The Story of a Failure

On Monday, January 21st, the news broke of yet another virginal man, Christopher Cleary, age 27, of Denver, planning to murder women en masse -- of course, this being my benighted republic, this barely counts as news, especially given the fact that no one was actually murdered. But the issue of the incel mass murderer has become one of the more trending topics of the past year or so, to the point where the "what an incel be" think piece has become utterly stale.

What fascinates me more about the sequence of events is everything but the fact that he was a 27 year old virgin.

When the photograph of Christopher Cleary came up in one of my daily traipses through the Internet, all I could see was an almost emblematically sad American. Someone whose life had been molded by the late-capitalist Sunbelt world -- making him one of many, of course, who had come out of a landscape of Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's, the persistent smells of fryer grease and Yankee Candle Company, the rows of townhouses hemmed in by dwarfish pine trees, vinyl banners reading "RENTING NOW! CALL xxx-xxx-xxxx!" limply flapping in the wind. One of many shaped by the ideologies that prop up this purely marketed world. The difference is that he was foolish enough to announce that he was going to mow down women.

This being our current iteration of networked existence, we, the general public now have the ability to probe his social-media personality, and you see the way in which he tried, himself, to mold his persona into a brand. Even his threat of murder was accompanied by sad-face and angry-face responses.

 His Facebook Intro was reported as saying "I'm Kris. from Denver, sports pa announcer, free spirit traveler and a lonely Starbucks lover."

It's a bit like the "short story" famously misattributed to Hemingway -- "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In that 15-word statement, a life, a picture springs forth. There's something terribly sad and desperate-seeming about the way he switched the "Ch" to a "K," about the way he self-describes as a sports announcer (despite seemingly not being one outside of his own mind), the way he describes as a free-spirit traveler despite the fact that he seems like he's so ensconced in the suburban world and just cribbed the term from a legion of Instagrammers, the fact that he unironically announces a love for Starbucks, a chain that tried 30 years ago to seem like the sort of place cosmopolites would congregate, and which now is just another fast-food joint by the side of the highway, but the way he pairs it with "lonely" seems to conjure up some self-image of a lonely café dweller, a trope that has been a cliché for at least 100 years, but this time buying into a marketing campaign.

Or look to his Youtube channel, with its Intro video showing him cheesing and posing in front of arenas (in such exotic destinations as Las Vegas and Salt Lake City) and simulated backdrops of palm trees, special-effect dollar bills falling over the screen. You see his videos of him eating fast food, CRAZY MCDONALDS BURGER MUKBANG!!!!, and so forth. And you see his painfully superficial analysis of coming sports games, his attempts to mimic the cadences and hand gestures of ESPN talking heads -- "I find it so difficult how the Patriots seem to be in Superbowl contention every year, I'm not saying they're a bad team, but man, like, can't they just give somebody else a chance."

It's the voice of someone who has been told the great lie of the Internet era, which is of course an extension of the great lie of American optimism -- that you too can be a star. All you have to do is implore enough people to hit like and subscribe.

I should hazard right now that it's best not to prematurely project a narrative onto news events. But at the same time, it's hard not to see certain connections.

In the same way that Travis Bickles in Taxi Driver came to represent a specific kind of post-Vietnam malaise and the quixotic male response to this malaise, the Christopher Cleary case seems to be so specifically of an era. This is 2019 in America writ large.

Alone and adrift in a world of ephemera, unable to find personal romantic or financial success, but inundated in images of the same, one particular man, in the grand tradition of failed men, threatened to translate that failure into violence towards women.

I am not trying to defend this would-be Elliott Rodger, and I'm not trying to sympathize with him, but I am trying to illustrate that there's something horrifyingly logical about how the whole series of events manifested itself.
 
I'm reading various articles in various outlets covering the issue. Regardless of format, every page is accompanied by "Sponsored Stories," in which everything is "legendary," "insane," "genius," "stunning," "tragic." Every stock visual, every aggregated piece of bullshit, every mindlessly assembled listicle, every thinly veiled scam masquerading as a news story that occurred just minutes from where you live, every EPIC WIN and TOTAL CRINGE all repeating themselves immediately below, the immense Ouroboros serpent of our image industry.

