%)

• 19^th Century (10%)

• Male writers (67%)

The List

33. Kitchen Confidential— Anthony Bourdain, 2000

I swear I’m not trying to troll here. This book was recommended to me so many times that I eventually caved, and was sorely disappointed. It doesn’t help that autobiographies and the culinary arts are two of my least favorite things, but from people’s words I expected a much more hardcore story about greatness. Bourdain seemed to be trying so hard to act like he wasn’t impressed with himself, and I don’t think prose is something he cares about. Wasn’t the worst experience, though. I learned a couple things about knives.

32. Klara and the Sun— Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021

I picked this one up because I heard it had become a staple for people riding the tube in London. It was eminently readable, which I’m saying as a bad thing. Ishiguro (who appears much, much higher on this list) comes up with a lot of rules for this sci-fi world which he can’t abide by. There is something to be said for capturing the child-like mindset, but this child happens to be a robot, which kinda usurps that whole mission. I would highly recommend this book for robots and no one else. Is it an allegory for adoption? I don’t think so, and if it is, it is a failure.

31. Days of Abandonment— Elena Ferrante, 2002

My first and only Ferrante read, and I do get the hype— she is cool and fun and has a great understanding of narrative. There’s just nothing about this book which will stick with me. That being said, the sequence with the locks is a standout and I definitely learned a trick or two along the way (just nothing I hadn’t previously learned from other writers).

30. The Art of Cruelty— Maggie Nelson, 2011

Argonauts is one of my favorite pieces of non-fiction, but this critical look into the grotesque in the arts (mainly performance art) just fell short of informative. I don’t get her thesis, and having experienced close to zero of the art pieces she references, I don’t think the book was for me. I am pretty severely anti-violence in the arts (and life), and I thought I would read this book and find out where that sensitivity comes from. She never answered my question, and instead seemed to just doll out a litany of galleries she’s been to. Nelson admits to being drawn to the violent in a similar way that a lot of us are. I think this book will speak better to that lot than it did to me.

As a side-note, plenty of critics have pointed out that Nelson is laying out a new paradigm for art criticism. This is something I think needs to happen to escape the post-modern haze and the post-post-modern mediocrity. So if she is taking that very difficult first step, I applaud her and hope the discourse continues.

29. By Night In Chile— Roberto Bolaño, 2000

Bolaño has become famous for giving boners to literary MFA students across the country. He’s certainly a crisp and engaging writer, and this is perhaps one of his minor works. It’s a simple story about an aging priest reflecting on the new generation who has left him behind. There are a lot of great vignettes in this book, but the overall project falls short of what it aims to be— that is, a sort of Notes From The Underground for 1970s Chile. Susan Sontag calls it a modern classic, so there’s a solid chance I missed the point on this one. C’est la vie.

28. Wild Ducks Flying Backwards— Tom Robbins, 2005

A collection of shorts, essays, and cultural critique from one of my favorite modernish voices. Tom Robbins wrote two of my top-ten favorite books, but this one works best if you’ve already bitten off a significant portion of his bibliography.

27. The Waves— Virginia Woolf, 1931

Woolf is responsible for two perfect books, Lighthouse and Orlando. Unfortunately, this year I read two of her more oblique and incomplete works. Waves is undeniably brilliant and touching, but it’s hard to say that she stuck the landing. It chronicles a group of friends from childhood to death, and is written entirely in quotation marks, but for seven inter-spliced sections describing a sun passing over an ocean (because of time, get it?). Woolf’s voice is obviously among the greatest of all time, but it’s so hard for me to ignore the tradition this book started of a really really really shitty and annoying avant-garde theater. It also, however, inspired the modern masterpiece Ducks, Newburyport, and for that it gets immense credit.

Obviously the prose is perfect. And obviously it’s one of the important books of high modernism and 20th century literature. I’m grading her on a special curve, which expects her work to be really good.

26. Homesick For Another World— Ottessa Moshfegh, 2017

My top-read writer of last year, Moshfegh is one of the best young voices we have. This collection of short stories followed her debut novel, Eileen, and is the perfect showcase of her voice. It also is a strong indicator of where her career may lead, since there is a range in theme and setting in these stories which hasn’t been scratched by her novel output yet. Unfortunately, I’m rating this book against Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior, the holy grail for this genre of short collections, and it is difficult to look really good in that context.

25. Madame Bovary— Gustave Flaubert, 1857

A fine read, technically brilliant. Solid story too, except for two really annoying and poignant missteps (1. where the fuck is her husband the entire time? And why was the first thirty pages of the book exclusively about him if Flaubert was planning on erasing him halfway through? and 2. towards the end she passes the convent she grows up in and sees her first extra-marital lover drive by. Then nothing happens. This level of coincidence then dropping the ball just flummoxes me, I must say). I think a lot is lost in translation, since Flaubert is regarded as one of the most musical writers and I just did not get that from my edition.

24. Pretentiousness: Why It Matters— Dan Fox, 2016

Reviewed, sorta, here.

23. Lullaby— Chuck Palahniuk, 2002

Oh boy oh boy this one gave me the heebie jeebies. Really good, and really memorable, but if you’ve never Palahniuk’d the guy is demented and that just doesn’t do it for me. But still, this is a perfect three-act structure, characters are well developed and interesting and the ending is a total mindfuck. It also straddles the reality/mystical line in a way that’s almost exactly my taste— though maybe just a hair too much towards the mystical.

22. Mrs. Dalloway— Virginia Woolf, 1925

A fine book. I unfortunately read it just after Ulysses, and it just felt like a huge step down. But once again, Woolf is a genius and I’m grading her on a curve to her disadvantage.

21. Beloved— Toni Morrison, 1987

Morrison is a legend, and appears again much higher1 on the countdown. And while this book is considered her masterpiece, I had a really hard time understanding it’s rhythm and voice. Once I finally did, the reading experience improved, but it never leapt off the page as a work of pure genius. It was just a beautiful and brilliant and hard to swallow story with a great ending. Maybe this should be rated higher

20. As I Lay Dying— William Faulkner, 1930

Another book which takes a minute to catch up to, but which really blossoms once you do. Ironically, I found this one eminently readable. Maybe because the head-hopping employed here has become nigh ubiquitous, but it’s a straight-forward story— (mama requests to be buried in Jefferson county)— and it’s telling reads like an adventure story. Added points since Faulkner supposedly wrote it in one, three-week stint. Why isn’t this higher up? Probably because Absalom is one of my favorite all-time books, and this one isn’t Absalom.

19. The Beautiful and Damned— F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922

I can’t remember why, but in February I went to the Fitzgerald section of my library to re-acquaint myself with an old favorite. As much as I’ve read his four (finished) novels, I mix up the title endlessly. So I thought I was gonna read Tender Is The Night (or This Side of Paradise… I’m not 100% sure) and accidentally read this one, which I didn’t like the first time around and didn’t love this time. But still, it’s Fitzgerald. The guy can spin a fucking sentence. Also I was taking like three baths a day at the time, and so was the protagonist of the book so.

18. The Candy House— Jennifer Egan, 2022

Such a fantastic follow-up to her 2011 Visit From The Goon Squad. I think I even liked the sequel more than the Pulitzer-prize winning original. It’s just a tender, tender book, and I think perhaps the best possible future for the novel. By that I mean a book which is seven hundred pages with all the interweaving work, the necessary chaff of dense literature, removed. While the original is lauded for playing with form, Egan does it to much less effect in this one. But still, tender as fuck. It’s very rare for a book to make me cry, and I can’t remember if this one did but it was definitely close. Also read in my bath era. Books = better in bathtubs?

17. Letters to Emma Bowlcut— Bill Callahan, 2010

Bill Callahan has been amongst my top played artists for the last few years. He was the man behind Smog (and the legendary record Knock, Knock), but his best work began when he started releasing under his own name in the mid-2000s. It’s clear from his music that he’s a significant writer, and this book is the proof. Formatted as a series of letters written to a married woman, it is a power-house of imagery and metaphor. Coming in under 130 pages, this is a top recommendation of the year and could probably replace Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in the historical canon.

16. For The Time Being— Annie Dillard, 1999

I’ve gotten some nasty shite this year for praising Annie Dillard, but she is, in my opinion, the prototypical living Writer. By that I mean she is one of the best writers on writing: she dishes out non-fiction, fiction and essays like no one else, and she is married to a Thoreau scholar, placing her in a lineage back to the Concord transcendentalists of the 1830s. This book has more information on sand than you’d ever expect to want, and a surprisingly juicy love story between a French archaeologist/priest and his best friend. Another quick and easy read, which will make you feel more connected to ancient people than a fifth re-reading of Gilgamesh.

15. Chronicle of a Death Foretold— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1981

I haven’t much to say about this book but that it’s a ripping good yarn. Marquez is, of course, the master of temporal weaving, and here he employs that skill to great effect. There is also a mystery in it, quite beneath the surface, which is never resolved in the end. This has led to a ton of great conversations reminiscent of the days when we all watched the same prestige television shows and discussed them on Fridays.

14. Autumn of the Patriarch— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1968

A modernist doozy, one of those books where you have to read a chapter (40 pages) each sitting or else start over from the beginning the next time you pick it up. Notable for ending on a thirty page sentence. Really good, if a little character-deaf. Also significant for tossing the narratal lens into multiple, maybe hundreds, of perspectives. I have never seen that attempted anywhere else, and he pulls it off perfectly.

13. Mason & Dixon— Thomas Pynchon, 1997

The hardest book, bar-none, I have ever read. Took me and my book-club partner a full year to read this, including a very necessary four-month break in the middle. The TLDR is that Pynchon wrote a proper 18th century novel over the course of fifteen years. It is about an old yarn-spinner, Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, trying to tell as long a story as possible so he can continue to live at his cousin’s house for free. The tale he tells is about the famed cartographer/astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, but is really about the foundation on which America was built.

This book is misunderstood as postmodern and misunderstood as a buddy-cop comedy, though it is a comedy, I think. It would be extremely rare for me to understand more than three sentences in a row before having to go back a page and try again. So many sequences from this book appear to me like dreams, and I can never place which book that insane idea came from until I remember— oh, obviously. Mason & Dixon. Even the ampersand in the title is a part of the symbolism of this book, which symbolizes… I have no idea. I just simply don’t get it. And narratively, I don’t think it sticks the landing. If that was Pynchon nodding to the era, that’s fine, but it doesn’t do it for me. This book is America and has been suggested as the Great American Novel we’ve all been looking for, which it might be if it was at all readable. But it’s not. What it is is one of the greatest literary trips you’ll ever take. Here’s a quote— written, I remind you, in 1997

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.

Thus goes the entire book. Read it, just so you can say for the rest of your life that you have read Mason & Dixon. To the thirty people that will mean anything to, it will mean a lot.

11. Anna Karenina— Leopold Tolstoi, 1878

This one isn’t as good as I remember, which isn’t to say it’s at all bad. It isn’t bad, it’s incredible. First and foremost I want to say that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are very annoying as translators. I don’t speak Russian, but I’m just so certain that the Tolstoi I know and love did not write like this. And yet, it’s readable, and it welcomes a lot of people into the world of Leo.

The tired refrain here is that this book is not really about Anna, it’s about Levin. Anna is kinda incorrigible. Obviously there was a lot on her shoulders, but she’s a tricky gal to stand behind. Meanwhile Levin, the oaf, is one of literature’s great mensches. I greedily ate up his thirty-page soliloquies about land management, and swooned for him and Kitty’s relationship like a good love story oughta make one swoon. There is more lessons about decent living in the Levin sections than I’ve gotten from any other book or any other person, I think.

10. Sula— Toni Morrison, 1973

Just an impeccable story. It gets extra points for being so quick, but the final conversation between Sula and Nel is one of my favorite passages from literature. It’s hard to say much without just extolling the plot, but the opening section and the framing by years really clicked for me as well. Highly recommend.

9. My Name Is Asher Lev— Chaim Potok, 1972

The ultimate book for artists from working class backgrounds, who are terrified of offending their parents but equally terrified of not living their artistic truth. And while the first 100 pages could be ripped out with very little lost, this book has some timeless artistic wisdom and a gut-wrenching ending. All this is done with zero violence or romance, which ain’t so easy.

9. Ghostly Father, I Confess— Mary McCarthy, 1942

A novella (actually part 6 of a longer novel) that I am including because it’s that good. Halfway through this story I started believing I might be a woman, because of how intensely I identified with the female narrator. Just an impeccable story about Catholic dysfunction, all told in the framework of a one-hour therapy session. I look forward to reading the full work next year.

8. Remains of the Day— Kazuro Ishiguro, 1989

What a great, subtle and elegant book. Once again, whatever I happen to read in the first week of January ends up in my top ten, but there’s no other place for it. Ishiguro weaves one of the realest love stories I’ve ever encountered. It would probably be higher2 if I never read Klara and the Sun and got such a low estimation of the guy, but anyways. Check it out.

7. Figuring— Maria Popovich, 2020

Described perfectly by my friend as “nurturing,” this is one of those books that you buy a few copies of and hand to your loved ones. It is as intellectually stimulating as anything I’ve read, and yet somehow also emotionally comforting. That seems to be the elusive combination that so few artists can hit, and Figuring is the crown jewel of the archetype. Relating the work and romance of fifteen or so scientists from the 16th century to the 1950s, this debut from the Bulgarian writer has somehow made me feel welcomed amongst greats. Deeply researched and passionately written, this is going to be my top non-fiction recommendation for a long time.

6. The Idiot— Fyodor Dostoyevski, 1868

Everything in life is in this book. That hyper-specific experience you had a few years ago and thought nothing about? That’s somehow in here. It is a story about the viciousness of community, and one about the necessity of community. Poor Myshkin is harangued by this terrible crowd, and I found myself shouting at him to go back to Switzerland, give your money away, be happy and kind… until I remembered that wherever you go, people will be there. And the journey of life is not avoiding them, but engaging with them. Helping them and allowing them to help you. Notable for its tremendous descriptions of seizures and modernist play with time, this is one of those books that will live another 150 years without losing any applicability. Every section of it is memorable and brilliant and exciting.

5. Absalom, Absalom! — William Faulkner, 1936

My 2022 pick for #1. If you want to know my thoughts about this book, call me.

4. Lord Jim— Joseph Conrad, 1900

My 2023 #1 pick. See above.

I was investigating on this re-read what I love so much about LJ. I think, and this is going to be one of those unforgivably sentimental and nerdy things you’ll have to forgive me for, it is its structure. If you’ve read the book, find my fan theory in the footnotes3.

3. Even Cowgirls Get The Blues— Tom Robbins, 1976

A great book. It is reminiscent of the sort of fun you’re not supposed to have these days, and has been a huge influence on the second book I’ve been working on. A good start if you’ve never read Robbins before.

2. Infinite Jest— David Foster Wallace, 1996

Writing a positive review for this book is one of the nightmares that dudes have when they start a Substack. And so but if I’m being honest, this is a book I’m hesitant to admit I’ve read at all. Not for its content— it’s a beautiful, potentially genius piece of literature. But the culture around it has tore its reputation to shreds, and the main reason for that is because of the hoards of annoying lit-bros (i.e., me) calling it beautiful and potentially genius.

The amount of research, the finesse of touch, the intricacy and mold-bending this book accomplishes is enough to warrant it that spot at the helm of “Great Modern Literature,” and once it gets up there it inevitably becomes a target. It places itself at the end of the lineage from Hamlet through Ulysses, and yeah, I know. I can hear myself. What I will say is that nearly all of the whingeing about this book sucking comes from people who haven’t read it. What I will also say is that there are thousands of young writers across this country trying really hard in every line they write to not sound like Jest. We are an overlooked and underserved community and we demand, if it would be alright with you, representation. The only solace, and the only thing that keeps me from hating Wallace for that, is that Wallace himself suffered from the same struggle. More than anyone else, I’d imagine. This book weighs heavy on anyone who has read it, and will hopefully survive the first half of this century to eventually take its spot amongst the all-time greats.

1. Ulysses— James Joyce, 1922

You hear that? That’s the sound of any credit I earned for not putting Infinite Jest first on my list going down the drain. But what can you do? Read Ulysses and not say, at the bare minimum, that it’s the finest book you’ve read that year? Will this book ever not be the greatest book? I hope so. It is an annoying and unforgiving Best Book Ever. It demands re-reads upon re-reads, demands guides and footnotes and dictionaries which are wide enough to include Irish slang and ecclesiastical etymologies. I can’t blurb this book any more than history has. I don’t recommend it, or recommend anything. Literature is pretty much a waste of energy since this book. Hang it up. Happy 2024 everyone. The world deserves a swift end.

Notable Short Stories:

Ghostly Father, I Confess— Mary McCarthy, 1942

Fast Lanes— Jayne Anne Philips, 1984

Patriotism— Yukio Mishima, 1961

New York Girl— John Updike, 1996

The Swimmer— John Cheever, 1964

Non-Fiction:

Pretentiousness: Why It Matters— Dan Fox, 2016

Figuring— Maria Popovich, 2020

The Art of Cruelty— Maggie Nelson, 2011

Wild Ducks Flying Backwards— Tom Robbins, 2005

For The Time Being— Annie Dillard, 1999

Kitchen Confidential— Anthony Bourdain, 2000

There’s an old folk story which has lodged itself in the public consciousness for some time now. A coy and wily rabbit evades a bitter old hunter, time and again escaping his murderous threats by the narrowest of margins. The 1950’s which gave birth to this narrative was an era of clear-cut enemies, of fascist threats on every inch of the globe, a world in which Elmer Fudd was an easy direction to cast our pent-up hatred. But the last seven decades have taught us nuanced laws of empathy, and a casual revisit plus some due research reveals a more complicated dynamic.

Poor Fudd

Fudd and Bunny stood alongside Tom & Jerry as archetypical enemies. A hyper-aggressive codependency which staked all semblance of passion and focus on the destruction of the other, but only to the point where the other may still return, at full strength and with a renewed vigor. Were one character ever to finish off their foe, not only would the series end, but the hero would find themselves at a loss for meaning. Much like the delusional American public, which relied on a common enemy, the death of their aggressor would eradicate any sense of purpose in their own life, and would resemble, in effect, a suicide.

In Elmer’s first appearance on screen, Elmer’s Candid Camera, we get the clearest picture ever offered of this mistakenly simple character. Elmer is entering the first stages of the latter half of his life, and the details of his backstory are easily deduced. He is a victim of the first world war, the modern era’s first glimpse into the true heinousness of life. After years of failed re-integration into society, Elmer finds himself one of the lucky few veterans to be chosen by our government’s limited efforts to restore humanity to its patsies in the European theater. This included housing, career opportunities, and a community of fellow vets. Soon after, however, the program is abused as an open source for experimentation, and as Elmer is fired again and again for his recurring “episodes” thanks to his government-issued PTSD, he is chosen as one of the earliest recipients of two new and widely unpredictable procedures: Insulin Shock Therapy, and Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT).

While the latter has survived today as a legitimate and helpful means of soothing painful neuroses, the former is now ubiquitously regarded as inhumane and extremely violent, and despite ECT’s long and successful development, in the earliest stages it was a brutal process akin to the lobotomy. This is the explanation for Elmer’s pure bald scalp and detached, blurry demeanor in Candid Camera, where for the first time he has decided to stop binge-buying from mail-in catalogs and finally enter the world to exercise his passion from childhood: photography.

As war raged across the world and food shortages led to spikes in the consumption of wild rabbits, Fudd took it upon himself to become a pseudo-conservationist. He set out into the wilderness, away from the world which had worn him down, in order to take pictures of the majestic creature in its natural habitat. He planned on selling these photos to popular magazines, to show the world the playful and loving side of the furry critter in order to curb the rampant poaching which had decimated their population. He was going to shoot some rabbits.

If this was Fudd’s original sin, the foundation of all the hatred that was soon to be dumped upon him by the heartless consumer public, then I submit that we lift his charges, allow Fudd to re-enter society. The story complicates from here, but it should never be forgotten these peaceful and altruistic origins. It’s true: as he is repeatedly scorned and duped by Bugs his anger grows. But where was the hare’s appreciation for Fudd’s passion, a mutually advantageous one at that? Why must he revert to escapades rather than allow the poor vet to exercise his hobby? This leads us to the radicalization of Fudd, a point I don’t wish to dwell on. As he faces Bugs’ ridicule it is easy to see why Fudd took to the gun, and why he surmised that with this one rabbit out of the way he can return to what originally inspired him. The gun was how he was raised, was how he is defined, and was how our government taught him to communicate.

Consider 1957’s What’s Opera, Doc?, a rather cruel homage to the work of Wagner considering Fudd’s uneasy relationship with German sympathizers. Our two foes steep deep into the classic canon, with Fudd vigorously outperforming the hare. Fudd’s portrayal of the Dutchman in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer has what the character deserves: heart. Meanwhile, Bunny’s ironic detachment and general malaise deprive his character of any Wagnerian spirit, besides that of rampant racism, perhaps. When Bunny seeps into drag in an attempt to pull off the nuanced Princess Elisabeth, the Landgrave's niece, there is none of the character’s tact; her barbarian roots are leaned upon in a weak attempt to put baby in the corner, so to speak. His alto is a weak soprano, choosing to remain well within his limited tessitura. His garb is anachronistic, and he is an insult to the role.

When Brünnhilde rides her golden calf into the gaze of Fudd, we see the former photographer’s love for what it really is: a repressed homo-erotic obsession for his sole passion. That wascawwy wabbit. The two drift naturally into an erotic dance and we see what paid Bunny’s bills all those years, his pure grace of movement. Fudd is clearly a career beer drinker, and his only source of exercise is the occasional hike. He plays a modest straight man here, while the rabbit twirls in and out of the set pieces, wielding his body for the pristine tool that it is. But Bugs is a cruel lover. At the peak of their courtship Bugs’ body is nestled in Fudd’s arms and the two have proclaimed their affection:

Return my love, I need you beside me

made for you and for me.

Return, won’t you return, my love,

for my love is yours.

In this most tender of moments, it is Bugs Bunny who pulls Elmer Fudd’s helmet over his eyes. It is Bugs Bunny who breaks his promise and flees their terrace. Fudd yells his threats, as he does, but the betrayal is entirely in the hands of Bugs, and the promises of cruelty lodged at the beast is only Fudd’s attempt at keeping their lives entwined. He will endure that pain, will accept it, as long as it means that Bugs will remain in his life.

When Elmer Fudd calls upon the heavens to strike down the rabbit, he does so unaware of his own power. This move is petty, and surely a sign of his deeper fear of abandonment. But he does not realize what it will actually do, because Bugs has never been vulnerable enough to show Elmer the power he actually has. The lightning strikes, and Bugs’ body is left lying on the rocks as a light rain falls upon him, slain. Elmer is horrified, not by his own power, but in fear that he has destroyed the one thing meaningful in his life, the thing he had no clue he was capable of destroying. He rushes to Bugs’ body, takes a trembling knee, holds the furry little bastard in his arms, and weeps. “What have I done? I’ve killed the wabbit.” No, Elmer, the wabbit was dead long before. The wabbit died when Hitler sent millions to die. The wabbit died when Eve bit the apple, when Cain slew Abel. The wabbit has been dead as long as humans have felt pain. You could not have killed the wabbit, old Fudd, because the wabbit was incapable of wuv, and thus incapable of wife.

