It didn’t then even cross my mind that most if not all people are absolutely winging it, in conversational banter, in romantic scenarios, political debate, moment-to-moment living — just riffing, repeating something they’ve heard, aping behavior they’ve seen, mimicking thoughts they’ve recently overheard, which are themselves similarly only recently received. A series of rippling impressions and manifestations and movements from people who, just like me, have no fucking clue what is going on.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me because of the way we talk about identity and belief and selfhood and personality as if it is so clearly defined. So static and complete, as if those subjects are not constantly in a kind of quantum flicker, vibrating all over the shop, and not ever really existing anywhere at all ever. And maybe this is a singularly English language conundrum, the use of simple present tense is-ness, when identity-ing and belief-ing and and personality-ing are perhaps aa bit more present continuous activities? If not outright Schrödinger’s cat-like qualities that only appear where we are describing them because we are describing them in that place.

The substance of which at least I must have inferred if not understood totally consciously when I was a kid: that language creates worlds. That articulating an idea is to bring it into existence, or at least into the dimension we can reach with consciousness, though perhaps only summoned from some other, less-form-specific goopy plane of forms beyond. That language can capture these soupy trawlers of the depths (of reality and consciousness, perhaps), and in hauling them close to the surface of our recognition make them into a shape we can use ourselves, to make tools of, to pass along to others.

And even then — this, I guess, was when I started to really fall hard for books and movies, maybe in early adolescence? say between ten and thirteen? — I think I understood, even if I could never myself have described this notion, that language, and the process of storytelling, was not only bringing things up from the depths of feeling, giving them name so that we might better recognize them and perhaps understand them, but that it could also spin from whole cloth, could, weaving its way into the cerebral sphere, project, constructing castles of imagination — could make recognizable and, again, communicable, the wild, weird, wonderful, or terrifying fantasies of our dreaming minds.

Which is a lot to put on language, granted, to make of it a bridge between experience and reality, with identity, with other people, though I still know of no other ways to reach them. Which can at times be overwhelming, and can cause me to stay back, to retreat, to pull up that bridge and escape into an un-described other of my own. Because what would have blown my mind when I was younger, and what still unmoors me today, stupid kid that I am still, is that so many are using language, and creating fantasies, in such spectacularly bad faith, for the same reason one uses a toxin, with the intent to disable, to manipulate, to maim. Projecting as in projectile, harmfully, hurtfully.

And I think I spent a little too much time this week reading, listening to, and watching all of the demented, bad faith bull shit, and I now feel a bit sick. Poisoned with the rage and feelings of futility that are precisely the toxic states intended by the poisoners, by the mediums they/we use to communicate. Feel the doom and terror and frenzied anger of their fevered dreamworlds. And feeling like I need to find new ways to engage, new ways to retreat, new ways to nourish.

Yesterday was a travel day for me, and, as often happens, with increasing intensity these days, the doomscrolling kind of broke me. As did questions of how to do my job while America falls into fascism, how to be a person, friend, human today, flickering between the doomscroll and dissociation, how to be both more present and more protected, more radical, more real, more myself, and perhaps a little less described, how to pay rent, to resist, and then how to dream better, to write, to read.

Obviously I’m pretty sure that it still all comes down to language. So I hope you are finding the stories, the conversations, and the ideas that nourish you today. We’re going to need them.

He has obviously seen the endless books and movies I’m consuming about resistance to fascism in the 30s and 40s, which I expect he writes off as me just sublimating. Though I don’t think he cares much for my more paranoiac reading. I imagine him rolling his eyes at my apparent preoccupation with Bohemian Grove, for example, scoffing to himself about some terrible boss of his who used to brag about the grubby Eyes Wide Shut-scenes he’d seen there.

There is no need, though, to run my perpetual, incessant rereading of Denis Johnson or Pynchon up the chain, I expect he reckons. Still, I wonder if, say, Vineland, and Tree of Smoke are categorized as gateway materials. A conspiracy theory cul de sac for your garden variety stoner and Phillip K. Dick fan, sure, but sometimes, just sometimes, seen among the stash or more hardcore kooks and outright radicals? A shelf or two below The Anarchist’s Cookbook maybe, but not never in the same bookcase, I guess he thinks? I don’t know.

I’m being flip but my FBI agent already knows now where this is going — he’s read earlier drafts — and, I wonder if he’s flattered, if he knows that he matters. Really, I know it is an oldie, but what a goodie, and a fascinating construction — a kind of post-ironic winking joke about our always online life and the surrendering of privacy that has become something else, something almost like a fairy godmother character, someone watching over us, watching us watching ourselves, judging how we see ourselves and the portals we look through to see the wider world.

A kind of god, really. Not entirely indifferent. Not always on our side, either — enough of a snitch, anyway, to do his job — but maybe, possibly invested in our well-being. Caring, but utterly quiet. And not entirely unlike the entity that watches our “I” as we perform our identity, as we go about our lives. The consciousness that reflects on our consciousness, spying on us. Something vaguely felt, a vantage point more inferred than experienced. Our own personal intelligence agent, as Sam Shepard characterized it in his final book, The Spy of the First Person. The one watching and reporting on the actions of “I”. Which, if you are the owner of a hacky sack, you might explain away as a glimmer of The One, of the collective consciousness, the universe and all of its sentient beings. The body and brain of the snail that it sees when it turns its eyestalks around to look back at itself.

