(hello!...)

waking from hibernation / some book reviews

I wrote on the plane please clap

1.     throat-clearing

I’ve sat on this domain for over a year now. At this point I have at least three half-baked newsletter introductions (that I can find), written several months apart, all circling in some way around all the reasons I’m loath to write—throat-clearing, as I’ve heard folks call it. On this fourth time, I’m committing to send this email out, throat-clearing and all. 

I get newsletters from people I care about and I pin them to the top of my inbox where they stay for a couple of days until I dig myself out of the suffocating hole of slack pings and work emails, until I can sit in the sun with an espresso and a crumbly pastry and the cherished words from my friends, or my acquaintances, or writers I respect. 

If I can give this care to others—and I know that if anything, others are probably more generous, patient, and kind than I—why can I not offer it to myself? If I am keeping you from reading a book or following the news or learning science—or, god forbid, getting away from your laptop entirely—then I’d better have something good to say. 

I read Draft No. 4 by John McPhee around a year ago. In any given draft, he writes, probably around half of the words can be cut while preserving meaning and intent. Also around a year ago, I took a writing workshop where the first three exercises were to take a 500-word piece and reduce it down to 250, then 125. I’ve always been a rather ruthless editor (in high school I cut down my then-boyfriend’s Yale essay from over 1000 words to the requisite 650—he got in and I did not), but in the past year, I’ve found myself holding my writing and my words to ever-higher standards in pursuit of ever-tighter prose. 

So on this throat-clearing business. If this were an academic paper I’d delete it all, this entire top section. The piece of writing would become strictly better, in the formal sense of the word. But the Substack editor is not Overleaf, and all of this fluff—these several hundred words that don’t say much—somehow still contains stuff I want to share. That’s one of the weird things about this platform, that it’s ostensibly for sharing writing (and often is actually used for that purpose) but really I’m mailing words directly to you and that dynamic changes everything about the words I write. Letters to my friends. I chose this domain because I wanted to make it as low-stakes as possible, to trick myself out of wanting to make something perfect, but I might have lowered the standards a bit too far. But maybe with this very extended throat-clearing I can get straight to substance the next time I write here.

What words really matter? I don’t really know what it is I’m trying to do or trying to say. I think the point of art is to evoke a feeling. Or maybe to create a new sort of feeling. A corollary, then, from the above discussion on flabby writing: The ideal piece of writing is one which succeeds in evoking some feeling in as few words as possible. In no words at all.

Again, I know intellectually this makes no sense. The point of art may be to evoke a feeling, and/but the medium itself is part of the point, too. Again, I can be generous to others (in this case, to other mediums), but not necessarily myself. In film¹, for example: repetition and routine put down layers of anxiety, because the audience’s experience of time is beholden to the filmmaker’s control over the forward motion in the film, purposely made excruciatingly slow. To cut the repetition is to ruin the whole thing.

In my own writing I tend towards elaborate and often over-edited prose, but maybe it doesn’t need to be that way. Maybe I just need to get out of my head.

2.     my first 3 books of 2022

In all three books I’ve read so far this year, I think in some way the authors simply did not give a shit about what people thought. I didn’t feel any of them were earth-shattering or revolutionary, don’t think they necessarily changed my mind, don’t know what I’ll remember of them in a few months. But I don’t think any of these authors particularly care, and I think that’s what makes them great. Here are a few mini reviews.

In, by Will McPhail, is a graphic novel about a comic artist who lives in Brooklyn and is obsessed with finding capital-M Meaning and capital-C Connection. Thematically, it’s simple; the plot is sparse and, were it to be transposed to a short story or other purely-written form, might be dismissed as trite. I’d probably find the main character insufferable in real life; he also, annoyingly, is characterized as someone who would be hyper-aware of this perception. But there is so much tenderness drawn into every frame. I teared up a few times. It’s sort of a dumb story, but so are our lives, right? The little stupid things we deal with on a daily basis, and also the things that are maybe not so little or not so stupid? Why do I feel compelled to qualify my enjoyment of the piece with a disclaimer that it’s not special?

