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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.

With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it cannot be wondered at that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivolity in people. They say to themselves, It is better to be alone than in bad company. And it is really a wish to be met—the wish to find society for their hope and religion—which prompts them to shun what is called society. They feel that they are never so fit for friendship as when they have quitted mankind and taken themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the hills or the woods which they can people with the fair and worthy creation of the fancy, can give them often forms so vivid that these for the time shall seem real, and society the illusion.

But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprises of education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote.

“The Transcendentalist,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

started keeping a physical diary. better to do more personal writing where it’s not stored on some anonymous server; i have much more faith in the longevity of paper than i do in these information networks we’ve collectively decided to run the entire world with. well, it wasn’t exactly a collective decision, it was forced upon everyone in a fait accompli by the ruling technocratic archons of the aeon, but as with most archontic fait accomplis, everyone pretty much falls in line because what else is there to do.

i also sense that keeping track of what’s going on with me will be important in the coming months and years. there’s nothing specific on the horizon, but something in the air, a certain cast of light from the setting sun. change is a-coming.

a refrain i’ve encountered a few times online is that americans are woefully ill-equipped for the times we’re living in, which begs the question, what times are we living in exactly? a time when no one uses the phrase “begs the question” for its original meaning? birds of prey circle overhead. the wind shifts directions. the kids look up from their phones, if only for a minute. what’s in store for us? if there’s hell below, are we all gonna go?

seriously though, i’m worried. and possibly thrilled. like when jack nicholson met diane keaton, something’s gotta give.

catching up on the NBA.

working on a story about a crazy dude i helped at the library a while back who thinks a medical device he had implanted is actually a sentient AI that’s taken over control of his body. but he also hacked it because he saw the doctors input the device’s password. interesting to note that even though a person playing my “part” in the scenario is in the story, the crazy person protagonist is the primary site of personal, though kabbalistic, identification for me.

thinking a lot about the feedback my boss gave me on the other story, especially notes to (eye roll here) “show don’t tell,” and to “put some emotion into it.” the fact that he so often irritates me means there’s something for me to learn.

reading sorrows of young werther for the first time. thinking about how romanticism and hopeless infatuation are related to german fanaticism and fascism. seems significant that emo music became a mainstream force in pop during the highly jingoistic, imperialistic Bush era.

myself, i’m craving strange.

catching up on the albums i missed this year so i can throw together a favorites of 2023 list, like i used to do back in college. to the surprise of no one who’s been paying attention to him, billy woods’s album with kenny segal producing is killer, the closest woods likely will ever get to an accessible feel-good record.

i think any writer working nowadays who isn’t paying attention to rap music is missing out on what’s the most interesting development in language arts since, i don’t know, the modernists? since amiri baraka? you could argue that amiri baraka’s poetry is kind of proto-rap. anyway, if a writer isn’t paying attention to rap music they’re also probably racist.

trying to incorporate the influence of rap into literature is something i’ve always vaguely been interested in. sometimes as an exercise i’ll do a kind of automatic writing where i follow the flow/rhythm/rhyme of the words without much concern for intelligibility, coherence, etc. like i’m writing ghostface killa bars, basically. i also often fantasize about producing and recording rap albums that strive for a literary quality. billy woods is bar none the most talented and literary rapper going right now, maybe ever. off the top of my head i can remember allusions to aleksandr solzhenitsyn, william burroughs, DFW, and cormac mccarthy. a quick google search is telling me that at least one person has made the argument that billy woods is the best american writer of his generation, which i think is my generation too? all of which is to say i think deliberately drawing on him as influence will help breathe some fresh life into my writing when i’m feeling stuck, or like i’m getting lost in ideas when i need to foreground language. other rappers to think about: MF DOOM, the aforementioned ghostface, fellow wu-tanger GZA, vince staples, earl sweatshirt (who also put out a great record this year), danny brown, biggie, schoolboy q.

tangentially, listening to a lot of hip hop always makes me want to smoke weed. it’s been about 5 months since i last smoked. this year i had some weird experiences that i’ve written about elsewhere. why weed made me semi-psychotic i don’t know, and since then every time i’ve smoked it’s been hard to not be on guard, and therefore back in it, against that happening again. and while i definitely smoked way too much weed for a long time, i do miss having it as a part of my life. being stoned makes it easier to entertain unconventional ideas, it makes music food and sex more enjoyable, it helps me focus when i’m producing hip hop beats. but will i ever regularly use it again? should i ever use it at all again?

maybe i ought to try growing my own. the legal weed they sell at the dispensaries is too damn strong.

anyway i think since i’ve fucked up my newsletter so bad lately i’ll shoot to have the next one be a 2023 album list.

in a paywalled post on his very lucrative and popular Substack, the ersatz Hunter Thompson Matt Taibbi covered a recent development in the ongoing battle between European regulatory bodies and the Big Tech firms. The EU passed the Digital Services Act, which places far greater onus on platforms for monitoring content and for doing away with manipulative user interface designs. as part of this roll out, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton has sent letters to Zuck and Musk warning them that they’ll need to do something about the “illegal content” on their respective platforms if they want to avoid hefty consequences for continuing to operate on the Continent.

