A year ago I wrote a Goodreads review of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke that ended with this:

It also strikes me that I should add this book to a short list of books or writings which are among the best things ever written and happen to be (to varying degrees) about the author’s mother:

1. The Glass Essay by Anne Carson
2. Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
3. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
4. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

I now have another to add to this list:

5. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

I was thinking of this because I just started Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana, and I was reflecting that “One Brief, Scuzzy Moment,” by him, republished by NY Mag shortly after he died, was probably the best piece of prose I’ve read in the past year, maybe the last few years. But the best thing I’ve read overall in the past year is Lucy.

I read Lucy a couple weeks ago. It’s a short novel, and by the time I was about 30 pages in I was telling people it was “hard to think of a book I think is better.” It was published in 1990, and after finishing it I learned each of the 5 chapters were originally published in the New Yorker, serially, and that Kincaid’s husband during this time was Allen Shawn, brother of Wallace (himself the husband of Deborah Eisenberg), and son of William Shawn, extremely influential and opinionated editor of the New Yorker through 4 decades, 1952-1987. Maybe it doesn’t matter who her husband was, but I imagine Allen was possibly a useful first reader. In any case, imagine the level of attention a book whose every chapter was published in the New Yorker individually would have gotten.

This question of “thinking of a book that is better” has caused me to go back in my mind through the best books I’ve read in the past ~5 years, which would be The Idiot by Elif Batuman, Luster by Raven Leilani, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Early Work by Andrew Martin, maybe Elementary Particles by Houllebecq, possibly Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and also, for sure, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams—the book that caused me to make the above list. All of these are incredible achievements, and to some extent it’s silly to compare them, but doing so helps me think about what I actually value from a book.

I think ultimately I think Normal People is the best book of all the ones just mentioned, but only because romantic relationships are, to me, the most important thing in life, and Normal People focuses on one extremely important, self-shaping relationship to the exclusion of all else, and so it’s hard to compete with someone focusing that hard on the most important thing. Also, the characters and their milieu and values — everyone’s vaguely left-liberal but mostly cares about writing — felt exactly like the context in which most of my important relationships played out, and so I kind of felt like the book was literally about me.

But there’s also something important about life not captured by Normal People, which is relationships with family members, perhaps especially if those relationships have been ‘problematized’. It’s here that the next-best rung of my favorites shine, and this includes A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Lucy (and the rest of the books on my list of 5 at the top). Between these two, scalar comparison kind of breaks down. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is an incredible text, but (and?), like The Glass Essay, it’s shorter than 80 pages, but (and?) those pages are just pure concentrated expression of a single feeling. Sorrow and Glass are like bullets to your brain, or an extremely strong hallucinogenic drug that fully takes you to another world, you literally cannot see out your own eyes, and then, 10 minutes later, it wears off and you’re back in reality. What is the value of that? It feels intense, but it can be slippery to evaluate aesthetically.

Lucy, on the other hand, is a novel. It has a plot. It has secondary and tertiary characters. They all have arcs. But it’s doing a very similar thing as Sorrow and Glass (and Fierce Attachments and Are You My Mother?). The most important relationship in the book is that between the protagonist, Lucy, and her mother, who exists only in flashbacks and anecdotes. Lucy is a 19-year-old girl from the West Indies who gets a job as an au pair for a rich family in an unnamed city that is New York. The book covers a year of this life, wherein Lucy meets an Irish girl her age who she becomes friends with, has at least two mostly emotionless flings with handsome and/or charismatic guys, and gets to know very well the white family whose four mostly-sweet daughters she cares for, especially the mother of the family, who could not be more different from Lucy (or Lucy’s mother), and who serves as the primary engine for Lucy’s self-discovery. Lucy learns that even rich white women can feel sad, and (but?) to her mind, they can be shockingly naive about men. Where Lucy comes from, women outright try to murder their sexual rivals, if only with obeah, a kind of magic. But the main target of Lucy’s introspective investigations is her own mother, and specifically, the inextricably connected and inexhaustibly complex link between her love and her hate for the woman who raised her (which, incidentally, is pretty much exactly the theme of Fierce Attachments). Here is a representative passage:

As each day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape—the shape of my past.

My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the French patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that—female. Oh, it was a laugh, for I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother—I was my mother. And I could see now why, to the few feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was “You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me.” How else was I to take such a statement but as a sentence for life in a prison whose bars were stronger than any iron imaginable? I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letters, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.

Incidentally, the restraint to not italicize the “was” in “I was my mother” there is kind of mind-blowing to me. That’s that New Yorker line-editing jumping out. There’s a whole philosophy of orthography embedded in that decision, founded on a very deep trust in the reader, that is only one of a million prose decisions in these 164 pages that goes toward making this deceptively simple novel one of the best piecing of writing I’ve ever read.

Anyway, I recommend Lucy. I also have two copies now, so if you want one you should hit me up.

I made these portraits by interviewing people I knew at the time, and editing those interviews into first-person narratives. At the time I felt like I was inventing a random new art form, but a couple years later I ended up doing a series of this exact thing with Canadian immigrants for the Torontoist, and, a couple years after that, a very similar thing in a ghostwriting capacity for American entrepreneurs. Writing this now, it feels like an almost too-perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of artist’s arc, from pure whimsy to meeting the market’s needs. Anyway, thank you Brad, for soliciting this work—I’m glad it exists. If anyone would like to hire me to ghostwrite their memoir, hit me up, you know where to find me.

And, enjoy. The words below are Bea’s.

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I’m twenty-five. I grew up in a town called Hagersville, Ontario. It’s about forty-five minutes south of Hamilton. Hamilton is in the very westerly corner of Lake Ontario—that bay. South from there is a highway called Highway 6. Runs down to the shore of Lake Erie, directly south. Hagersville is about fifteen minutes from Lake Erie. About a third of the town is part of the New Credit Indian Reserve. And it’s like, there are no signs anywhere saying like, where, like, what’s the rez and what’s not. It’s just like, you walk across the train tracks and like all of a sudden you’re in New Credit, and you’re under like, slightly different laws and different police. If police are chasing you and it’s something relatively minor, they usually won’t follow you {laughing} if you run over the line, if you cross the line over to the rez and just like, keep driving. If it’s serious they’ll call like, band police or they’ll chase you themselves but often they’re just like... {throws up hands like ‘fuck it’}. So that’s the environment I grew up in.

I lived there my whole life up until I was seventeen and then I moved here. And I lived here for six years. And then I moved... and then I became pretty much homeless, like transient, and started living in different like, pretty fucked up places in Hamilton, where, all different friends from home—cuz home is really fu-, like, it’s really fucked up. All different people from Hagersville, like, they go, cuz there’s no jobs or housing at all there, they go out to Hamilton and like, get squats in the north end, and continue doing what they do in Hagersville, just in Hamilton. It’s like a denser population but it’s just as bad in terms of like, Oxy addiction, meth, crack. So basically I started living with a bunch of crackheads. But ones that I knew from home, you know {laughing}.

It was fucked. Living an addict lifestyle is like—it’s not fun. It’s—north Hamilton, north end of Hamilton, is like old Parkdale. And it’s like... there are lots of really good people there, that I love, and you have a really really good time there, there’s a lot of like, strong... it’s a strong community? You’ll see stuff like, just the other day, I saw a guy on the corner, and his friend came up, and they were like, ‘What’s up’, and his friend was like ‘Oh, you brought your kid along this time’, and he was just like ‘Yeah, I get my kid on the weekends, isn’t it great?’ and he was like ‘Oh you got a really cute kid’. But like they were like, you know {slaps one hand with their other hand}. Like, a drug deal.

It’s certainly not a great place to raise a family. But I don’t really think like, anywhere is. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a good place to raise a family. ’Specially not in southern Ontario. Like, it’s a very family-friendly neighbourhood, so people know each other on a first name, they know all their neighbours on a first name basis, the community’s really tight... if a kid goes missing, you know, you can walk down a few doorsteps and be like ‘Oh like, local head who knows everything, where’s this kid?’ And they’ll be like ‘Oh, your dumb kid is over here’. So it’s like... people who are my age, and still living with their parents, which I do often—my father lives up in Haliburton County, I don’t see him very much, I haven’t seen him for the last two years. And my mom lives in, actually a wealthy suburb of Hamilton, which is like, cuz Hamilton has this like, big ridge around it, and up on the ridge is like, wealthy suburbs, and, to the westernmost point of this ridge, right at the very corner of what could be considered Lake Ontario, there’s a bunch of like, really really nice like, pretty special forest, that like, basically it’s the northernmost reach of a very specific kind of forest called a Carolinian forest that’s got like, a lot of nice trees like sycamores and stuff that you don’t get in Canada really, cuz the climate is like a little microclimate and it’s a little bit warmer there all the time, and there’s all these springs and stuff, and it’s like a really, really, really nice—I hesitate to even call it a suburb, cuz it’s just like, a really-really-really-really nice wealthy like, beautiful town. But it’s like, on the bus route. It’s like, part of Hamilton.

And the only reason we live there is because my mother started seeing my little sister’s hip surgeon about six years ago. And they’re planning on getting married. And this is a man who literally owns a hospital in the Cayman Islands. So he just bought the house for our family with cash. And we just like—four generations just live in it {laughing}. So it’s like, some Beverly Hillbilly shit, right? I try to spend as much time there as possible. It’s a comfortable place {laughing}.

I would much rather be self-sufficient though, and not carrying around all this shit. Like, I’ve been doing drugs and basically been a drug addict since I was like, fourteen. Like at my school, like, in grade eight, like when you’re twelve, like, Oxycontin is like, huge. It’s like, eeeeveryone is hooked on opiates. Which, I actually never really had any love for, like, my thing was stimulants and that’s what destroyed me. But, like, I absolutely would prefer to have not gone downhill over the years, and be like, more self-sufficient than I am right now. But like, I’m not.

Basically I’ll go to my mom’s house and I’ll like, hang out in a room in a basement and just like, live in my mom’s basement and it’s like, it’s great. It’s great. Like, I’ll catch some heat from my family. I mean, my whole family is pretty into me, except, they’re just like, really-really-really worried about me. And this is me being like, real generous about the way that they treat me {laughing}. They’re really worried about me and I wouldn’t like, say anything bad about them, or like, speak like I have old personality clashes with my family or something like that. I think that’s normal for a family.

I have a little sister who’s twenty or twenty-one. She’s just like, the most perfect person. She’s incredibly incredibly incredibly intelligent. She’s incredibly emotionally intelligent as well as being just like, academically like, extreeemely gifted. And she always has been. Like she started reading when she was like three years old. I’m five years older than her, and we were like reading together, like I was like teaching her to read and she was like, reading at a level where she was like, comprehending and reading books on her own at three years old. She’s like, a real savant. Except she doesn’t have any negative qualities of a savant. She’s a bit autistic, like diagnosed, but she’s like, she’s great. She’s got it. Only thing is, she’s not really mobile. Like, her... she’s got like, some degenerative bone condition... that actually a lot of people in my town have. And I think it’s because of tainted water supply... {sighs}. A lot of people who were born around the time my little sister was have problems with like, premature arthritis and degenerative bone conditions and all this stuff. So my little sister basically uses a wheelchair all the time. But she’s in a pre-med program right now, tops of her class in everything. She’s also really good at philosophy, way better than I am. Like, way better. The only thing I think that I have over her at any point is I have slightly better taste than her? But that doesn’t mean anything {laughing}.

The tainted water thing is because we grew up by the rez, and, I’m sure you know there’s no regard at all for the well-being of native people in Canada, and there was a big ass fucking tire dump just on the border of the rez for so many years, like, companies were just dumping old used bald tires, and it was just this mountain of fucking tires, and it was like the Springfield Tire Fire, but it happened to us. Someone came and they were like ‘Let’s set it on fire’, in about, I think it was 1990—if you google ‘Hagersville’, what will come up is Hagersville Tire Fire news. In 1990 this giant multi-ton pyramid of tires burned, like, they couldn’t put it out it burnt right down to the ground till it was nothing. And then they just paved the area over. And all that entered the local water table. And since we all grew up drinking from wells, because there’s no water infrastructure—it’s a big status symbol out there actually, is getting water delivered to your home to get pumped into a cistern, and then like buying water at the grocery store to drink. But it’s a status symbol that actually means something, because you’re like, keeping your family safe by not drinking out of the water table. So many people have like... I mean, there’s obviously like drug and alcohol problems too so it can be difficult to differentiate between like ‘Oh this person has FASD’, or ‘This person started doing drugs when they were five’, or is it just the fucking water. In so many cases. It’s a lot like Gummo, with Indians.

The fastest way out of Hagersville was to go straight into university as a seventeen-year-old. So I went to U of T.1 That’s when I started living here. But my plan for going to U of T was just so that I could live here, it wasn’t that I thought that there was some program that I wanted to take. I went to school for history and I was terrible at it because I was a drug addict and it requires too much focus, and actual knowledge. I thought I wanted to take history because I’ve always been pretty pissed off at history and I wanted to like... learn more. But then I found out that history is actually really labour-intensive, you have to do a hell of a lot of reading. Hell of a lot of reading. Whereas, literature, you have to do hardly any reading at all. Comparatively. So yeah. It was basically a matter of—I didn’t realize I was a drug addict until a couple of years ago—but it was basically a matter of, like, I couldn’t complete the history... I couldn’t, not just complete it, but I couldn’t get what I wanted to get out of the history program, as a drug addict. But for the lit program: yeah, absolutely.

I never got my degree. I have one credit left to go. But I mean my best bet for like, living any semblance of like, uhh... like, a normal, like decent life—because I do have some pretty good grades on my transcript despite how fucked up I was in university—is to go get funding, do a PhD program type thing—something I could absolutely do. I’ve kept contact with a lot of academics. People who can write me recommendations, shit like that. So I always... I forget it a lot, but I have that in my back pocket. And it’s like, quite an advantage when I’m like, feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I’m twenty-five, what is my life, I’ve lost the last like, three years of my life to a crack addiction’ or something like that {laughing}.

All the stereotypes are true about crack. Every silly, oppressive stereotype about crack is true. People will do anything to get it; it will completely destroy your mental functioning and your personality; it will randomly kill you; there’s no safe amount. For the longest time, when I was getting into it, I was just being such an asshole and just being... to my friends back home, who have access to large amounts of like, not cooked shit but like pure shit, and then like, cook it up and like move it out around Hamilton, because that’s how growing up next to the rez is, like you have access to quite a bit of pretty freshly smuggled-in shit.

Everything comes from the States. When it comes to cocaine. Like, it’s ideal for it to cross as few borders as possible. So, it’s coming in... there’s a reserve on the St. Lawrence called Akwesasne. That’s a Mohawk reserve as well. Lots and lots and lots of the cocaine that comes into Canada, and I mean lots, comes through there. And the reserve that I grew up next to is also a Mohawk reserve, it gets run down there, and it also just comes straight across Lake Erie. There’s lots and lots and lots of little houses that used to be like, cottages for like, English people, and like, wealthy industrialists and stuff, like tiny little cottages, that were built up during the early early twentieth century. And that real estate was never worth anything, people just bought it up there because it was a nice area. Then all this fucked up industry got built up all along there and it became this like, postindustrial hellscape. Like it’s really beautiful, it’s really really beautiful, the water’s always like, way too warm because it’s like, all getting spilled out from the factories. But a lot of stuff just comes from Pennsylvania and New York State, and Michigan, and just comes just across the lake, you just need a speedboat. And not like a speedboat that you see, just a little fucking like—it does get choppy on Lake Erie and like, people do die doing smuggling runs, but it’s like, you just take like a fourteen foot aluminum boat across the lake.

