cody frank

a thing I hate is when people think of me as someone who “likes books.” not because I don’t, obviously I do, but because it reduces it to the level of like, “being a gamer,” or of “liking coffee.” it sounds like it’s merely a consumer choice, designating which market demographic I belong to. people have even bought me novelty socks with stacks of books on them.

to be sure, plenty of people do “like books” in exactly this way. people who participate in library book clubs, most high school literature teachers, even many academics. all people who “love books.” I would say I don’t begrudge them this, but I do, because it cheapens the power of books.

reading Nietzsche or Shakespeare or Flaubert or Plato can and should push someone to radically examine what it means to be alive. taking seriously what reading does to you, how it alters you, forces you to confront fundamental truths of the human condition, this can and should inspire commitment to living more fully, to treating your life not as something to slink through, making as little trouble as possible, but as an opportunity to experience the drama of the cosmos as directly as possible, as a bodhisattva would, or a Romantic would.

I say all this not because I’m particularly good at burning burning burning, Kerouac-style, but in the hopes that I don’t end up as someone who merely “likes books.”

today my friends announced something that I knew they’d been working on for a while, a new series of episodes about Mad Men for their podcast. Erikk told me that I am personally responsible for this idea, because I suggested to him that they do something a little lower stakes than their last series of episodes, about Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski, since that project, uh, sort of got the better of them, with an entire year gap between the time the first several episodes were released and when the last few were. what I suggested was they watch The Sopranos, or at least this is what Erikk tells me I suggested. Mad Men is more suited to what they’re trying to get out of this new series, so I don’t begrudge the change, even though I haven’t seen Mad Men beyond the first two episodes. if you’re interested, I’ll let them tell you what it is they’re trying to get out of this new series, because this is my blog, not theirs.

what I’m doing now instead of watching Mad Men is rewatching Twin Peaks, the original run, the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the deleted scenes from the feature film The Missing Pieces (which I’ve never seen), and the limited run reboot Twin Peaks: The Return. the announcement of the Relentless Picnic’s rewatch/reevaluation makes me think it might be worthwhile to do something similar myself, for Twin Peaks. though I wish I had had this idea before watching the first six episodes of the show, because I would have been more deliberate with my viewing.

no matter. instead, what I’ll do is prepare for some kind of critical project centered around rewatching Twin Peaks: The Return, because, as great as the original run of the show is (well, about half of the original run, excluding the nosedive season 2 takes after we find out who killed Laura Palmer), the Showtime limited series is of an entirely different breed, different even from the rest of David Lynch’s directorial work.

besides, if I were to comment at length on the original run of the series, a lot of what I’d say would be resentment over the fact that the writers swerved away from what would have been the most interesting aspect of the plot: the romantic entanglement between Cooper and Audrey. fuck you, Lara Flynn Boyle!!!!!!!! i’m saying this now because i’m vowing to not dwell too much on this in whatever it is i do end up putting out, even though it goes some way towards understanding what’s going on with Cooper in The Return. but that’s all metatextual and therefor not open for interpretation.

retyping a story that I’m very pleased with. feeling better about my writing efforts than i was a few days ago. it’s good for me to post something here every day, i think.

Manhattan district federal judge Loretta Preska ordered a trove of files from two court cases pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein, from 2015 and 2016, unsealed this week. several of those documents have been made public now, and naturally a lot of sensationalist reporting promises to detail all the names listed in these documents. from what I’ve seen, not much of the info is all that new. many of the names included in the depositions are only mentioned in denials by the accusers, as in “no I never met George Lucas/Leonardo DiCaprio/Cate Blanchett.” there are obviously also plenty of incriminating mentions, of Bill Clinton and Marvin Minsky and Stephen Hawking and Tom Pritzker and Alan Dershowitz, but if you still trust any of those people wrt their connections to the late “disgraced financier,” may you find the light of God someday.

more shocking to me is news that Stephen Deckoff, founder of Black Diamond Capital Management, unveiled the renovations he’s had done on his recently purchased property Little St. James, the US Virgin Island better known as Jeffrey Epstein’s Island aka Pedophile Island. Deckoff’s plan is to turn the location of an untold number of horrific acts of violence and child sex abuse into a luxury resort.