If, on the other hand, the stuff you smoke has itself begun to turn back on you, well, you might not think the FBI agent is so benign. You might, instead, freak the fuck out that we have internalized the cops. That we have so absorbed the systems manipulating and profiting off of us, that we have, if not exactly knowingly, but maybe sort of semi-consciously, invited the powers that be into our inner workings. Welcomed the actual literal devil to sit on our shoulder (though I can’t help picturing a sort of Master/Blaster situation). And, in a kind of Kafkaesque way, just sort of generally accepted that the system, by way of our personal, internalized cop, knows of our wrongdoing, has already judged us to be guilty (of being human, mostly), and is, what, merely collecting further evidence for our eventual sentencing?

It is fucking dark as hell and of course funny too in the way that only overly online things are. But it is a way to acknowledge a kind of a death. An acceptance of futility. Which can feel inevitable “these days.” Everything does feel too big, too intractable, too far beyond the reach of our political power, too remote, too heavy, too cataclysmic. And so you think oh well what can I do, little old me. How can I stop the genocide, the climate catastrophes, the encroaching authoritarianism. What can I do, but look out for number one. Keep my head down, keep myself safe until the above mentioned terrors inevitably come for me. What can I do?

Which, I reckon, is actually the cop speaking. Because that’s the other part about letting the system in. It isn’t passive. It isn’t just watching, but also telling you that life is too big and scary and awful and so should be left to the experts, to others, to those on the front lines. Telling you that work and life is so overwhelming you might as well get yourself a treat. That the world doesn’t let you matter unless you perform a particular version of yourself, make yourself into a product that you market. And to do that you are going to need to have things. So many things. Because how else are you to perform an identity, to perform values and taste other than to buy things, to be the very best at buying things, the very best at showing those things, the very best at performing selfhood and wholeness and the perfection of you-the-product that we can all affirm with likes and comments and maybe commissions the better to participate in your producthood.

The fatalism we feel is intentional, is all I’m saying. It is a necessary condition to continue the extraction of the Earth’s resources to the detriment of our collective well-being, for one (because if nothing matters then why not plunder the globe for the last five minutes we have here). And it is a kind of surrender to the status quo (and to those who control and profit from it), a surrender of self, and the actual seat of perception and identity to, of all things, the cops.

Which is, I guess, part of the reason that I have been reading about death. Because if I have surrendered that driver’s seat in my self, then I am dead, and have been for the past …however long it has been that we’ve been locked in this forever fight-or-flight mode, held hostage as our nervous systems are by our devices, by our means of communication, by our fears for work and survival. The parts of me that I recognize as myself, or once did, in the before times, are gone. Because I think I have finally bottomed out, as Doug Rushkoff called it. I have hit a wall with our digital lives. I’m over it. I want to find a way out. And because books about death are also, oftentimes, so much more about what actually matters in life — whatever those things are!

There are pages and pages in my notebooks from last fall, during the time I was sort of accompanying and shepherding my dad through his last days, filled with rants to the extent that I did not want to become more professional, more productive, more of any of the things to which good and responsible capitalists aspire. Instead, I wrote, in these huge blabbering screeds, I wanted to be better at being myself. At seeking out inspiration, at fanning the flames of excitement, for ideas, for people, for projects, and better at channeling that energy into creativity. Which I guess sounded totally deranged when I tried it out on people, just judging from their uncomfortable responses, the kind of tittering awkwardness which we generally reserve for people who’ve said something profoundly cringeworthy. Which, maybe it is — as is speaking earnestly about anything other than, like, a fitness routine or maximizing performance (getting better as a productive capitalist); feelings and all that other juju, less so.

But it seems worth mentioning that, if we have surrendered the driver’s seat in our identity to the machines, we may have also, more than ever, given up being the end user. It feels less and less like it is me who lives my life, in other words, less me that goes on safari or whatever, let alone writes about it, than ‘Chris,’ if you see what I mean. As the present in which we exist becomes more and more provisional, as the platforms on and through which we interact with one another incentivize performative personality and producthood, the Chris that I am out there in the world becomes more and more of a construct.

I mean, I’m preaching to the choir here of course. You know all this, and live it every day. But it does make me wonder, if I am no longer in the captain’s chair, making the decisions and watching over my identity, in the seat of perception, looking out for my best interests, and neither am I fully in my body, living life as myself, then where am I?

Maybe, probably, I can’t ever get my old brain back, can never get back the kinds of energy and focus and creativity and elasticity and optimism I had in the before times. Just like I’ll never have back the parts of myself I could only ever access with my dad. That part of me is, if not dead, at least dormant, remembered, like a dream, only in snatches and glimpses in other things perhaps — and maybe probably a reason I’m even writing all of this now. But so too is the life I’ve been leading up until this point, the ‘Chris’ I’ve been playing at — this hollow sort of ghost propelled by whoknowswhat, that has forgotten he can just stop.

I have been carrying around all of this guilt and regret and anxiety for so long, in mounting supply, that I don’t think it ever occurred to me to try to set some of it down. To head off in a different direction. To pick up new and different things. Go other ways — whatever that might entail. I don’t know.

What would a life after (or anyway, with less of) the machines look like — beyond not posing this very question on Substack? Is there a way I could make a kind of quarterly print newsletter and mail that out instead? I wonder i might like to try.

That’s another thing about death, it is rebirth, and I was basically born yesterday, so I don’t really know how to do anything. I guess I’ll try to figure it out.

