You wouldn’t have a child who couldn’t swim. You were dead-set, damned sure of this. Until I left home I thought you simply chose states of being, this one of them—
You shaved your beard completely, finally, in Massachusetts.
You drove off a bridge in a storm and held your pet rabbit up until help arrived in Massachusetts.
You held the cage up, and when it flooded, the rabbit.
You taught me to touch the cold gem of Massachusetts in my mind to make sure I still had it, like a coin in my pocket.
My idea of you was so sparse and childish it turned out to be a good estimation.
Because he’s alone, a sailor’s always telling himself who he is.
I think back to this article more often than I care to admit, especially this part:
Perhaps you’ll be a dilettante: You’ll love what you think about and you’ll think hard about it, but you’ll be easily bored and won’t think about anything for long. You’ll read many things and (perhaps) write many, but you’ll read and write about disparate topics, and once you’ve read for a while about something, and perhaps written about it, you’ll move on to something else. Clever people—quick studies—are often like this. They have properly intellectual gifts, but they lack the patience for attention’s long, slow gaze, and so their intellectual life coruscates, sparking here and there like a firefly on the porch, but illuminating nothing for long. Some of the people you’ve read and delighted in have something of this about them. It’s partly true of Augustine and Newman, for example, and of Sontag.
I’d like to warn you against this tendency. It’s not that there’s anything deeply wrong with it. Suggestive and stimulating work can be done by dilettantes, and, as the label suggests, they tend to be true lovers of what they think about, even if they don’t think about it for long. Neither is there any sharp and bright line between the work of dilettantes and that of intellectuals properly speaking; the categories shade into one another, and it’s usually possible to find, even in the work of the most dilettantish, threads that make a single fabric. It’s not going to be easy to say when an intellectual becomes a dilettante or a dilettante an intellectual. There are, however, clear cases here, too, and the extent to which you embrace dilettantism is just the extent to which you won’t do serious intellectual work.
It’s a pretty Catholic take, sure, but it makes an argument for picking a field of study and sticking to it in a way I’ve found useful. I reword the last line to myself like so: “The extent to which you embrace [other stuff] is just the extent to which you won’t do [poetry].” I just went a month and a half without writing a single new poem and even though I got work done on other projects, including this blog, I wasn’t doing the work I’m committed to, and I did feel inattentive and distracted. I don’t take myself too seriously as a “poet” or “intellectual” but I return to this article periodically to remind myself what the habits of a thinking person are.
gruesome Nosferatu spreads its claw over the light, its spine curves that wave, misshapen jealous curled Saturday my synths, piteously, not yet messenger these our works, “now” being merciless being crushed as a matter of criticism into nonspecific talk of waves, the little irresponsible pedals
In a period of recompensing— making amends, as for damage or loss, or trying to do so, never having known how often or how thoroughly, or whether even to wash rice—there was an animal in the apartment with me, worn out from her vet visit that day.
My attempts to wear a coat of fog were slouchy. I slunk into a demonself and liked the fade. So busy in my room I did not know—I did not sense the slowing and evaporating.
Emily’s new loom is a quick-moving, inexhaustible machine.
You guys, I agreed to take the late-late shift tonight, meaning I start working on the thing I have to do when it comes in between 1-1:30am. I’ve been here since 5pm with no actual work to do, but that’s normal. What’s n o t normal is that I didn’t realize I was out of juul pods. Even crazier, I forgot my ID card today (of all days!) which means if I leave the office to go to the bodega I won’t be able to get back in!
There’s no one else here.
Supplies:
endless supply of clean water
coffee but not the drinking kind, the caffeine-is-a-drug kind
internet
Doritos
1 cigarette + lighter
Seasonal Associate and my Japanese textbook
M & Ms
phone (social media)
chapstick
driver’s license, ID cards, credit card, debit card, metro card, $23 cash
juul + juul charger + 2 almost empty pods
phone charger
toothbrush + toothpaste
unpopped popcorn and a summer roll
pens + legal pad (+ unlimited office supplies including paper, staples, binder clips, tape, pushpins, etc.)
So it looks like I’m smoking my last cigarette in the C**** N*** bathroom kinda soon. Gotta pace myself. I found an extra juul pod in the bottom of my bag so I’m not despairing yet.
