Posted on Wednesday, 08/24/22.

I spent the late afternoon reading a story by a former professor. The story contained all sorts of thin references to places on our mutual campus, where she had been an undergraduate also. In the story the speaker is at first a student and then a professor at their midwestern university too. The speaker is reserved, slightly aloof, perpetually unconvinced, and insecure only as far as they are convinced that their insecurity is not only justified but elevated: informed. She writes quite sparely, sometimes with the flavor of the words of people in their thirties. Careful curtness. A small number of basic swear words. A close eye for commercial products. A skepticism of people’s intentions. Thoroughly modern. I give the writing some charity because I feel like I know her but it is also transparently solid. People who were children in the 90s seem so sad, and the ones who read a lot of books to cope with it only got sadder still. She has some sort of benign predeliction for french inserts: words like repartee, canapés, jouissance, joie de vivre.

The following paragraph is a sentence from the story, which I found beautiful in isolate. It is a small disease to love lists of names like this. They are a common MFA trope, and easy to bash, easy to excise, but in my heart I allow them.

Flowers grew in the ditches, thistle and yarrow and hyssop, some sagebrush and chamomile, and she collected some.

This reminds me of the opening of The Pale King, which I’ve reproduced below.

… where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtain, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans …

People who know the names of things appear powerful to me. We are good at referring to objects but unless we are indentured to a trade we rarely learn the kind of nominative lushness that makes other people uncomfortable to witness. In truth though what I am in love with is the way that writers kleptomaniacally repurpose these terms, in much the same way that some serial killers are known to flay and wear their victim’s skin. It is wrong and shallow and largely purposeless, and thus possesses all of the textural aspects of a loveable thing. Like a wrinkly cellophane bag and the possible dopamine of asphyxiation. This sort of purposefully unuseful or aesthetically fatigued mode is some sort of shadow or sign for the sort of involuted fastidiousness that gives someone’s soul the enamoring illusion of total substance. Fractal dimension. Smoke and mirrors. It is why I care about things like the reanimation of the encyclopaedic novel. It is why I have been attracted, in the past, to regionally competitive science bowl participants, scrabble champions, and amateur horticulturists. I am some sort of epiepiphyte.

Low howling storms in the late afternoon were presaged by green darkness. Heavy rivulets from the windows’ tops to bottoms. The shhh of guttered water and the reverberation of tempered glass slapped by sound. Clouds so low the topography looked smoked or glazed. While walking in the early afternoon, before the weather hit, there was the smell of earth and vaporized water. I’ve been told that the cicadas 蝉. When they make sound the verb is 鳴く (to whine, chirp), which is homophonous to 泣く (to cry, as a child does). The corresponding onomotepia is usually ミンミン (min, min). will stop making noise soon; I am not sure if this means they will die, or hibernate, or simply move south. I am waiting for the trees to change, or for there to be a chill when I open my window. I am not sure what I am waiting for. I am waiting to know.

Before taking the bus to the research center, up in the mountains, I spent five minutes in the convenience store next to the bus depot; it was a Daily Yamazaki, which are relatively rare, and perhaps rivaled only by MiniStop in their novelty, barring a few local offshoots in the far peninsulas down south. I bought a small packet of candy because I wanted something small and bolus-like to consume between sips of coffee later in the day. Once I am in a place for two weeks I start to build causal chains of petite actions for comfort. Before leaving the house I placed two small coins in an accessible pocket from which I could pay for the candy easily. I have begun to organize things in grids on my desk for the morning. I have begun to take long looping walks around my apartment when I cannot be inside any longer, and have seen things like women riding bikes with empty children’s seats strapped to the back, old men collecting trash, a teenager trip and nearly fall on an errant curb, and a large stone cemetery surrounded by unoccupied lots filled with tall green grass.