cody frank

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.

I have an aversion to realism for esoteric (to me) reasons that I find justification for in an essay, Lemurian Time War, from the CCRU about William S. Burroughs:

Every act of writing is a sorcerous operation, a partisan action in a war where multitudes of factual events are guided by the powers of illusion….Even representative realism participates—albeit unknowingly—in magical war, collaborating with the dominant control system by implicitly endorsing its claim to be the only possible reality

I say this is a post-hoc justification because I don’t know exactly why I feel averse to writing realism. a story draft I just finished is more or less realistic; it takes as stylistic departure a certain kind of corporate HR language that lends the story a slight strangeness, but what “happens” in the story is normal everyday life stuff. for whatever reason, when I think of the kind of fiction I’d like to write, I imagine surrealism or magical realism, cartoonish burlesque, dream-logic narratives that defy clean categorization and play with the expected relationship of literature to whatever “reality” is. I like the story I wrote, but it also seems “small,” both for being more-or-less realistic, and for not being all that engaged politically or socially. (plus it’s short, only ~1700 words on first draft.)

relatedly, there’s probably some unresolved tension in my psyche that manifests in seeing my own life as “boring,” and that therefor the “things that happen to me” aren’t worth writing about. the one story I wrote isn’t about something that happened to me, though I can see where personal experience has been transformed into the emotional background of the story. the other story I’m working on is more closely informed by actual events of my life, but not related in the way I would tell the story to someone interested in the actual events of my life; things are exaggerated, characters are rendered unkindly, things are rearranged for effect. strangely, though, this story lends itself more to a surreal, unstable mode. so I guess what this post is about is, what exactly is art’s relation to reality, and what exactly makes something “realistic.”

the reason this question comes up for me is that the two artists—David Lynch and Thomas Pynchon—that I most admire and who I spend the most time thinking about do not tell stories that are “realistic.” and a lot of the time I spend thinking about their stories involves me wondering how exactly I can tap into the kind of dream logic they operate on. this line of thinking feeds on a kind of schoolmarmish, backwards undergraduate way of thinking about art, which conceives of artists as puzzle makers, cryptographers with secret correspondence keys for what their images, symbols, motifs “translate” into in “normal” terms. which is to say, it’s a conception of art as a purely intellectual exercise. Lynch himself says that the way he works is by intuition and revision, developing ideas, reworking, taking things out, putting new things back in, so that the symbols in his work are living, dynamic glyphs, not pure allegories.

there are two tangential concerns in this post, I think: one, that I need to allow myself to work at whatever I find engaging to work at, free of any preconceived notion of what’s “supposed to” be made. this might mean dropping the demand that I make something “weird” or “surreal” or “dreamy” in favor of making something at all, even if it’s closer to “realism” than I sometimes think I should be. and two, that to work in a dream mode, I have to be comfortable with not understanding exactly what the thing I make means, or at least not having a readymade account, were someone to ask for one. (worth noting that neither Lynch nor Pynchon [Lynchon, lol] ever deign to give an account of their work, despite there clearly being something the work means to them, personally)

and I guess, a third thing: that reality is stranger than anyone who demands realism from their art would ever admit. writing always requires contact with “real life”—even in the most effective but deranged stories, something resonates with our understanding of the world—but “real life” sometimes is surreal, or like a film noir, or a ghost story.

this all speaks to what I always want from art: making art ought to feel like getting away with something I shouldn’t be allowed to do. this is how I take Adorno’s declaration that “every work of art is an uncommitted crime.” art is an act of transgression, borne out of sublimated anger at a perceived lack of freedom (at least, it is for me).

which isn’t to say that the content of art has to be transgressive. but I have long been drawn to art that is transgressive. lately I’ve been watching more movies, but, not wanting to be someone who just watches what’s offered by a single corporation, I’ve been seeking out movies that aren’t offered by the good people at Criterion. if you’re someone who loves movies but doesn’t love mainstream movies, if you venture away from the hallowed halls of what Criterion collects, you’re bound to stumble upon a subset of movies that are broadly seen as “trashy,” “bad taste,” “lurid,” etc. I haven’t myself yet watched many of these genre movies, but as I’ve oriented myself in this section of the virtual video shop, there’s a thrill in realizing I can tell any kind of story I want. for whatever reason, it’s been immensely helpful to me to start thinking about the stories I want to tell as genre movies: crime thriller! erotic horror! paranormal noir! some of them I could actually even do treatments of as screenplays, but even if I don’t plan to make movie (I do), thinking of a story as a movie, to my broken 21st century brain, is way more exciting than thinking of stories in the Gordon Lish/Iowa Workshop way of words after words, plot’s not important, blah blah blah. using genre conventions is a way of swinging a crowbar against the confines of the Reality Control System.

