Nov 20 // give voice to our doubts
Nov 20 2023
weather: bright and cold!
mood: pre-nostalgia?
music: Julia Jacklin, "Be Careful With Yourself"
Hello! I started writing this on November 1st and somehow here we are. Oofa doofa, as they say.
2024 Birthday Mailing Sign-ups!
A Further Note on Time Travel
On Hate, Wonder, and Humanity
I'd Like to Send You Something in the Mail on Your Birthday
Some of you might remember getting something in the mail from me in 2021. Stymied in my writing due to pandemic-fear, newly ensconced in my upstate life but still under pretty strict lockdown, I came up with the idea that I would send a bunch of people something for their birthdays -- a different something each month, for that month's birthdays. It was a half-cocked plan when I started -- I remember walking on the Ashokan rail trail in December 2020 and thinking that it was going to have some over-story about a game between a pair of immortals in the Aziraphale/Crowley vein -- that turned into something delightfully unexpected: what I call a 'collage novella' entitled Things Found in the Attic. Some of it was goofy, some of it was great, all of it was heartfelt.
I've wanted to do it again, but haven't had either the time or the right idea -- until now! I'm really excited about this both as something I think you'll enjoy receiving in the mail and something that'll make for a fun creative project for me. I'll even give you a teaser: the working title for the project is Welcome to Allantide. (The keen-eyed among the 2021 recipients may notice something familiar about that name, as might the players from my short-lived Monster of the Week game.)
Sign-ups now open HERE!
No cut-off other than if the month of your birth starts and you haven't signed up, you probably aren't getting a mailing -- I'm reaaaaally going to try to get out in front of this and have the mailings locked and printed etc before any given month starts. (January being an exception for sure, so y'all please be patient.) (Also if you live in a household with multiple same-month birthdays, I'll do my best to make sure each person gets different stuff -- unless you aren't the sort to share, in which case I'll make sure to ask.) (Also also you can pass this along, or sign up for somebody else too! The more the merrier, and if you think somebody out there might enjoy a little wonder on their birthday... well, I'm here to help.)
A Further Note on Time Travel
In July, I wrote to you about time travel. Appropriately enough, I'd like to return to the topic now, in November.
First off, the question you've all been waiting to have answered: yes, The Hives have still got it. I didn't exactly feel like I was a teenager again, but that also makes sense. It was better, in fact, that I didn't. In some ways, the night was like my teenage dream of adulthood I didn't know I had: I drove into the city, I had dinner with an old friend and caught up on life over cocktails and burgers, I took my earplugs out after the opener and let the sound wallop me into dancing and singing, and then I drove home! To my wife! Tell nineteen year old me that and he'd be pretty happy, I bet.
But I have another, less joyful facet to contemplate and that's about what happens when something doesn't live up to your hopes or your memories.
When I was in high school, I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Not only did I love it, but my friend Aimée also loved it and so we set out to read the rest of Tim O'Brien's backlist -- and we did, within eighteen months or so. As I think back on it, I think it could be the first time I found myself fully in love with American Literary Fiction, so much so that I needed to consume the rest of an author's backlist. I loved my genre writers and had done deep-dives on R. A. Salvatore and Chuck Palahniuk and Anne McCaffrey and Stephen King of course, but I was only dallying on the shores of modern Lit Fic when teachers assigned them. Same, honestly, for the classics.
So it was new, to me, to go out and find a bunch of books by a modern author, by an author writing in the moment. July, July had just come out and it was a time not exactly pre-internet but certainly pre-the-way-we-use-it-now -- we were doing this on our own. We argued about Tomcat in Love and In the Lake of the Woods (which is still my favorite) and debated reading his non-fiction before deciding not to, because we didn't like non-fiction. (Again, teenagers.)
The announcement that he had a new novel coming this year, some 21 years after his last, had me revved up with excitement. Not only was there a book coming out, but it sounded like a romp: a weird crime caper, full of oddball characters and 21st-Century exhaustion. The man whose work did more than probably just about anything else in this world other than my natural instincts to turn me away from violence and war would be great to read on this violent and insane present, right?