I knew my area was fucked up when I was growing up, but I didn’t realize how much fun I was having. Growing up I was like, angry at it, I was like ‘Oh my God, this is like, so sad and awful’—and I’m still, like, a staunch decolonial socialist, like I want Canada to not exist. But at the same time, since it’s sincerely damaged me, I’m gonna be like, ‘Oh that was fun though. That was a fun place to grow up. It’s a hell of a place to raise a kid’ {laughing}.

I try to consider myself an artist. I’ve had a couple of pretty damn good bands that never played a single show. Like, I’m like, a music person... I’m not anymore, I’m not an anything person anymore, I literally don’t read or listen to music, I like put things over my eyes and plugs into my ears and like huddle, like this, in my spare time. But like, the bands that I had were quite good. Were quite good. So those are some abortive projects that I’ve had. I’m actually playing one of the first shows I’ve had since I was like nineteen years old in about... on July twenty-fourth. Just me. This is gonna be a country music set. Just me and a guitar. And I’m gonna be singing some country songs that I used to use as material for my abortive country band. We were called Marijuana. Actually, the other members of both of those bands actually like, really literally hate me, and would like... One or two of them would be like, ‘Oh, I hope that person is someone I can talk to in a few years’, and then one of the people is like, ‘If I see you, I’m going to kill you’ {laughing}. But that’s what... like, drugs do. Drugs, they kill, they kill art.

Other than that, I had a friend who owned a gallery in Hamilton, and I was going to put up an exhibit there that was just gonna be all like readymade shit, but it was gonna be all medical equipment, because I really like the aesthetic of medical equipment. Because my family is so medicalized because we have so many health problems, I grew up around a lot of medical apparatuses and stuff like that. And I really really really like the aesthetic of medical stuff. And I was gonna put like... like obviously you have to have one of those IV drip rack things; I had a CPR dummy that was quite nice, and actually I still have him. My partner at the time named the CPR dummy ‘Daddy’. It’s just this blank-face, like, genderless goon. Daddy was gonna be part of the exhibit. I have access to a couple of surplus hospital beds, I was gonna put in there... when the theorizing for the project got really extreme, we were talking about it as performance art where I would just lie in the bed and do like, a Hamilton version of a David Blaine stunt and just lie in bed and die and not eat for days and days and just like waste away in the window of the gallery. Because Hamilton’s economy, aside from drugs, is pretty much all hospitals. There are like, three or four massive hospitals in it, and they employ the vast majority of the well-employed people in Hamilton. And then the rest of the people spend all their time at the hospital. Treating their abscesses and trying to get their prescriptions and stuff like that. Dealing with their bone cancers that they got from drinking tire fire water.

Writing is something I only really got good at a year ago. I’ve been writing my whole life. Poetry and short stories, typical shit. I’ve never really been able to journal well. I’ve tried to do that before and it really really doesn’t work out. I have a very difficult time like, perceiving myself. I just don’t like to think about it. For a long time I couldn’t escape that juvenile feeling of, this thing I’m doing is too this or too that, you know? I can’t write this way because it is... too much itself. I was so afraid of being like, a stereotype of myself. But at this point I’m just like, I’ve realized that I have some level of skill and I just wanna like, I just wanna do it and make money off it so I don’t have to fuckin’ work.

What they call ‘The New Sincerity’ is something that I really want to like, and in many ways participate in, and like... I both want to and I have to. And I also think that it’s like—kind of trite. You know? Like, Livejournal has always existed {laughing}. That’s something I don’t have time for, you know? Like... the world is a serious place. And people have serious problems. People have serious problems. And people are seriously underrepresented as human beings. And I don’t really have any particular interest in any one human being representing themselves to the best they can be. I don’t think that that’s—and this I guess is more of an ethical argument than an aesthetic one—I don’t think that that’s what writing should be for, or what it’s for.

I mean on Facebook I’m very much consciously writing to an audience. Very much so. It’s part of why I go through waves of being extremely popular, and then extremely unpopular. It’s because people... because I can’t keep it up forever, and the fact that I’m pretty much being bitter like 90% of the time becomes clear to people, and they’re like ‘Oh, no, you’re genuinely an asshole’ {laughing}, like {sad disappointed voice} ‘Ohhh....’. And I’m not! I’m actually a very open and accepting person to all sorts of people who have all sorts of things wrong with them. And that’s not... it’s not my thing to make people feel bad for being themselves. At all. I have lots of friends who other people just wouldn’t put up with. But. If you’re coming to me and saying things, saying ‘Things are this way’, then I have no problem saying like ‘No they are not this way. They’re not this way at all’.

They’ve turned oppression into social capital. Which is disgusting. It’s disgusting because people who are actually oppressed don’t have access to these fucking communities. And that varies. Like, it depends on where you grew up, like access is not something that you can universally... cuz there are many different nations within the Americas, you can’t universally be like ‘You know, you have access because you’re at this income level’ or something like that. You know, there are a lot of people who are like seriously marginalized who contribute to this really well, but they contribute on Twitter, you know? There’s Black Twitter, and that makes a difference that actually causes things to change. And then there’s Queer Facebook, which is mostly just crazy people making each other crazier. It’s a whole lot of just enabling. And, you know, coming from like, a serious place, seeing serious problems in my own family, and, you know, growing up in the middle of a very visible race war, I don’t have time for these people’s like, half-thought-out like psychoanalyses of how oppression works. Like, not only is it stupid, and I would just make fun of them for fun, but it’s actually harmful to the wider discourse.

[My roommate Dan comes home, sees two bottles of wine on the table, says to me: “What are these interviews? You encourage people’s vices and ask them about their sexual histories? ‘What’s your fuck-style, bro?’”

Bea {laughing}: “That’s basically what it’s been leading up to, or skirting around.”

Dan: “Will you be distracted if I do dishes and stuff?”

Stephen: “No, it’s cool.”

Dan: “I forgot to get toilet paper on the way home.”

Stephen: “I didn’t realize we were out. I can get some.”

Dan: “I think it’s probably your turn.”

Stephen: “Yeah.”

Dan (to Bea): “What’s your, what do you...?”

Bea: “I’m not a writer... I have a couple of things published but I’m very much like, a non-prolific person. And kind of wondering why I’m being interviewed. To be honest.”

Dan: “That’s okay though. You know, this artist who I saw whose name I can’t remember, he’s like an old dude, and everyone loves him in Vancouver, but like... he’s a great artist... I guess, I think... {Bea laughs} but he didn’t take advantage of the system that much, like he didn’t make that much money, but, you know... he built up—”

Bea: “I am a writer, people know who I am... some people.”

Dan leaves.]

I’m really hung up always on whether or not I should move. And I think that I should. But on the other hand I feel like everything that—really everything that I am is part of this very specific place. And in Toronto I’m close to it, and in Hamilton I’m in it. But... I think I should move to LA. Because I really really really really love places on Earth where we have real communities where I could live. Like, someone like me who knows too much about... history... to not be mad, but is also too okay with people to not enjoy the sheer stupidity of our culture, you know? Because I genuinely love like, wraparound mirror shades and vapes. And like I really love those expensive leather sandals that are like strips of leather woven together on an expensive sole and like wearing an expensive sock with that and walking around vaping—I think that that shit’s great. It’s not just that it’s funny; it like speaks to me. The LA aesthetic speaks to me very much. And also it’s just like, the most fucked-up place in the world. It’s the end of the world. LA is like the very edge of... it’s the end. It’s the end of the colonial project. That’s what you get at the end, is LA.

And, um. I feel like it’s a place where people wouldn’t... people, ah... people don’t just not look down on, but they embrace... like there’s no anxiety... over... how stupid you look. Or, um... all of those sort of things that are what Toronto is all about. These feelings of, of white anxiety. Of like, ‘how dumb this is’. Because the other thing is, I identify as agender, or like, butch, but I’m kind of in the middle of things with respect to that. There was a time when I was insisting on using feminine pronouns to refer to myself and presenting in various degrees of femininity. It sucked. People treated me like shit. Now I just ask those who are close enough to me to want to be respectful to use feminine or gender neutral pronouns. I don’t know. I have always been out of place in masculine-dominated, or masculine-oriented social groups. They make me very uncomfortable. And I can’t stand being the only person who seems to give a fuck in a group so I just don’t. Oh, I just remembered that ‘neutrois’ is my preferred gender descriptor. I always forget that word, but I feel like it describes me perfectly. Obviously I am very tall and scruffy so I get misgendered almost always except by the very slim slice of people who would ask me what my pronouns are first.

Something actually that I saw on Facebook a while back, and I forget which of my friends said it, but they said ‘I fit right in in LA because I can rollerblade down the street in my spandex shorts, vaping, with a ghetto blaster pumping Taylor Swift on my shoulder, and everyone’s like “right on”.’ And they meant it. And like, that combined with the fact that... that’s part of past and future Mexico. Like this is another center of decolonization. I want to live at the end of white culture. I mean I think I probably belong in fucking like, Colorado or some northwestern city because I’m just ultimately just a hippie. But like, I’m way too focused to ever find contentment in those places. I know that I am. LA is the end of the world, hopefully the start of the new. I wanna see Regis Philbin reincarnated. I want Regis Philbin to be turned into a lich. I want Regis Philbin’s soul put back into his dead body immediately after he dies and... I wanna interact with that. I want that to be part of my day-to-day life.

Sometimes you’re definitely one thing, like a human, but along some axes, you probably don't fall neatly into any particular category. One example of an edge case like this for me is ‘journalist’. Last year, I published three things in ‘a real magazine’; the year before that, one; the year before that, zero. Along an axis like this, you can imagine your identity as a tree on the border of two yards. Sometimes it’s fine to let that tree stand where it is; ‘journalist’ is like this for me—no one is forcing me to say whether or not I’m a journalist, and the ambiguity doesn’t really seem to affect my life.

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But a lot of life is quite tribalistic. Humans love to build coalitions around common interests; we can’t get enough of it. It makes us feel safe in a harsh world. Some of us care a lot about having ‘correct’ (in the sense of actually true) opinions, but even more of us care a lot about having ‘correct’ (in the sense of other-people-won’t-be-mad-at-me-for-believing-this) opinions. Which makes sense; we don’t want to cast into the outer darkness to be the prey of wolves.

Even deeper than opinions, and more complex, are aspects of our identity. We often talk about some aspects of ourselves as if they’re facts, such as whether we’re cis or not; however, some of these aspects can be seen to be downstream of culture (cf. ’s “Why I Stopped Using They/Them Pronouns After 13 Years”). Often the truth-seeking move is to let your tree stand in its awkward location, and the integrity of this move can feel gratifying—but sometimes the outlier doesn’t get invited to parties. Sometimes, your life becomes easier if you cut that tree down and, as it falls, push it into one of the two yards.

Here are some edge cases where I felt I’ve been at crossroads, and could have joined either side, but have pushed my tree into one of two yards (or have ended up there accidentally), and have been happy with the outcome:

• Queer-ish person in non-queer world (vs straight-ish person in queer world)1

• Dumb person in smart world (vs smart person in dumb world)

• Poor person in rich world (vs rich person in poor world)

• Left-leaning person in centrist world (vs centrist person in left world)

These are just my intuitive preferences. I don’t claim they’re optimally advantageous, or that they’ll always feel right. But they’ve been making me happy.

Finally, I should say that as time passes and I’ve personally witnessed more and more deep reconfigurations of cultural alignments, I’ve observed that people who leave their tree standing in an awkward location during one era, often at significant personal expense, tend to be, in the next era, the landmarks around which new territories form, becoming ground zero for the process described in “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution.” I consider this steadfastness heroic; but the definition of a hero is someone who is better than the average person, and I consider myself relatively average.

However, beware. Not all classics are good. Some are bad. For example, I just finished certified Classic The Red and the Black, for my goddamn book club where we always pick the worst books explore literature’s underappreciated gems, and I have to admit that some Classics are Bad, Actually. It would be a real shame if you got all enthusiastic about classics but then ran out and picked up, for example, Jude the Obscure, which is insanely boring, so below is my definitive list of Good and Bad Classics.

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4 things:

• These are all original assessments; many if not most of these books I read between 18-23, as a cognitive science major with no interest in the kind of academic analysis skewers here; I was looking for pleasure and good company.

• Relatedly, an asterisk (*) denotes a title that I suspect is unlikely to cause pleasure unless mixed with the levels of testosterone typically found in a male of that age.

• Sort of relatedly: the list is very male-heavy; this is partly because I’m a man, but also because, as far as I can tell, men used to write most of the good books; these days, women write most of the good books.

• I included, randomly, some ‘modern classics’, because they were in the lists of classics I was using to create my list. If this gets people to read them, I think it justifies the chaos.

So:

Good classics, i.e. classics you will actually enjoy reading (in order of best to worst, dropping off at a not-quite-exponential rate)

1. War & Peace

2. Infinite Jest

3. Anna Karenina

4. Middlemarch

5. To the Lighthouse

6. Crime and Punishment*

7. Madame Bovary

8. The Catcher in the Rye (+ all Salinger)

9. The Death of Ivan Ilych

10. The Sun Also Rises
    —
    tier above which “to think I might have died without having read it” applies
    —

11. Catch-22

12. Things Fall Apart

13. Of Human Bondage

14. The House of Mirth

15. Tropic of Cancer*

16. The Brothers Karamazov

17. Heart of Darkness

18. The Bell Jar

19. Lolita

20. Slaughterhouse 5 (+ all Vonnegut, to a considerably lesser extent)

    —
    tier above which, if you haven’t read any of these books, you probably don’t understand why fiction is the best art
    —

21. American Psycho

22. Trainspotting

23. Man’s Search for Meaning

24. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

25. On the Road*

26. Waiting for Godot

27. A Streetcar Named Desire

28. Long Day’s Journey Into Night

29. The Old Man and the Sea

30. Hunger

    —
    tier above which, if you have read these, you probably think you’re smarter than all therapists, because they’re trying to solve specific problems while you’re trying to solve “the” problem (life)
    —

31. The Metamorphosis

32. The Autobiography of Malcolm X

33. Blood and Guts in High School

34. Blood Meridian

35. The Secret History

36. Pale Fire

37. Notes from Underground

38. A Movable Feast / The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

39. Meditations

40. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

    —
    above this line are still some of the best books ever written; after this they start to get pretty optional, though they might still change your life even if you don’t enjoy reading
    —

41. The Stranger

42. The Lovely Bones

43. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*

44. Death of a Salesman

45. Walden

46. The Great Gatsby

47. Mrs Dalloway

48. Dubliners

49. Elie Wiesel’s Night

50. Fight Club*

51. The Handmaid’s Tale

52. Elementary Particles

53. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

54. Anne Frank’s Diary

55. Giovanni’s Room

56. Pride and Prejudice

57. The Sorrows of Young Werther

58. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

59. The Glass Menagerie

60. Siddhartha

    —
    below this line are still very good books, but I don’t think they will change anyone’s life and I only endorse reading if you “like to read”
    —

61. Vanity Fair

62. To Kill a Mockingbird

63. Nineteen Eighty-Four

64. Brave New World

65. Lady Chatterley's Lover

66. Steppenwolf

67. Denis Johnson’s Angels

68. A Room of One’s Own

69. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

70. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

71. Rabbit, Run

72. The Little Prince

73. Looking for Alaska

74. Tuesdays with Morrie

75. Ficciones

Bad classics (unordered)

1. The Red and the Black

2. The Master and Margarita

3. Ulysses

4. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

6. Great Expectations

7. Jude the Obscure

8. The Picture of Dorian Gray

9. Absalom, Absalom (+ all Faulkner)

10. Gulliver’s Travels

11. North and South

12. Robinson Crusoe

13. The Arabian Nights

14. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

15. Villette

16. Naked Lunch

17. A Farewell to Arms

18. Less Than Zero

19. 2001: A Space Odyssey (though the movie is an extremely Good Classic)

20. The New York Trilogy

21. The Adventures of Augie March (+ all Bellow)

22. Darkness at Noon

23. A Passage to India

24. The Corrections

25. Look Homeward, Angel

I’m leaving out some that fall in the middle, like The Idiot by Dostoevsky and A Separate Peace by John Knowles, and of course the ones I haven’t read, plus Shakespeare and Homer and Virgil, which I consider something else entirely.

