i always wanted you to admire my fasting

january, jonesing

Greenpoint waterfront

The current show at the Drawing Center is overstuffed and incoherent, featuring too many things that are not drawings, including several of those awful Kaws mice with the X-ed out eyes. On the other hand, admission is free, it’s next to impossible to find a bathroom in Tribeca, and there are some gems if you bother to look for them, including work by Hilma af Klint, R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Henry Darger:

Darger, obviously

It’s been a weird month. I spent Christmas week with family in Altadena, walked around Eaton Canyon to get some fresh air. My sister-in-law’s house is okay, but almost every other place we went that week is gone now. The building at Sewanee where I work when I’m down there took some damage in an arctic blast, radically accelerating infrastructural problems that have been accruing for years. Everyone had to clear out and now we’re trying to determine how much work needs to be done and when and if it’s ok to be back in there in the meantime. I sent a lot of emails about floorboards last week. Floorboards and pipes. Probably will this week, too.

Speaking of Sewanee, I had the privilege of being in conversation with my dear friend and colleague Adam Ross, editor of The Sewanee Review, for the magazine’s podcast. We discuss his excellent novel, Playworld, which is out this month from Knopf and has been taking the literary world by storm.

I was interviewed for The Creative Independent by my friend Shy Watson. We talked about writing practice, research methods, courting chaos, child actors, and teaching. This was exciting for me not only because the publicity for Reboot is pretty much all died down at this point, but because I’ve been a regular reader of TCI for a long time. One cool thing about their setup is readers can highlight passages and the most-highlighted stuff gets shown on the site:

A few days after New Year’s I lit out for the east coast to spend a week in Manchester, NH teaching at the Mountainview low-res, where I co-ran a nonfiction workshop with Adrienne Raphel and gave a craft talk on revision, in which I reiterated several of the points made in this interview, including those quoted above, plus some stuff about Bob Dylan. I’ve been teaching at Mountainview since 2017, am now among the longest-serving member of its core faculty. All jobs have their pluses and minuses; one big plus with this job is reuniting with my colleagues for this annual weird week in our frantic cocoon. We spend all day in a university building that looks likes an unused set from Severance and then we spend half the night sipping wine (or tea! we’re all getting older) in a back corner of the lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn. The little gym had a Peloton that I managed to ride every day even though the half-busted seat kept slipping and I’d finish each ride three inches lower than I started. They had an outdoor hot tub that we went in on the night it hit zero degrees. The week is a supersaturation of communal living and shop talk and life updates and crisis management and just talking—talking about whatever, talking forever. If we didn’t have to get up the next morning and do the job they hired us for, most of us would stay up all night talking every night. In keeping with Mountainview tradition, I read new work at the faculty reading, a story just short enough that I was able to read it in its entirety, which is my favorite way to give a reading: no set-up, no jump cuts, nothing that “you need to know.” Just start at the start and end at the end.

I rarely eat sweets. It might sound stupid to say it this way but sugar bores me. I’ll eat a courtesy bite of dessert if we’re out to dinner, and maybe twice a year I want an ice cream cone, but mostly it feels like something that has nothing to do with me, like a Spanish-language guidebook to the architecture of Rome. But on this trip to NYC I was staying on the same block as the Hungarian Pastry Shop, which is one of my favorite places in the world and my brain’s stupid rules don’t apply there so I had cookies for breakfast every day. I love their poppyseed hamantaschen, the linzer torts with raspberry goo, those pink or green sandwich leaf cookies with the chocolate in the middle that are exactly like the ones I used to get from the Publix bakery when I was a kid (if you asked nicely you could have one for free) and the spinach pie, one of two savory items on their menu, the other being a cheddar biscuit that I’ve never gotten around to trying. I love that whatever else changes in the city, the war for the soul of humanity is still being waged on the walls of their windowless bathroom.

These are my favorite cookies to get at the Hungarian; I consider this a perfect complete meal:

I was good about boozing on this trip, easier than usual because nearly everyone was attempting some version of Dry January. Damp January it seemed like to me (you know who you are) but whatever. I did get goofy one night because I met my agent for a drink at a wine bar that turned out to be three drinks thanks to a very amiable bartender who insisted that we finish the bottle we’d been ordering from by the glass, then I went downtown to meet my friend Alec who was drinking negronis so I got onboard with him and was going to order dinner but it was 20 bucks for a smashburger and we’d already split a popcorn chicken appetizer thing so I thought I’d skate through, but by the time I got back to 110th street I knew it had to be Koronet pizza, which isn’t the best but is the biggest, and more than good enough for midnight on what I think was Tuesday:

Hard to say what this was but I had it for breakfast on Wednesday at a coffee shop near where we used to live on Smith Street. That’s Isaac in the background.

Dim sum lunch with Tracy at Nom Wah Tea Parlor on Doyers Street on Thursday. Everything we ordered was great but the soup dumplings and salt-and-pepper shrimp were truly exceptional. I love this place.

Friday I got this everything bagel with chicken salad, tomato and red onion at a random place I picked because I needed to meet Adrienne somewhere near where we were going to meet our other friends. A woman in line behind me changed her order from whatever it had been to this after seeing mine. We were both so right.

