What I’ve been up to, what I’ve been reading lately

So you might have thought I died or something. In all truthfulness, I have, many times over. And each time I woke up I’d look around and say, “Where was I?” Not receiving any response, I’d ask again, “Where am I?” But I never heard the answer, because some imperative would impose—say, an approaching deadline for a tax form, or the unexpected failure of the starter of my car—and addressing that issue meant to give up listening and plug my semi-compatible wires into a vast, diesel-scented system of habits and reflexes. I’ve already died again, by this point, without realizing it. It takes a while to realize you’ve died, which is simply another way of saying, it takes a while to come back to life. 

I’ve passed through that cycle countless times since my tour. So many times that the tour days seem completely foreign and even the lyrics to my newest songs, that I knew back & forthwards only three months ago are now hard to remember…

I think I forgot 1) I can write here anytime – it is my website after all ; and 2) I don’t have to labor the structure as if I were in school, and can write conversationally.

In fact, I’ve been sick, with the flu, or something else horrible. Decommissioned for a few days—aching body, alternating between fever and shivers, sweating buckets, coughing up blobs. With sickness, though, comes the benefit of being forced to slow down. The psychological changes allow a different sort of perspective, similar to a small dose of mushrooms. And there’s a closeness to death that makes life seem more precious. Even when healthy, I’m an easy cryer, tearing up every couple of days (almost always when alone, usually a sense of wistfulness, especially when listening to music, watching movies, or reading). When I’m sick, this multiplies by about ten.

So this is the part I really wanted to get to: books, movies, and music that I’ve been into lately.

I’ve had a long-distance relationship with reading in the last few years, meaning “we don’t see each other so often,” mostly because I feel like I’m not “working” while doing it, so I leave books until bed, always surprised at how quickly I’d fall asleep. Drinking at night adds another distance. Reading while drinking is just impossible for me, though I have never ceased to try. This state of affairs led to me not reading much at all, which is the flipside of when I was younger and would spend long stretches of time just reading and feeling a book, in the middle of the day, outside or inside. I loved that and have missed it for years. But I’ve only done it twice, when the book wouldn’t let me do otherwise (Overstory by Richard Powers and Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend). Other than that, I’ve felt obligated to do other things. When people have given me books as gifts, while thanking them, I’ve thought, with considerable sadness, “I’ll never have time to read this.”

This was especially true between 2021 and 2023 when I was doing a master’s thesis on Samuel Beckett. My advisor was Lydie Parisse, a brilliant & eccentric writer and artist whose goal in teaching seemed to be to remain as detached as possible from the whole process and concentrate on her real work, which was writing fiction, theater, and criticism, directing plays, and making visual art. I genuinely liked her a lot, and though at first I think she was skeptical, in the end she seemed to like me too. At the first meeting between Madame Parisse, myself, and the two other students she was mentoring, she told us to read everything ever written by the author we were studying. So for two years I was reading Beckett and little else (I actually had to read novels for other classes, too, much of which I just couldn’t finish in time) I mostly just made it through the “greatest hits” of Beckett (I recommend Molloy). As I was writing the 100+ page essay in French on Beckett, I remember thinking, what is all this work for, when it seems like once it’s written, it will only serve to get a grade, and then very likely never be re-read again? And now, that exact thing has happened. That’s fairly sad, as I could have spent that time working on something that would actually make a difference in the world—some music or anything. But, if you want, go ahead and read my Beckett paper. I’ll put it here for you.

Back when I was on the tour, I was listening to a lot of audiobooks while driving, and I found one with an exciting idea: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. That book critiques the general accepted story of the inevitable progressive development of human society, from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists to capitalists. I love critiques that show that the way the world is assumed to be, is not how it has to be. I guess I’ve always been bewildered to see how people walk around thinking everything is normal—it is in fact, extremely weird. Everything that happens is a one in a billion chance—we’re riding a never ending wave of unlikeliness that is constantly happening, and when we reach our foot out, away from the wave, the wave moves where we step. Well, I’m getting very far away from the subject of this book, which is a critique of received ideas of anthropology, which primarily elevate european views at the expense of indigenous ones, when, in fact, the book argues, much of the innovation in european enlightenment thought—scientific truth’s basis in physical proof, the importance of deliberation to arrive at truth—comes from observation of cultures encountered in colonial projects.