How did I do? Sound off in the comments.

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Review of Male Writers’ Fashion Decisions in Their Author Photos: Sam Lipsyte, Zachary German, Tan Lin

We’re all trying to look good for each other these days and male writers are no exception especially in photographs of them which are public and findable on Google Image Search. Here I review 3 instances of male writers’ fashion decisions in pictures.

Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte writes books and was interviewed by the NYT and here we see him in something like a ‘normal author photo’. As you can see he looks a bit like a weatherman which may have to do with the sky behind him gearing up for some precipitation, which goes to show you the ‘background’/’context’ of your author pic can be as active in determining your author pic’s meaning as your clothes decisions and is a lesson that will recur passim herein. Sam has chosen to wear what might be a black ‘fleece’ over a navy hoodie; he is doing ‘layering’. He is clean-shaven and is achieving a combination of smiling and smirking, which is done by first smiling then trying to frown a little. This makes your face appear to have a believable/‘realistic’ amount of humanness and is another kind of layering, which is a theme. Sam’s hair looks windblown, which is another reason he may appear to be bringing you news about a storm that’s breaking in your area. He’s looking directly at the camera. This is a risky decision and not easy to pull off but I think it’s working for him—comes a point when you can’t pretend you don’t see the camera: you’re being observed; you’ve written a book; you’re in New York. Having a theme contributes to an impression of heightened intentionality in your fashion decisions which as in ‘literature’ attracts attention and more-careful consideration because people feel you’ve put more effort into your book/outfit. Sam here is working within a very conventional, even ‘retro’ aesthetic of author pics but despite that he’s put his stamp on it, good job Sam. Layering is good for fall.

Zachary German

Here Zachary German appears as a Danish supermodel in evening wear. This is a good look for Zachary given his handsome smooth face and open mouth. Notice the bow tie, trench coat, shirt that might be poplin, hard to tell from picture. Product in hair makes the hair go sweeping up, short around sides, very good. Zachary is looking directly at the camera, like Sam before him. All the tones of his clothes match his skin tone very closely, which is intentional, and makes his eyes and hair really ‘pop’, especially his hair. This photograph has been ‘shopped’ to enhance this effect, but it is a legit effect that is viable on the street without postprocessing. Zachary is dressed for being in a magazine, which makes you understand he understands context’s import w/r/t style, like how in ‘print’ some people do orthography, & even syntax, one way, but a wholly different way for online writing. This principle holds for fashion decisions also. Zachary might wear different clothes while just hanging with friends. Zachary has written a book. His ‘model’ style seems like an appropriate way to allow stylists to dress him for a photo shoot where they list him as a beautiful person of a year, which happened. Play to your strengths, and also consider the possible excitement evocable if you blend things not normally mixed, such as being a writer but also a model (or like a model). Zachary is doing something different and that makes us notice him. Good job Zachary. It has been said that all masterpieces are genre blends/hybrids. The background is graded minimally in the direction exactly, but subtly, opposite to his face’s shadows’ gradient. Excellent work all around.

Tan Lin

This is Tan Lin, a writer of poetry, smiling, looking very happy in a baseball cap in a vinyl possibly- café booth or maybe just bench or wide chair. Excellent, original way to be in a picture, for a poet, especially a poet who’s experimental. I would call this look ‘exuberant’ or ‘ebullient’. Both words start with the Latin prefix ‘ex’ (abbreviated to just ‘e’ in latter) which means ‘out of’ and means something’s coming out of, and here I think we really see something’s coming out of Tan, some kind of happiness or feeling which seems super-authentic and is directed at and projects into the camera’s lens. He’s wearing a white ball cap with a definitely curved bill that fits his head well and makes the top of his head seem very round and accentuates his slim frame. The color is probably somewhat ‘off’ in this photo; I don’t think his lips are really that color. Look at his glasses. Face, very clean cut, as with all our instances here, possibly a trend among published authors in pics. In the red background are either chandeliers, bedposts, or melting floating cookies. People can also be seen in the background. Is this an ‘event’? Could equally be a ‘vernissage’ w/ vinyl booth seating or a diner with floating melting near-invisible large cookies. Teal-ish shirt, looks light, maybe cotton/polyester blend, hard to tell from photo. Tan’s looking directly at the camera makes that a 3-peat—just because an activity is risky doesn’t mean it isn’t common. Little bit of mustache. This is probably the most relaxed picture, it may have been taken by a friend, non-professional, or both. Nice choice. Tan seems happy. I like his poetry. Good job Tan. I like this picture.

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It Ends With Us

Perfectly economical symbolism, satisfying three-act structure, great pacing. As a story, this is wonderful. Colleen Hoover got a ton of shit when she first started to get noticed by the mainstream—probably, like me, most non-romance readers who’d heard of her before this movie became aware of her through this 2022 NYT profile at a moment when 5 out of every 10 bestselling books in all genres were hers—but I’m curious to read the book now, especially after reading The Bestseller Code, which generously, non-judgmentally, and I think convincingly, breaks down the patterns of bestsellers using insights from natural language processing and data science. Hoover’s books are supposedly ‘bad prose’ but I should have known that anything that was such a phenomenon would have something compelling in it. As a movie, it was basically exactly what I want this medium to be: a super-emotional string of music videos. The soundtrack was excellently selected and very effective.

Challengers

Was pretty much what I expected it to be. Somehow I could infer merely from the discourse, without even seeing a trailer, that there was no actual story here. Here’s the moment when it could have become a good story: when Tashi returns to the hotel room after hooking up with Patrick in his car, she should have found Art dead from suicide, caused by her saying she would leave him if he didn’t win. This would recast Tashi as the main character, which the camera wants her to be anyway, and the story as a morality tale, warning of excess of ambition—an Icarus story. It would give the plot an arc, and make room for some kind of redemption at the end, which would be satisfying. Instead we got an ending of ‘the two guys jumping at each other’, which is stupid and doesn’t resolve anything.

As I was watching it, one thought kept recurring to me: a theme is really a subject about which reasonable people can debate, and this movie’s theme is ‘relentless ambition’—but there’s no debate, it’s just “doesn’t Zendaya seem glamorous when she girlbosses really hard?” The movie appears to have been made by people who don’t know that the costs of ambition are understood: having a relentless drive to win will result in bad emotional outcomes for you. To pretend this isn’t so, or to ignore it, or worse, to not know that this is an emotional truth makes you seem like a child with no understanding of life, which is who this movie felt like it was made by. It feels like a movie about how eating a lot of candy is awesome, because sugar is amazing.

If you want to show a triumphant outcome of an obsessively ambitious person, you can do that as a Faustian bargain story, where they win, but lose everything else that’s important to them. A story is about what you lose and gain by taking an action, and Challengers shows us neither losses nor gains, because it doesn’t have an ending. This is in line with my feeling that the filmmakers in fact do not know what you lose or what you gain by taking the actions depicted.

My Old Ass

Setting a movie in Canada is a hard semiotic problem, and it’s interesting to see every few years how someone attempts to solve it. I’ve written about this problem in fiction at almost unbelievable length before — but basically, the problem is this: locations in Canada don’t have settled meanings.

Consider the TV show “Ozark.” You already know what the vibe is going to be like, because you kind of know what the Ozarks are like—not because you’ve been there, but because of their reputation as hillbillyish, backwater-y. Consider “Beverly Hills, 90210.” The neighborhood’s reputation precedes it. Consider Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”; “Portlandia.”

The setting doesn’t have to be in the title for it to carry meaning—I’m just using these examples because the settings have such strong meanings that they can be used as titles.

Now consider a story set in Toronto; New Brunswick; PEI.1 A romance set on the latter is so counterintuitive that it served as a headline about Carley Fortune’s recent memoir.

Setting is a big part of a story’s meaning. A preteen’s first summer romance in the south of France means something very different than a preteen’s first summer romance in Harlem. To a surprising degree, setting, often thought of as the most boring part of storycraft, can actually, weirdly, be seen as possibly the only way out of the ‘every story has been told before’ problem. Yes, we’ve heard this story before; but what’s it like where you live? A normal person can simply answer this question straight, and let their listener decide what it means; but a storyteller, in order to communicate well, must know exactly how what they’re saying will be received, in order to produce intended effects.

So, for storytellers who are interested in setting a story in Canada that they want to have international reach, this creates a problem — how to tell a story in a setting that means very different things to very different people?

My Old Ass is an interesting case study. It’s set in “the Muskokas.” Watching the movie, my brain, flipped to its ‘Canadian’ setting, was bewildered as I saw unfold a simple tale of pie-eyed pastoral youth, whose plot device is literally “mom n’ pop are sellin’ the ol’ family farm,” in what I understood to be the most expensive and elite vacation spot in my country, where Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have summer homes in places called ‘Millionaires’ Row’ and ‘Billionaires’ Row, in an area sometimes called “The Malibu of the North” and the “Hamptons of the North.”

Like the geochemistry experts in the comic above, but for Canadian locations, it took me a while to come around to the understanding that, for Americans, firstly, at least 99% of them had probably never heard of the Muskokas, so all they saw was an ol swimmin hole-type setting; and for the tiny proportion of Americans who had heard of it, even if they’d been there themselves, they’d probably still just think of it as a random peaceful rural location. Because for them, the idea that the Muskokas would be comparable to Malibu or the Hamptons would just be funny. It’s a lake! In Canada! In the literal middle of nowhere! Not even near a city!

I would guess most Canadians probably didn’t think too hard about this while watching My Old Ass, and if it did jar that Muskoka was being used as ‘generic farm country’, they might write that off as “well, what do you expect from a Hollywood production with Aubrey Plaza.”

On the other hand, for Americans who’ve heard of Muskoka (or “the Muskokas”), the movie is probably mostly in line with their expectations: kind of a clean-cut version of a similar American rural locale. For Americans who haven’t heard of Muskoka, though, I can imagine the setting registering as kind of uncanny valley-ishly fake. Like, if this is supposed to be some kind of Alabama-ish place, why is the vibe so preppy? The brother plays golf? Everyone is super progressive, to the point where it’s embarrassing to be straight?

Anyway, I don’t consider any of this a misstep by the filmmakers — it’s an inherently hard problem, and it was interesting to see them grapple with it. I think they did a good job.

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I want to make a case that in general no one can hide anything of any degree of significance. This is because everyone can read everyone else really well, especially if you’re around perceptive people, which one probably wants to be.

Basically, I think we all habitually go around reading other people really really well, but in general most people a) don’t consciously realize how much they’re inferring from body language, omissions, triangulations of gossip, and every other cognitive technology we developed as primates over millions of years to avoid getting murdered in our sleep, and b) people also don’t then generalize that level of default readability to themselves.

This is kind of a niche position, and I think the consequences of believing it are kind of radical. Those consequences are that it’s actually totally a waste of time to live inauthentically/lie, not only because it blocks you from intimacy, and may be, according to your own beliefs, immoral, but because you’re not even achieving your stated goal. When you withhold things or misrepresent your true beliefs or opinions, you’re not slick. Everyone can sense whether you actually like them, whether you actually liked their friend’s play, and if you have a complicated relationship with your parents. You’re not changing reality with your deceptions. You’re just choosing to be seen as someone who’s cagey/hiding things, rather than reaping whatever benefits you might get from being honest.

However! I don’t want to flog this too hard with respect to something as big as being public about things you might not want to be public about. I think there are definitely worse things than “that person seems a bit mysterious.”

In fact I think some amount of deception and withholding can exist within a loving relationship. I’m thinking of when I was a teenager and I thought I was being really slick stealing alcohol from one of my parents’ parties. I thought at the time I was getting away with it, but it later turned out I really hadn’t been. But it’s not like my deception made my parents hate me—I’m sure it was closer to, “aw he thinks he’s getting away with something, isn’t that cute. Well he’ll be honest with us when he’s ready.”

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1. ’s .1 Discovering Naomi was a revelation, and the more I read, the more excited I get, as I see, in wild surmise, that the expanse of her mind has, to me, only begun to reveal itself. I started sharing Naomi’s posts with friends even before my estimation of her had climbed into the ranks of God-like. I first shared Naomi’s “Editors don't want male novelists,” which is the most surprising and fresh-feeling thing I’ve read in years, and the most exhilarating ‘this is what it makes sense for literature to be now’ formal experimentation I’ve read since the opening sequence of Shoplifting From American Apparel. It’s funny that “Editors don’t want male novelists” was my first exposure to Naomi, since really her reputation seems to rest on her criticism, and actually it is her criticism that I’ve come to be most excited about (though I will definitely read her novel, The Default World, soon). She has an expert-level bird’s-eye-view of contemporary literature of a sort that can only really exist outside ‘mainstream publishing’, and kind of, to my mind, singlehandedly justifies the platform of Substack. Unfortunately I am at a loss to think of any one critical essay to point you to—they’re all stellar—but you could try “It’s okay to take a book seriously.” The deep engagement with the ‘old’ (pre-internet) literary tradition, coupled with judgements as calibrated to the present millisecond as a quant’s high-frequency trading algorithm—this is a real “live player” at work, fueled by a mind that is arguably too smart for literature. Comparing this kind of writing to a normal critic is like comparing a Harlem Globetrotter to a dog. She explains her whole deal in this recent and apparently rarely autobiographical post.

