cody frank

I have a bad habit of browsing letterboxd reviews. as I’ve decreased my social media presence (as of this past weekend I disabled my instagram account), the time I might have spent idly scrolling has been redirected into an increased attention to the social media site about movies. this wasn’t even what I wanted to write about but I realized it was both funnier to say that browsing letterboxd at all is a waste of time, and also that it’s true that despite being pretty successful at training my attention away from most distraction machines, I still have been wasting time clicking through this one last site. something to note for myself, is all.

anyway, I have a bad habit of browsing negative letterboxd reviews for movies I enjoy. it strokes the same sensitive spot in my mind that secretly enjoyed being angry about the myriad stupid opinions and shitty “jokes” people share on twitter. it’s really not even worth engaging with most of these reviews: I can convince myself that it’s worthwhile to temper my enthusiasm against valid criticisms of movies I think highly of, and surely this is good to do. however, most negative reviews on letterboxd are like “this sucks” “what a waste of time” “snoozefest”—reactions that are perfectly within the audience’s right to have, but they don’t teach you anything beyond demonstrating that there are, in fact, different strokes for different folxx.

I saw Anora last night. enjoyable movie, excellent entertainment. it’s the kind of movie that should just be the standard for quality adult viewing. it doesn’t condescend to the audience, it’s shot well without being overly slick or pureed, and it’s not an adaptation of a preexisting intellectual property initially intended for children. does it deserve all the hype it’s gotten? should it have won the palm d’or? no probably not, but until they invite me to judge at cannes that’s not for me to decide. that’s not a criticism of the film, though. an indictment of the sorry state of the cinema, yes, but Anora is a perfectly “good” movie, which there are too few of nowadays.

because I enjoyed it and because it’s a buzzy movie, that means I had to see what kinds of negative things people were saying about it, and I guess try to respond to some of them. several low-star reviews feature some variation on “omg how could anyone find HUMOR in a SEX WORKER being subjected to VIOLENCE?” the long home invasion sequence in question, obviously farcical, wrings most of its humor out of how hard the hired goons try to not be violent with Ani. the men are the ones who actually suffer injuries in this scene! injuries caused by Ani!

“obviously written by a man.” and that’s a priori bad? what do you mean when you say that? there are definitely scenes that are voyeuristic, where women’s bodies are sexualized. this has never been a convincing line of criticism to me, in part because I’m a man who likes to watch nude women be sexual. but 1) you’re watching a movie, ie you are being a voyeur, and 2) it’s a movie about a stripper, do you not expect there to be some objectification involved, objectification that we all participate in, male female or somewhere in between? I could go on and on about how poorly understood the concept of the “male gaze” is in contemporary discourse, but even granting that yes there are some scenes in Anora that exist primarily to titillate, they aren’t exactly gratuitous, nor are they the primary focus of the movie. and if you mean the man Sean Baker botches the opportunity to write realistically about the life of a woman sex worker, then I would say I didn’t buy a ticket for a documentary, I bought a ticket for a convincing entertainment and feel satisfied with how the titular character was written in the context of that entertainment. which brings me to:

“Anora” may be named after its main character but Baker spends barely any time developing her. Who is Anora? What does she want? What motivates her? What does she fear? You imply she is smart but then give me a solid hour of her acting dumb. 

this is the most thorough example of the other “criticism” that some people are leveling at the movie: that Ani doesn’t have “agency,” that she lacks “interiority.” but the way this poster poses these questions points at exactly what I thought were evidence of her “agency” and her “interiority,” namely that she’s a complicated, imperfect person, driven by contradictory desires. she’s fiercely independent, and believes herself to be wised up, but the whirlwind of meeting Vanya brings out the hurt, neediness and romanticism she works overtime to suppress. she’s “smart” enough, but totally unprepared for the forces of class and power she’s stumbled into, so she “acts dumb” in an effort to maintain the illusion of having escaped her poverty. (as an aside, I also don’t think Ani is particularly smart, nor that she needs to be to be a good character. just like with men, some women aren’t very smart!) plus, to ask “Who is Anora? What does she want? What motivates her? What does she fear?” after watching the movie suggests to me that either you weren’t paying attention, or that you yourself feel a peculiar lack of agency and interiority. because this movie doesn’t condescend and trusts the audience to pick up on subtext, some people end up projecting their own impotence all over what I thought was a really well developed character.

a random bonus potshot:

I also didn’t like her casual use of the f slur that was super unnecessary, especially being used as an insult against a guy who isn’t a rapist.