I loved that book so I read (these are all audiobooks, by the way—I listen to them with Libby, the library app. If you’ve never heard of it, see if your library has it) Pirate Enlightenment, and then Bullshit Jobs, both also by David Graeber (writing solo this time). This last one is the most impactful book I’ve read in the last few years. It actually made me feel much better about myself, almost like you would expect a self-help book, though it’s actually a very scathing critique of our current economy and its effects on culture and people. I’ll not explain the whole thing, because it’s a popular book and a lot of people know about it, but  this short essay sets out the basic idea that he went on to expand in the book. One of the ideas that Graeber attacks is a sort of default attribution of moral goodness to working. I’ve wondered about this question for a while: why would someone who stays home, and does, say, nothing at all, in the most extreme version of sloth imaginable, be considered morally inferior to someone who works for an oil company spreading disinformation about climate change in order to maintain their company’s dominance ? The first does no harm by not working, the second works towards planetary death.  How about workers at an advertising firm that work to make people feel unattractive if they don’t purchase some beauty product placebo? How about someone running a chain of payday loan offices? They’re all “hard workers” that make life worse for everybody.

Bullshit Jobs outlines the resentment felt towards those who work jobs that we as a society deem to be “rewarding in themselves.” These would include artistic pursuits, anything with clear ethical goodness (teaching, caregiving, charitable work, etc). This resentment results in relatively lower pay (doctors are an exception) than jobs that have no redeeming value (i.e. corporate lawyer, financial sector), which are rewarded with the highest salaries. Outlining and ridiculing all this resentment made me realize I’ve felt ashamed of things, for years, that I had no need to be ashamed of, that I have no need to feel “less than” for never having built much of a career, and also that I regretted having felt that way, which definitely dampened by artistic pursuits over the years. I also often felt resentment—from the outside, but also a deeply internalized resentment—against myself as one trying to make beauty in the world, and I’m sorry to admit that much of the time I buckled under those feelings.

This is all to say, though, that, after reading Bullshit Jobs, I felt a huge weight lifting off me. I feel much more justified in my own “hates” about the way the world works and more resolute in defying that, in my own way, which is imagination-driven. The final chapter of the book suggested, with some reservation, a policy that could attenuate the situation, which is universal basic income, an idea that now sounds pretty appealing to me—but the more important idea I want to communicate is the power of imagination. This quote was brought up probably more than once in the book: “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (this seems to be attributed both to Slavoj Zizek and Fredric Jameson), and that highlights a need for imagination and for art in this world. And yet, it is very hard to be paid for art, so people use most of their energy working and have just a little left over for art. That energy often gets taken up with other things—family, alcohol/drugs, sports, social media, health problems… Most artists are those who come from the well-to-do, who of course are much less likely to want to imagine things differently than they are—so we get a lot of boring stories about people in New York who are studying writing, going out to eat and sleeping around, etc. Haha! I’m showing my grouchiness—but how often do I start to read New Yorker or Harper’s fiction and find another story like that—brilliantly written always but that leaves you with a sick feeling that a person from a wealthy background is trying to show how sick the culture is, in a decadent way, as though the aim is just to sicken and die rather than fight for life. That’s kind of at the heart of what I feel when I sing, because I feel something so beautiful and so strong, and it’s life that bursts through that mire, whether the life is explosive or gentle. To sum up, this has just amplified and made real the desperate need for more art-making all across society.

I barely have gotten to the part I wrote earlier that I was hoping to get to—and the post has gotten a bit long. If you’ve read this far, I couldn’t ask for any more, so I’m just going to very briefly list the things I read/watched/listened to while sick this week. It would be ridiculous to claim it’s very original, I just was inspired by one of the things I read, the Steal like an Artist audio trilogy by Austin Kleon, to do it. This book has a lot of short takes on different ideas about making art, and it’s kind of like a free book shelf, you just take what interests you and leave behind the rest. There was plenty I found helpful in there—including the idea of using the internet to be open about what you’re up to, what you’re reading, etc., as a way of being part of a community. That struck me as a great idea, because I’m always curious about what other people are into and especially artists I like, and so I’m going to start this and hopefully be able to connect with people more through it. It would be great to keep up the bonds of friendship that were rekindled on my tour with some people that I rarely get to see, since I live in rural France…