even this post, I’m not sure I’m getting across what I mean, and I’m kinda just letting the ideas spill out without really knowing where it’s going, trusting it means something to me and sure I’ll draw connections as they come to mind but fuck you.

palm trees shade
valentine etched in concrete

flowers pressed 
—some other 
time, boot heel
crunches glass cracklings
a curbside shindig
no one was invited to

it's too much to wonder
what could be
what is
is this

the hills of Sanfrancisco
separate aeons
of possibility,
futures cancelled
to save the worst of all
it won't end 

the coda to The Phantom Empire, by Geoffrey O’Brien, touches upon a question I ponder from time to time: will we always have movies? won’t, at some point in the collapsing future, the tools necessary to make films become harder and harder to come by? most significantly, contemporary film stock is made from petroleum byproducts—and the components in digital cameras are extracted in processes that are also detrimental to the environment. the mechanism for distribution, the zigzagging of flights between locations, studios, and premieres, the state subsidies that launder the blood money of the American Experiment. “And will this empire indeed go on forever? Won’t the electricity run out, won’t the raw materials have to be rationed, won’t such practices fall victim to the impending war against pollutants?….[Maybe people in the future] would simply lose interest. Having evolved out of a world where the little living pictures were everywhere, perhaps the most exciting thing they could witness would be the screen going blank.”

movies, more than any other medium, inspire the deepest ambivalence in me. people can decry novels as “bourgeois,” reflections of a particular formation of subjectivity, relics of an era and a class with the leisure time required to read hundreds of pages. I’m not convinced by this, but it gives pause, and novels certainly can be used as a method of withdrawal from the world. nonetheless, stories, even those written on paper and bound in books, will not likely disappear, and they have been and will remain objects that beckon to the highest aspects of the human spirit.

painting has certainly become a little more than a barnacle on the flank of financialized capital. since at least the 1950s, what appears on a canvas is less important than how much money can exchange hands behind it. the most “valuable” paintings more often than not sit in Swiss warehouses or on Caribbean islands, hidden from the prying hands of national governments seeking to remove wealth from circulation, not to mention any eyes that might see something beautiful. but then we are confronted with those images on the cave walls of southern France, and we’re reminded just how mysterious this impulse is, to represent, in whatever material’s to hand, the forms that constitute the world.

movies, though. movies swallowed reality. movies promise a shared community experience, but only by turning each audience member into an interchangeable cipher. the movies colonize our memories, our dreamspaces; not just with their plots, but with the private lives of their actors, the business intrigue between their production companies. the movies are everywhere, too: television shows, advertisements, music videos, TikTok dances, YouTube essays, surveillance footage. and the movies operate by flagrantly manipulating perception: whether or not you recognize it as technique, or an illusion, the fact is that with movies we’ve managed the most effective means of mind control ever dreamt of. the Roman empire would kill to have movies, and perhaps that’s exactly what happened; Leni Riefenstahl, Ronald Reagan, Top Gun: Maverick.

but a world without movies? without the beauty, splendor, horror, or longing we’ve experienced through the screen? without these glimpses into a reality we inhabit but can’t quite realize? it pains me to imagine a world without movies. but perhaps that’s what exactly what the movies want us to feel.

watched “Crazeologie” last night, which is a student film directed by Louis Malle, who most people know as the director of My Dinner With Andre. on a technical level the short was competent, demonstrating a natural feel for how to work the camera, how to pace dialogue and block actors. as an attempt at making Cinema of the Absurd, hey, Malle tried at least, but not everyone can be Samuel Beckett.

i’m discouragemaxxing. hackcore. totally impostorsyndromepilled. it’s giving failed novelist. big poseur vibes. this blog is boring-coded. in short, he’s NGMI.

up till today, I’ve been pretty good about working here and there on this and that. today I haven’t written anything and don’t feel much like writing anything. the things I’m reading all make me feel less-than-confident in my own ability to write eloquently or poetically. it’s part of the problem with writing, I guess, feeling like what you yourself write reads as too obvious or trite, because of course if you’re writing your own thoughts which are always buzzing in your own voice in your own head, then it’ll sound uninspired to you. (really need to stop publicizing my doubts; I’m fucking talented, & no one has my perspective, & all my opps [who live in my head] are bitchass chumps).

