Today, because I’ve been at the end of my tether and this note is eight days overdue, once more we’re going to try something new. I’m writing this off the top of my head, and if it proves undeserving of your attention I’d be grateful for feedback to that effect.
I’ve been at the end of my tether not just the past week but the past eight months, with periodic reprieves. The causes need not detain us today. Suffice it to say I’ve been more than a bit disgusted with myself and my working life, such as it is.
Amid this disgust I’ve sought refuge, like so many, in shopping for Frivolous Stuff®, and while my widely rehearsed horror of stuff (if you have not yet got round to a second or third reading of my 2021 The Human Scaffold, what are you waiting for?) makes it borderline impossible for me to take pleasure in acquiring new things save consumables like tea, woodcase pencils, notebooks, and 6/1 botanical-dyed needlework thread yall,(°) I seem to have created a loophole for old stuff, so long as it is not so old or in such good condition as to be really exciting — it has to have a certain junk quality to get past my Stuff-Induced Self-Hatred® filters. Toward the end of calendar 2023, staring down a pair of books that had been leering at me for too long, I decided that the path to absolution ran through better writing implements.
I wrote my first book — the first to be published, anyway — with woodcase pencils. The publisher must have thought I was insane, not least because the theme of the book was pervasive computing, but I knew I would work faster writing it by hand and then typing it up, because in this way I would spare myself the compulsive citation that would otherwise entrap me, Velcro®-like, at every turn. So, yes, I would sit out front of Bonanza Coffee Heroes up on Oderberger Straße, back when that was the only game in town — back before they expanded, and when Kauf Dich Glücklich, down the block, was selling ice cream and used clothes the way the gods intended rather than Carhartt WIP and earth-toned suede New Balances — with the sources I was writing from up on the screen and the text itself in a paper notebook, and spent that December barricaded in a borrowed flat on Hobrechstraße typing it up. But in the years since, I’ve been obliged to write directly to the screen, the better to facilitate the circulation of early drafts, and the idea of writing a whole book by hand has come to seem like a weekend spread in Gualala: hazy and unattainable, and in any case a bad investment in view of the Overton trend in the relevant jurisdictions.
So it was with a certain demented commitment to the impractical that I cultivated an obsession with old fountain pens, which found an outlet, after a month’s methodical ingestion of the literature, in a pair of Pilots from the mid-nineties. I could not tell you the model name, but these are really not the sort of pens that a proper penhead would care about: “resin” acrylic-bodied, friction-fit cap, distinguished only by the fact that the nibs are 14-karat gold, which lends them just a touch of feedback: as with a woodcase pencil, you feel the paper, there’s a modest scratchiness. Writing with a gel pen feels, by contrast, like having first injected your fingertips with Novocain.
And this, I’ve realized — though it hardly required purchasing stuff — is what I’d been missing: the scratchiness, the sense of stakes, of friction, of being obliged to commit to change in the world, perhaps to its deterioration, its patina.
Patina, in fact, is my true theme, the thing, one of them anyway, I wish to pursue when these two books have been dispatched (and, in the knife fight in a phone booth that is finishing a book, I seem, at last, to have got the upper hand). Perhaps this is something we’ll explore in future editions: how things age, and how, in their disintegration, things, in particular clothes and other things that we habitually bring into contact with our bodies, afford us an intimation of death — and in this way affirm our own continuing vitality. The older I get, I say in one of the two new books, the keener my sense that the self is a cheap fiction, albeit, like so much cheap fiction, a useful one.(°°) What I do not say in this not-yet-published book is that I am equally aware of how little time we have, to accomplish whatever acts of vanity we’re determined to make our life’s project. It is a comfort, if an ambiguous one, to see how a shirt, say, grows suppler, more observant, you could say, of the body’s form, the more wear it acquires.
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If this spoke to you, I bid you to share it, that I may shortly reach the kind of circulation that will oblige me to give thought to how to cover the (very modest, and 100 percent worthwhile) hosting expenses.
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(°) No I’m not going to provide recommendations for tea and woodcase pencils, at least in this edition, it’s bad enough I linked the Nona needlework thread. My thoughts on tea, notebooks, and woodcase pencils could fill six months of this newsletter apiece, which goes to show that a horror rei need not entail a lack of interest in the material properties of things. In this newsletter, unless otherwise indicated, we use stuff in a technical sense, to refer to the composite nonconsumable impedimenta that clogs our homes and minds, and until you reach the point you’re purchasing made-in-Japan Tombow Mono 100 HBs NOS by the carton, pencils don’t count. Nor does tea or needlework thread, though the regular use of either obliges one to acquire all manner of durable stuff, not to say receptacles to store it in.
(°°) On the utility of cheap fiction: laid up with a deadlifting injury, just after finishing the first draft of The Meat Question, I spent a week in bed, seven years ago next month, reading Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four, which I highly recommend. Incidentally, you should be on your fourth or fifth pass through The Meat Question by now, and if you need an excuse, try Joe Fassler’s just-published retrospective on the cultured-meat hype cycle, anticipated in TMQ ’s Epilogue.