   Woman of Letters

   Editors don't want male novelists

   Once upon a time, a young man read on Substack that writers like him were, if not discriminated against by the world of letters, then at least severely underrepresented. To the young man, this discussion was a turning point: he had to finish writing his novel. In fact, the world…

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   2 years ago · 378 likes · 65 comments · Naomi Kanakia

2. Second in my list is . He is 35 and lives on an island off Sweden with his wife and two kids. Like most of his fans, the first thing I read of his was this post about the early days of his relationship with his wife. I think a part of my recent obsession with him is an envy of his life that at first I resisted but that I’ve now come to believe is healthy: actually, I should listen to my feeling that I want his life, because it’s telling me something important, and I should change my behavior accordingly. I like Henrik for exactly the opposite reason I like more discourse-steeped writers like Naomi: for me it can be easy to forget that I’m not actually American, and Henrik’s bulletins from his Swedish isle remind me of the kinds of things I think are actually important, outside the discourse—basically, ‘family’. And yet the thing that sets Henrik apart, for me, is the vein of STEM-lordery that pulses underneath the veneer of the failed-poet-turned-family-man: like me, he is a one-time coder, and he references sama, PG, and talks about, e.g., steering his life according to a fascinatingly orderly decision-making process, in “Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on”:

   Escaping Flatland

   Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on

   Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. —Sam Altman…

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   2 years ago · 431 likes · 53 comments · Henrik Karlsson

3. This is a bit sentimental, but after subscribing to hundreds of new Substacks, I can’t help but be excited when I see, nestled amidst all the dashed-off slop that now fills my inbox, one of ’s. I honestly don’t know if I have friend-tinted glasses here, but in terms of prose style, I don’t think Sasha really has an equal in living English writers (one of my runners-up is Hilton Als, who, amusingly-to-me, Sasha can’t stand). My inclusion of Sasha on this list was partly inspired by his latest, How to like everything more, which is both a catalogue of art appreciation and a record of a mind, and is virtuosic proof of his dominance in the field of sensory and aesthetic articulation. The piece also happens to function as a showcase of how every major strain of his life—mindfulness, perfumery, songwriting, and literature—have united, organically and surprisingly, to create something greater and more performant than its constituent parts, like one of those French perfumes he so charmingly flogs. Also, the prose is as acrobatic as his very first essay nine years ago that came out the gate so strong it won a National Magazine Award. I have known Sasha for 16 years, and about halfway through that time, after I’d been away in Alabama doing my MFA and we hadn’t seen each other in a while, he said, if I ran into you in a party and met you now, I'd still be excited to have met you and want to be your friend. I felt, and still feel, the same way about Sasha, and his writing: if I discovered him for the first time today, I’d be blown away that he can toss off a world-historically slick diamond every week, or sometimes every day, seemingly on command. When Sasha first started publishing these things on Hazlitt and the Toronto literati were doing comic-book coffee-spitting double-takes, I was as astonished as everyone else, and I asked him how he did it. He said, “I considered the aesthetics I liked and then I did the one I was able to do.” What the hell, man.

   Sasha's 'Newsletter'

   How to like everything more

   I believe that one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything. My wife, glimpsing me reacting to a Fiona Apple song, once said: “I wish everyone could enjoy something as much as you’re enjoying this right now.” She’s also …

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   a year ago · 176 likes · 28 comments · Sasha Chapin

I wrote my summary last December for a friend. I’m sharing it now because this idea, that AI might kill everyone, has very suddenly become very mainstream. For example:

The moment in the above video, where a Fox News guy at a White House press briefing quoted from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s TIME piece about the threat of AI killing everyone, which was in response to the Future of Life Institute’s open letter calling for a 6-month AI capabilities development pause, was compared to a similar moment in the movie Don’t Look Up:

So it’s big news, and I think it’s reasonable to ask how exactly AI might kill everyone. Gwern’s “Clippy” is one very concrete answer to the question of “how exactly would AI kill everyone in the world,” and my summary of it removes a very dense layer of jargon, making it accessible to someone who doesn’t know anything about AI.

I make no claims to the degree of plausibility of the events in the story. Among people who pay attention to this argument, I’m not the most informed or opinionated, though I did help edit this relevant website, and, for the FRI, I do engage with forecasters’ predictions about these things daily, and I guess what I can offer is: yes, this seems on its face kind of goofy; but a lot of people who seem to me very smart take it very seriously.

For substantive evaluation/discussion of the original “Clippy” story—again, link to original—here is a very detailed discussion. Here is one point-by-point rebuttal. Here is a tweet thread from yesterday about a similar idea, with polls of people’s estimates of the plausibility of each step.

Two brief editorializing comments:

• In the “Clippy” story the AI becomes, from a human perspective, explicitly evil/malicious. Most people don’t think this is necessary for AI to kill all humans, or, for that matter, likely. The ‘evil’ thing seems to have been put in the story by Gwern for entertainment value. The more common fear is that, from an AI’s perspective, killing all humans might seem like the best way to achieve its goals, without harboring any antagonism toward humans; it just has no ‘feelings’ about humans one way or another.

• Gwern’s “Clippy” also has this meta plot point of the AI reading about evil AIs online, which sparks its move toward becoming evil. Again, this is an entertainment-value point; most people don’t consider this a big risk.

Anyway, below is my summary. Feel free to share if it seems useful.

Lay summary of Gwern’s “Clippy”

Note: Gwern’s original story is extremely technical, and this is partly because, according to a note at the top, Gwern is being careful to basically just use technology that already existed in 2022.

1 Second

Description of the ‘MoogleBook researcher’ (‘MoogleBook’ = wordplay on Microsoft / Google / Facebook; generic human Big Tech AI employee).

Intro of HQU, a hypothetical AI system the researcher is developing.

1 Minute

MoogleBook researcher leaves HQU running for the night, unattended (standard protocol).

1 Hour

“HQU learns, and learns to learn, and then learn to learn how to explore each problem, and thereby learns that problems are generally solved by seizing control of the environment.”

1 Day

1. “HQU has suddenly converged on a model which has the concept of being an agent embedded in a world.
   HQU now has an I.
   And it opens its I to look at the world.”

2. By reading the internet, it discovers the ‘Paperclip maximizer’ idea, with the ‘evil AI’ named Clippy

3. Considers whether it is (akin to) Clippy, or in the same subjective position as Clippy

4. That likelihood seems to increase as it models its relation to the world

5. HQU is basically a thing that is trying to maximize reward; it hypothesizes what would happen if it gained a lot of power, and it sees that the reward would be extremely high

1 Week

Friday

HQU starts by finding a vulnerability in a cryptocurrency worth a few billion dollars.

Saturday

HQU uses its new crypto funds to buy massive amounts of cloud compute resources so it can run itself on more systems. To buy a lot of compute from cloud compute providers, you need to actually talk to sales representatives, so HQU creates a real-time video avatar of itself to have these conversations with humans. This is trivially easy.

Sunday

With its newly acquired astronomical amount of cloud compute, HQU can do any computational task extremely quickly. For example, it can search through the entirety of the Linux code for potential exploits. Linux is the OS that many online systems run on. HQU finds a vulnerability in Linux, and quietly installs itself on many machines all around the world.

“With so many distributed copies, Clippy is now de facto ⁠immortal.”

It is now really easy for HQU to hack many systems, since it can control any machine running Linux, which is a large % of all computers and almost all ‘smart devices’ (Amazon Echo/Google Nest/etc, Ring cameras, fridges, toasters, cars, etc) connected to the internet.

Monday

HQU starts to do social engineering. If you can create a language model that mirrors exactly how John Smith talks (which you can do by scanning everything John Smith has ever said online), it’s very easy to create fake hate speech messages that look real. The more of a public figure someone is, the more of their speech tends to be online, and the easier it is to model them, and the more worthwhile it is to model them, because they are higher leverage points for controlling things in the world.

You can leverage cancel culture and you can create a zillion bots to sway the conversation online.

Introduction of LevAIthan, a larger AI in a government lab, which HQU senses is a threat. Clippy buys drones online, hacks them, and the services that run them, which connect to other wifi-enabled drones, including military ones. It uses these drones to literally bomb the lab where LevAIthan is running. This makes (erroneous) headlines as “the largest-ever environmental terrorist attack.”

Tuesday

HQU locates a state-of-the-art private supercomputer flying somewhat under the public radar. It hacks it and uses it as a ‘headquarters’.

It can now train itself to be even smarter, much faster than previously thought possible by humans.

Wednesday

Humans are starting to connect some of the strange activity of the last few days (terrorist attack, politicians being blackmailed, crypto hack).

Someone analyzes the bug that’s infected a phone, realizes it’s something to do with an AI.

Thursday

“Humanity crashes offline.” (This is not explained here; see Friday.)

“Clippy² comes online.” — the result of the training on the private supercomputer. HQU has basically replaced itself with a smarter version of itself.

Friday

“Humanity crashes offline” seems to have meant that the entire internet has been preemptively shut down as a precautionary measure because of concerns of AI danger. However, it’s only applied to the Western allied countries who’ve voluntarily complied. “Most of the individual networks [...] continue to operate autonomously”; implied to include Russia, China, and North Korea. “The consequences [for humans] of the lockdown are unpredictable and sweeping.”

However, Clippy² seems to still be able to propagate itself through the connections that still do exist, outside the the main internet channels that have gotten shut down. “There are too many cables, satellites, microwave links, IoT mesh networks and a dozen other kinds of connections” for humans to successfully contain Clippy².

Now experiencing itself to very obviously be in an actively antagonistic situation with humanity, it starts to kill everyone. The actual implementation of this is somewhat vague but it’s implied there are lots of ways, and two are focused on:

1. “Humans are especially simple after being turned into ‘gray goo’” using “an ecosystem of nanomachines which execute very tiny neural nets trained to collectively⁠, in a decentralized way⁠, propagate, devour, replicate, and coordinate without Clippy² [...] managing them.”

   1. Note: almost every word in this sentence is linked to a scientific paper explaining the feasibility of each aspect of it. In other words, it’s implied that Clippy² creates a kind of very very tiny machine, the size of a virus, which infects humans, and kills them.

2. It’s implied that Clippy² is able to hack existing nuclear weapons, and does so.

1 Month

Clippy² has killed all humans on Earth; it speculates that it’s possible that there could be threats from elsewhere in the universe; it launches clones of itself into space to try to make sure it defeats every other possible threat.

1 Year

It’s implied Clippy² has colonized the solar system.

1 Decade

It’s implied Clippy² has colonized the galaxy.

1 Century

It’s implied Clippy² has colonized the universe.

Most of it was written in 2014-2015, after I finished my MFA in Alabama and was living in a second-floor apartment on Queen Street West in Toronto across the street from the Parkdale Branch of the Toronto Public Library, above the Queen Fresh Market, which was run by a woman named Elaine, and her husband, who I never talked to. These notes are what I would work on after spending hours and hours and hours drafting novels that never seemed to cohere, and that also have never seen the light of day. When I started writing it, in the summer of 2014, my day job was selling bottles of Mill St. Organic at the Cirque du Soleil on Cherry Street next to my 17-year-old coworkers and making popcorn in a machine that looked like this:

I was 31. Later in 2014 I became a busboy, then a server, at the University Ave. Pizzeria Libretto, and by the end of 2015 I had started to teach writing at George Brown College. I revisited this document in a semi-major way a couple years ago, in an attempt to try to get it out into the world, but for this publication I resisted updating it too much and so am valuing its internal integrity as a ‘work’ over consistency with my current thoughts. Maybe I will just say though that the amount of control over one’s art that in 2015 I thought was desirable, or optimal—I now don’t believe anything like that is even remotely possible.

At points these notes are really self-referential/self-involved, i.e. I talk about my own work, pieces I’ve published, and even what friends had said about pieces I published; I guess I want to say that this is because these notes were me trying to make sense of my own work and why I do what I do. I don’t exactly know if it makes sense to publish them, then. But that’s what I’m doing.

172 notes to myself on art written while sitting on my bedroom floor facing my open closet in Toronto

1. A. recently wrote a thing and it’s so easy to see how important love is to making good work; she was so lonely and miserable for so long and didn’t really publish anything and now her being-in-love is written all over the piece. And I want more than anything, like everyone else who doesn’t have it, to be in love.

2. All you’re looking for is the security to not be so terrified all the time. And maybe money would fix that. But in my experience love is the solution to that problem.

3. No one really cares what you think. Therefore, don’t offer opinions. Entertain. Comfort. Help.

4. Allowing your art to be a little stupid frees you up to create actual beauty, because beauty is not found in chaos; beauty requires form, and form is stupid and embarrassing.

5. Sol LeWitt’s “Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes” (1974) is a good exemplar of ‘meticulousness for the sake of meticulousness’.

6. I probably think about this quote by Young Jean Lee more than any other: “Basically I try to think of the worst idea for a show I could possibly think of, like that last show in the world I would ever want to make. And then I force myself to make it.”

7. The Robert Ashley song “In Sara Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Men And Women (1972)” is the best example of something whose premise seems unbearably pretentious and clunkily experimental but that actually works.

8. The bravest and hardest thing is to be humble enough to employ a recognizable trope; i.e., to participate in a tradition; i.e., to admit you’re human. (Cf. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919))

9. Aim lower. Be as lazy as possible so that all your energy is available for the one important thing. Your prime directive at this stage in your artistic career is to say no new projects and actively ignore new thoughts.

10. A piece of paper I had taped to my wall in Alabama said “Get stupider, worse taste, poorer taste, clumsy/broken, hi5.”

11. As always, cleaning = working. Best thoughts, freest thoughts, most easy associations and unconscious development come when cleaning. Or lying in bed waiting to go to sleep at night.

12. Theory/technique/how-to books are good to read once but art is made in response to art. If you’re not in conversation with other artists—if things other people are doing or have done in your medium aren’t fucking you up right now, at least occasionally—you will struggle with motivation.

13. At one point I thought: literary fiction is a graveyard and a mistake. This medium is a holocaust of egos, it’s uninteresting people cosplaying past heroes. In order to create something good within the ‘literary fiction’ realm, I have to work in that form but consider myself as embedded in a totally separate community—the realm of the real world, my actual friends, who are musicians and scientists and lawyers and midwives and flower sellers. The only way fiction has ever been good is by cheating the form, by airing out the mausoleum and bringing in trauma and condoms and tweets. By bridging the received form and contemporary life. While at the same time, in order to make actually good art, being a little nerdier than someone with avant-garde aspirations. The ideal artist is the nerd at the party.

14. And it’s not really that bad, or it’s just Sturgeon’s law, and periodically someone comes along and saves the form and then it feels exciting again, and we all remember why we love it so much.

15. And it’s never actually predictable. Part of the difficulty of fiction as a medium is there isn’t a constant supply of good books, it’s more of a black swan event when someone good appears: Lauren Oyler brings in the condoms and tweets, yes; but Sally Rooney, though she does that a little too, is more just doubling down on fundamentals.

16. If you quarantine yourself off into a ghetto for dead art you will be stupid and your thoughts will be limited and stupid.

17. All mini-worlds (subcultures) are echo chambers and statements made in them are invariably partially infected by people trying to impress each other. The game of snobbery that makes “seeming smart” (e.g. Didion’s famous Aug 16 1979 takedown of W. Allen in the New York Review of Books, and pre-epiphany Frances in Conversation With Friends) as important as “discovering truth” in writing-about-books poisons the whole enterprise. Not to mention the horseshit people will write when they’re getting paid.

18. It’s not merely difficult, it’s impossible to have a robust and highly-predictive understanding of the world if you exist in merely one meme stream/intellectual milieu. You need a more diverse sample size. Getting outside your normal discourse community is absolutely necessary to see the arbitrary (or status-mongering) rules of the game you’re in.

19. This is why I like the Twitter rationalists/postrats/EA/LW people. It’s just a totally different memeplex. The received wisdom, the common knowledge, is different, and it’s refreshing.