sorry, are you saying it would be preferable if Ani called someone a “f****t” so long as the guy is a rapist?

it makes perfect sense to me that a certain section of very online people with Perfect Politics would take issue with Anora, even though there’s almost nothing particularly offensive about the movie aside from several f-bombs being hurled. but, I hate to break it to you, woke mob: regular people, especially lower class people you so valiantly wish to champion, are often stupid, they say offensive things, and they don’t behave with the decorum you expect everyone, even people without fancy graduate degrees, to carry themselves with. and more often than not, it doesn’t matter how much “agency” they exercise when pitted against the richest and most powerful members of the international elite.

does Anora ultimately have much to say about class or sex work or being Russian? no not really, and that’s fine! again, it’s just a solid flick. a Howard Hawks style screwball not really deserving of the kind of defense I’m mounting here. but I’m very very tired of the scandalized, self-righteous stance some people take when criticizing movies (or any art) that treat their audience like adults. it’s evidence of a neo-puritanical anti-intellectualism that makes me despair at the state of American culture. you don’t have to like the same movies as me, but if you don’t dress your distaste in smug sanctimony, then I won’t have to call you a pissy adult baby.

the past week or so I’ve been working out what exactly it is I’m trying to do. as an artist, as a person, as a wage laborer who probably needs more money. this last one’s come back to the fore, after many months of not looking for a new job, because my boss is leaving for a new position on the other side of the country. this was expected, because he’s an ambitious go getter with lots of big ideas, and the library system I work for is dysfunctional, mired in inertia, and woefully underfunded. what I didn’t expect was him telling me, after breaking the news, that I should apply for his position, and that people in the administration seem interested in me taking the job. am I interested in it? if I’m going to be at this library, I don’t really want someone else to be my boss. and if I want to move somewhere else for a library job, it would help to have “city librarian” on my resume, to make me a more attractive candidate or whatever corpo-bureau-careerist bullshit phrase it is.

what I’m actually interested in is having less job, not more. because I’m trying to determine where to place my ambitions, because, contra the slacker in me, I am an ambitious person. does that mean being ambitious in my career? library work is pretty much the only field where I feel I could be ambitious without sacrificing too much of my soul. sacrificing some of it, to be sure, but if there’s one field of democratic spirit left in America, it’s in libraries. however, while I have a knack for public library work (not that it’s hard, though of course if I have a “knack” for it I wouldn’t think it’s hard, so idk), I just can’t seem to get excited about any aspect of it, maybe because it’s still ultimately wage labor, maybe because I have artistic ambitions I can’t shake, maybe because I want to be a layabout and I resent any sort of external obligation. probably all three in varying proportions.

the question then is, what does it mean to have artistic ambitions in America in 2024? the outlook for life as an artist has never looked so grim. the options are abject poverty without any social safety net, a series of compromises in service of becoming a cog in the culture industry (compromises that are increasingly detrimental to the ability to hold onto a sense of individuality and originality, given the dire state of publishing, the music industry, the film industry, etc.), or totally selling out and approaching the prospect of being a “creative” as cravenly and psychopathically as possible. the middle path is the one most people with any measure of success (“success”) try to walk, and I don’t mean to cast (many) aspersions on anyone with the desire to see their book published by a big 5 publisher. but the demands placed on artists hoping for traditional forms of “success”—self-promotion, constant hustling, little support from institutions supposedly “backing” you, poor financial prospects—amidst the meat grinder of the “attention economy” seems to have stripped away the faculties in artists that are necessary to create truly countercultural, visionary, strident, original work. there are some artists, none of wide renown, creating nowadays whom I respect, but even them….when was the last time it felt like an artist under 45 really fuckin went for it, made a genuine stab at the heart of life, with an eye to the complexity of the modern world, and landed a critical blow? maybe I’m not reading enough contemporary work, but I also don’t read much contemporary work because I sense a failure of nerve among artists nowadays.

all of which is by way of thinking through what I want from the artistic life. I’m developing these ideas more rigorously (and artfully) elsewhere, so be on the lookout, but one upshot I’m trying to internalize is that I need to take art making a seriously as possible, while all but abandoning any hope of being “famous.” “fame” once meant achieving a certain level of recognition from the world that bolsters the possibility of the work reverberating through posterity, but now, “fame” mostly means earning the fickle support of a system that runs entirely on the evaluation of things in the most vulgar terms, those of the market. (adorno argued that this was true even in the 19th century, with “posterity” being a product mostly of the proto-advertising efforts of publishers, but we can’t discount the fact that the already debased workings of the culture industry have become so endemic as to threaten the very possibility of something like “culture” with meaning outside its worth to shareholders).

