COFFEE • SHOWA JAPAN • CLOCKS • INTERNET DIET • SMALL ROOMS • PARIS • SUSAN SONTAG
The first one of these things
I’m in an underground coffee bunker and — just this very second — a grandfather clock chimed bong bong bong behind me. There’s another wall clock ticking above my seat — the seat marked “1” and “Smoking Allowed.”
It’s midday outside but so dark in here that I’ve got my screen brightness to one bar — ONE BAR! The only time you need one bar is in the middle of the night on a cross-country red-eye and you want to work and everyone around you is snoring.
The interior is a charming mess. As if a very confused, pressed-for-time time-traveler grabbed a bunch of wooden furniture from Showa-era Japan and threw it in a room. Let’s just say that if a fire were to break out, we’d all die. All three of us. Me and the guy reading a book and the owner — head shaved with glasses and surly in that sort of I’ve seen shit during the war kind of way, not the San Francisco barrista kind of way.
So anyway, I’m in this bunker and I’ve wanted to write to you guys for a while. There’s a bunch of you. And I’m so happy you’re all here.
I started writing one letter on the plane ride over from San Francisco and … — bong bong bong — the clock just chimed and the owner delivered my “normal” coffee and grilled cheesecake.
Wait, where was I? Right — I was writing to you folks on the plane ride over but … I dunno, people write too many letters on airplanes.
So I’m here. And there’s something special about where I’m sitting — this is the seat in which I sat with Bin Sugawara about … five years ago? We sat here and went over his power-point presentation — because the dude wrote a poetry book in powerpoint (which really is sensible when you think about it for a moment) — and that presentation, five years later, turned into Hadaka de Veranda, which PRE/POST published this past January.
In a fit of inspiration, I remembered this place and decided to come and sit here and write to you from this very seat. Thankfully, nobody was sitting in it. I’m also in the middle of editing something new and thought it would be fun to connect the past and the present. I am a sucker for parallelisms and symmetry and the collapsing of time and actions and space.
Right now, in Tokyo, I’m on a bit of an internet diet. HIGHLY recommended. I try to take them at the end of the year. The end of the year is such an easy time to turn it all off. After Thanksgiving you’ve got about two weeks of ‘real’ worktime left and then everyone packs it up.
Last year I was in New Hampshire, traipsing through the forest under pitch-black night cover to my cabin, petrified of being mauled by deer grazing in the moonlit meadows of MacDowell. I saw a ghost fly over me into the wall above my bed and played pingpong before a fiery hearth in the grand hall until I was an exhausted and sweaty. No RSS. No Tweets. Just deer and ghosts and pingpong.
The very nature of MacDowell is such that there is almost no cell service and limited connectivity. So an internet diet is easy to pull off. Here, in Tokyo, not so much. So I have my rules:
Stick the iPhone in airplane mode
Unplug the router
Wake early and shower (to remember your humanity) and make coffee
The coffee is from a small village in Ethiopia called Wato. We grind it and smell it and — like it is so often the case with smell — we are gone, transported far from our kitchen, to a mountain in Ethiopia, even though we’ve never been to Ethiopia nor know the topography, nor even if there are mountains there, landing, finally, back in our cramped kitchen with a tiny yelp of joy.
The music comes from a selection of Keith Jarrett live recordings, chosen randomly — or, somedays, chosen to complement our present location. Tokyo? Budohkan, 1978.
Drink the coffee and get to work
No internet before 5pm
No meetings before 7pm
It’s REALLY fascinating to watch the language and texture of the world around you change when you disconnect. It’s also a bit sad, I guess, or hilarious, I suppose, to fetishize disconnection. But that’s the world we live in these days.
Or is it?
I started thumbing through my library here in Tokyo (the resting place for 90% of all physical books I own) and began to re-read Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn. Low and behold! These kinds of diets aren’t all that new.
Check this out: It’s 1972 and Susan has been living in a tiny, barely furnished apartment in Paris for over a year. (By the way: she’s 39-ish at this time which somehow makes her prolonged asceticism more impressive. I know it probably shouldn’t, but doesn’t it seem so much easier and more natural to choose minimalism and simplicity in your early 20s than late 30s?) She’s got a cot and a desk and typewriter and she’s got some rules. One of which is just too good not to share:
"[It is] in this tiny room where books are forbidden, where I try better to hear my own voice and discover what I really think and really feel."
Books! The enemy! Excise them to go: Offline!
This is such a great description of why one needs an internet diet every now and then: to better hear your own voice and discover what you really think and really feel.
We grab frantically at social network signals, news, podcasts — whatever — during all moments of downtime. Nevermind the last time we heard our voice, when’s the last time we gave our voice a chance to be heard?
I talk more about dieting or creating space or permission for your mind in an upcoming article for The Manual. So I’ll shut up about it for now. But I’d love to hear if any of you go on such diets:
Do you have any specific rules for when you’re on an information or network fast?
I have a bunch of other stuff I want to share with you all but this feels like a good enough place to stop.
I’m attaching an image here at the bottom to ground this coffee bunker with a pinch of reality. You can’t see much — just my computer and an empty cup and Sontag’s book and a pen and my bag. Trust me, though, there’s a universe of weirdness — too dark to photograph — just beyond the frame.
Hope you’re all having a wonderful year end, and see you in 2013.