The writer and critic Dwight Garner is one such loon, and the grocery store analogy comes from incredible new book, The Upstairs Delicatessen, in which he spends an entire chapter trying to get through an afternoon visit to his local Stop & Shop while assailed and spirited away by the many Madeleines and other Proustian prompts he finds there. In a funny way, this shopping scene is an inside-out version of the delicatessen in the book’s title, the vibrantly lit cornucopia of delicacies Garner has collected in his mind from a lifetime spent reading — and eating, and reading about eating, and eating while reading, as he jokes. It is a phenomenal book, a food book that belongs on the highest shelf of esteem with Jim Harrison’s The Raw and the Cooked. It is also one of the best articulations of this personal, critical, and hallucinatory quality of a reader’s mind.

Of course, Garner is a great reader, a mammoth reader for work, as the book critic of The New York Times, a position he’s held since 2008. And a reader of deep curiosity, as he has been since his youth — something he attributes to “observational greed,” a phrase from Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries, a delicious little bit from the delicatessen, and important backstory to the mental machinery that has created his book. “We read for tangled, overlapping reasons,” he writes in the book. “I’ve looked to novels and memoirs and biographies and diaries and cookbooks and books of letters for advice about how to live, the way cannibals ate the brains of brilliant captives, seeking to grow brilliant themselves.”

For similar reasons, I suppose, I devoured this book, and then emailed Garner to see if perhaps he might like to get together (so that I might at least be in the presence of if not consume his brain). We met at a bistro on the Upper West Side — just north of what I think of as Nora Ephron-ville, or Thomas Pynchon zone, around the corner from where we all went to Joan Didion’s funeral — for lunch. French onion soup, an Arnold Palmer, and an espresso for him. Steak frites and a glass of cote du rhone for me. Garner teases himself for being on a second-day hangover, which is rare, he says. “I like drinking so much that I'm really careful with it,” he says, “because I don't want to have to quit.” He went out, big, with his son a couple days prior, and toward the end of the night, as he began tabulating the bill in his brain, he says, “I was thinking I could have bought him a new overcoat or something. But we’re going to remember this night our whole lives,” he says, “because we had some really cool things to eat. I just feel like, it was an event for the morale of both of our lives. Don't you feel that way sometimes?”

I do, and try to tell him so, try to explain that that is precisely what we are doing here, why I wanted to meet him, because he fanned back to flame some little pilot lights in my life that I thought had perhaps gone out for good, post-pandy, that his book made me want to live again, rather than just be alive. It is that kind of book. And he is that kind of writer — who in a recent review of a book about the good old days of publishing, writes that “all the martinis came in triplicate” — whose truly toothsome joy makes you want to crawl out of your cave and sit at the end of the bar and just dig all the deliciousness available in the world. Which is, of course, the very spirit of the book itself.

“I'm very suggestible,” Garner says over lunch. “Whenever I read something in a book, I can't wait to go try it. Just this morning, I was reading a historical cookbook and a woman said the only way she eats oysters is with black pepper. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I've liked oysters for 30 years. I've never heard of putting black pepper on an oyster.’ So now I'm going to hunt a place to try that, maybe I'll do it tonight. But life is like that, isn't it? We're all just… Is it fear of missing out? Is it that banal? Maybe it is. I just feel like we're all on this hunt. If we're going to live anyway, why not enjoy it?”

Beyond just the magical communication of this joy, in living, eating, and reading, I wonder, too, if Upstairs Delicatessen isn’t, like, “important” — as in, fundamental to understanding our particular time, when everyone is both a critic and a personal brand, expressing themselves through their tastes, differentiating (and selling) based on the super specific snowflake beauty of their minds and collected affinities. Being as it is about the way our consciousness works right now, about how we understand the things in our lives, the book is also an incredible picture of the functions of criticism, which I think may be my favorite art form, and which of course has meant the world to Garner in his life. As he says, “When I was a kid, I loved finding the critics. I grew up in an upper middle-class family. I had tennis lessons and orthodonture. We just didn't have a lot of books in the house. We weren’t a very cultural family. So I would read all these books and have no one to talk with about them. I loved to read criticism because there was someone who could fill my mind up with ideas about what they felt reading it and I could talk back to in my own mind.”

We talk a lot about the way media has changed, about what a critic’s byline in Time magazine meant back when, about discovering people of like mind through magazines — about moving to the New York we’d read about because that was where we were going to find our people — and about where to find the good stuff now. Before he joined the Times as a critic, Garner was an editor at The New York Times Book Review and a founding editor at Salon (the first big web magazine, which he says he started before he had an email address). Like Jim Harrison, he had a wonderful, long-running, roving column for Esquire. And he is still a ravenous consumer of all media, on various platforms. “I fucking love Tik-Tok,” he says. “It is the world talking to itself. And I like seeing what crazy things people are doing with Ring Dings. It's weird. It's Americana. It's life,” he says. “If you’re not interested in Tik-Tok, you’re not interested in humanity.” Of magazines, he says, “I'm a back-of-the-book reader. Any magazine I pick up, I'm right to the back of the book. I like funny. To me, wit is brainpower. If I pick up the New Yorker, I always go to Anthony Lane first, because I know it's going to be funny.”

Recently, a writer described Garner as a sort of low-key Jim Harrison character. Which he loves. “Harrison’s a hero of mine,” Garner says, “but I don't have a bottomless tank like he did. I love my pleasures, but I can't eat 30 courses on a regular basis. He could. He could drink two bottles of wine and be fine. I drink one bottle and I'm under the table.” But even Harrison, this great Falstaffian character, was always writing crankily about the diets he was on. And Garner is very funny in the book and in life about diets.

