2025

Date: January 17, 2025
Categories: notes and errata

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14/04 – 20/04 – Something to Do with Paying Attention, David Foster Wallace

So to the honorable men who stand to wrangle the coming tides of data, to ‘deal in facts‘, to slug through the necessary. I suppose that is me also. That is my life is it not?

Lately, I’ve been somewhat fixated on those relics and artifacts of the data we engage with. Where do old emails go? What happens to those pdfs and word documents and spreadsheets we arrange? The ones that slip through the cracks? It’s funny, I was walking in South Bank actually the other day and I came across that bookseller by the BFI and under the Waterloo Bridge; the one who lays all those ancient, orange Penguin paperbacks out on big tables. I had a quick look and outside of a few of the big names—Eliot anthologies, some Graham Greene, etc.—the vast majority were complete unknowns. These books were likely never to be read in full again. And I’m not sure why, but a bit like unread emails—it felt like there was something pure about these books, something uncompromised. They were purposeless now—functionally defunct—a bit like our main character, during his rotating-boot-sign watching days.

It’s a special skill to make this kind of stuff come to life. To write about tax and make people feel something. And I suppose I don’t share our main character’s saim disdain for the creative arts; but perhaps that is just what works for him: he’s a ‘cog not a spark plug‘.

I myself can admit to finding some freedom in order. In understanding the pieces of the world and how and why they work together. What legal and tax systems—like all other vaguely relational systems—tell us is usually more about ourselves than anything else. They contain (baked in) the petit choices and decisions that make the world the way it is. Even for me: a dreamer, someone who more than anything wants to create new ways of seeing the world, understanding these decisions is critical. How and why they operate; how and why they sustain themselves.

Increasingly I feel the coming of a new epoch: the architecture is profoundly changing, shaking, being enumbered. I hope to be help ‘slice the pie‘ too, in my own way.

And at least a thousand useful heuristics—the ones to return to whilst alone. To help remember that: “a work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity”. 

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10/03 – 17/03 – Stay True, Hua Hsu

This is very good. I do not always enjoy this style: it’s modern and quite The Atlantic-ish; but they way he talks about grief is rare. Grief lives in association with memory—and much like memory involves building these totally complex maps of associations and imagery; often spiralling into mutual unintelligibility, self-doubt, and paralysis. So much of the world—which in any case can feel a bit like a dull slideshow with wacky transition animations at the best of times—is scarred by those memories, and the loss of that person. Hsu gets this. I feel for him: it is truly an awful thing.

I’d recommend listening to Losing Haringey with this one.

–1.;;’a[=1;2;m00_

10/02 – 16/02 – An American Dream, Mailer

This is bold—and to be totally honest, it’s refreshing to read something like this right now, because practically no-one writes like this right now. And I mean that in every sense. Sure, the content is graphic, —some of it obscene—and almost all the protagonist does is soliloquize in an overly long monologue that verges on facetious at times—but damn it feels good to read someone so unashamed. Like yes, he will murder his wife and shag the maid in the first chapter… And why not? Mailer quite clearly had that uniquely 20th century relationship with women where they represented both an near-ontological proof for utter evil and the only credible way to heaven. And it plays itself out incredibly in his strange and dark impressionism; in his ability to comfortably explore depravity. I’d recommend this simply as a means of being better in touch with our own dark sides.

And his faithful trawl through our darkness yields more than its fair share of reward. Mailer’s use of hypothetical, in particular. Take that brilliant conversation between Barney Shelly and Rojack—where Shelly details his view on the prospects for satanism after watching Rojack on television. In an almost socratic manner Shelly repeats what is surely Mailer’s own argument: If Satan is real, and really is in an eternal war with God, surely he must have a chance at victory? If that were not the case, then surely Satan would have been defeated? And if that is the case, is the Church not Satans’ agent? Do they not, by assuring us of the God’s inevitable victory, lure us into that false state of confidence that make space in our hearts for Satan and his ill-doings?

I for one, could not find issue with his reasoning.

-12..”==a0-11″_)_+

20/01 – 26/01 – Pale Fire, Nabakov:

It’s genius, like all Nabakov—and perhaps just a touch too genius; just a touch too smart and funny and wild and wholely him. And so I can’t really speak to it. This slides off me like soapy water: like the pulling-back of some veneer that leaves us actually wholly naked and yet somehow invulnerable? Like that there might actually be a pristine layer underneath all of this after all, but it’s just that we cannot imagine it.

I can’t imagine Nabakov finding anyone’s conversations interesting. He’d pretty much always know where we were going next. The turn of phrase we’d seek to rely on; the latent insecurity that reveals itself despite attempted deception. Like playing chess against a child. A stupid one. Perhaps he’d find some merriment in it. Like the older brother leading the gang of young children down the country path, he’d pretend not to be enjoying our company. I could see that for him.

And in any case, what is it even all about anyway? Does he like Russia? Does he hate the States? Is he parodying the European nobility? Or chastising himself for being their literary amuse-bouche? Nabakov’s relationship with the postmodern is typically antithetical—Nabokovian, even—but I don’t mind that. After all, it suits him well.

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13/01  – 19/01 – Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke:

Practically a manifesto, and I underlined so much that it has become quite difficult to put down exactly what I feel about it. But I suppose trying to try, simply because it feels neccessary to do so, I suppose that’s the whole point, right? I mean it’s all just somehow stuff we always knew, deep down, somewhere in there. Rilke is somehow able to tempt that stuff out; and it’s just brilliantly put—with real venom and ice. With all the clarity of a crisp winter morning. And with a natural clarity: there is nothing digital about it. Rilke appears to have no artifice. 

—12o3”..’1|}\

06/01 – 12/01 – The Waves, Virginia Woolf: 

The modernist masterpiece and without having read it, and despite all internal mental protest to the contrary, it turns out I’d never really understood what that term meant anyway. Somewhere between the anxiety of losing the past and an impulse to build the new. Impulse in the face of anxiety: that is modernism.

This book will leave you on the face of a cliff: facing an wide anonymous northern ocean and exposed to the headwind. Everything in you is blown about—there is cold bright sunshine; a passing shower—and the oil is stripped from your face. Where the past meant conformity—meant meeting standards and petit fours in warm cloisters—and where the new meant this cliff: this raw,and sometimes unintelligible experience of new. Not a stream but a river. And it’s terrifying in large parts. The characters—all so full of recognition that their lives simply come at them. That it does not appear to be in their power to control these things. Even for Bernard: who is clearly Woolfs’ write-in. And then setting all this upstream chaos against the never ending beating-on of time…

I’d love to write it gifted too, but I’m glad not to be her. I recommend Jack Yeats, The Poetic Morning with her.