i’m not articulating this well, and i sometimes think i need to be more “dialectical” in my thinking, more specific in my examples, and more ranging in my scope. but this is my blog, so whatever. the point is, what I care about is making good art, uncompromisingly; using art as means of approaching the Sublime, of examining the conditions of reality, of figuring out “how to live a moral life a culture of death” (Charles Bowden). which is almost directly opposed to the idea of being “discovered” by the culture industry.

that leads me back around to needing to make money in a way that best supports this attitude towards making art. (also developing a certain discipline, but that’s a discussion separate from this one). whether that means taking on more responsibilities for slightly more money and something on my resume that might lead to work in a more interesting city…idk. when i put it that way…

last week I was doing some research on gangstalking for a fiction project I’m working on. gangstalking is a phenomenon where people, who call themselves “targeted individuals,” are convinced they’re being subjected to a form of coordinated harassment and surveillance by a group, usually, though not always, members of a government agency. if you search “gangstalking” or “targeted individual” on youtube you can find videos from people, clearly disturbed, describing their experiences with this harassment. people break into their homes and rearrange their belongings; people call them at strange hours from unknown numbers; people drive by their houses repeatedly; signals are sent to their brains via local cell towers; their friends and families are convinced they’ve lost their minds and cut off contact.

The U.S. Department of Justice charged [Ebay] with stalking, witness tampering and obstruction of justice as part of a “harassment and intimidation campaign” that targeted David and Ina Steiner, two private citizens who deigned to criticize the company online….

The couple used their spare time to publish EcommerceBytes, a newsletter focused on ecommerce that was often critical of the company’s business practices. The small newsletter was such a large thorn in the side of some of the higher ups at eBay — which has a market cap of more than $21 billion — that they decided to respond by sending anonymous deliveries to the company’s home in an attempt to intimidate them.

The deliveries included a book on surviving the death of spouse, a bloody pig mask, a fetal pig, a funeral wreath and live insects. The company also sent the couple private messages using sock puppet accounts on Twitter threatening to visit the victims home. 

The harassers eventually made good on its threat and sent people to surveil the couple’s home and put a GPS tracking device on their car.  

source

later in the week, bored and procrastinating, I checked in on an online social space I no longer participate in. someone had shared a screenshot that morning from a newsletter describing, as though commemorating a great civil rights victory, how a US city had declared the month of October “Havana Syndrome Awareness Month.” Havana Syndrome is a purported affliction, experienced primarily by American diplomats, caused by directed energy weapons or weaponized radio frequencies. symptoms include those “associated with a perceived localized loud sound such as screeching, chirping, clicking, or piercing noises…visual disturbances such as blurred vision and sensitivity to light…intense pressure or vibration in the head, ear pain, diffuse head pain, and cognitive problems such as forgetfulness and poor concentration.” whether or not Havana Syndrome is “real” is a matter of dispute, and is experienced by some 10,000 people total, so the idea that a US city would deem it something worth being “aware” of, as we should be of “autism” or “hepatitis,” was likely meant as cause for mockery. I myself might ridicule the idea.

what caught my interest, however, is that the city in question is the one I live in, Ventura CA. a strange coincidence, perhaps. being a active and engaged citizen, I did some searching to determine when my city would have made such a declaration. strangely, no such proclamation appears in any of the official channels. the image of the official municipal declaration looks pretty convincing, and even has the correct name of the mayor on it. only problem is the colors are not the ones usually used by the city for its official communications. the only place I can find anything like press coverage for this important issue is on a website that seems to be one where anyone can submit a “press release.”

the organization making a big fuss over this, of course, also advocates for targeted individuals to be taken seriously. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I want them to be taken seriously as well.

how many things needed to have gone exactly the way they did for you to be here, now? how much of a shame would it be to not live up to that great honor? at what point does the opportunity you’ve been afforded become missed? what if everything isn’t conspiring against you, but for you, and your fear is all that’s keeping you from the life you want?