I’d gone to MoMA right when it opened because they’re showing Christian Marclay’s The Clock right now and I’d never seen it. I caught around two hours before I had to leave to go get this bagel and then meet my friends for our planned visit to the Kafka exhibit at the Morgan Library. Which I had chosen as my desired New York Group Art Activity and I’m sorry to say it was underwhelming and expensive so I felt bad about having urged us all to go there, especially since mostly we just wanted to see each other and hang out and talk. So we left the Morgan and posted up at an Irish bar in the east 30s where we spent the next three (four?) hours bullshitting and nursing Guinesses as slowly as humanly possible just to hold our table (not that there was any competition) until it was time to find a Korean BBQ place to have dinner (good job, Adalena).

I loved The Clock. If I hadn’t had to go meet the gang I would have stayed all day. If I ever get the chance to do the full 24 hours I’ll take it in a heartbeat. It felt ecstatic, transcendent, to be simultaneously instantiated in time and released from time. The perpetual attention to the passing minutes paradoxically combined with the non-narrative propulsion of the clips, the way that little eddies of meaning would gather and release, and the whole history of cinema (more or less) revealing itself to you out of order and free of annotation. So many flashes of recognition but also the sense that it doesn’t matter whether you can or can’t identify any given actor/scene/film, because either way it’s going to be gone in a moment and there’s going to be something else to recognize or not. The frame of reference you bring is rewarded for depth and breadth, but said frame’s shallowness or narrowness goes unpenalized. You do not need to recognize anything. Maybe it would be better if you didn’t.

A collage that is a kaleidoscope that is also a wave. (And RIP David Lynch btw.)

I didn’t look at my phone once while watching The Clock. A few times it occurred to me to check the time to make sure I wouldn’t be late to meet my friends, then I would remember that I didn’t need to check the time, I already knew the time, because the subject of the film I was watching was what time it is at this very moment. It was 10:48 when I got into the theater, 11:24 when I got a seat, and 12:39 when I left. I had meant to leave at 12:30 but found it difficult to tear myself away. I was worried about missing the next turn of the next minute, yearning for whatever one o’clock would bring, knowing I would not be there to see it. Leaving felt like dying—the clock goes on without you—and I wanted to cry as I rose to my feet and started for the exit, knowing that even before I reached the door my seat would be filled by someone who’d been standing for a long time waiting for a seat to open, just as I had done when I’d first arrived, and that that was like dying too. Then I was out in the bright main hall of the museum and even though I was running late I popped upstairs to the Rothko room. I didn’t have time to sit with the work, but I couldn’t be that close and not at least share its air for a minute. There was some Matisse thing happening too, I kind of saw it, but I had to hurry to get south and east to eat my beautiful chicken salad bagel and then inflict that silly Kafka thing on everyone. The Clock is showing at MoMA until February 17th. You should go if you can.

This marked-up page proof from a Philip Roth essay was my favorite thing at the Kafka exhibit, save for the woman who overheard me talking about the story “A Country Doctor” and interjected to ask me to explain to her what I like about it and how it works. In the words of the late great Denis Johnson, I’ll never forget you…you were my mother.

I’ve been working on a new project that has driven me even deeper than usual into some of my longest-standing musical obsessions, which, paradoxically, has made me want to spend more of what I guess I’ll call my leisure time listening to things that are less familiar. In which I have less of a stake. I’m not sick of what I love—not even close, it’s the not-being-sick that is the sickness—but I’m restless. I asked my friend Brittany for help. She sent me this playlist which I’m still getting to know and am liking a lot so far. It opens doors I wouldn’t have known to wonder about walking through. She also encouraged me in my ongoing reacquaintance with Herbie Hancock. Headhunters rules of course, but what about 1980’s Mr. Hands, and the live album with Chick Corea that I found at the record store for eight bucks, and 1983’s Future Shock, a track from which makes appears on this playlist that I put together for January.

The Caretaker is a Mark Fisher favorite. I used to not get it but now I get it. RIP Garth Hudson. Unbelievable that none of them are left. The Fall, why not. Johnnie & Jack, I refer you to Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song. Pauline Oliveros was mentioned by Allegra Krieger in some promo thing she made where you choose three songs, though she chose “Horse Sings from Cloud”, a 20-minute song from a 2-track album called Accordion & Voice. It’s gorgeous. I had it on here for a while but worried people might get bored with it and bail on the whole playlist. But you should give it a listen. I saw Krieger when she came through in December; she’s back in February with Christian Lee Hutson and I’m gonna go see her again.

Alex Chilton, rarely a bad idea. Arooj Aftab I’d not heard of until my friend John took me to see her at the Aladdin last week. It was a cool show, a lot of her songs are in Urdu but not this one. Her 2023 record, Love in Exile, with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, is great. I’m seeing Quasi on Wednesday in the middle of the afternoon as part of a fundraiser for a local dog shelter I’ve gotten obsessed with. Brad Mehldau was playing while I was in NYC but I didn’t get to go. Little Walter, I refer you to Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song. I don’t know why I keep thinking about Little Feat lately but I saw Phish play this song at MSG 12/30/10 though that’s not why I thought of it/them lately. Geoff & Maria Muldaur was a nice find. I fucking love this Herbie Hancock song. More Caretaker and more Band to close. Was gonna go with “The Weight” but I love how front and center the accordion is here. That’s Garth. This is Hilma af Klint: