Month: December 2023

the library i work at flooded extensively. the building is 15,064 square feet, and damn near every single one of those square feet of carpet was sopping wet. last wednesday night/thursday morning, the oxnard area was inundated with four inches of rain in a single hour. local senior living apartments near the harbor saw the worst of the flooding. whoever said it never rains in southern california usually is right, but in case you haven’t heard, things have gotten a little weird, weather-wise, around the world.

in addition to the carpet, up to two feet of the drywall was saturated with water. the library administration team told staff that it will take at least two weeks to remediate the building, and the library will be closed indefinitely. my boss told me, “off the record,” that it will be five to six months before we can open up again. he also mentioned, “candidly,” that he’s trying to avoid this leading to furloughs.

i’m currently sitting at a different library branch, one that’s much smaller, only open in the afternoons, and, for most of the day, quiet as the grave. i’m still waiting to find out what the next few months will look like for me, and desperately hoping that my life isn’t terribly inconvenienced by it. and, “candidly,” “off the record,” a furlough wouldn’t be the most inconvenient for me, so long as i can get unemployment.

this all’s been an opportunity to reflect on how i feel about the library i work for (not great), how i feel about public library work in general (better than i thought), what i want to focus my attention on more actively (writing), whether i want to stay in ventura (to be determined). i’ve applied for a few other librarian positions. i’m slowly gathering notes for some kind of work about Ventura, this placed i’ve lived for eight and a half years now. i’m toying with maybe doing renegade local journalism, and embracing the idea that ventura can be like kafka’s prague, or pessoa’s lisbon, or wcw’s patterson.

there’s a lot of time to use while i’m here at this empty library. i better get to writing.

a while back, my friend angie messaged me about a nabokov novel she was reading at the time, i don’t remember which. “occasionally while reading nabokov i’ll feel pynchon like, ghosting across the page. and then i go a little cross eyed trying to figure out how u teach that particular style.”

lore has it that even if pynchon didn’t take nabokov’s lit class at cornell, he at the very least sat in on it. vlady doesn’t recall young tommy, but vera nabokov claims to remember reading his essays, which were written in half-printing, half-script. independent of that, it’s obvious that nabokov looms large as an influence on pynchon; there are overt references to lolita in the crying of lot 49, and a particularly shocking sequence in gravity’s rainbow is likely intended to be in dialogue with lolita as well. to say nothing of both writers’ affinity for word games and structural derring-do; compare pale fire with the SEZ WHO revelation halfway through gravity’s rainbow, or the “woman abducted by jesuits” side plot, as told by the teenagers, that melts into the primary plot, as told by cherrycoke, in mason & dixon.

anyway, i asked angie how she would characterize the resonance between the two writer’s styles, and she said “sentences will have like, 5 turns of phrase that should make u stop and gawk but an internal propulsion prevents you from pausing. feeling ranges from a pleasant tension to total sub/dom dynamic.”

an effective, and illuminating, characterization, i think. the idea of writer as dom is a useful one, and one i’ve thought about a lot since this conversation. a dom expects acquiescence, even to outlandish demands. but a dom also has to earn the obedience of their sub; in sartre’s formulation, the sadist/dom is ultimately dependent on their subject’s willingness to submit, an uncertain prospect, given the abyss of knowledge between consciousnesses. in terms of literature, the work has to earn the reader’s willingness to submit to the whims of the writer, which makes for a delicate interplay between the expectations of the reader, the compulsions of the writer, and the demands of the muse. (i’m working out a theory that further complicates this, where the artist is actually submissive to the domineering forces the drive the artist towards creation, but that’s for another time.)

so in this sense, a novel is akin to the rarefied time/space of BDSM sex, with the appropriate building of tension, cresendos of intensity, and choreographies of ego-stripping eroticism.

to map this onto a different coordinate system, one could also conceive of a novel as a sequence of yoga asanas. chapters place emphasis on secondary and tertiary aspects circling some central concern. similarly, a yogic sequence will have ebbs and flows, spikes in difficulty along with periods of recovery, a focus on specific muscle groups or an “intention,” stretches of nigh unbearable discomfort, a gradual and conscientious progress towards certain “peak” poses, and a denouement that symbolizes death, with the suggestion of rebirth.

decided it’s time for a rewatch on David Lynch’s films (and “coincidentally” his wife filed for divorce the same week). despite abiding love for the work, a neurotic part of me’s avoided revisiting it for the past few years, especially twin peaks, for reasons too baroque, esoteric, and plain psychotic to get into here. the short version is i became convinced that twin peaks is a refracted message from the astral plane about my personal karma, and the associations resulting from this, again, psychosis, made me wary of ever being able to watch the show again. but i’ll get there soon. i rewatched eraserhead this past sunday. in my letterboxd review, i said “David Lynch is a gnostic. in his films, the universe is a failed, fallen realm, plagued, menacing, and grotesque. attempts at making sense of existence will always only dredge up more mystery, more confusion, more insanity. our only hope is in embracing the darkness within, and in so doing, allowing the light to shine forth all the more clearly, despite futility, despite absurdity. these are the themes he will explore throughout his career, but with Eraserhead, he presents them in utero, waiting to be born.”

if i disentangle the ego-driven paranoia from the phenomenon, i’d still argue that art is a “refracted message from the astral plane.” those works that most resonate with you, they reveal something about you, sometimes uncomfortable things.

even if i don’t want to grant the extremity of my most deranged and neurotic associations, even if it’s not exactly the case that the correspondences i feel acutely in times of psychic distress are as meaningful as they seem, even if it’s purely coincidence about lynch’s divorce….put it this way. why is it the case that around the time i finally decide to brave the neurosis and revisit a cinematic realm which holds particularly strong associations in my psyche, why’s it that i have a dream in which i have two car accidents, then the following day get into an actual car accident? explain that one for me, freud and/or jung. (everyone’s fine, it was a minor fender bender in the parking lot.)

slowly an essay about a theory of writing is coming together.

my day job workplace is an absolute shitshow right now. fittingly, the management team all have lynchian names that i won’t divulge here, not for their sake, but for opsec.