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

there are moments in Werewolf where a much better movie shines through. the scenes in the Slaughtered Lamb are both funny and unnerving, working on the trope of creepy insular rural community to great effect. John Landis has the good sense to make you wait almost 2/3rds of the runtime before witnessing the (still shocking) transformation David suffers under the full moon, but he dangles plenty of grotesque and gory fun to keep you entertained along the way: Griffin Dunne’s decomposition, the absurd dream sequence where monstrous shock troopers with Uzis mow down David’s family. but I wasn’t crazy about this one. right from the start, the dialogue between Dunne and Naughton felt too artificial, and not in an expressionistic anti-realism way that sometimes heightens the effect of certain films. the two had chemistry but maybe were directed poorly?

right after finishing the movie I felt satisfied by its abrupt, anti-Hollywood ending. it’s a pretty funny joke to have Alex tell David she loves him, and, for just a second, suggest that maybe her expression of love got through to the monstrous wolf that’s been terrorizing Piccadilly Circus, only to immediately shoot such a saccharine ending down with what would actually happen in such a situation, namely, the police shooting down the murderous werewolf. but then I started to think that it wasn’t particularly well delivered, given that the mechanics of the plot felt a little rickety throughout.

it’s fun, I’m probably wrong to be so critical of it. it’s certainly more interesting than most major horror movies. I would recommend it if you’re a horror fan and somehow haven’t already seen it, mostly on the strength of Rick Baker’s iconic practical effects work. it’s a real shame they don’t make movies like that any more.

Ring (1998)

a simple story, well told: a girl lives a short life and dies a violent death. her spirit, unresting, seeks vengeance on the world that wronged her. the rage she projects from beyond death can not be contained. it must spread, virus-like.

there’s a fairy tale quality to the film responsible for an international craze for horror pictures coming out of East Asia. when the dread is conjured this well, the details of the story don’t actually matter all that much. exactly what’s going on with Sadako or the Izu Peninsula is a little convoluted, as is the supernatural world that Ring inhabits (why is Ryuji also sort of psychic?). and, to offer some criticism, a lot of the dialogue tells you exactly what’s animating the plot, in a way that’s ponderous yet not terribly helpful. but what’s significant about the film is how it utilizes elements of folklore to spin a yarn about an extremely modern phenomenon: image culture, and the possibility that our new networked world can spread archaic evil. it is a parable of the Spectacle, told with all the earnestness usually forbade by the Spectacle. I place Ring alongside (not in terms of quality) such works as Videodrome, Twin Peaks: The Return, and Ghost in the Shell, films that try to grapple with how electronic media have warped our bodies, dreams, and minds. despite that warping, though, we nonetheless remain human, even as what “human” means is strained to its very limit.

I’m interested in this idea of using fairy tales or folklore to help orient us in the strange new world we find ourselves in after the detonation of the atom bomb. we are still reeling from the shockwaves that technological advances sent through the 20th century. it seems to me that maybe, rather than hoping to find new plots or new characters, we as writers and artists should find new ways to vivify those archetypes that have long guided us in the shape of stories. Sadako is a onryō, a vengeful spirit of the kind that populates every culture’s imaginary in some form or another; her videotape is a curse, dark magic that all people, no matter how secularized, fear in one way or another.

I do remember the American version being scarier, though. and I kind of wish Hideo Nakata’s version weren’t so explicit and allowed the dark enigma of the story to exist on its own terms.

Blood and Black Lace (1964)

ahh giallo. what a genre. I’m toying with how to write a sort of crypto-giallo, but my conceit effectively makes it not a giallo, in that it’s from the point of view of the would-be “killer”, obviating the element of mystery from genre. I’m also wondering if it’s a story or if it’s a film. or if maybe it’s a story, and I should write a giallo-influenced film. god, do I want to make movies. but they’re so hard to make!

writing is hard too, but at least with writing all you need is something to put words on and a room to shuffle those words around in. with a film, you need that (assuming you’re the writer-director, which I would want to be), then you need film equipment, sound equipment, actors, locations, means for editing and sound mixing, days for shooting…excuses, excuses.

I really do wonder sometimes if I’m, at heart, a lit bro, or a film bro. not that it’s impossible to be both, but my original artistic dream was to direct. novel writing and directing seem very similar to me, especially if the director is also the screenwriter. idk I’m losing the thread on keeping this interesting. just something I can’t quite resolve: where to put my energies.

