I pulled an old paperback of William Gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, off the shelf at the bookstore one afternoon when I was done shelving and needed a break. It starts with an estate sale and an old man hanging around, talking at whoever will listen. I took the book home.
I’ve been avoiding Gass a long time. I’m all in with William Gaddis, whose name is so similar that they were often mistaken for one another. Both wrote long, difficult books throughout the second half of the 20th century. I might have tried The Tunnel once and given up pretty quickly. If I did, it was certainly before I tried to write myself. Since then, beautiful sentences have become a lot more important than narrative coherence or logical comprehension. The things I get the most out of now are often things I hardly even understand. It’s the sound of the phrases, the rhythms, that grab me.
Having recently worked on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury helped prime me for the amorphous, abstract atmosphere of this book. Faulkner is often cited as a big influence on Gass.
A plot summary of Omensetter wouldn’t do much to give a sense of what it’s like to read. There are passages that are so non sequitur that I forgot what I was even reading. It’s very much a stream of consciousness thing and that stream is an ugly, poisoned body of water indeed. The insides of the head of a corrupt pastor in a small Ohio town at the end of the 19th century is not a cosy place to be. And yet I read on.
…I remember there were rings in the pools of water by the road, and I thought how exciting for the boy to live by the river, to catch fish and keep frogs, you know; grow up with good excitement. Now he’s sick, Curtis, in this low place, and there’s no honest snow to cover it or cold to hold it coldly even, and the hill we came by is still a slippery yellow. The boy is going to die, Curtis. I just feel—I’m scared he’s going to die.
Occasionally, I put the book down and searched the availability of Gass’s other books online. I learned that Dalkey is publishing a new edition of The Tunnel on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Maybe I’ll work up to that one eventually. In the meantime, I checked Middle C out from the downtown library.
I wake up at 2am from a dream in which K is talking at me through a Coke can like a walkie-talkie. I lie there trying to go back to sleep to know avail. She wakes up a little later because I’m no longer snoring so it’s too quiet. Both our alarms are set for 4:30 because we have a 6am flight to LA. We give up on sleep and get going.
There’s been a lot of chatter about security lines becoming an extra nightmare because of a government that’s bent on destroying all the country’s infrastructure but we sail through nearly unscathed. K scowls after getting patted down for walking through the scanner with her belt on. She feels singled out (she’s all smiles on our return flight when I get patted down instead).
I usually read on airplanes but battle to keep my eyes open the entire flight. K wants to finish writing her book before we return home to Chicago but I can tell she’s struggling as well. We both fall asleep not long after reaching my folks’ place in Lawndale.
Soon after we wake, late afternoon, we pack up all the food they have cooked and head to Max and Lauren’s. With a second baby just arrived, my parents’ grandparental duties have increased somewhat. K and I don’t have much to do after unloading the trunk. We sit at the dining room table and watch my mother play with Raya and my father and Max prepare dinner. Sometime later, Lauren appears with the newborn Roni. Some hours later, we eat.
Even before the babies started coming, visits here and to the east coast always leave me with an uncanny feeling. Watching how others live is always like this. I feel like a trespasser and keep hearing the refrain from that Pere Ubu song in my head: I don’t see anything that I want/I don’t see anything that I want. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with how my relatives live. They’re all better off than I am by any metric but it all feels somehow foreign or alien to me. I try to trace the steps required to arrive at the room I’m sitting in and can’t even imagine moving in any of the furniture. I’d be willing to bet they’d feel the same if they had to stay at my place a few days.
Does everyone feel this way on family visits? Perhaps this is a symptom of living thousands of miles apart. If I saw them every week it might be different. Then again, I know brothers who live half a mile apart and see each other once a year.
The next afternoon we drive to Taluca Lake for lunch with Bruce. We talk about writing and movies over diner sandwiches at Patys. The conversation’s easy, as if we’ve all known one another a long time, even though this is only my second visit with Bruce and K’s first. This is his local spot and he tells us about eavesdropping on Bruce Dern complaining about his meal here on a recent visit. It’s an old-time Hollywood kind of place. The whole thing is a combination of unreal and welcome.