Au Revoir, Messieur Fudd

This was Elmer’s last appearance in any of the original Chuck Jones’ cartoons. It was no solace that the short was the first animated piece of art to be deemed by the Library as Congress as “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant,” nor that it tops nearly every significant list of the top cartoons of all time. Without the rabbit, there was no Fudd. We can imagine his life after these traumatic events. In rural 1950’s America there was likely no community for the man, and we can assume that after a quick attempt at hunting again, at maybe finding an equally meaningful partner, he was quickly met with the emptiness of the world. It wouldn’t have been long before it dawned on him that he’ll never have what he had with Bugs again, that most of us aren’t blessed enough to find it even once. The bias against therapy and the lack of a sympathetic civic bloc to turn to, as well as the subsequent repression of these heavy heavy thoughts, would soon drive Fudd to the bottle.

It wouldn’t be a decade before the bank would foreclose on his house leaving him destitute, dependent upon liquor, and entirely alone. Fudd, we can assume, would meet his own end far less glamorously than the rabbit, likely in an alleyway somewhere, covered in years of accrued filth and without one person to identify his body. He would be buried in an unmarked grave, in a plot of land which would quickly be purchased for a Walmart parking lot. His skeleton would be crushed repeatedly by the hulking machines of a mafia-run construction company, and it would be years before some local teenagers would stumble upon his tibia and jokingly toss it to their drugged out rottweiler. Off in the distance, some war vet of Fudd would breath his final breath, muttering faintly a final credo: “That’s all, folks.”

Fudd only wanted to shoot. And his message was absorbed and flipped and implemented as a tool of terror. The entire paradigm was put into effect and orchestrated in one massive strike. A strand in the mane of the broom of the system. And now he is a villain. No, now we are villains.

This piece is for people who use Letterboxd. I won’t spend any time here trying to convince anyone to join the movie-tracking social media. All I’ll say is that I held out for years, and am now a full convert. The biggest sticking point for me was that I would never be able to remember and log all the films I’ve already seen, and I wouldn’t want an incomplete profile, but after a few years I have a pretty accurate-seeming 752 films. It is great as a networking app, as in, you can see what your friends are watching and what they think of it.

The most duplicitous and open-to-interpretation portion of L-Box is its rating system. Five-stars, broken into halves. (So, ten stars.) Are you suppose to rate the film during the credits? The next day? Are you allowed to change your rating a week later, are scores suppose to make sense against other scores? For example, if I give both Dune Part II and some animated short-film a three-star rating, does that mean I think they’re of equal value? I realized giving films scores based on “vibe” leads to too much confusion, so I wrote up a little template which became a big template. But as I run films through it, I’ve found it actually spits out decent ratings. Here’s the template, and below a sample filled out version with the movie I watched last night, Love & Other Drugs.

The Scorecard

Each of the six categories are bell-jar’d around a rating of half-a-star. If they are executed adequately, they will award .5. If they are done really well, they can earn 1. If they’re botched, they should earn 0. In exceptional cases, they can award more than 1 or less than 0 stars. After they are added up, an average movie will be at a 3, a heinously bad one will be 0, and an exceptional one will be at a six.

1. Story. How was the narrative? Was it engaging, original, interesting, important? Did the plot take twists and turns that kept you engaged and surprised? Was there a moving ending?

2. Acting / Casting. How were the performances? Were any of your favorite actors in it? Any break-out roles for unknowns? Down the call-sheet, was the fifth or sixth billed actor any good? Did the casting director put a lot of attention into capturing the world of the film? Were the characters believable and interesting?

3. Direction / Cinematography. Did the film make interesting choices? Did certain shots or scenes feel out of place and disorienting, or was the whole thing very smooth and legible? Really good cinematography will never remind you that you are looking through a camera— you will just feel like you are in the world. Exceptional cinematography will make you re-think what it means to observe, will show you something basic like a sunset or the interior of an apartment in a way that changes your perception of your own world.

   Did the film have a distinct voice? Did that voice mold to the world of the film, or did it get in the way and obscure the point of the story?

4. Inner Experience. What was your inner-monologue like during the film? Did you smile throughout the whole thing, feel very warm and hopeful about life? Did it cause you to re-evaluate your own life? If it was a comedy, were you able to forget about your stress and laugh throughout? If it was a horror, did it sustain a paranoid and stressful tone, or did you get bored?

5. Taste. How was the score? The soundtrack? The aura of the film? How was the title card font? The wardrobe, the set design? Was it interesting and accurate, bold and fascinating, or did it feel bland and under-considered? Did this movie have a vibe you vibe with? Or did it feel like it was aimed at a completely different demographic?

6. Production / Context. I went back and forth on including this one, but I think it deserves to be considered. How was the marketing of the film? Was it petty and unprofessional, like Don’t Worry, Darling ? Did everyone tell you this movie sucks, and you actually kinda liked it? Did a stranger hand you a DVD in a coffee shop and say this movie will change your life? Did it win an Oscar you don’t think it deserved, or was it independently financed? Is it a foreign film from a country you otherwise wouldn’t think about? Sometimes you watch an 80s movie with four-minutes of intro credits, but that was the style back then. Did they fall into obvious traps, or was it surprisingly timeless or modern? If you’re watching a 1940s classic, which redefined the state of cinema and influenced hundreds of directors for the last 80 years, it may be earn some extra stars just for its role in history.

Add up the points above. A completely average film will now be at a 3.

Merits / Demerits

• You left this movie with some completely unexplainable plot hole. Weeks later, you can’t stop thinking about how random that one scene was, how it didn’t fit into or help the movie at all. Subtract half a star.

• You find yourself thinking about it way more than you thought you would. After the movie ends you and a friend talk about it, and both realize a bunch of stuff you missed. A week later at work, you find yourself quoting it, or trying to find one specific scene on Youtube. Go back into the app and add a star. This is pretty much the highest compliment for a piece of art.

• The film was unnecessarily long. Subtract half a star.

• The film takes place in a neighborhood you used to live in or a setting you are very familiar with. Add a star.

• You’ve never seen anything remotely like it. This is how I felt after watching Sasquatch Sunset and French Dispatch. Add half a star.

• You cried:

  • You never cry. Maybe four times in a good year, and getting there is tough. This film healed something you didn’t know was broken: add a star

  • You cry weekly, are reaching for the Kleenex any time a puppy looks both ways before crossing a street. Add half a star.

  • You don’t cry and you don’t want to cry. You are angry at this film for making you cry. Subtract half a star, and get a therapist.

• It is a filmmakers debut. Add half a star.

• It is beneath the filmmaker. This is pretty much the only route to a .5 review in my book. That rating is preserved for movies which were bad, and were made by someone who knows better. Christopher Nolan is so much better than Tenet. Robert Eggers is too talented for The Northman. This is, like, the vindictive side of me. Subtract 1.5 stars.

• They got something very wrong. That’s not at all what its like to live in ______, to be a ________, to experience ______. This is the Hollywood effect, it gets reality wrong. In most cases, subtract a full star. If the film was intentionally playing with reality in a way that felt well-informed, adjust accordingly.

• You’ve seen way too many films with the same premise. It doesn’t feel like the director is even trying to subvert your expectations. Subtract a star.

• The film is in a language you don’t speak. You spent most of the time staring at words on the bottom of the screen, and couldn’t quite tell if the characters were delivering their lines well, if it felt natural, or if there are subtle cultural references you are missing. Add half a star out of good faith.

Vibe Adjustments

• Sometimes you watch a movie and just kinda intuitively think, that was a four-star film. Then you run the mouse-car moment Overly Complicated Letterboxd Star-Rating Score Sheet© and it only gets a three. The move here is to average out the vibe-score and the sheet-score. This will often be a .5 or 1 point difference— it would be really rare to think a film is a five but then the score sheet gets it a zero.

• If the film ends up on a non-.5 number, like a 3.75, use your instinct on whether it’s a four or a 3.5. This is a valid way to review art— some people (myself) over rely on vibe, but I think the proper amount to trust vibe is about 5%, which is how much this adjustment allows it.

NB: A film can only get five stars if you’ve seen it more than once. This helps subvert the bias of Being In The Right Mood— the right setting, a good theater experience, etc. mouse-car recommends watching the film again in a different context. If it’s a true five-star film, it should be eminently re-watchable.

Sample: Love & Other Drugs

1. Story. Great narrative. The love story rotates around a thematic idea (Big Pharma / health). It is adequately structure, a bit obvious but one of those examples of how adhering to template can yield strong results.Even on a re-watch, there were moments that put me into pleasant surprise. The script had a really strong voice, especially Anne Hathaway’s character for the first half and Josh Gad’s off-brand humor. 1 full star

2. Acting / Casting. Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, what more could you ask for? Never once do you wish someone else were in these roles. The inevitably annoying Josh Gad actually kills it here, had me laughing out loud four or five times. Gyllenhaal dropped the ball in the final few scenes. He was just staying in character, to his detriment. But down the bill, there are great choices. Hank Azaria. Harvey from Suits. Even my man and old neighbor Michael Chernus has a small cameo. Extra credit— 1 star

3. Direction / Cinematography. It’s a pop-film, a pretty straight & narrow rom-com. Any unique or artistic choices would have felt out of place, and the DP knew this, didn’t fuck around. The voice of the film was strong, Perfectly adequate— .5 stars.

4. Inner Experience. This movie did what rom-coms are suppose to do. I fell in love with Hathaway, and I feared for their future, then I believed in their devotion. Right on the money— .5 stars

5. Taste. Mostly on the line with this, although Hathaway’s apartment is legendary. Just full of curiosity and fascination. I remembered it before even putting the movie in the player, and it actually informed my decision to rent this DVD. It’s a great apartment, up a cool alley-way. Beyond that, her wardrobe slaps. I didn’t really clock the score, and usually I leave a great movie with one or two saved songs in my Spotify. None of that here— .5 stars

6. Production / Context. For some reason people laugh when I mention this film. They usually haven’t seen it in a while, and they just kinda scoff at the general idea of it. I have a vague memory of someone telling me it’s outright bad. But it isn’t. It’s good! It’s a little stuck in 2010. Intro credits over a montage. Cheesy monologue which didn’t seem to recognize its own cheesy monologue-ness. Year later rom-coms would become really thoughtful and incredible, like Palm Springs or Sleeping With Other People, but we can’t expect this movie to be that. An adequate .5 stars

Current Total: 3.5

Merits / Demerits

• Okay, why does Anne Hathaway have this twelve-thousand dollar apartment? And why does the “Ohio River Valley” have such massive wealth in the first place? Also, would Hank Azaria, a clinical physician, really let a pharma Rep “shadow” him and pose as an intern? These are all minor, though, and could be justified. But they just leave you feeling like some corners were cut. Minus .5

• This one stands out to me among rom-coms in general. It’s not that “I’ve never seen anything like it,” but in a genre that doesn’t really appeal to me, there’s this gem. Plus .5

• Did I cry? Of course I cried. Not in the obligatory final monologue, which was botched by Gyllenhaal’s acting, but when Hathaway first realizes that she loves him. She delivers an Oscar-level stare, about two seconds, which hit right where it hurt so good. Plus 1.

That brings the total to 4.5 stars, which may seem high to you, but that’s exactly what my vibe score was when the film ended. It’s Letterboxd average is three stars, Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 50%. That means I like this movie far more than the average audience-member, which feels accurate to me.

Conclusion

This may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s an additional benefit to the score-sheet I want to mention. Since implementing it, I’ve found myself watching films differently. I’ve been thinking about the techniques used, noticing bold choices and dropped balls. Doing anything mindfully is usually rewarding, and I think it has helped fix the passive viewer I’ve become in the last couple years.

Spending two hours ingesting a piece of art can be a positive experience, it can also be a waste of time. Thinking critically and deeply about it afterwards definitely helps push it towards the former.

1. Planetary Scale Vibe Collapse

A great essay by CubeFlipper about consciousness, especially Liminal vs. Supraliminal awareness. In the liminal state, the brain refuses to split things into concepts, just allows them to be. It is a brain which can’t determine a thing’s existence in context or in relation to other things, they remain pure perception / acceptance. Pure intuition. From the “post-conquest” or supraliminal state we get the concept of certain things being proper, or correct, with others being inappropriate.

CubeFlipper suggests that, via meditation, we can attain something close to this pre-conquest state, but he goes further. He thinks the trauma of transitioning from this liminal state into the rational brain which built the world we know is our original trauma, and that it has been passed down for tens of thousands of years through our DNA, causing all those pesky dysfunctions we consider the “human condition.” Garden of Eden, type shit.

2. Is It OK To Be A Luddite

1984 essay from Thomas Pynchon, originally published in the NYTimes, about technology. It is more relevant today than it has ever been, with the AI-Question lingering over us all. He talks about living in a world with too much data, and retells the story of the maligned Luddites. The Luddites were a group at the dawn of the industrial revolution who would go around town smashing textile machines to bits. They were masked bandits, scared of technology. But not really. What they really were smashing was the removal of jobs from the hands of good, honest weavers. They were not charging at windmills with swords (or anti-eco policy) trying to fend off modernity. They were burning servers to save truckers.

Here’s a taste of the flavor of this piece:

“There is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed.

3. All Trails

I’m sure you’ve stumbled onto this site the last time you were looking for a waterfall, or trying to figure out the best place to park to see that waterfall you saw on instagram, or halfway into a hike, trying to figure out how much longer it will take to get to a waterfall. But AllTrails has a vastly underutilized home-page, where you can search your zip code and figure out what nearby gems you may be missing.

I travel a lot for work, and whenever I have thirty minutes where I can keep the clock running without doing anything productive, I’ll pull up AllTrails and see where I can get a dose of the outdoors. A lot of the stuff I find on there is very familiar to me, but occasionally I’ll notice a nearby pin in an area I didn’t think had trails. Its also a good resource for clocking how far you’ve walked, how long that favorite trail of yours is, and for wistfully looking at some pics from some dream-hikes or nostalgic favorites.

It is also, for better or worse, the state of play we have arrived at when it comes to nature vs. technology. Whether these two have ever truly been separate (see: Rebecca Solnit on the concept of “Wilderness”), they form two formidable and presumably warring forces. A lesson received ad nauseum from history is that nature and everything are connected, and a lesson unavoidable from the present is that technology and everything are one. These two have been meeting in an epic battle for the human identity for millennia, but within the internet lives this one neutral zone, this one Christmas-Eve-game-of-soccer on the front lines— AllTrails.com

4. Diamond Jubilee— Cindy Lee

More of a music recommendation than anything else, but I think the link and website are a part of whatever is happening here. For context, Cindy Lee is the moniker of Patrick Flegel, Canadian musician originally of the band Women. They are one of those musicians bubbling under the surface of major success, one of those acts you can catch from a mile away every so often and thank your lucky stars that you saw the meteorite before it disappeared, or, in other cases, before it grew larger and larger until, far too late, we realize it’s headed straight for Earth, and that this mama jama ain’t gonna disintegrate in our stratospheric forcefield.

About three months ago Cindy Lee release a double LP on YouTube, which very slowly but very surely gained views. The album was not available on Spotify and, folks, it is rare for me to leave Spotify. I mean, truly, I listen to music almost nowhere else. I have a pretty decent argument that Spotify is the greatest app ever created— oh sure, it puts musicians out on the streets, truly robs them for every penny. But user interface? Accessibility? Sharing features, playlists, collaborations? Would Spotify let it rest there? Nope, two years ago they added LYRICS?? Obvious move, sure, but they are the ones who did it. I think. Maybe that started on Apple Music, but I wouldn’t know because I would rather support the independent billion-dollar start-up which brutalized musicians than the independent trillion-dollar startup which destroyed humanity.

I digress. After three different sources muttering the words Diamond Jubilee my spidy senses started tingling. Since when is there veritable buzz around a small-time album by a name no one knows? Mumford & Sons? I begrudgingly leave Spotify, leave my phone un-locked for two hours, and listen to the full album as God (Cindy Lee) intended. Is it good? I’m not sure. It’s definitely perfect, but good? As they say, the ugly can become beautiful— the pretty can’t. This album is disparate, hasn’t been glommed upon by Warner, is really truly one brilliant artist in their home-studio working complicated, messy magic. It has something albums refuse to have anymore— flow. Then you get to this website. What is this? Why is it so 2008-coded? Is that…. calibri? You’re only accepting PayPal? On the… honor system??? Sign me the fuck up. This is a release people, this is music as performance art, if only by virtue of being hella nostalgic and hella good and hella weird. After a week of pretty much only listening to Diamond J I started moving on, actually re-opened my Spotify app to check in on what podcasts I missed (hello, Elevator Pitch). And it felt all wrong, like smelling your apartment after a week-long trip and sensing a lot more patchouli than you would have hoped. After an hour or so I re-adjusted, found my recently played et al waiting for me dutifully (I don’t listen to these AI created playlists— I’m a disgraced radio DJ, goddamnit), and normalcy had returned. But the album, the release, it all did something to me. It was that feeling, you know the one? When you encounter real art? Something like that.

Cindy Lee played a show in Milwaukee a little while ago that was lauded all over the internet— apparently the performance is even better than the album. The next day, they canceled the rest of the tour. Pay attention folks. We got a real one on the hook, let’s be gentle reelin ‘er in.

5. You Are Not Destined To Live In Quiet Times

A classic humanity-scale check-in from a brilliant thinker. The piece is a few years old but still relevant and still worth considering, even as a cultural artifact (has that much changed in the last few years? Yeah, kinda).

He makes what I consider a fundamental mistake and which you’ll see very often in pieces like this. He breaks the history of humanity into three periods initiated by three revolutions— the neolithic, the industrial, and the information. The problem with this breakdown is the first period lasts 10,000 years, the second lasts 300, and the third is only 30 years old. The bias here— the unlikeliness that two of the three most significant events in human history happened within recent memory— is so obvious that to state it is almost self-justifying. But it’s not. It ignores the crucial steps taken within that 9,700 year gap and conflates two separate ones— the industrial and the information. Yes, the world is vastly different from what it was sixty years ago. But is it more different than it was between the years 1300 and 1700? I don’t think so. One answer to this bias is that with each successive revolution, the next one should occur magnitudes more soon. But by that logic, there should have been a new revolution 3 months after the information. Could AI launch us into a completely new territory that would be markedly different from what the internet brought us? Maybe. But that speed would be un-maintainable.

That note aside, the piece is a really helpful paradigm for understanding our current moment. It is helpful to think often on where we stand historically, and to keep the most pressing questions of humanity’s fate at the top of one’s mind. Along with its flaws, this piece is a valuable tool for meditation, and has a bangin title. It also does some dazzling, an essential tool for modern theorists, in inserting the specialness of our iteration of mankind. Props.

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The Scene

There’s a solid chance history ended like forty years ago. At least, cultural history. This is not exactly but sorta the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 landmark (and since back-pedaled) book The End Of History And The Last Man. Fukuyama argues, ludicrously, that as of the fall of the Soviet Union and the ascendancy of Western Democratic hegemony, the world is pretty much set in place. We have end-staged, and the closing chapter which will run in loops until the sun explodes is, can you imagine?, mostly just manageable and recursive democratic un-rest, presidential scandals and tyrannosaurus Senators glued to their seats, propped up by teams of oil-funded focus groups. Aren’t we a lucky bunch? Doesn’t Nirvana make more sense, now?

Of course, Fukuyama was wrong. Like, kinda hilariously wrong—see: Ukraine, The Belt and Road initiative, global autocratization— but jimminy the guy knew how to swing for the fences, ey? It’s like predicting the world will end in nuclear holocaust. Every day that passes in which it doesn’t, you are proven wrong, and if it ever does, no one will be around to award you with a medal. It’s a prediction for the love of predictions. Reputational suicide, the boldness of which payed off in spades. Fukuyama is considered amongst the most notable living voices in political philosophy— he went on to champion and then denounce Neoconservatism, and has spent the last twenty years quietly wood-working and funding the publications of Russian sex-workers.

But consider this thesis, not socio-politically, but culturally. Does it not, comrades, feel a tad musty in our stratospheric dome? Is there not a layer of dust accruing on all these fine works of ours? Is there a chance, pray tell, that the shadow of the 20th century is a bit stifling? Think of the greatest novel ever, think of the greatest film of all time, for gods’ sake think of the best painting ever painted. Was it before 1975?

While placing a stone pathway with my old man a few weeks ago we started talking about insurgency. At least, I was talking about insurgency, and he was talking about un-civil unrest. I assented: my generation has a wick the length of a panda’s tail (aka, short). We are, how you would deride, reactive. #reactiveaf, tbh. What we are reacting to, I needn’t remind you, is the continuation of the long-standing practice of absolutely heinous immorality on the part of the ultra-rich. They aren’t snuffing out koala bears, friends. They are starving Yemenis and poisoning the atmosphere beyond breathable. They are toppling any economy which doesn’t play the free-market ballgame and, by-the-by, convincing us to call nations— those beautiful, soulful things, those formalizations of ethos’— economies. Tis bleak, but we’re working on it. Slowly, in our own way, we are working on it. “You’ve had it pretty good,” I told him, in a playful twist on the old cliché. “The prime of your life was lived in peace— what other generation, across the last couple-hundred thousand years, could expect to rock the ages ten to sixty without a single conflict dirtying your picket-fence, while simultaneously experiencing mythical levels of economic growth? It may very well be my generation’s fate to learn to shoot weapons from cubicles in Arkansas. That, or how to grow a beet from nuclear ash while wearing a hazmat suit and fighting off scavengers. What your ilk love to call the total-descent-of-normalcy may in fact be the end of a miraculous period of absurd prosperity (tallied, lest we forget, against a fairly steep bill, which, thanks for not charging rent, this one’s on us).” You think we enjoy this? Well, okay then, I suppose we do.

Now hold on right there— what in the mouse-car moment are you talking about, Ry? You don’t mean to imply this is fun for us, do you? The flagrant destruction of all of our precious structures, the roiling of fear and the roistering of civility? The disquietude, the distension and dissipation of values, the snipping of the threads of reality— you’re saying that’s what we call a good time? But of course it is. In the words of Walter Russell Mead, “we are not destined to live in quiet times.” In the words of Bane, “we were born in the darkness.” Shit’s been haywire since day one for our kin. The towers had already crumbled, it never made sense and we were never asked to play. We did not adopt these rules, we forged them from the ashes we inherited. So, what are those rules?

