Sunny skies and the temperature is sixty degrees because winter is just a blip now, the bulk of it consigned to childhood memory. I’m dragging out the last pages of The North Water, Ian McGuire’s novel about a catastrophic Arctic whaling expedition. I’m reading slowly, not because it’s a slog but because I do not want it to end. I want winter to last a little longer.
McGuire is a hell of a writer. A lean 250 pages, this story rips along in a dignified yet ferocious present tense that details “fetid blasts of butchery” while smudging the lines between man and beast. McGuire has created an exquisite villain in the form of Henry Drax, a harpooner whose intuitive violence begins to make existential sense. “You can’t kill us all,” the captain tells him, to which he replies, “I ‘spect I can kill enough of you though.” And later: “I do as I must. Int a great deal of cogitation involved.”
But the location is the primary draw, with its snow-choked fjords, ice like cracked marble, and temperatures so cold your teeth explode. Polar horror is one of my favorite genres: the temporal dislocation of permanent night, the cosmic vertigo of being at the very top—or bottom—of the world, and claustrophobic outposts populated by characters with sketchy pasts who are running from their sins or searching for salvation. Then comes the inevitable moment when they must depend upon the heat of other bodies to survive, and once they leave the distressed ship or bunker, there’s a lot of room to go crazy.
And snow. All that snow covering god only knows.
The North Water joins Dan Simmons’s The Terror among my favorite polar horror stories. And there’s a fine television version of The North Water with Colin Farrell as evil incarnate. Viewing-wise, there’s also the bonkers Fortitude, the slow burn of Trapped, and the first seasons of The Terror and The Head. A verdict is still pending re: True Detective: Night Country.
Any recommendations for other polar horror tales would be much appreciated, especially now that a snowy winter feels more and more like a strange memory.
Boston. Eleven years sober and another year older. Spent ten hours wandering the galleries of the Museum of Fine Art with C., which is my favorite thing to do on this planet.
I fell in love with John Singer Sargent for the first time, I savored the tranquil light in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Woman in an Interior, and I admired the paintings of François Boucher, who disliked nature because it was “too green and badly lit.” As for natural lighting, I’ve always appreciated the phrase ‘civil twilight,’ which describes the moment the sun sinks 6° below the horizon and perhaps the moment we’re living through today.
When I came across an artist whose placard mentioned “his untimely death at the age of 35,” I resisted a mad urge to look up the cause. Why do I crave this detail? Does it come from a decent place of human curiosity, or is it rank rubbernecking?
I love Catholic art. If I take a mental step back, it looks like Europe was absolutely out of its mind: little winged people flying around the heads of men who beat their chests and stare at the sky, zombies awakening after being nailed to posts, and so many elaborate portraits of breastfeeding. Or consider Francesco del Cairo’s portrait of Herodias with Saint John the Baptist’s decapitated head, “swooning in ecstasy as she mutilates the tongue that spoke against her.”
In the African wing, I was struck by a Kongo nkisi nkonde, a power figure that served as a healer of conflicts, its body studded with nails, each signifying a problem or a vow. “The figure’s open mouth suggests the uttering of judgment, and the abdomen and eyes contain mirrors to deflect danger.” I’m determined to work this detail into the new story I’m writing.
I’m on an airplane to Boston to look at some art. I’m still a terrible flyer. The first thirty minutes of every flight are spent in the thrall of a big-budget panic attack, my body pulling out all the stops. Pink-purple dots crowd my vision. My arms go numb and useless. My heart rate is jacked to an industrial techno bpm. This lasts from the moment the door closes and I realize I’m trapped until the plane has spent fifteen minutes at cruising altitude without falling out of the sky. When I look out the window, it’s a torment. I shouldn’t be up this high. But eventually, the screaming sense of I want to get down I want to get down subsides, and I accept my new reality. My vision clears. The tingles fade. My heart drags back to normal, and the scenery becomes a Burkean sublime: beauty twinned with reverent awe, a scale I cannot comprehend—the pink tops of clouds, the drift of tiny civilizations below.
