L4: short "Steve is a writer with a career" update
Hi. I missed my Sunday deadline, so here is a Tuesday letter. My life has been uneventful in a personal sense in the past week, so I’m just gonna do a brief professional recap:
My book of short stories, The Jokes, was published in French one week ago as C’est une farce. The text was translated by Alexandre Soublière and published by Tête première. Tête’s page for it.
I just got notified by Instagram and Twitter that my 2017 essay on lonely men, “The Legion Lonely,” is their 5th most read piece of the decade. Because I’ve been gathering evidence for my “““success””” for visa reasons lately, I am in possession of the knowledge that it was read over a quarter of a million times. That’s nice!
A short story of mine, the only one to be published this year, is supposed to appear sometime this month on hobartpulp.com. It is called “Kinship With All Life.” After I submitted it, I had an email drafted that retracted it from consideration, but I never hit send. I wrote it in 24 hours when I was in Toronto this February spending most of my time at the Toronto Writers’ Centre, because I wanted to submit something to a story contest. I’ll link to it next Sunday if I remember.
The literal finishing touches of the final episodes of my web series Miss Misery are currently being applied. I showed the first episode to an audience here at PAF and they liked it and coaxed the following 3 out of me. (This was a double bill with Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s short film “Retract,” which was very beautiful. Itonje is currently reducing 6 hours of footage to 2 to make a feature based on this short.)
I am sitting at the middle desk in PAF’s library. Mikkeline is sitting on the couch behind me. I read a little bit of George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces today. My life feels incredibly coherent at PAF. I eat the same thing every day. I think if you do few enough things, it becomes easier to process the patterns of your life. This may also just be me.
On that note, one more thing: a few weeks ago, an old obsession with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who ate the same thing every day, began resurfacing for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me. It happened on the day after Jahandar left though, and I wondered if it was perhaps a symptom of loneliness—my hypervigilance metastasizing in a social vacuum, making me begin to think the only path to happiness was, like Wittgenstein, obsessive cognitive labor in a hut by the side of a lake in the mountains in Norway.
Of course, thinking about Wittgenstein in his Norwegian hut may also have resurfaced because my life in those weeks in fact kind of resembled that tableau. I wrote every morning in a large bare white attic with a bright pine floor and exposed beams beside a room reserved for meditation and devotion. But anyway, all this was prologue to my realization that this location seems like a good metaphor for writing itself—it’s not exactly meditation or devotion, but it’s in an adjacent room.
Hope you’re well.
Steve