13 Mar // tell the rain not to drop
13 March 2023
weather: snowy?! again?!
mood: outside of time, yet inside it too
music: Madonna, "Don't Tell Me"
Hello, you --
I wrote and trashed a half-iteration of a Slow Post missive at the end of February/beginning of March -- thinking that I was meant to be writing monthly, that that's what I'd set out to do and so that's what I needed to do, and damned if it just didn't feel right. Everything about it, in fact, felt forced. But I was excited about writing to you again and so I decided to sit back and let it happened when it happened.
So, here we are. A truly irregular-letter kind of newsletter, as I somehow always should've realized it would be.
I've been thinking about time, recently. I just spent five days in London, we just shifted into Daylight Savings Time, the psychogeography of a flight from East to West compassing both those things -- but also the gap of time since I last wrote to you, the length of time it takes me to read a book, the cost of wasted time, etc etc. A lot of there there, I realize, but I promise this'll keep a moderately tight focus.
TODAY:
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus // The Burnt City
Lydia Sandgren, Collected Works
A Lunch Flight
We were standing in the Daunt Books in Cheapside. I was admiring the Faber reissues of Kazuo Ishiguro's backlist that they did to match the beautiful Klara and the Sun cover, and picked up The Remains of the Day as it felt like the right next-Ishiguro. My wife agreed, surprised I'd never read it, and mentioned that she wondered how I'd respond to it, reading it after The Buried Giant.
I loved The Buried Giant. It was one of my favorite books of 2015, and is probably one of my favorites of all-time when I think about it. The strange haze of memory and myth that lingers over it is so elegant, the re-envisioning of Arthurian legend so incisive. The only other book of his that I'd read was Never Let Me Go, which I enjoyed although I think knowing the twist in advance diminished the potency.
And I think my wife was onto something, in that if I'd read The Remains of the Day before The Buried Giant, there's a chance the former might be beloved in place of the latter. Both books are wrapped up in a question of Englishness: what is it, to be English? What are the stories that Ishiguro's 'we' (The English) tell themselves? TBG does this by casting a line way back to the earliest days of England; TRotD is quite a bit more recent, looking at the modern-most English myths. But they're both deeply engaged with the liminality of memory and 'the present' -- and they're both fantasies, in their way.
The last time I was in London, it was October 2016. A lot has changed since then, whole epoch-shaking reversals have come and gone and come back around again. Even more has happened since I studied there in 2009. It is harder to love the place like I used to -- because I love my new home, because love means something different, because the place has changed or I have changed, because I'm not the same person I was at 20, or at 24, or at 28.
There are new stores, new Tube lines, a new King. But as I walked down streets I used to dream about, streets I would've given anything to go back to for good, and as I found myself confronted with memories much as Stevens is on his journey into the English countryside, I had to ask what it was I used to love. Why is it that it is easy for me to let myself slip into a light British accent? Why is it that I feel so unequivocal about British theater being better than American theater? Why do I idolize a place that is just as fucked (if not, in some ways, more so) as America? I wasn't even terribly happy when I lived there -- I was heartbroken after a break-up, I was starting to realize that I didn't want to be a lawyer and that I wanted a life in the arts, I was so depressed that by the end of my stay I'd gained 40lbs and was only leaving my flat to go see theater and stop by a grocery store.
But I love what it represented, what it made me imagine. A place that gave everybody access to healthcare, that was more politically engaged, that had a stronger and more universal support for the arts. A place where mysteries could be solved through deduction, where giants used to roam the land, where one slip might send you into a magical world like the ones that had kept me company since I was a boy. Is it so different, what Stevens is reminiscing on? A time when the pinnacle of achievement was being not only in the room for great moments but in fact supporting, quietly, perfectly, the people who made those moments great? To be part of it and yet to be innocuous, to be content with a single small acknowledgement of praise. To be great because you worked hard, damn it, and people would notice that.
Of course, it isn't so easy. It isn't really like that. Sometimes the men we work for turn out to be wrong, in catastrophic ways or in small ones. Sometimes we misinterpret the things in front of us, believing that the work was what mattered most. The number of times that I, Drew in 2023 sitting in a cafe in the London of 2023, felt a core-level shock at something Stevens, butler in the 1930s working in an English manor house, articulated about putting his work first and hiding his emotions and believing all of this to be healthy -- because I remembered myself saying or thinking something like that, not just in the recent past but going as far back as high school! Except my hindsight and emotional vulnerability make me go weak when I think about it, whereas Stevens manages to stiffen his lip again and again.
I often think that I cannot make sense of the gap of the gap between my younger self and the man I am today -- not in the "how did I get here" way but in a "where did X thing change" way. It's like how you can't really track getting taller or your hair or nails growing out: you only see the discrete moments, the individual frames as opposed to the motion picture.
On the plane home, I watched George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing and finished the Ishiguro over a long lunch hour -- my 7-hr flight left at 10:45am and arrived at 2:45pm, allowing me lingered in that lunchtime window like I'd finally found the slo-mo button on the world. The movie's joyful examination of storytelling was an interesting counterpoint to the somewhat more somber examination in the Ishiguro. But both made me think about a quote from another English story: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
Also, I'm very excited to go read the rest of Ishiguro's work now. I feel embarrassed that it has taken me this long, although perhaps it is the power of a gray London day that I can only capture so often and reading him too frequently might overwhelm that delicate part of me. It can be hard to think so much about the past, to both want it to have a hold over you and want very much to escape that hold.
Different Upon Returning
Revisitation in general is a strange thing. You can't step in the same river twice, and yet, of course you can. It's weird to me that things in London didn't feel exactly like they did the last time I was there (or the time before that, or the time before that, or the time before that) -- and yet of course they are, and it is actually fun to experience the dissonance too.