feeling like I shouldn’t only be writing “watched this, read this, listened to this,” or if I’m going to do that, do other kinds of writing (my coworker once complimented the writing I do here but also said he would like to see more “day-to-day” kind of writing, something I very much struggle with, and justify away via projected disdain for autobiographical writing, though that all probably suggests it’s what I need to lean into the most, the area of writing I find most daunting; on this note, I rather enjoyed my friend’s latest newsletter which he characterized as too “dear diary”) or else do more rigorous critical writing. to resurrect my dormant newsletter, I’m planning a big multi-part project that’s probably actually a bad idea because it will have me thinking too much about someone else’s art rather than making my own, but it’ll be a good excuse to do a bunch of research I’ve been meaning to do anyway.

reading The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century, by Geoffrey O’Brien. some of the most poetic, elliptical and evocative critical writing I’ve ever read. this is one of the things that’s making me feel like my own writing is flat & boring. support-anons will say “it’s a published book, it’s not a first draft, O’Brien didn’t land on those images or ideas without working them over.” shut up.

finished The Culture of Narcissism. ironically, given Lasch’s contempt for the “therapeutic” turn in our priorities as a result of the conditions of commodity capitalism, reading this book was actually pretty therapeutic for me. it helped me see certain habits of mine in a different light, namely that it’s a result of an underdeveloped ego that leads me to overvalue the esteem of others to the point of always tailoring my behavior to best present as whatever it is someone else needs of me. this is a pervasive problem among people nowadays—always behaving in such a way as to curry favor with a (largely imagined) audience. one of the most interesting aspects of Lasch’s analysis is in locating the neuroses of contemporary culture in a malignant superego. for me, personally, this manifests as a preoccupation with doing things the “correct” way—a view that is inimical to the creative process.

for all the book’s strengths, however, The Culture of Narcissism spends an inordinate amount of energy on lamenting the loss of certain values that seem, to my view, typical of more oppressive social arrangements: Lasch takes it on faith that the “family” is a unmitigated social good; that former gender customs a la chivalry, even with their shortcomings, helped restrain the worst excesses of patriarchy. his impulse towards rigorous historicizing is unevenly applied, in my opinion. the thrust of his argument is worth grappling with, but too many of his talking points, even if they are presented with more nuance, only echo typical conservative anxieties about the decadence of modern society.

if I were interested in being that kind of writer, I’d try to meld some of his arguments with a media ecology style exploration of internet pornography, but instead that’ll probably end up in some fictional creation instead.

picked Satantango back up again. I wouldn’t say I’m struggling with it so much as it’s something that forces you to let happen to you, and keeping track of the intercharacter dynamics takes a backseat to keeping your head afloat amidst the deluge of text. it’s a work that I’m sure would reward deep familiarity, and a first read does not provide anyone with deep familiarity. but the atmosphere of screaming desolation, and the grim absurdity that’s pressed out of the desperation these people seem so crushed by, is intoxicating. glad I picked it back up.

watched The Seventh Seal, always a delight. I should write something about Bergman’s belief that cinema has nothing to do with literature, because it’s an interesting question, especially for me, a writer who is always tempted to follow the siren call of filmmaking.

a new JPEGMAFIA album is out, which means that I want to make beats again. it’s honestly fucked up how great Peggy is at producing; it’s too bad his rapping can’t keep pace. ah well, we can’t all be renaissance men.

an artist must follow the call of their feeling, deeply and truly felt, wherever it may go. this, more often than not, will lead to dark crevices we dump gallons of psychic energy pretending into filling up and aren’t there, even though what lurks within them holds far greater sway on the course of one’s life than we like to admit. call it “shadow work” if you must, but in art we tend to call this “honesty,” or even “bravery.”

