je lis trop: plain white feeling

january essay on Catherine Lacey, digital billboards, mental space, Tokyo game parlors, and malicious outcomes of being good at email

I was in the evening hours, facing a busy intersection. A traffic jam was forming. People were going home… or someplace else. I was on my way someplace, too, and I wanted to cross the street. There was a digital billboard right in front of me. It was malfunctioning: the screen was split in half, one half showing the same commercial over and over again, the other one displaying some technical information, including the number of commercials set to run on this billboard. The number was thirteen.

That billboard reminded me of something: The cover of Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States. It shows a billboard in a plain field, set against the peaceful blue sky. The location is unclear, could be anywhere in the States. The billboard is missing some pieces. And for some reason, I find this image appealing.

Certain American States is a collection of short stories, twelve in total. American States are territorial units but they also refer to emotional circumstances. Lacey’s characters are lost in the real sense of the word. They are agitated, lonely, and disconnected. They have “newly broken” lives. They are “inappropriateness-seeking” and doing a lot of “never-minding”, pondering human relationships while comparing nutritional supplements on a shelf. They might have lying problems. They are often desperate. For example, “Learning” is a poignantly desperate story. A man teaches a watercolor class at a law school and he’s not successful, not at all, because he’s trying to teach a class that his students treat merely as a hoop to jump through so they can collect the necessary credits. But he cares about this class. At one point, he lies on the classroom floor out of desperation. Is there anything he can do?

In another story called “Family Physics”, the protagonist is fed up with being told that she’s “been going through a lot” (it’s true, she’s gone through a lot. But what exactly? I’ll leave that for you to discover). She’s fed up with listening to that phrase and she wonders: “Couldn’t a life of too many small, pointless things, a life dripping like a faucet, be, in many ways, so much more terrible?” I haven’t considered this before, but she has a point. Which leads to another question: what is a bearable life? Where’s the line between a too-bland life and a too-much-to-handle life? Does it truly all depend on how you treat the events that befall you, and is it your responsibility to attribute them meaning, even when you see none? “Maybe one shouldn’t lift the hood of some machines”, a man says in the last story of this collection. Interrogating emotional states is rarely easy. It could also turn out to be absurd. But I’ve always been compelled to do that.

Catherine Lacey is a contemporary writer who does interesting things with her writing, things you can be either be intrigued or annoyed by. For example, long sentences (“Violations”), brackets within brackets (“ur heck box”), or a story told in numerated fragments (“The Four Immeasurables and Twenty New Immeasurables”). I think that brackets within brackets within brackets are a lovely lovely thing (if not overdone), because they resemble a natural thinking process, with all the digressions and supplemental information. Long sentences, on the other hand, help the reader get into a certain obsessive rhythm, which is fitting to the story’s context (as in “Violations”, where the man is obsessively worried whether his ex-wife’s stories might be about him). My favorite stories from the book are “Violations”, “Learning”, “Family Physics”, and “The Grand Claremont Hotel”.

As I was crossing that busy intersection in front of the malfunctioning billboard, my thoughts lingered on Catherine Lacey, but not for too long. I was feeling overwhelmed and was thinking about rest and space. Mental space, to be more precise. Because I want to have more of it. It’s having mental space that allows ideas to spring up out of nowhere while you’re vacuuming the floor. One, or two ideas—really good ideas—shoot right to the surface of consciousness, ready to be picked up and used.

Here, I am compelled to mention Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use it, which must be the first self-help book in this newsletter. I am anxious about time, I want to pursue many different interests without losing any depth and always strive for something. But endless striving doesn’t necessarily lead me anywhere. The book shows the glaring absurdity of getting tedious tasks ‘out of the way’ before focusing on more challenging (but also more meaningful) work. I understood that it’s okay to dislike the calendar or a to-do list and it’s okay if I don’t want to build my life around them (people who know me, even if just a little bit, often assume that I love calendars and to-do lists and that’s false; I absolutely loathe them). I always knew that “missing out is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place” but refused to accept it. And I was surprised to realize that there was so little that I gained from being “good at email” since I was only creating more work for myself and building the unhealthy reputation of being responsive.

I’ve seen criticism that Four Thousand Weeks could’ve been a long article instead of a book. I don’t agree with it. First, I didn’t find it repetitive. Second, whatever repetition there was, it helped drive the message home. I accepted the fact that I don’t have time for absolutely everything I want to pursue. It’s a beautiful echo to what Clarice Lispector wrote in one of her crônicas: “But one lifetime is not enough to do everything we would like. There must always be a large dose of resignation.” Accepting this already seems to create more mental space and a sense of relief.

Walking further down the street among flickering billboards, I continued thinking about my various pursuits. One of them is learning Japanese (and I will not say no to it). Then I thought of Tokyo and game parlors. There’s a book that has both: Elisa Shua Dusapin’s The Pachinko Parlour. The story revolves around a young woman named Claire, who’s tutoring a ten-year-old girl. Claire is living with her grandparents who’ve lived in Tokyo ever since they fled the civil war in Korea. They’re operating a pachinko parlor in this city. Claire wants to visit Korea with her grandparents and therefore give them an opportunity to see their long-lost homeland. That’s the goal this foggy, elusive, melancholy story is running toward. 

When I first read The Pachinko Parlour, I didn’t connect with it. But because I decided to write about it, one evening I started flicking through the pages of the book. I analyzed sentences here and there, perusing their slightly chopped structure: “I look down at my tart. A single raspberry glistens atop a lump of whipped cream. Compact and rubbery-looking.” It turned out to be a warm half an hour of sitting on the floor and remembering bits and pieces of the story. It was an interesting reading experience, I might say. Even better than reading it the normal way. And there was a plain white feeling, fluttering in the room, making my worries recede into the background.