Welcome to the Après-Garde

Pause, kiddo. You’re not trying to answer that question, are you? Take a smaller bite, man— you ain’t even got an MFA yet. For the love of Allah, stick to purple pants, muse all you want on the eclipse but don’t you dare go on speaking for a generation which you barely pay attention to (Kendrick and Drake are mad at each other?). But here’s the rub— I can’t work on anything, can’t write anything or produce anything or appreciate anything, especially the work of my peers, without context. Why do I love Matisse? Because of what he did to realism. Why do I love Charlie Parker? Because of what he did to Swing. Virginia Woolf is brilliant in a vacuum, a genius when placed next to Hawthorne. Hawthorne, in turn, looks best while standing slightly to the right of the Brontë sisters. I learned to read cultural-historicism by its relationship to thought; read: I only understand art by what it has succeeded, by what it has replaced. This post-renaissance rigamarole, the Antiquity —> Classical —> Modern —> Postmodern schematic is such a convenient lens that I blithely ignore its admitted smoothness, its over-simplified nonsense, because the narrative is just too damn juicy. Because this lens produces those wonderful GMO fruits we’ve come to call tomatoes despite having no historical relationship to the Tomato. So yeah, I do need to define these things, for my own boat to push off the coast I need to put this on paper, need to name it— name our cultural moment beyond the ominous Z, need to call the next shot if only for someone with a finer degree to tear me to bits, or for some wee thing currently swaddled in a cradle to come and replace it once they are of the appropriate age. So here I go, swinging for the fence— swinging for the parking lot, for the stadium in the next county over. Since the best the cultural theorists have offered us is post-post-modernism, and since I’d rather not live in the shadow of a shadow of a movement, I present to you the Après-Garde.

But first, a brief tour.

Generally it goes like this: Science and Technology jump first, launch themselves over the ledge, durn what follows. Just as there is no Hellenism without advanced sea-travel and celestial-navigation practices, no Rome without plumbing, there is no renaissance without Copernicus placing the sun at the center of the universe, no English Civil War without the printing press. What follows, after those pesky thought-leaders are the-relative-equivalent-of murdered by the-relative-equivalent-of the Church, is an evolution of social awareness leading to a bilateral progression of the political landscape. The telescope and heliocentricity and cartographical breakthroughs inevitably spark humanism, which inevitably sparks revolution, which inevitably is assuaged by a political shift. Through a process called mimesis, all of this seeps like sweat from a gym-sock into the minds of the public, and the first to suckle from that juice, if we are lucky, will always be the artist.

[sidenote: This is the section of the essay where you all tear apart my, let’s say playfulness, with historical fact. Where you tell me the Magna Carta came two-hundred years before heliocentrism and Petrarch came one-hundred years before Cromwell, etc ad nauseam. A convenient place (though let this be the last time I ever sidenote a tenet) to mention one of the core principles of the Après-Garde— namely, the usurpation of history and linearity and causality. These terms were abused by the powers-that-be for about a minute too long and we’re kindly asking for them back. Narrative is a foundational principle— Things Could Have Been Any Way That They Were, so to speak, and it’s time we started forging mythos rather than worshipping on the altar of technicalities. Technicalities, truths (as in Things That Happened), the narrative of history… these things have always been workable concepts, and, for that matter, have always been worked by the ruling class to our detriment.]

The 19th century brings us vaccines and steam engines, international trade brings us coffee houses, coffee houses bring us empiricism and social consciousness, the swirling vortex of progress, ever-more complicated the closer we view it from, produces shifts in cultural thought which blossom into (in this case) democratic principles, which bring us Locke and Hobbes and Thomas Moore. The artists frenziedly seeks these dripping sweat juices, takes big, putrid gulps and does what they can to digest. The juice becomes them, those lightning rods, and they exhale in foul-smelling rants the Works of a Moment. Fast-forward to the turn of the 19th century. War ravages the recent past and near future. The world has become frighteningly small and frighteningly aware— it takes a day, not a week, to hit up Boston from New York. It takes an hour, not a month, for news of the battle to reach the citizenry. Apparently those folks in that colonized country were humans! Apparently, and don’t quote me on this, reality is subjective?? Did you hear about Nietzsche? Have you seen the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower? Look what the Bolsheviks are up to, listen to what our students are chanting. I like this Stravinsky fella, but who can stomach that Schoenberg? Queue Joyce. Queue Monet, Manet, tippy-tippy day day. Combustible Engine —> planes and tanks —> trench warfare —> To The Lighthouse.

Stir two-parts Einstein, one-part quantum-theory, a dash of Atomic Warfare; shake well over The Lost Generation, serve alongside the spread of Marxism, rim the glass with the Military-Industrial Complex, sprinkle some CIA on top and strain into a technologized environment— I call it, Postmodernism. Sipped in morose parlors by the French surrealists, the Dada daddies, the relativists and the pluralists, Postmodernism is a drink to wash down a pill. It is a confusing swirl shaken and dished out by the confused. It is the sound of recognizing how gosh darn complicated everything has gotten, how gravely we’ve lost the plot. It is the symptom of a literate populace, the antidote to unilateral domination. The process moves from the visual arts— Pollack et al— into high-music— Philip Glass, John Adams— down through the literary— Pynchon, Vonnegut— sifts into low music— Madonna, the Velvet Underground— and finally, always finally, into Cinema. Kubrick, 8 1/2, the Cohen Bros, Pulp Fiction and Blazing Saddles.

Now, as a wee lad, a young commie who heard rather late that God was dead and didn’t leave a will, I worshipped these folks. Most of what we consider the crowning achievements of each art-form mentioned above exists within the time period and under the philosophical insinuations of the Pomo atmosphere. Oh darling, must we drown all our heroes? Must we bid arrivederci to The Godfather, sayonara to The Great Wave— must we exit the cave? We’ve grown so pale in here, couldn’t we lounge just a moment longer? The world, let’s be clear, is not any more linear than it was when these artists set out bravely to declare that nothing has meaning, that no one exists but us except everyone else, that every single institution is new and will soon be dead but all feed on one singular will-to-power. It is exactly because of the universality of these truths, their hard-fought but long-since won acceptance that yes, we must burn that barn. It is time to build a new one.

The New Barn

Now, okay. Okay so, here’s the thing. I’m not smart enough for this. The artist is meant to vibe out these cultural shifts. Suppose to take shrooms and intuit and then spit out what feels right to them. Suppose to taste some scientific theory, chew on some news, and then take a fat dump into the collective psyche. It’s the theorists, the critics, the historians, the academia who sifts through the shit with tweezers looking for gems, curating a narrative. And it inevitably happens after the fact, post-mortem, so to speak. More accurately, the philosophers catch on to the new, hip Truth— the artists can’t comprehend what they’re talking about but just slapdash some work anyways, and then the theorists draw a through-line. This bumfuck of a manifesto will not hold up in court, I fear. But what I’ve tried to do is set some context and build a blueprint. Against my better judgement, and for the sake of me getting over the what-the-hell-is-my-art-suppose-to-smell-like hump, I have to go into this weird unknown. So, we start with the scientists.

What is the defining, ground-breaking scientific theory of our time? Born in the 1970s and not-at-all empirically verified to this day, that would be String Theory. I will not for the briefest blip of non-linear, random, one-slit photon time purport to understand String Theory. I am still wrestling, to be quite honest, with the Einstein-debunked Newtonian sort of fare, to say nothing of the Relative, to say even less of the Quantum. What I do know is that the scientific community is shook by it, that it changes everything, that it explains much and calls into question much more. That it is the unifier of the cosmic and the microscopic, the peace treaty ‘tween the Relative and the Quantum. What I gather is that it supposes that the smallest of known particles are not an ensemble of unique creatures, they are the results of a smaller material, so fundamental we may call it an essence. This material, these strings, vibrate at unimaginable frequencies with a cosmically profound tension to just sort of, um, vibe into our subatomic ingredients. Einstein taught us that everything is relative, the Quantum suggested chaotic, absurd levels of randomness. One was intuitive, one supplied all the correct answers without anyone understanding how or why it works. Both cast us into an irrational and unknowable universe. This new force of synergy, this String, is the answer to what comes next.

See, imagine that instead of an ever-growing list of “smallest-known-particles,” instead of “we are an infinite collaboration of increasingly tiny ingredients,” instead of three Ds, String is one-dimensional. It plays on the increasing complexity of reality by saying the most complicated thing of all: that all complexity flares upwards from one beautiful, invisible and eternal hum. There’s a quiet noise not registered on the finest of Seismographs, an unimaginably subtle flutter— as God opens an eye. Just one, just barely, but I swear, it moved. Beneath all this rubble, amid all this chaos, a harmonious and singular particle emerges from the darkness and reinstates what we’ve been lacking for one-hundred and forty years. Wholeness.

Not to be all, String-Theory-will-save-us-all-from-destruction. There are plenty of scientists who do play that game, and power to them, I certainly hope they are right. But from my viewpoint, it is so laughably obvious that these successive theories come like waves, one after the other, washing over our heads as they prove the previous one to be incomplete. But there’s me being pluralistic, there’s me being postmodern— fuck it, STRING THEORY WILL SAVE US ALL FROM DESTRUCTION. Another tenet of the Après-Garde: we decide what we believe. No more pre-packaged values, no more towing the party line. Thought is determined from the focal point of the soul. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s see what the tech people have been up to—

*turns page*

Ah, shit. So while I was talking, apparently, the cow farts suffocated us all, nano-bots replaced our brain tissue, and AI either turned us all into gods or paperclips. But isn’t that exactly right? Isn’t that so apropos? Isn’t the only lesson us twenty-somethings have ever been fed that you have no idea what will happen next? So in one hand: unity; wholesome and melodic humming; harmony, and its contingent beauty— a brand of beauty that we haven’t dined on since the time of Kings and Dragons. On the other: every piece of known data in our palms, Total Entertainment Forever, virtual reality and the particular sort of cruelty national leaders partake in once they have accepted and dismissed the fear that we will find out immediately. This is the collective consciousness of our mouse-car moment. This is the state of things, the soup of our wombs. This is our lot. Us renters, us tik-tokking toddlers, us micro-plastic fed hackers and anti-capitalist capitalists, us citizen journalists, us all-famous-all-the-time highly viewed invisible youngons: this is our landscape, our frollicking grounds are littered with land-mines. So what in the get-to-the-almighty-thesis bullshittery does our art look like?

Tenets of the Après-Garde

The easier-to-deride-than-comprehend David Foster Wallace coined a term in his placed-on-the-nightstand-to-get-laid magnum opus, Infinite Jest. A tiny detour: Wallace is the perfect person to coin the term for whatever comes next. He has that ideal lead-you-to-the-promise-land-but-not-allowed-to-enter self-hating rope-swinging posture, that torn down vibe, that unmistakable Millennialism; and, as the cherry on top, he hated postmodernism. “Postmodernism has run its course,” he says “the problem now is a lot of those shticks— irony, cynicism, irreverence— are a part of what’s enervating the culture itself.” In Jest, 7th grader Hal Incandenza writes an essay on the Modern vs. the Postmodern hero. The modern is single-faceted, gruff and determined, and has a single-minded goal achieved by a single-minded will. The Pomo hero lives in a world more reflective, or so we’re to believe, of reality. He deals with thirty problems at once, each influenced by yet independent of the others. He is not the main focal point of the drama, but a refracted piece of it, full of conflicting pluralities. In his final paragraph of his essay, Hal predicts what awaits the hero in the following era: non-action. A hero straddled by inactivity, malaise, and boredom. Wallace spent the final years of his life trying to put this concept to words in his final tome, The Pale King. This theory undermines the fundamental requirements of narrative: 1) conflict finds a hero, 2) the hero acts.

Though prescient, Wallace can not be the person to define and embody the next chapter in the progression of human thought and art. Born in ‘62, he was too early, too young, so that his lot in life was to be squarely in the Pomo camp, deride and rue it as he may. That section of history was not played out yet, those lessons did not sift from the high to the low as they must, until the lessons therein are so ingrained at the level of the commons they seem trite. The equivalent of Your Brilliant Idea to Revolutionize The Way Burgers are Prepared for Customers being perfected so totally until the end-product is the blandest known entity on earth: McDonalds. That is precisely when the next era must shuffle in and kick down dusty doors with a bottle of spray paint in one hand and a torch in the other. Wallace suggests the phrase Après-Garde, defining it as “a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence.”

Avant-Garde, that dutiful a-structural madness which energized the art scene of the last hundred years, was once a term to denote a scout, who walks Avant (ahead) of the Garde (the army), risking their safety to get a sense of what lies ahead. Forging into uncharted territory to bring information back to the generals. Our movement, in a nod to the “post-post” supplication, in a recognition that we live in the shadow of towering greatness, is not Avant but Après (after) that Garde. We are the clean-up crew. Those who come in after the last structure has been toppled, the last bomb dropped, the last prisoner taken, in order to survey the damage. We are the Après-Garde, the inheritors of destruction being asked to make a life out of what Nonsense has left in its wake. The map is not at capacity, it has just been wiped clean.

1. The number-one-with-a-bullet tenet is sincerity. It is the only antidote to the hold-nothing-sacred zeitgeist of pomo’ism, and should be a core value of what follows. On first glance, it may not seem fun to have to bear that weight. The last few generations got to be irreverent, they got to tear down and deride, got to place themselves safely out of the way of vulnerability by not caring about the consequences of their actions. And that does sound fun. But what I see churning within our cohort is not irreverence, but a profound sense of empathy. A belief that we can and should push our weight against the system to try and pervert its momentum. If that doesn’t sound fun, it at least sounds meaningful. And that sounds fun.

2. Close behind #1 is the idea that this should be fun. Not just because the crushing tendencies of life has been so exposed that there’s no other response than to laugh and rebuild, but for a more utilitarian purpose. When all entertainment lies within our pockets, the art of the Après-Garde has some severe competition. Entertainment devoid of substance is so pervasive that the concept of a Guilty Pleasure is antiquated. So much of our content is blatantly surface-level, that the practice of digesting and investigating art with patience and introspection is bygone. Since we are inundated with so much of it, each individual piece loses its weight, and we have lost the knack to chew on art, to consider why rather than if we found something good— to say nothing of powerful. What I’ve learned from doom-scrolling is that nearly everyone uses humor to sell their brand, and that to give someone a little hit of it will endear them to you. The work of the Après-Garde should be humorous in a meaningful way, should use that age-old human hack to plant itself into people’s minds. Plus, there is no greater weapon than comedy. If the world finds us funny, they will have nothing to throw at us. We will be exercising that most human of traits: laughing in the face of the abyss.

3. These works should be self-contained. The allure of the meta, the self-referential, has been stolen from the arsenal of the bold by the mainstream. This is the lesson from Deadpool and Marvel post-credit scenes. The “Meta” has literally been usurped by Mark Zuckerberg, and if you need any other reason to abandon it then you should get cozy in blandness. We have deconstructed the wall between viewer and art— there is no longer an illusion of separation, and that is a powerful tool. Without that barrier, the art can speak directly to us, it can make vulnerable statements and be regarded as it ought to, as the story of a story-teller who feels they have something important to teach. The practice of self-reference was a defense against vulnerability. It was the placing of hands in front of the face to avoid direct criticism. It said “even I don’t take this seriously, so why should you?” It invites a gap of trust which de-fangs the power of art, and removes one of our few tools to fight against all those pesky megaliths of the past.

4. Linearity is subjective, and its ours to subject. This point was mentioned in the essay above, but it warrants repeating. Postmodernism illuminated us all to the illusion of objectivity— there is no one left who believes that a thing is a thing, end of discussion. Reality is Subjective: this lesson is repeated again and again as scientists prove the ways in which we perceive memories, the present moment, sensations and interiority differently. It is suggested that there are multiple, perhaps infinite realities. It is suggested that we live inside a computer, that the world suffers timeline-lapses, etc. Most of the literature on this subject is hogwash, but the underlying theme is that we have disregarded the idea of a singular, linear experience of reality and are exploring the ways in which it may be fractured. Postmodernism danced with this concept, it is our lot to marry it.

   This doesn’t mean we should be flippant with data, or disregard lived experience. It means we should allow ourselves to draw intuited Truths from the metaphorical substance available. If Pomo tore down the edifice of objective fact, we may now put the raw material to use. In bygone eras, artists and thought-leaders might tell the story a tortoise outrunning a hare, not to teach about the tortoise but to teach about persistence. We don’t really have observed nature, we don’t have natural mysticism or the enchantment which guided our ancestors through dark nights. What we have is our own stories, the ones hammered into us from grade school for the purpose of socialization, and its time we used them.

5. I think there is a place for religion in this movement. Not the Old Guard, bend-at-the-knee-and-adhere-to-our-dogma sort, but religion in the sense of a guiding philosophy to give us structure. It feels like so many thought-systems have been run-through— from the monotheistic to the nihilistic, our history is full of theory, and it is all available for us to learn about. With the delusion that religion must be true absolutely gone, we can figure for ourselves how it may be helpful. Make your own religion— take Pan and Thor and Yahweh and Athena and stir them up, light incenses for Krishna and practice rain-dances. Many of the young Christians I know do this— they have their God, attend their services, and scratch out the parts that say slavery is okay and queerness is not. It gives them a foundation, and in making the active choice they, by definition, remain above its tendencies for manipulation. If the Pope ordered a Crusade today, these folks would laugh. Design your own lore, and stick to it. Decide what happens when you die, and make it interesting. Living without this guidance has proved brutal— we have no value system to turn to when shit gets complicated, no empowering myth to handle the depression and anxiety growing ever more pervasive.

   How does this look in the Après-Garde? It turns art into window-shopping. Where it was once “view this art and believe my thesis,” followed by, “view this art which destroys the idea of Thesis,” the Après-Garde may say: “Try this out. It kinda works, you just gotta tweak it a bit.”

6. A stress on quality. Most young artists of worth have accepted the fact that what they do isn’t very lucrative, and that that’s okay. Most young artists can’t sell a piece every couple of months and afford a loft in Paris, they have to work. But if you are trusting your soul to an artist, do you want that person to be living a fanciful life of luxury, or spending their day-times hours doing the same bullshit job you are? In this new paradigm, we should try to return a sense of rigorous quality to the work. Spend years on that painting, that novel. Put every dollar and every owed favor into your short film, leave it all on the court. Most of us ain’t having kids anytime soon, what are we saving for? Commit to your work, and insist on its worth. It will immediately separate it from the one-off pieces of content which we consume every day. It will help push against the bottom-line mentality of major corporations like Amazon and Apple who for some reason make most of the art we consume. Plus, like any Zen master will teach you, it is the all-out commitment to the work which will be meaningful in the end, rather than the work itself. In a world which makes it feel so good to sell out, don’t.

7. The Après-Garde should have strong values. Postmodernism has done splendid work in tearing down old value-systems, value-systems which were constructed to protect the elite and keep the rest of us subordinate. But a world without any values is a dangerous place, more dangerous than it has to be. The word has probably lost its meaning since every company has a tab on its website preaching their “Core Values” which amount to nothing more than a defense against lawsuits. This is mostly hot air, and it feels disingenuous to pretend that any of us actually live by these empty sentiments. But one of the most valuable functions of art is to give people something to believe, something to live up to. The sort of values I am talking about are not the antiquated Honor or Forgiveness. We are too conscious of muddy reality to adhere to these. The values I’m talking about are more along the lines of “every outlaw has a code.” Things like Standing Up For What You Feel is True, like If Someone Needs Help, Help ‘Em. They feel sentimental and corny, but that’s the idea. We should override that inner radar built-in by the ubiquitous irony of the last thirty years of art and say yeah, feels weird, but I guess that’s true. I think the revitalization of Campy movies speaks to this ability. We are re-learning how to enjoy stuff that is overtly grounded in tropes and cliches, because those tropes and cliches speak to an undeniable universality. There are certain tools we have stopped using because they just seem to obvious, but they are helpful, and they exist for a reason.

8. Which brings us to sentimentality, a loaded word in art but one that is ultimately seen as negative. R. H. Blyth described being sentimental as “giving to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” It has been maligned as gushy nonsense, as devotion to a thing too small to deserve it. But from an original position, disregarding all we have learned in the understanding that it may not be as true as we’ve been told, why should this be wrong? Why shouldn’t we be tender and devoted, more tender and devoted than even God? The answer is because we will then be made a fool, but the secret is out— we are already fools. We are the play-things of corporations, with votes that don’t count and net worths that don’t make a difference. We will all die and disappear into obscurity in a hilarious and foolish way. For fools to accept their foolishness is an honorable thing to do— it is a Thing being What It Is, which is, in a world which rewards conformity, a radical thing to be. Salinger notes on Sentimentality that “the human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.” The speaker, Buddy Glass, is a broken and confused man, and cannot help but see through this lens. But the lesson is not to accept his miserable philosophy, it is to overcome it. The work of the Après-Garde should take everything tenderly, should be obsessed with small things, simple delights, easy and cheesy victories and saccharine losses. A sentimental art-movement will not be devastating, it will be rewarding and robust, as strong as a fragile old monk living on top of a mountain.

These are my scattered thoughts on what ought to follow the postmodern wave. It is a wave which has lasted for 80 years, and if this current moment is not a watershed, if things aren’t fundamentally changing right now, right beneath our feet, then I can’t imagine what that would feel like. Maybe this is just a desperate plea to avoid living at the tail end of a movement— I would much rather be at the vanguard of a new one.

The thing is, built into these tenets is the condition to accept nobody else’s paradigm. Our generation has grown so ultimately weary of preconditioned limitations that whatever does come next, it should not come down from some overarching thesis but upwards from each individual artist. Maybe this should have been called “My Tenets of the Après-Garde,” but that has less of a ring to it, less oomph.

Labatut, Trickster

The opening of Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World (2019) lays out the pessimistic paradigm which is the central theme of the book. In his discussion of cyanide and its proliferation amongst Nazi leaders at the fall of the Third Reich, he establishes a correlation which fascinates the author: that mathematics are responsible for begetting violence, that violence begets math, math begets art, art begets beauty, and then that same art begets violence. He tells the two-hundred-year story of Prussian Blue, a dye which required the crushing of millions of silkworms to create a hue which energized the continental art scene with its spiritual allure, its resemblance to the untouchable blue of the sky; the blue which appeared in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and the waters of Hokusai’s The Great Wave [19], as well as the uniforms of the Prussian army. He tells us how this dye was soon blended with sulphuric acid to create the pesticide which allowed California to produce previously unfathomable amounts of perfect oranges, the same mixture which was pumped into gas chambers at Auschwitz, staining the interior cinder blocks to this day. The blue responsible for so much beauty, the one which covered the walls of the trains which carried prisoners into camps, was Hitler’s favorite color and the same blue he tasted in his final moments as he crushed down on a pill inside his bunker. He speaks of the sweet scent of almond which cyanide gives off [10], the way it, quite literally, “takes your breath away” [21].

