Do you know that feeling that there is always someone who, if they are not always looking over your shoulder, is at any moment liable to appear there and ask you to account for yourself. I think its pretty common, especially among all this grindsetting. And yes— the obligatory acknowledgement that capitalism and the attendant cult of productivity is a diseas— but you know that and I know that and theres no need to belabor that point. The point is that I’ve been feeling sick with worry about my productivity and what that old big other makes of it.
Part of it is the nature of my current project. Most of the time I’ve spent writing for the past year has been dedicated to working on a novel. The thing about novels is that they are long. They take longer to write than poems and short stories and until they are finished there is little to show for the time spent working. It’s only pretty recently, since I hit the 45k word mark (and half of them are actually pretty good), that I’ve really been telling anyone about it. But now that I’ve hit that mark it feels real in a different way— it is at the very least novel shaped— and I am ready to make the commitment to the project that comes from speaking it aloud, or writing about it in a little post. I’ve published an excerpt from the novel with Expat Lit and I recently had the chance to read a different excerpt aloud at the Test reading put on by my friend Zach in Chicago. The latter was a great experience, because 1. it was the first time I let any part of the book out into public and it was met with a pretty positive response and 2. Test’s deal is that it serves as an opportunity to get feedback in a performance/ workshop hybrid, and I got some useful feedback, especially regarding dialogue.
But the point is that a novel is a time consuming project and I’ve been worried that I don’t have much to show for my past year. Beyond the novel excerpt, the only other thing I’ve published is a short story I wrote in 2022. I also presented a paper on the independent poetry Timeless Infinite Light and occult materialism at the Louisville Conference of Literature and Culture. Hopefully, I will figure out a way to publish that paper, even if it is only on this platform. I have some poetry (that I wrote in 2022) and book reviews forthcoming, my musical project, Early Country has finally started releasing music and playing shows, and I have an exciting role lined up that I want to kind of keep the lid on until it starts, so there things moving, if you are asking me to account for myself. It just makes anxious.
And so, perhaps falling back into the trap of thinking the best way to deal with a problem is to just work harder, I am going to commit to writing regularly on substack, for the sake of practice and for the sake of building something vaguely portfolio shaped. Something to show for myself. I still want to use it to publish the longer form pieces I was doing a couple of years ago, but I my plan, and this is a commitment, is to write a post every Sunday. Just a brief check in on what I’ve been working on, maybe some brief reviews of what I’ve been reading, and maybe talk about a movie I’ve watched or music I’ve listened to and see what grows from this practice of essaying. You know, like normal substack posting.
I am a normal and productive member of the community.
BOOKS
I am nothing if not always on my bullshit. By which I mean I’ve been reading Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. It is, you might be surprised, very long. So its taking up a lot of my reading time. I’m about 700 pages deep now. I reached that mark and realized, oh god I still have 400 pages to go.
A common criticism of Pynchon’s work is that it is overly systematic. No one denies Pynchon’s brilliance as a systematic thinker and writer, critics sometimes claim that that systematic insight comes at the expense of both the humanity of the characters and humanism more broadly. Michiko Kakutani’s review of the book reiterates this criticism. She says of Against the Day that “The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces, moved hither and yon by the author’s impervious, godlike hand. Sad to say, we really don’t give a damn what happens to them or their kith and kin”.
I get it. There have been plenty of times where I realize I have no idea whats going on. Characters come and go. I can acquaint myself with some but some I just have to let pass by. Sometimes I’ve found myself annoyed by the all density and convolution. Many of the tertiary and even secondary characters are either chess pieces or funny names. But the book isn’t without humanity.
The heart of the novel seems to be the stories of the children of a Colorado anarchist murdered by the mine owners’ hired guns. One son becomes an engineer and finds himself working for the mines. One son becomes an itinerant cardsharp who wanders the American southwest, swearing revenge. One son attends Yale at the largess of a robber baron before becoming lost in Europe as world war one looms. The daughter marries her fathers killer. There are, of course, many other characters and many other plot lines, and many of them are even interesting, but these are the characters I’m counting on to ground me to the story.
Pynchon is excellent at capturing characters compromising their values in the course of living. The moments that Kit and Frank realizes they’ve betrayed their dead father and it might be too late to cross back over. Even with his daughter marrying his killer and from the killers point of view, running from the law and the furies and finally realizing that no one is chasing you and realize that now all you have in front of you is life and is that any better.
Maybe because thats sort of where I’ve been at, evaluating my life choices, feeling in some ways like the dog that was chasing me throughout my 20s has slackened its chase and now I am left to face down the rest of a life that has been shaped by decisions I made while I was running away from that dog. But it’s not too late to pick up the pieces.