25 Jan // fear is the mind-killer
25 January 2023
The Catskills
weather: snowy
mood: seeking balance
music: Julia Jacklin, "Lydia Wears a Cross"
**
Dear you,
I've considered writing and re-writing some newsletter-y sort of thing for a while and found myself stopping every time. It feels connected to my decision to finally cut myself off from Twitter (Dani changed my password, I haven't been there in 25 days now) -- a question of what, really, is the point? I have thoughts, but do they need to be shared? Certainly not all of them! Certainly not without intention!
But this also feels like ~the point~ in a way. At a time when everybody is sharing, sharing, sharing... one can still share, but perhaps the waiting, the consideration, the intention is where the usefulness comes from. And so, a cautious return. We'll see how this goes...
My thought is that towards the end of the month I'll reflect on a few things I've read and how those things have provoked some thoughts! Book recommendations but less about the review and more about the contemplation. Again, we'll see!
TODAY:
Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards
Lana Harper, Payback's a Witch
"Get Used to Expensive Eggs" by Yasmin Tayag, The Atlantic
Bret Easton Ellis made me cry?
Talking about Bret Easton Ellis is difficult. His novels have been divisive, let's say, and his post-writer persona -- the one that has been saying stupid reductive Gen-X nonsense on the internet over the last decade -- has been frustrating to say the least. I revisited Lunar Park last October and found it less charming than I did when I first read it, but I was also reminded of some of the things that made him a totemic author for me for a hot minute. I was reminded why I still consider American Psycho one of my 'favorite' novels -- not because it is pleasant to read, not because I agree with anything going on in its pages, but because it captured something with such audacity. It looked at the dark heart of humanity, in the midst of those go-go 90s, and knew without a sliver of a doubt that we were fucked. And not for nothing, it turns out that he was right.
It's impossible to think about Ellis's work without looking at the ways in which the world has changed over the thirteen years since his last (and worst) novel. Society at large missed the warning signs in American Psycho and Less Than Zero, because if we had paid attention to what Ellis was pointing towards, I genuinely don't think we would've elected Republicans to anything from about 2010 onward. And Ellis's coolly-detatched depictions of violence feel harder to stomach in the years since the MeToo movement hit the mainstream. What could this man have to say about our present that wouldn't feel reductive at best?
It turns out that his new novel The Shards deals with all of this by looking back at the 'formative' moment of young Bret Ellis, the time before he was a wunderkind. His senior year of high school. Which, of course, involves a serial killer and lots of cool kids doing drugs in the 80s. But the narrator of the novel, a present-day Ellis, is (for the first time ever) open about how shattered he is, how broken, how everything that he has been processing since he was that wunderkind at Bennington goes back to his teenage years. It is shocking to see Ellis grappling with being a closeted teen in the early 80s, to see him genuinely asking himself (and his readers) to pay more attention to that whole nihilistic LA scene in ways that none of us did the first time around. There's a scene where Ellis leaves a classmate's house, another young man with whom he has been casually intimate, and he breaks into tears and has a hard time driving himself back home because he is so overwhelmed by his emotions.
Who among us?? Who among us hasn't been wrecked by the dismissive parting, especially at that age? More than that, what does it say for a writer whose whole shtick has been ignoring emotion to then lay that emotion out there on the page? Even his cool (tonally and temperature-wise) prose, which remains pretty cool, has a hard time masking the feelings going on here.
Now sure, there's some Grand Guignol horror and some coke-numbed Reagan-era nihilism -- because it is, after all, a Bret Easton Ellis joint. And the book is toooooo long at nearly 600 pages (nobody goes to BEE for length). But it makes me want to re-read Less Than Zero in particular. That book struck me as so sad when I was a freshman home for winter break, seeing myself in Clay or at least in his circumstances of being back in a place he doesn't feel is home any longer -- but few people I've ever talked to about it associate with that feeling. I wonder if more people will see Ellis as a titanically sad writer, after The Shards. To realize that behind the murder and the sex and the drugs and the violence is just a guy who never felt like he could be himself. Perhaps that guy deserves a bit more empathy. Perhaps more empathy towards those guys in the present could have positive effects on our society, because very few guys like Bret go on to write novels. Too many of them end up killing people instead.
Witchy romances forever, apparently
I had a realization last year, as I've mentioned, that I actually like romance novels. My sister talked to the folks at The Ripped Bodice in LA (one of her two walking-distance local indies) about what I ought to read next and thus her Christmas gift to me was Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree and Payback's a Witch by Lana Harper. And the latter has proved something to me that I'm now making, in a very Tumblr-y way, part of my identity. (The former deserves to be written about on its own. It isn't exactly a romance novel, although the romance is part of it. Really, it's a sort of anti-novel, in a way? It's so cozy and quiet and easygoing and yet absolutely transporting in its comfort.)
Witchy romances are the best fucking thing, y'all. It seems so obvious: I like witchy things, I like love, I like good writing, I like magic, I like reading for escapism. So why has it taken me so long to fall into this very obvious subgenre?!
What's interesting to me is actually (as ever) the dissolution of genre boundaries, on the page. You could put Lana Harper's Witches of Thistle Grove books on the regular fiction shelf -- Alice Hoffman is there, after all -- but you could also put her books on the fantasy shelf, because witches. You could also put them on the romance shelf, because falling in love is a core part of each of these books and there's good sex writing too. Is sex writing the thing that tips a book into "romance" in the same way a teenage protagonist makes most people say "must be YA"? That feels wrong to me! Plenty of books have good sex writing and are about emotional romantic falling-in-love arcs, but you'd never call them romance... so what gives?