WWCTUTW is a continuous spiral through the ground-breaking discoveries of 20^th century mathematics, their ability to manifest in both war and art without bias, the way they tend to eat at the minds of those who discover them. The book remains acutely aware of the trepidatious nature of knowledge, its capacity for horror and beauty, the peculiar way in which the weight of certain knowledge weighs upon those who discover it and the world at large. It is an insightful, inspiring book which befuddles the reader who relies too heavily on truth or narrative alone, which somehow steals complicated lessons from a mind-numbing century and presents Truths as difficult as the ones which these mathematicians uncovered. Whether by the first or fiftieth page (or in some cases only at the bitter end), the reader realizes that they have been lied to, that the literal history of the events enclosed, what we feel the urge to call the ‘truth,’ has been manipulated. This brazenness leaves the reader either scrambling for tangible matter or, in accepting the whirling dervish of his writing, enlightened to Labatut’s deeper message.

Pessimistic Paradigm

In Christopher Nolan’s 2023 Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography on the scientist, American Prometheus, the viewer is left to meditate on the role of scientists, their crucial parsing of the laws of the universe, and the duty they have to the way their discoveries are used in a world which is inevitably violent. There is a central correlation in the text between Oppenheimer’s roles as both Prometheus and Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation who teaches Arjuna of the powerlessness of humanity, and the ways in which all is governed by the divine. Oppenheimer, a central character in Labatut’s book, has managed to ‘steal fire from the gods’ with his creation of the atomic bomb, and in doing so embodies Vishnu’s lesson as he convinces Arjuna to lead his troops into battle against his own people. Vishnu inspires the general to attack by transforming into a terrifying beast, and telling him that he has “become death, destroyer of worlds.”

How should we comprehend this dichotomy? How do we marry the gifts of the trickster, in this case, Prometheus, and the destruction they tend to cause? This is a major concern for Labatut, the question which he tangles with and simultaneously the method by which he tells the story. In WWCTUTW, Labatut presents us with a series of tricksters, their individual struggles and the ways in which their divine role eats at their humanity. He carefully studies the paths Discovery takes into both Beauty and Violence, an often blurry line, and rather than present a cohesive theory allows the contradiction to lie uninterrogated.

Tricksterism

In the opening line of Lewis Hyde’s 1998 Trickster Makes The World, Hyde admits that “the first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either.” So what is it? As Hyde says himself, it is a story. An ancient thing; a strange medium distinct to humankind which predates the written word, predates all known knowledge. Narrative exists in the liminal space of human consciousness— its rhythms and rules are foundational to our chemistry; are so mysteriously central to our construction that modern theorizers suggest in vain that it is modeled off that other foundational medium, the orgasm. The greatest tomes written on stories— Aristotle’s, Joseph Campbell’s— can point towards their functionality, can make complicated assumptions on their roots in the family system, in the particular way humans emote and perceive reality. And yet the discovery of the gene which makes them work, the chemical origin of their utility, will forever remain beyond our understanding. In Labatut’s framework, the search for this scientific explanation might even be the death knell for the scientist who seeks them.

Hyde claims that the role of the trickster is to travel between worlds, to carry people and messages between heaven and earth and— in eras when that road is closed— become a thief, smuggling these messages and artifacts [7]. Among the most notable of tricksters is Prometheus, who carried the light of heaven on a torch and gifted humanity with fire. Prometheus was famously punished for this act, and I believe an age might be defined by the ways in which we treat our own tricksters. To shun them is to deny a gift— to act as the hangman of the gods, the gods who require no hangman. To exalt them is to mistreat them— the trickster cannot handle praise. The trickster defaults on attention. Some literary tricksters— Edward Teach, MD or Douglas Hofstadter— try to remain anonymous. Labatut pays his price in user reviews on Good Reads, accepts that perhaps for the rest of his career he will be tainted by the assertion of ‘falsehoods,’ accepts the possibility that those prestigious magazines which allow writers to make a career out of a vocation might reject his prominence for fear of an inflated fact-checking budget. “Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act,” says Hyde, “trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something on the right/wrong precipice which will get life going again.” Trickster takes on the burden of Churn. Trickster is responsible for keeping the Wheel of Being in rotation; since even the iron core at the center of earth is liable to pausing, and perhaps it is only in the crossing of worlds that it might be re-started, whether with or against the rotation of the earth itself.

Madness

It is a common motif that the trickster is liable to madness, what Labatut calls “Grothendieck’s Curse” [65]. He tells the story of Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, a man whose work remains required reading for mathematicians around the world. Grothendieck churned out proofs at an unprecedented pace and moved theory into realms thought impossible as he sought his own Philosopher’s Stone, his own torch of the light of heaven— what he called motive, or, “the heart of the heart—” a ray of light capable of illuminating every conceivable incarnation of a mathematical object [66]. Labatut recounts the movement of his career from brilliant theories through this fool’s quest, and the growing suspicion that the work he was doing might be the source of great destruction. This suspicion became a defining fear in the “possible effects that his own ideas could have on the world,” aka what mankind might do if it had the power of the knowledge Grothendieck was seeking. Labatut details his descent, his abandonment of family and friends, his growing obsession with the corrupt nature of power wrapped up in the military-industrial complex. As Grothendieck becomes obsessed with the idea of the universe as a conscious entity, he begins to eschew the physical world, stops eating, wears tattered clothes and denies himself shoes and medicine. He becomes indifferent to pain, starts a commune which ends in a sordid love triangle and the burning of tens of thousands of pages of his work. For the last fifteen years of his life, Grothendieck disappears from the world, lives anonymously in a remote village in the shadows of the Pyrenees and denies all visitors.

The history of genius and its link to madness is a recurring theme in modern psychology. In his 2014 paper Here Be Dragons, psychologist Rex E. Jung posits that the complex stew of creativity and intelligence— the basis of Genius— may result in a paradoxical pull between two poles: abstraction and certainty. This tension has the capacity to infect the mind which experiences both to such extreme degrees, leading to a proliferation of psychological conditions— what we may refer to as madness. WWCTUTW is Labatut’s attempt at creatively spinning this concept into a narrative, and investigating the worth of such a descent, furtively posing the question of whether ‘descent’ is even the right word for such a journey. To do so, he uses the life of Karl Schwarzschild, a German Jew who discovered black holes while fighting voluntarily for the German army in World War I. Schwarzschild was horrified by his discovery that a black hole might suck the entire universe into its crushing density, and as he lay dying in a medic tent at the front lines, days after sending his proof to Einstein, he trembles at the idea of matter causing such destruction, and the possibility that it might do the same to the human mind. Labatut writes:

Could a sufficient concentration of human will— millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space— unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in his Fatherland….. Schwarzschild was inconsolable, babbling about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that that there was nothing we could do about it [56].

In the relation of this story, Labatut is presenting the methodology by which the genius might succumb to madness. He presents how a glimpse of the unimaginable might spread like the Pemphigus which ate away at Schwarzschild’s body, covering him in scabs and abscesses and rendering his throat unusable for both swallowing and putting into words the theories he was dreadfully approaching. Schwarzschild’s work was originally dismissed by all who encountered it, including Einstein himself. And yet, history proved his theory of black holes to be mathematically accurate. If we are to trust Labatut, he may have been psychologically correct as well.

The Antagonist

There are foils to this pessimistic paradigm, certain thinkers who towered in the same field as Grothendieck and Schwarzschild yet who insisted on the saving power of the universe, who insisted on a universal balance and who remained “well-adjusted,” (i.e. psychologically healthy), while working on the same theories which drove others to destruction. The most prominent was Einstein, who served as a soothing mother-figure to the scientific community, diligently deconstructing the work of these mad-geniuses and insisting on the rationality of the universe. Einstein was the final word on all subjects mathematical, and as the Schwarzschilds of the world detailed the great potential for destruction which he believed to be inherent to mathematics, Einstein maintained an equivalent sense of order. He is one of the few thinkers in this book who managed to live a long life, and he appears in each story throughout as a sort of Pied Piper, unable to save the singular thinkers but struggling nonetheless to prevent their followers from running off cliffs. The Pied Piper, in this context, could be seen as the universal foil to the trickster, the trickster who without looking over his shoulder dives head first in order to prove gravity wrong.

As Einstein walked the streets of Prague alongside Franz Kafka, he foresaw these ideas and their implications, and in a crucial moment of his career turned, Rip Van Winkle-esque, away from Quantum Theory and its troubling implications. He instead buried himself deeper into the Theory of Relativity, thus forming the basis of the most consequential ideas in scientific history. And yet, over the next fifty years, the man was ultimately proved wrong. He denounced the Theory of Probability, what was later proved accurate, and in doing so turned his back on what he likely knew to be true, but which in its proving might destabilize all preconceived notions of reason and order. Labatut hints that Einstein was playing chess in the realm of human thought, attempting to prevent human hands from ever grasping these universal truths, throwing his weight against the tricksters on their road of return from the realm of the heavens.

Trans-Human Survival Gene

Labatut does not intend to raise these concerns— to hint at the potential de-stabilization of Reason— without addressing their validity. Without having the mathematical prowess to disprove them, he hints at alternative theories so as to not leave the reader alone to lament, like Schwarzschild, on the potential of mathematics to destroy humanity. On the question of the singularity, on our supposed fragility, on the myriad simple and terrifying ways in which our individual candles might be snuffed, Labatut hints at the strange, colony-wide survival humans have relied on for our two-hundred thousand years.

For a few decades now there have been several buttons which, if pressed, might end humanity. Consider this. Certain men at the head of aggressive body-politics caught in countless petty battles have a key which, when turned, might very simply lead to our complete annihilation. And yet, we remain. Why? Are humans not impulsive? Do we not occasionally act before thinking of consequences? Aren’t we blinded at times by anger, bitterness, regret, exhaustion, drug-use, philosophy or a thousand other factors emotional or otherwise? And yet, that button has never been pressed. Is there, perhaps, some colony-wide gene, some prohibiting factor, which prevents this? To raise this question to a cosmic level, let’s consider the way Oppenheimer theorized that the detonation of an atomic bomb might ignite our atmosphere, and in one brief moment reduce the entirety of Earth to a ball of fire; an analogous concern to Schwarzschild’s theory that a black hole might subsume all matter across the universe. These things were theoretically proven possible. And yet, to our knowledge, they have not happened. Why not? Bad theory? Or, worth considering, some protective force within our reality which prevents this. Some universal, fundamental yearning for survival. Perhaps this word is misleading. Perhaps survival is a human construct, which obfuscates the larger question. Perhaps the correct word is continuation.

To Tame or Protect?

This question is not directly raised, but it is the sort of fare a close reader of Labatut inevitably wonders. Throughout the book, queries like the above are pranced upon and discarded, giving immense density to the slim paperback. One such consideration comes from his section on the German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber was an instrumental player in biological warfare, who created the pesticide which would kill his half-sister, brother-in-law and nephews in Hitler’s gas chambers. According to Labatut, among his possessions when he died was a letter to his wife lamenting his role in humanity’s history, though not for the direct horror his inventions would enable, but for the process he created of capturing nitrogen from the air. He feared this practice would alter the chemical balance of the atmosphere, and allow plant life to overtake human civilization. A version of this idea, popularized by HBO’s series The Last Of Us, is that a slight alteration of the internal temperature maintained by humans could pave the way for an explosion of parasitic fungus, potentially beckoning the end of mankind.

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The mastery of this book is that it does not take as a given the need to bolster human civilization. To eradicate this foundation, which nearly all artistic and scientific work presumes, allows the reader to re-frame how they approach information like the above. A question that comes in and out of style regards our relationship to nature. The current wave of discussion and legislation regarding climate change is only the latest in a thousands-of-years old discussion on the matter. We enter this discussion from the assumption that nature ought to be protected. If there are only a few male rhinos left, we should gather their sperm, and devote funding and labor to creating new ones. If we soil a river via excessive mining, we should regulate the mine to keep the waterway pure. If we are injecting massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, we should try to capture the carbon and protect the Ozone layer. This stance of protector is a new turn for humans. In the 1800’s, the romantic movement popularized an adoration of nature, and soon after the transcendental movement focused on nature as a means to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.

Further back in western culture, while indigenous cultures were worshipping nature-based gods and implementing rituals to prove gratitude for natural abundance, nature was an enemy. Long, cold winters in Europe meant widespread death, and expansive oceans were hurdles for us to overcome. This shift over the last 600 years, where Nature went from being feared, to being fought, to being worshipped to being cradled, is one we take for granted. Is the concept of stewardship justified? Are we foolishly presuming that, since aspects of the natural world are now subjugated to human intervention, we are greater than and responsible for preserving it? It seems so obvious that we should try to repair what we’ve broken. But this imposed hierarchy, through Labatut’s lens, becomes distorted. Does nature not still regularly level us via disease and severe weather events? Are we really so alien from it, as our eradication of ants from our apartments presupposes?

What does this shift do to the human psyche? It places us in a false food-chain, where we are at the top. We neglect Nature’s power by assuming that it needs us to steward it. But Nature is just fine— it plays a long game, and all the carbon we pump into the air will be recycled and put to use in the millennia to come. Species have come and gone for billions of years, the only constant being the laws which govern them. We have this very human idea that since we’ve done damage, we ought to fix. But in reading this book, that idea seems ludicrous. What have we ever fixed? The very act of living involves the consuming and repurposing of matter. The rallying cry of environmentalists to restore purity to the natural world is really the sound of human-beings looking to extend human-kind— a noble wish, but not their explicit goal. What we have lost in this transition from fear to preservation is a respect for Nature’s omniscience and brutality. The prevailing sentiment from Labatut is that the best thing we could do for earth is, maybe, just chill.

Anti-Intellectual?

Labatut presents an idea antithetical to the contemporary faith in the Scientific arts. As a pandemic surged and bio-technicians around the world raced to develop a life-saving vaccine, chants billowed from the masses to “Trust the Science,” a sentiment familiar from years of rampant denial of climate warnings. Does Labatut stand in opposition to these sentiments? Is this a fundamentally conservative or anti-intellectual piece of writing? A careful reading of WWCTUTW begs one to consider the practice of Math, and the way Mathematics operates within lived reality. Take scientific concepts such as Bernoulli’s Principle or the rate of gravity. Sure, standing on a train platform as a vessel flies by should suck one into its wake and onto the tracks. Sure, an object should fall at the constant rate of 9.8 meters-per-second-squared. But they do not. These things, while theoretically and experimentally verified, do not occur in our lived reality. These truths suggest a correlation between hard science and a supposedly distinct thing: Religion. The tenets of both can be vehemently attested to, can be suggested as ‘true.’ But they may only be proven in a vacuum. And when one is trying to conceptualize the complexity of life, these vacuum-truths are helpful only symbolically, as one approaches a livable philosophy. Science, in this framework, is a religion. Labatut is not anti-intellectual, he is not anti-progressive. He is wary of mankind’s ability weighed against our fragility. The sciences are subject to the same follies that all human constructions are, and Labatut suggests that they ought to be deliberated with the same scrutiny.

Fact v Fiction

There is a worthwhile discussion to be had on the concept of fiction. One simple definition might be a made-up story. But this delegitimizes the artist’s license, which must be capable of asserting that what they are saying is true, even while it may not have happened. In responding to an artist’s work, aren’t we complicit in this assertion? Doesn’t any discussion of reality end up devolving into the flimsiness of a fact? In lived experience, don’t we find, again and again, that truth might be beholden to more factors than we care to admit? Have you ever tried to tell a story to someone who was also present, and realized that there may be two truths, perhaps even more? In studies following the attacks on the World Trade Center, subjects were asked, once a year, to relate their experiences in the days following the event. Without fail, these memories evolved, changing each year so dramatically that when participants were shown their responses from a mere few years before, they balk, actually going as far as to say, “no, I was wrong then,” or even, “I was lying then, now I’m telling the truth.” Reality is flimsy. Our perception of it is beholden to so many conflicting influences that to pin it down is a classically rational folly.

So, then, what is fiction? Does the definition include its literary value, or the quality of its construction? As a literary artist, this factor is dear to me. I love writing for what I may say with it, sure, but what keeps me in complete devotion is the quality of how it is being said. Both for the way it might serve the thesis and as an end itself. It is thrilling to push the artistic construction of words further, and Labatut’s work passes this test fabulously, pulling the reader through with language that never falls too heavily into the technical or the flowery, but somehow engages both the practical and artistic mind with each paragraph. It strikes an incredible balance by engaging the whole of the imagination, informing one of the advances made in Mathematics and reminding one that we live in a esthetic world, playing to both the child and the student in all of us. He never misses an opportunity to place an emotional beat in the physical world, such as when the frantic Heisenberg is lost in a dense fog, and “the few things he could make out— a seagull’s skeleton, the wrinkled wrapper of a cough drop, seemed strangely hostile” [99]. When he informs us of complicated theory that we may not have the background to understand, he does so by relying on the theories mystical qualities and its context in the history of thought. He conveys the significance of Shinichi Mochizuki’s proof that a+ b = c by writing, “if proven, it will become a formidable tool capable of dispelling, as if by magic, a vast quantity of long-standing enigmas,” explaining that Mochizuki created a “vast universe, of which he is the sole inhabitant” [64]. This manner of presenting such ideas allows their significance to fit where the technical explanation would not.

But studying fiction on these grounds is analogous to studying a painting’s brush strokes and not its subject. The question remains: what is true? Labatut himself says that there is rampant fictionalization, and that while only one paragraph in chapter one is made-up, “the quantity of fiction grows throughout the book” [189]. Note the word “fiction,” and not “falsehoods.” When we consume art we are trusting the artist’s asserted Truth. We are complicit in their story-telling to the value of their message, whether that be Science, as a human construct, has the potential to reap violence, or There are lines to human knowledge, the crossing of which may be analogous to drinking poison and accepting infection. It may also be, The hearing of a good story is an ultimate Value, worthy as an end unto itself. It may be Time spent listening to a good yarn, idly considering some higher thoughts, is time spent well. WWCTUTW is a worthy exercise by any of these metrics. It is packed full of scientific history, of accessible introductions to recent developments in quantum theory, of biographical data about the scientists who made these discoveries. It is also a valuable resource of these higher thoughts, these Truths, and one who reads it closely is rewarded with a rich meal of Things To Consider, things to Keep In Mind as one traverses life. In service to these themes it does not hold ‘what actually happened’ to a high standard. ‘What actually happened’ is a waste of time when the goal is to inspire, to interrogate, to get one thinking about their own ethics, their own epoch, and our universal duties. ‘What actually happened’ is a blindfold, in this context. Labatut boldly removes it, takes the consequences of this to the chin.

He speaks in a cadence very familiar to modern readers, with origins in the work of Joan Didion or Hunter S. Thompson which refined itself into the modern, formulaic voice which can be found all throughout creative non-fiction. It’s the voice that appears in both David Sedaris and wedding toasts. It opens with a story, mixes in a couple jokes, does a bit of theorizing and gets awfully close to sentimental until just at the end, when it returns to the original anecdote, cracks it open in a fresh way, and leaves the reader thinking they’ve been touched. It’s popular because it works, and its ubiquity speaks to something happening in the modern world. There is access to such a plethora of ‘truths,’ to so much information, that one might reasonably be terrified to sift through it. We require writers to do some research, figure out what is worth knowing, and distill it for us into something digestible, something with some narrative, something with some heart. This tone of truthiness is one thing in personal narrative, but it becomes muddled when a piece claims, explicitly or implicitly, to be factual. One assumes that the tone, and the testimonial of a publisher, implies a level of verification akin to research papers, with their peer reviewing, sources cited and blind studies, etc. But there is a reason the New Yorker doesn’t casually publish research papers, relevant as they may be. Information on its own is brutal; it sits like lead and calls no attention to itself. The qualities that make art entertaining— pity, fear, musicality— each come at the sacrifice of rigorousness. What happens when the presence of this tone supplants our inner bullshit radar? Stories weaved from facts fly at us un-sifted, and we take each Truth and give it a companion emotion until it becomes core theory, sample-size and legitimacy-rating notwithstanding. Labatut was forged in this wave, knows this voice and these weaknesses all too well and employs them to get us wrapped up in a story too good to be true, because of the simple fact that it isn’t. But behind this decoy, the reader ought to contend with them anyways. Ought to consider the possibility that here be Truths, whether or not they are built on facts. The original experience of this text is one of awe. Awe with the research conducted, with the journals we imagine Labatut pouring over, with the implication of the message. But beneath all of that is the awe that the world we live in is so precarious; that the closer one gets to the central facts of the universe the less rational they are, the closer they edge towards madness. By the time one gets a whiff of the improbability of what is being told, the hook of the underlying thesis is in the fish’s mouth, and the reader remains enthralled so as to hear some sort of resolution to the woeful, universally relevant narrative.

Share the mouse-car moment

Leo Strauss’ theory of Great Books says that one should approach any thoughtful work with great attention to the writer themselves. We should try to parse where they were, what world they were living in, what they were and were not allowed to say and how their work is a product of their limitations. We should assume that any brilliant writer has some awareness of how their book will be perceived, how it will move in its own particular way into the mind and beliefs of the readers. The brilliant writer, who has something important to say, will craft their art in the specific way it needs to be crafted for that message to have the greatest and most robust lifespan possible. With this level of consideration, it is viable to think Labatut was very intentional in his approach, that he was trying to play on our perceptions of literature and its rigid counterpart, research. He must have been speaking to something very sensitive in the nature of truth, something taken for granted, or perhaps something dangerous. If Labatut is as brilliant as this work supposes, there may be an intention to the work that is beyond designation, some thesis beneath the layered theses which one has access to, some Truth which might take time and attention to reveal itself.

The Lemon Tree

Labatut in his acknowledgements says point blank that “this is a work of fiction based on real events” [189]. In reviews online it is categorized as ‘historical fiction,’ something that didn’t happen, but could have. This simplification reduces the particular magic Labatut is able to construct in these pages— the sense of imminency he curates via characters we sort of know, stories we’ve sort of heard, and places them into reality with knowledge and theories that only some of us have access to, but which in time will be worked into the fold of our understanding of the world as all new theories do.

He closes the text with a parable, in a section which breaks from the tone and uses the first-person. In a six-part series of vignettes Labatut tells the story of a plague eating the trees of his neighborhood, and a mysterious man, who in the context of the book might be any one of the enigmatic thinkers mentioned earlier who fled public life and abandoned their research out of fear of that research’s implications. The former mathematician speaks of his horror at “the sudden realization that it was mathematics— not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon— which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant” [187]. The narrator considers a prized lemon tree on his property, considers its beauty, the enigmatic splendor of its produce, and wonders how long it has to live. When he learns that the only method to answer this question would be by chopping it down to dissect it, he balks. “Who would want to do that?” [188]. Perhaps the beauty of brilliant madness, the beauty of the last century of heavenly strides in our understanding of existence, oughtn’t have been dissected. But it was, by Labatut, and in dissecting it he destroyed it, revealed its putrid core and the funereal soil from which it grew. He destroyed it to show us just how much we have to lose.

Voting on this year’s Academy-nominated films closed yesterday, so I can finally post this without influencing any decisions. Ultimately this was a great year. There were very few ‘statement pieces,’ and people returned to theaters in a big way. The Marvel wave has crested. Zero of the Best Picture nominations were musician bio-pics1, we got two foreign films in the top ten, two directorial debuts, four films adopted from novels, and only one from a piece of non-literary IP. Three of this year’s Best Picture nominations are films about writers, meaning people are finally accepting how interesting we are.