Fear of Flying

I had thought that Mitski's “Last Words of a Shooting Star” was a calming song to listen to while waiting at the gate, half-asleep, with its pretty guitar line, its quivering vocals, until I listened to the lyrics: “All of this turbulence was not forecasted, apologies from the intercom, and I am relieved that I left my room tidy, they'll think of me kindly when they come for my things, they'll never know how I'd stared at the dark in that room with no thoughts like a blood-sniffing shark, and while my dreams made music in the night, carefully, I was going to live.”

It's been a quick series of events lately. Time zones flash by. I see the world from above, when I'm lucky. Traces of snow over the Canadian prairies. Endless parched flatlands in Turkmenistan. A labyrinth of impossibly deep canyons somewhere in the Afghan desert which, if it was anywhere less remote, would be world-famous.

For various and complex reasons, I've been flying a lot. A total of 15 flights over the past three months, including three trans-Pacifics, one trans-Eurasian, and one trans-Atlantic – I'm counting that one because while Reykjavik is something of a halfway point, with its winter vibes and little bottles of brennivin at duty-free, my final destination was Chicago, so it was basically a trans-Atlantic.

Bangkok to Oslo, Oslo to Paris, Amsterdam to Reykjavik, Reykjavik to Chicago, Des Moines to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Seattle, Seattle to Taipei, Taipei to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Dallas, Dallas to Kansas City, Des Moines to Denver, Denver to Seattle, Seattle to Tokyo, Tokyo to Bangkok.

That's not to count the numerous trains, buses, courtesy shuttles, and long drives in private, taxi, and rental cars as part of the process, nor does it count the numerous taxi and subway rides that take up my life, given my choice of a city-center existence, which many would consider absurd given the fact that I'm rapidly approaching middle age.

I am flying by air not just because I love travel – which I do – but because of various personal reversals, and above all else, the fact that for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be somewhere else, whether that “somewhere else” is my adult self wondering where I'll move next, or my kindergarten self wishing he was digging up treasure and gunning down Nazis alongside Indiana Jones.

Probably the best-known movie about the fundamentally evasive nature of a life defined by travel, Up in the Air, wasn't an especially good movie – serviceable, but not especially good – but one thing it got consistently right was the dread feeling of transitory space, of departure lounges, airport bars, tinny music in Marriott Courtyards and Doubletrees, stodgy smoked salmon on stodgy bagels, of being simultaneously sleepless and tired as well as overcaffeinated and twitchy.

What I couldn't sympathize with though – although I realize it's regrettably a real thing – was the George Clooney character's obsession with the tangential benefits of travel, the accumulations of frequent flyer miles and platinum cards, the rights to use express lanes and VIP rental cars, all the little titles granted to little men with business cards.

For someone who loves travel, I hate flying, always have. This is not an original idea – most people do, I think. The uncomfortable seats, the security lines, the constant reminders that I am a valued customer even as I'm treated like a veal calf. And the perks and add-ons, even when I get them, fail to comfort me. From the moment I enter the queue at check-in, I feel as if I am entering the vortex.

I come out hours later. Generally, if I'm flying clockwise I'm fine, but counterclockwise, I'm likely to be in trouble. I carry that weird, jittery energy out with me, and small things seem ready to set me off. Maybe it's the falling concrete that forms the “wall” of the metro station at Barbès-Rochechouart in Paris. Maybe it's the ersatz localism at Chiang-Kai Shek Airport in Taipei. Or maybe it's the Dad humor scrawled next to the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny drop at a store on the drive in from the Kansas City Airport after a 24-hour series of flights -- “Take a penny, that's fine. Take two, get a job!!!” – while the local constabulary busied itself harassing a random black man in the parking lot.

After flying, all seems to be a disgusting, farcical facsimile.

I thought I was fine, after my time in the vortex ended. I thought I had, more or less, beaten jet lag. I thought I had balanced the appropriate quanta of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, THC, CBD, alprazolam, and melatonin that would ensure a graceful dismount, a return to everyday life. A swim, a little bowl of noodles for breakfast, a bottle of vodka to infuse with guavas, mastic resin, and cedar tips.

