mouse-car menagerie #2

Margaret Fuller, Acting My Age, cultural recommendations and meanderings

Springtime Check-In

I returned to West Virginia this Wednesday after a trip north to find every tree had bloomed, the temperature was a steady 88, and there was that smell. Not a late-winter petrichor smell, not an early-spring grass smell, but the proper, full-bodied, humidity-and-leaf smell of spring. While location scouting for a short film yesterday, I spoke with a man foraging for morel mushrooms. He said that the ground had become too hot to support them. Could it already be “too hot” for anything, I wondered as I cleaned the filter on my A/C. In the middle of the woods we saw two men dressed in camo, guns on their hips. We walked over, and the forager learned that they had recently bought the plot next door. Neighbors, in the middle of the woods, alerting each other where they had seen barbed wire. I took a guess at our altitude and, checking his watch, he told me I was only 44 feet off.

In the car I asked my friend how much a chicken cost. “No idea,” he said. About an hour later we passed a man on a corner with a crate full of chickens, and my friend rolled down the window. “How much for one of them?” I asked. “Twunny.” These things happen.

There is an old man who tends the garden in my building’s courtyard. I have seen him a hundred times, said hi just as many, but have never spoken to him. He wears knee pads. While showering the other day I saw something strange on my wall. It was a reflection of my bathroom mirror on the tile, and in the reflection of the reflection of the outdoors, I saw movement. I didn’t know what I was looking at, just a strange blur of color, but something about it was odd. I opened my shower curtain, and outside, across the street, the old gardener had collapsed. It was the sort of collapse that, even though I had never seen one, I knew to be a stroke. I guess that sort of movement is recognizable in all forms, down to the most distorted.

I didn’t know what do to, but seconds later my super was beside him, lifting him into a chair with the help of a neighbor. The gardener seemed stable, I figured there was no use in me running outside, but it was a strange feeling. It is rare to stand naked, watching a stranger have a stroke. But these things, too, happen. A week later my own grandmother would have a stroke. She is a very defiant woman, and when I saw her recently she seemed to deny even having one. Three specialists a day visit her, testing her speech and mobility. “I’m fine,” she says, and she does seem it. They are worried about aftershocks. A rare earthquake struck Connecticut a few days later. An uncle thought his water heater was acting up. My other grandmother thought her new washer had exploded. They, too, are worried about aftershocks.

I watched them test the gardener’s reflexes. His right arm worked, his left wouldn’t. A few minutes later I was outside, getting into my car. An ambulance had arrived, and the paramedics were encouraging the gardener to get in. Behind the ambulance was a loud screech and the sound of metal colliding. Two pick-up trucks had collided on the boulevard. I drove away, helpless, to my job at a homeless shelter. I handed a bag of sanitizer to a mute man awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend. He spent three days sitting beside her remains before being found. A family nearby had reported a smell. At night, while the trial is delayed another six months and he looks for shelter in his wheelchair, he pours the sanitizer into a carved-out soda can and lights it for warmth. All of these things happen all of the time.

After eleven weeks straight of essays and a heap of new readers I thought I’d check in. How’s it going? Remember those purple pants I bought? Wasn’t that fun?

To the new folks, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Acting My Age

My Substack contemporary and bitter rival / dear friend Celeste Amidon wrote an incredible piece this week that’s sorta about the eclipse, but is really about her lifelong battle with the tendencies of her own mind. We had an eclipse-essay-challenge in the works, and I humbly doff my cap to the jewel she produced. It’s a gut puncher.

On the subject, this is the first time I’ve ever seen literary work of mine be quoted and responded to in another literary work, and the feeling is…. well you oughta try it.

For Those With A Few Bucks To Spare

Speaking of talented literary friends of mine, a fine poet that I grew up with has just released a zine. Her name is Taylor Shaw, and you can buy it for $2.50 right here.

A regular at the bar I used to work at, Zach Hammer, has also just published a little something. It is available here, and what I’ve seen of it is incredible. $4.00.