I also have this hope that, because I am a "serious reader" and I have some modest clout as a recommender/reviewer, I might urge some more people to pick up yet another genre they might've skipped otherwise. In the Tournament of Books Discord recently, I saw someone saying that they don't read genre 'unless there's a real reason for it to be genre' and it made me so sad (and then angry). It must be so limiting to think "oh, there's a spaceship?" or "oh, this is about two witches falling in love?" and have that turn you off from something that is otherwise so fulfilling or exciting or joyful or just a damn good read.
But I've thought that way about romance up til now. Glass houses, stones, all that.
Eggs and History and Change
The price of eggs is insane right now. I kind of didn't notice at first, because I've cut eggs on their own out of my diet almost entirely -- my doctor was like "you should watch your cholesterol" and because I am scared of death and heart-stuff, I immediately started taking turmeric every day and cut waaaay back on eggs and should probably do that with cheese too but, like, life's too short as it is -- although I still get them for baking and because Dani still eats them sometimes.
This piece at The Atlantic was helpful in explaining what the hell is going on -- but I was most intrigued by the end of the piece, two bits I share here (emphasis mine):
More than anything, the egg shortage is a reminder that the availability of food is not something we can take for granted going forward. Shortages of staple goods seem to be striking with more regularity not only due to pandemic-related broken supply chains and inflation, but also because of animal and plant disease. [...]
Getting used to intermittent shortages of staple foods such as eggs and lettuce will in all likelihood become a normal part of meal planning, barring some huge shift away from industrial farming and its propensity for fostering disease. These farms are a major reason certain foods are so inexpensive and widely available in the first place; if cheap eggs seemed too good to be true, it’s because they were.
Bear with me, I'm coming back to the above, but some context: I've had a few conversations recently that have helped me form a conclusion that, in a different life, I might've tried to package into an essay to sell to some fancy magazine. Basically, it's that Francis Fukuyama might've been right after all and that we did indeed pass the end of history. When I talk to older generations about my fears for the future (of which there are many), I often get some kind of "but we were scared too" response, a dismissiveness that stems from the belief that every generation has had its challenges and yet we all keep going.
When I respond that things right now feel different, the dismissiveness continues. "Oh, but we thought that too" and so forth. But pulling in such disparate data points as the fall of Roe, the price of eggs, AI taking the jobs of artists instead of helping us do our taxes, the countdown clock in Union Square that shows how much time we have left til the global temperature tipping point, and so many other things besides, it has become so very clear to me that we are in uncharted waters. We have moved beyond history, and that's an important thing to grapple with. Human beings look for patterns, because that's how we understand things. "History" is, in one very reductive conception of the term, patterns found in human behavior that could then allow us to predict what might happen next or to at least understand what brought us to a certain point -- but the variables have changed now. For a minute at least, we are outside of 'history' because the variables have changed and the patterns that modern society has been built upon are no longer valid data for what's happening, let alone what is coming next.
No American or Western generation in living memory has had to deal with less; the promise has always been more. Plenty of people have continued to have less, but the 'American Dream' promise that there would continue to be more got combined with the pace of technological advancement and led to the go-go '90s and that feeling that perhaps we were on the cusp of a brave new age of possibility... and that's how many of my friends and I, we oft-maligned millennials, were raised. We were taught that the future was only up! None of us believe that any more -- I really don't even think the finance bros believe that. Subscriber/user growth slowing at (insert social media platform or streaming service) makes sense to anybody who looks at the global population and realizes that there is, in fact, a finite limit on growth and perhaps the point shouldn't be to constantly earn more than you did last time but to earn enough to keep making good shit. It's just a question of how much people can squeeze out of the final throes of good ol' late capitalism.
Back to the eggs thing. A country like ours, where most people wouldn't pass the marshmallow test if you gave them a mulligan, is not going to do well at first with not being able to have. It's the thing that is powering the right these days, this fear that not-having inherently means that things are being taken away -- and if they're being taken away, there must be someone doing the taking. Even this eggs thing, I'm sure Fox is like "oh it's China" and the Q people are like "it's the 5G!" and everybody's looking around trying to find the guy who did this when we are all the ones wearing the hot dog outfit.
It's scary to consider having less. I get scared when I worry about money, about making 'enough' (a whole other horrible weird nebulous concept) and what my earning power says about me and all that. What does it mean to have 'enough' when even the richest men in the world can't buy their way out of dealing with climate change? I get scared when I worry about the future, about whether or not I want to have a child who will inherit this mess of a world. How can you contemplate that when you're also dealing with the question of whether or not your local grocery store will continue to have what we have up-to-now considered 'basic staples' -- or even the larger question of how do we shift away from the unsustainable grocery store model? How do you explain this stuff to the people whose knee-jerk reactions go from "but that's where I get my stuff" to "you can't take my stuff" to "well then I'll take YOUR stuff" pretty fucking fast?
I don't have an answer, but I personally don't feel scared about the eggs thing. And not just because I don't eat them so much. Rather, it's because I have seen what it is like in my own life to choose to adapt, to open myself to the changes being forced upon me. That's a scary thing in its own way, but it makes me more able to face the very scary possibility of more changes to come. It's just the question of whether or not the larger 'we' can get on board.
Well, I think that's quite enough for the time being. It felt cathartic to write these things out, to process them in this way. I could've used these words (the numerical word count, not the literal ones) on the novel but the novel can wait. It has its own words, there isn't a scarcity mentality here or anywhere if you don't let there be one.
Thanks for being here, thanks for reading. Let me know what you're reading these days, let me know how these things strike you, let me know anything at all.
See you sometime.
xo
D