Letter

I quit another social network. I lasted about ten months on Substack but couldn’t stay any longer. It’s my fault. Every time I sign up for another one I think I can handle it. But I can’t.

What happens is that I start obsessing. Checking stats. Opening the thing at all hours when I have many better things to do. It’s what they build the them to do. They work on your mind. It’s fine if you’re an easy-going fella who can compartmentalize and not take things too seriously. That ain’t me.

This is the second time I’ve quit this one. It used to just be a newsletter platform and I tried it out when I used to charge for my newsletter. It was the third of the five platforms this thing’s been on over its fifteen-plus year lifespan. I didn’t like that they were okay with Nazis or that they paid famous people to have newsletters to juice their cred. I still don’t.

I rejoined sometime last year because they had expanded their Notes function into a kind of Twitter/Tumblr/Live Journal entity and a bunch of writers were singing its praises. I wanted to see what was going on. Then I got invited to contribute to a publication called Zona Motel. Now there was a legit reason for me to login.

But I couldn’t just write my pieces and log off. I had to keep checking the dashboard to see how many views I got. And there, next to my stats, were the stats of the other contributors. And some would inevitably get more views, more likes, more comments, just more. And, of course, I would wonder why this was so. And those thoughts never went anywhere good.

K had deleted her account on the platform months ago for what I suspect were not dissimilar reasons to what I’ve been talking about. But then she had a piece accepted by a publication on there and decided to give it another go. She texted me about a couple notifications she’d gotten about my tagging her in posts. When she logged on she couldn’t find them. What happened was that I’d make a post mentioning some event or story she’d published and when, after a few hours, there weren’t many responses, I’d deleted it. I would do this routinely—put something up, then erase it if it didn’t get a reaction. I think everyone on social media does some version of this but now I had to account for my shameful behavior to someone I cared about and I was embarrassed.

I half-answered her a few ways until the entire thing spilled out. She thanked me for trying but the whole thing just felt wrong. I don’t want to feel these things or think about them. I don’t want to gamify my work or that of those I want to share with others.

I wrote Julia to ask her if I could still write my Zona column if I quit Substack and she said I could. We’ll see how it goes. The first one is about my friend Frank’s paintings.

I want people to see and read my work but being on social media is like being a performing seal and it eats me up from the inside. I don’t know what the solution is but I’ll keep searching.

These sketches are of readers at last week’s Tuesday Funk where K read a couple excerpts from her forthcoming book. Here’s another.

A young woman in a ratty sweater wanders up to a riverbank and seems ready to fall in, but then a standing kayaker in full black wetsuit floats by like an alien messenger, causing her to change course. She returns home where her exasperated boyfriend asks why she hasn’t been answering her phone. Then they’re in the backseat of a car on the way out to the country to take a boat trip but just before they get on the boat she tells the boyfriend she’s not feeling well and wants to go home. He borrows the car to take her to the bus station but rolls the car on the way and is killed. She survives.

A middle-aged woman—who they nearly run into just before the rollover—hears the noise of the crash, runs down the road, then walks the young woman back to her house. The young woman starts a new life as a kind of surrogate daughter. She meets the older woman’s estranged husband and son. They don’t know what to make of her or how to act with their wife/mother now.

The way these four people fit into one another’s lives is uncanny and requires many stars to align just so but somehow the filmmaker makes it sort of inevitable. It’s a dream logic that only works in art.

I see the movie on Saturday and text K to see if she wants to see it. We’d seen the trailer a couple weeks back. We go on Tuesday and even though I know the plot points and reveals it takes nothing away from the simmering tension Petzold is able to maintain. His four characters are all lost and grief-stricken, they seemingly find a way out, all know it’s wrong, but keep the fantasy going because it feels better to pretend.

The big difference between the two screenings is an overheard conversation in the theater before the second viewing. An insufferable local filmmaker whines on and on to a retired critic about the state of local arts journalism somewhere behind our heads. They sound like Statler and Waldorf. It only takes me a minute to place both voices. I’ve had forgettable interactions with both these burnouts. They mention three or four others I know as well. Sometimes a big city feels very small. Fortunately, the lights dim and the trailers run, silencing the complainers.

Petzold names his movie after a piece of piano music by Ravel. The piano is a recurring part of the story. I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this.

Go see Miroirs No. 3.

I read a few pages from William Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck into a microphone.

Flattered to’ve become a plot-point in a Bud Wiggins story.

My shows at Wormhole and Firecat are down but that art is available in case you have walls that need covering.

I text Mallory that I’m thinking of going to her reading in Pilsen on Saturday night but she answers she’s sick in bed and won’t make it. I decide to go anyway. It’s not far from home and I recognize a couple readers’ names from the internet.

I lock up my bike on the short iron fence to the right of the entrance. It’s a corner building and the poster said to look for the side door. It’s open and I see a set of mismatched chairs set up so I know I’m in the right place.

There are only a couple people inside. I’m early, as usual. I pick a seat and look around. The hostess offers wine but I still have my ice coffee from Jumping Bean.

The walls are partially repainted a dark green but show worn away layers of previous paint jobs, it’s intentional like ripped jeans. A small sidetable stands near the back wall like a podium for the chairs, holding a vase of flowers. The wall behind is full of lit candles in small compartments, stretching up to the ceiling. A small bathroom is on the left wall, with another passageway just beyond it. Several women go in and out, making final preparations for their guests’ arrival.

Soon the seats fill and the reading begins. From where I sit, the readers’ faces are each partially obscured by flowers. The level of interference varies according to the reader’s stature and posture. It’s dark too. Only candlelight and the phones and laptops off which they read to illuminate their faces.

I like the translations of 90s Chinese poems, first read in the original. The reader says the writer belonged to a group called the Lower Body Poets and, indeed, many of the poems had to do with functions of that part of the anatomy.

A few people ask about the drawings after and the hostess asks to take some photos. I want to ask her what she does here when there aren’t literary events. I heard her refer to the place as an apothecary but don’t see many vials or tinctures. Maybe they’re in another room through the doorway the women passed through before.

I wonder whether I could read in such darkness. I’d probably bring a clip light and ruin the vibe. I ask the hostess whether there’ll be more readings and she says she hopes there will be.

I go home and scan the drawings and post them online. Many of the readers “like” them and that’s the end of that.