miscellanea
april 2026
Excerpt from the first chapter of a novel I was writing last summer, that I’ll never finish, that I won’t write, about Montreal, about what it was like to live there for 6 years, clumsy, Anglophone, always feeling so deeply embedded in that city and resenting it, hating and loving the snowplows and the same street corners and the wind tunnel on Prince Arthur. Walking past Café Nocturne this last winter it had been three years since we played chess and I learned what a fork was.
I did whatever Renée told me to do, interviewed, obtained the job. It was convenient to follow her advice: I could not trust myself. Every day was completely different from what had been before, a sort of after which I had never envisioned. Even my dreams were relentless. They were full of images from a previous life: fractal sets, percolation interfaces. Finitary approximations of SLE(8/3) curves. In one dream, my advisor kept emailing me over and over, begging me to talk to him, but every time I tried to reply Microsoft Outlook gave me an error message. After this dream I woke up and bolted to the toilet to throw up a thin brownish liquid. Avoiding the mirror, I traced the hard ridges of my teeth with my tongue, as if I could palpate my damaged enamel. Later Guillaume sent me a text message: stp tirez la chasse chaque fois merci 😊.
He was out of coffee. Usually Robert bought coffee, ordered it online. Usually meant five months ago, six months ago, a year ago, two years ago. How distinctly David could feel the dark blotches of sweat on his shoulders, his lower back, gluing his t-shirt to his skin. The thin wet trickle of sweat down his vertebrae. His spine a column of pure heat. Fragments of conversation. Ahead of him an older woman saying to her husband, we’ve got to find somewhere to tuck in. Silver hair flying away from her sun hat, Puritan in a dark skirt. No response from her husband, silent, panting, lobster-necked, red-faced. But they walked, not ceding an inch of sidewalk to him, and his eye is drawn to their clasped hands, her pale fingers enclosed in his. The myth they chose was the constant lovers. / The theme was richness over time. This refrain always in his head. In this heat his face was a mobile, gelatin, living thing. Wet with salt, needled by that unflinching white light above him. He blinked away sunscreen sting at the corners of his eyes, knew it was only sweat which swept out along the greyed shadows under his eyes.
If he got coffee. If he sat alone—what was it to anyone, let alone him? Taking the 51 without searching for those two adjacent seats. It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it / because it requires a long performance / and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts. Did it matter to him, that he could not look upon that dearly beloved face. Its red-rimmed eyes? The dip of the collarbone, the cradle of it? Designated by God to hold that silver Star of David. And always the anxious hands, thick, blunt hands unlike his own. And always the palms pierced by the dots and points of that six-pointed star. What did it matter, did it leave a trace, was there an impression there, when it was so easy to blink away?
The tourist couple long-gone now. He skirted up St Laurent, adhered to the shade. His phone exploded into that beginning chord of the Scriabin piece he hated by this point. Pure dissonance. Hello?
Hey, David. It was Robert’s voice on the end of the line. Summoned by his own thoughts. At once David ducked to the margins of the sidewalk, leaned against a dirty façade. Listen, I’m sorry, I hate to ask about this.
Leaned against the building. Drank in that scratchy voice. What do you need?
Thinking always about the contingency of life, that life is contingent: what happens really matters, the way things worked out. No amount of detachment, no amount of measured self-control can fully insulate us from life’s caprices, its slings and arrows. As in, the Golden Notebook, page 56.
‘Molly?’ said Anna painfully, in appeal.
‘What? It’s no good going on about it, is it?’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking. You know, it’s possible we made a mistake.’
‘What? Only one?’
But Anna would not laugh. ‘No. It’s serious. Both of us are dedicated to the proposition that we’re tough — no listen, I’m serious. I mean — a marriage breaks up, well, we say, our marriage was a failure, too bad. A man ditches us — too bad we say, it’s not important. We bring up kids without men — nothing to it, we say, we can cope. We spend years in the Communist Party and then we say, Well, well, we made a mistake, too bad.’
‘What are you trying to say?’ said Molly, very cautious, and at a great distance from Anna.
‘Well, don’t you think it’s at least possible, just possible that things can happen to us so bad that we don’t ever get over them? Because when I really face it I don’t think I’ve really got over Michael. I think it’s done for me. Oh I know, what I am supposed to say is, Well well, he’s ditched me — what’s five years after all, on with the next thing.’
‘But it has to be, on with the next thing.’
And Doris Lessing on youth, page 115, the way I still am in this extraordinary mindset, never have grown out of it.
“Anna, beautiful Anna, absurd Anna, mad Anna, our consolation in this wilderness, Anna of the tolerantly amused black eyes.” We smiled at each other, with the sun stabbing down at us through the thick green lace of the tree in sharp gold needles. What he said then was a kind of revelation. Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by “tolerantly amused eyes” was years away from me. I don’t think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
Mayakovsky by Frank O’Hara. The first verse, the mystery of the third one. The fourth one so legible: untether untether untether from the force of another’s mind. But then I should use the modern terminology, anxious, avoidant, the parlour talk in the minivan. I am being recommended a Youtube video called “Your attachment style was shaped before you turned 10 | Alain de Botton.” Every single video I see with him is filled with such platitudes and inanities, such flat, pseudo-contrarian rugsweeps—love isn’t luck, art is therapy, compatibility is overrated—that upon watching my head instantaneously explodes and rains blood and dura mater all over the room. And then I re-read Mayakovsky.
1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!
then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.
[…]
4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
Today I calculated the gradient of some smooth function from R^n to R, became tripped up over converting a vector equation to a scalar equation, asked ChatGPT to explain to me why a certain identity was true. (The answer: take the dot product of the left hand side with itself). So refreshing, clarifying, so surreal, as if I was reaching into the jaws of the machine to pry open its inner workings, to clarify itself to me in sychophantic bullet-pointed prose, the monster which works by some flavour of gradient descent. Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace:
Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy.
Algebra and money are essentially levellers, the first intellectually, the second effectively.
About fifty years ago the life of the Provençal peasants ceased to be like that of the Greek peasants described by Hesiod. The destruction of science as conceived by the Greeks took place at about the same period. Money and algebra triumphed simultaneously.
The relation of the sign to the thing signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is being multiplied of itself and for itself. And the increasing complication demands that there should be signs for signs…
Among the characteristics of the modern world we must not forget the impossibility of thinking in concrete terms of the relationship between effort and the result of effort. There are too many intermediaries. As in the other cases, this relationship which does not lie in any thought, lies in a thing: money.
But I loved him, and him, and I love him, and him, and I was wondering what the point is, all this money and time, doing problem sets, learning math, and always seeking connection, and always cynical about it simultaneously, my capabilities, the trouble of inhabiting this double-mindedness. The way the fantasy mediates the reality, Zizek Kinder egg video. In a 2024 diary entry:
The fantasy of an eternal moment of love and somehow only accessing the present moment (pure, un______) via the pleasure of the prolonged immortal love, i.e. shared graves, i.e. marriage, i.e. symbolic children, etc. Love is very real but only sustains itself via constant illusions & false desires (‘success’ e.g. is the same way). So the real thing (muddled) only exists bc of the false thing.
“New York Address” by Linda Gregg, on the one hand.
“There Is Only One of Everything” by Margaret Atwood, on the other hand.
I can’t tell anyone this, but the grackles, the birds in Austin entranced me, particularly the one which I pointed out, the way it was impossibly blue.