lend me ur eyes 082
About a month ago MP said that “work, ideally, provides useful metaphors for life.” I still don’t know exactly what this means, but I have not stopped thinking about it. The workplace is a weird microcosm of a larger world. In it, people are either squished together awkwardly or squirrelling away in isolation. When working for someone, the worker is supposed to be creating profit for that person. For doing this, the worker is granted an income. When working for themselves, the worker is supposed to be generating their own living. In both instances, the worker can sometimes find themselves distanced from this profit motive. They can plug away at various things, hitting knobs, cranking levers, ticking boxes, or moving files around between different folders, all the while forgetting what these constituent actions are serving. They can focus solely on the tasks that they do and gain enjoyment from the results of their labours.
There is a large advertising company whose slogan is “THE WORK THE WORK THE WORK,” and, as embarrassing as it is to admit, I’ve always liked that branding. In my work-life, I have often liked to focus purely on the mechanical actions of the work. Button is pressed, email goes out, customer receives the product. The upside to this is that you can enjoy each process for its own sake, isolated from any kind of larger analysis of its importance. The downside is that the more that the process becomes alienated from the outcome, the less satisfying it becomes as an action. As a postal worker, for instance, you can take pleasure in the procedure of delivering a letter: the sorting, packing, driving, carrying, navigating, manoeuvring, communicating, and posting. But this is all for nothing unless the item reaches its destination.
When working, we seek meaning where we can get it. We try to channel the tasks we do into ways of understanding ourselves and others, and, if we are extremely fortunate, we also want to feel that what we are doing has some value or significance. Meaning is perhaps one of the “useful metaphors” MP spoke about, if not the only one. There are always more buttons to press and levers to crank, more emails to write and letters to send, more meetings to space out during. In an ideal world, all of these insignificant gestures compound and contribute to a significant outcome, but it is also good to appreciate them in isolation. Not everything needs to be so meaningful, some things can just be something that happened.
READING
I have been reading a number of books that are considered to fall into the category of “weird lit,” in so much as such a category exists outside of the reddit group that named it. I came across this “movement” after reading Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, and then B.R. Yeager’s Amygadalatropolis, a book massively inspired by The Sluts, just after. Both books are completely horrible and also kind of amazing. I read both books in single sittings, and I don’t really recommend either but I also recommend both of them? The Sluts is a novel about a young gay sex worker called Brad with whom a community of clients become infatuated. The novel (published in 2004) takes the form of message board posts and emails through which the story of Brad slowly emerges, contorts, and then collapses in on itself. Amygadalatropolis, also written mostly in the form of forum posts, is about a young man who never leaves his bedroom, exploring his descent into a kind of personal hell after looking at the absolute worst things available on the internet. Both books are about the internet and anonymity: how people distort the truth when given the freedom to do so, and how they perform characters and live out fantasies online. And both contain the most obscene subject matters (murder, violence, incest, rape, castration and more) and are written in a lurid style that made even my (pretty desensitised) skin crawl in moments. They are also about the book form in so much that they convert web-based text forms to print matter, playing with what happens on the page when narratives are built out of this sort of transitory, unreliable communicative form. After reading these two novels, and digging around on reddit threads about “the most depraved books” or whatever, I came across “weird lit” and read a couple more books from this nexus of writers, who all seem to float about on small presses that publish strange genre novels and books with weird layouts and formats. I read Gary J. Shipley’s Terminal Park, which is an apocalyptic zombie-ish science-fiction story about a world in which people start to split in half, eventually filling the whole earth in a sea of multiplying corpses, and B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space, which is also a sort of apocalyptic story but with a plague of teen suicides as the epidemic at the centre. In the former book, the crisis is observed from one perspective, the world ending around one man as he watches on online and from up atop a tower. In the latter, the perspectives shifts paragraph by paragraph, embodying the voice of an array of different interconnected teens. Both were good, but Terminal Park felt a little too derivative, with influences of J.G. Ballard and Don DeLillo taking over. Negative Space, however, is totally its own thing, and also one of the best expressions of small town teenage despair I have encountered. B.R. Yeager has another newer book, which I will also be reading. I can’t say exactly why I read all these books, nor why I’ve been drawn to them at this particular moment, but I’ve enjoyed what I read. There is always something fun about moving away from the “classical” or “literary” and messing around in the muck of the marginal.
LISTENING
I’m sharing here a few recent albums I’ve been listening to, quoting from the liner notes liberally out of both laziness and a fondness for the form. As contrast to the above horrible books, this is all lovely music. First up is more ease & kano matsui’s computer and recording works for girls, a nice, gentle emo ambient thing that merges “atomizing guitar, computer-mangled found sounds, synthesizers, and the futurist glissando of auto tuned vocal harmony into a fine digital mist.” Also lovely is 1982 by Yui Onodera, an ambient album made with “electric guitar, piano, electric violin, field recordings, found objects, portastudio 414MKII, SONY CF-1480 & CF-2400, processing, and various synthesizers and cassette-corders.” As is White Poppy’s Ataraxia, described as “paradise music” that uses “nimble guitar, elevated bass, clean rhythm, and clear light” to merge “new age, bedroom shoegaze, and bossa nova” into what is referred to as “transcendental Tropicalia.” The melodic IDM album You're Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever by Bogdan Raczynski is written up as having tracks that are “alternately drifting beatless on the breeze or underpinned by lo-fi drums, sometimes barely held together with a delicate construction of odd synth patches and ping-pong percussion,” and I have been finding these clicky sounds oddly addictive. The album’s themes (per the liner notes) are grave, but the sound is indeed bouncy and breezy, proposing “beauty in the face of planetary collapse and 24/7 livestreamed genocide.” Lastly, Leave Another Day by Milan W, a dreamy, oozy pop-ish thing featuring oboe, violin, and lots of lovely layered vocals. I love the Boomkat copy for this: “Trust, it’s just one of those albums.” It is! There’s lots of good music this year, this is what I am finding.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.