That dissonance can also be deadly, I realize. I recently re-read The Night Circus because I was in a bit of a slump, feeling a bit of a way about my reading but also very specifically my writing -- and while I did love the book upon a revisit, it didn't bowl me over like it did the first time around. I saw some of the seams this time, the things that (I now realize) bothered me so much about The Starless Sea that were present in The Night Circus but felt like a one-time-thing instead of a recurring annoyance. Morgenstern's work owes a debt to the brilliant immersive theater pioneers at Punchdrunk -- but even that particular rush, the one that a well-built immersive show can provide, can dull upon the return. Or it can sparkle fresh, seen through a new lens. Sometimes it can be both at once.
I saw Sleep No More several times during its run in Boston (the one that Morgenstern drew so much from) and the early years of the New York run. I'd studied this kind of theater in school, I was fascinated by it, and I knew that I couldn't come back to London while a new Punchdrunk show was on without making a visit. It's a completely different show from SNM (this one is about the invasion of Troy, SNM is a Hitchcock-ified riff on Macbeth) and so I wasn't expecting a similar experience in the same way that re-reading, you have (most times) at least some modest expectations re: knowing how things might go. But I wasn't anticipating it to throw me quite so strongly as it did.
Part of the design behind a Punchdrunk show is that it loops, three times. This is so that you can see as much of it as possible, so that you can follow different characters down different paths each loop and ultimately come away with a sort of kaleidoscopic look at space-time -- for when else do you get to revisit, in flesh and blood, the exact same moment from multiple perspectives? It's nearly science-fictional! I also knew this about Punchdrunk, much as I knew some of the tips and tricks of attending their particular kind of immersive theater.
Imagine my surprise, when I found that there were characters who did not loop but instead who carried on a single story across all three loops -- a further metaphysical level occupied, with characters existing somewhere between the audience and the rest of the play.
This sort of thing makes my brain practically sizzle. What happens when somebody turns to you from inside of the thing you're engaging with (the movie, the book, the record, the play) and starts talking to you about it? And what happens when the things they do within the story start to change the story? What happens when the bartender dusting the lamps is interrupted at different moments by different phrases from the man at the bar, and how do those ripples impact the hypothetically identical loops? It's a thrilling challenge from a creative standpoint, but it also speaks to the larger question of re-engagement. These characters in the non-looping story were like me sitting down to re-read The Night Circus (or anything else I've re-read): they had different knowledge, different feelings, and thus they would encounter a different story. I think that the prose on the page in Morgenstern's book (or any other) remains unchanged, despite the cheeky and joyful possibilities about the BookWorld proposed by Jasper Fforde in his Thursday Next series. But I also believe that those words function differently in 2023 than they did in 2011.
Thinking about it from another direction: I still remember the bookstore at the National Theatre as being to the left of the main doors, a tiny open space by the glass-fronted windows looking out onto the South Bank. Never mind that the bookstore had already moved, the last time I visited; I'll probably again believe, the next time, I visit that the bookstore's new location is just that -- new. And when confronted with what seems like a change but is in fact a reminder, I will once again feel that "but that's impossible" kind of friction in my brain. Is it the same river, or a different one each time? Can it be both, and if so, can one truly hold that paradox in their mind or must it collapse into something that our limited experience of the fourth dimension can comprehend?
I suppose some of this is veering towards the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff from Interstellar, but that movie made me realize I had fallen fully in love with Dani so nary an ill word shall be spoken of it in my presence. It's also becoming increasingly difficult to talk about without starting to talk about the novel I'm working on, which has deep connections to Punchdrunk and mythology and all of this. More on that anon, perhaps.
Giving Up the Ghost
I gave up on a book that I liked, recently, and I am here to tell you that this is a good thing and you should all try it. The book in question was Lydia Sandgren's Collected Works -- out now from Astra House, translated by Agnes Broomé, a massive hit in Sweden. It's over 600 pages long and I enjoyed so much of what happened in the first 400 or so pages, and then I also decided after being in the book for over a week, that I had gotten all I needed from it. Or that it had served me to its full extent, or that I was just ready to move on.
There's no good way to say it, I find. It always comes out sounding like something went wrong, whether in me or in the book itself, that caused me to stop reading around page 450. I did skim the ending (things resolved more or less how I'd imagined they might) but even that... it causes something complex to bubble up in me, these competing ideas: that I want people to commit their time and energy to works of art (I particularly feel this because if I'm hoping people will do that with art I create, then for karmic reasons if nothing else, I ought to do the same with the art of others) and that people should be empowered to leave stories when they feel satisfied by them and not overstay if they don't want to.
I enjoyed Collected Works, I really did! And I was very happy to move on, as well. I don't have a bad thing to say about it, I don't believe that it was too long even -- I was simply ready to move along. the fact that this happened over a month ago and I'm still thinking about it tells me that it struck some kind of chord in me. I'm wondering if any of you have grappled with similar questions and complexities? I must imagine so, even if it feels transgressive to talk about -- I promise I'll keep your secret if you keep mine.
Speaking of you, it was really lovely to chat with several of you after the last missive went out. Keeping away from social media (at least compared to how I used to engage with it) has changed the way I'm interacting with the world -- it has me less online, even in the places I used to love like the Tournament of Books (which is happening now and deserves a glance from you if you're a reader and unfamiliar). How marvelous then to find some deep interpersonal engagement across a relatively old medium -- not unlike putting on a favorite sweater on the first cold day.
Anyway, I've taken up enough of your time today -- I promised the focus would be tight, and it sort of was but it sort of also went loooong. Thanks for reading, thanks for being here. Let me know what you're reading, how life is treating you, or whatever else -- if you're so inclined. If not, that's groovy too. And either way, keep it up. Talk to you soon, my friend.
xo
D