Leave Society - Tao Lin - Post-mortem Summer '21 - the slow end of everything rotating into view
...a fifteen-millenia release from matter into the imagination, a place that was to the universe as life was to a book: larger, realer, more complicated.
“The wettest hour in New York City history” is how the National Weather Service put it. In the rich parts of the city people posted photographs of the rain on social media while in the poor parts people drowned screaming in basement apartments with children in their arms.
Comparisons to the relevant Parasite scene have been everywhere but they’re so obvious as to be almost tiresome. This is the world we live in and everybody knows, there’s nothing to say about it that hasn’t already been said. It’s bad and it’s going to get worse.
I stopped sending out newsletters in April when it seemed like COVID was over and there started being stuff to do again. I got vaxxed (“the J.J.”). Hiking, climbing, camping, beach trips, driving back and forth from Irvine to Pasadena. I visited my brother in Chicago, went clubbing, and fantasized about having a sprawling group of friends like his. My brother visited LA and we went to some restaurants. I went to a mariachi festival with my buddy Josh Calixto and 13 of his relatives/family friends: a life-altering experience.
I wrote a bunch of short stories and lost faith in them and sent out query letters for my esports novel but after no response lost faith in that too so I rewrote the first couple of chapters again a few different ways and sent out a couple more query letters after that. Having gotten bored of this newsletter’s stated purpose (re-reading my favorite short story collections) I started going to the library for new books, and read the following:
Fox 8 by George Saunders, a quick fun read
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schuhmacher, which had good personality and was “formally interesting”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, a short story collection which I remember liking a lot but which I can’t recall anything about the specifics of right now
Daemon by Daniel Suarez, which I heard about on the podcast Interdependence and which was interesting and ““generative,”” though not in a literary way
The first third of Ulysses before I gave up
The first third of The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, which I liked but couldn’t stay interested in for some reason
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala which was very disturbing but good
Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez, the sequel to Daemon, which was less interesting than the first book but still pretty interesting
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer, which was not my favorite novel from him but effectively held my attention through the plane ride back from Chicago
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, a short and extremely good novel that reinforced my belief that Le Guin is the greatest speculative fiction writer of all time
Most of Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson, the last section of which I am finding it difficult to push through
I didn’t see smoke from the fires up in the Pacific Northwest in my sky but my parents over in Indiana did. They sent pictures to our family Signal group, the “Grooterdome.” (We are using Signal because the whole family has come around to the suspicion of tech giant surveillance platforms that my dad had Before It Was Cool.)
This year’s big climate report by the IPCC says that a global temperature rise is happening even faster than we thought and will likely reach 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades. Democrats have not done anything so far to address this despite controlling the entire executive and legislative branches of our government. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. A regular wobble in the moon’s orbit will lead to ridiculous tides in the 2030s which seems like solace when I think about what it will do to wealthy people’s coastal real estate holdings but stops seeming like solace when I think about what it will do to island countries and the economy in general. (If the economy is even a real thing, which seems increasingly doubtful.) I keep waking up in the middle of the night and typing doomer stuff into my phone:
NFTs happened this summer too and cryptocurrency in general went up like crazy. My brother paid $800 to enter a “tokenized” “NFT” Discord community and his stake in that community is now worth $8,000. I invested in Bumble because the only way to meet people now is dating apps and that’s gone up about 50% in the same time period. The stock market in general is screaming hot. How does one square this financial optimism with the floods and fires and skyrocketing inequality/homelessness/etc.?
World’s ending so why buy bonds. Why wait twenty years why invest in your 401k why work a minimum-wage job why bother? Just gamble, get rich, burn out the last few years of the planet in style. Seriously though why am I putting money in my 401k? When I’m 60 it’s going to be 2051 and the world will be both different and the same.
I started reading The Downward Spiral, a culture column by Dean Kissick in Spike Art Magazine, and that led me to a new lit magazine called Heavy Traffic, which features some insanely good & deranged stories by people like Honor Levy, stories I cannot link here because my grandmother reads this newsletter (I love you Grandma!!!). Everybody in those circles is doom-pilled and getting into the kind of fringe Catholicism that rejects whatever ecclesiastical council got rid of the Latin Mass. Those folks were all talking about Tao Lin’s hot new novel Leave Society this summer so I picked up a copy.