I finished a draft of a story today. all it took was devoting time to writing, and what do you know, writing happened.

yesterday, the first of October, I did something I often consider doing but haven’t yet until this year: I set out to spend the month finally reading all of House of Leaves. I’ve read the first 119 pages something like 3 times, but on each previous effort, I put the book down after finishing Ch. VIII and never mustered the courage or time to dive into the notoriously bonkers Ch. IX. I’ve always enjoyed that first section, so I feel obligated to at least push through the barrier and see if the rest of the work earns my attention.

a kind of “joke” in the first chapter I never caught until this read was that The Navidson Record, the fictional film that the novel is supposedly an exegesis of, was distributed by Miramax. Harvey Weinstein is mentioned by name. it’s an interesting metatextual wrinkle to know what eventually became of the king of 90s independent cinema. not that it bears much on the novel.

by happenstance, last weekend I went to a screening of the 4K restoration of the movie most associated with Miramax, Pulp Fiction. a friend of mine once posted a review on Letterboxd of Magnolia describing it as “pulp fiction but you adjust the ‘written-medium-to-filmed-medium’ dial a few notches to the left.” I mention this only to point out what’s been pointed out innumerable times before, but Tarantino makes movie movies, films that operate on the logic of what cinema does that other mediums don’t lend themselves to. he writes tight dialogue and his narratives are well constructed, but he primarily asks “what do I want to see on screen.” this is signaled somewhat ironically by the line Fabienne delivers after telling Butch she wants a pot belly: “It’s unfortunate what we find pleasing to the touch and pleasing to the eye is seldom the same”

watching Pulp Fiction brought to mind a question I often wonder about, and have probably posted about here: why are genre exercises, or crime stories, or surrealist pastiches, more likely to make for “good” movies than novels? why are novelists expected to be more “responsible” and stick to “relatable” stories than filmmakers? I realize I’m making a generalization that immediately brings to mind a million exceptions—plenty of novels from the last 100 years aren’t exactly “relatable,” and the demand for “relatability” in art has warped the direction that non-comic book, non-horror movies have taken as of late.

it wasn’t until writing this that I realized my issue is with this idea of “relatability.” I’m desiring more freedom in what I’m making, and I imagine that filmmaking gives people greater freedom than what writing fiction does. this obviously isn’t true. I’ve internalized some norm that I should do away with. ironic that I feel this as a result of reading a novel about a movie, even more so than I did when I watched the movie about movies.

I’m frustrated with the thing I’m working on in part because I feel like the technique I’m using is too…basic. it’s also pretty close to mundane lived experience in a way I’m generally not particularly interested in in fiction. but what I’m working on is important for personal, therapeutic reasons, and I recognize the desire to throw it away just as I’m digging into something genuinely felt is me trying to self-sabotage. nonetheless, I feel the need for some project that allows for greater latitude in plot and technique.

this week is the first week where I’m being very deliberate and protective of my writing time. these are your hours, show up to work. this will involve working out what exactly my process is, and maybe it’ll be beneficial to have a couple, wildly different projects to alternate between. maybe I’ll even get around to actually writing a screenplay.

I should start taking photos again.

I was made aware of a tweet posted by Tao Lin, a photo of his bedroom. I have to be made aware of tweets because I don’t look at twitter/x anymore. the room is spartan, a mat in the middle of the floor serving as bed, with some bookshelves, makeshift bookshelves, and stacks of books on the floor. otherwise empty. the conversation around this tweet also included a tweet from Lin about his cat being a “volcel,” and another where he urges himself to think less about the “deep state.” if you couldn’t guess, the tenor of this conversation was derisive. I myself said something about how it seems like Lin’s intellectual project in the last 10 years has been to reduce everything he cares about to an equal level of banality, so that his ideas about various foodstuffs are on the same plane as the possibility that there is a “breakaway civilization/deep state/new world order” suppressing anti-gravity technology. I tend to agree with Ezra Pound that an artist is always conveying a hierarchy of values in their work, but when you believe, like Lin does, that there’s no “good” or “bad” in art, only preferences, then having convictions about what’s more or less important is all but impossible.

in this way, tao lin makes it easy to dismiss him as an intellectual. unlike most people, I actually don’t object all that much to the subjects of his various (interchangeable) fascinations. it’s true that vaccines have a bunch of additives in them that probably aren’t good for us (whether that has anything to do with autism, or if autism can be “cured,” is a different question). I also spend too much time thinking about the “deep state.” what I object to is how cursory his engagement with all these subjects is, despite the fact that he can tell you exactly how many hundreds of academic papers he’s read about them.

so I included in this mockery a tweet where he “recommends” earning a living without having a boss. that’s easy to do when your parents paid for your apartment in NYC while you were establishing yourself as a young writer. don’t get me wrong, I also don’t object to him being supported by his parents. I have been so supported at various times in my life as well. but I certainly don’t give people useless advice that makes it seem like it’s easy to escape wage labor.

but I want to save my criticisms of Lin for another time, or not share them at all. if I’m being honest, you wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t for Tao Lin. 10 years ago I discovered what was by then the dying online “alt-lit” scene, and though I’ve long since tired of the stylistic choices that characterized the movement, I still believe, despite the direction the internet went since then, that the idea you can write whatever you want, without regard for good taste or professionalism, online where an audience can find you directly, a little magical. and whatever disagreements I have with him, or feelings of superiority I might feel over what he chooses to spend his time writing, the fact remains that Lin is almost pathologically dedicated to writing as a vocation. he’s who first showed me how totally committed an artist ought to be, and how far you can get on pure hardheadedness.

the image of a thin mat surrounded by books. a writer’s bedroom, stripped of anything not directly feeding into the Work. if only I had the wherewithal to live so radically devoted.