But America Fantastica isn't a Tim O'Brien novel. Or, rather, it is -- of course it is, he wrote it, and I certainly also don't mean to in any way diminish his faculties -- but it isn't the Tim O'Brien novel I was looking for. Because it never could have been. The book is plenty flawed, reading like some of the worst Boomer anti-Trump fan-fiction you might find on Facebook these days (I was frankly surprised that Robert Mueller never made an appearance, although I confess that he might've and I wouldn't know as I stopped reading before the 100 page mark) -- but more than that, I'm a different reader from the one I was when I was 16.
I haven't spoken to my old friend Aimée in probably about 12 or so years now. I don't talk to anybody I went to high school with, not really. Sometimes I try to look some of them up, curious about what they're doing. Are they still the people I remember? Of course not, it'd be tragic if any of us were. But I also don't reach out, for a whole host of reasons -- but chief among them is the probability that, as with Tim O'Brien, I won't like the newer version. Better to remember the old and enjoy those memories for what they're worth, I think, while going ahead and making new ones in the places / with the people who know me now.
Looking Up
I keep looking at the first photos from the Euclid telescope, and feeling both the incredible awe that I often feel looking at photos of deep space as well as an unfamiliar (in its intimacy) sense of the scope of the tragedy of human existence. How anyone can look at these photographs -- the one of the veritable sea of galaxies, in particular! Thousands of galaxies, not just stars but galaxies full of stars!! -- and not feel a uniting sense of wonder at the very grand scale of the universe is beyond me.
But I suppose I know, from history, that it is scary for human beings to look out into the darkness. We are burdened with enough consciousness to be able to grasp the finite extent of our lives, to be forced to hold as true that we are mostly mundane creatures living moment to moment and that we can also understand some semblance of the a dimension through which we are inexorably moved in a single direction. At some point, it became easier to believe that we are special, that we are even possibly unique in the scope of the universe! That if there is a god, that being cares about us more than it does anybody or anything else out there.
People are dying, right now, because it is easier to believe in the immutability of our differences than it is to recognize that the same fucking blood flows through all of our veins, that the same blood flows through the veins not only of all humans but of many other species besides. Many, many more people will suffer in the months and years to come because of this misguided hateful misunderstanding.
Just look up! Look up, and think for even a single moment about how small you are. Don't shrink from that, don't feel bad about it -- it is not a bad thing, to be small. It can be empowering, it can be a reminder that your time is limited and that you ought to do good with it instead of fighting, hating, hurting. Consider how likely it is that, when your time on this earth has passed, the universe won't notice. Know too that the universe didn't notice when Shakespeare died, or Harriet Tubman, or Cleopatra, or Lucy -- and that is not tragedy but rather a reminder that in the narrow scope of human existence, we can do amazing things with our limited time if we seek wonder and goodness, and that making even one moment of time memorable for ourselves or one another on this single tiny planet amidst an infinite sea of possibility is an incredible act of power.
This is what I mean when I talk about existentialism, these days. That, and that one must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I could go on, but there is work to be done! Thanksgiving approacheth and yrs truly is hosting for the first time, which means it is time to make some charts about available cooking spaces vis-a-vis cook-times and so forth. You'll hear from me again at the dawn of the new year, with my thoughts on the 2023 year in reading -- some teasers of which will be available to you at Lit Hub before the end of the year, so keep an eye peeled for the various year-end lists over there. If you've got strong thoughts already, I'd love to hear them!
Also, big big big reminder: DO NOT SHOP AT AMAZON IF YOU CAN AVOID IT! Shop direct, or shop indie, and if you can at all, shop local. Small businesses continue to need your support, and a single purchase from that cool candlemaker you saw on Instagram or that little indie bookstore you visited over the summer can make their entire year -- no exaggeration. Yes, it may take longer to get to you, but we aren't supposed to be able to get things whenever we want them. That's just capitalism sucking the lifeblood of your humanity, parasitically trying to convince you that this is normal.
On that note: Happy Thanksgiving, and a very happy holidays to you all. It's a terrible time in the world and yet I don't think it hurts to offer hope that it might be better, or even that you might be having a nice time despite it all.
xo
D