Featureless Feature

Features are on Mondays for now. Sometimes it's nice to not have to do a thing on Sundays. Regular posts will be T-F with the digest on Friday nights still. Thanks for reading.
-JA

I’m sick of reacting to the news. I had this whole mess queued up where I whine about Governor Whitmer capitulating to Trump and agreeing to build more warplanes and about how the auto economy is a vice worse than heroin and how Michigan will never be free or make progress if we can’t find more creative ways to live than through producing expensive machines no one really, if we’re being honest, needs to need as much as we do.

Now that the whole idea's been abandoned I don't have a theme. I’ve decided that’s fine. In the stories I've been working on I'm trying to get away from the habit of imposing artificial structures on everything. To be more organic. Less processed and locally sourced. Butchered while you wait.

A typical passage before edits from me these days looks like this:

So I went to the one grocery store on Rue Rachel where I know they have the portable little tearoff laundry soap sheets which are helpful and useful to have around when you’re living out of a suitcase and hopping across town to another studio apartment each month which would be romantic if I romanticized hoboes but I’m not into hoboes and anyway the more portable things like detergent are the better especially when you’ve been collecting small appliances to help you stay focused and stable in your daily life, like a miniature cooling tower fan thing to counteract the dampness of the basement apartment you’re sleeping in, or a sunlight panel to prop up on a chair in the morning to subsidize your need for natural light because you lived forty-five years on the planet Earth before recognizing that one of the many factors contributing to your difficulties, namely mood swings and seasonal depression, was a simple lack of exposure to solar radiation. Anyway that store didn’t have those kinds of tearoff laundry soap sheets anymore so I had to settle for a box of pellets and I hope you’ll pray for me that they work okay.

Here's my confession: my only concern on reading that over is whether hoboes has an ‘e’ in it or not. Otherwise I’m perfectly happy to spray verbiage in this format out into the universe and expect it to love me back for my efforts.

One of my favorite quotes from anything is from John Gardner’s Grendel:

“Surround him!” the king yelled, “Save the horses!”
–and suddenly I knew I was dealing with no dull
mechanical bull but with thinking creatures,
pattern makers, the most dangerous things
I’d ever met.

What interests me is the way our brains make connections. I think that’s our defining characteristic as a species. It’s what made us powerful and organized and what also, when corrupted, makes us dangerous and stupid as hell.

I believe in long, twisty, labyrinthine sentences that last for three days. Guys like Faulkner and Henry James wrote like that and it was in vogue for a while before the perversions of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop put young authors in a hairshirt and forbade them from using adjectives or dependent clauses or semicolons or expressing sentiment and we got a whole generation of prose that reads like you’re running your fingers over treated wood.

I also believe in the value of following someone else’s train of thought in order to understand them better. That’s literally how empathy works.

And I know autofiction is making a comeback and it’s probably pretty annoying for publishers and editors to have to sift through that stuff but the success of authors like Annie Ernaux and John Fosse (Nobeleates) means there’s some life in the genre. And besides who cares what the mode de la mode is anymore. Market trends are for functioning civilizations. Also I’m dismayed by how little I hear about Miguel de Unamuno, whom I discovered some twenty years ago and realized was the pioneer for a lot of stuff in the 20^th century that became revolutionary at the time but really wasn’t, like making yourself a character or starting out with a quotidian description of buying laundry detergent and then next thing you know you’re having an awkward conversation with a cop in a language you’re not quite fluent in so at first you think he’s accusing you of stealing the laundry pellets but then I realize gradually that he’s asking me for help, he’s trying to solve a mystery, and he’s showing me a photograph of a woman I actually think I recognize and I say yes, I saw her in the park this morning near the statue of George LeMarque Rabelais the Third and he says that’s a fine statue and I don’t have the heart to tell him I think it makes the guy look like an oaf but now we’re off on some adventure and if you’re still reading this I have to warn you that this is what a lot of this space is going to look like in the near future and I hope you stay with me because I love aimless walks and even more having someone along.