“I'm on diets all the time,” he says over lunch. “I've done the Cabbage Soup Diet. I've done the Atkins thing. Lately, I've done Lose It, which is an app that helped me lose about 25 pounds about a year ago. I probably gained about nine of them back. But I hate it. I don't get it. I'm 58, which a little bit old, but not that old. And I've been married for 30 years to a beautiful, brilliant woman whom I love. And still I am vain as shit. It stuns me that I have friends now who are literary guys, 75, 80, who are still working on diets. I'm like, Jesus Christ, does it ever end?”

What will never end is Garner’s collecting of quotations. About food, and sex and violence. And bodily movements, viscera. “I'm an earthy reader,” he says. “I like reading earthy writing. And by that, I don't mean that it's not cerebral. I like cerebral writers writing about earthy things. Food, sex, living.” And all of that earth just seems to stick, he says. “It's funny. I don't have a great memory in general, but I have a nearly photographic memory for quotations.” He does make notes, too, he says. He has kept a commonplace book since he was a kid – a book, and a practice, that went a long way in informing Garner’s previous book of quotations that he has compiled over a lifetime of reading. “It's an addiction I have,” he says. “So when I go into a supermarket and I see apples, I have three or four things that I can't help but remember that I have read about apples. Or this coffee. I can't help not think about what Kierkegaard did with his coffee or how Orwell made tea or... So I was trying to evoke in print what goes through my mind while I'm eating or drinking.”

I wonder if food memories specifically imprint on our minds differently than do any, all others. I wonder how memories made second-hand, while reading, can be so vivid, more vivid even than so many of the experiences lived. Garner and I talk about Geoff Dyer’s notion, in his essay about having “reader’s block,” that the books read in one’s youth contribute so much more, percentagewise, to our understanding of the world than do the books read later on, and perhaps that is why they remain so important to us. Like the music we listen to in our teens. And yet food memories, whenever they are made, are indeed worth far more than overcoats, or whatever. And writing about food seems like such an ideal way to write about everything else, from culture to etiquette to class to metaphorical notions of restraint and indulgence…

“I think I've always wanted to write a kind of quasi memoir,” Garner says, “but I realized my life isn't interesting enough. I'm a fucking book critic. I've never been attacked by a bear. I've never been stomped by motorcycle gang, anything like that. So by bringing in this food aspect and other perspectives, I could really enrich it.”  

Toward the end of lunch, Garner brings up peaches (though not as an aside about Andre Aciman, alas). About wanting to put each of the precious fruits of your mental labor into a piece of criticism. Each lovely idea. “You have the space to fill every week, and I have 30 peaches, meaning ideas, I want to fit into it. And I used to try to get them all in there and end up smashing all the goddamn peaches. Now I finally have come to realize that no, you want the perfect five peaches that will fill this thing nicely.”

I do like the five perfect peaches, and then all the rest, plus the steak and the oysters and a partridge in a pear tree. But in keeping with his practice I will bite my tongue and spare you the at least 3987 further perfect pieces of produce Garner shared with me over our lovely lunch. Those, just a tiny fraction he keeps in the deli upstairs, where, mercifully, we can visit him through the book, any time.

I have been thinking a lot about my ways of escape recently, in part because I am in above mentioned state of needing them, but also because I can — and I think we are all acutely aware of just how unique that is in the world. To have a passport, say. To have idle time in which to worry about things like career and identity, rather than merely just survival.

I spent most of the second week of October in Miami, and last week in California, and it feels ridiculous and deranged to watch the ongoing crisis on CNN in airport lounges, shameful to be worrying about such petty concerns as rent and jobs and all of those emails and pitches you’ve sent that never got a reply. It is a strange vantage point too, from which to watch the way that political impotence works, the way that all of us, feeling a lack of agency to help, protect or effect… anything, are turning on others within our social media spheres, policing points of speech, bullying, bartering, throwing tantrums, shaming, fighting, unfollowing.

But then maybe these are two sides of the same coin, two arenas in which to consider our effect, our impact on the world, how we are heard and valued in our personal and professional lives on the one hand, and what kind of impact we can make politically on the other. I wonder if these are tied up together for me in the same way that money and self worth are — if, in other words, not feeling like I have agency politically compounds the feeling of invisibility we can all feel professionally. If what we strive for in both arenas is to be heard, to matter, what does it do to us when our democratic apparatus utterly ignores us in a time of crisis. Again, a wild luxury even to be thinking about this, but when all of the onus is on us, all of the implications and horror about how our tax dollars are spent, how our collective representation is presently being used…

I joked a while back that Graham Greene stole the title of my story — his memoir is called My Ways of Escape — and I guess I am back on that beat again. I just this moment received by express mail my new passport, a replacement for the previous book which has been full for ages and regularly causing me fraught interactions with customs agents around the world. So at least in theory I am able to get back on the road, to climb out of my burrow to zoom out again, to feel the wonder and exhaustion and excitement and panic of travel again, to inhabit again my best self, which is how I feel on the road: open, engaged, alive and present in a way that I’ve forgotten how to be while at home. Now to sort out everything else.

Just a little dispatch in solidarity. Sending you love and comfort wherever you may be, physically and otherwise at the moment. Queue Pony.

