For reasons I don't fully understand, |
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this summer was one of the fastest summers I’ve ever experienced. The same’s happening for the fall, but I know exactly why. My younger kids are doing out-of-school activities three days a week, including Saturdays; my wife and I are each going to the gym three days a week, including Saturdays; and after probably two and a half years where we were punctilious about testing and masking whenever we socialized outside of the immediate family, we let up in early 2023 and have been compensating for the social deprivation by sending the kids to all the playdates and birthday parties time would permit.
There are, of course, no more hours in the day. We all work or go to school full-time. I’m going to a local writing group once a week for three hours, but the daily writing practice is getting really hard to maintain.
Which is all, if not the champagne problem, at least let’s call it the Martinelli’s problem of being a well-compensated knowledge worker with a thriving young family who for some reason continues to insist on pursuing a side hustle that doesn’t fund more than a case of beer in a good month. It’s hard to complain, and that’s not really my objective.
But it does bring some extra… depth? To what I’ve been reading lately.
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What I've been reading lately |
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TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, by Gabrielle Zevin. A novel about the rise, from the late ‘90s to the late 2010s, of a fictional gaming company, told mostly through the eyes of its two founders, Sam and Sadie. There’s a little bit of will-they-won’t-they around Sam and Sadie, and I won’t say whether they do or don’t; but whether or not, the intensity of their relationship is forged in a months-long crunch during a break from college when they create their first game, which launches their careers. Gabrielle Zevin is about 5 years older than me and is writing about a Harvard-MIT tech scene that I caught whiffs of secondhand from an MIT student I was dating in the late 90s.
SOLANIN, by Inio Asano. A self-contained manga about a young couple, Meiko and Taneda. Meiko’s supporting both of them by working a soulless entry-level office job, Taneda’s trying to start a career in music. Meiko finally gets fed up with her job and quits, with Taneda’s sort of terrified support; but unlike Taneda, Meiko doesn’t have a specific focus for her energies, and the book gradually winds through the tensions and problems inherent to the situation, although there’s a shock halfway through that puts things on a very different track. Asano is exactly my age. “Solanin” appears to refer to the poison found in nightshades; this isn’t ever explicitly referenced in the book, which is named after a song Taneda writes, although you can argue that thematically it more or less works.
BLUE PERIOD, by Tsubasa Yamaguchi, translated by Ajani A. Oloye. I’m four volumes into this manga, which runs fourteen volumes as I write and is ongoing. It’s about Yatora Yaguchi, a high school student who’s good at academics but not particularly interested in it, only to find he has a passion for art… but no particular talent for it, as he sees it. He’s from a poor family, and art school tuition in Tokyo is expensive, so he resolves to get into TUA, the only art school in Tokyo with affordable tuition… which, of course, every other art student in Tokyo is also trying to do. (Yamaguchi is a graduate of the same school, and there’s a lot of exposition about the economics and admissions processes of art school in Japan that Western reviewers on average don’t seem to appreciate.)
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The obvious common theme here is: Young people throwing caution to the wind and diving into art.
There are differences too, of course. T&T&T is about passion for the work, but it’s also very much about relationships, and not all the nice kind: For every deep and passionate emotional connection, there’s a transactional connection, sometimes (maybe always?) between the same two people. Love, sex, art, and friendship are tangled with privilege, authority, and access to resources in ways that are never clean, and the realness of that entanglement is a lot of what’s great and difficult about the book.
BLUE PERIOD, OTOH, is a little bit about privilege, but mostly as a plot constraint: Yatora has to get admitted to TUA or give up on an art education. The real tension driving BLUE PERIOD is whether, and to what extent, dedication can substitute for talent—and what the markers of talent actually are. Yatora is constantly comparing his art to others’, making fine (and harsh) judgments about the level he’s at and the levels he has yet to achieve. He learns from others, but all the real battles are with himself, and maybe with the TUA admission exams. He decides pretty early that all he can do is work as hard as possible, and his volume of production does a lot for him at first, although there are hints where I’m at (vol. 4) that this won’t carry him all the way to where he wants to be.
But T&T&T and BLUE PERIOD are both very much about what it’s like to spend a chunk of your youth on art, and to a lesser extent about the concessions and sacrifices of spending your life on it. SOLANIN takes the idea of a life in art as almost an impossibility… which is at least a small irony in retrospect, given that Asano appears to have been publishing professionally in manga since he was 20 and was declared “a voice of his generation” when he was 30. But it’s fair for outliers to understand they’re outliers, and folks who know more than me say that SOLANIN itself was his breakthrough. What SOLANIN covers that the other two books don’t is the uncertainty of youth—what life is like when you don’t have much money and you don’t have a burning passion to fuel your every move. Taneda is serious about his music, but it doesn’t structure his life the way art does Yatora’s—and Taneda isn’t the main character in SOLANIN; Meiko is. She sees his art mostly through the lens of their relationship… although what that looks like evolves as the series unfolds. But at a basic level, art in SOLANIN is understood to live in between the other things people need to do to survive.
This is reflected in an interesting parallel moment in T&T&T; in each book, our heroes are presented with an opportunity conditional on a compromise, but they accept it in T&T&T, and in SOLANIN they turn it down. Both books deal intelligently with the consequences—and in particular, neither one offers any easy lessons about how you can stick to your convictions and still have it all. But it’s hard to escape the sense that, in SOLANIN, going commercial would have been giving up by another name.
And then there’s another thing all the books have in common: None of them is about a middle-aged guy with a family who’s still pursuing this thing he started working on in his 20s, even as it hasn’t really materialized.
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It sure feels like this book exists. Maybe I’ve even read it? And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily have to. It feels like one of the minor modes of mid-twentieth-century literary fiction, the kind of thing that would include extramarital sex with college students and other ungraceful acts of (sorry) self-insertion.
Which is a slightly too handy self-dismissal. I mean, I’m not necessarily the one who’s going to write that book well, and there are plenty of ways to write it badly. But…
… I don’t know. I’ve taken this in a few different directions and it all ends up in navel-gazing and self-pity. Which is honest enough, feelings-wise; but I don’t think that needs to go out to you.
Maybe all I really want to do is just say, for a moment, that it’s hard, filling these scattered minutes with writing instead of rest or entertainment. My life, in general, is not hard; but this is. It’s hard, and it’s not terribly clear why I do it after all this time; and when I see Sam and Sadie, or Taneda, or Yatora, just fucking getting after it, I can see the timeline where I did the same thing as clean and clear as black ink on white paper, and for a second there’s nothing I want more than those sharp, graceful lines.
You can make fiction out of ink and paper, of course, and those lines I’m yearning for are absolutely that. Sam and Sadie, Taneda, Yatora, all built from the same stuff. But the stuff of our lives is a little less obliging.
So if you, perhaps, have something in your life that is like writing is in mine, that thing that you preserve and pour your time into even as everything else threatens to crowd it out, that thing that asks for everything and returns what feels like so very little...
... I mean, I'm not going to tell you to stick with it. Maybe we should both be smarter about how we use these precious, crumbling moments under the stars. But you can go to bed knowing there's at least one person out there who's at least as dumb as you.
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- As of about three weeks ago, I'm on Bluesky and, for the moment, active. No guarantees that continues to be the case; but, right now at least, it's giving me big 2015 Twitter energy, and that's an energy I mostly enjoy.
- Although I should be editing HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT, I'm going to spend November grinding out the first few thousand words of SNOWDRIFT STARLIGHT, my whoopsie baby. ETA on HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT right now is probably spring; stay tuned.
🖊️,
Matt
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