Journal Entry #4, 5/20/2020

In which I make my escape.

I’ve been decompressing the last few days. A bit of a chest cold, which makes me wary with worry, wondering will I wrangle with Streptococcus pneumoniae? Or just Beowulf-style alliteration? Certainly, there are Grendels about.

They’re a psychological problem, the Grendels are, even if I’ve artfully dodged pneumoniae (he said hopefully, making a sign to ward off the evil eye). There’s the never-ending tsunami (which only gathers strength, never dissipates) of insults and horror and corruption from Mr. Trump and his followers, resulting in a “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism” that strangles the next breath, and then the breath after that.

Grendel, the monster, was more merciful: he dispatched Hrothgar’s men quickly.

I’ve changed the typeface in my copy of Microsoft Word to Consolas, which was developed by the Dutch designer Luc(as) de Groot (who also designed the ubiquitous Calibri). I don’t think he had it in mind, but Consolas reminds me of console and consolation, something which is scarce and awkward to offer or receive while scrupulously maintaining no touch physical distancing. De Groot did, however, describe Consolas’ rounded design as having a “warm and soft character,” which is as close as it gets for capitalism.

“My branches weigh me down, frost cleans the air,
My sky is black with small birds bearing south …”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I’ve been drifting perpendicular to my newsfeed, up and away into fiction. Even John Milton, my usual evadere, seems a bit too panic inducing in this moment … Our mythical but psychologically true parents shamed and banished to the East of Eden, or powerful bishops with smelly socks, or Samson’s desperate pillar-crashing suicide-protest against the Philistines, or the 17th century Charles I regicide … None of it encourages one look forward to morning coffee in this cursed time.

So I’ve grabbed a sunburst of balloons and floated free of politics, if only for 10^-9 seconds per day, which is the daily accuracy of a synchronized atomic clock (a “clock device that uses a hyperfine transition frequency in the microwave, or electron transition frequency in the optical or ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum of atoms as a frequency standard for it’s timekeeping element,” which is, without doubt, every bit as wonderful as it sounds, but understanding hyperfine transition frequency in the microwave (good for cooking popcorn?) is, for me, on the far side of the Grand Canyon-like chasm within my memory of a long ago year-long college physics course, during which I wrestled with a corpuscular calculus far more often than I meditated on the Tao of physics. OM [528 megahertz of mind altering vibration]).

Where have I perpendicularly drifted?

To the works of Robin Sloan, a programmer. He’s the author of two novels, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (which I read in one sitting several years ago) and Sourdough (which I’m reading now; yes, it’s about bread — and obsession), both detective stories that are unlike any detective story you’ve read. He also wrote a novella, Annabel Scheme. Novellas are what you write when you are groaning under one of two constraints: (1) Your idea didn’t have the legs you thought it had, so it couldn’t traipse the novel distance; (2) You’re writing to a deadline and you’re dead. Sloan produces a quirky newsletter called The Society of the Double Dagger, which he convenes sporadically via email and hyperlinks, and he’s writing a narrative adventure game, The Perils of the Overworld, and he encourages you to look over his shoulder as he labors to actually finish writing the damn game. Oh, and he operates a California virgin olive oil-by-mail order business call Fat Gold.

Strictly on the QT, he’s hinted that he has another book in the oven (or wherever books are made). Top secret stuff, apparently.

Sloan is a regular well-rounded weird guy, but, as a caterpillar once said, I’m okay with that now. Look him up on the intertubes.

My second balloon drift is into a more substantial novel, The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald, a German writer (born in Bavaria in 1944) who lived in East Anglia in the U.K., only a few hours from where I once lived. He taught German at the University of East Anglia while writing four novels in German, which were translated by others into English. The Rings of Saturn was his third novel (preceded by Vertigo and The Immigrants, followed by Austerlitz).

Despite its name, The Rings of Saturn is not a science book, nor is it science fiction. It has a deceptive 19th century Romantic feel: a brooding man takes a melancholy walk and ruminates on things. Many, many things. Yes. Humpf. Prepare to embark on a journey of 20th century stream of consciousness. One reviewer wrote that Sebald’s books are a “curious and wide-ranging mixture of fact (or apparent fact), recollection and fiction, often punctuated by indistinct black-and-white photographs set in evocative counterpoint to the narrative rather than illustrating it directly.” That is a succinct description of The Rings of Saturn. There is humor, too, but you must be preternaturnally (from the Latin praeter naturam, “beyond nature,” which medieval scholars wrote as praeternaturalis) alert to spot it. Actually, you don’t, but it doesn’t hurt to bring along a super-sized amygdala, hippocampus, cerebellum, and prefrontal cortex full of short- and (comparatively) long-term memory for detail.

And there is detail. And more detail. There are long skeins of connections between details. There are long skeins of connections between the long skeins of connections. Many deaths in the first few chapters, most natural but nonetheless melancholic and perplexing. Memory and the loss of memory. French literature and sand in Monsieur Flaubert’s brain (the French think of everything). A 17th century physician’s missing skull. An approach to knowledge that is described by a complex geometric shape, which I find appealing. Personal and civilizational decay. A mansion conspicuously constructed to consume the wealth of an upstart Englishman, now subsiding into genteel decrepitude. World War II and carpet bombing and firestorms. The Garden of Cyrus. Or, The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially Naturally, Mystically Considered (1658). Silkworms and Nazi death camps.

A long walk through the Suffolk countryside.

A very long walk.

I’ll read Sebold’s other novels, but, sadly, it’s four novels and a full stop. He died in an automobile accident in 2001. Actually, it’s more of a California stop than a complete stop, because his books aren’t read and forget, they’re read and ponder and reread. And he wrote three volumes of poetry, of which I am innocent. He also published essay collections, so I’ll meander through those as well, because he’s a good writer and I like essays, so a good writer of essays is always welcome in my house.

Like Montaigne, I consider a good book to be an honored guest. W.G. Sebold’s books will be honored guests.

You must commit yourself when you read Sebold, like a devout monk commits to copying and painstakingly illuminating a manuscript of intricate theological arguments: good and evil hang in the balance, and it’s not safe to assume God will overcome Satan. As was written of my temporarily benched Milton, while reading Sebold you will embark on a “curious and perpetual search for knowledge.”

His novel Austerliz, which I have not yet read, reputedly contains a sentence that spans nine pages.

Oh, and not incidentally, he was once considered by literary critics to be one of the world’s greatest living writers. As in Noble Prize worthy. He’s not anymore, an unsurprising if unfortunate consequence of no longer being counted among the living. But in his novels, or at least in The Rings of Saturn, his being is alive.

I’ll drift with my balloons a while longer … Studiously avoiding, of course, 99 Luftballons. Unless Mr. Trump insists.