In the new Apple+ documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, John Le Carré — author of Tinker Tailor, and maybe my favorite novelist of all time (?), describes the life of a double agent as “self-imposed schizophrenia,” articulated by, “the duality of being opposite from your outward self.” Tinker Tailor is probably the best spy novel of all time, and a fictionalized story about the most effective double agent in history. So Le Carré speaks to director Errol Morris with some authority on the matter, as well as on the subject of making art and identity.

Morris’s favorite metaphor/image in the interview is the “bubble” from which Le Carré says an artist sees and experiences the world — an artist’s “imaginative retreat from reality.” Glass bell jars and paper weights pop up throughout the film (as does a forest of mirrors, both in a wilderness and in a library). And that too was about the time I started vibrating while watching the documentary, feeling, as I always have, that Le Carré was speaking right into me.

When we get to the main meat of the interviews though I started to feel a weird sort of euphoria, as if Le Carré were speaking for me. It is Morris who prompts him, referring to a line in the The Secret Pilgrim, a great book which is essentially a series of anecdotes told by George Smiley (baby Bill Roach all grown up, in some ways) in a lecture given to a class at spy school (“the nursery” in Le Carré’s amazing jargon):

“You want the rolled-up parchment in the inmost room that tells you who runs your lives and why,” Le Carré wrote. That is the energy that the writer says drove him in his early life, when he worked for a time in intelligence, and the energy too that he says drove him in the early part of his writing life, until, ultimately he understood, as we all do, “that the inmost room is bare.”

“In my perpetual innocence,” Le Carré tells Morris, “I believed that there was some great secret to the nature of human nature. There is none.”

I have written a bunch about my early life feeling that the whole rest of the world was in on some secret that was withheld from me, about a fixation from childhood on the secret, the way, the truth that would make all of life make sense. And here is one of my greatest heroes saying almost the same thing in almost the same language.

Why should it be so, I wonder, that we all seem to feel this way, that existence — to which we have first hand access — is such a mystery, that there exists beyond our own faculties, our clearance, our education or reach or status, some universal truth. That there exists some key to reality (“that holds the world together at its core,” Le Carré says, citing Faust) beyond what we see an experience ourselves. The feeling of this lack in fact seems to be so universal it actually may be the single most fundamental truism of human nature. The feeling that a secret about reality exists and we can’t know it (and other people do), then, may be the actual only secret truth about humanity. At any rate it seems to be the fuel for all of our institutions, but anyway.

So what happens when one comes to realize that there is no there there, that the real secret of life, reality, humanity, is that there is no secret, and that we’re all just winging it, “ad hoc,” as Le Carré says? How do we respond when we find that there is no god? For Le Carré, who describes writing as a way to learn what he already knows (about the world, about himself, and presumably about morality), he created characters for whom that new wisdom was deadly, a threat, and had them try to respond. Alec Leamas of course in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, rebelled, went rogue, and became a martyr for the wanderers in No Mans Land looking for a cause, a belief. As I wrote about all of this not so long ago:

After he is sold out by his “masters” in Whitehall toward the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and thoroughly disillusioned with the entire institution of espionage, Leamas lets out his great screed, “What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not!” he says to his doomed beloved, Nan Perry, or to his own conscience, or the bugs that are probably listening in. “They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?” 

They may not be monks, but for the le Carré cast of field agent, and in particular for Leamas, who will later sacrifice himself for Nan, weighing right and wrong is the point of the story. Spy fiction of this sort is precisely about the existentialist drama of a man finding his morality outside the system of law. Less stark, maybe, than the Western hero’s frontier, where there is no law, the spy hero’s spot is a sketchier still alleyway, a darkened place setting him in a vacuum between institutionalized systems of violence and betrayal, both of which will at some point try to murder him. In that rift between the erratically shifting plates of policy and the whimsy of his masters, the field agent has to create a personal morality, finding virtue in the chaos.

But if the agent in the field creates morality, extra legally, and in exile, his handlers and the mandarins above them are sort of akin to Nietzschean ubermenshen, defining codes for others even as they break them themselves. From Gunther Bachmann, the Hamburg station chief in le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man dangling his small fish defector, vice squad style, in hopes of catching the big kahuna, to the callous diplomats always ready to sacrifice their agents like pawns in a pick up game at the park, the real baddies in le Carré’s fiction are not the murderers and rogues on the opposing side of front line, but the “gray men,” the apparatchiks and bureaucrats who sit smugly behind closed doors. “You are wearing gray today, Barley,” the Russian whistleblower at the heart of The Russia House tells him. “My father was sent to prison by gray men. He was murdered by men who wore gray uniforms.”

At its root, the spy story asks, what is of value? Outside of the rules or laws of warring nations, in the chaotic no man’s land between, what matters? Is it a commodity, like intelligence or people, to be traded in a marketplace? Is it security, or winning, and, at what cost?

We love that scale, though, don’t we? Good, better, best, greatest of all time, ever. Power rankings. AP polls. Top 10s, etc. Which feels a bit like religious impulse? Or any way, iconographic. Trying to imagine the utmost, the superlative, superior. A hierarchy, a pecking order — which is probably the bit that unnerves me.

The timing for this debut is of course right on with our increasing dependence on recommendations to cut through the so-much-ness of the world. There are now a few apps that offer this, powered by the taste of influential travelers, eaters, shoppers, who will give you a list of their favorite spots in Paris or London or Tokyo — this, an updated version of the endlessly shared Google map, say, or the Wallpaper guide to a city. I imagine the sponsors of the new event framing those recommendations as subjective, as mere whims when compared to something institutional, seemingly objective. A consensus of taste.