Here is a break-down of the Best Picture noms. I’ve seen most of them only once, and these impressions all include spoilers.

My Top 3:

Past Lives

I watched this movie about twenty minutes after seeing Barbie, which definitely helped. But I re-watched it last week and it holds up, very well. It’s a brutally real movie. Both characters are decent, and they want the same thing, and yet shit doesn’t work out. Time passes, people change, circumstances complicate emotions.

The cinematography deserves a huge shout-out. The presentation of characters in reflections, through veneers, the rustic beauty of the retreat house, the seclusion of the actors into their own frames, it’s all visually stunning and none of it feels egregious. It is the way Celine Song tells her story, and it makes for a fascinating re-watch.

Greta Lee is incredible as the lead. She has this impeccable wryness, this sort of ready-to-smirk smile that comes off as brutal, but the people who love her in this movie know it’s only a defense. She has had to be hard to make the life she wants.

The final exchange between Nora and Hae Sung will stay with me for a long time. As she walks away from the Uber, her and the camera perform some of the most incredible choreography I’ve seen between an actor and a DP, all set to the back-drop of Lower East Side store-fronts.

Has there ever been such a good ‘falling in love over Skype’ montage before? How did they convince us of that in under two minutes of these characters on their laptops? Incredible.

Notable is the monologue in bed between Nora and her husband. The, “in this story I’m the bad guy” scene. It was a brilliant touch, and adds a great depth to the story. Was he being selfish in that moment? Was he being too passive, letting his beloved slip away? Should he have been more jealous, more insecure? Could he have been more supportive, despite the painful reveal that he feels as if he doesn’t have access to a sacred place in his wife’s heart? There are no answers to these questions. This movie, like life, is brutal. But it’s also endearing, also funny, also sweet and nourishing.

Oppenheimer

You might not think it looking at me, but I once thought Christopher Nolan was done for. Says a good deal about my loyalty, since he was batting a thousand as of three years ago, but Tenet was bad. It was so bad, I thought it signaled some sort of existential break in Nolan’s mind. I thought we might have to strip him of his DGA license, and I went into Oppenheimer to very sternly surmise whether we were to lose one of our great chair-less directors.

But it’s a masterpiece. And more than that, it was one of the most watched movies of the year and it was about a scientist facing a series of moral conundrums. AND it was over three hours long (three hours and nine seconds). That is an incredible sign for the state of cinema.

The bomb scene is undeniably breath-taking. The complication towards the end, when Strauss suggests that Oppy is a power-hungry manipulator, is the sort of nuance that one doesn’t expect from blockbusters.

Should he have focused more on the victims of the bomb? Yes, of course. And yet, that wasn’t this film was about, and the moral weight of the bomb is well-known enough to us all to not require heavy-handedness. We know what’s at stake.

In turns this film made me think Oppenheimer ended all war forever, and that he ignited the entire atmosphere of earth. In the end I came down somewhere more complicated than either of those extremes. I have an essay on Oppenheimer and the role of scientists dropping in two weeks, but this film did not shy away from the question.

There were some Nolani-isms that by this point are exhausting. The worst one in this movie was ‘A character says something snarky, and then another character uses it against them in their next scene together.’ If you’re unlucky enough to notice it, you’ll realize that most of the dialogue in the second half of this film somehow follows this structure.

Poor Things

My favorite of the year. This film is as “about life” as any movie gets. It’s about how we learn to communicate, how we receive education, about coming up against barriers, about dealing with emotions starting with the supposedly simple and evolving into the incredibly complicated. It is funny, well shot, has a career-great performance at the top, gathers all of the themes of the directors previous work into one place, and is full of great film-making decisions (see notes on the score below).

The cinematography and set design is a masterwork in patience and story-telling. The slow transition from black & white into color, the way the physical world begins as fantastical and full of the manifestation of Bella’s childlike wonder to the end, when she returns to London demolished by the weight of reality, forced to confront the death of a complicated parent, and the city’s design has become as morbid and bleak as her perception of the world.

Some argue that the film is too long. I’m not the right person to contend with this argument, because when a film touches me as much as this one did, I tend to wish it was six hours longer, if only so I can spend more time re-watching it. The sequence of her developing from a child to leaving with Mark Ruffalo is much shorter than you think. Some say they should have chopped the Paris / Prostitution sequence, but friends of mine claim that to be the most important part of the film, and I could’ve watched Bella learn about socialism and pleasure for far longer. Some think it could have ended with the wedding, and she never had to run off with Christoper Abbott. But then we wouldn’t have the missing puzzle piece of her life pre-lobotomy, which to me was the great reveal of the film.

A huge shoutout to Dixie Chassay, who was the casting director for the greatest show of all time, Patriot. She put together two of the quietest comedians ever, Ramy Youssef and Jerrod Carmichael, she got my guy Christopher Abbott to make a third hour appearance, and who doesn’t love Margaret Qualley? Plus, who thought Mark Ruffalo was capable of this performance?

I also think the score deserves an Oscar. I know Oppenheimer’s is widely lauded, but it’s very one-note, sounds like a lot of other stuff, whereas this one from Jerskin Fendrix (don’t you want to hear that name called out on network television?) is an all-time great. It is less ‘songs played during the movie’ than a true score, the use of instruments to carry the tone of the film. If you listen to the album months after seeing the movie you will immediately be placed back into the world of the film. This one especially, from potentially my favorite scene in cinema since the Triangle of Sadness puke montage, is absolutely haunting, and brings me right back to when Jerrod Carmichael stops Emma Stone from running down the stairway into the Alexandria slums, confronting the brutal morality of the modern world.

The Rest:

American Fiction

I was confused during this movie. I watched it after it got its nomination, which is a terrible way to watch a movie. With that, “oh, this is supposed to be good” attitude. I always end up preferring movies— ahem, Maestro— that I’m told are bad before I see them. We all have our biases.

I also did something I never do, which is watch a trailer before seeing the movie. It came on while I as waiting to see Poor Things at Lincoln Square, and I didn’t have much of a choice. The trailer was really good, but like with all modern trailers I immediately knew the entire plot of the movie. There was no whimsy. Its why I hate trailers. No surprises except for the very end, and I hate waiting for the very end. Anyways, this movie I was especially waiting for the very end.

Why, I wondered, was the acting so strange? Why was the score SO bad? Like, noticeably wrong? There were endearing moments, especially with the sister, but something just felt so off. So many decisions seemed bad. The basic plot is that he is spoofing the reading community by giving them something ridiculous, which they eat up. About a third of the way into the film, I asked if this movie was perhaps the same thing. An obviously ridiculous film that spoofs the viewer by delivering exactly what they ask for. This was the Oscar nomination talking— as in, clearly something layered is happening here, because what I’m watching isn’t Oscar-worthy. And in the end, that’s sorta what happens. They half-ass their way out of the movie by making the movie itself a creation of the writer. And that was cool. But it didn’t quite justify everything. You can do everything wrong, on purpose, but all that stuff still has to be cinematically and artistically cohesive.

In the opening scene of this movie there is a debate about reading texts with the N-word in a college literature class. Instead of having the discussion, the film cuts away off a smirk from Jeffrey Wright like, “can you believe these kids?” I mean, yeah. They are the dominant voice in modern education. You are an artist, Mr. Director, let’s have the discussion! That’s essentially the issue with the movie. It gets so close to so many interesting social dynamics and questions… and sorta drops them. Goes for the soapy choice, or the comedic choice, or mic-drop choice.

Anatomy of a Fall

This movie was essentially one long discussion, much of it in French. This marks the second of two Oscar-nominated films led by Sandra Hüller, the german actress who made international fame after the 2016 comedy, Toni Erdmann. Besides making this cover of a 50 Cent song iconic, the movie complicates the True Crime genre, a genre which I’ve been bored of since the second season of True Detective. I have no notes.

One thing that strikes me is that this film isn’t necessarily about whether or not she did it. That question isn’t even answered in the end. It’s about the experience of the viewer, about the journey of blame they go on throughout. How quickly did you write off Sandra Voyter as a murderer? How much evidence did you ignore to hold on to your belief that she wasn’t? If she didn’t push him, did she drive him to suicide with her brutality? And the biggest question of the film: how long did it take you to realize that the kid was blind?

I’m very excited about this Justine Triet / Arthur Harari writing duo. Imagine writing that fight scene with your husband? Ooh-fah!

Barbie

Ah, Barbie. When this movie was first announced, I was incredibly excited. Noah Baumbach is easily in my top 5 favorite directors, and it was first hinted at in a Variety cover story about him and Greta, framed as a collaboration. When it started looking like it was her movie alone, I was still pumped. Knowing how incisive and funny she is, I was excited for the Barbie take down, the obliteration of the megalith that grew from a doll. Margot Robbie has a nearly perfect track record in choosing scripts. Ryan Gosling is my boy. This was gonna be great. The last thing I expected was an advertisement, which, seeing that the Barbie brand doubled its value at the release of the film, is what it was.

This was also decidedly a Movie, rather than a film. I hate punishing something because it did well, but when you reach a certain level of mass appeal, it signals to me that you sacrificed something honest for universality. This is just one of my core beliefs, and I’m working on it— it probably indicates some misanthropy brewing in my soul. But I go for the gritty, hyper-realistic sorta fare and this was the exact opposite. It felt like a Marvel movie. It felt— and I know that this was the point— plastic. And I just don’t like plastic.

There was a brand of feminism in this film which felt very second-wave, and I know for a fact that Greta’s own ideas on women-hood are leagues beyond the ones presented in this film, but I’m glad it exists, if only for the sake of twelve-year-old girls in the middle of this country who have never been exposed to these sort of ideas which, to us young urbanites, are almost regressive. Almost.

Phew, okay. I’m glad that’s over. I walked out of this film and directly into a screening of Past Lives and was reminded of all the things that I didn’t like about Barbs. That it didn’t feel like a singular vision. That it didn’t present a true, heartfelt story. That the sets were fake, and the people were fake, and the story was fake. But again, the movie Barbie just wasn’t made for me, just like Barbie dolls aren’t made for me. And that’s fine. I just miss Greta. I hope she makes a heartfelt drama next. Something fancy and smart.

The Holdovers

The golden age of all-male catholic-school movies is decidedly over. We’ll never again have the five year run that brought us School Ties, Kicking and Screaming, and Dead Poet Society. Should there be a renaissance? No. Do we miss them? Surely. The Holdovers bungles this aspect of the film, failing to create the bonds and traumas which usually define those movies. At the point of the film when the besieged lads band together, the entire crew, sans Angus Tully, is literally air-lifted out of Barton Academy. So this isn’t one of those movies, even though it probably wants to be.

The movie shouldn’t work. There is so much to distract you throughout— a corny guitar score, some shoddy acting and cartoonish antagonists who inexplicably morph for the sake of a punchline. But somehow throughout the entire movie I felt very warm. It’s a warm movie, what can I say? That’s sort of the trademark of this Alexander Payne guy. Nebraska, Election, Sideways, Downsizing, About Schmidt…. they’re all bad movies. But they make ya feel something very subtle and hard to come by in a movie.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Sometimes it’s hard to decipher between “this is a great movie,” and “this is a movie with two of the best actors of all time.” KOTFM is one of the darkest films I’ve seen… ever? It also strikes that note of incredibly dark super early, then doesn’t change pitch once. It is not like A Little Life or I Know This Much Is True, which continue to get darker and darker throughout. It just drops you into a deep pit, and never once throws a rope down to fetch you. When Jesse Plemmons arrives halfway through as one of the nation’s first FBI agents, it isn’t like other Scorsese films, where the Law is the enemy and causes paranoia. It is the only shot at redemption the film offers.

For all its dismal broodiness, this is a story I didn’t know about, and one that’s really important for understanding this country. It made me dream of a different America, one with pockets of diversity. Black Wall Street. An Osage empire in Oklahoma. Libertarian havens in Deadwood. Budding, heathen-Hollywood. The California Missions. In this version of our country, you would have real choice as to what type of adventure you’d want your life to be, while remaining under the blanket of a distant government. Most of these dreams died (read: were brutally murdered) in the 1910s.

Leo’s role in this is not something we see a lot. He plays a character with agency and power who is really, really stupid. He played that character so well that I didn’t even realize what he was doing long past when it was obvious. He never really understood the full implications, either, and it was a huge source of confusion and pain for him because of the amount of effort it took to remain willfully ignorant. Why is this important? Because most films are about smart people, or at least wily people, or at least normal people. The fact is, a noteworthy percentage of humans are pretty dumb, and they sometimes do awful shit, or are manipulated into doing awful shit for other people. KOFTM raises awareness of this very important issue.

Maestro

Man I just can’t understand the hate around this movie. I think it probably has to do with how desperately Bradley Cooper wants to be taken seriously, which is unsettling, for sure. But this movie is not bad! It’s definitely not the Bernstein movie I wanted, but the more I think about it, the more boring that movie seems. This was a pretty radical look at someone universally adored, and it was a great portrait of what it means to love someone who is loved by everyone. The marital arguments throughout were sharp and consistent.

I think there is a really good hour in the middle here. The surrounding bits are the fat that feel very Oscar-baity and nauseating to me. The dance number? Why, Brad? To implicate how gay he was? To point to a deep love of musical theater in the man? That does happen to be a major, complicated theme in the real Bernstein’s life. He was torn between the high- and low-brow, and probably wanted to have both in a way which would keep him from having either, fully. This theme is very gently touched on in the film, but not with the dance scene. That was just… because Cooper loves dance?

But that pales in comparison to the most glaring, confusing aspect of the film. Cooper’s nasally accent is just incomprehensible to me. I have seen approximately three thousand Bernstein interviews on Instagram, and halfway through this movie I had to pause and watch a few on Youtube to confirm that he did not, in fact, at all, have that nasally voice. It sounds like Cooper was fighting an intense cold throughout the entire movie, and there’s not even a hint of that in the real Leonard’s voice. It’s bad enough in a vacuum, but with the added layer of controversy over his prosthetic nose, the nasal voice really just boggles me.

I will say this— the cathedral conducting scene, when he plays a long movement from Mahler’s 2nd… that was fuckin good. But that’s also the moment when all of his issues disappear, and he suddenly has no conflict, and this becomes a movie about someone whose wife is dying. Which is not the movie that it was, and the movie that it was is never resolved.

The Zone of Interest

Oof. Really great movie, but OOF. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on here, having read nothing in advance. At a certain point I thought, oh no, are they Polish Jews, and the war is coming for them? Oof. It wasn’t until she tells her friend that she found her diamond in her toothpaste that I realized what I was watching.

If I have a note, it’s that the girl walking through the night and planting food for the prisoners never came to anything. Besides a fight breaking out off-screen “over apples,” I’m not sure this portion of the film really clicked for me. I think I may have just missed this reveal in translation. That being said, it was a crucial point of humanity in the film— it proved that it was possible to appreciate the horror happening just over the wall. That even a child could see it. And that’s the question of the film— what does it take for us to realize the horror occurring beneath our comfortable lives? One of the common defenses against citizens who didn’t do more to stop the Nazi’s was that “the full extent of what they were doing” wasn’t known until after the war. But this family can’t use that defense. So, what defense do they have? In the classic hypothetical— what would YOU have done during the holocaust?— these characters all miserably fail. All except the grandmother and the apple-girl, I suppose.

Noteworthy:

Saltburn

I give some cursory notes on this film here. I’m mostly excited about this moment of significant Irish actors. We saw major performances this year from Cillian Murphy, Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott and Barry Keoghan.

I like that this film divides the crowd. I like the bold decisions made by the actors throughout. I like the cinematography and the script. The, “look at how he manipulated everyone” montage in the end was unnecessary, but more than that, it was unimpressive. Sometimes Soderbergh will do the same thing, and it will also be unnecessary, but it will at least be engaging, and convince you that the heroes were not only smarter than the antagonists, but the audience as well. This montage was already fairly obvious to the audience, and just confirmed the stupidity of everyone else in the film. Would’ve been a lot better had those reveals been sprinkled throughout.

May December

There was something very odd, similar to American Fiction, happening in this movie, and it too was verified by the ending, when it’s revealed the caliber of the film that Natalie Portman is preparing for. The difference for me is that this film felt cohesive throughout, like even though I didn’t understand what it was, they had a vision that they were aiming at. Having it be justified in the end was a cherry on top. The final frame was also a sort of punchline, warmly bringing me back to the world of Tár. Ultimately, it was not psycho or sexual enough to earn the psycho-sexual label, but still an enjoyable watch, full of juicy moral q’s and memorable lines. “This is just what adults do.” Ouch.

Wes Anderson

Zero nominations for Asteroid City is a bit of a let down. It’s certainly not one of his best, but it’s a fine film and confirms the ridiculous practice of waiting for September to release Oscar-bait (unless you’re Barbenheimer).

That being said, we also got four short films from Wes this year, a practice that’s way less common than it should be. Remember when PTA and Spike would churn out awesome music videos? It’s been a while since we’ve seen side projects like this, especially in this vein. Who would have thought Roman Coppola would make such a good cinematographer?

Wes Anderson seemed to have Roald Dahl clogging his brain, and I’m sure he would have done ten years of films based off the writer if he couldn’t get him out of his system this way. These short films follow a very interesting narrative style, where you are read an abridged version of the story while watching some imaginative but simple sets shift around behind the one or two characters in each. These were like taking shots of Wes Anderson, highly distilled, and it made me excited for the next big project he decides to work on.

Inside

I thought this Willem Dafoe film where an art-thief gets locked in a billionaire’s apartment was pretty cool. Definitely in the top 2 of 2023 Films Directed by a Greek. Amazing trailer, too. And, to be honest, you could probably just watch the trailer and feel the full range of emotions the film offers.

Éirinn go Brách

I’ve never been to England. I’ve never been to any of what less bitter students of history call “the UK,” and I will insist until it dissolves that Northern Ireland and Scotland are occupied states. Pro-Independence parties have the majority in Scotland. Two weeks ago, Michelle O’Neill became the First Minister in Northern Ireland, marking the only time in the last hundred years where an Irish Nationalist has assumed the nation’s top position. I’m not sure what’s going on in Wales. In my imagination they have spent the 900 years since the death of the last Prince of Wales singing, which seems mainly to be true, but it also seems like support for Welsh independence has risen 32% in the last ten years— and they’re supposed to be the happy victims of English hegemony. They were the ones who spent legislative energy on changing the name of their jurisdiction from “England” to “England and Wales,” like an abused spouse asking to have their name included on the answering-machine message.

This is not my fight. I think about it a lot, even though I have never been to England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. If I’ve inherited anything from my grandmother, however, it’s a deep, let’s say distaste, for protestants. She refuses to acknowledge the existence of any Ireland above Dondalk, and I’ve carried this sentiment in my Irish blood, carried it for Patrick Quinn, my great-grand-uncle who worked alongside my great-grandfather in an English quarry, who insisted on ferrying himself back to his homeland each day after work at the job which would kill him before the age of thirty. Carried it for his brother Anthony, who returned to his home in County Westmeath after planting nine children in the US. He was just a kid when Erin’s two halves went to war, but in a struggle to retain my Irish roots I’ve chosen to bear that grudge over a hundred years later; fuck the King, fuck the Queen, Up The Ra.

When I left Roman Catholic Monroe, Connecticut for two 4-year stints in the two largest American cities, I stopped thinking about this divide. But now that I’m back in God country, religion has returned to my perception of the world, and everywhere I look, all I see is protestants. Reformed, atheistic the lot of them— but still eerily ubiquitous protestantism. Despite what I believed growing up, they really do exist, and they’re just like you and me. And while my grandma’s distaste for protestants is really a distaste for Northern Ireland, and while her distaste for Northern Ireland is really a distaste for England, her distaste of England is about something else.

This piece is not about protestants, and it’s certainly not about England. It’s about that feeling, about a very specific cultural bias called pretentiousness.

Pretension

The other night at a bar I spoke with a journalist and a rapper when pretentiousness came up. I’d like to say it did so naturally, but seeing that I’m currently reading Dan Fox’s 2016 book Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, I’m going to assume that I steered the conversation toward it. The journalist said that to her, being pretentious meant looking down on someone else’s level of intelligence. I talked about how in cable news we would present the most basic, tasty version of a story, completely devoid of nuance or words which required googling. I told her this felt like an inherent insult— like we were assuming a level of intellect of our readers that was extremely low, and in doing so might manifest that level of intelligence. I believe that people are about as smart as they’re asked to be, and that if we challenge the public with our work, they will easily rise to it. Dan Heyman calls it ‘aiming just above the head.’ The idea of giving your audience something just outside of their realm of understanding, and hoping they’ll extend their reach to grasp it. The journalist at the bar said she saw her job as doing the research no one else has the time or energy to do: learning about an event and distilling it into the simplest form possible. She would do the reaching, and then would drag the information down to the most accessible level without betraying the facts.

The rapper had a different take. He channels ideas from When Einstein Walked With Gödel and Asimov on Astronomy into boom-bap tracks overlayed with french lyrics. He believes that to label someone as pretentious is to underestimate their intelligence. It is assuming that they don’t have a full grasp on what they’re speaking of, and that they’re pretending to have more knowledge than they do. The Latin root of the word is from prae (before) and tendere (to extend). It describes the act of holding something out before you, insisting you have a firm grasp on something which you actually don’t. In this context, to be pretentious is to aspire. To call someone pretentious is to conspire against their aspiration.

What does the man who wrote the book, Dan Fox, say? It’s not clear. I haven’t read non-fiction in a while and this book, while relatively straightforward, went mostly over my head. It makes sense that Fox, an art critic, would have a tendency for highfalutin writing. Who in their right mind would purchase a book titled Pretentiousness in the first place? Certainly not me. I’ll admit, when I received the book as a gift and pulled it from its package, the P-word in bold lettering across the top made me laugh. Is my friend trying to suggest something? Is it possible that I am pretentious? Moi?? I took a sick pleasure in the book going over my head, but only just over my head, close enough for me to try and grab it.

Speaking of pretentious, Paul Graham once wrote an essay about how there is a certain type of knowledge you can only have on a topic once you’ve written about it. He believes the forming of impressions into arguments is a distinct way of knowing a topic that can’t be met by ingestation alone. According to Graham, “if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.” Why call his essay ‘pretentious?’ Because it argues that you don’t have something which, presumably, he does. You may feel that he’s right, may appreciate his argument, and yet some inner-radar in us still sounds off, still feels like Graham is a tiny bit of a dick for suggesting it.

Before reading Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, I liked pretentiousness. I felt like the state of knowledge was poor, and if perception of “smart people” needed to shift in any direction, it was towards the favorable. The label of pretentious is helpful for eras when academics are overly-trusted and over-exalted; eras when someone’s worth is measured by the amount of degrees they hold. I think of films like Kicking and Screaming (the Baumbach, not the Will Ferrell), where twenty-somethings using their education as a shield are lampooned for their idiocy, for regurgitating the ideas of their professors as they waste their lives in idleness. It is for that crowd, that era, that the word pretentious needs to exist. These trends still stand in the marketplace, but public perception of the Knowledgeable is low. Professionals and academics are commonly derided as snooty and elitist, as Over-Educated— a term which feels like it shouldn’t exist. And even if we don’t overtly subscribe to those metrics, don’t we feel a tinge of, let’s say, distaste for someone who knows more than is good for them? For someone who holds their intellect prae tendere?

