Fated for Tragedy — mnchrm vol. xli

Hello friends, enemies, weary travelers, and dour hermits alike! I'm looking out the window up above the courtyard my apartment complex surrounds at a high-rise in the distance. Well, it's only a few blocks away I suppose. Thick waves of mist are rolling across it and breaking around the brick. I wonder, what must the view look like from there?
We're midway through June, and so far it's been a cold Summer in Chicago. Temps mostly floating around the high 50s, low 60s. Today is a bit of a warm spot, high around 70. Maybe I'll go for a run later.

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After 10 weeks straight of sending out my newsletter weekly on Mondays, I broke my streak last week. Of course, even this is a day late on the schedule. I'm sorry! But worry not, I didn't forget you all. Honestly, I've gotten lazy. After coming off of a big contract, I sort of slipped into a lax cycle. As a freelancer, my cycle is all sorts of messed up. You'd think as someone who preaches habit building and consistency, I'd be better, but in fact I talk about it so much because without it I am so bad.

If I'm not on a job, I have a tendency to sleep until 730 or 8ish, shower, eat breakfast, make coffee... by the time I sit down to actually write or work on something, it's nearly 10, and then before I know it, it's 5. Pair this with my bad prioritizing and blind ambition, and I'll often get sucked into a task that's less essential for a few hours. Bleh. I just have to keep working at it, though. I know there are things I want to do every single day, like write, and know where I mess up. 

I think I'm going to go back to try and log my time again, manually, for a week at first. I'll start an activity with a time goal in mind, write down how long it took me to do it, and how well it went. Hopefully in one week of this, I'll get a clearer picture of my hangups and how to get around them. 

I'll let you guys know how it went in 6 days.

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My first piece was published last week! I wrote a review of Adam Popescu's debut novel, NIMA, for The Chicago Review of books. Link here, and here's an excerpt:
 

Writing something for an outlet was a big goal of mine this year, rather than just for one of my blogs, or more work on my novel in progress. It was an interesting process. Very cool to get a go-ahead from an editor, and to ask a publisher for an Advance Copy of the book to cover. 

However, it was frustrating as well. I was really most excited to work with an editor and have them inform my revisions on the draft. However, the editor I worked with ended up being too busy to do a paper edit with me, and went ahead and edited the piece online, which I gave the "okay" on before they scheduled it. Not really the dialogue I was looking for, though of course I appreciate their hard work amid their busy schedule. 

In fact, just getting in contact with them was difficult. I had entire weeks of unanswered emails, so much so that I convinced myself that I would just be ghosted. Of course, a big part of that is just myself overthinking it, but I was looking to work with them more than just contribute some writing.

Beyond that, it was weird for me to formally review a book. I thought a lot about what the purpose of a review is, what sort of information I should be conveying, what a potential reader might want to know, what the CHIRB wants to say.

And the book. I think it's clear from the review I didn't love it. I certainly didn't dislike it, just thought that it missed the mark a lot. I actually would have liked to be a bit more critical of it, but I worried that wasn't exactly useful. I am so tired of all the hot take reviews we get now, just shredding work. I think it's good to be honest about work, but if it's not harmful, why bother? They just read exhaustingly to me, like high school kids who confuse snark for cleverness.

The book has its flaws, though. Nima, the titular character, often just feels like a mouthpiece for Popescu's view of the region or the work the Sherpas do. It's sort of generically-critical of the tourism to the region, but with Popescu a white former-correspondent, and three of the main characters white correspondents, how critical do you think it is? 

There's so many interesting things going on in Nepal around the Himalayas right now, almost all of which the book ignores. No mention of China. This year, 11 climbers died on Everest, literally waiting in lines to get to the summit. Trash and bodies litter the ascent. This did not make it into the novel. Perhaps a lot of these nitpicks are my projection of what I wanted the novel to be, rather than an analysis of what's there, so they didn't make my cut for the review. 

Overall, it was fun, and I learned a lot not only about working with an outlet, but about the difference between internal and external critical analysis. As I've been reading a lot of work and thinking critically about it this year, that can only be good.

I have been told, though no confirmation, that my next review will go up tomorrow. It's a review of Kathryn Scanlon's fascinating AUG 9-FOG, a curation of a journal she purchased at an estate sale. I'm proud of the piece I wrote on it, and will share it on Twitter when it goes live.

After that, I've got one more booked with the Kenyon Review, which I'm super excited about. Hoping to get a few more publications lined up!

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Ever since reading Ben Lerner, I've been fascinated by the data we create and the new difficulties it presents for archivists and historians. In his novel 10:04 as well as the New Yorker short story THE GOLDEN VANITY which is the second chapter of said book, he muses about how the papers of writers now will be stored. It's not as simple as collecting all of Hemingway's letters.

We're in a weird point with data. It seems like everything is eternal now, being digitized and stored on the internet, but the opposite may be the case. A friend of mine who is versed on such matters said that we may be living in a data "dark age". Without written journals and letters, what happens to the events of our day once Twitter and Gmail go belly-up? Even beyond that, we're reliant on a lot of architecture and infrastructure now that's all sort of hacked together, never intended for long term use, but here we are.

For those of you who've been following along for a while, you may know this is a major plot point of my novel, where a man is using his memories and a written journal to try and piece together a relationship fated for tragedy.

I spent a lot of last week just pulling all the data off of my old MacBook, in preparation to install Ubuntu on it. Just backing up old writing, old photos, all my music. It was like finding a time-capsule. Even in the six years it's been since I got that computer, it's amazing how much we've moved away from even our own data. When I was in high school, I was buying CDs, burning torrented albums on to blank CDs, and loading MP3s onto an iPod. Now, almost all the music I listen to is rented to me via Spotify; I don't even collect the MP3s anymore. I buy vinyl for the experience and to support artists.

It's one of these things in tech that's not scary on its own, but if it goes bad, it's way too late. Should everyone break out their iPods and ditch their Netflix subscriptions? Might not be a bad idea...

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In the end, I did get up and running on Ubuntu. Right now, I'm running zsh and vscode through gnome. I'd like to make this as efficient a workstation as possible for development, sticking to the command line where I can. It's really fun to optimize this and get it up and running exactly how I like. I think I'm moving towards an i3-gaps and polybar setup, and into nvim.

If that's all gibberish to you, no worries!

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Thanks for letting me transmit this dispatch directly to your inbox. I hope the silent week without my message was a good one for you, and this one has gotten started the same way.

Fight on, my friends.

Your faithful commander,
 — I