Taste has always been a main staple of the economy, of course, a way to sell us things, because after all you have to perform your taste, to demonstrate it if you want credit for it — receipts or it didn’t happen etc. But now that it feels as though everyone is an expert, a guru, marketing themselves around their taste, and perhaps even profiting off of their recommendations that come from it, taste — replacing or at least expanding on its predecessor, image — has become the main line of our culture (and the marketplace, if there is a difference). And taste has become super performative, opinions we tell others about.

I have been thinking a lot about what makes Sofia Coppola’s new Archive book so particularly inspiring, and I wonder if it isn’t at least in part because it is a sort of autobiography of taste. The cohesiveness of the aesthetics, of course, is incredibly comforting (and lays out the case the Coppola is a big pillar of so many of our present tastes). All of the red leather Smythson diaries and blush pinks of Coppola’s films are here, often with a cozy 35mm veil over them, courtesy of Andrew Dunham’s incredible on-set photography (and in fact this book functions as well as Dunham’s monograph, a collection of his work — including of course the anachronistic portraits of Jason Schwartzman and Kirsten Dunst smoking cigarettes and using a laptop in costume on Marie Antoinette). Durham’s portraits of Coppola, too, which have been published alongside profiles of the director in fashion magazines, are perfect editorial images, even featuring recognizable fashion credits. And in a weird way I wonder if it isn’t Coppola’s own life-style that is the main subject of the book. Look at Sofia direct. Look at Sofia moodboard. And the world she makes is totally intoxicating — the world she is building (to inhabit herself) even when building other worlds (for the screen). This over-arching, umbrella world, Sofia-style, we might call it, all dressed and propped and furnished just so, is of course a mainstay obsession in recommendation culture: The kind of stationery she uses, the Charvet shirts, the Cartier watches, the little Contax point and shoot.

I once asked Sofia about her taste, how she came by it, what she had to do to protect it, to project it. She was very gracious, just thanked me and sort of dissembled, elegantly. All the question deserved, probably. I went on, though, trying to prompt her about memories we shared, the hours we spent across Paul Jasmin’s living room table, leafing through the piles and piles of fashion magazines and art books, sort of taking, mostly listening to Jazzy, building a visual reference library (in her case) and observing my own idiot observations, in mine (because I was going to be a writer, lol). And here she did sort of spark up, wanting to say something nice about Jazzy perhaps, but also honestly relaying (for probably the billionth time) how much fashion magazines in particular had meant to her as an adolescent, giving her a place that was a little bit her own, a place where she could escape and dream, and to which she could apply a cinematic language she was inheriting from her parents. I’m paraphrasing.

Coppola isn’t overly explanatory, of herself, her work, her life. So when she does lift the curtain a bit, in an interview, in this book, it feels wildly incisive. Finding reference images (from art and fashion magazines) next to the still frames from her films that they inspired, for example, is a lot of fun. But when, in The Beguiled section of the book, alongside an image by Jo Ann Callis, of a young girl, her body arched, revealing a neck tied with a ribbon, Coppola writes that it fits the feeling of the movie, and “being trapped in ultra femininity,” it feels like a kind of epiphany.

But then maybe the withholding — the showing and not telling — is a big part of what makes Coppola’s world so alluring. So cool — isn’t that the essence of cool? Not explaining it? And isn’t that what makes us all clamor for more, clamor to make sense of the runes left on screen and on the page?

But in that sort of reaching for an understanding, trying to get a grip on whatever is going on in my reaction to the book, whatever powerful chemistry is going on in its pages, I begin to worry that those minor understandings — takes, opinions, critical perches on which to hang an idea, a response to whatever material is being engaged — are stopping off points, only. In a way, opinions may be a kind of defense mechanism, throwing up a protective wall of (posited) understanding to protect ourselves from doubt, from the nagging feeling of wonder, concern, interest. Because it is an unsettling thing, to wonder, to be tugged at by something… indescribable, something as yet unidentifiable. The not knowing, the lack of a clear and definiable stance, gives the brain permission to keep on toying. To keep exploring. Looking for the hotel that speaks to you, say, rather than the one recommended to you.

I wonder if my own suspicion of opinions, of those sort of stopping off points, those pulpits (and ranked lists), is linked to my general embarrassment at ever saying anything at all, and why I have been so slow to post things on here. What could I possibly add, in other words. I used to think that the reason I wrote in the first place was as a way to arrive at an understanding — that, through writing on a subject, I might finally be able to articulate my response to or feeling about something. But maybe it needn’t be all so clean and tidy and complete as all that. As Adam Phillips likes to say, the whole point of assaying, essaying an idea, is just to sort of try it on, workshop it, think aloud. Maybe writing, like taste, and even best-of-lists, can be a kind of work in progress. Always a rough draft. We’ll see.

I’m rereading Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, again, and there is this little bit that keeps gnawing at me. “Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics,” Bobby, the protagonist says, in the middle of a conversation that is typical for the book, both about everything and nothing, “has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and o-ular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.”

In the sequel/companion book to The Passenger, Bobby’s sister, in one of her conversations at the psychiatric institution in which she has checked herself, she argues this bit from the other side — in effect, saying that there is no reason to trust that our sensations are reporting real or imagined stimuli and/or the reporting is any good. Reality then is uncertain, maybe unknowable. Which, fine. I remember being very excited by the Kant to Hume to Berkeley chain of dissociation from sensory information when I was in college (if it now sort of makes me tired). But Bobby’s argument sort of bugs me.