When I arrive in Bangkok, I find a city trapped under a thick blanket of smog as the cooling winds from the Sea of Japan failed to blow in, a high-pressure zone preventing the normal particulates – organic molecules from vehicle exhaust, heavy metals, and the like – from rising and dispersing, with talks of cloud-seeding operations to relieve the Beijing levels of industrial hydrocarbons in the atmosphere.

And on Saturday night, when I went to bed, I quickly lost myself in an 18 hour passout, not waking up until after sunset the following day.

I tried and failed to fall asleep the following night. “Well, another long dark night of the soul,” I told myself, my own bed-gnawing misery probably bearing little in common with what Saint John of the Cross had in mind when he'd coined the term la noche oscura del alma.

But when the sun rose, and I was still whole, if sweaty and on edge, before my apartment building was shaken by the sudden roar of helicopters.

Lying there, I thought of the climax scene of Through a Glass Darkly, the spider crawling through the wall, the helicopter flying past, the door opening with no one behind it. Karin, our heroine in the midst of her stands up calmly before running into the corner, screaming.

I was frightened. The door opened. But the god that came out was a spider. He came towards me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face.

Was the door open, more now than the night before? And was that a spider on the far wall, descending between the curtain and the first shaft of morning light?

Montmartre

Perhaps it's the memory I return to the most. I'm 16 years old, the summer heat is stifling – it's 2003, a year of record heat over much of the region. The elderly are dying, forests are on fire. And yet here, above Paris on the heights of Montmartre, on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, I can breathe, and a gentle breeze is blowing over a cityscape bristling with steeples and chimneys, a light smell of jasmine on the wind. The sun is slowly setting over the Champs-Élysées, guitarists play, couples hold each other, and I'm away from home, with the money I've squirreled away from summer farm jobs, and I read the line from Italo Calvino that makes me gasp:

“An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects – the oracle replied – has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.”

The bells clang as the sun disappears, a collective sigh, and the awkward American teenage boy knows he will be thinking of this forever.

The name “Montmartre” had always held some magic for me. As a young child, I saw reproduced images of the paintings of Maurice Utrillo, showing the haunted-looking streets of the neighborhood, in a light that could be either dusk or dawn. And not long after, I remember being at some pâtisserie in some American city – and seeing an elegant-looking pastry called a Montmartre, next to the little Sachertortes and Réligieuses and other things that I'd never heard of.

The name retained its cachet, something about its association with various -isms of the artistic and philosophical worlds, even in the way some kind of vague notion of Parisian bohemianism was presented to us in the moronic textbook sidebars in high school French class (you know the kind – “C'est Patrick. Il est un élève. Il aime aller au café”).

But it wasn't until I climbed those steps, saw the city laid out before me, and just as important, sat down with the book that would probably inform my life and thinking more than any other, that the name truly meant something to me.

So it was preserved in amber for me for so many years, another sepia-toned memory of another place, another time.

I come up the stairs at the Pigalle station in October 2018, into a light rain after a long journey.

Part of me was somehow expecting the worst, and the din of voices of 20 year olds from my homeland wasn't helping. Nor was the Steak 'n Shake that had popped up on the Boulevard de Clichy. Nor was the self-conscious supposed naughtiness of Pigalle, nor the crowds of mouthbreather tourists coming out of the Moulin Rouge, expecting whatever ooh-la-la bullshit the came to Paris for.

I walked around town all of the next couple of days. A lovely meal of rabbit in mustard sauce and escargots à la gascogne, balanced with the motherfucker who caught my jeans on a metal bar, ripping the knee open. Curling up with a book at Shakespeare & Co., knowing full well that James Joyce almost certainly had sat there, balanced out with the braying crowds at the Musée d'Orsay of what I termed the 5Ms (that's Minnesotan Moms on a Mission for Monet and Merlot). The delight in the fact that the Panthéon was carefully restoring extensive murals of French victories over Moors and in the Crusades (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of casual racism and Islamophobia) and venerating the body of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of sexual deviants with grand and unworkable theories of human nature who wrote like whiny high school sophomores).