Taibbi’s very reasoned and thoughtful stance on this supposedly censorious overreach by the EU is that Zuck and Musk “should hire Louis C.K. and have him flown to Brussels to tell Breton in person, American-style, to eat a bag of d— (sic).” the post is titled “Europe, Get Off Our Speech Lawn,” and subtitled “The European Union deigns to lecture America on free expression.” you don’t need that lecture though, huh Matty, seeing how polite you were to self-censor your slam dunk dick joke.

whatever Taibbi goes on to say about this I have no idea, because I’m not giving Substack my credit card information. this morning I’m feeling pretty down on Substack, despite my own use of the platform, since they rely on schlubs like me to provide free content while making cash deals with gigapundits like Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, all to legitimize their business model and erode what’s left of public journalism in the exact same way Uber destroyed taxi cab companies.

the extent to which the DSA actually censors anything that would not be censored in offline media is unclear to me. “hate speech, child sexual abuse material, scams, non-consensual sharing of private images, promotion of terrorism, the sale of counterfeit or unsafe products and copyright infringement,” these are all things that American news media can’t broadcast/print anyway, so is Taibbi upset he won’t be able to promote a scam selling counterfeit child pornography that incites terrorism on Twitter? maybe, I don’t know the man. I didn’t even read the newsletter. anything’s possible.

the DSA also covers a broader, vaguer, and more insidious range of content: disinformation. this is where things get murky. what constitutes disinformation? who decides? is disinformation pushed by government officials, usually styled “propaganda,” at issue here? is anything the EU disagrees with false, anything it says true?

these are dark times, epistemologically speaking. for centuries, power maintained tight control with strict monitoring of who can know what, what secrets must be kept. since the the exponential increase in information made available in the last 60 or so years, a different strategy was taken, at least in the West: drown everyone in so much information that it’s impossible to sort through it all and come to an adequately “informed” decision. this makes it so that what’s easiest is to continually seek out confirmatory sources, partitioning off the social sphere into noncommunicable psychic sectors. in such a world, what difference does it make if a few people get the straight dope, if everyone’s convinced their mutually exclusive view of the world is Gospel? and yet here we have a regulatory body, a supranational hierarchical power structure, fretting over the idea that the wrong information might get into the wrong hands.

again, I have no idea if Taibbi wrote about any of this; he can make money keeping his posts behind a velvet rope that I don’t care to be let into. meanwhile, I’m offering all this, for free, and no one even notices.

the situation in Israel demonstrates a cunning on the part of Hamas that some commentators can only explain by arguing that “this is what Netanyahu wants,” or “Mossad knew this would happen, and let it happen.” (gee if that’s the case, then I wonder what other things Mossad might have known about and maybe facilitated, perhaps 22 years ago in Manhattan? I digress) Israel’s domestic politics are not pretty right now, or they weren’t until a week ago, with 38 straight weekends of protests against Netanyahu’s “alleged” corruption indicative of deep divisions in the country. and there’s nothing like an invasion to rally unity in the face of, as Israeli officials are so fond of saying, subhuman barbarian hordes. subhuman barbarian hordes with a keen sense of strategy and timing.

anyone not bought-and-sold, either literally or psychologically, by Israeli propaganda knows it’s ridiculous to condemn violence on the part of Hamas without at least mentioning the nearly 80-year-long campaign of settler colonialism carried about by Zionists under the auspices of Western, namely Anglo-American, patrons. others can detail the systematic, psychopathic destruction of Palestinians, the huge disparities in casualties, the shameless bad faith with which Israel claims its “right to defend itself.” of course, Free Palestine, down with Zionism.

deeper, though, than the overt anti-colonialist struggle, the situation in Israel is a warning shot for the coming crack-up of the neoliberal world order. Israel is and always has been a white colonialist project given justification by cynical deployment of “anti-Semitism”, so that the Anglo-American establishment can maintain an outpost in the oil rich Middle East. the reign of the New Romans (who incidentally operate Empire more like the Spanish than the Romans, but don’t spoil their fun) is only possible so long as pipelines pump that sweet petroleum out of the Arabian desert and into American or British banks. part of maintaining this foothold is in Israel projecting an image of indomitable strength, hence the billions of dollars in funding and arms sent there each year by the United States–Obama signed an agreement that promises $38B to Israel between 2017 and 2028, and Antony Blinkey has said they’re working on sending more aid to assist in what Netanyahu believes will be a prolonged conflict.