For those in Charleston, a poet and fellow DJ has just published a collection, now available at Taylor Books. Her name is Emily Beane, but if you live here, you already knew that.

And lastly, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid member of this blog. For only $5 a month or $40 a year, your support is very meaningful to me. My first subscriber-only fiction post will drop next weekend. The piece is called Winfield & Hatch, and is the story of a journalist who gets entangled in the ivory trade in Mogadishu, but it’s really the story of killing your heroes, and of what some people choose to sacrifice for a chance at greatness. These fiction posts, once a month, will only be available to paid subscribers— not because I think they’re so good they deserve money, but because they’re vulnerable, and I want as few people as possible to read them.

Chopsticks

For a month now I’ve started eating every home-cooked meal with chopsticks. There’s not much more to say except that I highly recommend it. I wish I could attribute it to some new-age bullshit like “intentional eating” or portion control, but I really think the bulk of my excitement comes down to not having as many dishes to clean. There’s also something so barbaric about stabbing and scooping. Chop-sticking is a skill, it requires deftness, patience, attention— all worthy attributes to introduce to eating, to every portion of life, I guess.

The Many Deaths of Margaret Fuller

I sometimes forget that Margaret Fuller Ossoli is not an old friend of mine, but actually a barely-published writer born over two-hundred years ago. I first learned to love Fuller from a mentor of mine, Lincoln-biographer Philip Kunhardt III, whose affection for her was contagious. Since then she has appeared as a character in at least four different biographies I’ve read, and her slight, un-extravagant life always seems to leave a powerful impression. She was dear friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson; the two of them forced the other to consider the sanctity of marriage, the joys and awkwardness of a purely spiritual friendship. She was central to introducing Goethe to the english-speaking world, worked closely with education reformer Bronson Alcott (Louisa May’s father), and edited our dear Thoreau (the namesake of this blog) as he published in the ground-breaking, short-lived literary magazine The Dial— the well-spring of the first great truly American artistic movement, Transcendentalism.

Fuller lived a penniless life, and never got to fully appreciate the prominence her work would have on American literature or feminism. She spent the last five years of her life in pseudo-exile in Rome, where she documented the (failed) Italian Revolution. She was an anti-marriage and anti-offspring sapiosexual who had a child with her philistine husband, in a volta that speaks leagues to how personal philosophy evolves, how someone brilliant can believe something so strongly and still be open to new experiences which may contradict those beliefs.

Perhaps one of the reasons biographers love to dwell on Margaret has to do with her death. After finally scraping together the funds for a boat back to the states, Margaret spent two harrowing months at sea before colliding with a sandbar 100 feet from Fire Island. Residents filled the beach, and for twelve hours watched, from within shouting distance, as everyone on the boat either swam to shore or drowned. Fuller, her husband, and their baby were the last three aboard. The final reports of a living Fuller have her atop the mast, singing to the infant in her arms, as a massive wave washer her into history. Her body was never found.

Over the years, when Margaret enters a biography as a character, I have developed an expectation to read about this tragedy in a different way. Each writer who tackles it brings their own information and context, spun in their own voice. It’s like painters painting the crucifixion, or jazz musicians releasing covers of Gershwin’s Summertime, each interpreting the simple tune in different ways to pay homage to a tradition while showcasing what separates them from others. One of the finest, and my personal first, was Robert D. Richardson’s account in the Emerson biography Mind on Fire.

Reading Maria Popova’s life-changing debut from 2020, Figuring, I ate up seventy pages of prime Fuller content, eager to see how such a gifted writer would handle the famous death sequence. The Fuller section of her book ends with her on the boat, steered by a novice replacement to the seasoned captain who had died from smallpox. Fuller’s baby, Angelino, also had the disease, and suffered greatly before making a miraculous recovery at sea, giving Margaret two extra weeks with her disfigured, beloved child. Popova leaves the story alone for another two hundred pages, and I am left in shock as her book progresses through the 20th and into the 21st century. What is she saying by not including the most famous moment from Fuller’s life? Is she, perhaps, sick of writers implying that the most noteworthy event of her existence was its ending? In a move of poor taste, Emerson himself released a Fuller biography which stretches the truth, rushing the publication for fear that once headlines stop covering the tragedy, no one will remember or care about Margaret. Does Popova want to re-write this faux pas, and insist that Fuller’s greatness exists independent of her demise?