And at the end of the day, I walked back to the top of Montmartre.

I followed each street up, up, up, the chill of the fall evening setting in between the fairy-lit streets, the air of the neighborhood taking on that of a street carnival more and more. Groups of unbelievably attractive young people sitting on the steps drinking wine, a brass band, all in fezzes, playing a cover of Serge Gainsbourg's “Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus” (which Bangkokians may know as one of my 2:00 a.m. shitfaced-at-a-Japanese-karaoke-bar standards). And lastly, at the very crown of the hill, pop-up stands selling wine and regional foods, singers and guitarists, a beardy hypeman in a striped Breton shirt (Mr. Too Damn French over here) getting in some crowdwork.

What shocked me the most was that these didn't seem to be tourists. None of the conversation was in English. This wasn't the image of the city, it was the city itself.

The next day, I climbed the steps again, to say my goodbye to the place. It was a different Montmartre, the Montmartre of quiet, swept streets and the smell of morning baguettes, the Velvet Underground's “Sunday Morning” drifting from a cafe. On the steps made famous by Brassaï's photos, the assorted detritus of the previous night littered the stairs, broken glasses and wine bottles, a few revelers still up, a XXXtentacion (of all people) song playing from an open window, disembodied voices.

That week, Paris had decided it was in mourning for Charles Aznavour, the father of French chanson, and a singer whom I never quite understood the appeal of. But his 1965 hit about life in Montmartre, “La Bohème” was a hit because the bohemia he sang about was the nostalgic one everyone had thought/wished they had had, once, even if the ending line was a bit of a screw-you.

La bohème, la bohème
Ça ne veut plus rien dire du tout

“It means nothing at all,” he sings, the closer to line after simpering line about lilacs and café au lait.

I don't think anyone can say much of anything new about Paris. It's like New York. Most of the time someone tries, it comes across like a voiceover from Gossip Girl.

My feelings are the same, as rapturous as they might be.

The unfailingly arrogant and tiresome Ernest Hemingway famously called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it has always struck me more as a Xanadu, a place always beyond the horizon for us homely, try-hard self-loathing Americans.

And yet up on the now-deserted steps in the morning sunlight, I didn't want to leave. Sighing, I walked back down the hill, gathered my bags, and took the Métro to the Gare du Nord, looked at my ticket. Bruxelles-Midi. A new country. I took my seat and set off north.

A Eulogy

I was hesitant to write anything about the recent death of my father. After all, the topic of the death of a parent in the long form just seems like such a heavily covered topic that has become one of the great banalities of the modern novel or New York Times-baiting work of creative nonfiction. Furthermore, it's such an intensely personal topic that to write about it at length seems somewhat dishonest, with the danger of turning the intense complexities of human life into a lame biography filled with platitudes. Conversely, to write a short-form reminiscence, while a seemingly more appropriate and universal expression of grief, just isn't me. I don't do brevity well.

And yet writing was the thing I did that my late father seemed proudest of, and to not cover the subject of his death – and I want to say death, not that horrifically deceptive term “passing” – would be a sin of omission, a failure to act when I was perhaps most obligated to do so.

So who was the late Giles Fowler? I could mention the inevitable boxes to be ticked – father, aesthete, professor, journalist, jazz lover, travel junkie, Southern gentleman – but all of these social roles come off as hollow, prepackaged tropes.

As his son, I saw everything through a son's eyes, the kind that start as fawning admiration, turn into a brief “fuck you” at some point in adolescence, before mellowing into something more nuanced. He wasn't a particularly closed-off man, and as anyone who knew him would tell you, he was always at the ready with a witty story from his long and varied life. But what I see still has an angle, an angle made up of personal memories, of old photos, of narratives told, of bits I wasn't supposed to see but saw anyway.