(There is a classy, let’s say folksy way to hold knowledge and present it to others. It is an extremely delicate balance, and it suggests that even though I know something you don’t, it doesn’t give me any impression that I’m better than you. The ability to wield this is ninja-like in its dexterity, and it feels like one of those talents that one is born with. Or, as the pretentious might say, “one of those talents with which one is born.” It is the ability to present this information as if you came by it out of pure luck. Like you were out on a stroll through the woods when some little strands of data descended from the crown of a Mulberry and landed softly in your pocket. It requires the use of general intel rather than precise figures. Percentage points and direct quotes are to be rounded off and paraphrased. It is, if you’ve ever tried it, exhausting.)

But why should we favor the delivery of information when it is done so tactfully? If someone has facts which might elucidate an argument, what is the barrier within us which shuns them? Would we be better off if we all had a little less EQ working our social interactions? This is kinda how I imagine San Francisco working. A bunch of nerds arguing on the basis of who has access to the most information. The reality is it’s probably more like Los Angeles, where value comes from who you know. Is that a better system? It would depend on what you hold as the goal of society. Is it to create the best reality via the best, most accurate products and ideas? Is it to form a stable social hierarchy, where supposed philosopher-CEOs steer the truest course? Is it to form the tightest web of community through kindness and service? I honestly don’t know. That last one feels nice, but what if we happen to be in an era of crisis, say, an era of destabilized democracies and portentous weather? Anyways, now that I’ve ridiculed my second, third and fourth largest reader-bases— LA, SF and Northern Ireland— I can safely continue.

Saltburn

This has been an incredible year for controversial films. My favorite of 2023, Poor Things, is often seen as either a masterpiece or pure garbage. There is the Barbenheimer debate, and there is, of course, Saltburn. Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to the incisive yet glitzy Promising Young Woman is a story of class. Lower-middle Oliver Quick changes his accent and his backstory to ingratiate himself into the refined strata of the Oxford-posh. He lies about his father dying in order to score an invite to Felix Catton’s summer villa. While there, he works the family’s tendency to gush over working-class sob stories into a position of power.

If you’re in one camp, the film is visually stunning, emotionally engaging, and playfully twisted. It is a viable statement-piece. When Oliver sucks up the dregs of Felix’s cum-water, when he fucks the grave of his departed friend, half the audience felt they were experiencing the height of art-house cinema. The other half thought they were witnessing a load of pretentious shit. They saw the drapery of red-purple light as egregious and unnecessary, they saw the theme of the movie— class-mobility— as trite and lacking in nuance. Through this filter, the boldness of Barry Keoghan’s acting appears unnecessary and embarrassing. And at the center of their argument inevitably sits the director herself, daughter-of-a-famous-jeweler Emerald Fennell.

Take a glance, if you can stomach it, at the ‘Early Life’ section of her Wikipedia:

“Fennell was born in Hammersmith in London to a jewelry designer. Her sister, Coco Fennell, is a fashion designer. Fennell's 18th birthday, documented by British high-society magazine Tatler, was attended by socialite Poppy Delevingne, Lady Alexandra Gordon Lennox (daughter of Charles Gordon-Lennox, 11th Duke of Richmond) and Alice Rugge-Price (great-granddaughter of the 7th Rugge-Price baronet). Fennell was educated at Marlborough College, a private school in Marlborough, Wiltshire. She then studied English at Greyfriars, Oxford, where she acted in university plays. Fennell, writes journalist K.J. Yossman, ‘was part of a rarefied social set whose family names I recognized from gossip columns and history books… Balfour, Frost, von Bismarck, Guinness, Shaffer.’”

Is this the person, ask the Saltburn-haters, to make this decade’s ode to class-warfare? The person who had a literal debutante ball, attended by none other than Poppy fuckin Delevingne? Is she not the exact enemy of this film? Should we not be concerned taking notes on stratification from the stratified? And in this vein, perhaps we shouldn’t. While her background may lend credence to how that class of people truly be, it also calls into question the vilification of Oliver Quick. Is the ending, when Oliver dances through the halls of his new manor, supposed to be viewed with satisfaction that the rich have been eaten, that the ladder is not broken? Or are we supposed to recoil in horror as his dongle flicks specks of whizz on poor Saltburn’s chaise lounge? That is, after all, the same chaise lounge that Poppy sat on when she gave Mrs. Fennell advice on which jewels to include in her tiara.

Whether Fennell’s film is the perfect revenge-on-the-elites tale we need or not, it is the perfect case-study of pretentiousness, which is and has always been about class. That is why the film is perfectly set in England’s elite university backdrop, since in England, according to Fox, “class is a neurosis as much as much as a set of social conditions.” Your worth comes from your county, your county is identified by your accent, and the language is so infused with cultural signifiers that you are treated different by a shopkeeper if when ordering bacon you ask for “back” rather than “streaky.” No wonder my grandmother grew up hating protestants, meaning hating Northern Ireland. Because the Northern Irish were her own Gaelic people, and they sided with the lot who looked down upon them like a sack of potatoes. But we carried that tradition to America as surely as we did smallpox, and at the height of the Gilded Age we had taken the idea of a social hierarchy and planted it deeply into rich American soil. One hundred years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald (what did Scott Fitzgerald do to you?) wrote a searing portrait of the American elite, the same American elite which he spent his entire life striving towards and emulating, ever to be cast towards the fringe for his crime of being born in St. Paul1. The novel is about the romance between the ultra-rich protagonist, Anthony Patch, and his ultra-rich girlfriend, Gloria Gilbert, who in the novel is literally Beauty personified. In one scene, they sit in a Harlem cabaret and judge those around them:

At the next table a party of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and a girl, who were evidently late — in the manner of the girl was a study in national sociology. She was meeting some new men, and she was pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending and by words and by the scarcely perceptible motioning of her eyelids that she belonged to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do, that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined— she wore a last year‘s hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and palpably artificial than herself. Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the impression that she was only condescendingly present. For me, her eyes said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with belittling laughter and semi apologetics.

This was not the sort of place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was nearby and convenient – every party in the restaurant poured out that impression. They were forever changing class, all of them – the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men striking suddenly a magnificent opulence: a sufficiently preposterous advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone.

This display of “I’ll accept what is beneath me” is, to Fitzgerald, pretentiousness to a tee. Decades before the beats would glorify the lowly and down-out, Fitzgerald identified something deeply wrong. That we were all here, and yet none of us felt like we should be (hmm, what a curious pathology for an American). This was because we were chasing some faulty notion of where one ought to be, rather than appreciating that the best possible night out in 1920s New York, in perhaps the entire world at that moment, would be inside a Harlem cabaret. But the end of that quote points towards something else, something distinctly American about pretension which would serve as the basis for Fitzgerald’s next book, The Great Gatsby. Namely, that Americans can change their class.

Earlier in the novel, Anthony considers joining the government:

He tries to imagine himself in Congress, rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book ambitions by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lusterless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people— and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!

Back in his apartment the grayness returned. His cocktails had died, making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly. The very thought was bitter. Anthony patch with no record of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with truth when it was given to him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism.

Anthony looks down upon the legislative class as ‘glorified proletarians,’ with low ideas and flimsy values adopted by whim. But they are not the pretentious ones, they are the grovelers, those with nasty aspirations and empty words, but not pretentious, just awful. It is Anthony who is pretentious, he figures, because he has all the opportunity in the world and spends it idly, slipping from the faulty precipice of his idealism. He is pretentious because his own aspirations are laughable.

It is a wonderful symptom of democracy that one is not fated to resign to the calumny of their origin. It is perhaps not as true as we love to believe, but it is truer than it has been in the last twelve hundred years of Western Culture2, and it is the fuel which keeps the engine of American excellence sputtering towards the end-times. Anthony Patch is not Oliver Quick. He does not aspire to higher ranks— he is the heir to one of the largest American fortunes, and is surrounded by Harvard-peers who “plan to spend three years abroad followed by three years in utter leisure.” His friend Maury Noble, who is anything but, believes that all Americans but for a rarified few should be “compelled to accept a rigid system of morals— Roman Catholicism, for example.” And that’s what strikes one about Fitzgerald’s take-down of ‘the American elite.’ Fitzgerald was oh so close to this elite, was practically a part of it once his first novel so wholly gripped the state of literature. But he wasn’t quite there, and this forever tainted him. He had to prove he belonged as close as he was, in order to make the final leap into the sort of wealth which builds dynasties and lasts generations, like the one built by Jay Gatsby. And he oddly does this by satirizing the exact audience he desperately wants to join3.

Aye, the label of pretentiousness may have once served as a handy weapon for the poor to lob at the rich as they rode by in their gilded carriages. But like all good weapons-of-the-poor it has been usurped by the rich, and in their hands it has shed blood in unwieldy ways on all sorts of targets. As the 1960s flipped social dynamics on their head and Culture became dominated by young and working-class rebels— lads from Liverpool who bathed in the fountains of Washington Square Park— the young and rich saw that the Bohemian was where it’s at. The alt-scene was infiltrated by the wealthy, and soon sons of business-men were wearing their hair like Jesus, and Poppy Dele-fucking-vigne is spotted in shredded overalls and a white tee like the sun just set and it’s time to head in from the fields.

So when debutante Emerald Fennell makes a film saying ‘fuck the rich,’ it is seen as a move to ingratiate herself even deeper within the rich. It is why Oliver Quick does not lie about being wealthy but about being poor, which earns him immense social value amongst the wealthy in the twisted dynamics wrought via democracy.

That shift is where a lot of the confusion around the term comes from. Is pretentiousness a look up, saying you are snobby and trite? Or is it a look down, saying you do not belong among our ranks? Is Fennell pretentious for making a glamorous but pointless film, or is Oliver Quick pretentious for pretending to belong to a class which isn’t his by birth? Is it pretentious to rap about Einstein, or pretentious to use nuance in journalism? I’m not sure the debate has been settled. And that’s why the argument behind the argument in Dan Fox’s book is that the word needs to die a swift and quiet death.

What does the Fox say?

Dan is the latter sort of pretentious, a middle-class upstart aspiring to higher things. This, incidentally, is my particular brand of pretentiousness. It is the sort of pretentiousness which might lift one out of Monroe, Connecticut and into the realm of the ultra-rich of New York. It is the pretentiousness of small-town dreamers, who don’t really know what the larger world is but want to be a part of it. I have a churning fear of the label because that is exactly the sort of journey I am trying to take. And that is why I have yet to ‘come out’ as a writer to my parents: because my dad brags about never having read a book in its entirety, and my mom has never personally known someone who makes money writing. It is a pretentious, foolish aspiration, and the sort of tricks I have learned in my quarter-of-a-million dollar education are the exact ones I have to side-pocket when I’m back home.

This performance brings to mind the time where I worked for two separate landscapers, and when one of my bosses met the other he asked about me, “what is that guy, an asshole?” “No,” replied the other, “he’s just too smart for his own good.” I recall visiting home one Christmas Eve when I was still in college, when I slipped the ideas of Jacques Laçan into a conversation about accents. I was met with blank stares, suggesting that even if those ideas are true, what use are they? I couldn’t understand not being open to them, not basking in the game of them. What is the value, I wondered, of this self-inflicted labeling? Of considering a member of your own class foolish for wanting to transcend it? It is tribalism at its most basic, and says to he who aspires beyond his origins that once you enter that higher echelon, we will have the same distaste for you as we have for them.

Dan Fox thinks both versions of the term are harmful. That to lob the weapon upwards is to restrict access to the higher rungs, and to lob it down is to discourage climbing. He tries to reframe the debate, asking if “what’s pretentious for one person is enthralling for another, is debating pretentiousness simply another way of talking about taste?” But this doesn’t quite usurp the acidity of the word. That “taste” is a socially prescribed taste. The rich can enjoy their post-modern art and suck for doing so. The rest of us should stick to hard truths, should turn up our noses at the snooty, the same way they turn theirs down at us.

We all play chess with our social roles, working them against their own preconceived perceptions. A West Virginian journalist insists that her job is to funnel ideas into the accessible. A rapper uses french in his lyrics. Oliver Quick fakes low to go high, Felix fakes sympathy to retain status. In the ultimate act of ouroboros, Dan Fox defines the term so wholly so that at the end of the day, there is no proper way to use it. He does not rebuild the barn he’s burnt down, does not infuse the word with a new meaning so that its legacy can live on. Without saying so, he hints that the word, for lack of a non-destructive usage, should simply disappear.

So why the intro about the UK? I included it because it is the social issue I think of most often, and because there are QR codes promoting this blog in Belfast, and I just have to make it clear where I stand. But atop all that is the realization that my condescension towards the Brits is really just a tat for the tit of their condescension on my own people. And it’s time for me to recognize that, apart from some heinous colonialism, my distaste for the lot of them is really just a lob against pretentiousness, the same pretentiousness which allowed me the dream of becoming a writer, a dream which has kept me fulfilled for the ten years I’ve held it. That’s why I love pretentiousness, and why I should probably refine that distaste.

Share the mouse-car moment

Day One

The TV was $5 from a lady in Belle, a dusty gray box, thicker in the back than the screen is wide. I picked it up in a Shoney’s parking lot and found that it had a built-in DVD player, though this wasn’t why I bought it. I bought it so I could watch the news, some measly effort to be a better employee. The antenna cost me twelve, and I quickly learn that the cable hook-up didn’t work, quickly gave up on the dream of flipping though the twelve free channels watching re-runs of Modern Family like the days of yore, but now here was this thing: this gray box from the early 90’s, sitting in my room. The fuzzy image runs a persistent and slow shutter from bottom to top. It’s an atrocious piece of technology, countless iterations behind the quality of its contemporaries, and for this reason I have fallen in love with it, feel rather protective of her.

At the Walmart in Cedar Creek there is a bin of $5 DVDs, and after browsing for a few minutes I pick out two sets for my collection: a group of four Adam Sandler films, and 80’s and 90’s family classics. The latter includes The Goonies, Willy Wonka, Space Jam, and a film I’d heard of countless times but knew nothing about, a film which implies everything in its title: Dennis The Menace. I can immediately guess 90% of the plot by this name, I can imagine the quality of jokes, the level of raunchiness, the ham-rating of the acting and I can close my eyes and predict, with eerie accuracy, exactly what the score will sound like.

Heading towards check-out I return again to a mental list of potential essays for the mouse-car moment. I try to conjure an idea which will launch me into the fast-paced world of A-list publishing, something which will place me amongst the literary-journalistic rushmore alongside Didion and Thompson. Where is my Fear and Loathing, my Slouching, my Miami and the Siege of Chicago? I look at the used case in my hand and chuckle. What if I just keep watching this one, shitty movie?

The Menace

Dennis is a child of about seven whose antics regularly terrorize the quiet neighborhood of [town name unclear]. He is undeniably cute, and this keeps him in a state of forgiveness of all those he wrongs. All except George Wilson, his neighbor and foil, who seems to go unappreciated for the amount of deviousness he puts up with, being Dennis’ neighbor. I was spot on about the score, and there are no surprises to be found in the milquetoast plot. My interest was briefly piqued during the the opening credits, when I learned that this was a John Hughes film. Maybe it won’t be so bad, I ponder. It will be.

My largest note upon first viewing is the strange structure of the film. It doesn’t seem to escalate, and while there are stakes, they constantly shift in importance, and certain sub-plots end up nowhere. A grimy robber, Switchblade Sam, stalks the village, but his presence isn’t important to the climactic scene, and he is an utterly flat character. George Wilson’s garden party promises a foreboding ending, but once again, there is no build to this moment, and when it arrives it plays out in a way that is entirely predictable by the first few beats of the film. Dennis’ parents threaten putting him in some sort of summer camp, but the idea is never brought up again, and its not clear what hell Dennis is teetering on. What is this character’s version of heaven and hell, what does it look like for him to achieve his goals, to fail? Nothing. The meat of the story is his antics, is “what will he do next.” And while some are sufficiently shocking, most are mildly amusing in a way which doesn’t move the needle.

The movie is boring, poorly written, and kitschy in a way which doesn’t attain camp-status.

—First rating: 1.5 stars—

Day Two

I arrive home from work and look at a shelf of un-read books, hover my thumb over my Netflix app where hundreds of Seinfeld episodes await a re-watch. I look outside at the softly blowing trees and contemplate texts from friends looking to hang. I consider essays which need to be written, applications to be sent, beauty to ponder. I sigh, sit down, and turn on the dusty box. A static pinch fills the air, it runs the channel set-up and finds a signal on zero of seventy channels, and I switch input until arriving at the home screen of Dennis the Menace. I press play.

Our introduction to Dennis is via his accoutrement. Tied to his bike are heaps of rusty cans and playing cards taped to the spokes of his wheels causing the ruckus which precedes his presence. In a wagon which trails him sits a heap of tools primed for destruction. I think back to my own industriousness at this age, the time I rigged a pulley system so I could open my bedroom door while lying on my mattress, the time I cut the rope from my blinds so I could control the speed of my fan without stepping on a chair, rendering the blinds, as well as the fan, inoperable. These things never quite worked out as I wasn’t particularly handy, and in the end I would use them for a day or two before having to stare at the wasteland of my creation for years. I’m jealous of the logic of Dennis’ world, of the ways he creates fun within the mundane. This is his only redeeming quality.

I realize, begrudgingly, that I’m far closer to the camp of George Wilson. All I ask for is peace & quiet, is to not be bothered. I sympathize with the man who watches his garden get destroyed, his mouth-wash replaced with nasal spray, his bathroom drowned in suds. When he makes his appeal to Dennis’ father, he speaks to the man’s sense of duty. He references his forty-three years with the post office, his appreciation of the community and the desire to not be seen as a child-hater, but to insist that Dennis is disproportionately destructive. It is peculiar monologue which says a lot about the small, pleasant town. “I’m not saying he can never come over, just that if he does, he needs to behave himself.” Why not say he can never come over? What is it about Dennis that makes him saunter into George Wilson’s un-locked doors every day, anyways?

Here is another aspect of the core-conflict which deserves investigation. Dennis is seemingly obsessed with Mr Wilson, seems to focus the bulk of his mayhem on the old man. Sure, every baby-sitter in town has his parents’ number blocked, but no one receives the brutal fall-out of the kid’s misadventures like George, and Dennis seems incapable of leaving him be. He dotes on the man, hangs around him despite his cold demeanor, takes any chance he can get to rest his head on George’s lap and listen to his bitter diatribes. Is George the most easily and entertainingly annoy-able person in town, or is there a missing grandfather presence in Dennis’ universe?

And why doesn’t anyone listen to George? Why is his moaning about the pest so dis-regarded about town? He is the conservative, familiar mail-man: a town staple, and a world-class gardener. Does this not earn him any merit when he loses his marbles complaining about a pesky 7-year-old? Why are his concerns so quickly minimized? Poor George.

—Second rating: 2 stars—

Day Three

I really can’t do this anymore. It’s boring, one. It’s time-consuming, two. It’s not a good movie, and I don’t even know what that means anymore. I decide to turn the volume down on this viewing and to watch with only subtitles, utterly annoyed as I am by that kid’s squealing wail, the poorly delivered lines, the way he screams “Mr. Wilson!”

The subtitles, unfortunately, provide more to be considered. Suddenly lines which I had missed or misheard are written out and illuminated. I begin to consider what this movie is about. I figure any artist, and John Hughes was certainly an artist, has an inherent intention. Intended or not, conscious or otherwise, there is some experience of being John Hughes, some head-canon working beneath the lines. When he writes he is playing against and with certain social floes and making some sort of commentary. Surface-level writers tend to turn these off, tend to avoid them, but they are still informed conceptions, still exist in a framework and still work within a perception of existence.

Take, for example, the feminist sub-plot which I hardly noticed on first viewing. Dennis’ mother has recently returned to work after taking time off to birth and raise the Menace. She enters an office dominated by men and has an immediate rival, the only other female employee at her level. In board meetings towards the top of the script she is met with leering glances from this rival, and the assumption goes that this other woman is resentful of Mrs. Menace. Resentful of her marriage, her beauty, and especially resentful that they have arrived at the same place in their career, but that she has forgone child-rearing and Mrs. Menace hasn’t. When Mrs. Menace needs to miss out on a corporate trip to look after Dennis, the other woman refuses to cover for her, insisting that “though I may not have children, I do have a life.” And why is she working, in the first place? Is it for fulfillment, or because, as Dennis says, “we’re poor and she has to.” Is it maybe both?

And then there is George and Martha Wilson (George and Martha Washington?). George seems happy with life. 43 years as the local mail-carrier followed by a retirement filled with gardening and peace, so long as he can get that Menace to leave him alone. I’m struck by a certain wan spirit to Martha, a certain malaise towards life which she buries in her warm demeanor, buries in cookies and comfort as women of that era were forced to do. When tasked with baby-sitting Dennis she comes to life, is finally excited to cook because she has a new audience. Delights in the mess in the bathroom because now she has a duty beyond looking after her curmudgeonly husband. She recites a poem to Dennis, one she learned from her own mother, who “would, in some small measure, be proud.” She wistfully sighs in bed that evening, says to a sleeping George, “I would have been a good mother.”

—Third rating: 3 stars—

Day Four

Dennis’ top 13 menaces:

13. Ding-dong ditching his babysitter, who is eschewing her duties as care-taker and attempting to woo the neighborhood hunk into some teen nooky, thereby thwarting her attempts at romance in a bold assertion of the innocence of childhood.

12. Coming upon a supposedly-asleep George Wilson and determining that the usually early riser must be ill, and in an attempt to heal his grandfather-figure fashioning a slingshot into which he places a handful of aspirin to launch the medication from an unnecessary distance into the pursed mouth.

11. Loosing his dog into George’s house, leading to some uncouth, though admittedly steamy, bestiality.

10. Having a ruckus in the bathtub and causing major spillage onto the bathroom floor, on which the elderly George, accustomed as he is to a life of sterile cleanliness, loses his footing in an extended display of acrobatics which thrusts him into a full split, putting his septuagenarian hip at risk of permanent paralyzation, and eliciting from the man a pain-laden howl and the covering of his stricken genitals with comically cupped hands.

9. Trying to teach Switchblade Sam how to properly tie him up and, thus, tying Switchblade Sam up.

8. In a moment of fascination with Bernoulli's principle of the static pressure of fluid, squeezing Mr. Wilson’s nasal spray empty while marveling “Old Faithful!", and in an attempt to shroud his subterfuge re-filling the desolated bottle with a mysterious liquid labeled Plak Attack, a fact lost on Dennis who is no doubt a truant student, both incapable of reading and unaware of the marketing-colloquialism “Plak” and it’s likely spice-ridden flavor palette and subsequent harsh effects on the nasal passageways; then realizing that the depleted mouthwash bottle must also be re-filled, choosing from the extensive collection of bathroom products a pine-sol cleaner meant for the toilet, thus causing Mr. Wilson to snort mouthwash and gargle with an acidic cleaning product in the low-regulatory landscape of 1980’s toxicity.