Israel (presumably) launched a missile on Tehran, killing Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh. the brazenness of this attack, on the man most actively working towards an end to the hostilities against Gaza, is shocking, even by Israeli standards. Israel is in deep crisis, and has been since before the events of October 7, 2023. expect the political leaders and the military to grow increasingly erratic in the coming months, especially as schisms form between the police and the IDF. & whether or not Iran chooses to retaliate is only a matter of timing; at some point Israel’s actions will draw the region into a wider conflict, one that will likely prompt decisive action by Iran, and perhaps even China or Russia, which will embarrass the United States, who has admitted they will not provide the kind of support Israel will need to survive such a conflict.

meanwhile, the US’s steadfast devotion to supporting the Israelis no matter how appallingly they behave suggests that what’s currently happening in the Middle East is a proxy struggle over the all-but-guaranteed unification of Europe and Asia by supply and transportation routes that will leave the United States out in the cold in the back half of the 21st century. my bet is that once the chips are down, the US will switch focus back to the other front in this proxy struggle, Ukraine.

however, most concerning is the prospect that the US is so eager to back the Israelis in their psychotic, genocidal, fascist suppression of the people of Gaza because, to deal with the cascading crises that US supremacy has wrought upon the world—destruction of the global south leading to mass migrations, along with a hollowing out of America’s own internal hinterlands, all exacerbated by worsening environmental catastrophes—the US wants to normalize the most egregious of Israel’s suppressive efforts. that way, vast surveillance networks, open violence against the poor, assassination of anyone inconvenient, destruction of infrastructure, all appear as business as usual, the cost of living in the Greatest Country in the World. the realization of the virtual Fourth Reich that Western Elites have been building since the fall of the Third. if you have a hard time imagining that, consider that once upon at time police officers didn’t wear bullet proof vests and carry M4s like an army occupying Fallujah. the imperial frontier always comes home, as they say.

anyway, I wanted to write about short story craft stuff today, and I didn’t really do what the Knight of Cups called me to do here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t remind my readers that The Empire Never Ended (And It Won’t Any Time Soon).

in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s telling, Pages sit between the 2 and 3 positions, 2 being the number of untapped potential and 3 the number of activity unfolding. 2+3=5, and yesterday I pulled the 5 of Pentacles; 5, according to Jodorowsky, is the hinge point between 1-4 (materiality) and 6-9 (spirituality). needless to say, there’s a threshold I’m at, and it involves transforming, alchemically, base material (pentacles), which I’ve been thinking of as “narcissism,” into spiritual gold—schizomystical proclamations. I came up with this schema for interpreting the card before I had The Culture of Narcissism, by Christopher Lasch, come in for me at the library this morning. in it, Lasch discusses how in the 60s, new literary forms developed, what we might call “New Journalism” or “the confessional mode,” that flaunted the writer’s own particular perspective as a means for interrogating how culture, economics, and politics worked upon the writer to shape that perspective; that is, it refined the base material of the writer’s personal life into gold that shines upon the society from which it arises.

in Lasch’s account, this is a worthy innovation of the period, but, of course, this privileging of the personal as way into the political risks falling into mere self-aggrandizement:

Yet the increasing interpenetration of fiction, journalism, and autobiography undeniably indicates that many writers find it more and more difficult to achieve the detachment indispensable for art. Instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it, they have taken to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations. Instead of working through their memories, many writers now rely on mere self-disclosure to keep the reader interested, appealing not to his understanding but to his salacious curiosity about the lives of famous people. In Mailer’s works and those of his many imitators, what begins as a critical reflection on the writer’s own ambition, frankly acknowledged as a bid for literary immortality, often ends in a garrulous monologue, with the writer trading on his own celebrity and filling page after page with material having no other claim to attention than its association with a famous name. Once having brought himself to public attention, the writer enjoys a ready-made market for true confessions. Thus Erica Jong, after winning an audience by writing about sex with as little feeling as a man, immediately produced another novel about a young woman who becomes a literary celebrity.

too bad Lasch isn’t around to comment on Knausgaard. another fun part of the little bit that I’ve read so far is the page he devotes to dunking on Jerry Rubin, clown prince of the yippies-turned-yuppies.

in other reading news, I’m struggling with what else I’m in the midst of. Satantango by Krasznahorkai is phenomenal so far, but with 30-page chapters consisting of a single paragraph requiring intense unbroken focus, it’s been hard to “chip away at it”, while I’m trying to devote more time to this blog, planning two novels, and writing stories. if I don’t pick it back up in a few days I’ll probably set it aside til I can give it more of my attention in a few weeks. on the subject of planning a novel, I’m also annotating Shamanism by Mircea Eliade, having lots of fun with it, but it’s a little repetitive and describes in rotation the practices of various northern and central Asian cultures. it’s quite interesting, but a little too in the weeds for my purposes. and I’ve been sipping from Minima Moralia by Adorno and totally honest, it’s great in flashes, but nearly opaque in others, to the point where I know I’m going to have to reread it once I’m done and therefor I’m tempted to put it aside half-read as well. here’s a famous tidbit from what I’ve read so far:

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.