At some point, I picked up a dog-eared and forgotten book about Middle American culture written when Middle America was at its Keynesian peak, a kind of book we don't see too much of anymore – too functionalist or structuralist or old-school humanist in its analysis, too many claims to metanarratives, not enough pathos to find a mainstream publisher, not enough Foucauldian (on one side) or evo-psych (on the other) analysis to find an academic publisher. My answer as to why it was even there was a line I remember describing my old man as “Giles Fowler, one of America's young, hip, dangerous film critics.” And all I could think was him? The man shining his shoes in his sweatpants yelling “That fucking Rumsfeld!” at 60 Minutes.

All I can think of is the scene in the first season of Six Feet Under where Nate, reeling from the death of his father and trying to settle his accounts, smokes his late father's weed in his late father's secret man cave above an Indian restaurant, imagining his dad ripping bongs with bikers, getting a beej from a hooker, firing a sniper rifle from the windows as the Amboy Dukes' “Journey to the Center of the Mind” plays on an old record player, wondering who his dad was when his dad wasn't being a dad.

But of course there were the stories I knew of my dad as my dad, the sorts that will live on fondly, that I'll tell other people, and while I'll probably never have children of my own, they are the sorts of stories I would tell them. Of him telling me the difference between a classic dry and a Gibson martini while he gave me a bath. Or how Hemingway's writing was like a Cézanne painting on the way to school. Or asking me as a college freshman if PCP-laced weed was still a thing, with the honest, non-judgmental curiosity of a man who had seen the beats, the hippies, and the punks all come and go, and assumed the bohemianism of my own generation would, like any other, have its own linguistic, sartorial, aesthetic, and narcotic standards, which he had been around the block too many times to be shocked by.

And last of all, of springing him for the night from the rehabilitation facility where he was, we thought, recovering from a nasty full-body infection, a faux-colonial building by the side of Highway 69 where ancient men in baseball caps watched reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond in a stupor in a lounge that smelled of instant mashed potatoes, to get him back to the world of the living and lift up his spirits, to take him out for a hanger steak and an illicit cognac sidecar. He talked about his prognosis, which was then looking quite positive, about his delight that he wasn't too ill to submit an absentee ballot against Steve King, about how glad he was that his two eldest sons, both of whom lived in other countries, could be back at the same time for a visit.

I flew out the next day, and a week later he was gone.

I'm now left with my memories, a fair bit of the sort of haze that comes in the wake of a loss, and I'm listening to a Coltrane album he loved, drinking Bulleit – a personal favorite of his – and I find one of his last emails, mentioning a trip he had just taken to see the homes and graves of his ancestors in Pettis County, Missouri, where his people come from:

“A lot of ghosts in that town – men in straw hats and white suits and women in filmy finery drinking highballs on the Staffords' lawn across the street from Granddad's. Strange that I was alive there.”

I'll miss you, Dad.

The Nostalgia Industry

Nostalgia is a bitch. You have something so personal, so confined to one's own field of view and one's own experience, and suddenly you find that your nostalgias have been transformed into commodity, part of the nostalgia machine.

At least that's the way it was the first time I heard Green Day on the classic rock station, on an icy day in the mid-2000s on the boom box in my dorm's bathroom while I was shaving. It was official. An element of my childhood had become a commodity, or rather, it was revealed as the commodity it always had been, now hermetically sealed and fitting in comfortably on an FM radio station for aging boomers, less talk, more rock.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Lizzy Goodman's excellent Meet Me in the Bathroom, the recent oral history of the New York rock scene from the late '90s through the late '00s, from its early precursor in Jonathan Fire*Eater up through around the time I graduated from college, and the transformation of the Lower East Side and then Williamsburg from shooting galleries to the sanitized rock and roll theme park they are today.

It was almost inevitable reading it that I started listening to albums I hadn't listened to in years, albums I'd once held very close to my heart – The Strokes' Is This It?, Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights, The Walkmen's Everyone Who Pretended to Like Us Is Gone, The Rapture's Echoes (while confirming that I still couldn't stand Vampire Weekend or most of LCD Soundsystem's discography). Each contained a memory – memories of dances with vodka bottles in the snow, Nag Champa incense in shared houses, an empty pack of Turkish Silver cigarettes on a well-worn Modern Library edition of The Trial, bags of mushrooms stuffed into empty canisters of Republic of Tea jasmine green.

I first developed a musical consciousness of the sort I can actually look back fondly upon in those heady days when Limewire was the download technique du jour, and the industry was still trying to peddle garbage albums for 15 dollars at Sam Goody on the strength of one modern rock radio staple single.

It wasn't a great time for American pop music. The rock charts were dominated by inoffensive trash like 3 Doors Down (bands with numbers in the name tend to suck, from Three Dog Night on through 21 Pilots) and moronic nu-metal bands, the pop charts were full of hip-hop in its worst phase, the phase of Ja Rule and “Drop It Like It's Hot”-era Snoop, and like so many American teens – the sort that now contribute infinite Youtube comments – I decided that the best days of music had basically ended with Nirvana, and the heights of the Beach Boys, Public Enemy, Otis Redding, and the Dead Kennedys could never be summited.

So when I discovered the wilder, weirder world of what was going on in New York, and in Montreal, Oslo, Reykjavik, Athens GA, I went in with all the enthusiasm that only a 16 or 17 year old can muster.

Of course I was far too earnest in my disposition to be cool. Which is why I don't want to let this devolve into yet another meditation by an aging hipster on sex, drugs, and rock & roll. The world has too much of that as it is.

And eventually, as with all things, the wave receded, and I cared more about other things than about hearing new albums a month before their official release date, even as much as I might be crushing on the latest album by Mitski or Angel Olsen.

As that wave receded, likewise, the music world moved on, with the sort of rock music that I found particularly endearing becoming less and less relevant to the discourse. The latest wave of SoundCloud rappers, themselves remarkably informed by those same shitty nu-metal bands and Dirty South platinum enthusiasts that annoyed me as a teenager, by and large do next to nothing for me, with some notable exceptions, and I realize more and more that I'm not of a demographic that anyone is interested in, and that's fine. I'm getting older, and I'm not supposed to like Post Malone. When I was younger I figured that at a certain age, you stopped caring about musical trends, and you instead settled in for a long engagement with the past, confined to your echo chamber, as reactionary as that may be.

Hell, rock music has itself largely become a reactionary genre, with its most ensconced forms becoming the soundtrack of the so-called silent majority that has never been either silent or a majority, with good times and great oldies! becoming what is in essence a conservative reaction to newer forms of predominantly black music. When Jimi Hendrix played his version of the national anthem at Woodstock, it was revolutionary. Now it would fit in with Rush Limbaugh throwing the opening pitch at a Cardinals game, just like how Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused riots upon its opening, but not long later was used by Walt Disney in Fantasia. A supposed postmodernism eats itself just as readily as a supposed modernism.

The fruit of that reaction can be found in the infinite number of obnoxious “don't make 'em like they used to” Youtube comments made by soapboxing boomers and gen X-ers (as well as younger commenters who are upvoted for espousing nostalgia for a time they never knew, echoes of my own early adolescence there), and my generation is quickly en route to doing the same.

Now would be a good time to point out that what I liked about the Lizzy Goodman book was its refreshing refusal to play the nostalgia game, even if the nostalgia was probably a salient marketing point for its publisher.

So when the nostalgia industry will start using my youth as grist for its mills in a few years, all I can do is to hold my very individual memories dear, and tell anyone trying to sell me a variant to fuck right off.

The American Political Book

All books have a half-life, but political books seem to have the shortest half-lives.

I reached this conclusion upon deciding not to read grand magister of American journalism Bob Woodward's latest installment in the "Why Trump Sucks" book series (reports on which have been dominating my news feed for the past year or so), Fear. Part of this is simply that I need no reminder that the current commander-in-chief is an illiterate, reactive oaf. This is pretty fucking self-evident. And part of the reason that I don't pay attention to my news feed anymore is that I need no further reminders of this, nor do I have much patience for the various encomia to only marginally less repulsive figures (looking at you, Comey).