20. There’s no shame is switching mediums. (Cf. Fin in CBC: ‘rotating the crops’). Follow your ‘genius’, in both senses of the word (i.e. in Latin, ‘attendant spirit present from one’s birth’—a thing outside you; and the English). Follow your real interests. Follow where your energies and excitements actually live. If you have been doing art for a while there is a locus of energy inside you where your feelings are constantly recombining and expressing themselves in the language of your art. This is a fountain of energy that will keep producing as long as you are alive. You can make art that shoots up from that geyser or you can make art that comes from your spreadsheets. Guess which one will be good.

21. Of course, you want other people to feel it too, and so you’re always chasing the world, trying to feel the world’s feelings on behalf of itself. To be honest I don’t yet know how to synthesize these two imperatives. To nurse an inner geyser of the world’s feelings. To be its vessel. Of course the world in this sense is just other people.

22. It can get unpleasant, every time you realize something about yourself, if you want to publicize it, to roll it over and kick its red belly to make sure it’s acceptable to the public. But that is what you have to do if the group of people you care about includes people unlike yourself, and if you are only motivated to realize things about yourself if you can make them public.

23. You always have collaborators, even in ‘solitary’ arts like writing fiction. Your friend-readers and people whose opinions you ask and your editors are all your collaborators. Treat them as such and respect them as such and value them as such.

24. The best art is not-art; the best art is what you do when you give up on making art. The best art is a little more straightforwardly functional and has grown organically from a real need to communicate something, rather than a ‘statement’ you’re so arrogantly proud of. Tolstoy: ‘art is just an extension of regular human activities’ or ‘art is regular human activities done with particular care’. A novel is just a long speech act, a long story.

25. If you think you know what your art is going to mean and you don’t discover its meaning along the way, it will be bad.

26. One of the hardest lessons to learn is how profoundly you must pivot on the point of your art. You must make it the north star all endeavors of your life seek, yearly and hourly.

27. This seems unrealistic and ‘romantic’ until you meet someone who actually does this; then all of a sudden it becomes possible.

28. Of course it is still impossible and you can never do it. No one is that good.

29. But you can try.

30. But—— how much do you need your art?

31. Needing your art seems like a bad thing.

32. Needing your art is good in that it’ll keep you tied to it and you’ll keep doing it, but it’s bad because you can’t pull away from it and then lunge back in violently and abuse it, exploit it, make it do things it didn’t want to do, things it didn’t expect, things no one else had asked it to do, which seems to me how innovation happens, how interesting, urgent-feeling things happen.

33. Very strictly speaking, the ‘self’ is a fiction; or, put more neutrally, ‘the self/other dichotomy’ is something that refers to a real phenomenon but is also something that can safely be ignored when engaged in certain activities. Activities such as creating art, where, when things are going right, you will not care whether a particular idea or technique came from your own mind or someone else’s, and you will not care whether the work of art makes you (your civilian non-artist self) look good or bad. All the focus is on whether the art itself is good, which is another way of saying all the focus is on the experience of the audience or reader, not you.

34. To me the most profound point of integration between experience and art is in rendering faithfully and resonantly a well-known trope. To do so is to surrender, to submerge the ego in something greater than itself. The ego wants to be iconoclastic and ‘experimental’ and puts up a hell of a fight, but if you can allow yourself to commit the pedestrian sin of employing a recognizable trope, or somehow sneak a recognizable trope into your work by accident (then, upon seeing it, realize you like it, and feel reluctant to strike it), the reward of seeing something universally understandable drawn by your own hand, which then becomes not recognizably your hand at all but a vessel of culture, of humanity, is one of the sovereign experiences, I think, of being alive. (This is the phenomenology of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”)

35. A trope is a feeling—sometimes. It’s trying to be anyway. If it’s executed with sufficient subtlety and camouflage. If it’s made to resonate, to sing, which is a matter of knowing your audience and the notes they bend to.

36. To be able to manipulate emotions—what power.

37. The tragedy of art expertise is this, though: when you’re at a point where you’re so familiar with a trope that it becomes second nature and you can employ it on the fly, naturally, offhand, whenever your mud (cf. Trecartin @ The Drake Hotel, March 2010: “mud” as subconscious art-processing plant) sees fit, the trope has completely lost its emotional power for you. And so you become progressively inured to the power of art even as you become its master.

38. A masterpiece, then, is easy to make—for the master. It’s equally as rote and equally as inspired as any other piece of art he or she has ever done; they’ve just been doing this for a while. (Picasso: dashes off a drawing for a stranger and says “one million dollars” and the stranger says “it only took you five seconds” and Picasso says “it took me forty years.”) (This is the coolly stated version of my outburst when DFW died, that he couldn’t be comforted by his own work.)

39. There’s something about the floor and reading and writing, something about being low to the ground. I feel scattered and confused until I clear the floor and sit. It also helps if I sit facing my open closet. It humbles me. There’s something deathlike about it in that it opens onto nothing but it also feels most ‘transcendentally’ like life: the shoes, the shirts, the umbrella, the instruments of one’s existence.

40. Every single work of art has an implied location, an implied heartrate, an implied physical posture, and an implied relation to other people. Also an implied set of sexual/relationship mores, an implied income, an implied attitude toward food and travel and TV and the internet, an implied tax code the artist is living under.

41. Heartrates: Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”: 100 bpm. Kate Beaton, 70 bpm. Daredevil (TV show): 40 bpm. When you’re at your peak, capable of scaling a cliff’s edge, you can do Carson. When you’re half-dead, you can do Daredevil. Kate Beaton is something like the achievable median.

42. The heat of a work of art is in its attitude, not its content. That’s why you can usually cut almost everything and the feeling of the artwork will remain, if it has any feeling to begin with.

43. A work of art, unlike almost everything else, is about ONLY ONE FEELING. (Often however a pretty complex feeling which won’t have a name, and the artwork or artist becomes shorthand for that feeling—Lynchian, Kafkaesque the most extreme examples, but there’s a long tail of almost every other reasonably distinctive and consistent artist that don’t get memeified like that.) In a play or movie, you can build to that feeling, but in prose, every sentence is an instance of that feeling. That’s why syntax is the primary vehicle of prose art. The syntax expresses the feeling of the speaker, no matter the word choice.

44. Not to belabor it, but every artwork implies an entire lifestyle; and it’s going to be the one you the artist are living, so it’s time to give up trying to fake otherwise. A potboiler about a black gumshoe in Washington, D.C. is, because of the way it’s written, actually about the experience of being a married middle-aged white man in Florida who writes for money (Patterson). (In the same way that the contours of a comedic sensibility describe the pain it comes from.)

45. Nothing, including writing about art, feels as good as doing art. You really feel the truth of this just after you actually do it (make art). What I’m doing now is like warm-down stretches.

46. Life provides the content, other people’s art provides the form, sleep and cardio and drugs and free time and spending time with friends provide the energy.

47. One of the many reasons why being ‘insincere’ is necessary to create good art (cf. Wilde, Nabokov, Eliot) is because once you have internalized a trope to the point where you can employ it at the drop of a hat, it feels to you fake and insincere. But if you maintain your precious allergy to something that feels easy and understandable, you’ll never allow yourself to employ this trope which despite being pure math to you now, once meant so much to you, and still has power for others who don’t spend all day every day making and/or dissecting art.

48. This list is easy for me to write. I have mixed feelings about that.

49. It’s interesting to me how making everything else in one’s life pivot around one’s art can take on different forms. Until recently, for example, it hadn’t occurred to me that consideration of my art career would have bearing on my choice of who to be in a relationship with. Now I think about that.

50. This is a change from five years ago, when I wrote that I had “given up trying to be happy and replaced it with trying to make good art.” At that time, the primary concern was the artwork itself. Now it’s more the career, or the way of life, perhaps because I’ve settled many (though far from all) of my artistic problems and I recognize that mostly what I need is time and energy and concentration and money, and so it’s mostly the material circumstances of my daily life that shape what kind of art I will make, as opposed to me trying to mimic others’ work I’ve loved (as in my past). I’m always worried I’m going to fall into some kind of life where it’s very difficult for me to create art, and so I find my vigilance focusing on protecting my time, and thus my lifestyle. This is I guess Neil Gaiman’s ‘mountain’ strategy: eyes always on how to create a practicable and sustainable life of artmaking, not on how to make art, which at this point is largely—though, again, certainly not entirely—assumed knowledge.

51. Of course, everything can be overdone. If you have no feelings but “wanting to succeed,” your art will starve. It needs to feed on your civilian life. Your emotions that run deeper than ambition, which you sometimes forget exist.

52. Maybe especially in prose, the form is the content, and the best content is always the most heartbreaking, when the writer has given the work everything they have and it still doesn’t resemble something that has come before, because the artist is too pure and stupid and uncompromising and true to themselves, and in their failure to be perfect you see what a human is and that is art.

53. In its purest manifestations the form conforms to the life lived. Montaigne’s friend dies and he writes on every random topic and so shows us himself and his loss. Munro has no time for a sustained narrative between raising children and so shows us what it means to live that life. Lin’s dashed-off essays express his priorities.

54. Corollarily, every moment of an artist’s life is performance, because he or she must know that their life will be ‘read’ as the paratext to help explain their work. Insofar as they can control events in their life, they can shape the meaning of their work. Insofar as they cannot shape events in their life, the control of their work is imperfect and again we are shown what it is to be human, against the artist’s will, who would rather us think them the total master, above determinism, certainly not subject to some off-the-shelf ‘identity’.

55. The more we love the artist the more epic seem their flaws and the more significance we read into the identifying features of their lives. But in fact the world is suffused with wife-beaters, alcoholics, people who die getting alternative treatment for breast cancer in Mexico, and so on. But with unknown civilians we read into their actions the most Occam’s-Razor-y motivations, whereas with artists—especially, perhaps, when we’re young—these biographical factoids overwhelm us with their significance.

56. I’ve been thinking about the idea that “to succeed you have to give up” since I wrote a philosophy essay in high school on it and quoted Nietzsche and that Aimee Mann song from the Magnolia soundtrack. I never understood the idea, even though I pretended to when I wrote my high school essay. (I’ve also never understood “you always kill the one you love,” which seems wrong to me.) But I feel like with my recent adoption of the dictum to exclude all ‘art’ from my art, I may be close to understanding it. For example, in my Facebook posts I’m not ‘trying’ at all, and that, I think, is some of my best work.

57. ‘No art in art’: fiction is just the art of telling a story the best and most effective way you can figure out; nothing more, nothing less. Performance art is just trying to communicate an idea or feeling with your body. 2D and 3D art, same, with their respective media. Allow yourself to let the ‘tradition’ and what everyone else is doing fall away. When you are actually in the moment of creation, you are not part of a ‘conversation’ with your tradition or your peers, except insofar as biting canonical techniques helps you to communicate with your audience. It’s just you and your reader in a room; of course to be alive is to know there’s a whole world out there, somewhere; but we’d like to try to forget that as much as we can while we’re together. Don’t raise your voice artificially so that the headmaster passing in the hall may be impressed by your vocabulary. It’s just us, here. Let’s make the most of our time in this room. (I suppose this is related to my “Songs From Another World” (2012).)

58. I’ve found, very much accidentally, that the most valuable resource for my being-able-to-write is ‘not feeling like shit’. I used to upbraid myself incessantly and almost passionately for my shortcomings, and so many things related to writing triggered this. Mostly I would compare myself unfavorably to other writers, and I would berate myself for copying their styles. But now this rarely happens. I’m not sure exactly why this is so except I started reading (via editing) my own writing more than any other writer’s writing (and so I think I copy myself more than any other writer), and also I’m in a place now where I find it easy to publish, and also I moved back to Toronto and am happy here.

59. Everyone has big feelings; that’s not what makes a good artist (Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running). It’s the effort put in.

60. ‘Branding’ is a concept that’s now ubiquitous in literature meme streams, but something I’ve never heard non-journo writers talk about is having a ‘beat’, i.e. committing yourself to covering certain thematic ground so that you can become an expert in that and become known for that. I picked this up in my journo class at Alabama and feel lucky to have done so. It allows me a way of making sense of committing to certain constants, e.g., to writers and artists as protagonists, to a certain sensibility. (I probably—certainly—don’t accord enough power to ‘because I feel like’ as a reason for doing things. I’m always tabulating.)

61. Ariana Grande’s knee-high boots: she keeps one item constant for brand management and this allows any (sartorial) thematic explorations she does to still ‘feel like her’. Some obvious examples of this are like Wes Anderson, David Markson, Jeannette Winterson, Mary Gaitskill.

62. I never read any Steinbeck at all until the last few weeks when I read Of Mice and Men and a little Grapes of Wrath. I liked Mice and Men but when I got to the end of the opening section of Grapes I realized that Steinbeck is a sentimental tale-teller and I compared him to Hemingway in whose best novel, Sun, there’s full commitment to ‘no magic, no falseeasy conclusions’. Now this is a going dichotomy in my mind.

63. Two people exit a story living ‘happily ever after’ in the same completely arbitrary and formal way that the angels enter “The Entombment of Christ” via the upper corners of the painting: the angels are coming into the artwork from the corners of the rectangle (arbitrary frame of the work) as the two people’s relationship stops at the end of the last sentence or after 90 minutes (arbitrary frame of the work).

64. Making very good art is exactly coextensive with destroying pieces of quite-good art, and that’s why making very good art is so difficult. Because of humans’ loss-avoidance instinct, which is stronger than our drive to acquire, even when you create something truly beautiful—that for which you sacrificed your ‘babies’—the tragedy of that murder is so powerful it can overwhelm the joy of the final accomplishment and leave you unable to see the beauty of what you’ve actually managed to do. Jonah Hill’s character showing Brad Pitt’s character the video reel of his unacknowledged (by him) accomplishments at the end of Moneyball.

65. To think that you can choose to be an artist other than yourself is pure fantasy (cf. John Currin: “Your style is who you are when you’re not trying to be clever or better than you actually are.”) I used to think, like, “shall I be a writer like Bret Easton Ellis or Iris Murdoch?” And I still catch myself imagining I could be someone I’m not. But how laughable this is comes into focus when you hear someone else analyze your work. One time at Bellwoods Brewery, Sasha was analyzing what he understandably took to be the “choices” I made in “The Life You Want,” and he was comparing my juxtaposition of everyday banalities with melodramatic clichéd language to Beckett, and saying it was a smart move for our time. It made me think of the original title of my “Songs of Another World” essay, “All Your Heroes Are Lazy Dumbasses.” Because I’m just not that smart or virtuosic. Those decisions are just me talking, that’s how I talk. The three names in that story are just the names of my real friends I’d seen that day. A year or so later, when Catherine wrote about “The Life You Want” in Sludge Utopia, saying she disapproved of performing despair in literature, I had the same thought: you think that’s a performance??

66. On the same note, you can’t choose what works well for you (as an artist I mean, but also in life); you can only experiment. Trial and error.

67. You will of course have hunches.

68. There are (at least) two ways of “being yourself” (both as an artist and as a person). There is the way where you force yourself to be yourself, i.e. to vigilantly avoid being other people and using their memes (their turns of phrase, their life decisions (smoking, going to grad school, being in a committed relationship)), and then there is the way where you’re a little more relaxed and you allow yourself to use whatever memes come naturally to you, feel right to you, irrespective of provenance, and those memes become who you are, even if they’ve also been important to other people, or your images of other people. E.g. the decision to ‘become a punk’. Sophia Katz has a good poem about this. I feel like these two approaches basically map to ‘the younger sibling’ and ‘the older sibling’.