Carl Jung, when he visited the Athi Plains in East Africa went into this grand reverie about the majesty of Earth and blah blah. But then he goes on to say how incredible it is that we are here to see it, because without our experiencing the beauty of the Rift Valley, it wouldn’t exist, as Bobby might agree. That we are in fact the second Creators of the world, because we bring it into reality by experiencing it with our senses. I bring this up and rant about it a bit in the PB book because PB loved to name drop, especially if it was to brag about Africa, but also because it is directly antithetical to one of his main projects, which was to remind human beings that we too are animals, not removed from nature, certainly not above or beyond it, but inextricably a part of the whole. (My favorite ever illustration of this, an image of human consciousness contemplating the oneness of creation is Jj Sullivan’s of a crab turning its eyes around to contemplate itself). And what Jung is doing here, along with Bobby, is ~othering~ nature, removing the crab from its eyes, or something.

Anyway. I also brought Pawl Bowles’s Their Heads Are Green with me, as well as some more Matar, but I may just drown myself in wine and pasta for the week. Ciao for now.

All of which led me to thinking that, not only does rewatchability not equate to favor — or even interest if plane movies are added to the equation — but, I wonder, too, if scarcity and lore adds to a film’s lustre.

Anyway, one of my thoughts about Soy Cuba is that it is intended as a response, formally, to the kinds of post colonial books and films that Northerners/Westerners were making about peoples and places in the tropics or global south throughout the middle and late 20th century. Under the Volcano, for example, is about the dipsomaniac diplomat in Cuernavaca, and whatever Mexicans and Mexican culture appear in the book, and film, are just blurred abstractions, as if seen through the length of a full bottle. Duras’s India Song about the languid colonials in Calcutta doesn’t even have any India in it (it was filmed at a chateau in France) and the one Indian is of course a servant. Even A Quiet American makes Phuong into a symbol of her beautiful country that is being corrupted, a woman and country that both Fowler and Pyle are so desperate to save.

I’ve been super sensitive to the ways in which our books and movies make of a place and people a romantic backdrop for our own heroic doings downstage. How postcolonial literature for example informs the way we think about travel — or, crucially, the way we think about ourselves in the context of travel. How Agatha Christie, say, contributes to my feeling of fun and intrigue and decadence on the road to Abyssinian ruins in Iraq, say. How Paul Bowles’s stark scenography effects the way I interact with or visually understand Moroccan geography and landscapes.

I think it was Claire Denis’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Stars at Noon that got me thinking about all this. The film is a bit of an anachronism, of course, coming out last year, well after book — which came out in ‘86 and so was part of maybe the second- or maybe third wave of Northern Gaze stories, in which the white Westerner enters a tropical (“exotic”) location that is in turmoil with the idea of saving herself, destroying herself, finding escape or success, maybe all or any of the above. In fact the trajectory and cynicism in Johnson’s book is not that far advanced from say Under the Volcano but the highfallutin pomp of a westerner abroad is dead, the false sheen of colonial or post colonial narrative is gone utterly grimy to reveal the horrors of power imbalances, racism, geopolitics, oil money, the CIA, et al involved… and the danger is ramped way way up. The Westerner, in this case, is not a postcolonial diplomat or detective, not visiting architectural ruins with their partner, but purely a tourist qua tourist, even if she semi sort of plays at being a journalist (and I am dying dying dying here to segue through Oliver Stone’s Salvador, which came out around the same time as Johnson’s book, to Costa-Gavras, and his Missing which I might say is the next evolution in this sort of narrative — and happens to be my absolute aesthetic dream space, so perhaps that merits an entry of its own — but suffice to say that agency and primacy of perspective and the moral high ground that comes with that in film, is, in the sort of stories mentioned above given to the white Westerner on sojourn, whereas in Costa-Gavras, perspective is somewhat dissolved into the soil of the setting. But we will come back to that).

I guess I started reading these sorts of post Northern Gaze books when I was in college or thereabouts. Before I could travel myself and feel first hand those power dynamics at play and understand my role in perpetuating and maybe possibly understanding and even writing about them. And I still quite like them, and they continue to thrive — see for example Lawrence Osbourne — even if I worry about them, about my affinity for them.

Anyway, power, safety, and the perception of Americans abroad are all on my mind as I thumb this into my phone, having just had about a dozen increasingly weird encounters with Baghdad police and Iraqi military while walking around town. Signs, all, to wrap everything up for the night.

And I thought I would start to more regularly do a little media diet wrap up here, mid-week, and maybe do something travel-y on the weekend. Wednesdays and Sundays? I dunno.

I’ve started but can’t quite get into Mario Vargas Llosa’s Harsh Times but I’m wildly intrigued because it stars two of the main baddies in my worldview, such as it is, the chief architects of public relations on the one hand, and of the United Fruit Corporation on the other, the latter of whom, hired the former to shore up his reputation in Latin and Central America, before of course manufacturing a kind of need, dependence on his product worldwide. Edward Bernays, the PR man (and Freud’s nephew if I remember right?), also coined the term engineering consent, wrote a sort of manifesto called Propaganda, and functions in the great Adam Curtis’s The Century of Self as the prime mover for what is now our suffocating reality: of being sold the idea that by consuming commercial products we can approach happiness, that in purchasing we demonstrate our identity, and that our individuality, again manifested only in the marketplace, is the premiere goal of the species. And of course United Fruit was among if not the worst commercial forces (of course supported by the CIA) of the 20th century. At times, reading the book, I just sort of drift into a very dark fugue and think that, since the gamification of identity and consumerism that came with social media, maybe all we do want is to be entertained by our own and others’ demonstration of identity through commerce and to buy strawberries in December or whatever. Ugh anyway.