I loathe these brutal nerves of mine. It’s like some alien organism has installed itself in my amygdala, utterly detached from truth or reason. Why does the brain torture itself? Perhaps these bouts of panic are a Jungian arrow pointing to an unsettled problem. Maybe my aura needs alignment. But my hunch is that it’s genetic and hardwired. My mother suffered terribly from agoraphobia. Lately I’ve been thinking about how she avoided the highway, even as a passenger, because this is happening to me too. It started last year in Vegas, and now I do not drive on the highway, although I still happily tear down surface streets and county roads, which makes no objective sense.
Quietly losing my mind in a window seat at 35,000 feet is fine. I can gut it out, even get to know it. But I should not explore my panic while seeing spots at 85 miles per hour between a semi-truck and some jackass flashing their high beams. To panic while driving on the interstate, of all things! I wrote a book about driving. I built a small personality around it. Looks like I’m finally going to have an adventure with therapy because this cannot stand. Now the call is coming from inside the house.
Columbus is the eighth cloudiest city in the country, and after spending a year in a very bright desert, I’m savoring the gloom. I’m still turning up at the library to write fiction every morning, and I’ve been pondering why I’m good at doing a particular task every day or not at all. If I aim for three or four times per week, I’ll push it around until it dissolves.
I’m starting a new book while I wait for my first novel about a loud god to cool off and collect feedback from a gracious reader. Then I’ll spend the spring and summer revising it a final time before I harass agents in the fall.
This new novel started while dredging up the half-finished short stories I’d squirreled away in various clouds and drives. The ones I expected to be worth finishing were ponderous and concerned with “themes.” Then I found a ludicrous three-page thing I wrote fifteen years ago about a cage fight at a nursing home. It was terrible. But a line from it kept nagging me: They returned to the old ways and shaved their heads, grew their fingernails long, and slicked themselves down with baby oil. I wanted to know the conditions that could bring such a world into being. Perhaps a reader would too.
So here I am, five thousand words into something I can’t distinguish from worthwhile or ridiculous, but I’m having big fun writing again. This is important because I’m certainly not doing it for money.
Starting a New Big Thing has taken the weight off the Old Big Thing and made writing feel much less precious and fraught. How many times have I encountered this advice in writing how-tos? Put your draft in a drawer for a few months, they say, then start something new. But I have a knack for taking the longest, most taxing route to common knowledge before finally climbing out of the muck and saying ah, right, there’s wisdom in that.
Woke at 8:30 and showered and filled a mug with coffee and drove straight to the library. Only when I sat at a desk did I take a sip, look at my phone, open a can of Helwit Salmiak, and satisfy the little beast inside me that craves caffeine, internet, and nicotine. This is progress.
(I’ve been importing my nicotine from Sweden and the shipping costs are killing me but I enjoy having an international vice.)
Flipped through a massive book of Gary Winogrand photos and selected characters for a new story: a gnarled old man who looks like he was muscle for a union in some midwestern town, another with a spooked expression like he’s spent too much time thinking about God.
Went for an ugly run in the rain, and it was gloriously dramatic in the mud and the grey. I’m picking up my mileage now that the weather is no longer fuck-you degrees.
Came home to the news that one of my favorite music producers was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room, along with two other artists whose work I’ve admired. For fifteen years, Silent Servant has been a steady part of my life’s soundtrack, a name always in my playlists via landmark imprints like Sandwell District and Hospital Productions and Jealous God, and an early producer of one of my all-time favorite projects, Camella Lobo’s Tropic of Cancer. Now there will be no more. Goddamned fentanyl. It has claimed so many, and the chemicals are only getting weirder and more relentless.
Early in my sobriety, a loud old man in a church basement said this would be a life of stepping over dead bodies. I thought he was being melodramatic, but his words come to mind more often with each passing year. I loathe the moments when the suffering of others reminds me to be grateful. This should not be necessary. But tonight, I’m reminded yet again that my sobriety is like grace and cannot be taken for granted.
The winter has turned warm again. Rain and fog and highs inching into the fifties. I write about the weather because it is the only thing that feels true these days. This country is becoming a hallucination, everyone committed to the reality they prefer.
Time to get serious about writing again. Two hours at the library every morning except Sundays. A dead simple schedule, something I can remember even though I’m not a morning person—but I can no longer wait for the day to get out of the way. There will always be demands and obligations, but they do not need me before eleven o’clock.
