Internet Time Capsule #42: You Wouldn't Let It Lie
“In due time, the meerkats accept me. I flick my ears back and forth to say thank you.” — Evan Williams and Ruby Rorty, ‘Feeling Small,’ HAD.
I hope the narrative flows of fascism that are out there in the world don’t find future hold in the way that the past occupant of the White House was able to harness certain narrative flows that existed within the internet, the Republican Party, and elsewhere. (See — for point of immediate reference — the way in which Biden called ‘some members of the Republican Party semi-fascist,’ which set off paroxysms of working the media ref; the way in which major U.S. news networks all carried King Charles’s first speech but didn’t carry Biden’s primetime address to the nation on internal extremist threats to democracy; the occasional absurd TikTok video; the return of Satanic Panic; Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis engaging in human trafficking; and the way in which The Washington Post published an unsigned editorial explicitly citing Chile sitting upon the world’s largest supply of lithium as reason to be concerned about a constitutional referendum that sought to grant social rights, gender parity, indigenous rights, and to protect the environment.)
A SHORT REMEMBRANCE. Ken Starr wasted our time. Many learned from this. (See — for instance — above.) Jean-Luc Godard did not waste our time. I don’t say this to imply that you can’t go around listening to a song like, ‘Come waste your time with me’ — it’s just that there are lots of different ways we can talk about our collective relationship to time.
“adam loses a bet, so i make him watch season one of the oc. he thinks i’m still in love with seth cohen and maybe he’s not wrong, but really i miss marissa cooper and all the disaster girls on tv—what happened to them? beach-blonde, wild and doomed, abundant in sadness—did no one want them around anymore? where have they gone?” — “MARISSA COOPER IS PROUD OF WHAT SHE DID AND SHE’D DO IT AGAIN,” Gauraa Shekhar, HAD.
Garth Miró sent me his galley of The Vacation. In true ‘What is time? What is a schedule? And, wait — what do you mean writers rely on editors and others to create a structure loosely resembling reality so their work can enter into the world in a semi-regular fashion?’ I’m only just getting to it now.
Here are a few out-of-context lines from the book:
Just mechanically-separated sandwich ham and low-rent apartments and pressed oxy crumbs and nothing, that was my soul.
— and —
The sun continued dripping its pretty pink pulp down our necks.
— and —
Became a gummy bear with a doll soul.
— and —
I saw a chiaroscuro nightmare of asbestos and instant mash potatoes and powdered milk and all the food came from powders and everyone was a car salesman.
More on Garth’s novel later.
This is a fun interview — we see explored the relationship to place over time, the idea of comedians as ghosts, the particular relationship between accents and identity that still exists in the UK, the ‘soft architecture’ of culture that can only be observed by being repeatedly exposed to a place for years, and more.
ELSEWHERE — Robbie Herbst recommends stuff beyond his most recent contribution to Hobart and this newsletter / Congrats to Denise and Seth! / “When private equity buys nursing homes, death rates go up 10%” — via / New music from Outer Wilds! / Mike Davis wants to remind you that despair is useless / An unexpectedly informative thread as to why Dr. Oz owns a farm in Florida / What is a woman? / El Pais on the death of Javier Marias (Spanish) / Aaron with a non-fiction piece about the past few years / Bill Hader Created A Killer To Cope / You can read and download the Abbott Elementary pilot script here / Mixing Comics and Literature in Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies /