6 Sept // open the door & let 'em in
6 Sept 2023
weather: too hot
mood: contemplative, bordering on mournful
music: Wings, "Let 'Em In"
Morning. (Or insert appropriate greeting for whatever time you're reading this.)
I turned 35 over the weekend and was surprised to feel some feelings about it. Mostly, those feelings are a kind of relief -- a sense that I now can live my life, because I am 'in it' instead of waiting for something or struggling to meet some deadline or some such. I'm never going to be one of the 5 Under 35, I'm no longer eligible for under-35 tickets. There is a feeling of no more excuses, a little bit. Never mind the ridiculousness of the youth-centric structures supported by capitalism -- some of the best debut novels I read this year were by people over the age of 35, most of them over the age of 40. This, in and of itself, is a nice reminder: things will happen in the time that they are meant to. I do not need to rush, except insofar as I will eventually die and would like to get some things done before then.
But I got a tattoo of a skull (a Jon Klassen skull, from his latest book The Skull, which is so charming for people of literally all ages) because I've always wanted a memento mori and doing so now feels right. I will die, someday. Better make it count in the meantime.
Speaking of death, the mourning mentioned above is about the internet and social networks. Ian Bogost wrote a piece last fall for The Atlantic (and he & Charlie Warzel have written several more since) where he captured something that spoke to me: the shift from social network to social media. The former was a thing designed for and primarily used to facilitate connection. The latter is a means to share 'content' (which is really just a way of saying 'providing free labor' but that's a whole other argument). I'm sympathetic to the take that these content machines still facilitate connection, but they do not do so at anywhere near the same rate or with the same feeling of genuine engagement.
I bring all of this up on this particular day because Season Three of Voyage into Genre launched in August -- I'm very proud of it, episode three dropped today -- and the numbers have been DISMAL compared to the first two seasons. Some of that, I can track to some broken functionality on Lit Hub's website -- but most of it seems to track, to me anyway, to the collapse of Twitter and the diffuse nature of every other social media platform by comparison. Some of you are, no doubt, still on Twitter -- I get it, there's still some use in the thing -- but make no mistake that it IS dying, in the same way that Facebook 'died' and is now a poorly-reanimated zombie of its former self. Because the communities that made it vibrant have left, in the hopes of finding safer or kinder or easier or just more fucking functional places.
But what gets lost in the transition? The networks that we built, the connections and the communities -- those have to be built again from scratch each time we leave for a new platform. Yeah you can import your followers with a third-party app or whatever, or something like Threads comes along and makes it 'easy' to bring over everybody from Instagram... but it isn't the same thing, because you aren't in the same place. It's like running into your high school teacher in a bar years later; nobody feels quite natural about it.
Anyway, all of this to say: the podcast's numbers are significantly diminished and while I have some kind of peace with that (the numbers aren't zero, and it is nice that people listen to anything, and I made it because it was fun to make not because I wanted to be famous or whatever), it'd still mean the world to me if you gave it a subscribe -- or left it an iTunes review, if you had three minutes to spare and a kind word to offer. It feels wrong to let these things sail off into the darkness, you know?
Fittingly, one of the best things I've read in the last few months is a book that you can only get online (the only physical copies are print-on-demand through Amazon) -- a recommendation that came to me from Michael Kelleher, the director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes at Yale. I had the pleasure of working with Mike this summer on a podcast for the Prizes and we got, as book people do, to sharing recommendations. He told me of this strange book he was reading by an author called QNTM, about an organization trying to defend humanity against self-deleting ideas.
There is No Antimemetics Division is bonkers. Borne out of one of the original creepypasta wikis (The SCP Foundation), it is a masterful slice of Weird Thriller that shouldn't work and yet continues to excel at every turn. The very thought of an idea that erases itself from human consciousness is horrifying -- there's some of the best cosmic horror ever in this book -- but the author's skill with prose makes this high-wire act look easy. You start the book feeling like you might be reading somebody in the Michael Crichton vein, but the ideas rapidly spiral out to Michael Cisco levels of weirdness. If you dig Jeff VanderMeer's more out-there writing, this one is for you. If you like "Welcome to Night Vale" but wish that it was a little more gritty, this is for you. If you want to read something you've never read before and have fun doing it, regardless of genre... this one is for you.
In a different but sibling-y vein: Dani and I drove out into the Western Catskills this weekend for birthday adventures (there was a Rip Van Winkle-themed mini golf course involved, which was kitschy and perfect and so strange) and stopped by The Lost Bookshop in Delhi, NY. Goes without saying, I think, that one must patronize any indie bookstore on one's first visit, particularly if one is simply passing through -- and I like trying to be open to the whims of the spirit, not going in with things I need to get and instead letting whatever book calls to me be the one I take home.
Enter The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager. It's a book that, according to my moribund Goodreads page, landed on my 'wishlist' around its publication in 2019 -- but it struck me as something I'd never seen before, this weekend. I picked it up and ended up reading it in just over a 24 hour span. It's one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had all year.
It is a book about siblings (hi Val, love you) and about Halley's Comet and about Hansel & Gretel. The book moves through time from the 1300s to the 2300s, on the cyclical 75-ish year return of the comet. Gutenberg and his sister are in the book, as are the Brothers Grimm, as are two space probes sent out the early 2100s to share all of humanity's stories. The book is short, it's written in that Maggie Nelson / Jenny Offill short-paragraph-with-much-white-space style, but it contains multitudes. It also has one of the most moving depictions of hope during the AIDS crisis I've ever read, possibly even more moving than The Great Believers. It will make you think about what we gain by writing down our stories, and what we lose -- something all too worth considering, as my neighbor this morning told me that his children (both in their teens) have never heard of Rip Van Winkle and show only modest familiarity with any of the other remaining oral-tradition-ish stories of American culture, like Jonny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan or John Henry.
I've read some other things lately that have been quite good (the new Labatut, The MANIAC, is even better than his last book and quite timely vis-a-vis the AI conversations ongoing) but I don't feel much like writing about them at the moment. I am, instead, looking ahead: the October Country list is nearly ready, the shelf looking gloomy and beautiful -- I'll share it, as ever, by the time you wake up on October 1.
In the meantime, hope your back-to-school (however that manifests in your life) is going well and that you find some moments of peace and stillness in the chaos of our days. If you liked something recently, do let me know -- I'll add it to my list. And, although it genuinely hurts me to say it again, thanks for giving the podcast a listen or even a share/review. Boy oh boy how is it gonna be when I have a book to plug...
xoxo
D