Hello all. I haven’t really found a use for this blog, but then, that is in keeping with the name I picked for it. So, I thought I might use it as a bit of a scrapbook, sharing published pieces, recent reads, albums I liked, art I’ve gone to see, etc etc. I might even share a bit of the novel I’ve been writing while To the Madhouse is out to agents. See the bottom of this post for more.
Links
First, my publications:
I ended last year with a long piece on the Liberties blog about Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, but more so I used it to explore what going online seems to be doing to us all. They even let me talk about Simon Leys!
Just today they published another long essay, this time on the theme of slop as both technological excretion and ideology. Yes, I do call Elon Musk a neo-nazi, why do you ask?
I started 2025 with a review in the Atlantic of Lily Tuck’s intriguing but underwhelming The Rest is Memory.
And soon after another in New York Magazine on the (excellent) latest from Han Kang.
Then, yes, Commonweal let me do a semiotics on the Brutalist.
Listens
ML Buch - Suntub
Ex-Vöid - In Love Again
The Weather Station - Humanhood
Mount Eerie - Night Palace
22* Halo - Lily of the Valley
Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat
Advance Base - Horrible Occurrences
Porridge Radio - Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for You
Etc.
In the past months, I went to see the Neue Galerie’s Egon Schiele exhibition twice, once alone and once with my girlfriend. Schiele is many things, among them that he was a deeply multitudinous person, and his art reflects this. He could do seemingly anything, and to see a bunch of his paintings and illustrations collected in one room is to witness a virtuosity which was forever seeking and discovering worthy subjects. His pencil portraits capture an entire personality in a few quick lines, and his landscapes employ all manner of conflicting and diverse textures, materials, and points of view, generating a vast and contradictory whole on a single flattened surface.
Nearly a decade ago now, I found myself wandering the halls of the Leopold while waiting for a train to take me to Bratislava. This was the second time in three years I had been in Vienna, and I planned to just whirl through this city I thought I knew. Yet I could have lived a whole month in the city and done nothing but look at the Schieles collected in this one museum, a fact I only realized as it came time to leave. He died at 28, already a master, and his loss is ours: who knows what we might have seen, had he been there to show us.
A snippet.
Last fall I started work on a new novel, tentatively titled The Searchers. Here’s a little bit of the second chapter:
He was a thin man of maybe twenty-six, with a weak chin and a loud voice, and he was not happy to find me climbing into his car. The three French-speakers had come down from Bosnia together, and were not interested in translating their rapport. They answered me awkwardly, hesitating over their simple childish sentences, and never asking anything in return. By the time the car was climbing up from the bay, they had disappeared into their language, and did not return.
We switchbacked into a dry white landscape of scrubgrass and sunfaded stone, stopping to look out over the bay, to get a drink, and, at last, to take in the mausoleum. But none of us knew the man as poet or politician; we took our pictures in the gold-roofed room, and we left. At one point we passed through a tunnel, and the sound of the traffic sang back off the walls with its own curious harmony. They day passed, the light dimmed, the French girl fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.
This is how I spent my twenty-fourth birthday. No one noticed; no one knew. When I connected my phone to the wifi, only a few messages—my mother, my ex—came through. Yet I could not imagine having spent it alone. So I asked the group to meet me at a cheap restaurant nearby for a night on the town, and left to take a shower. I must have sat there for two hours, for three, downing a bottle and a half of the local wine. They did not come, not even the German, but then I had not really expected them to.
By the time I rose on rubber legs, squelching the plastic chair beneath me, it was late and the plazas had emptied out, leaving only the dregs: stray cats, blind drunks, dreadlocked buskers strumming beat-up acoustic guitars. I couldn’t bear to wedge my way into one of the backpacker bars, to try and find some pitiful point of contact with people who would not remember me after an hour, and I would not waste my time in a bed where I could hardly sleep for the closeness of the air, the bile in my mouth, the soft sound of teenagers fucking across the room—could not bear being alone with others, in any sense.
A man was playing his accordion on the cathedral steps, a cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth. There must have been something wrong with the instrument, as it quickly began to gasp and stutter, struggling mightily to keep up with the man’s fluid fingerwork, his music cutting off mid-melody and then picking up again a few notes or a bar later with only the labored wheezing breath of the bellows to fill the space. Yet this did not deter him. If anything, the more his instrument failed the faster the musician began to play, the image of a great spirit at war with its failing container, until silence crowded out the music, and a harsh voice shouted from a shuttered window, and the man packed his accordion away and nestled up against the doorframe to drink. I tossed a euro into his cap, and he lit me a cigarette.
How stirring—how pathetic—how disappointing and sad. I was alone in this old stone city, bribing kindness from a bum, and so I smoked and tried my best to look away from the one kind man I had met all day. From where I stood I could just make out a few lights glimmering high up on the mountain, and I wavered there on my drunken feet trying to make out what they could be. The musician twisted his body around to find what had so compelled me. “The fortress,” he said, and settled back down. “You have been?”
I shook my head. I’d only just gotten here.
“Oh, you must, you must,” he declared, punctuating each phrase with a thrust of his cigarette. “Go now. No crowds.” He waved me towards a nearby sidestreet, where a narrow arrangement of footworn steps rose up between the buildings.
Til next time.