Murakami Manga Stories – I’d never read Murakami before but Yuri’s dad gave her this book, and when I was feeling very feverish and tired, reading a comic book seemed like the way to go. I read mountains of comics when I was a kid, and a few graphic novels like Watchmen, Maus (this was actually assigned reading) and Jimmy Corrigan in college, but comics are a pleasure I often deny myself. I really really enjoyed this and it made me want to read more of this very well-known author that I’d always avoided, I guess because he seemed “too popular” (I can be stupid like that, usually ends up with me missing out on good things). That is definitely the case with Murakami, because I feel like he’s a kindred spirit. I’m reading The Disappearing Elephant, a short story collection, and also listening to, concurrently, his other short story collection First Person Singular, and his nonfiction collection Novelist as a Vocation. I was especially crazy about the stories “The Second Bakery Attack” and “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova.”

The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk, which tells the history of the colonization of the Americas with emphasis on indigenous peoples. This is another audiobook—I can’t say I’m remembering all the many details by any stretch, but definitely seeing the grand contours of Indian life in America. It’s around the mid-1700s right now, and I’m very eager to hear about the early 1800s when my ancestors, extremely shamefully fought, Creek/Muscogee indians in South Alabama.

“The Pleasure of a Working Life” by Michael Deagler, Harper’s, June 2024. This is a beautiful story that I loved so much I wrote the author fan mail at the end. I recommend it so much, a really strong vision of an everyday, pass-the-time kind of middle class existence (the lead character is a postal worker).

Dune – I had never read Dune, but I woke up about a month ago, also very sick (I think this is the third time I’ve gotten sick this summer), not having been able to sleep for a runny nose, and I woke up at dawn, took Patti the dog for a walk with my brain in the tremblingest lucidity, and decided, fuck it, I’m gonna find out what Dune’s all about. I started it and was slowly walking around, staring at trees in the gentlest light of morning, and that was a beautiful experience. The book ended up surprising me constantly and I loved being in the huge whirling fantasy-world and got really inspired by the tight-rope walk of heroism that Paul Atreides was doing. I also loved all the built in axioms and lore. Now that I think about it, I was also inspired to read Dune by an article in Harper’s called “The Gods of Logic” that mentioned how Dune’s society is based on an ancient (in the timeline of the novel) rejection of artificial intelligence. Also, when I was little, my older brothers were fans of David Lynch’s Dune (there was a poster on the wall by our Apple IIc computer), and I remember seeing it at way too young of an age and it was, of course, fascinating and scary. I need to rewatch that now, because I’m sure there are some deeply-buried psychological images in there.

I watched The Creeping Terror, which was recommended by Lux Interior in an interview cited in article I read about the Cramps and horror. I checked the trailer out and had to watch the movie. It violates the “scariest monster is the one you never see” rule to the extreme – the monster is right there basking in the light of day within the first five minutes. It’s a flabby, formless, enormous thing. Almost every bit of dialogue in the movie is inaudible and explained by a voiceover saying, “Barney said… and Martin reacted with disbelief.” There are very long dance sequences with very little action. Really muted reactions to horrible screaming deaths. This was a very, very cool movie.

Ikiru – amazing vision of 1950s Tokyo. I cried a few oceans of tears. A good one to watch while sick as those “could it be cancer” thoughts start banging around, and the lead character has stomach cancer. (this is the first thing you know about him, so no spoiler here). Many parallels between this movie and Bullshit Jobs—the main character has worked his whole life in a soulless, bureaucratic position, and when he learns he’ll die soon, he tries to change his life and the way his work functions.

Vivre sa vie, this a Godard film, and it actually made me cry as well. I still haven’t seen lots of Godard movies and feel like I don’t understand him, he’s so loved by academic types and, though I am kind of like that, I also have to say, I can hardly stand a lot of academic writing on literature and stuff—I don’t understand it and don’t understand the point of it. Occasionally it seems to cut to the quick, but often it just seems beyond me, with all the jargon and stuff. But whenever I read quotes by Godard, I think Yes, I’m going to love this guy… I think he’s an intellectual who cuts to the quick, who is human, fleshbound, and I think, after seeing this movie, I could kind of see why, but I don’t think I’m quite smart enough to explain why.

That was a bit long so I’ll stop here. I could add other stuff but we’ll save that for another day. Thank you for being here, and leave a comment if you like. I don’t think anyone has done that so far on this web site.