But political books have, by and large, always been awful, given that they are usually designed to either rouse up the base or address hyper-specific moments rather than engage in the sort of deep, long-term analysis and study of historical, cultural, social, economic, environmental, and indeed political trends that make up any kind of real look at the world in which we live. They seem to come into two types.

- Type 1: The Airport Bookstore Version

This version seemed to be omnipresent in the Bush years, both in its liberal versions (such as those by well-meaning amphibian Michael Moore) and its conservative versions (by Sean Hannity or any other American flag lapel-pinned slug-humans who blather on about freedom while happily taking it in the ass from whatever loathsome authoritarian comes their way). You know the type, with the picture of the smiling pundit on the glossy cover and the supposedly incendiary title, jeremiad prose, and lots of floating-block insets of text with glib asides that make the whole damn thing look like “Talking Points for Dummies,” ideal for the sort of reader who buys books not because they enjoy reading but because it was written by their favorite cable news talking head.

- Type 2: The Insider's Approach

These books usually have a plain-ish cover and a tasteful font, I guess to indicate that these are Real Books, and quite often have forewords by US senators. Extensively footnoted and decorated with fleurons at the beginning of each chapter, these are longer-form versions of the sorts of articles that appear in the Atlantic or National Review that address specific policy issues, and extrapolate to reach the conclusion that resolving this one particular issue will, in some way, fix everything. The authors are largely DC types for whom the lanyard is the equivalent of a teardrop tattooed under the eye, and who spend a lot of time talking about “healing America's political divide,” whatever that means.

What connects the two, other than the subject matter, is their intellectual myopia. By failing to examine the breadth of history or ask the necessary and uncomfortable deep questions about the nature of the discourse which we conduct, what we are left with are the hollow cheers and boos of the political class at one very specific moment in time, and they are painfully out of date within months of their release.

But this is to be expected, given the denigrated nature of the public sphere (although “denigrated” makes it sound like there was a golden age, which there wasn't, and if you don't believe me, read Dwight MacDonald's “Masscult and Midcult,” a thorough skewering of the middlebrow faves of the 1950s). Blowhards and Ted-talkers like Jordan Peterson, Thomas Friedman, or David Brooks have the right appearance of authority (elderly white men in suits, frequently bespectacled) and the right jargon to be anointed as serious intellectuals by a public that has, by and large, never bothered to understand the humanities and social sciences in any meaningful way. Sure, there's a lot of very justified frustration nowadays with the rise of Internet conspiracy theories and clickbait journalism, but so many of the same people who get in a tizzy about these things are just as likely to be taken in by these fucking hucksters.

For a long time, I felt the need to keep up with these things in the spirit of being an informed citizen. But then again, I don't go to Marvel movies because, no matter how big a part they are of the dialogue at large, I don't care about how the magic man feels sad even though he's magic. And likewise, I don't care to read some commentator's painfully oversincere takes on the past week and what it means for America.

But when I read a book by David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon or Joan Didion, then everything becomes crystalline, and it does so because, while very much of a time, it is ruthless in its analysis. Or if I do want to read something explicitly political, I'll have a look at any article in the Jacobin, which in one issue contains more wisdom, insight, and analysis than the complete oeuvre of a mediocrity like Chris Hedges or Bill Maher.

And therein, I think, layeth the path to liberation. Not in any political sense, mind you, but psychically. To be both more able to comprehend the world around me more clearly and to engage in a more meaningful dialogue, I have to turn off the white noise, and while the world is not necessarily any prettier, it is freer of artifice. And damn, the clouds are nice this afternoon.

A Volcanic Island

I arrived in Jeju, halfway between Japan and the Korean peninsula in the midst of a heat wave. I'd known that this wasn't an ideal time to travel in this part of the world, especially given my love of autumns in East Asia, but I'd feared typhoons more than anything else. Which was why I didn't go to Taiwan or Okinawa or Luzon, all other options I'd considered, but here.

It's a peculiar little island, well-known in this part of the world owing to its frequency as a setting in KBS soap operas, but completely obscure outside of it. I knew little other than that it looked pretty, with a complex volcanic landscape, that flights were cheap, and that I had a few days to spare. So with little preparation, I packed up my tweed suitcase, downed three Tigers, an Asahi, and a Gordon's and tonic, and boarded a redeye.