if you can find a better metaphor for the liberal imagination, I will give you enough money to buy your own island.

it’s january, so i’m taking a break from alcohol. it rained last night, so january’s not exactly “dry” though, is it? ha ha ha. i didn’t sleep well. as i was drifting off my girlfriend awoke me asking “what was that??” i only caught the last mental impressions of some kind of tap sound, or banging sound, according to my girlfriend’s characterization. but our dog hadn’t reacted so it must not have been anything? as i lay in bed i convinced myself that lurking in my kitchen was a ghost or some other malignant entity. the only thing to do with such a presence is to banish it, which i did by telling myself “that’s ridiculous,” as though i don’t suspect that such things may occur.

then i awoke again after what felt like a long, convoluted, involved period of dreaming. what the dream was i don’t remember. i’m working on keeping a dream journal, as a way of bringing my subconscious and my waking conscious more in alignment. but last night was a difficult, fragmented visit to dreamland. because it felt like so much had happened already, i was sure it was nearing morning, perhaps an hour until my alarm was set to go off. nope, it was only about 130am. i spent much of the rest of the night tossing and turning, sweating, slipping in and out of fitful drowses and disjointed dreams, the only details of which that i remember involve me sing-shouting olivia rodrigo’s “get him back,” and purchasing a leather joint holder for my girlfriend’s friend, who doesn’t smoke, while longing to be able to smoke myself, which i haven’t done in about six months now.

when my alarm went off at 6, the finer details of all this REM sleep dissipated, leaving me disoriented. usually when i dream and wake up i feel refreshed and aware, even when the dreams aren’t pleasant. but last night black bagged me, kicked me in the gut, and dumped me on the side of the road, a road i knew i lived on, but couldn’t tell in which direction i lived.

so i was tired. and because my day job situation is all fucked up, since the library where i work flooded, things are generally unsettled. and when things are unsettled and i’m tired, every self-defeating, discouraged thought i’ve ever had returns with a vengeance. i’ll never finish anything worthwhile. if i do, i’ll never get it published. if i do, no one will ever read it. because no one reads this blog. because i never finish anything worthwhile on it. because i don’t have enough time, because writing something worthwhile requires losing yourself a little, being Deep in the Shit of my subconscious, something that’s hard to do when i know i have to be at work in an hour. david lynch quoted someone, a childhood friend’s dad who was a painter if i remember correctly, as saying that in order to get one good hour of painting done, you need four hours of free time. now, this is also about the fact that painting requires a lot of set up and materials, which doesn’t translate to writing, but the spirit of the point still stands.

i told my friends, who number among the few consistent readers of this blog, that i was discouraged, that i didn’t think blogging was doing what i need for it to do, namely get attention for the thing that i believe myself highly capable at, namely writing. there’s no easy way around getting eyes on the art; it’s been a problem for artists for at least two centuries, when art became an expression of an individual’s subjectivity. it requires a considerable amount of luck, but also “shameless persistence,” a phrase i came across in, i think it was, a blurb from percival everett, on a book i don’t remember the title of. “shameless persistence” is now my mantra (though i don’t do mantra meditation, i “just sit” zazen). “brazenness” is the energy i’m bringing into 2024.

in addition to those things, art also requires sacrifice, and what i’m realizing is that what’s most readily sacrificed, and most valuably sacrificed, is being reliable at my day job. and it’s looking like i’ll be afforded a considerable leash here in the next few months, being allowed to “work” from home for several hours a week, mostly putting together orders for new books. that means i won’t “have to be” anywhere for work a lot of the time. and my boss was spread thin before our library flooded, so now he’s too preoccupied to worry much about me, because he trusts me, because i’m reliable.

there are stories i need to edit, stories i need to draft. there’s a mess of notes i need to decide what to do with. i need to stop placing too strict demands on myself and just play around and have fun because having fun and playing around is what gets you chicks dude.

what’s up with all my dreams about smoking weed?

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.

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.