Search History, by Eugene Lim, is a novel that I feel obligated to describe as experimental though Lim would probably be unhappy that I did so. I don’t have any real basis for saying so, other than that the book reads like so much of a fuck you to conventionally successful fiction that I think Lim must also feel averse to categorization. Where the hell did he find the word dysthymic? As in, the dysthymic AI scientist who wants to basically GPT-X an award-winning novel, which is what Search History reads like sometimes, but also a robot dog which possibly is a sort of reincarnation of the narrator’s dead friend, a few characters whose names sound familiar from Dear Cyborgs, Lim’s last novel. Plot, structure, dialogue, none of it makes any sense, and/but also it sort of works. I didn’t really know what was going on but I still felt things, like yeah maybe we are just chasing things that maybe we don’t even believe in and like yeah maybe we are just walking around doing shitty imitations of one another but also what distinguishes us from GPT-X is that we still care, about all of this, about each other.

Then, in the last few phrases of the piece, Frank slows down the number, freezes all of our lives for a moment, suddenly but smoothly transforming the song with a series of Satie-inflected chords, and it’s as if we were allowed for just a few seconds to look into the basin of the music to see there what we always knew we’d find: a profound and utter void.

People From My Neighborhood, by Hiromi Kawakami, is a collection of interlinked flash pieces; I don’t know if magical realism is exactly the right way to describe them but it’s close. I’ve been reading a lot of Japanese literature in translation recently, and something I’ve felt is common to all of them is a particular solidness, a sparsity of language, which I feel can only be attributed to something about the nature of how Japanese prose is inherently structured. (I could be wrong though, please let me know.) At any rate, the result is that instead of being dazzled by diaphanous language, it’s the ideas themselves that are compelling—and here, instead of Murakami where the ideas are like… Love, Betrayal, Institutions, or otherwise grand in some way, they’re things like an irl gingerbread house or a city built on the dunes of a temporary desert or the life cycle of “babies” that, among other things, take the form of a stack of books at some point in the cycle. As far as I can tell it’s not really about symbolism or anything particularly deep. Just—what if we lived like this? What if the world was just like this? It would be fun I think!

For the first time in ages, we had a no-gravity alert. “This is the Disaster Preparedness Office speaking. We have been informed that there is an eighty percent chance that a no-gravity event will take place between two and five o’clock this afternoon.”

Recently, Kanae’s sister confided to me that Rokurō, too, was swallowed in the goo, and that the Rokurō we see today is himself a counterfeit, baked in the oven by his classmates during their home economics cooking class.

In other words, I think there are many ways for a piece to be “good,” and I think I really respect and admire those who have the conviction in their own ideas and their art to lean in all the way instead of what I do, which is often to feel so constrained by the need to make something good and valid and useful that I make nothing at all. In fact, here I am writing hundreds of words to intellectualize and legitimize these works to myself. Because again, the artists did not need me to do this!

3.     postscript

The actual impetus for writing and sending this now was that I was going to write something on desire, on wanting things, on winning, and on putting in the work towards those things. I was watching Olympic figure skating (the whole event, front to back; if anyone reading this also did this let’s talk). I always get overwhelmed with emotion. All that work, all that suffering, and yes, all that want, compacted into the space of a few minutes, and then it’s over, and then you win or you don’t and you get what you wanted or you don’t. Around the same time I read a truly awful essay by a Harvard white dude about why and how we should want less and got really truly upset. And I’m also in the midst of getting and not getting things I’ve wanted intensely for a while now, which is truly an out of body experience.

But then I started throat clearing and talking about books and I have neither the space nor the energy to do this hypothetical essay justice now, so I’ll end here and add it to my collection of “timely” drafts that are languishing in my gdrive half-finished.

Idk dude, how do you end a newsletter? If any of my <5 subscribers reads this far wow ily! comment subscribe or reply if you feel so inclined, I guess!

1. I watched First Cow recently, which is why I’m reminded of this so viscerally. The movie itself is tonally the exact opposite of what the synopsis would have you believe; v worth the watch.