In the final fifteen pages of Figuring, after a hundred-page detailing of the life of ecologist Rachel Carson, Margaret’s story resurfaces. Popova employs it to speak on fate, on what-ifs, on the role of tragedy in genius. What a bold move, to end your album on a cover, to end your magnum opus telling an extremely well-known story. And against that boldness it is, in my opinion, the preeminent re-telling of the disaster, and the perfect crescendo for one of the best books I’ve read in years.

Culture Stuff

2024 films:

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire: I love these Kong movies. Once a year I try to see a major blockbuster, just to keep up with where the industry is at. The last addition to the franchise found Kong and Godzilla at war, fighting atop an aircraft carrier at sea, leveling Hong Kong in an epic final tussle. It was east vs. west, it was muscle vs spirit, I loved it. This newest one was disappointing. Most of the film takes place at the center of the Earth, and as a hollow-earther myself, I was excited for this. But the story keeps driving deeper into the center of the earth, each layer suppose to be a new revelation until the splendor wears off, and you stop finding it impressive how hollow the Earth can get. By the end there are three additional gods in the Kong / Godzilla war, Kong and Godzilla are working together, and a giant golden Moth keeps saving the heroes lives on the brink of death but inexplicably never joins their fight. The sheer size and power of the beasts is no longer a novelty, the lore has jumped the shark. I’m excited to see where they go next. Probably space.

Dune: Part II: I had no intention of seeing this but two trusted friends forced me too. They both threatened and hounded me, and since I still, inexplicably, have moviepass, I decided to try it. That one scene where he stands on the Dune was cool, the one where he is preparing to ride the worm. Otherwise, I am completely lost as to what people are seeing in this. I like the political implications, but what’s the message? Neo-liberal colonialism is bad, we should honor the Arab nation instead of sucking their resources dry? Sure, I get that. I’d rather watch Three Kings for the ninth time, if that’s what I’m going for. Also, doesn’t this film, in that framework, imply that White Christian Westerners invented Islam to sew complacency in the Middle East? Ahem? Anyways, I have a hard time telling the difference between CGI and special effects, and this film was indecipherable from a Marvel movie. It also used my least favorite film trope— bad guy unexpectedly kills an un-named henchman to prove how mean he is— at least four times. There was solid humor, I really liked the religious dialogue, and the battle with the Empire’s army was great. But could a minor planet’s army plus three (out of an unnecessary 94) nuclear weapons level the entire Empire’s army? Shouldn’t that of been harder? If Timothée Chalamet’s family really had nukes, would they bury them on Arakis, and wouldn’t the Empire have an anti-nuclear arsenal?

Sasquatch Sunset: This film follows one year in the lives of a family of bigfoot. There isn’t a single word spoken, but the film never drags, and in a couple moments had the theater in uproarious laughter. I had the strange sensation of being really offended by this movie. Not by their customs, but by the way they failed to be decent. The way they ate, the way they harmed each other, in the sound design and their anatomy. If they were animals, or even early humans, I don’t think I would have felt that— but they were eerily human. A part of me wished the make-up was one notch better, but I think that comes from the same place. Throughout the film I kept thinking, one shouldn’t behave like this. In the end it was unlike any film I’ve seen before, and it was surprisingly touching, morose just to the limit of what the audience could accept. There is a lot of philosophy in it, but at times I got the feeling that it was a Joe Rogan brand of philosophy, the sort of we’re not meant to have jobs, we’re meant to wander and taste plants and fuck! philosophy.

1973 releases:

What’s Up, Doc (1972) / Paper Moon (1973): In 1971 Peter Bogdanovich released Last Picture Show, and then these two films in the two following years. All three are safely in my all-time top 25 movies, in a three-year run that will never be touched by any director ever again. They are all perfect. I can recommend them to absolutely everyone. Each has its own brand of hilarious and moving, each touch the heart and mind in different ways.