Can I be as I believe myself or as others believe me to be? Here is where these lines become a confession in the presence of my unknown and unknowable me, unknown and unknowable for myself. Here is where I create the legend wherein I must bury myself.

Miguel de Unamuno, as quoted as epigraph to Black Spring by Henry Miller

The doctrine inculcated since Aristotle that moderation is the virtue appropriate to reasonable people, is among other things an attempt to found so securely the socially necessary division of man into functions independent of each other, that it occurs to none of these functions to cross over to the others and remind each other of man. But one could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, with a secretary minding the telephone in an anteroom, at his desk until five o’clock, than playing golf after the day’s work was done. Only a cunning intertwining of pleasure and work leaves real experience still open, under the pressure of society. Such experience is less and less tolerated.

Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno

finished Open Veins of Latin America this morning. it’s so dense with information that I had to give up on the idea of taking notes, lest I end up rewriting the whole thing stripped of Galeano’s breathlessly invigorating prose. I’m not treating things like homework any more: all I ever did with homework was put in as little effort as possible so I could get a decent grade. that’s not a good way of actually learning things; almost everything I know I had to relearn after I left school.

I’m trying to be a socially conscious artist. no, a socially conscious person. that’s incredibly obnoxious to admit in that way, but fuck you. and I don’t mean socially conscious in the “In This House We Believe” stuck into the dying lawn way, I mean it in the “stare down the horror of the contemporary post-Hiroshima, post-Auschwitz, post-everything world” way. for real, though. not just by being the smartest in a roomful of people who haven’t heard of Operation Condor. could I actually tell you what happened in Operation Condor? not much beyond “we deposed Allende and backed Pinochet.” which, most people know!

nonetheless, I didn’t see the solution to my pseudointellectualism in taking more notes. it was a problem with attitude. rather than working, writing, reading, out of curiosity and humility, a lot of the time I did it out of self-imposed obligation, as a result of narcissism. this means it was more important to me that I have read than that I actually retain what I read. how little I remember of the many things I’ve read over the years can’t be attributed to smoking weed for a lot of that time, especially now that I don’t smoke weed.

anyway, I find all that boring to post here but I’m relinquishing the need to control the way I’m perceived. unleashing the tight grip on the back of my head so that I fall face first into a pile of dog shit.

Open Veins of Latin America should be required reading (god I hate that phrase. you know the only thing that should be required reading? Moby-Dick) required reading for anyone living in the global capitalist world order. nothing has so clarified my understanding of what “neoliberalism” means as reading Open Veins and watching The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire in the same week.

Open Veins was written right at the dawn of the neoliberal order, and so it’s not directly addressing everyone’s favorite political buzzword. but throughout, Galeano makes clear what the policies packaged under the misleading name “free trade” actually mean: free access to resources for European nations at the expense of colonial lands. an interesting aside highlights this for the Yanquis: during the 1800s, the United States, as we all know, was divided into the industrial North and the agrarian South. in the North, places like Massachusetts maintained strict protectionist policies that helped build their economies, using the proceeds from the robust manufacturing sector to establish economic independence from the European continent. The South, however, traded their cotton and tobacco freely with Europe (and the Northern states); some 80% of all cotton spun in European textile mills came from the Southern United States. this, however, left the South trailing behind the Progress of History, which was headed in a decidedly industrialized, capitalist direction. much like the Latin American countries who depended on proceeds from exports to buoy their economies, the South did not develop the industry it would need to hold its ground against firepower manufactured in Northern factories. of course, in Latin America, this situation came as result of violent conquest and coercive economic policy.

I’m not writing a book report, just wanted to organize some thoughts

my girlfriend moved her work desk out of our back room and into the front of the house, where it’s sunny. I moved some of my bookshelves into the backroom, where my desk is. this morning I wrote. tomorrow I’ll write. and the day after. and the day after.