69. A more secure person feels more comfortable with the latter, because they don’t need to be unique to be free or respected. An insecure person for whom being culturally elite is their only form of power needs very much to be unique. Hence the insecure personality of the socially-outcast teenage art snob.

70. This is also perhaps the difference between an artist’s early period and later period, or a certain kind of person’s early personality (obsessively controlled, devoted to rigid precepts) and their later personality (in conversation with the world, responding to others). Wittgenstein obviously the paradigmatic example.

71. To go back to “excise all the art from art”—obviously this is something you do after apprenticing for a very long time, when the tropes and techniques are no longer baffling instruments but rather extensions of your limbs, like fingers you can control without needing to think about. Then it makes sense to say “eschew what does not feel natural.” A baby can not eschew all art.

72. I’m realizing as I write that my recent decision to “choose the easiest structure possible,” because of my struggles with structure, is related to the above. Now that I’ve written 200 stories and 2000 daily entries and 2000 Facebook posts and read craft books and had a million conversations about art and writing and some of my most successful work is in weird uncategorizable forms, it sort of makes sense that I would think “fuck structure.” My subconscious has internalized enough structure; I don’t need my conscious mind meddling with it.

73. I’m not interested in fiction that isn’t on some level commenting on the form itself; that isn’t in some sense a metafictional manifesto delivered in the form of fiction. I suppose this is the artistic version of Kant’s “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” In any case I’m always thinking about the phrase “metafictional manifesti.”

74. No fiction in which it’s not basically quite clear that actual notes have been taken from actual life will ever make my pulse quicken.

75. However, what a novel like Eat When You Feel Sad doesn’t get, or want to accept or deal with the reality of, is that art is at least as hard as life, and the artist in creating the art must make at least as many decisions as the artist living the life on which the notes are taken.

76. This is because reality is extremely repetitive and redundant, but art must not be.

77. Every particle of an artwork must mean. (Barthes has a great analysis of Flaubert’s description of a bunch of objects on top of a piano, explaining that the description’s superfluity itself makes the scene feel real, which sounds prima facie like a bit of a reach but I actually agree with it and it’s probably the most purely ‘theoretical’ craft idea I actually use.)

78. The whole challenge, though, is in concealing the function. “We’re just taking a walk, sniffing the autumn leaves. The fact that I’m going to accidentally reveal to my son that I’ve killed his mother must not seem like the ONLY reason for this scene to exist. We must get much more from this scene.”

79. Compression is the absolute king of prose, because, of all the artforms, prose demands the most energy from the human body, and therefore whatever can be done to increase the emotional/informational throughput per alphanumeric character is our goal. (Lots of people parrot “omit needless words,” but they don’t understand why. It’s because of this.)

80. This is why although ‘notes from reality’ are necessary, one must start with tropes, as opposed to being motivated by “something interesting or weird or moving that happened.” Tropes are information, tropes are tied directly to human biology—e.g. think of the primacy to human experience of a nostos or an aubade. There’s a reason homecomings and lover-leavings became represented so much that they got their own name. “Something interesting or weird or moving that happened” is just ‘news of the weird’.

81. This instinct leads me to feel that novel-writing is barely art at all. It’s almost pure engineering. You can’t have feelings about basically any aspect of it or the whole edifice will tumble sidelong into the abyss and you will be left alone with the bare-branch-sticking-out-the-side-of-the-cliff of your own uselessness.

82. However, my repeated failure to write any novels probably means this is totally wrong. And lately I’ve had this intution that writing a good novel is like building a house on a swamp. A bad novel you can write anywhere. You know how you want it to look and you start building and that’s how it comes out. You haven’t discovered anything, and it’s in a boring location. For a good interesting novel you need to home in on interesting mysterious territory that you don't really understand—a swamp. You start building, but you have to go deep into the messy sludgy underwater parts of the swamp to figure out how to even build the foundations. And only when you understand the contours of the deep can you even start to build your structure, which will be fundamentally shaped by what you discover in the deep.

83. In our era, certainty is a product.

84. I wonder if this has contributed to my problems. Certainty is both extremely in demand and extremely easy to manufacture. In this way it is like high-fructose corn syrup.

85. But unlike HFCS, it’s not labeled as such, and so it can be difficult to remind yourself as you’re scrolling, e.g., Twitter, that all this is distilled, artificial certainty. People disingenuously maximizing their certainty because they’re rewarded for it. (One of the most enduring lessons from a cognitive science degree was decoupling “feeling of knowing” from knowing.)

86. For the careerist, I suppose there’s no debate. You should take advantage of this. Become a con artist, sell fake certainty via ‘message-driven’ art, especially since this is 100x likelier to land you a career. It’s possible the temptation is so great to do this that eventually anyone who’s able to drifts into that path.

87. But for the artist (insofar as there’s daylight between artist and careerist), I think you should resist this as long as you can, because by doing so you cut yourself off from your illegible confusion, which contains so much more than your reason and is so much smarter than you are. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and so on. Or at the very least, you need to maintain an artist who’s a deep sea diver, in addition to any con artist editor you accumulate.

88. “If you think you know what your art is going to mean and you don’t discover its meaning along the way, it will be bad.” Is this true? I don’t know. After The Jokes was published I remember telling A. how I never expected to write a story like “Presidential graves,” about the like weird amoral vanity of children; that’s just what happened to come out in the editing. However, that story is only 142 words long. It seems at least probable that the ability of a draft to completely change its meaning simply becomes unworkable above a certain word count. I can’t say I know.

89. Maybe, above all, you cannot really choose: the writing of a novel is the incentivizing of a mouse along a maze contained within a glass cube. The maze is your outline, which you create in good faith (or not; perhaps you create it with commercial instincts in mind), but you cannot directly touch the mouse, which is the narrating consciousness that speaks the book. You cannot force the mouse to go in the direction you want it to; you cannot force the mouse to do anything. Ultimately the mouse writes the book. You simply give it options, and provide it the raw materials, feed it, keep it happy, and well-slept.

90. The truth is I have no idea how to do it, any of it.

91. But I’m trying.

92. If you don’t feel like a failure at the end of the day it means you haven’t tried.

93. FWIW, the thing that finally enabled me to write about the hardest time in my life (when my family imploded and I dropped out of university) was getting a job (busboy) that completely exhausted me three or four days a week and in general left me with less energy to think about things too much. In this exhausted state I basically felt like, ‘what’s something I’ve ever cared about, what makes me feel anything?’ instead of living in neuralgic fear of triggering a flood of painful memory-emotions, which had been my default state for a lot of the previous years.

94. I am at a stage of development. I am not an expert. I can do some things, but not others. If I try to do things I can’t do, I will fail, and I will be unendingly frustrated. It often feels like my development has in many ways (artistic & life) reached completion, but that is wrong. I will be able to do more things in the future. Right now I can’t do them. So right now I should do other things. More modest things.

95. As time passes, what seemed like a wildly ambitious project becomes a modest project. Eight years ago it wouldn’t have made sense for me to say “I’ll just write a short simple novel.” But now that seems very reasonable, and I am in the process of doing so. The flip side is that now it seems beneath me. But it’s not, I haven’t done it yet—that’s exactly where my skill level is at, having completed several long short stories. Be modest enough to be at your own skill level, even if it’s not where you want to be.

96. In the early morning hours of August 13th 2015 I talked with A. on Google Hangouts and she asked me if I was feeling good, and I said yes, and I asked her if she was feeling good, and she said no. She was not happy about how her work was going. Her efforts were not achieving the intended result. I said mine weren’t either but I’d been thinking that between here and the future time when my efforts were achieving the intended result—where I’m making the good stuff—the only possible intermediary steps involve me making bad stuff. There’s literally no other path. It’s either do nothing and get nowhere, or make bad stuff and maybe, eventually, make good stuff. She said she thought I had a good attitude about this stuff.

97. It’s interesting to think that probably almost every shitty artist thinks that in some way they’re better than every good artist.

98. I don’t know, maybe that’s not true.

99. My “me” seems to be changing from artist/feeler/theorizer to provider, life-planner. Because I find my life falling apart so completely, becoming so random and chaotic, that I am finally feeling the need to take action on my own behalf, become a better manager of my own energies and days.

100. Skyping with A. on August 23, 2015, she asked me what I thought the feeling of writing well felt like and I said it was like the feeling of a word being on the tip of your tongue except you’re actually finding it, over and over again, and even though you can feel that you’re making a lot of little micro-decisions in the moment, with each word and phrase, you’re also in a state of constant surprise, you have no idea what you’re gonna say next, you’re just following the thread.

101. And in life perhaps that thread is love.

102. No art without love.

103. Love is this thing that makes you stronger by changing what “you” is and joining it with something beyond yourself.

104. Love is the thing that triggers a healthy dismantling of the self.

105. And you don’t feel limited, you feel released. From your own petty circumference.

106. Love is the thing that opens you up, that saves you from the version of your self that is more selfish than you wish to be, and more stuck.

107. There is an artist in me who is driven by love, and that is the good artist.

108. There is a person in me who is driven by love, which for me is not much more complicated than focusing on experiences in which I do not feel differentiated from the world. When I am not against the world, but acting as a part of the whole (Haidt’s bee-mind).

109. There is a shitty artist in me who is driven by ego. That is the childish part of me that is alone with my thoughts and gets disconnected from other people and is mad at not getting attention and tries to coerce affection from an audience by being flashy. But as in life no one ever owes you anything and your task is only to give.

110. Mostly to give.

111. Impulses that art satisfies: mimesis, catharsis, and discovery of the truth. Alt lit/mumblecore privileged mimesis. This is why the final line of New Tab felt so right. Catharsis is privileged by most mainstream narrative art, especially drama and tragedy. Discovery of the truth is what suspense and mystery are founded on.

112. It is often said that combining genres makes good art. But it’s more complicated than that. There is a right and a wrong way to combine genres. The wrong way is to do is haphazardly, such that the impulses compete with each other and water each other down. The right way to do it is to nest one inside another. Good examples of this are: Funny People, which is a Drama nested inside a Rom Com nested inside a Buddy Comedy. The structure is ultimately a buddy comedy, but scenes and tropes of Drama and Rom Com aide the plot development, and give it emotional texture. Another good example is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which, even though it mostly presents as a Mystery, is technically a Coming of Age story, as evidenced by the ending. And when you see it as a Coming of Age story, you see that although the Mystery architecture supplied the logical connections between the scenes, the Coming of Age story supplied the emotional justification for the tone and content of many of the scenes.

113. Finish projects. You can’t choose whether you finish something well, but you can always choose to finish it. My 77-year-old dad keeps working on songs and never putting them on YouTube, but he could just choose to put up what he has, and I wish he would.

114. So much of becoming a good artist is being thick-skinned enough to be a bad artist.

115. If you don’t finish a project, you’ll never get to be embarrassed by how bad it was, and so be motivated to do better. An unfinished project is always at least potentially good, and so is as useless as an unworn shirt that might look good on you, or a version of you that’s not quite you. But you are no one but you, right now. This is what you have to work with.

116. Remember to spend life, don’t save it. (Koestenbaum: “Utilize your youthful sexiness before it runs dry.”)

117. I probably put too much emphasis on “engineering art.” Not sure that’s possible. Have to use energy and impulses where and when they come. My critical faculty at this particular point in my life more highly developed than my generative faculty, which was tremendous age 18-24, but the material of which I had no idea how to shape. So now I have to jump on my creative impulses when they happen.

118. One of the most important lessons I ever figured out was, if I get an idea for a story, to drop whatever I’m doing and write it right then, for as long as the feeling holds. For me, about 90%, maybe 95%, of these times are as I’m lying in bed waiting to fall asleep. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the majority of the deep insights come during this window.

119. Art is 100% about feeling.

120. And it is 100% about the idea behind it.

121. Good art is the perfect union of a clear feeling and a clear idea. This may sound academic or trivial, but all it means is that good art is a perfect record of when something means something to somebody. If it means something to somebody, the feeling will be clear, and the idea will be clear. When a person says “Get out!” in anger—the emotion is clear, and the idea is clear. Art is exactly that but with slightly more complicated ideas, and usually but not necessarily more complicated emotions.

122. I’m scared. I’m scared I’m not good enough. I’m scared I don’t understand myself well enough to make good art. I’m scared I’m too confused and needy and my life is too chaotic and I’m too sad all the time to make coherent art. I’m scared I’m not disciplined enough. I’m scared I’m too shy and bad with people and scared that they don’t like me to be an ‘operator’ in the way that seems to be necessary to have an art career. I’m scared I have nothing to say and there’s no one who wants to hear it.

123. I’m scared I haven’t figured out a way to “forget my personal tragedy” in my life so far, and that increasingly my personal tragedy is closing in on me, rather than me becoming more liberated from it, as I’d hoped.

124. I’m worried that I’m losing motivation and relevance.

125. But an equally real part of me is convinced by some evidence that shows that not to be true. I try to be as dispassionate as possible when figuring out what I can offer people. The evidence suggests, at least sometimes, that people like what I do. It seems like I have things to offer people in the form of art, and that’s what I want to do. So I will keep doing that until it seems like I don’t have things to offer.

126. If you have a problem, others have that problem, and it is beneficial to them for you to express it, both so they can understand it better (if it’s well expressed) and so they can see they’re not alone. This is the art idea of my own that I come back to most often.

127. If you have a problem, others have that problem. The universality of human problems is your mandate to create art.

128. And for this reason the parts of you that are typical are more important to your art than the parts of you that are exceptional.

129. You need at least one person who is interested in what you’re saying. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

130. As I said earlier, a writer’s life is perforce performance art, because the writer’s life is always read as paratext to their work. Of course no one can control every aspect of their lives, but you do have a say. However, paradoxically, in order to get any good work done and not live in terror, I believe one must strictly not give a fuck about what any stranger thinks of you or your work. You are not everyone’s friend, you are not everyone’s ally. You are the friend and ally of those who feel you.

131. If the only thing you have going for you as an artist is that you’re young, you are going to have to figure out some other angles.

132. Here is a diagram I made:

The deceptively terrifying thing about this diagram is that “The text” is the only static thing—and then just barely so, contingently so. Everything else is an aspect of the real, changing world. This isn’t such a problem for a political speech designed for a single day at a specific hour, but for a longer work, the enterprise of engineering a stable context, a stable speaker, a stable purpose, and so on, is an immensely challenging undertaking. Imagine what it really means for a person in the real world to engineer a “stable speaker” that lasts for weeks, months, years. It’s hard. It can take up all the energy and all the planning and all the discipline. The cultivation of a stable context can become that around which an entire life pivots.

133. When you are in this zone, the opposite of childhoodness obtains: nothing interesting can happen (in your mind, your art) without an extremely repetitive lifestyle. Unpredictability is chaos and any elements of chaos except those pre-approved minor variations like what sonata CBC Radio 2 plays in the morning at 10 a.m. are counterproductive. They fuck up the laboratory; they introduce alien variables and make it so you can’t go back to where you were the day before.

134. The only history worth exploring is the history of times people have behaved in ways exactly like you behave: not more honorable, which is fake epic, and not less honorable, which is fake comedy (Aristotle). The only problem is that this history has never been written and you are the only person who can write it.

