#31: I Just Had To Get To Your Apartment
“Actually, she loved the bat. All that stuff about not loving the bat was a lie. Sometimes she really did pick it up and rock it in her arms like a baby.” — “The Bat” by Emily Ziffer, Hobart.
Part of the implicit, still relatively contemporary social structure of the internet is an updated version of ‘Don’t touch that dial.’ For all the attempted bites of the figurative apple taken by Patricia Lockwood (Nobody is Talking About This), St. Vincent (“Digital Witness”), Arcade Fire (“We Used To Wait”), Black Mirror, and more, we’re all still trying to eat an infinitely more bizarre, infinitely more self-aware apple. Like, that’s it. We’re here and we keep coming back here because something is about to happen. (This is to say nothing about ‘emotional acceleration,’ bubbles, and all the stuff we have become so familiar with since 2016.)
And I bring this up because it’s wild to me to take the structure of ‘Don’t touch that dial’ and revisit some of the earliest pages of the internet with that in mind, which you can either see here or through The Wayback Machine.
Because … this is it? Beyond the charm of seeing those old pages, beyond these pages being a lesson in ‘anything can come from anywhere at any time,’ I’m also thinking of how the Saxon Tower of St Michael at the North Gate in Oxford was built in 1040 and is still standing today. You can visit the Megalithic Temples of Malta and they were built in 3500 BC. The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine in the White Mountains in Inyo County in California is nearly 5,000 years old. The Pantheon in Rome has been a church since 609. There are businesses in Japan over 1,000 years old.
And, yes, the whole point of the internet is to move away from computers that filled entire rooms and made unsettling theistic statements to Dwight Eisenhower. (Or — at least — the point has been to move away from this experience for the individual user.) And, yes, there are server farms across the world whose visual arrangements make the imaginative leap taken by the television show Westworld seem reasonable. And, yes, I am well aware of how the reductive version of this argument is just, “Hey — did you know that things are old?”
But if the internet is a public utility — and it is — then where is the public representation of that? I can see the television and radio towers as plain as day when I’m driving through Richmond, Virginia. But where do we put the ‘net? Do we bring back public calendars hung up in town centers to track The Year Of Outrage the way Slate did in … 2014?
I’m not saying we should take all of the ephemera of the past 27-plus years and try and translate it into a piece of architecture — or move it all into some exceedingly material ‘materiality,’ but I still recall the experience of helping my Dad and others run wires through the ceiling of a local middle school when the local middle school was being wired for the ‘net for the first time; I still recall holding up the antennae on my grandparents’s television; and I don’t feel the same sense of satisfaction or ownership when I look at a line of code.
So what does this mean when I look at an earlier version of this newsletter? When I let the Ouroboros well and truly rip? Like —
But there is a counter-argument to be made that joy in literature is remarkably easy to achieve — and that it’s an easy argument to make, too, because what is an aesthetic choice if not a decision inextricably bound up with a certain kind of joy?
— would I want to hear more about this? Or more about Peter’s time in Turkey? Would I want to print one of these newsletters up and ask Taco Bell Quarterly to annotate it accordingly, just because?
Comfort is out, softness a thing / of shame. They have been supplanted / by a Pacific view, by injurious angles / and strawberry Seconals in the medicine / cabinet …” — “4 Poems” by Claire Cristoff, HAD.
“When the ultrasound technician adjusted the wand and said, ‘oop, it’s a boy’ my first thought, the first thing I said to my partner in the deliberately shadowed room was, ‘how do we raise a non-toxic white boy in the South?’”/ “I relate to so much of what you say about poetry as magic.” / Douglas Stuart on the Doocots / A review of Sara Baum’s latest / “I’m pretty sure Pete Buttigieg didn’t propose to his husband in a Taco Bell. But under the fluorescent lighting, and with the grease of our Fiery Doritos Locos Tacos starting to congeal even before we finish them, it feels right.” / Kali Fajardo-Anstine at the National Book Festival / Yanyi at Poets House /
“His brain works out loud, / Why can’t we lead off in my league? / Do you think the Pistons will be good next year? / Will everyone be mean in middle school?” — “2 Poems” by Mitchell Nobis, Hobart.