The End of The World Review

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Dear Reader, We’re so back. A little hiccup, nothing to worry about, I only got a new job. I’m not dying. I mean, I’m pretty sure those two things don’t feel the same. (One is certainly harder.) A succulent six, this week, for the free subscribers; for my finsubs, I’m just gonna put the payment thing on pause for a month to make up for lost time. (Time never to be regained, in all the grand lineage of the universe’s incomprehensible unfolding!!) The list is a little outdated.

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Dear Reader, For you, a little Rumi, as a treat: Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Where do I come from? What rung do I stand on? In what market am I for sale? One moment, I feel the sorrow of separation. One moment, I’m a mystery in Mystery’s arms. Now waxing and waning, in pace with the moon. Now whirling and staggering, drunk on the divine. Now I’m Joseph, thrown in the well. Now I’m his brother, looking down from the rim.

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The movies. The playlist. Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982) Instant favorite. Transcendent vibes. A great “inflation era” movie. It has this laconic inflationary aesthetic, where large sums of money/jobs/decisions in general are treated as important but meaningless at the same time: relevant today but useless for the future. A film noir where everyone thinks the guy trying to solve the crime is wasting his time; not because there isn’t anything to gain, but because gain itself seems pointless.

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Dear Reader, An image occurs twice in this week’s reading: the hair of an It Girl laid on an altar for the dead. One, Jane Bowles: a lock of hair on a priest’s bedside shrine; two, Sean DeLear: false eyelashes on another punk’s altar. Fame, fashion, self-insert fanfiction: those are the sub-themes. But the It Girls of bygone days tower above all: a cheerfully tragic pantheon. Unrelated: a friend and I were looking at someone else’s copy of Vuzz the other day.

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Dear Reader, First off, big thanks to TEOTWR reader Ron Hogan, who informed me that when a book has its own sign, like the sign that appears throughout this new edition of Gaspard de la Nuit, it’s (probably) properly referred to as a sigil. Which got me thinking, Hey, I have one of those. I made it up in summer of 2020 and it’s been haunting me ever since: three downward pointing triangles, the ever-inverted sigil of the end of the world.