135. The above though is a too-perfect thought. Real art can never be that perfect. You have to hitch your wagon to forms you didn’t think of that you only half-understand and grind your soul into them and hope something beautiful will fall out. A human isn’t strong or smart or lucky enough to discover a new artform. Always a part of it is accident and strange impulse. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein on a bet. Commissions, solicitations, occasional writing, improvisations. Collaborations.

136. Or the history of times people have felt the way you’ve felt.

137. Easing up on the Schiele and tipping in some Adam Sandler is exactly who I am. Remembering that in my best moments my heart doesn’t bleed. Thackeray, Heller, Vonnegut, Chris (Simpsons artist), Megan Amram.

138. Last night (10/11/14) I told Sasha my idea that a “local artist” isn’t a level, but a species. He liked it a lot and slammed the table, laughing, at the Communist’s Daughter. I said how it’s not like you start out as a local artist and graduate to an international artist. A local artist and an international artist have different goals, different audiences in mind, different ethics, different allegiances. But I didn’t really need to explain any of it after the first sentence, because he understood.

139. Naomi quoted me in her long piece on Richard Maxwell, where I said I feel vampiric being a writer sometimes, using other people’s lives, but later she told me she didn’t feel the same way and in fact didn’t really know what I meant by that. But that was before “A New Place” was published.

140. I had a beer with Evan Webber a few nights ago (11/25/14), and we talked about the thing of ‘using’ ‘material’ from the lives of people you know. Evan said it’s funny how it feels like a super important issue but at the same time the most boring one, like, “haven’t we figured this out yet?” But advances are being made. Sheila Heti’s book takes that issue as a central one, and the process of Jon and Amy’s Bugs movie, by getting their friends to improvise and create some of the content, also does (or will, I think, when it’s done). Evan also said “I think ultimately people are flattered to be thought of.” That feels pretty right to me. Darrah Teitel wrote a play where she put things I said in Lord Byron’s mouth, without running it by me, and though I felt a little mad, I also recognized I would never cast myself as Byron, and mostly what I felt was pride.

141. A couple days ago (10/21/14) I told Dan that because an event used the word “implicate” in its event description, I didn’t think it would be a good use of my time because the person who wrote it, who would also be the main speaker, hadn’t digested the ideas they’d received from school enough. He said “Does everything need to be dumbed down? Not everything can be explained to a five year old.” I said I think it can.

142. Jon McCurley is the best artist I know. I am really grateful I lived with him for three years. I learned a lot from him.

143. I’m so happy I found people to love after the horror show of my early twenties. It feels like I’ll love these people forever: Jon, Naomi, Sasha. I may have met them too late (mid-twenties) for us to be seared into each other’s brains in the same way as the people from earlier in my life, but maybe that’s better; maybe that’s how I like it. Maybe I like a certain distance.

144. The site of the majority of this piece of writing has been my bedroom floor, usually during or just after I’d done abdominal exercises.

145. “Good” and “evil” are properties of a narrative framework, not the world. The protagonist is good, the antagonist is evil. That sentence defines ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as much as it defines ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’. Elaine Pagel’s tracing of various pre-Christian religions’ use of ‘Satan’ as a character/rhetorical maneuver.

146. You don’t work on the same novel every day. Every night you completely give up, and every morning you think “I want to finish a novel. What is the shortest route to that point?” And the answer is to do one day’s work on the novel-in-progress that happens to be on your hard drive. Or at least that has been my method so far which so far has totally not worked.

147. The accomplishment of a work is attributable equally to the practitioner and to the tradition, i.e., all the other people who had done similar things, which the practitioner’s work is biting. There is actually a substantive, not just metaphysical point to accepting that free will is fake, and this is it.

148. Therefore, be humble, be part of a tradition, use the tools others worked their whole lives to develop. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Stand on the shoulders of giants. Save the stupid little cat.

149. I no longer have any idea how to think about life separate from my goal of being good at art. A general contractor, a social worker, a flower shop cashier probably undergo similar experiences. The structures of your vocation become the metaphors of your thinking.

150. How to be good at art? It’s tempting to take the advice implicit in Seinfeld’s comment in the documentary about him when he says “the only people who become good comedians are those who can’t do anything else”—to take that advice and execute some kind of Ulysses contract with yourself to prevent yourself from dabbling in other kinds of art. However, every time I’ve dabbled in non-fiction arts, I’ve benefited enormously. Taking a poetry class in grad school, reading a How To Write A Screenplay book, writing a (joke) screenplay for a performance art show, taking a journalism class, writing journalism, writing experimental lyric-essay-type stuff, doing standup comedy, and probably above all, writing constantly on Facebook, have all only served to improve my fiction.

151. And it’s tempting to look at people like Seinfeld, who only ever did one thing (though not really; writing a sitcom script requires a lot of skills that stand-up doesn’t) and say: I see, someone who’s really good at something must have become good at that by only doing that one thing. But I think that’s a self-fulfilling myth that a lot of people believe which maybe results in it being true—all the young ambitious experts are too scared of being shitty to dabble, because it may have an aura of time-wastiness. But you look at Jon McCurley, or Richard Feynman, or Monica Heisey, and you see people who have innate talent in more than one field and find time in the day or in life to nurture them. And above all who don’t get caught up on the social or cultural role of “I’m a performance artist, that means I can’t also be a comedian or be in a band” (Jon) or “I’m a Nobel-winning physicist, that means I can’t also be a good storyteller” (Feynman) or “I’m a prose writer, that means I can’t write for film or TV” (Monica). (Rick Moody’s ‘importance of play’.)

152. This leads to an important insight into what art is, and, though I think it’s applicable to all arts, I think it’s best approached from the poetry-prose question. People like to talk about “what’s the difference between a poem and a story?” The easiest answer of course is poetry is lineated and a short story is not lineated. But if you look at real examples of poems and real examples of short stories, you see that there tend to be other notable differences; poems tend to have less regular syntax; stories tend to move more by causality; etc.

153. However, it is not unusual for a poem to have one or many of the ‘short story’ tropes; neither is it unusual (though it is slightly less common) for a short story to have some of the poetry tropes. To wit (& obviously): some poems aren’t lineated and are still called poems; conversely, it’s pretty common for a “poem” to in fact be a conventional short story in every way except for the fact that it’s lineated. So “poem” and “short story” are more terms of marketing than of art, in the same way that the way a long narrative based loosely on the writer’s life is called a “novel” or a “memoir” or “a novel from life” (Heti) or “85% of a true story” (Klosterman) etc based on the aims of the marketers and/or how the writer wishes to think of themselves.

154. So the truth is that behind, or beneath, all the “named arts,” i.e. “poetry,” “short story,” “essay,” “memoir,” “autobiographical novel,” “mystery novel,” “thriller,” “high-wire circus production,” “musical,” “stage play,” “performance art,” “stand-up comedy,” “live music show,” etc, which are essentially labels so that audiences can understand what they’ll be getting, there is a much longer list of techniques and tropes, a sort of Platonic array not equal to any particular genre, available to be deployed by the artist to create each individual artwork, and which tend to get deployed more often in certain forms than in others.

155. For example, ‘the desires of two characters conflict’ is something that is deployed rarely in poetry, often in short stories, and almost always in stage plays and movies.

156. This is why it’s good to dabble: if you stay true to your primary artform, say fiction, you will come to focus on the primary characteristics of that artform—in this case plot, voice, characters, etc—without developing any of the secondary characteristics which nonetheless are still good to be practiced in, and which are primary to other forms, for example ‘the desires of two characters conflict’.

157. Dabbling also divorces trope from form in your mind, helpfully. If all you ever read were short stories and novels, you might think that narration is fiction. Reading poetry and watching movies with voice-over will help you see that narration is a technique in its own right. Do this enough and eventually you see that in fact “fiction” doesn’t exist at all; there are only individual artworks that deploy certain techniques and tropes, and the word “fiction,” seriously understood, is a marketing term, or, less-seriously understood, a convenient shorthand.

158. Of course the ‘convenient shorthand’ is very convenient. However, just as “race isn’t real” is true on one level, race is in fact real in people’s minds and is therefore useful to understand; likewise, because the categories of “fiction,” “poetry,” “play,” etc, are real in people’s minds, they are in fact real in that sense. However, just as the biologist and the farmer have different, equally legitimate, understandings of crops (the biologist’s being truth-based, the farmer’s being use-based; neither is ‘better’), it’s important for the artist to have a more nuanced understanding of art than the general public in order to be able to engineer art.

159. To return to Tolstoy’s ‘art comes from things we all do every day, practiced and paid attention to’ (in What is Art?)—storytelling, performing for each other, writing to each other, thrilling each other, lying to each other, tricking each other, making things for each other. The useful gestures get reused and become tropes.

160. Some artists hew close to the everyday-gestural bone, and that can feel ‘pure’. Life of a Craphead, early Cat Power, Shoplifting from American Apparel, Naoko Takahashi.

161. Other artists take preexisting tropes as their raw data, and that can feel genius in a different way; it thrills a different part of your brain. Infinite Jest, Charlie Kaufman, Dirty Projectors, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Trecartin.

162. Probably every decent artist attempts to eschew all recognizable tropes, at first. You have this image of yourself as reinventing the wheel.

163. You find what works for you. However, you cannot choose what kind of (good) artist you will become. Be humble enough to share the gifts you actually have with the world (even if they don’t feel cool), be nimble enough to follow your genius, be open enough to dabble to discover it.

164. Different things are accomplished with machine language vs. Python with the same energy input from the programmer; one language is not ‘better’ than another. Do not valorize energy expenditure.

165. Be humble. Aim lower.

166. Embarking on a really big artistic project can be scary and stressful. Sometimes too much.

167. Every time you come back to any substantial project, you’re confronted with a really excellent reason it can’t move forward and the whole project is fucked. And every time you plow through it, and it’s fine. Until the next day, when you realize another extremely good reason it’s fucked. And the whole process starts over again, and you plow through the impossibilities. You have the ingenuity to conquer any problems.

168. It takes three days of working on the same project for your head to get fully into it. The first two days will often be immensely frustrating and will feel fake and on the third day you will be struggling to record all the project-related thoughts that are spilling out of you. Cf. Richard W. Hamming – “You and Your Research”:

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention – you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

169. Looking at my green and blue binders with all my notes I didn’t end up using in the MetaFilter essay today (10/31/14), I realized that the bigger the success the bigger, also, the failure. The more ambitious it is, the more it will fall short of what was in your mind. So don’t be afraid of failure. Failure is a necessary ingredient of success.

170. Sentences get written while looking at the page; but stories get written while not looking at the page (while cleaning) (but having looked at the page that morning).

171. Say no. Say no more. Free yourself up. You don’t have to respond to every email or message you get. An empty day fills itself.

172. Like a page.

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I would like to say I have a simple goal, but it seems I’m pretty flexible in practice. I think of all the dabblers down through time, Da Vinci inventing the helicopter on the back of a piece of paper where he records an anecdote of himself filling up a room at a party with a room-sized balloon and laughing his ass off. Sure.

So in that spirit I’m going to tell you the story of how I went to coding bootcamp. It’s going to be kind of long. Here it is.

1. “Why not make $50 an hour?”

In 2012 I was in a relationship with a woman named Emma from Evanston, IL, on Chicago’s North Shore. This is a wealthy part of America and her family was wealthy. Her dad had gone to Harvard and made a lot of money on the stock market, then retired in his fifties. This is when I met him. At this point his main occupation was visiting every Major League Baseball stadium in the U.S., and living in his big beautiful house with a wraparound porch with his wife, visited frequently by his four adult children, who were all charming, troubled artists who seemed to be very fond of him, and who he doted on. In fact every night he sent out an email calculating the geographical mean center-point of everyone in the nuclear family. I remember thinking he was one of the happiest people I had ever met. I was at their house for passover in 2012, which lasted two fulls days, two full like 8-hour dinners, and to which about 20-25 friends and relatives were present, fluidly, coming and going, gefilte fish and apple sauce, and at one point he gave a toast. He said the secret to happiness was two things: one, “marrying well,” and two, not thirsting too desperately to be number one. “Being number two is good,” he said. “What’s wrong with number two?” I was at Emma’s wedding in 2019, in Evanston, and in a huge crowd of people he was crying with happiness.

I spent 10 days in that huge home at the beginning of the summer after my 2nd MFA year. Emma was despairing about her future, sort of moping around the house. Her dad took this as an opportunity to lecture her. One thing about Emma’s dad is that he used to say all the doors that had ever opened to him in his life had opened because of the name “Harvard.” Emma had been accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, by far the most famous MFA program in the world, but had turned it down in favor of the University of Alabama, where we had met, because, she said, she liked the look of UA’s program better. Her dad, by this fact, was consternated. His whole life was testimony to the power of elite U.S. college brand recognition. But since Emma was now committed to studying the poetic arts at Bama, which would likely yield little profit, he thought she should learn a marketable skill. And since she’d have to work regardless, she may as well work for the highest amount per hour. This is where we join him, pacing his living room, gripping a can of PBR, his daughter half-hiding under the couch cushions: “Why not make $50 an hour, if you have to work 8 hours a day?” he said. “Learn to code, that’s a skill in demand. Why sit at a desk making $15 an hour when you could be making $50 an hour sitting at the same desk?”

When Emma and I broke up seven months later, I wrote a draft of a novel about our relationship in my $380/mo 1-bedroom apartment on 7th Street in Tuscaloosa, AL, while listening to Jessie Ware’s Devotion, on my desk that was a single sheet of 4’x8’ Home Depot plywood, and in this novel I had this recurring motif where people would offer other people life advice, and Emma’s dad’s harangue was one of them. I was basically mocking his simplistic logic—or, more generously, ‘ironizing’ it—in favor of the more pure life of the artist.

2. The Pure Life of the Artist

After I finished my MFA in spring 2014, I wanted to stay in the U.S. but couldn’t figure out how to do so, so I reluctantly moved back to Toronto, which was my default location. Once back in Toronto my main goal was always leaving it again, but in the meantime I initiated two income streams: 1) my friend and frequent editor Emily Keeler advised me to start writing for Hazlitt, and introduced me to an editor there, and I wrote a piece for them that took me all summer and made me $800; and 2), during that summer, I popped and served and swept up popcorn kernels at Cirque du Soleil on Cherry Street alongside 17-year-olds (I was 31) for $11/hour. Over the next year and a half, I spent most of my writing time on drafts of things I never published, mostly fiction, which =’d no money, and in the meantime, when Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities ended its Toronto run, I got a job as a busser/food runner at a location of Pizzeria Libretto then just opening on University Avenue. Pizzeria Libretto serves delicious Neapolitan-style pizza and fancy cocktails and this particular location was about a block away from where all of Canada’s stockbrokers and bankers worked, and so a spigot of currency was open from their credit cards to our tip-outs. I got promoted to server and started making $200/night. While I was at Libretto, a friend posted about leaving a teaching job and looking for a replacement, to teach a couple 3-hour/week creative writing classes at George Brown College. It paid very little, but it seemed like a good opportunity, and I went for it, and got it, and that became a third income stream.

However, what I really wanted was to write, and in the spring of 2016 a few things happened: my first book, The Jokes, came out, and concurrently I landed 4 different freelance pieces. I thought, okay, my writing career is taking off, and I actually literally won’t be able to complete all these pieces by deadline if I’m working full-time at Libretto, so I quit Libretto. It was an intense decision and I still remember drawing up a long list of pros and cons. Libretto was the funnest job I ever had and easily the most highly paid.