7. Flinging a flaming marshmallow onto George’s face.

6. Distracting everyone from watching George’s mythical 28-year orchid’s brief bloom, rendering the thin veneer of Mr. Wilson’s post-career passion moot and robbing a man who put his faith in capitalism of one of the few moments of ecstasy he would know before his time in this cruel realm expires and his soul returns to the ethereal goo of non-existence from which we were all forged.

5. Trying to teach Switchblade Sam how to properly tie him up and, thus, tying Switchblade Sam up.

4. Incidentally tying Switchblade Sam to a passing train and preventing himself from being stabbed, the mechanics here being unclear and supporting the strange sensation the viewer gets that the world inhabited by the Menace and the sleepy community on which he wreaks his mayhem exist in a sort of alternative physical reality and that Dennis, a cosmically ingenious child, has come from dimensions unknowable to spurn the clockwork reality of this world as an anti-christ figure, a mythoTrickster, entangling the confines of their logic-framework in a desperate attempt to dislodge the security which keeps the brainwashed citizens from questioning a universe beyond the void.

3. Smearing paint on George’s grill before a barbecue.

2. Replacing the teeth of George’s dentures with chiclets just before his photo is taken for the local paper, leading to a portraiture of pure lunacy, rendering the visage of poor George to resemble a demented rabbit, the rabbit that is, perhaps, the theoretical foil to the Trickster-ethos of Dennis, the omnipresent and dysfunctional “bureaucrat-bunny” of the Menace-verse whom Dennis-as-Hermes must thwart in order to free the Common from the mind-numbing forces of regulatory inanity which confine them to lives of indecisive, predictable Order that is directly opposed to the universe’s elegant endeavor towards entropy.

1. Slamming his mother’s bitter co-worker’s face into a copy-machine

—Fourth rating: .5 stars—

Day Five

I can’t. This is painful— I have a life to live. I put on the “movie,” this document of destruction, this broadcast from a realm unthinkably morose, and let it play into the void of my apartment which I am no longer certain exists when I do not inhabit it as I become increasingly uncertain that any reality outside of my hilariously diminutive perception exists, full-stop. I roam the streets un-tethered, exhaust myself to the point of collapse searching the empty cosmos for answers, drag myself through the Kanawha River Quay desperate for the blessed un-housed, those ethereal messengers cast out from their dimensional-origins to pierce my veins with their veil-lifting, Truth-revealing and unGodly syringes.

I contemplate the existence of a fascimilitic adornment of the Film itself etched into my increasingly deranged neural pathways, of the palimpsest of my thin conception-of-self being re-written in real time as Dennis Menaces across the cosmic fold, Menaces through Black holes from his false reality into mine, chased by the rabbit-George, the bureaucratic-bunny, the true anti-christ (??) in a perverse Tom & Jerry of hatred and love, enacting their ancient battle on the scarred slate of my Ego.

—Fifth rating: as Numbers begin to lose their rigid placement at the center of our constructed Universe, as the inhuman gaul to harness the power of Stars for the sake of imposing Taste and esthetic hierarchy I scream as I drown, air bubbles flowing somehow downward, deeper into the depths of the River Styx as I realize the Menace is leading me, of all No-bodies, down into the warm release of death which I now fear means placement into the Menace-verse itself; means entering the very realm which has dislodged my ideology so swiftly, as if it were propped on rotting tooth-picks; scream nobly, scream as my Bible taught me to: TWO AND A GOD-FUCKING-HALF STARS, PLEASE, OH PLEASE, DENNIS, DO NOT SUBDUE ME TO YOUR MISSION— JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT FREE DOES NOT MEAN I HAVE TO JOIN YOUR MISSION OF SALVATION—

Day Six

The poem which Martha Wilson recites from memory to a subdued Dennis, the poem which her own deceased mother once read to her and which has ingrained itself into her memory as a trauma-response to the undue pressure placed upon her to procreate; the memory-as-remnant of Martha’s essentially rebellious decision to not be a mother herself in order to curb the ancestral flow of tragedy and to not permit more suffering into the sterilized world of the Menace-verse; the poem which speaks to the madness of their world’s fragile, paradigmatic “Perfection” (read: dishonesty); the poem which has for seventy years painfully forced Martha to consider that despite her cruelty, her over-bearing mother was acting out of her own mother-learned and damaging perception not of Love but of Duty, though a love-informed-Duty, which she hoped would protect her daughter from the collapse of the veil between this world and the virgin universe and which inspired her daughter’s decision to wed the Bureaucrat-Bunny, the obedient Christ-figure of George Wilson, to take the corrupted Christ’s-soldier-figure’s name, the name of the man who, despite insisting on the sanctity of his universe’s Logic, was cursed by his own Father (none other than the bitter God of the Menace-verse Himself) with an impotent doubt in his own humanity since his white-picket-fence indoctrination of an attainable, not-quite-Lynchian, perfection; the poem which in some desperate way was the trickster-bereft Martha-mother’s attempt at speaking into her daughter’s psyche from Beyond the possibility that this faux-reality is in fact a dishonest shroud— the sanctioned embodiment of a Judeo-Christian, Dante-esque Hell:

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night

    Sailed off in a wooden shoe—

Sailed on a river of crystal light,

    Into a sea of dew.

"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"

    The old moon asked of the three.

"We have come to fish for the herring fish

That live in this beautiful sea;

Nets of silver and gold have we!"

                  Said Wynken,

                  Blynken,

                  And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,

   And Nod is a little head,

And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies

   Is a wee one's trundle-bed.

So shut your eyes while mother sings

   Of wonderful sights that be,

And you shall see the beautiful things

   As you rock in the misty sea,

  Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:

                     Wynken,

                     Blynken,

                     And Nod.

Eugene Field, 1889

—Sixth rating: 5 glorious, simulated and Truth-piercing stars—

Day 7

There is a moment, a brief, almighty moment, when the Menacing of Dennis’ proto-mythic Destiny reveals itself in gracious clarity.

Dennis and his two friends, who will remain un-named in this essay, stumble upon an out-of-use tree house on the outskirts of their “town,” which is really the playground of their Gods’ primordial rivalry. The tree-house serves a perfect symbol of the world beyond their realm, of a return-to-nature, to true Reality, rather than the mythoTrickster Dennis’ version of Chaotic Salvation. One might imagine the forested abode as a resting spot for the Cosmic Watchmaker Himself, the hideout which was used as this anti-divinity crafted the madness of the Menace-verse.

Dennis and his friends scale the rickety ladder to where they are, for once, safe from the misguided Truth below— just out of reach of Switchblade Sam’s switchblade, secure from the anti-Christ, Bureacrat-Bunny George’s scourge of rigid worship of regulatory conformity. It is telling that Dennis leads these children here, like the Pied Piper who was, of course, a mythoTrickster sibling of Dennis himself. Dennis, for all his holy and timeless Menacing, insists with these actions on the purity of childhood, on the sanctity of pre-fall awareness, on the worthwhile endeavor of Saving the Children. We realize in this moment that he, truly, is here to save us.

The female friend, the Unrepentant Thief on the Cross to Dennis’ right, dreams of a tastefully decorated parlor, a world where they can “welcome company,” aka “protect the woe-begotten children from their cruel God.” She will not be saved. His male friend, the Good Thief on the Cross to Dennis’ left, has ascended into the tree-house alongside his savior, and holds for him a nail (!) which Dennis aims to pierce into the consecrated walls of their temporary hideaway. Dennis tells his Child to hold the nail until, on the count of three, the Menace will swing the hammer and claim for the sake of Humanity that salvation comes in the form of Belief in Him. The Good Thief closes his eyes, fears greatly the pain of this world’s nail, but decides, in his Liminal understanding of reality, to trust his Lord, to hold his nail in place until the final moment, to help Dennus bear his Cross for the promise of salvation in the Kingdom beyond this world. Dennis raises the hammer, counts to three, and swings with all his might. When the Good Thief opens his eyes, he sees the righteous nail firmly placed, sees that his Trust in the Lord has saved him, and realizes the Cosmic weight now on his shoulder. The mythoTrickster blesses his Child, decrees him St. Dismas, hands him another nail and says, “This time on the count of four.”

—Seventh Rating: 1.5 stars—

Montgomery

One Saturday in April I drove east on Rt. 60, the Midland Trail, towards Fayette County to see the affect of consistent rain on the New River. The waterway is heralded as the second oldest on earth, and one of very few which flows North. It eventually feeds the Kanawha river on which I live and I decided for all the time I spent on the banks of the damn thing I ought to know its roots.

I wound the historic roadway, between smoky hills and past the remnants of once-bustling towns which owe a debt and an anger to King Coal. I passed small mountains of the black rock waiting for the work-week to begin, waiting to be loaded into the trains and barges which float dutifully by, ten a day, to carry wealth and pain away from this world and into the Ohio River.

After a day in the Gorge I make my way back home, back past the Kanawha Falls, the London Locks & Dam, by illegible graves and between low clouds which don’t move, just perch real still in the crannies twixt cricks and hollers. It is four-ish when I come to Montgomery, when I cross the bridge into that once-pleasant city, to see if a particular pawn shop is open. I have looked inside so many times I can recall perfectly the wall of DVDs, the rows of guns and guitars whose imperfections I’ve never been able to assess. It is closed, as it always is, and I begin a dreary walk back to my exhausted car along Third Ave, past shut-down furniture stores and dilapidated mansions in the shadow of the abandoned WV Institute of Technology, which left Montgomery in 2017 and in its wake massive and stunning brick edifices, un-kept lawns which once held games of hacky-sack or discussions on developments in Engineering.

Between these homes, under the faded marquees of Pizza Shops advertising the best Pepperoni Rolls in West Virginia I find alley-ways strewn with fire escapes and clothes lines and can see the best of Italy, the most charming of Peru, in the gaps between this town’s once greatness and it’s current slump. In the aura of these brief divinities it is hard to imagine the flight from this place, it is hard to fathom that the last time I was here was for work, was to film a shooting which left two dead, left drugs and blood scattered across the main strip. That I stood there from three to eight a.m. as trains whizzed by, as thirty officers from six different departments took notes and questioned witnesses, as a neighbor told me that “things like this are five times as common as they are reported,” as a helicopter air-lifted a dying man to a hospital as if this were the wilderness, not his home.

Along these streets I walked, past my car, past the Amtrak station and further into the afternoon until the glorious rays of a sunset swiped my cheek and left me dead in my tracks. From the foot of a bodega advertising fifty-cent soda I watched as houses across the street were struck with an orange glow, were sanctified by this brief but magnificent event. And in the same moment I realized it was too early, was hours from Sunset; that while incredible the glow was somehow wrong. I searched the ground and found a lock-box with a hole carved out, and from that hole I found piercing orange rays projecting through the rain across the tracks and onto the buildings opposite. On that lock-box I met a man, a man called Jaja.

Interview #1

[The below is a re-creation of the first of two conversations I had with Jeremy Adkins Jr., one of the strangest men I’ve ever met and someone who seems to not only bleed creativity, but infect those around him with it. I didn’t feel comfortable recording this first chat as it was impromptu, but I did write as much as I could remember in my journal just minutes after speaking.]

Me: Is that a projector?

Jaja: Yup.

Me: That’s sick. How does that work?

Jaja: What?

Me: What’s causing that?

Jaja: Mirrors.

Me: Like, inside the box?

Jaja: [sigh] Yes.

Me: Oh, cool. How does that work?

Jaja (to a man leaving the bodega): You got an extra cig?

Me: Here.

Jaja: Thanks. Yeah it’s lenses. There’s a flame on the inside, and then a bunch of tiny pieces of glass refracting it or whatever, and then the light projects outwards through that hole. And I added flowers.

Me: Where?

Jaja: Right by the hole. Whenever I want to fire it up I find wildflowers and crush and press them onto a plate glass which slides into the hole. That’s why the light is orange.

Me: How often do you fire it up?

Jaja: Whenever I want to see a sunset and there isn’t one. Like today it’s raining, and I’m bored, so I set it up. It works best right here on those white buildings because I designed it in my shop right here, above the store.

Me: That’s sick.

Jaja: Thanks. One time Amtrak tried to fine me because the light blinded one of their drivers.

Me: Cool. I’m Ryan by the way.

Jaja: Jaja.

Me: Jaja?

Jaja: Where you from?

Me: I live in Charleston.

Jaja: I know, but where are you from?

Me: Connecticut originally, I moved here from California.

Jaja: There’s a guy in Danbury who used to come here to collect Trilobites.

Me: Oh cool.

Jaja: No he was insane.

Me: Are you a contractor?

Jaja: What’s that?

Me: I have no idea. Like someone who builds stuff?

Jaja: A builder?

Me: Yeah I guess.

Jaja: Then yeah.

Me: Sick. Do you get a lot of work with that?

Jaja: I do some furniture, and I repair instruments and amps or whatever. And some fashion, and I design covers for a few local musicians. Plus yeah, some ‘contracting.’

Me: Cool. I work at the radio station in Charleston, you should come on air and do an interview.

Jaja: Nah dude.

Me: Haha okay, can I get your number if you change your mind?

Jaja: No.

Me: Word.

Jaja: I’m on facebook. Just look up Jeremy Adkins Jr.

Me: Cool. Oh, I get it, Jaj-a.

Jaja: (turns away and stares at the houses across the tracks).

Me: Nice to meet you, man.

Jaja: So long.

March → June

The farewell stuck with me, kept Jaja prominent on my mind as if the ingenious contraption wasn’t enough. The phrase was rare to hear these days, but I was very familiar with it. It was a favorite of my grandfather’s, who’d yell it from his porch as our car drove away, his arm extended, hand cupping and splaying in a way I struggle to make look normal. The expression has mysterious origins, and one of its earliest uses came from a letter Walt Whitman wrote to a friend:

“So long” is a salutation of departure, greatly used among sailors, sports, and prostitutes— the sense of it is till we meet again— conveying an inference somewhere, somehow they will doubtless so meet— sooner or later.

I’m pretty sure my grandfather wouldn’t have heard much Whitman since his school days, if even then. As for Jaja, I couldn’t say.

I found him on facebook as promised, and what was there only deepened the mystery of the man. He had posted no photos, but there were sketches, ostensibly his, which served as self-portraits. A distinct style stood out: bulging eyes, cartoonishly large stenciled craniums and small, stifled mouths. His body was rarely human in these photos, and his favorite substitute was that of a bird. Others included lions, frogs, and a beloved West Virginia totem, the possum.

Luckily, others have posted for him. Flipping through his tagged photos I found grainy images dating back thirty years of him with musicians, photos where he’d be toying with strange instruments which looked like none I had seen before. Some seemed ancient, some like they haven’t been invented yet. I saw a Jaja who couldn’t be more than ten years old playing what looked like a Dulcimer, another which resembled a Ruan. He was shown with a theramin, a fiddle, and in one shot was seemingly making music from an old, boxy television. Whatever the setting of the photo, the room seemed to curve around Jaja, seemed to rotate around his focal point. All eyes would float towards him, as his were relentlessly piercing the ground1.

The next time I saw one of the other DJs at the station I asked her about Jaja. She had grown up in Charleston, and was my go-to resource for insider info on the artists who make up the Kanawha Valley scene. She knew who he was immediately, and seemed a little surprised that I had met the man. “He doesn’t do shows anymore, but yeah he’s a local legend. He used to headline shows around town with Tyler [Childers] and Sierra [Ferrell]. I haven’t seen him perform in years.”

I asked what type of music it was, and she shrugged. She tried explaining it briefly as experimental, industrial, but something stopped her and she insisted that it was actually kinda folky, sorta like John Prine meets Basquiat. When I asked another resource, I got a similar answer but with Nick Cave thrown into the mix. This second source mentioned a name which has become sacred in this state, adding to the lore that Jaja had worked closely with Daniel Johnston when he was twenty. He told me they had written an opera together, and that they developed an entire series of illustrations to accompany it. Copies of the designs were briefly handed around town, but he hadn’t seen one in years, and nothing came of the show as far as he had heard.

The more I learned about Jaja the more lucky I felt to have run into him, to have had the singular, precious conversation we had. When people spoke of his work, ending reliably with “he hasn’t performed in years,” I got to proudly add that he was working ‘in lenses,’ was firmly planted in Montgomery developing inventions and tools to weather the harshness of life just as he always had. This was a liberty I took with the truth, but being new here and having so little cultural caché I’m embarrassed to admit that I squeezed quite a bit out of my one-cigarette payment. Soon the conversations ended, I had talked him to death, had figured out all the strange and arcane sources for info on Jaja that I possibly could. My fandom lay dormant for a little while, especially after a message I sent online was never returned. For a while it seemed like the end of the story, until one day in Taylor Books I saw a poster which featured a simple drawing: cartoonishly head, tiny mouth, bulging eyes, on the body of a dragon. I leaned in and saw, in the smallest of fonts, a date and a location: July 11th at the Montgomery shop. It was all I needed.

Nobodies

On the afternoon of July 11th I drove solo out to Montgomery and parked in front of the same bodega where I had met Jaja three months earlier. A glass door broken and repaired several times over was propped open with a brick, and as I ascended the dark hallway staircase I could hear ambient music, ethereal drums patterns overlaid with a sporadic and disorienting piano tune, and at the top I opened a thick wooden door into a bare-boned studio full of people milling about. The sensation of moving from the ominous street under a setting sun and into the studio was much like the one I felt seeing that first faux-sunset, and in my head themes of Jaja’s work began to sprout and wind in and out of his mysterious character.

The flat was a massive warehouse layout, with walls reaching up about five feet short of the tall ceilings and on the bottom of them I could see wheels so that the lay-out might be changed based on Jaja’s needs. The floor was hardwood, with intermittent rugs placed about, occasionally overlapping, in a way so that they might serve as an ersatz tour guide through the strange exhibit. That’s what it was— an exhibit. People of a cacophony of ilks— wealthy-seeming locals with glasses of red wine next to haggard drifter’s laden with stained jackets. By the front door was a large placard mimicking the one you might see at MoMA which read Nobodies, and by the entrance sat a corny kiosk full of brochures. Inside were paintings and poetry which were indecipherable, but at the beginning of each section was a photo, and before me stood a replica of the first, a man in a rain jacket photographed under an awning, cigar in his mouth, eyes heavy with age and cast just below the camera’s lens as if he was studying the photographer’s necklace.

The portrait stood about six feet tall in front of me, and I entered the room it fronted and found a strange assortment of furniture. Lining the walls were glass cases filled with strange relics— a hat charred by fire, a wedding ring, a smoked and chewed cigar mirroring the one from the photo. Besides these objects were small inscriptions:

Robert’s favorite and longest lasting hat. He found it in his son’s bedroom after the kid left and it remained in a box for six years awaiting his return. One day Robert put it on and felt warmed by the fact that it fit perfectly, the first sign in years that somewhere out there was a remnant of his existence. He could be seen often at the Kanawha Lounge in Buckhannon wearing the hat, and in the rare occasion someone asked after it he noted that it was his son’s, as if he thoughtlessly borrowed it from a present and loving figure.

Robert’s wedding ring, removed three months before his divorce from Jolene and kept in a small chest in his bed-side lockbox. Notice a blood-stain on the left-edge, likely accrued from Robert’s work with toughened ropes on the barge-dock by the London Locks, three miles from Montgomery.

A smoked cigar collected after being tossed into the street by Robert. On the night of this cigar Robert announced his retirement to his closest friend, Samuel Hayes, who he then only spoke to three more times in the seven years before his death. Samuel was critical of the way Robert tossed his cigar into the street and commented quietly that “you never think of others, do you?”

Besides a damaged couch in the center of the room a placard read: the couch Robert sat on for thirteen years, which he threw out when Pitt upset WVU in the Backyard Brawl, 2007.

The room was filled with a poor recording of someone butchering Chopin, and a note beside the speaker read the second-to-last last time Robert played piano before his hands succumbed to arthritis and playing became impossible. On the Tuesday before his death Robert tried the keys from the out-of-tune piano which lay dormant for years in his living room. He was unable to make any pleasant noise, and through tears decided that if he could no longer make music, he’d rather not live.

I read the small plaques, suffered the same three-minute recording four or five times before moving on to the next room, finding another portrait. Beside it stood the DJ who had told me of Jaja’s work with Daniel Johnston, and I said hello quietly, as very few people present were speaking. She noted off-handedly how incredible the brush-work was, and I leaned in to see that it wasn’t a photograph but a painting. “That’s incredible,” I whispered, and realized the portrait of Robert in the rain was of the same style. I checked the brochure and commented that I thought they were all photographs. “They weren’t real,” she said, and I looked up into the second room, one filled with musty gray carpeting and reeking of perfume and years of indoor smoking and it dawned on me what the exhibit was. “Oh, these are all fake people?”

“If that’s how you want to see it.” She walked away and left me to roam the second gallery, titled Marsha Gorecki. There were objects and placards, details of Marsha’s childhood in Roanoke, the swing her sister fell off and died, the phonograph her grandmother used to wind for her, a paper airplane she made on the first date with a future husband, a brief marriage which ended when he died in Vietnam, the last human she would ever live with after a quiet life in Milton working at a grocery store and calling agencies requesting financial assistance for her utility bills. A small shriveled thing, purple and brown, identified as the liver removed in the failed attempt to cure her cancer. I felt deeply sad when I read about a trip Marsha tried to make to visit her husband’s grave in Norfolk, the way a torrential rain forced her to check into a motel in Charlottesville without a heater, the place where she would catch the pneumonia that eventually weakened and killed her. Jaja had nailed a note to the wall in Holiday Inn stationary which read “53 mi: Take exit 177 to merge onto I-295 S toward Norfolk, Washington 24 mi Take exit 28A to merge onto I-64 East toward Norfolk, VA Beach” in poor handwriting.

I moved through the other rooms, found bookmarks, lighters, mugs stained with lipstick and candles lit down to the nub. Each gallery included wallpaper and furniture designated to each subject of Jaja’s incredible work. Each room brought to life a life never lived, established from ashes the full and painful and beautiful remnants of nobodies who lived and died through the blurry and mad stuff of existence. I laughed at jokes never told, mused over pages from journals filled with the thoughts and grocery lists never fulfilled, never brought to reality except here, now, by Jaja. In the final room a solitary figure in a black hood sat motionless on a hand-crafted stool, a figure I identified by its bulk and workman’s hands as Jaja himself. The photo-realistic portrait at the front of the room read Jerome Adkins Jr. and showed Jaja in boxers dressing a horizontal wound on the inside of his thigh in front of a mirror. I leaned in and found in its reflection a bloody pocket-knife on the floor, discarded bandaging on the floor.