Then we drive a few miles to Los Feliz to meet for drinks with John at Figaro’s. We’re early so we browse Skylight Books a few minutes but leave both feeling the place is a little too clean and tidy. Used-book stores have ruined places like this for us, no matter how well-organized and tasteful they may be. We like a patina of something or other on books we leaf through. The feeling that they’ve lived a bit long before we could paw them.
I only know John by his writing and voice. Figaro’s is hopping but after a bit of hesitation we find a table inside just past the bar. John casts a weary look at a woman seated on the nearest barstool, her thigh eye-level, a few inches to his left. The service is glacial but we manage to have a good time anyway. I tell him we just had lunch with Bruce and he points to a woman a few tables away saying she is a close friend of Bruce’s. I think he’s kidding until she comes over and introduces herself as Deb. Says she’s known Bruce since she was nineteen, back when they were both acolytes of Carlos Castañeda.
Back in Lawndale, we have tea and poppyseed roll and tell my folks about our adventures. There’s now a drawing of K hanging in this kitchen. The rest of the walls are covered with my pictures as well. I try not to focus on them, which isn’t always easy.
The next afternoon we meet K’s friend, Jenny, at a stripmall pasta place in Redondo that Max introduced me to. She lives in Ventura and generously agrees to drive to a place near us. Driving is inescapable in this town, which makes the idea of living here anathema. It’s a lovely lunch in any case.
We pick up my folks and drive to the Wende Museum in Culver City. I’d been trying to see this place for a couple years but it’s pretty underwhelming after the long wait. I was hoping for a sprawling display of Cold War artifacts, maybe a sculpture park of gauged and gored Lenins, Stalins, and Maos; instead, it’s a neat modern hall of vitrines full of various relics and a couple larger galleries of contemporary art. The gift shop has a few nice pins and tchotchkes but many better can be viewed or bought on the internet. Maybe it isn’t really possible to document the Cold War properly in the rarified setting of a culture center.
I begin to forget the place a few miles onto the 405 back toward Redondo. We’d packed more food in the trunk before leaving but have to hit the food court at Jon’s for a main dish. I get K and I a Coke and we sit at a little table watching my parents eye the available prepared meats. A few minutes later I help by taking pictures of the display case with my father’s smartphone and send it to Max so he can make his selections as well. Then my mother steers the cart away and into the heart of the store. We remain seated, sighting her or my father in this or that aisle. He never catches up to her and gives up to wait with us. I remark that she moves around the store much more nimbly than in any other environment. She appears a few minutes later with her purchases, wondering where we’d been.
The evening is a close copy of the one two nights before except that Raya is in a shitty mood, refusing to eat and wailing for no discernible reason. We speculate the arrival of a new sister is messing with her equilibrium. How could it not?
There’s a vague idea to visit the Norton Simon Museum the next morning but we run out of time. We sit in the backyard for a while and I christen a new sketchbook with a drawing that incorporates a bit of the mural I painted on the side of the house. We get takeout pizza from a place on Pacific Coast Highway that Max recommends. As we wait for our order, I see Smart&Final—extra! on a big box storefront across the parking lot. I joke that it must be a budget funeral home but it turns out to just be a grocery store. I wonder how the company settled on such a monicker.
By our departure gate at LAX, an Arabic-speaking family bunches up in the early-boarding area. As they start to move toward the gate, a scrawny man in a Harley Davidson vest says something to one of the women that they take exception to. A pudgy teenaged boy in their party threatens to fight him and they have to be separated. The men walk the boy away but he runs back up to the man and shouts, NO WAY, NIGGA! causing the man to challenge the boy to fight once they get back to Chicago. The boy’s words get an immediate response from the sizable Black contingent in the waiting area. Cellphones come out and there’s loud angry chatter all about as the boarding process continues. Southwest Airlines Presents: Race War, I whisper to K. Miraculously, no one has to be taken off the plane. When we get to our seats the scrawny shit-starter is in the window seat in our row, hiding behind a hoody. K and I stifle a laugh. Later I see him watching a Fast & Furious flick on his tablet. Figures the little racist likes racing movies.
I read my book as K types away next to me. We both have headphones in to drown out the caterwauling of children just behind our heads. An hour before we land she puts away her phone and tells me she’s finished her book. It makes me feel like we’re almost home. The point of travel is to make you appreciate what you’re returning to.
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.
