Don’t ever let anyone tell you that when you read a book there is no way you will see yourself reflected in the words on the page. Because that definitely happened to me this morning.
I was reading the novel The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, and I got to the part where the narrator describes his father, saying,
I knew that my father…was some sort of luckless failure before I knew what ‘failure’ meant, before I knew anything about money, status, power, fame or any of those coveted prizes whose myriad forms have led me throughout my life that dervish dance which is now, I trust, over. And of course when I say that my dear father was a failure I mean it only in the grossest worldly sense. He was an intelligent good man, pure in heart.
I can’t remember the last time I identified with a paragraph so completely.
Let this be all the evidence we need that books are good. Despite how most of the people in government couldn’t make their way through even an accessible but slow-paced novel like The Sea, the Sea from start to finish to save their lives—and I mean just reading one, not writing one—books like it have a lot to offer. Sometimes the author describes a loser in a way that evokes a kind of frisson, a kind of shiver of recognition that’s exactly what you need to get your heart started on a cold Tuesday morning.
Do I really think I’m a loser? Not on a cosmic scale. Not when it comes to, like, eternity.
Anyway, it took a few days for it to sink in, that the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute at the president's inauguration. He did it twice, in case you missed it, somehow, once to the crowd and once to the flag behind him. He did it again later, apparently, and now he’s telling Germans to put the Holocaust behind them, and dismantling the federal government.
I started to write this last week. At first, all I mentioned here at the start were the Nazi salutes.
Every day there’s more stuff I should mention. Like how the richest man in the world has enlisted the help of college boys to destroy the Department of Stuff That Helps People Out. They want to abolish the Department of Education next. I have kids who go to school. I went to schools, once, myself.
Is it time to buy a gun? I don't want to have a gun. But the president and his friends, who have more money than the rest of us have air to breathe, want people to get hurt. I might well be someone he wants to hurt. I might be the kind of guy whose life he’ll get around to destroying once he’s done some more ethnic cleansing and ended all taxation for anyone who owns their own boat.
I know that American history is soaked with the blood of mostly helpless people. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but the arc of American history will bend you until you break. It will take a long time, it will hurt, and as soon as they’re done with you they’ll start on your children.
It’s hard to come to terms with your own helplessness. Arming yourself doesn’t make you any less helpless.
I am, at the moment I write this sentence, at the luxury high school, which is not for the rich but is still a luxury. The same twenty or so students have been walking past the classroom where I am substitute teaching. They move in the same direction every time I see them. They have passed this room at least a half-dozen times.
There some of them are again. I don't know what is going on.
I was listening recently to the podcast The Culture We Deserve. They were discussing the film The Brutalist.
I haven't seen The Brutalist. I doubt I ever will. It sound boring, and it's three hours long. I don't have that kind of time on my hands. I haven’t done anything for a consecutive three hours in the last twelve years except work. I would say I have also slept for three consecutive hours in that period of time, but I’m honestly not sure I have.
There go the students again. Why is this happening?
It wasn't until I heard podcasters discuss The Brutalist that I learned its protagonist's name is Laszlo Toth.
I googled that name, and it turns out it belongs to the man who vandalized Michaelangelo's Pietà in 1972. I think he hit it with a hammer. I heard, once, that the founder of the City Museum in St. Louis was present for that event. I heard he helped stop the man from destroying the statue, and died later under strange circumstances.
Lazlo Toth is also the name of Don Novello's letter-writing alter ego. Don Novello is a comedy writer, who wrote for SNL, and made appearances on the show and elsewhere as Father Guido Sarducci. As Lazlo Toth, he wrote letters to presidents, corporations, and celebrities. He collected them in books, one of which I used to have.
The letters were funny, in the dry way that letters can be.
Is Laszlo Toth a common name? Is it the Mike Smith of another part of the world, somewhere? Like Hungary?
Am I the only one left who remembers the letter-writing Lazlo Toth?
And isn’t it strange, how everything seems to get heavier all the time? Every year, it’s like a dial has been turned up in a lab where ambitious scientists are meddling with forces they don’t understand.
I doubt I’m the only one who has wondered if Earth’s gravity is going up. I can’t be the only one who wonders if its grip on us is getting stronger.
I am not saying that is definitely what’s happening. And for all I know, it’s a natural process, like the changing of the seasons. Like, it could be a natural cycle.
And I’m sorry if this sounds bizarre—new information often sounds bizarre, before you metabolize it. But all of the evidence seems to suggest I am right about this. You hear about climate change all the time, how it’s getting hotter every year. No one breathes a word about what’s happening with gravity, despite how clearly it’s been increasing, gradually but notably, at least throughout my lifetime. Maybe for longer than that.
I, for one, know that every year I have to put air in my tires more often than the year before. That means more weight is being pressed down on the tires. That extra weight has to be coming from somewhere.
Then there’s the increased cost of airfare, which they say is due to increasing fuel costs. Why does it take more fuel to get from one place to another than it used to? What is the reason for that changing like it has?
