Hello from the train! I’m en route — once again — to KII PENINSULA which many of you know is where my book Things Become Other Things takes place. I’m going back to photograph PEOPLE. That’s the aim, anyway. We’ll see if I pull it off. You can follow along in real-ish time on my new pop-up: About a Nightingale. It starts today (Feb 23, and ends on March 4, and then I delete all your email addresses). Direct signup to the new pop-up newsletter is here:
I am busy. I am undeniably, utterly, objectively busy — just a life and inbox bursting with to-dos. But I’m shoving this ten-day adventure into my schedule anyway. (Sometimes that’s the only way adventures can be had — shoved in against the tide of life.) Because the plan — the nutty plan — is to produce a companion photo book to the Random House release of TBOT which comes out on May 6. Meaning, I need to shoot (and get developed and scanned since I’m now a nonsensical Film Person) and layout the book by the end of March. A bit reminiscent of Koya Bound days, but with about 5,000% higher stakes and a 10,000% higher bar for myself.
Mod delivers a gorgeous account of his 300-mile walk around Japan’s Kii peninsula in 2021 … While passing through Ise Grand Shrine and a series of fishing villages, Mod discusses crumbling economies and extreme weather with locals who’ve lived in the region for decades.
Punctuated with stunning black and white photographs of the villages and landscapes Mod encountered, this tender exploration of fragile ecosystems and vanishing ways of life will encourage readers to look more closely at their own surroundings. It’s a nourishing trek.
I mean — yes, I’ll take it. What a generous reading.
BLURBS
We’ve also got BLURBS. I’ve updated the canonical TBOT page on my site to include them. Some highlights:
Mod takes the reader along on an epic, exquisitely detailed journey, on foot, through a rural Japan few of us are likely to experience. Uniquely unforgettable.
— William Gibson
Mod’s highly readable chronicle of a secular pilgrimage through Japan’s vanishing rural towns breathes new life into the travelogue while shining a light on the dire need for solace among all who have suffered through the trauma of American violence and social fracture.
An achingly real portrait of friendship in small town America — seen through the lens of Japan — that will ring true to many. It is nature, memory, heartbreak, and at its core, an ode to the beauty and wonder contained in everything, and the patience to find it.
— Aziz Ansari
I felt like I was in Craig Mod’s head as he ambled around Japan. Along with giving me comfort, his calm and honest voice imparted wisdom. This book made me want to go for a long walk and learn to listen to my own inner voice.
From its first pages, Things Become Other Things vibrates with energy — a calm charisma. The steady pad of feet on pavement (and wet dirt, and old stones) becomes a backbeat for histories personal and global, observations tiny and profound. Craig Mod’s memoir is the quiet road, set one back from the busy artery, that calls to you — maybe there’s something interesting that way? Oh, boy is there. You’ll be glad you took this path.
As I’ve been outlining in the SPECIAL PROJECTS members-only Nightingalingale Forever Diary about making this book, I am not exaggerating when I say I felt true relief getting those first blurbs. I really have no idea if anything is going to come through on this book. I’m just plowing ahead as best I can.
Book tour is shaping up — looking like 8-10 cities across America for now in May / June.
In other writing, I wrote about why the Japanese way of garbage is the best way, and everyone should aim to emulate it, and how a lack of garbage ownership or responsibility is yet another sign of the extreme infantilization of the contemporary condition:
The modern condition consists of a constant self-infantilization, of any number of “non-adulting” activities. The main being, of course, plugging into a dopamine casino right before going to sleep and right upon waking up. At least a morning cigarette habit in 1976 gave one time to look at the world in front of one’s eyes (and a gentle nicotine buzz). Other non-adulting activities include relinquishment of general attention, concentration, and critical thinking capabilities. The desire for deus ex machina style political intercession that belies the complexities of real-world systems. Easy answers, easy solutions to problems of unfathomable scale. Scientific retardation because it “feels” good. Deliverance — deliverance! — now, with as little effort as possible.
Books and TV
First, I just read the ARC for Lynne Tillman’s Thrilled To Death story collection and if — for some insane reason — you have not read Lynne yet, this is the one for you. It comes out March 25 and is available for pre-order now. It is funny, smart, ridiculous, quirky — Lynne, through and through, a thousand times over. I loved these stories. Lynne also got a starred Publisher Weekly review last week: “This shimmering, career-spanning collection captures Tillman at her most beguiling, playful, and inventive.” YES. Lynne and I are also planning a talk together in Brooklyn at the start of June. More info soon.
In TV land, I’ve been re-watching Twin Peaks (currently midway through Season 2) and … yeah, wow. That this showed on prime time is a miracle of the highest order. Just weird, weird, and more weird. Coop4eva. Season 2, episode 1 — the opening with the senile milk delivery guy just goes on … for an eternity? Thumbs up. Perhaps a scene only possible in an age before smartphones, when changing the channel required moving a body.
Also been following Severence which is fabulous and, IMO, the best thing — tightest script, cast, strongest vision, best cinematography, weirdness (Lynchian but not), fun and funny — Apple TV+ has produced. That said, I do think it is suffering from what so many of these shows suffer from: too much rope with which to hang itself. The pacing is a little … off. I felt pacing issues acutely rewatching (the superb) season one a couple of weeks ago, and I am feeling it again in season two. (Which I’m not entirely convinced is going to land upright.) I suspect: There is a cut of both seasons together that is like … 10 hours long? … and absolute perfection.
Reading Ali Smith’s Autumn; I can’t believe I hadn’t read Smith before. She is FUN and WEIRD and SMART. Although I’m a bit torn on what to read next of hers. She’s prolific. What should I grab?
Never read any Lauren Groff (!!) so I’m dipping into The Vaster Wilds and liking it.
As the world gets weird, I find solace in science. As a palliative, I read Carlo Rovelli’s (as per a Sloan Recommendation) Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, and it was great. Lots of highlights in this one including:
Genius hesitates.
It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah—scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of.
I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species.
As we know more or less well how to deal with our individual mortality, so we will deal with the collapse of our civilization. It is not so different. And it’s certainly not the first time that this will have happened. The Maya and Cretans, among many others, already experienced this.
(See? Uplifting!)
It’s nice to know humans have been idiots forever, not just now. And so I’m reading Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory which is just incredible in its intermingling of sources and commentary. (Sebaldian, in a way.) Paul is clearly a grumpy, brilliant dude. Which makes it all the more fun when he eviscerates pretty much everyone involved in managing the war. God, I never realized how stupid World War I was.
Many involved in that war simply didn’t think it COULD end, that this is what life would be like forever:
One did not have to be a lunatic or a particularly despondent visionary to conceive quite seriously that the war would literally never end and would become the permanent condition of mankind. The stalemate and the attrition would go on infinitely, becoming, like the telephone and the internal combustion engine, a part of the accepted atmosphere of the modern experience. Why indeed not, given the palpable irrationality of the new world? Why not, given the vociferous contempt with which peace plans were received by the patriotic majorities on both sides?
And: “The idea of endless war as an inevitable condition of modern life would seem to have become seriously available to the imagination around 1916.”
Also, I hadn’t considered the geography of WWI — in that you could be having dinner at your supper club in London at night, and be on the Western Front eating out of a tin in a latrine bog of lice the next; the front was so close to home it produced a kind of insane dissonance and accentuated irony (Paul argues the modern notion of irony comes from WWI).
Basically — a bunch of “modern thinking” or “modern notions” were forged in the stupidity of that war, and Paul is there to pin them up on the board for us. It’ll make you feel slightly better about how dumb we are right now. I guess at least we’re not in a pit, covered in lice, in an infinite stalemate? Yay?