I’ve had several dreams in which I’m negotiating with the deputy director of the library I work for. one of my bosses. no doubt this reflects what’s been top of mind for me this week: organizing my comrades for a union meeting to discuss issues with the library. that’s been a headache for me, because I disagree with the approach the union representatives are taking to bring these issues to the attention of management, but I’m trying to be supportive and strategic and not lose my mind seeing how easy it is for leftist organizing to fall apart.

but understanding these dreams as merely about the exoteric significance of their content is not how dreams are to be interpreted. at least not based on the ~1/4 of The Interpretation of Dreams I’ve read. so let’s dig deeper here.

the other, subtler problem I’m mulling is how to save enough time and energy for myself to work on what I really need want to work on. trying to write while fully employed is a negotiation between “management” (real life demands that require money) and the desires of the “worker” (my ambitions that don’t participate directly in the labor market).

unfortunately, I don’t remember the details of these dream negotiations. they would shed light on what my subconscious feels about how I’m allocating my efforts. there’s a vague sense I have that I’m capitulating too much to what the deputy director wants; the interactions are too chummy, too easily resolved. so often this is what a union does: back in the 40s, Adorno clocked how union leadership becomes the mirror image of management, helping to find the bare minimum of concessions that the workers will tolerate. my conscious mind knows I’m not working as much as I want to–it was a nice tweak to the way I talk to myself when I started saying writing as much as I “want” to, instead of “need” to, because that’s more accurate and more motivating (“need” to sounds too much like an order, and don’t tell me what to do!!!). but still the demands of management (my bourgeois ego) are, not even overwhelming, or strongarming, or coercing, but seducing my unconscious into betraying its ideals in the name of…convenience? comfort? two impulses that always serve Power as it’s currently exercised.

apparently even my dreams are Marxist.

I’ve been rereading Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy said that writing that doesn’t “deal with matters of life and death” is “not literature”; writers who he felt fail to meet that standard include such fêted names as Henry James and Marcel Proust. I won’t go so far as to condemn those two writers, if only because I’ve only read one of their books each. but what I would gain by passing such harsh generalizations is undeniable.

my writing lately is stagnated in plots I find small and inconsequential: a love story, a tale of a cracked homeless man, a domestic story with a sheen of psychosis. they’re fine, I need to finish editing them and get some feedback, but I haven’t found an expression for the deeper, wider, stranger subjects that draw me to my favorite works of literature—I agree with McCarthy that literature ought to address those questions that have long haunted humanity through its somnambulant tottering towards annihilation. no doubt love, eroticism and epistemology are among those questions, but striking at the heart of them requires a much more forceful stab than what I’ve mustered so far.

reading McCarthy has me thinking a lot about what the writing life demands. he was someone who totally dedicated himself. he didn’t work a day job. granted, it was easier to get by in 1976 not working a day job than it is in 2024. but granting that isn’t an excuse for not writing. friend of the blog jordan sent the groupchat this tweet a few weeks ago:

it’s been a struggle to build better habits and structures. distraction is so easy—the way the world is now, everything is competing for everyone’s attention. the past few weeks have been a process of quieting the mind. but even that’s become a method for procrastination. all that’s needed is to do.

outlining a novel, an idea that’s come upon me suddenly that I feel is necessary to work through before I can move onto other, grander ideas. but McCarthy can teach me two other lessons: work on multiple things at once, and quit outlining. the current idea for a novel, I’m treating as though it were a screenplay, with a semi-definite idea of genre and an eye for structuring the plot into scenes beforehand; but I’m running into a problem where I feel ill-equipped to make the pieces of the plot lock together. this, I hope, I can avoid by starting with the premise and writing by feel, contra what I thought about outlining to get basic beats down so that I could be more spontaneous in the writing. total coherence is also unnecessary, especially on first pass. this idea’s a kind of slacker noir thriller, a la the big lebowski.

how much of these gestures towards questions of life and death, whether the universe is hostile or hospitable, if eroticism isn’t inherently dangerous despite the liberal insistence that shame around sex is merely a cultural artifact of puritanical societies—are these only a matter of rhetoric, and not a matter of content? need a novel be about a marauding mob of murderous misfits to pose questions rooted in gnosticism and nietzschean horror?

well, no, but sometimes extreme gestures help give perspective on what’s necessary.

because my email inbox was more disorganized than an Italian airport (I’ve never been, that’s just the simile that came to mind, sorry to the Italians whose movies and culture I adore), I missed or ignored the notice from my webhosting service alerting me to an upcoming renewal charge. so yesterday my card was charged $360 for the next three years of webhosting. I could have disputed the charge with my credit card company, since I’m really trying to save money right now (more on that later). but I don’t really want to delete this blog. but I do need to find something to use it for consistently. and now that I’m out $360 for it, I feel pretty motivated to do that.