Last week, I fell hard for IBM Plex, an open-source type system that is dignified yet future-facing, which is nice because the current future does not feel dignified. I want the things I design to feel the same: crisp, cool, and sane. It’s a never-ending search for the line between clarity and personality, a quest that might apply to dealing with the self as well.
Last night, I sat in a half-lit conference room with eight very different men, and we discussed God, forgiveness, and making amends to those we’ve lost. One man scoffed at the idea. “Let the dead bury the dead.” Another spoke of time as a kind of god, that we live with all that came before and yet to be born, which meant our dead were with us now. And why not believe this? Why not believe my dead are waiting for me to speak to them?
But I do not. Instead I drove around Ohio listening to Sisters of Mercy.
2023 got away from me, but I’m not surprised. Time itself has gone wobbly. We’re deep into the 21st century, yet I still find myself waiting for the future to begin. Music-wise, I’ve always enjoyed cobbling together a yearly list of my favorite new albums to mark the passage of time and cement some memories. Perhaps it’s a side effect of age, but each new release these days reminds me of something I’ve heard before. Whether this is a curse or blessing, I’m not sure, but I’d like to listen to a song that immediately gives me a splitting headache or, better yet, leaves me covering my ears while screaming that’s not music.
I tortured my parents with Plastikman and Boogie Down Productions. They assaulted their folks with Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds, and my grandparents probably did the same with The Glen Miller Orchestra and The Andrews Sisters. Youth should frighten middle age. This is the sign of a healthy culture.
My sense of losing touch is compounded by today’s condition of all-at-once, in which images and sounds hit our devices stripped of context and location and time, leading to a strange dual sensation of liberation and stasis. So this year, release dates be damned. Here’s the music I played most often or rediscovered or that delivered an unexpected thrill while motoring through the desert.
Ambient drone of the highest order. Each track ranges between fifteen and forty minutes, giving it plenty of room to slowly unfurl from the faint whir of an appliance into a monumental pulse that feels absolutely life-giving.
Everything you need from a pop song: streetlights washing across the hood, a cigarette nodding on the lip, a memory of being cooler than you ever were, and a hook that will worm its way into your dreams because even though you don’t speak the language, you get the drift.
Music for a rain-soaked thriller in a fallen city: steam rises through the grates while trunk-rattling drums echo across windows with the shades drawn.
Kevin Richard Martin – Above the Clouds
Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook – Sleeps With the Fishes
Midnight music by turns haunted and reassuring, here is the 1980s ancestor that not only birthed Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s turn of the century gloom but the emotional bombast of early M83. And “Searching” is a stone brooding classic.
Dusted off my Speicher and Kresiel records and rediscovered this unhinged ode to a footballer. Twenty-five years later, it’s still the best thing for running as fast as I can manage, and it still gets stuck in my head for weeks: Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Te. Te. Te.
A magnificent piece of songcraft, here is the plush sound of AM gold alchemized with some guitar shred. On average, I played this song every other day in 2023, each time stunned by the sound of a band doing everything they know how to do. It’s like mainlining the 1970s in five minutes flat.
Woozy Americana that sounds like a half-remembered, rose-tinted fantasy, even if the song is about the murder of the Clutter family. “Come, Las Vegas sunset…”
Late 1980s and early 1990s sessions from the muscle behind the indispensable Sandwell District and Downwards imprints. A concoction of new wave and no wave, punk and post-punk, industrial and pre-industrial, and every other genre that produces visions edging toward the sacred.
Sandra Plays Electronics – It Slipped Her Mind
Earth – “Coda Maestoso In F(Flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)”
Legacy of Dissolution (Southern Lord, 2005) | Boomkat
High-grade low-end head-nodding sludge. An essential tool for challenging times.
Earth – Coda Maestoso In F(Flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)
A masterpiece and a monument, a cold hard tower of sound yet malleable like a Rorschach test depending on my mood. Twenty-five years later, this still sounds like the future.