In Leave Society, the autofictional protagonist gets deep into natural medicine in an effort to resolve the various chronic illnesses he and his parents suffer from. They get their mercury fillings removed. The protagonist convinces his father to stop taking statins. He breaks a laptop in frustration when he finds out that his mother is taking Nexium. He hobbles around Taipei in excruciating spinal pain, bouncing from masseuse to chiropractor to doctor with limited success (until he cuts starches out of his diet). The novel is just a guy reading internet articles, trying different kinds of alternative medicine, and yelling at his parents.
Or at least that’s what it’s been so far. I’m halfway through the book. I keep hoping there will be a part where he actually does leave society. This would be aspirational and satisfying. What we all want these days is to escape. Live our days out somewhere safe, in the country, with food and water and medicine. I don’t even think I need good internet any more. I’m hardly playing videogames except for work. There’s not enough time. What I want more than anything else right now is to read and sleep.
Yeah what I feel right now more than anything else is perpetually short on time. I’m turning 30 next week. There are a lot of books I want to read and a lot of places I want to go and a lot of things I want to try to write. I’ve been messing around with a surrealist interactive fiction thing but I think today the enthusiasm for that idea ran out. My thought was that I could make a puzzlebox in which nothing meant anything except when connected to the other components. Meaning defined solely by context. But it’s started to feel like that primordial copypasta of the girl who thinks she’s So Random ~ ~ haha.
I’m not actually depressed about turning 30 by the way. I was more depressed about it when I was 26. The view from here is that I’ve figured a lot of stuff out and my 30s should be pretty great actually.
Overwatch 2 is going to be great.
I went to Disneyland with my amazing girlfriend for her birthday and that was great. We are in love and that is also great. She works at the hospital as a diet tech but they’re short on staff so she keeps having to work doubles (7 am to 7pm) and back-to-backs (a 12-830pm shift followed by a 530am-1pm shift). Today is the eighth day she’s worked in a row and she texted me this:
“I feel like I’m dissolving into someone I do not recognize anymore.”
Which I found as poignant an encapsulation of our current moment as anything I’ve read.
Here’s a representative paragraph of Leave Society on similar vibes:
In An Electronic Silent Spring, Li read about the effects of electromagnetic radiation—the spectrum of frequencies of photons—from CT scans, Wi-Fi, smartphones, cell towers, and smart meters: cancer, diabetes, arthritis, inflammation, rashes, headaches, leaky blood-brain barrier, DNA and ion-channel damage, raised stress hormones, impaired memory and sleep.
Life had evolved in Earth’s electromagnetic field, the invisible glow made by the fifty or so lightning bolts that occurred globally every second. The field’s main frequency was 7.83 hertz—oscillations per second. . .
[ . . . ]
The U.S. power grid operated at 60 hertz. Phones and Wi-Fi used microwaves from 0.8 to 2.4 billion hertz. . .
[ . . . ]
Li realized the waveringly transauditory buzzing he sometimes heard or felt might be unnatural frequencies and amplitudes of light. He noticed he could parse language, feel emotions, sustain thoughts, discern tone, and remember things better in parks than in [his apartment unit] 4K, and better in 4K, despite the seventy-plus Wi-Fi routers his MacBook detected, than in the library, where, amid computers and phones, he seemed to regularly go brain-dead.
Everything is toxic. Everything is dissolving. Sperm counts are falling because of microplastics in our blood. People are getting cancer younger and younger. 43% of American children have one of 20 chronic health conditions. COVID variants proliferate, the whole world a petri dish. Our bodies and minds are falling apart. I worry about this persistent pain in my side, about my acid reflux, about the size of my lymph nodes. It’s impossible to write anything right now that is not a product of these vibes.
Vibes that are shifting. The apocalypse is increasingly acknowledged. Nothing is static. On Interdependence they talk about the Extreme Present, the sense that things are changing so fast, our brains can’t keep up. The stress we’re experiencing as a result. The cortisol our adrenal glands keep squirting out in response.
Two years ago my dad might have encouraged me to be optimistic about humanity’s ability to fix things; now he acknowledges on my doomer Instagram post that the last remaining hope lies in an act of God: “In whom do we have hope about the state of affairs we have made?”
Any time, God - We’re ready!
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