the details of all this are too onerous to get into here, but the short version is that the library I work for is more disorganized than an Italian airport. I have suspicions about impropriety with the budget, but only suspicions. administration has been less than forthright when we union representatives demand answers about how payroll funds are being allocated. the upshot is that they’ve shuffled around, collapsed, or disappeared positions in the organization to the point that everyone who works on the floors of our libraries knows we’re short staffed and can’t keep up operations. I am trying to lend my efforts to the union’s push for transparency in the hopes of correcting the poor work conditions that have resulted. but if you’ve ever worked against the forces of capital, you know it’s almost always a losing fight, if not immediately, then in the long run. when I learned the latest development in this wanton crusade against us, I wanted to quit. not quit rabble rousing, but quit the library all together. I don’t see this organization improving any time soon, if at all. and as much as I believe in libraries, as much as I want to be on the right side of this struggle eroding the final democratic institution left in America, I don’t want to make my name as a librarian. it’s a fine thing to fall back on, something to be proud of, but, as naturally as the work comes to me, I don’t feel it’s my “calling.”

these past few weeks, I’ve been home alone while my girlfriend was out of town. top of my priorities was watching as many movies as possible. I’ll post something about movies soon. but internally, my priority was clearing away the noise that’s built up in my head over the years to better hear what is in fact calling to me. because my mind had become more disorganized than an Italian airport. I built strategies that made looking at my phone less appealing–making the phone as “dumb” as possible. the removal of social media access caused flair ups in the addiction response that manifested as lurking subreddits I don’t care about, checking in on chatrooms I no longer participate in, and, most recently, cleaning up my email inbox. the irony is that all these habits, which aim at alleviating me of the burden to think and feel, brought me to years old emails I sent to people I care about but no longer speak to, or drafts of essays, stories, ideas that I never followed through on. try as we might, we can never escape ourselves.

what’s calling to me is a better version of myself who isn’t so afraid to make a go at being an actual artist, and not just someone who flatters himself by judging other harshly while never risking being so judged.

in La dolce vita, which I watched for the first time about a week ago, Steiner warns Marcello against following his example. Steiner lives a comfortable life of domesticity, with two children and his wife, and he and his friends fancy themselves the intelligentsia of Rome, an estimation it appears Marcello shares. but Steiner admits that he doesn’t have the goods; he laments that he’s “too serious to be an amateur, and too much an amateur to be a professional.” the stability of his bourgeois life precludes him from being overcome with the teeming bustle and drama of the cosmos, a prerequisite, Fellini seems to be suggesting, for the kind of passion that fuels the brightest creative minds. the ultimate fate of Steiner suggests what Fellini thought of such pseudointellectuals.

when Steiner said he’s too serious to be an amateur, and too much an amateur to be a professional, my own disembodied voice whispershouted in my ear: and so are you, asshole.

being ambitious is hard work. because the library I work for doesn’t care about my success as an employee, I’ve been seeking librarian positions elsewhere. but the process of applying for public sector jobs is grueling and slow. if I hear back from a library and they deemed my resume satisfactory, I have to take a test, then depending on where I’m ranked among test takers, I’m placed on an eligibility list that hiring committees refer to for anything that opens in the year or so after the creation of the list. and if I get hired and I want to be promoted to a new position a few years down the line, I have to do all that over again, after having dedicated myself to proving my competence for the position I held. none of this is appealing to me. it sounds like a whole lot of fucking work. but I can’t skate by on some low level position forever, both because the pays not good enough, and I’m not someone content to skate. I’ve long skated through life, and it’s not satisfying. so if I know I have to put hard work into something, I should put it into what I care about. which is writing.

another movie I watched is There Will Be Blood. in one of the film’s many famous scenes, Daniel Plainview tells someone that “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.” this time watching, I wondered how much Daniel’s Machiavellianism is an exaggeration of Paul Thomas Anderson’s own ambition. how ruthless must an artist to be to achieve greatness? posed that question, perhaps you would preach equanimity and grace, that worldly success is not worth sacrificing one’s humanity over. to which I say, “I drink your milkshake” before beating you to death with a bowling pin. spoiler alert or whatever.

saving money will come in handy in the event that I decide it’s not worth it to even do the bare minimum of work at my job, and that I need to skip town or bar back or do something else that would free up more time to really commit to what I’m meant to do: lay waste to the myriad mediocrities that make up the contemporary publishing industry.