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The room was sparsely decorated with far fewer objects than the previous ones. Included was a woodworking clamp which was listed as his father’s favorite tool for beating him, the same one he used to build the man’s coffin. There was a pink ribbon identified as Sara Harding’s, the first woman to show Jerome how a life lived in solitude would drain all the creative energies which Jerome felt were essential to live. It went on, “Jerome mistreated Sara, and when he left for three weeks to visit Seattle he returned to find her belongings gone and a note on the hobby-horse he built for their first daughter before Sara’s miscarriage.” Beside this, the note: “Jerome— in a way you and I never truly got to know each other. I’m sure we will painfully find in the years left to live, years which will be spent as strangers, the things we could have loved most about the other, even as memories of the pain inflicted fade. I will soon remember you fondly. Sara.”

Jaja: I won’t go to Charleston, but you can interview me here if you still want.

Interview #2

Jaja had not removed the hood over his head, but he now faced me. I took out my phone to find I was shaking, and began recording. I sat on a sofa a few feet to Jaja’s right, and he faced forward as I leaned the phone towards him. The transcript of our conversation has been reproduced below:

Me: This is an incredible show.

Jaja: [silence]

Me: How long did it take to work on?

Jaja: [silence]

Me: Is it only showing this once?

Jaja: Yes.

Me: Did any of these people exist?

Jaja: Every object in here is real. They have been the stuff of real lives, they have been manufactured for Purposes and have gone on to involve themselves in existence. The stories told are all real, about somebody, somewhere. We ought to be haunted by all of them.

Me: Am I wrong to think of the show as an ode to myth-building? As in, you have created a world inside here, and we are meant to imbue it with life, to “incarnate” it, and that these people become real as we carry them into the world?

Jaja: If that is what you’ll do with it, though I don’t recommend it. These people have weight to them, and if you choose to bear that weight outside of the studio it might bury you. Is that how you would act if you met them in the streets? Would you take the time to learn all these things, and if you did, would you be able to understand them on such an intimate level as you might’ve felt them tonight? Without feeling the roughness of their towels, without seeing their handwriting, their signature? Without flipping through their mail or hearing the sound of their doorbell? And if you could understand these things, how closely to your heart could you bear to keep them?

Me: It sounds to me like an experiment in empathy.

Jaja: Or maybe evidence of a lack thereof. Remember that each person in here tonight has the same burden of reality as the subject’s, and yet how many of us will take the time to learn it? How many of us would offer someone the chance to?

Me: I’m curious about the way you work. Was each object here curated for the exhibit, or is all this actually evidence of only one life, yours?

Jaja: There is no such thing as individuality, I think. Whether a piece you find tonight was inhabited by me or another, it is the residue of a community, and will disintegrate likewise, will revert to the same material with enough time. If each particle herein were traced to a specific path they would all, when viewed far enough away, resemble the same narrative. Creation, employment, destruction, and so on.I cannot claim any piece of matter from the earth, including the ones which make up myself right now.

Me: It seems like the show involved a massive amount of work for relatively little pay-off. Do you have a job?

Jaja: [silence]

Me: Do you consider promoting yourself more, or charging admission?

Jaja: To what end?

Me: Payment for your work. Fame, maybe.

Jaja: Fame is a flame which ignites and gives life to the voices in your head. I’ve spent long enough learning to work with them as they are, and wouldn’t want to give them any ideas.

Me: I noticed you don’t have much online presence.

Jaja: I flirted with that, but became terrified by the way digital technology might alter us. Think of the frequencies we used to live on. Wind, water, the murmuring of others. There is a new frequency to society, it churns at all times through the air, it is carried in waves through our walls and our minds and we have been forced to adjust our own frequency to its harsh amplitudes. We have tragically and totally re-wired the foundational resonance of our being, and I decided to be as little a part of that as possible.

I’m also weary of data, of the way they study our engagement, the way we move through the digital world. The way in which “they” actually are “we.” They aggregate us via every single byte that ever latched onto our presence and know exactly where to send us, what to put us through, better than we do, I suppose. And the worst part is that we, too, are aggregating machines. Quite good ones, relative to the food-chain, but against the clouds above and amongst us we stand no chance. I am bitter, I guess, to be out-done. I am fond of aggregating [he waved a hand around the gallery], and feel we’re being erased from an ancient duty that once constituted a life.

Me: Can you explain people as ‘aggregators’?

Jaja: The ability to acquire trillions of strings and weave them into something meaningful— a rope which might be pulled, identity— is the greatest thing which occurs in the cosmos. It is a timeless art, performed by all matter at all times. It occurs on a level far beneath and above us, and we are lucky to participate in that game.

Me: Myth-making.

Jaja: [silence]

This was the end of the conversation, and as I walked away I found the crowd dwindled to only a few stragglers, people looking like they’re out for a fix or a place to crash. I walked through the studio in reverse, lives blurring past me with dizzying meaning, and soon exited into the silent Montgomery night, away from the strange glow of the enigmatic man. I had a feeling that I’d never see him again. A feeling, I have no doubt, curated and disseminated in secret by Jaja himself like propaganda, or like words between elderly lovers.

It strikes me that men like this— mythmakers, mystics, frauds, perhaps— generally operate out of an exhaustion with the lay of the world as they’ve found it. Any youthful energy in Jaja is gone by this point, by the time he has learnt repeatedly the myriad methods of disappointment the flock of mankind will manifest to fuck you over, to spoil your dreams of saving the world.

They construct houses of mythos around themselves, out-chess anyone who enters in their search for an equal. They toss brilliant ideas, inspired inventions, purifying poetry and Oscar-worthy scripts into waste baskets because they don’t pass some ethical Strauss-test. They dream within those 5th through 12th dimensions, the ones curled up within our world so succinctly we pass through them without realizing we left our plane and returned countless times over. They are alternately good or bad, having moved so far beyond these concepts that trying to employ them is like applying sunscreen to a worm.

They are desperate, heroic figures. And they’d like to be left alone.

Share the mouse-car moment

Gary Shteyngart was born in St. Petersburg when it was still called Leningrad. He emigrated to the US at the age of seven and became a novelist, known for his signature style of pessimistic social commentary.

His 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, asks what would happen if every worst impulse of the American Order manifests to its entirety. Though not explicit, the story takes place circa 2030, and presents a troubling prediction for humanity’s near-future. Media and Retail professionals run culture, and to be outside of these fields is to be socially irrelevant. Meanwhile, financiers secretly receive the greatest treatment, the finest lifestyles and strongest physical security. Companies merge until they are all one mutant version of their originals. Credit cards are issued by Land o’ Lakes or AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup, and the National Guard is operated by banking institutions. The IMF goes from being a shadow government of global world order to the literal rulers of every individual currency. Our iPhones become ubiquitous and dominant— we cannot see people without them, we cannot understand words but only photos, our net-worth and Fuckability ratings drift above our heads like heinous halos. And lastly, the paradigm between the Chinese and US economies swaps: we are no longer spenders in great debt, but savers so that Chinese citizens may spend. The Chinese Yuan sky-rockets in worth, and US Dollars are only valuable so long as they are Yuan-pegged. Throughout the novel, the value of a Benjamin decreases to zero, and social media influencers scavenge the streets to earn one measly dollar imprinted with the face of the Chinese Prime Minister.

Shteyngart’s novel revolves around two central characters, lovers, who each introduce the other to the half of the world they are missing. Lenny Abramov is a second-generation Jewish man in his late thirties who keeps actual, smelly books in his apartment and takes a year-long sabbatical from work to wander Europe and ‘find himself,’ aka struggle to sleep around and appreciate fine works of classical architecture. He is old-worldly, in today’s terms a 90’s-kid with a nostalgic love language and an enamoration with the written word. He is ugly, poorly dressed, and keeps surface-level friends while lusting after younger women. Lenny works for a cult-leader/finance guru billionaire who founded a lifestyle company which sells eternal youth to other .1-percenters. It is unclear what his role in the company is, but he was there at the founding, and his cult-like younger-looking father-figure seems to be protective of him. Lenny is about my age, born in the late-90’s, and represents a rare stand-out in a generation of internet-bred Gen-Z’ers who have given in to the all-too-easy allure of immersive technology, and in the process have given up Presence in the Real World.

He falls, predictably, for Eunice Park, early-20s, educated but completely devoid of appreciation for the physical world, incapable of reading a full book and obsessed with remaining trendy. Eunice’s secret, besides her seemingly eternal youth, is that she was beaten by her immigrant father and to this day knows the visceral fear of disappointing an abusive loved one. This keeps her, as the older male characters in the book continuously note, “real.” She is street smart, and knows how to look after a lover, knows how to commit and trade romance for security, and when to trade-in for a higher net-worth lover (hence the “sad” of the super-sad-true story).

 “Even death, my slender indefatigable nemesis,” writes Lenny to his journal, “seemed lackluster compared with the all-powerful Eunice Park.” Rather than reduce Eunice to the function of her youth, Shteyngart infuses her with life via the use of messages she sends to an old friend, her family, and a crush. He reduces the dominance of his protagonist’s narrative by undermining his experiences and reflections with the alternate take, the thoughts and opinions of his girlfriend. It strikes me as a balanced flow of differing perspectives which doesn’t interrupt the story but still keeps the reader in well-informed territory.

About ten years shy of when the novel supposedly takes place, I want to take a look at how well his dystopia matches up with the current moment.

Some things Shteyngart pretty much nailed timeline-wise:

-the prevalence of smart phones and their ability to wedge themselves between human beings and obfuscate their ability to connect on a wholesome level.

-the merging and conglomeration of seemingly disparate multinationals under parent companies with increasingly messy sway over political factions

-the practice of incessant live-streaming for cultural capital. The book was written years before Twitch, TikTok, or Reels, and features several Influencers with a wide arrange of gimmicks to constantly vie for the attention of faceless followers.

-the trajectory of US / China relations?

-the failure of college students to actually read assigned texts

What did he get wrong*?

*This section is not to suggest that he made poor predictions. Dystopia is, at its best, a warning via the interpretation of trajectories. They are not meant to say “we will end up here,” but more, “look what may happen if this gets worse.” Further, the classification of ‘dystopia’ is prescriptive, and the term is never used by Shteyngart within the text. Would the characters in the book say, “damn, this shit is mad dystopic”? Lenny certainly would, but the bulk of characters would moreso think, this is what’s up and that is that, and a few would actually assert that the state of the world in the novel is headed in a positive direction, an economically sound and preferred order.

Anyways:

-the death of books. Covid was amazing for the prevalence of paper-bound books, and although literacy rates are stagnant in the short-term, local sense, they are sky-rocketing globally, long-term1. It feels like a substantial enough subset of the populace will at least pretend to appreciate literature enough to keep the artform alive for several more decades. I feel the same about the Wall-E version of humanity’s future. If you recall, the surviving humans are immobile and grotesque, practically incapable of standing on their own malformed legs because they spend so much time seated and staring at screens (Wall-E was fucked, man). It takes place hundreds of years down the line, but I feel like those athletics-obsessed, constantly active, annoyingly fit people have at least a good thousand years left (and by Lindy standards.. 200,000 years)

-the timing of the death of Paul Reubens (he was about ten years early).

-the powerlessness of political institutions. Sure, the façade is pretty much stripped bare, it is no secret that most of our politics are bought and sold by large corporations. But there is still some semblance of public servitude. In the novel, corporations pretty much wait until the whole system collapses and then flip a switch to take control. In the real world, there was no possibility on, say, January 6^th, for Amazon.com to take command of the Senate. Fifty years from now? Maybe. But the Defense budget is still quite a bit larger than any individual megalithic corporation2

-NYC as an unproductive tourist / lifestyle hub. In the novel, any poor people are forcibly removed from Manhattan and all pre-21^st century buildings are toppled and replaced with glass towers for international elites to vacation. I don’t think there is much of a precedence for this. When old monolithic cities die, they do so slowly and gruesomely. Look at major tourist hubs around the world. An exception might be, like, Aspen. But the scope of the erasure doesn’t really fit Shteyngart’s model. Athens, Greece is a workable parallel, though instead of shiny new buildings they have ruins as tourist-hubs. But the native, working-class population still resides with vigor within the city’s confines. If the SSTLS-paradigm rings true anywhere, it is Paris, which has both touristic value and is contained enough and stratified enough that it could be, and in some ways currently is being, rid of all low-income individuals and retained for artistic appeal for the wealthy international elite.

-the proliferation of PC Culture / linguistic sensitivity / identity politics / Diversity, Inequality and Inclusion. Amongst the ensemble of liberal, modern characters in the novel, not a single one of them seems concerned with performative deference to minority or oppressed groups, and they constantly use several banned words / exhibit zero nuance in the realm of sexual orientation or gender identity. As this was written around 2008, it is hard to imagine how he missed this. I suspect it was a bit of optimism on Shteyngart’s part, and this could explain his waning prominence throughout the 2010s. Widely identified by casual cultural critics by the 90’s, it is a huge blind spot for him to have failed to capture the most monolithic cultural shift since the Victorian era. He clearly hadn’t read his Kaczynski. Sidenote: if this was intentional, I struggle to understand how. There are a few moments where characters seem to be flagrantly spitting in the face of modern-sensitives, but this doesn’t seem to be in the name of commentary. Please, if I’m completely blind on this one, let me know.

-hipsters moving to Staten Island. Things just haven’t gotten so low, yet.

Shteyngart’s Purview

Shteyngart last two books suggest that his career’s main focus is wealth, not political dystopia. Taken on these grounds, he kinda nails it. This is an undeniably heinous era for wage-workers and the stratification between CEOs and their serfs. There is a systemic erasure of the legal rights and visibility of the lower class and, is it just me, or has there been a recent cultural shift towards the acceptance of poverty-shaming?

SSTLS has in its background the rise of an idiotic, populist president who speaks, as that type often does, to the struggling lower-middle class. When shit goes down he is deposed of in favor of foreign governments and monolithic corporations, which doesn’t seem very far off either.

It’s a troubling but enjoyable read, and we here at the mouse-car moment recommend it as the thought-provoking portrait of our worst impulses that it is. While it dips into geriatric mumbling about “things aren’t like they used to be,” it just as readily counteracts this narrative with youthful, unconcerned voices maintaining sanity in a rapidly evolving social order. In the end, it serves as a reminder that creative pursuit, critical thinking and devotion to loved ones are eternal concepts that can be salvaged in the worst of times, against the worst of odds.

This is well-trod territory. The fact remains that I spent three years studying television and know a bit about [how it works], and that supplementary studies in the humanities give me some authority as to [why it does]. The simplest paradigm I can suggest is that we live in the Cliff Hanger Era: individual episodes can be generally meaningless, so long as towards the end the narrative arch ramps boldly upwards and we are compelled, in the final moments, to continue watching. This is why the sitcoms you watch— shows which re-set by the end of every episode— are all re-runs from the 90’s through 2010 (Seinfeld, Friends, The Office). Those shows rely on familiarity and your nostalgic brain feeling like it is visiting an old friend group, talking about the same things you’ve talked about hundreds of times before. Meanwhile, the new shows which are considered Prestige are often short-lived (three to four seasons), and the characters in the final seasons are unrecognizable to who they were in Episode One.

The problem which arises from the constant elevation of stakes, from increasing the temperature exactly one degree per episode, is that things can only get so hot before melting. By the end of Season One the premise may be vaguely related to the one on which the show was based (who will succeed Logan Roy? Will BoJack Horseman find relevancy in his middle ages? How does Eleanor remain in the Good Place?) and by the end of Season Four what used to be called “jumping the shark” now flies as par for the course: Will Roman or Shiv choose the next president? Did BoJack kill Sarah Lynn or assault Penny (or Gina)? Can Eleanor convince God to re-write the rules of Heaven? Twenty years ago these plots would have seemed like ludicrous departures from the show that folks originally agreed to watch. Now they are prerequisites for renewal. How did we get here, and how do these new shows work?

A Bored and Diluted Landscape

This new paradigm is the result of 1) a growing distaste of predictability, 2) prestigious play- and screen-writers accepting Streamer checks, and 3) folks preferring to invest a few years into a series of gripping ten-hour movies, but needing those movies to amp it up every time to avoid #1.

There are also many more shows divided across the same amount of viewers. In ’86, ’87, and ’88 at least twenty-five million people regularly watched the soap opera EastEnders. One of the top programs of 2023 has been Succession, which was viewed by 1.4 million people in its final season[1]. Also changed is the modern sensibility. Sure, in a George Bush world things can slowly evolve, characters can fall in and out of love for six years and friends can live in the same apartment for time-indefinite no matter their employment status. But we don’t live in that world. We live in the world of shifting interest rates, of ten-second videos flying by in rapid succession making us laugh, making us feel, teaching us, aggravating us, introducing new characters and premises which are immediately irrelevant to history; we live in the world of presidents being impeached every fifteen months and of new coups and international conflicts erupting once per season. We live in a world where TV is no longer a uniting force because rather than having four shows which each speak to twenty million people we have twenty million shows which each speak to four.

Enter the modern landscape. With a massive growth of people with the job description “Television Writer” comes a lot of intelligent, creative people working within the increasingly insipid demands of execs and advertisers responding to a smaller and smaller cabal of tech and Studio-Head billionaires. The writers’ answer to these concerns— this new paradigm within television— is something which resembles the contemporary mindset. That is: something nihilistic, something low-key hardcore, something poignant and moralistic without entering challenging, something gritty without entering gruesome, and something which evolves fast. Like the rules of Meme-culture, as soon as an iteration is caught on to it must evolve, and as soon as the evolution is understood by a critical mass it must once again change until it is unrecognizable to the original and can re-surface six months later as a totem of nostalgia. In order to continue speaking to younger and more dismissive audiences, in order to retain attention when attention is capital and the competition is an infinite bounty of content, they have jacked up the stakes and obfuscated reality where it didn’t allow room for more and more ludicrous developments.

The artistry enters, far behind the proverbial eight-ball, not with how to make some sort of commentary within this new model, but what to comment on. Faced with such insidious terms, and being as insular and self-involved as the TV Writing community tends to be, a commentary on the paradigm becomes the paradigm. This is worth repeating. A commentary on the paradigm becomes the paradigm. This is the best way I can describe “progressive entertainment.” From a generation raised in a post-structural world, where meta is no longer meta if it exists on the same physical plane as the reality it is meta’ing from, entertainment must signal that it is intellectually and morally more advanced than you for it to be engaging. (For those who are left behind, the exact opposite must be true: it must be so far beneath you so that when you look down you can easily comprehend the way in which you are above it. This is how we get, on the other end of the spectrum, Emily in Paris and Bridgerton. The people who enjoy these shows know full well that they are not technically or thematically or culturally boundary-pushing, and appreciate them for this reason.)

The Other Two

Okay, The Other Two. This show originally aired on Comedy Central and moved to HBOMax, and you’ve never heard of it because it was only watched by .2 million people[2] (these days, just enough to be renewed for three seasons).

The basic structure of TOT and other shows of the ilk is this: 1) a classic premise is introduced[3], 2) the show quickly explodes into lunacy and then 3) lunacy becomes surrealism, and reality is discarded. In The Other Two the premise is that two flailing millennials must contend with the overnight fame of their Gen-Z brother (a Justin Bieber knock-off). Season One comfortably tackles this dilemma in a familiar way. The two struggling siblings learn to use their little brother’s fame to their own advantage. The plot escalates until both older characters get to the brink of what they want, but at the moment of claiming the fame and success they feel they deserve they realize they’ve been selfish, and that they’ve failed to consider what their little brother wants. When he decides to quit show business and go to college, their success tap is turned off and they must do the right thing, accept defeat, and let their family return to normalcy. The twist comes in the final moments: in the frenzy caused by the youngest brothers fame, the mother (played by Molly Shannon) becomes an overnight daytime talk-show sensation (think: Oprah).

Season Two opens with this new premise, but it is on HBO now, and things must evolve even faster. Struggling actor-brother Cary becomes nationally famous after a photo of his butthole is leaked. Sister-turned-manager Brooke is chosen for Variety’s 30 Under 30 and her simple-minded ex-boyfriend becomes an overnight fashion mogul. We have left the plane of reality, and by the middle of Season Two have gaggles of virgin gay-fluencers, little brother becomes a part-owner of the Nets, and talk-show host mom is a music/game-show tycoon instantly recognizeable to everyone. The show has become a farce, and while the central struggle of the main characters is unchanged, they have become cartoonish replications of their original identities. The problem: Season Three must somehow escalate even further.

Without going into gory detail, we suddenly have characters winning Peabody awards, Mom is so famous she must alert the Mayor a week in advance in order to walk through Central Park, Marvel actors and billionaires pine after the main cast and one character goes to space twice in a week. Logic dissipates as some people are chronically black-and-white, some characters turn into vampires and charity empires are built and collapsed in mere hours. This is all emblematic of the state of prestige TV. Remember when Dory from Search Party becomes a cult-leader who instigates a zombie-apocalypse? What the hell is even happening on Big Mouth? Westworld? Shows must make grand gestures to be the end-all be-all commentary on Social Media, on fame-obsessed youth, on the absolute hysteria involving celebrity-culture, on the transmogrification of politics into Reality TV, on the transmogrification of Reality TV into Surreality TV. Even documentary mini-series must escalate to this manic apex: Tiger King, How To With John Wilson, and Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal must go to great lengths to make reality appear like the hyperrealist madness that it resembles on X or TikTok or, in a strange twist, in The New York Times and the what-the-hell-have-we-done ­Associated Press.

We’re left to ask: is reality as wild as it appears? Was it, perhaps, briefly sane and now returned to its natural state of maddeningly entropic? Are we numb, and reality must be relayed to us at louder and louder pitches for us to hear?

The stinger: these programs, the Bojack’s and the Search Party’s and the Other Two’s all end in a similar fashion. One which, if they truly do resemble the mold of the contemporary mindset, leave me with a twinge of hope. At their final moments they attest something simple and beautiful: namely, that simplicity is beautiful. That fulfillment is available and easy, and does not involve a phone or a Red Carpet. That Cary can turn down the Oscar-bait role-of-a-lifetime to stroll a beach and connect with old friends. That family, nature, present-living, kindness to strangers and loyalty-to-friends is what matters, and the rest is pure noise. In the last notes of these sickening symphonies the young writers of these prestigious and minimally viewed pieces of entertainment step back, apologize for what they’ve done, and tell you it’ll all be alright if you just go for a walk, take a deep breath. Believe, against all odds, in things like Honesty, Duty, Kindness, and Presence.

[1] The biggest shows of the last few years (Stranger Things, Bridgerton) streamed on Netflix, who famously obscures viewership numbers and counts “Minutes Watched,” most likely in order to avoid the embarrassment of releasing numbers which look like mice next to the wooly mammoth that is M*A*S*H Nielsen Ratings. The WGA is striking, in part, to change this.

[2] Perhaps you’ve seen its thematic parallel, Search Party, which averaged a much more impressive .4 million viewers.

[3] “Classic Premises” changed with the Sopranos and Breaking Bad into the following definition: something familiar has a surprising twist element.