And how long has it been since you did a pull-up? I am willing to bet if you’re in good enough shape to do pull-ups you don’t do as many now as you did this time last year, unless you’ve really been training and increasing your strength. There was a time when I could walk up to a pull-up bar and get myself up there at least once without a problem. That’s out of the question, now, and I’m not out of shape. I exercise every day.
Something has changed, and it’s definitely not me.
I have seen people mention stuff like this, here and there, on Facebook and Bluesky, but I don’t get the sense that anyone out there is connecting the dots like they ought to.
I know I would like to get answers. I would like for a public official to go on record, assuring us that the US government has not interfered with gravity on American soil. That might be enough to calm my suspicions, but to my knowledge no such statement has been made. No one has said a word about it.
Someone has to do something—and so, lately, when I’m not writing newsletters, I have been working on a formula for a possible—well, not a remedy, exactly, because there is no remedy for this kind of undermining of the forces of nature.
What I’m working on is more of a counterbalance. I am perfecting a medication in pill form that will alter the self-regulating capacity of the cytoplasm in the body’s cells, and make them resistant to whatever is being done to gravity. It won’t solve the problem—that will take more time, and will require some investment from concerned and informed members of the public. But these pills will stop the bleeding, so that we can at least learn what blade has cut us open and who has the knife in their hands.
We know it’s not the Bee Gees who are holding the knife. Some of the band’s most important members are dead, and I had no idea what they sounded like in their recordings that came before the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
I was really surprised, when I found out what their first album sounds like.
I have been reading galleys of the Jamieson Webster book On Breathing, which is coming out in March from Catapult Press. I plan to write a review of it and try to publish that review somewhere, though it’s possible I’ll give up on that after some gentle discouragement and put it in a newsletter when I’m feeling less apocalyptic.
Suffice it to say for now, this book is going to change the way we breathe.
Actually, that’s not true. We’re all going to continue breathing as we always have, using our lungs, throats, mouths, and—god help us—noses. But it’s a good book, a series of short essays, or one long, segmented essay, about the human breath. It’s something we tend not to think about, especially because thinking about it makes us conscious we’re doing it, which makes us start breathing weird, as if we forgot how. Or maybe that’s just me.
I don’t think it’s just me. And it may take me some time to get the gravity regulation pills ready for sale and distribution, so for now what you can do is order one of my books. It will probably help. There are three of them. The most recent one is the novel Weird Pig. I’ve done some trials and found that reading it will slightly decrease the effects of gravity.
At the end of the audio version of this newsletter, which you can get here and on Spotify, I will read part of the novel Weird Pig. Weigh yourself before you listen, and weigh yourself after. See if you notice a difference. Even if the difference isn’t measurable, I’m willing to bet that when you walk across the room to the scale you will feel lighter than you did before.
This is a shorter newsletter than I usually send. So I’ll add one more thing.
I don’t like tiktok. I hate it, in fact. But my daughter can’t get enough of the thing, so she shows me videos from it sometimes, like this one, from tiktoker @avascreams, which I don’t recommend watching. I just want to make a point:
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There is another tiktoker who is basically the same person. She calls herself AntiPSIVision, and while she doesn’t look exactly like @avascreams, she looks an awful lot like her, and it sounds like they have the same regional accent, whatever it is. They even make some of the same facial expressions:
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I am not convinced these two people are in fact the same person. But I am sort of convinced that they are. And I know I’m wrong, but still.
The way I found this second person was through the Chinese version of tiktok, Little Red Book. It has been popular with people who like tiktok, because they thought they were going to lose tiktok. It’s also popular with me, because it’s got lots of videos of people throwing flying squirrels way into the air. People don’t try as hard to be funny on the Chinese tiktok, which is a relief, because almost no one is funny on tiktok, and when they are it’s usually because they’re not trying that hard to make anyone laugh. But then, what happens on tiktok is that other people will take the audio track of whatever video was funny and act stuff out that goes with the audio track. A good thing becomes its own reanimated corpse and multiplies until no one remembers why the original thing was good.
I’m sure there’s a lot of intended humor on Little Red Book, but it’s all in Mandarin and I can’t understand any of it. It can’t nauseate me. And in addition to the flying squirrel thrower, whose flying squirrel is like a living boomerang, it has this guy who posts a lot of videos of himself cooking massive amounts of food in a wood-fired stove made of stone. I don’t know how to post video links, because everything on the app and website is in Mandarin. But I can take screenshots:
He throws in ingredient after ingredient, and lets it all cook. Then, at the end of every video, he calls out to his pigs, and we watch as the pigs come and eat the delicious food he has prepared for them. The same soundtrack plays every time. It’s triumphant military dance music, or something.
A lot of the other videos are of women firing machineguns and rocket launchers. I really can’t recommend the app more highly.
I will now read from Weird Pig. If you like what you hear, you can order it from Black Lawrence Press.
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