Badlands (1973): The debut release from Terrance Malick. Me and Malick actually share a credit— he produced the Lil Peep documentary Everybody’s Everything (2019) which I worked on. We called him Terry. This movie is about standing up to convention. It is violent and sexist in the complicated way which seems to enlighten one about violence and sexism. It is funny and heartwarming, has tender moments and brutal moments. It is a rare positive use of voice-over (essential to this is having multiple characters be voice-overing, not just one of them). Cinematography is excellent, philosophy and soul abounds.

The Long Goodbye (1973): If you’ve never seen a Robert Altman movie, I’d recommend starting with M*A*S*H (1970). He was mumble-coring alongside Cassavetes twenty years before Baumbach, Gerwig, and the Duplass Brothers. The Long Goodbye is a P.I. story, but transcends the genre, like Inherent Vice or Chinatown. This is peak Elliot Gould— hilarious and unwavering— but in the film’s ending the world finally gets to him, he has a moment of rage and heart which goes against his entire character, alerting the viewer to the injustices brewing beneath the story’s lackadaisical demeanor. The sailor Sterling Hayden has a performance in this movie which is so blatantly legendary that he somehow pulls off. Incredibly shot. Made me want to start wearing a suit at all times. When I first saw this movie a few years ago, I bought a fifty pack of strike-anywhere matches.

What I’ve been listening to:

Tír na nÓg— The self title debut from the Irish band. This album is beautiful and mystical. For some contemporary Irish greats, check out SPRINTS or Lankum.

Bill Callahan— I think I’ve finally settled on which Callahan tattoo to get. Originally releasing under the name Smog, he put out the perfect album Knock Knock about a break-up with Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power. Smog nails that slacker-rock sound (think: Silver Jews), which at its best has extremely complicated and upbeat movements buried deep under layers of malaise. Hit The Ground Running is both surf-rock and disco, but on the first few listens sounds like any other chugging aught rock track. Later in his career he started using his real name, and put out two amazing records, Woke on a Whaleheart (2007) and Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle (2009). Of the three or four songs on earth that I can’t listen to because they’re too destructive to my psyche, Bill has written two of them. One of his tracks off Eagle is called Eid Ma Clack Shaw, and tells the story of someone waking up thinking they had written the perfect song in their sleep. The lyrics to the song are nonsense, but in some way, they were right. It is perfect.

My top reads of the year so far:

The Idiot— Fyodor Dostoyevski, 1868. A hefty, slow read, but one of those books that truly touches on every corner of being. That weird sensation you had only that one time, six years ago? It’s in here. Throughout the book you feel inclined to scream at Myshkin— run from these crazy people! Go retire in the Swiss mountains, care for the poor, be kind and have kindness bestowed upon you! But he can’t, because he is a protagonist, but because none of us can. We are humanity— to flee is to die. The only hope is to engage, to muster as much love for your fellow man as you can, to be unwavering in the face of confusion, to try and understand the cruelty of others and to continuously choose to try and heal it.

Candy House— Jennifer Egan, 2022. Sequel to her Pullitzer winning A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011). Both are very worth reading. I suggest taking at least a few months between these two books, so that the characters of the original slip into memory, until they start feeling like old friends. A perfect ending to this one. I hope in another fifteen years we get part three.

Figuring— Maria Popova, 2020. Enough said. Check it out. It’s 600 pages through the history of women in science and the arts, it humanizes historical figures in beautiful way, weaves fate and discovery and love in endlessly engaging tales. Good book to keep on your bedside table for a year, reading a chapter every few weeks. As a friend noted, it is comforting. One feels swaddled by Popova. Also exciting in that this is the Bulgarian writer’s first release. I can only imagine what her future will bring.

Seriously

Thank you, as always, for reading the mouse-car moment. Readership has (relatively) sky-rocketed over the past two months, and this endeavor, which started to satisfy a long-standing itch, has become a passion of mine. I’m really proud of some of these posts, and I hope they inspire some joy and curiosity in the world. Tell your friends.