if this is to be a prolong conflict, it means that Israel is not in the position of indomitable strength it needs to contain this uprising. a very bad sign for Empire. and if the conflict drags on, those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause will join up with Hamas, further destabilizing the region. the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, long-time supporters of Palestinian liberation, may be called into to provide reinforcements. keep in mind that World War I, aside from being a clusterfuck of petty squabbles between the decrepit houses of the European aristocracy, broke out due to conflicts between empires seeking access to markets and capital. nowadays, China, Russia, and the Anglosphere are competing to assert market dominance in the 21st century. Ukraine serves as proxy conflict between the US and Russia over economic access to the Eurozone. and now, with the promise of a prolonged conflict in the Middle East, the oil fields of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Iran may now be up for grabs as well.

the US has already promised to dispatch aircraft carriers and destroyers to the Eastern Mediterranean to support Israel’s “right to defend itself,” “enough to start World War III,” according to Marwan Bishara of Al-Jazeera. Bishara worries that Netanyahu may be “tricking the Biden administration into war” with Iran, fulfilling Bibi’s long standing dream of punishing the Islamic Republic for its nuclear program. but Biden has also, despite his gestures towards military withdrawal, promised to not “leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran” in the Middle East. it would be extremely rash of Netanyahu to expand a conflict that his IDF does not seem operationally capable of sustaining, but then again these kinds of wars don’t explode out of reasoned strategy. and the Empire is buckling, a position that only ever leads to rasher, and more violent, flailing.

and if Lebanese Hezbollah gets involved, Israel may be stretched so thin that its only option will be nuclear. and make no mistake, even without nuclear arms, there’s not much Israel can offer other than total devastation, either in a military victory over the present invasion, or by reducing Gaza, the West Bank, and the entire region, to ruins, fulfilling the doomsday prophecies of the evangelicals, those Jesuits of the Amerikkkan Empire.

but the ruins of the old world are always the fertilizer of the new, and if there is to be a new world, we must rethink what liberation is, where to best direct rebellion, and how to manage resources without the extractive logic of Empire.

against the advisement of my mental health professionals, not to mention my better judgement, I’ve been listening to Death Is Just Around the Corner a lot lately, for the first time in years. why is this a bad idea? aside from Mikey’s contagious pessimism, astute as it may be (though he seems better since kicking junk, and my parasocial well wishes to him for it), it means I’m thinking, as though I don’t already, too much about Pynchon, too much about Gravity’s Rainbow, too much about how maybe there’s nothing left for me to say.

because I only ever need the slightest nudge in that direction, now I’m thinking maybe I’ll reread Gravity’s Rainbow. to be sure, I will eventually. but I probably ought not right now. again, peace be upon MSJ, no shade, one love, all that, but I really don’t want to be a guy who filters basically everything through his understanding of Gravity’s Rainbow. it’s a little much to have every episode of your podcast make reference to, or quote at length, one novel, exhaustive as that novel might seem.

of course, MSJ has a broad and deep understanding of a lot literature, so I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. in fact, I’m envious of how much he seems to know, how thorough and dedicated his thinking is, the conviction and self-assurance he has connecting a variety of disparate ideas. why can’t I seem to maintain that steely-eyed focus? probably because it would make me a spoil-sport, a wet blanket, a crank, an impolite dinner guest. and unfortunately, somewhere along the way, I learned, subconsciously, that it’s a lot easier to be a go along to get along kind of guy. why, I know all too well why. it’s embarrassing how much psychoanalysis still holds true.

with the help of my actual, not metaphorical, mental health professional, who isn’t a psychoanalyst per se, I’m coming to realize a whole host of shit I spent the better part of my life deliberately not realizing. not like, repressed memories or whatever, I don’t even really believe in repressed memories. but working through shit, that’s what making art is for, but also but my internal resistance to fully submerging into what all that shit is is, well, there’s a lot of tricks my ego plays to dissuade me from getting there. one of the most obvious, to me anyway, is thinking about Gravity’s Rainbow, rather than touching upon whatever it is in me that’s fucked.

complicating my own personal internal defense mechanisms is that I have to spend 40 hours a week turning off my ability to feel and think deeply so that I can do customer service. and more than anything, what I envy Pynchon for is having been granted the time and money to lose his fucking mind enough to create a book that seems to encapsulate the whole world. but to do that, he had to really touch upon whatever it is in him that’s fucked, and also whatever it is in the world that’s fucked, and boy howdy is that a lot of pain to feel.

the staccato geometry of the overlapping window panes recalls modernist techniques either passé or endlessly replicated by hacks far removed from whatever pressures moved artists in the decades following the birth of the 20th century. little did those artists know where all that sound and fury might lead to, but we know, a century later, that whatever pressures bear down on us now aren’t moving us in the same ways, if at all.

snippets of a language we might understand if we listened a little closer, and studied a little harder.

everyone looks tired, and if they don’t, well, we’re not sure they live in the same world.

we listened to stravinsky on spotify. we watched the angles of telephone lines shift with our perspective.

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