OK, I’m being really dramatic, but I am imprisoned in this office. Sure I could leave, just walk out, but I’d almost definitely be fired.
To my left, out the window, the Empire State building is lit up in the following colors: red, pink, orange, and green, in honor of, I shit you not, some fucking pharmaceutical company. It’s #RareDiseaseDay. If I sit still long enough all the lights will go off.
I’m listening to Samantha, that off-brand Toro Y Moi album. This song has a clip from The Notebook in it, Ryan Gosling saying, “I’m not afraid to hurt your feelings. They have a two second rebound rate and you’re back doing the next pain in the ass thing.” I’m playing it full volume on my very decent computer speakers because again, I’m alone.
I’ve managed to pass four hours. I texted a few people. I remembered a song I used to like but couldn’t recall the title or the artist, so I killed forty minutes searching. I bullied someone on Facebook. I sent an embarrassing DM to a poet I like, an informal solicitation, but I fucked up the name of his book (even though I genuinely loved it). I posted on Instagram. I tried to read more of Seasonal Associate but it was just too on the nose. There are a number of other books here that I could consume but it’s hard for me to read to pass time, I have to feel like it’s something I’m doing of my own accord or I can’t enjoy it.
Where I work it’s clear that a functioning IT department is not really a priority. They already outsourced IT for the most problematic devices, the printers, and word on the street is that the belt is tightening. Already getting in touch with IT is a nightmare. If you need remote access to something, or a working mouse, or a generated password, you have to fill out a ticket and get someone above you to sign off on it, and if you’re lucky they’ll will send up a guy (and if the problem is really serious, two guys). For the most part, they won’t be able to help you. There’s no frustration like when a computer won’t do what you want, and to fix the problem you have to do exactly what the IT tech says. From my one high-school summer working in IT, I can say that a surprising number of folks don’t take well to that.
Which is all to say—Jason, I see you and I honestly have no idea how you do it. How the fuck did you find the license key for that ancient version of Adobe Acrobat? Where did you get that clean-looking extra keyboard? How do you maintain that perfectly good-natured demeanor, for Christ’s sakes even a smile, when most of your job is telling people that what they need is either impossible or going to take a long time? I genuinely admire the way you approach each new problem with such confidence, even if it’s obvious to everyone that there’s no solution, only tedious workarounds. It takes real grace and patience to do what you do, and even then people are going to grumble. We blame you for the company’s weird computer workings. None of it seems to get to you. Nothing but respect for that.
I knew from the first time the narrator said 2000 that the book was going to end on 9/11; you’re supposed to assume that. The thing about 9/11 is that it happened so suddenly, and so close to “home” for Otessa Moshfegh’s readership, the only way to write about it is to devote a lot of attention to the banal before-days without ever acknowledging their banality.
Thus, how a book about a six-month-long Ambien trip turned performance art project can turn out boring. The book didn’t do much for me emotionally or psychologically. It didn’t feel like it was supposed to. I didn’t care about the narrator’s parents (she doesn’t care about them). I didn’t care about New York. I definitely didn’t care about the narrator’s obsession with Whoopi Goldberg. I might have gotten a little invested in the bodega guys, the objects of the narrator’s apartment (i.e., the white fox coat), but I can’t say I’ll remember them tomorrow.
The only narrative suspense the novel has to offer is the portrait of Reva. You have a feeling she will be dead by the end, so much of the book is devoted to her despite the narrator’s pretty pathetic show of feeling for her. By the time she gets transferred to the Twin Towers you know for sure what’s going to happen.
I realize this sounds negative, but I don’t mean it that way. The book was a carefully oriented tonal piece. Feeling and not-feeling are both impossible. How do you write a novel in a world like that? The narrator has to sleep through most of it. Otherwise the contradiction would not hold; the world would tilt.
My sense is that in real life the world tilts towards feeling, the way the narrator watches the video of the 9/11 jumpers “to feel something, or because [she’s] bored.” And indeed, at the very end, Moshfegh reaches towards a pretty classic emotional/thematic conclusion: “she’s awake.” I might have liked a flatter ending. If 9/11 only really mattered because it gave all Americans a reason (an excuse?) to feel something, the narrator seems like the one person who would be immune. But she got the sleep she needed. She’ll emote with the rest of us.
Miss Forceful Wants You 