So I'm blowing the dust off this neglected station. You signed up for these dispatches at some point, I swear. Thank you. Having anyone's attention nowadays is a rare gift, and I worry about misusing it—and the newsletter is such a strange creature, appearing in your inbox next to god only knows. Now that it’s become the preferred format of today’s opinion-mongers and faith-dealers, writing a newsletter feels somewhat fraught. I feel as though I should have some grand theories to offer, or at least a point. But I'm not sure what the point of me is just yet.
Argument: The ghost in the machine is an analog creature that belongs to videotape and audio cassettes, to radio static and television snow. It simply can't inhabit a line of code. Hauntings require room for error and accidental discovery.
Question: How do you reckon with the internet when writing a story that takes place in the present day or near future? Writing about online living feels tacky for some reason, even though it might be the only thing we have left in common.
Many novels, television shows, and films dodge the internet by retreating into the past. Others leap into a decimated future without electricity, let alone email. They depict an offline world in the wake of infrastructural collapse or intergalactic warfare. Maybe there’s no need to be so dramatic. More likely, the internet will soon become so choked with horseshit that it will become untenable. Perhaps we’ll just walk away. Imagine it: the year is 2030, and we’re laughing at how unhappy our noisy screens made us, all the misunderstandings they caused.
Here in Ohio, I’m spending my mornings at the local library, a dramatic glass building that makes me feel like I’m in a mid-budget space opera where there’s a glitch with the hyper-sleep. Although I’m a night owl, I’ve been setting my alarm so I can arrive when the library opens and it’s mostly empty. A young woman studies for medical school. In the far corner, an elderly man sighs over a big book about trees. And I’m hunched over my notebook, trying to make a go of it, this writing thing. The twenty-first draft of my novel is coming along slowly, sometimes painfully. But it’s coming. I’m determined to finish this thing before I’m dead.
Right now, I’m revising a chapter where a priest stands in a parking lot watching a superstore burn, and there’s madness on his face because God has just moved through the world, rearranging the lives of everyone in earshot. Except for him. God has spoken, yet he heard only silence. I’m curious to see what he will do next.
Writing about the loss of faith is so much easier than finding it.
Such a rich emotion when the lady at Taco Bell said, "Welcome back." But it's nice to be remembered.
After three months in Green-Wood Cemetery’s historic chapel, my installation with Candy Chang, After the End, closed last month. Along the way, visitors contributed thousands of reflections about reckoning with loss in the 21st century, and they’re a rare gift of wisdom and grace—a reminder that we’re all walking wounded. I was moved by just how much people wrote. Long letters to their dead. Long letters to themselves. I saw myself in the handwriting of these strangers: apologies for not being present for someone in their last days, the collateral damage of repression and gritted teeth. And one that says I’ve committed to helping those affected by the very thing that took you from me. Most of all, I was moved by their accumulated presence, the collection as an object rather than something to be read.
After the End received a very kind review in The New York Times. And here’s the beautiful soundtrack that Stephen Baker composed:
The other night I dreamt about picking up my teeth in the street while a gigantic man knelt down to tell me he was raised by a mountain and that I did not understand how to live. When I asked if I could bum a cigarette, he tossed me into the sea. I swam into the dark until I was rescued by an inflatable child who cried like a ticking clock. I woke up wondering if I would live my life any differently if I measured my age in days or hours instead of years.
Dream interpretation: I clearly miss smoking. If it were socially acceptable, I'd probably start again.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour has been on my mind lately. And I’m reading Bring Up the Bodies. Although I’m not terribly interested in the Tudors, Hilary Mantel’s prose is so lyrical, dense, and wise that it feels like learning to read—and write—again: “Troubled men . . . sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound?”
If I have a soul, what are its measurements and boundaries? I close my eyes and try to imagine it. Perhaps this is a pointless exercise in metaphysical speculation. Then again, there’s the 21st-century joke—or horror—that our search histories might be the most accurate portrait of our souls.
At night, I fall asleep with Tomonari Nozaki’s Waves looping on the hi-fi: 54 minutes of ambience that pulses and breathes. See also: Dedekind Cut‘s entire discography, a suite of releases that fuses the quiet with the dreadful, occasionally erupting into growling synths and manic percussion. (I recommend starting with Tahoe and American Zen.)
I often think about the few surviving fragments of a lost work called the Ornithogonia that describes the transformation of humans into birds.
Last month I dredged up my old delay pedals, untangled my cords, and returned to a half-remembered conversation from too many years ago. I’m starting to feel that midnight energy again, staying up late with sound and image. In these moments, I almost feel my mind healing from the insults of the 21st century. Here’s a track that I built from a pair of half-speed classical loops, a lot of reverb, and a touch of Joseph Campbell:
Up next: a 40-minute bed of vinyl crackle and smudged vocals designed for writing and/or highway-driving in the hour of the wolf.
Next month I’ll report from London, where C. and I are doing a residency with the American School. Thank you for reading.