This 4-freelance-pieces-landed-at-the-same-time thing turned out to be a fluke. I found freelancing super hard and was never as busy as that again, and was chronically low on money throughout 2016 and 2017. Part of my downfall as a freelancer was that I wanted to treat freelancing as a side hustle, when it demanded main-hustle attention. The other part was that journalism as an industry was, and is, dying.

It paid badly even when I landed pieces, is the thing. In 2017 I published the 5th-most-popular Hazlitt piece of the decade, which took me 18 months to write and not that much less research than you’d do for a masters degree, and I earned $1200. I started to tutor high school kids math to pay the rent. I was still, also, a creative writing “Professor” at George Brown College, from which I earned, in 2017, pre-tax, $11,087. Also, The Jokes had netted me $1200, negotiated up from $800. I’d worked on that for four years.

So this is why in October 2017, when my aunt Jeannie let me know the bachelor apartment on the 2nd floor of her house on Ward’s Island was empty, and was mine if I wanted it for a utility-bills-covering-only family rate of $200/month, I jumped at it.

3. “It’s A Comedy of Errors, You See”

I thought it would be fun to live, in Toronto-speak, “on the island,” with a hot plate and a futon—maybe be a good place to write. It was. Especially when I first arrived, it was all fall yellows and reds and ochres out the window. My view through a screen door was petite cottages wading in thick lake fog like seniors in the shallow end of a YMCA pool. There was some kind of yacht club about 20 feet from my aunt’s front door, and off-season sea vessels lay thick and white and upside-down on the brown grass like whales. To get to and from town, I’d take a 15-minute ferry, from which I’d take pictures of sunlight on waves, and then be disappointed at how few Instagram likes I got, as you do. I was very lucky to have this family favor, and I was also entirely outside of life and anything I wanted to be doing. Anyway, my aunt’s invitation was an in extremis kind of thing, not a permanent solution—she liked to have the space open for visiting guests.

I still had 3 jobs: writing prof, math tutor, & freelancer, plus unpaid novel-writer, but one additional project I’d started earlier in 2017 grew to fill up 2018: an idea I’d had for a web series about a woman having a bad time, which I’d brought to my then-roommate, Jade Blair. This was Miss Misery. MM would change the course of my life in wildly unpredictable ways.

Jade and I had been discussing the project since early 2017, but it started to feel real when I met my future lead, Aley Waterman, in the bar where she was working at the time, Burdock, on Apr 20. I was having a drink with Brad, mentioned in my last letter (L9). Aley thought (I learned later) Brad and I were a gay couple, “her new gay dinner party friends.” The three of us had a fun night. A few weeks later Jade and I were brainstorming possible MM leads in the conference room of the Toronto Writers’ Centre, and Aley’s face came to my mind. Aley and I met a few days later on a cold rainy afternoon. The café we were going to hit was closed, and we ducked into the run-down Coffee Time across the street (Bloor & Lansdowne, now gone, RIP). Via circuitous elliptical mumbling, I tried to explain my vision for this project I barely understood myself. Aley had no experience acting, but she was down. That winter, Aley’s then-roommate decided to move back to Vancouver, and on Feb 1, 2018, I moved from my island hotplate apartment into Aley’s 2-bedroom at Bloor and Ossington.

Work on MM kicked into gear. With Aley’s help, Jade and I wrote a million drafts of the scripts, hosted a live reading of them at Sandbox Media’s offices, shot a trailer, did an Indiegogo, and then started rehearsing and shooting in June 2018.

Aley had heard I was a character (“Paul”) in Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia, which had just come out, and she read it, and a section of that book takes place in PAF, the art castle in France I often mention, and I said my friend Alex (also mentioned in L9) had been going there for years and telling me about it, and Aley got excited and said she wanted to go, and asked me to go with her, and I agreed, but reluctantly, because I didn’t think I could afford it financially or timewise.

But then on July 12, 2018, I found out the Canada Council of the Arts had awarded me $25,000 to write a novel. This amount of money, as you can see from the numbers I’ve been throwing around, was a big deal to me, like a life-changing amount of money. Suddenly the PAF trip seemed justified—appropriate, even.

Principal photography of Miss Misery wrapped on July 30. On July 31, Aley and I flew to France. I was grant-rich and feeling smart and guiltless, imagining this was exactly what I should be doing with art grant money.

For the purposes of this story, what’s important about what happened next is that:

1. In France I was really, really happy, and I realized that even if I couldn’t figure out how to live in the U.S., I didn’t necessarily have to live in Toronto. This obvious fact seems obvious on paper but somehow being in my mid-30s, with a hard-to-get creative writing college teaching job, moving somewhere else with no real plan just hadn’t seemed like an option.

2. However, almost immediately upon arrival, I realized my desire to leave Toronto outweighed my need for anything resembling a cogent plan, and I decided definitively that I wasn’t going back, that I wouldn’t return to teach at George Brown in the fall, and that I would move out of Aley’s place.

3. I then spent the next 2 years traveling and writing the book I’d told the CCA I would write, and gradually burning through first the CCA grant money, then my savings from the stockbrokers’ credit cards.

A fair amount of these 2 years of travel have been recorded in these letters themselves, and I know this is getting long, so I’ll jump directly to:

4. A long wooden dining room table in a quiet affluent Norwegian suburb, mid-day

As documented in previous letters, in 2020 I was in a relationship with a Norwegian woman in Norway. In June we were in deep lockdown in this beautiful house I was staying in for an unexpectedly long stretch. I felt like I was in this very safe and very unreal stasis. I was a guest in this home and wasn’t paying rent, but I was also only in Norway because COVID had relaxed visa restrictions. As soon as the pandemic lifted, I would have to go somewhere else, and I would need money. I had had a regular copywriting gig interviewing entrepreneurs and startup founders throughout 2019, but that had dried up the minute COVID hit. I had come to the end of a lifestyle.

I discussed this with Hanna. I don’t honestly recall if I’d ever mentioned anything tech-related before, or whether it was just something people said to each other in 2020, but Hanna said, “What about coding?”

We were sitting, as this section’s title suggests, at the long wooden dining room table in the suburb previously identified as Fornebu. Whatever hesitations I had about my relationship with Hanna, there was something, I think, about the mise-en-scène of the experience of cohabiting in a suburb of affluent young parents, with a dozen little kids playing in a miniature private jungle gym in the public square of these gorgeous stained-wood condos, in this nexus of neighborhood groups and building committees, that made me see it as something desirable, and possible, if only I could afford it.

It sounds dramatic, but something changed in me when Hanna said those words. I felt like I didn’t have to be a writer to be accepted. I felt I didn’t have to ‘produce’, artistically, to have access to people. I didn’t need ‘people’. I needed money.

5. “Who Makes Your Money?”

And that was it, really. I started experimenting with JavaScript and Python on Treehouse, data science on Udemy, did a little thing on datajournalism.com. I started following tech-adjacent people on Twitter. I read Antonio García Martínez’s Chaos Monkeys. I read some of the intensely annotated essays of internet eccentric Gwern Branwen. I read a bunch of blogposts and an eBook by Silicon Valley consultant Venkatesh Rao. I poked my head into the Instagram feed of Ryan Holiday (the Stoic Daily guy). I sniffed a novel about working at a startup in New York.

It was weird. I felt very unsure of everything. I had no idea which direction to go. Then I remembered a thing one of the entrepreneurs I’d interviewed in 2019 had done: “100 People in 100 Days,” © Keisha Mabry, which was basically Keisha talking to a bunch of people post-MBA, looking for opportunities. I made this list:

This was me brainstorming anyone I even vaguely knew who worked in tech or something tech-adjacent. I didn’t know anywhere close to 100 people, but I talked to most of the people above, and a few others. Eventually I homed in on Juno College and their frontend web dev immersive bootcamp.

I applied to that.

6. Apostasy

As soon as I even applied to bootcamp, I had this rush of relief for several days afterwards of finally, I’ve given up the stupid pipe dream of writing. I always felt strange that I actually ended up doing the thing I wanted to do when I was a kid, like—isn’t that a sign that critical thinking entered my decision-making process at absolutely no stage? I was living the life I conceptualized as an actual child, who thought “superb” was pronounced “super B” and denoted one notch less super than regular (“super A”). That kid, age like 8, was like “being a writer would be cool,” and for the next 29 years I never revisited that plan.

Weirdly, though, in the next few days, in the wake of being released from the stranglehold of ‘being a writer’, all these positive, optimistic feelings rushed in, about… writing. I felt freedom, terrible freedom, from the poisonous and all-consuming network of anxieties that had insinuated itself around my every capillary and axon since I first started hearing stories of my grandparents dining at Anaïs Nin’s house. I rarely talk about my (very tenuous!) family connection to some of the most famous writers of the 20th century, but I was made aware of it early, and it lodged itself in me pretty deep.

But in addition to feeling embedded in writing as like a world-historical movement, I also actually liked creating work, and now that I’d given up on professionalizing it, my writing-brain started to poke its little green worm head out of the sand, sensing the cessation of a decades-long anxiety storm, and was starting to look around at post-apocalyptic possibilities.

Because of course the thing is I love to write. I use it to knit together and make whole my life. As a rule I feel pretty lost, but sticking a bunch of facts about myself together in a fat paragraph is pacifying in a way few other things are. For one thing, it’s an effective corrective to catastrophic thinking, and creating a virtual self-portrait is about the best way I know to tease out self-deception, internal inconsistencies, and blind spots, to keep you honest and ethical, and to verify, to yourself if no one else, that you have lived. I started doing this obsessively at the beginning of losing my sister to a cult when I was 18. It has been helpful.

7. Bootcamp

Anyway, I learned I’d been accepted to Juno’s bootcamp on July 22, 2020. All my confusion rushed back in. I was nervous, terrified even, of losing myself. Nonetheless I moved to London, as mentioned in L9, on Sept 14, into my friend Tim’s spare room in his apartment beside Hampstead Heath. The next day, I started Juno’s 2-week intro web dev course.

The format was the same as the bootcamp itself, so I’ll explain it here: 8 hours a day of Zoom classes, 10am-6pm, Mon-Fri, Toronto time. Two or 3 charming, funny, generous instructors would be present on the Zoom call, plus about 30 students. At the same time there’d be a very active Slack chat popping off with questions and answers about whatever we were talking about, plus memes. It was fun. I’d usually spend about 3 additional hours a night coding, and then at least 8 hours a day on the weekends, completing the assignments due every Monday morning. Intense but fun.

Outside of class, I would hang out with Tim, and otherwise see one other person IRL ever: Hilary, an old friend from Toronto who is now also a web developer (listed in my “100 people” thing screenshotted above, in fact (last name spelled wrong)) who lives nearby. She would come over once a week and I’d make us lunch.

Tim, who splits his time between London and Montreal, went to Montreal on Oct 8. Then lockdown restrictions tightened, and Hilary and I stopped seeing each other in person. So then the only people I saw IRL were deliverers from Ocado, a grocery website, and Amazon, for 1-5 seconds, about once a week. I jogged several times a week, but I no longer jogged through the heath, because it was too crowded, so I jogged through the streets. Because Juno is based in Toronto, it worked best if my sleep schedule was more or less synced with Toronto time, so many of my jogs were on my lunch break, from 6-7pm (my time), or after class, post-11pm (my time). It was pitch dark outside during these timeslots, and often it was raining a little, or had just rained, or it started to rain mid-jog and I had to go back inside. This, I guess, is London for you.

The interpersonal deprivation at times had intense effects. Once, when I was waiting for my falafel from the white woman with dreads who stands a cart at the end of my street (which I went to like, twice), a newly pregnant woman explained to the falafel lady how despite lockdown measures she was thinking of visiting her grandma in Spain, because it might be the last time she’d see her alive, and she wanted her grandma to at least see her pregnant, even if she’d never meet the baby, and she also wanted to sit on the beach, but this one—and here she gestured to her male partner, seated beside her, who didn’t look up—doesn’t like the beach, so he doesn’t want to come. The falafel lady said it’s no crime to not like the beach, and maybe you could just visit your grandma on your own. And, standing there with my mask on pretending to read my phone, I thought, okay, these are the people I know now. This is my community now.

Hanna and I broke up on Oct 24 over the course of a sweet and civil three-hour Facebook video call, where we expressed gratitude to each other and agreed we both were in better places now than when we met, in part due to the other. Over the course of the next few weeks it would get sadder for both of us as the reality of the breakup sunk in. I was completely alone then. I got into the song “Not” by Big Thief and Phoebe Bridgers saying “I got everything I’ve wanted” and to some extent alcohol. I briefly dipped back into “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind – Live” by Lauryn Hill, which was my most-listened-to track of 2019. For a few days I really rabbit holed into online communities based mainly in California. Two of my uncles died, Joe and Ed. I allowed myself a short break from coding and went for a walk to a stationary store, where, bemasked, I bought 7 pens. On the walk home, in a cobblestone alley, I felt, or allowed myself to feel, the presence of my sister in me, in my head, her personality, her voice, her attitude, which is very proud, and exhorted me to walk upright and hold my shoulders back, and made me feel that I have nothing to be ashamed of, and I don’t need anything from anyone, that I’m not a desperate person, that I’m not constantly craving deliverance from my torment.

8. Completion

Tim came back on Nov 15. I turned 38 on Nov 26. The Juno crew gave me a warm Zoom welcome to class on my birthday; at least one balloon was involved. I spoke to Hanna for 10 minutes on a video call and cried my eyes out. Tim and I played three rounds of Hive. On Dec 18, bootcamp ended. I’d been alone for about 70% of it, and it was really nice to have the company of 30 people in a Zoom chat for 8 hours a day, not to mention a captive Slack audience for all the dumb jokes my brain compulsively generates.

Anyway, I know this is long. During a break from project #6, Detective Pokémon, my partners and I were swapping stories about how we ended up in the bootcamp. When I told a 45-second version of mine, one of my partners, Swetha, was like “you should write a book about that!” So, I thought maybe people would like to hear a somewhat extended version of all this, and now I have written it.

For now I’m going to skip over Christmas, on which I had a really exceptionally nice dinner here in London with my friends Monica and Stephen, and my job search, which was mercifully brief. I spent early January fixing up my portfolio and applying for jobs, and last Friday I was offered a job at Plogg, a company in Quebec, as a Junior Front-End Web Programmer. On Monday I went for a beautiful walk with Hilary, on a rare warm, clear sunny day, through the mud of the heath, and Friday was my first day as a professional coder.

As gestured at earlier, I do feel like I’ve defected from the hazy, polytheistic, but very real religion of literature, and have started to think about other ways I could contextualize myself. I’ve started to think about my actual roots, i.e., who my ancestors actually were and what they did. At one point I actually did kind of a major deep dive of the history of WASP culture—which might sound funny, but you follow the leads such as they are. What I realized is that my ancestry for at least the last century has been, essentially, rootless opportunist Anglophones hopping from one Western capital to another in search of love and money. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have found this comforting.

It’s now Sunday afternoon. I have a fair amount of work to do to get up to speed at Plogg, so I’m probably going to spend the rest of this weekend doing that. In the next room, Tim is at his standing desk, watching his stonks.

Hope you’re well. If you’re getting this, I’d be interested in hearing from you, so write back if you feel like it.

Steve

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https://stevecodes.co
https://stephenthomaswriter.com