The heat of more continental climates is somehow more oppressive than the tropics, where the sultry humidity is balanced by afternoon showers. It's a heat and a sunlight I'd largely forgotten, that I associate with the Middle American landscape I grew up in. I'd forgotten the sort of heat that demands an ice cream after a long walk more than a beer, the sort of heat that leaves sweat streaming down my face instead of lightly gathering at my temples.

And in spite of it, I did what I always do when I travel by myself, and, as so often occurs, I'm not really sure what the fuck I'm doing where I am -- I wandered.

Of course, I did the expected tourist things -- I saw the mountains, the crater lakes, the lava tubes, the “sea” of fir trees, the waterfall where the sage Xu Fu reflected on his journeys, having been sent by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang to look for the elixir of life, and where he finally said “fuck this,” sparked a fat blunt, and booked it back to the motherland.

And I ate the expected regional dishes, the abalones and the sea urchin noodles. I drank makgeolli, the viscous rice wine of the region, flavored with peanuts and with local Hallabong oranges. I had the famous barbecued black pork, which tasted like any other decent quality pork. And most memorably, I went to the central fish market for a raw fish feast, where the ajumma in charge insisted on rubbing her mitts all over my sashimi, wrapping it into shiso leaves and spreading it with ssamjang to show me how to eat it properly.

But to talk about all these things is to miss the heart of the place. They are the window dressing, the superficial level. What interested me far more were the micro-textures of the island.

Each evening, I walked down the road past the city hall, past rows of concrete buildings with makeup shops blasting Seoul's latest pop anthems, chicken-and-beer joints, shuttered storefront evangelical churches, posters for sex shows, all the trappings of a provincial Korean town. Night after night, I watched the waves crash over the breakers in the harbor, young couples on dates, groups of friends drinking on tarps, black cars gathered outside the casinos with signboards showing grotesquely made up lady croupiers, tinny electronic music pulsating from the rooftop discos on the hotels with their bisexually pink and ice-blue floodlights, all punctuated with the screams from the kids on the boardwalk rides, the flashing neon of the seafood palaces reflecting across the harbor.

And then I walked back up the hill, to a sort-of-dive bar that had a selection of local craft beer -- the kind of “American”-themed joint that has Texas truck license plates on the wall, chips with “guakkamol” on the menu, and the world's last surviving Big Mouth Billy Bass, something like a diner in Arkansas filtered through a Chili's filtered through the Republic of Korea – to write down my impressions, and to read my book for the journey, Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever, an account of Andrew Cunanan's youth defined by a spiderweb of infinite lies, culminating in a murder spree across the country ending in Miami Beach, where he hid out at a hotel that:

“... was faced partly in black glass, and had a ground floor of vacant storefronts. As with many buildings in Miami Beach, it was impossible to tell whether the Clarion Suites was being finished or undergoing an extremely languid demolition.”

A blank spot on a map for Westerners, a dramatic landscape immortalized in film and television for millions of Asians, and for Koreans, their personal Blackpool or Jersey Shore, connected to Seoul by the world's single busiest air route.

I thought it made sense, more or less.

I got to the airport, having had a nice trip, ordered a drink, and turned on the in-flight entertainment.

What I didn't know was that the hills I traipsed around held a secret. In 1948, under the auspices of the Syngman Rhee government, and concomitantly that of my own country, more than 10 percent of the island's residents were slaughtered, with whole villages on the slopes of Hallasan burnt to the ground, their bodies thrown in those lovely craters. A further several thousand fled to Japan, where many of them were fully radicalized, a number of their modern descendants still forming a miniature resistance group adhering to the Juche ideal, widely mocked by the rest of the world, and frequently harassed by Japan's version of 4chan lowlifes. And those who survived the purge and remained in Korea are still awaiting compensation, even as the Seoul authorities gleefully brand Jeju “the island of world peace.”

We form our ideas about what something is, and history always manages to thrust the knife into your gut.