The Joshua tree was named by Mormons in the 1850s, who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land. I wonder what it would feel like to see prophets and omens in the landscape. “God is not interested in our theology but only in our silence,” writes Cormac McCarthy in The Passenger, which restates Psalm 46:10 from a human point of view: “Be still and know that I am God.”
Stillness has been in short supply these days, and I’m trying to puzzle out the relationship between peace and growth. Does growth require pain? Or at least some degree of tension? I have yet to hear someone say their life was bursting with love and tranquility and they couldn’t count all the money in the bank and that’s when they decided to get spiritualized.
Virga is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground. It hangs across the desert like a torn curtain. When rain does fall, the unique scent of a desert storm comes from the oil released by the creosote bush, and this odor has a scientific name, petrichor, derived from pétros, the Greek word for stone, and ichor, the mythic golden blood of the gods. In Mexico, the creosote bush is called gobernadora or “the governess” because its root system crowds out nearby plants. This is why they appear so evenly spaced apart. There’s a creosote known as “King Clone” in the Mojave Desert that is 11,700 years old. The Mojave is a rain shadow desert because it is surrounded by mountains that absorb the damp winds from the Pacific and dry the air on the leeward slopes.
A few minutes after midnight in the Mojave desert, a preacher appears on a dead radio channel: “The devil’s job is to deceive you. The devil’s job is to make you think that God can’t do nothin’ for you, that God don’t care about you.”
This preacher is the centerpiece of Vegas Dust, a 77-minute sequence of grainy loops and phantom Americana built for a late-night drive. Neon gives way to starlight. Voices worry about their souls on the AM dial. A caller from Twentynine Palms says the universe might not even exist, that maybe the sun is hanging from a tree somewhere. But you can never see further than your headlights.
Vegas Dust is now available on Bandcamp (and for you bargain-hunters: three of the tracks are twenty minutes long. Because with Atlas Minor, your dollar goes further.) And Spotify.
Today the air temperature in Vegas reached 100 degrees for the first time this year. Meanwhile, 28 miles away, C. and I found a 68-degree breeze and a few patches of snow at 8,600 feet in the Spring Mountains.
But I did not enjoy the mountaintop. Each year I feel a little more vertiginous. A little more overwhelmed by the belly-flop sensation of tumbling from a great height. Perhaps this is another fun side-effect of becoming more familiar with mortality. Or maybe I’m just a ground-dwelling creature who prefers the pavement and neon and dunes.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve dog-eared and highlighted so many pages in a novel. The New House by David Leo Rice has become an all-time favorite—an eerie, challenging, and delirious book that has burrowed into my thoughts like a seminal dream. It reads like the murk of limbic memory. And in parts, it reads like prophecy.
When a child wonders whether he is at the Trader Joe’s or a Trader Joe’s, it becomes “a question deep enough to knock on the locked doors of the sacred.” From here, the doors keep opening, one after the next, until they’re swinging like a mad cartoon, corkscrewing down into the muck of ambiguity, where things are one way yet possibly also the other way, and these endless forks generate a feedback loop of the paralyzing and the possible that feels like invention itself.
This is a fable about the headfuck of creation, and I want to press it into the hands of every artist, writer, and seeker I know.
Art-making intertwines with myth-making as we follow “an artist whose singularity will come close to justifying the entire American experiment.” He meets an enigmatic old woman who says, “When you show people images they’ve never seen before, something dead inside them comes back to life.” And this book teems with life as Rice conjures a world of shapeshifting bullies, talking drops of blood, and two villains known only as “the couple from another town”—all moving through a night “so deep it serves as a sort of anesthesia.” Likewise, Rice’s prose generates a hypnotic effect that lowers the defenses until moments of terror arrive with little more than a single phrase, like the mad butcher whose voice “is like that of a pig who’s been trained by some lonely pervert farmer to speak.”
Ancient mysticism collides with freaky Americana in a glorious mess through which Rice carves a precision-grade line between the liberating and the horrifying—two conditions that describe any creative endeavor, including faith. There’s a moment when the hero fumbles his way to a definition of art as “the brute dragging of heavy objects from the world in which they already exist into the world in which strangers, ignorant of their origins, can admire them in comfort.” Because when it comes down to it, as one character observes, most of us “want to touch the weird without fearing that the weird will touch them back.”