I almost forgot that this week I read the novel Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch, about a guy so consumed with the lives he didn’t lead that he builds a quantum hopping portal to find his favorite. And of course all kinds of chaos ensues.

I guess I am a bit jetlagged because I also read Snow by John Banville. And there is definite consideration of alternate lives, other versions of ourselves there, especially for the Protestant aristo detective St John Strafford who is called out to solve a very self aware Poirot-ish murder at a country house in South East Ireland in the late 1950s. It is great and just the kind of sweep you away voicey narrative I was hoping would help me to sleep but instead kept me up all night. And it is not as deliberate as Banville’s Quirke novels (as Benjamin Black) or even his Marlowe book Black Eyed Blonde. But I did stick a bit on the diction early on, thinking how sort of workman like or even expected some of his phrasing is. A sky is leaded or mauve. A house on a hill looms. It got so that I felt like I was anticipating his diction and I started to wonder if that were in purpose, a genre aware device to keep the reader cozy and warm, focused on the plot at hand. And so I flicked over to one of Banville’s great ones which of course I love because it is about an English spy, The Untouchable, and weirdly, for a book I’ve always remembered as top shelf poetry and voice, this had some of the same, very familiar, almost expected phrasing. Anyway I loved going back to that, I loved Snow, and I am thrilled to know that there is another in the series. Off to Spain with Strafford I go.

I am in Beirut at the moment and reading the stories in Akashic’s Beirut Noir. But I was looking around for some mystery books set in the Mashriq. I loved the show made of Baghdad Central so that’s in the queue but would love some others. Anyway, whatcha reading?

It is a joke because I am a bit… bristle-y with any sort of authority. Not petulant. Not, don’t tell me what to do. But, more like… the way that Noam Chomsky defines his anarchism as an effort to collapse all power structures, politically, I am that way emotionally.

Which I think goes for a lot of us. How many times have you heard people joke about wanting to outsource all their decision making? (A recent British Vogue piece by Annie Lord articulates a piece of this, imagining life as a kept woman.) And why shouldn’t they? Decision fatigue is perhaps an inevitable stage in our utter destruction by capitalism. Once we were sold the idea that our purchases and behavior and skincare routines were what made us us, we were bound to be overwhelmed by the available options, and the stakes implied by our decisions.

At the same time, we seem to seem to be acknowledging the notion that the pursuit of happiness itself brings about diminishing returns. Chasing the dopamine hit from a payload of social media interactions or a retail therapy purchase, say, follows the same fading-luster-loop of any addition or craving. And is similarly sustainable, rational.

All of which should bring about a kind of revelation, the realization that all of these decisions, all of our multiple choice questions in the consumerist test that never ends, all of the performances we put on of the identity to which we aspire, are maybe not just exhausting but also totally meaningless? Just busy-work. And probably wholly irrelevant to this whole life thing (I was going to write irrelevant to happiness and fulfillment but, see above, I can’t really untangle those words or ideas from their use in the marketing of Sprite and sneakers, so).

And honestly who can commit that kind of time and resources to… doing things and adulting etc when what we really want to do is binge a show, and then another and another, while scrolling on our phones. (If only someone would tell us which show to watch! What to wear! What to eat! Who to be!) We just want to be entertained, distracted, I guess, from… everything.

But if this all sounds a bit fatalist, it should also sound of freeing, shouldn’t it? I’m speaking to myself here as much as anything. You are not your work, Toni Morrison wrote, as a balm. You are not your job, Tyler Durden said, as a manifesto. Maybe you are not even the content you create, even if the world may receive you that way. You may not be what you eat, or your skin care routine. But what then? I don’t entirely believe I am my bagel order, or my skin care regimen. But if my behavior doesn’t define me, what does? I can’t quite uncouple my understanding of myself from my habits, routines, and System Preferences.

There was a good stretch there for a while, at least a decade, during which ever blockbuster villain who didn’t want to wipe out half of all living beings, would claim that people didn’t really want freedom, or didn’t want self autonomy — what they wanted, Loki said to Captain America, for example, was the freedom of not having to decide for themselves. (The irony of this coming from an entertainment franchise from which there is little escape let alone alternative is something, but anyway.)

But if we do take away our jobs, our routines, our labels, our subscriptions to beliefs and newsletters, who are we? How do we then define ourselves?

It is probably telling that I have to ask, if I am not my byline, not my Delta status, my icloud, not my goals, not my Instagram, not the contents of my Moleskine or my credit score, who I am.

My mom told me recently that she’d written a draft of her obituary, and encouraged me to do the same, which, well. That is a lot, and once you get around the dictates of form and etiquette, there is the question of which you you are describing. Is it that shadow cast in the world of records, the one described by your actions, your behavior. Is there room for consideration of intent anywhere in there? For the story you told yourself about yourself? Are you your curriculum vitae, your collections of things, your taste?

Having just written the story of someone’s life — and learning that every person who knew Peter Beard seemed to know a different version, or rather see in him a version of themselves — I wonder if the story of ourselves is even ours to tell. If we even get to decide (Ultimately I told my mom that it is none of my business how/or if I am thought of when I’m gone; it doesn’t have anything to do with me.) At least we can rest assured that when asked everyone will say that we lit up a room. Xoxo happy Sunday