Hello from the swelterdome, the Cape O‘ Temperature Oppression, a.k.a. the Kanto area of Japan in July / August. It is so spectacularly, consistently hot that it’s hard to overstate just how bananas this heat is, how all consumingly present and manic it feels. Can’t outrun it, this Japan heat. “Outside” doesn’t exist from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and even then, you’re swimming through the air more than walking.
I’m Craig Mod, your bona fide humidity guide, broadcasting this Roden from beneath the leaden skies of Wet.
Amidst this season of goo, the plan was to “recover” from the TBOT book tour. For some reason I decided to do two very stupid things during this “recovery” period (spoiler: dear reader, there has been no recovery). First, I moved. Why did I think this would be easy? I have no idea. A friend was supposed to join and help me pack up for a few days, but he got sick, and I was left to attend to packing on my own. I … I … I simply couldn’t do it.
I wrote about Aloneness in November 2023, and a lot of that essay came rushing back. Here I was, once again alone, single, confronted with a move, packing up a life (eight-and-a-half years in this house / studio) by myself, administering to each object on my own. I packed about two boxes before I thought I was going to die. (So dramatic, Mod!) So I frantically messaged a few friends, and two came over the next day, and we completed a heroic twelve-hour packing session in a brutally hot house, with broken air conditioners (broke the week before), sweating not unlike you might sweat during mountain ascetic training in Yamagata, rushing up and down Mount Gassan in the cruel heart of the summer in white cotton robes, drenched, always drenched, no shower in sight for days, feeling like a stew of human juices.
See, the real issue (when boiled down) was an issue of decisions. Packing and closing up studio became a constellation of decisions. Decisions like stars on a cool winter night in the desert. Decisions like grains of sand in your shoe after a long walk on the beach. So many decisions; I’ve spent this whole damn year making decisions, wading through decisions, awash in endless decisions and I, dear reader, was fully, completely cooked. Total burnout. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. By the end, abject absurdity had set in. No more decisions could be made, just shove anything into any box! “Decisions” will be made on the other side of this Rubicon.
The packing concluded, I managed to get about 3 hours of sleep before the movers came. The came. They were … not happy — I seemed to have more boxes than they anticipated (but was it not ye who gave me thy boxes?). For me, eight hours of sleep allows for me to be “performatively normal,” six and I can scrape by. Three hours is like being waterboarded by reality. So it was, in this state of demented exhaustion, that I (alone, “always alone” the voice goes) sort of “helped” these five moving dudes get all the boxes into their many trucks, that I helped sweep up the remaining debris of eight years of a life.
And then on the other side: Helped them place the boxes, fill a new home, a new studio with boxes. When they left it was all I could do to curl up in a ball and sleep for a thousand years.
As I wrote in that Aloneness essay, it’s tremendously (nay: impossible, I’d argue) for someone swaddled in community, family, or partnership to empathize with folks stricken by default solitude. You might even go so far as to say many contemporary problems (and I don’t think this is much of a stretch! in fact, it’s so obvious I’m embarrassed to write it out:), stem from aloneness, from solitude, from the “broken mind” that comes from feeling like you’ll free-fall (emotionally, financially, whatever) to the core of the earth at any moment. It makes risk taking (the core mechanism of art and wealth) intensely difficult, and can make even the dumbest little thing (filling boxes with books, for example), feel Herculean, impose full-body paralysis.
I’ve come a long way in the past few years at shedding (or modulating) my feelings of aloneness or solitude, of breaking out of “scarcity mindset” states, but — god-damn — does it ever lurk, and did it ever pop up during this move. Whooooo. At least now I can hold it at arm’s length, admire its perversity (the scarcity mind — the dumbest mind, the most brutal mind) like a pus-filled jewel. And know, thankfully, when I need to call in the help of friends, and am able to do so shamelessly.
So that was the first boneheaded act. The move. The second was: I thought renovating the new place would be “easy” or “without complications” or “possible to be completed on time” all of which — I can hear you cackling in the background, people who have done home renovations before — are fantasies of the highest order. So the new place is half home, half construction site. It’s coming along. Bit by bit. The new studio space, the office, the bookshelves to house my library entirely in one room, the giant wall we turned into a magnetic blackboard, the other odds and ends of making this a true book studio, a place to write and layout books on the wall and reference the many other books with ease. (And have guests! — guests for longer collaborations like I’ve done in the past, but more comfortably.) But we’re not there yet. Hopefully by the end of August? That’s the goal. To have the place free of construction, to have all the boxes opened, their contents placed in their proper places, the books on the shelves, and most importantly, the work once again happening, because this is not about fancy bookshelves, it’s about books. Making them. And I am eager to make serious progress on my next book.
Speaking of my books: Thank you to everyone sending in the letters and DMs and posting shots of TBOT to Instagram, etc. I love that this book is finding an audience far beyond these newsletters. Some recent reviews on Amazon that made me smile:
I loved reading this book! First introduced to Craig Mod from the Tim Ferriss podcast and knew from listening to him speak that I would love his story. His written word however is far more evocative than I could imagine. Go read it, you’ll get it! — “Anne”
Three pages into this book I was ready to give up, ten pages into this book and I couldn’t put it down. Everything falls apart, even to the point that Yankee Ingenuity can’t save it, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying. That doesn’t mean you stop walking. — “Big”
Thanks for not giving up, “Big.” ;) The book rewards multiple readings. (Or, at least it was written to make more and more sense read twice.)
Also, I am grateful for this wonderful review over on Goodreads (warning: scary website) by Melanie. (It seems she has quite the following and has moved quite a serious number of TBOTs from this small writeup; I do not understand anything about selling mass market hardcovers to strangers.)
I’m currently working on finalizing the audio recordings of all the on-stage conversations I had on my May/June tour and releasing them as a podcast. Coming soon! (Next week? I hope.)
Meanwhile, amidst all the moving and scarcity-minding I listened to my first audiobook: Project Hail Mary. Don’t ask why I’ve never done an audiobook before (something about it felt like … cheating?), but the trailer for the forthcoming movie based on the book dropped, and a strange majority of the comments were all: THIS WAS THE BEST AUDIOBOOK I’VE EVER LISTENED TO. And I LISTENED TO IT SEVEN TIMES. And so I thought, How could I not? Mainly because it’s not a book I would normally choose to read. (Cue pretentious sound effect.) So I grabbed it, and through the terrible interface that is Audible (I mean, good god, why does Amazon hate books / literature / audio / video / media so much? Every one of their media apps, worst in class.) plowed through it in a couple of days (at 2x speed, of course (I have no shame)).
Wow! It was fun! Now, do I wish the protagonist had, uh, even the slightest hint of dimensionality? Do I wish we were being led through the darkness of space by a human who had — I don’t know — feelings, had ever kissed someone, or had a granularity of emotion outside of YAY! or TEARS!? Sure, sure I do. But aside from the fact that the 40-Year-Old Virgin is our leader (sorry, sorry but by the end I was actively yelling back at the audiobook), the book was a blast (as you’d expect from Weir) from a science / geek perspective. Narrated masterfully by the fabulous Ray Porter.
Over in SPECIAL PROJECTS membership land, The Good Place (TGP) continues to be a source of inspiration and kindness and sanity. I wrote about making TGP a couple of months ago. It’s our little members-only “social network.” I just added a weekly digest email so you can scan for interesting posts from the last week. It’s good, The Good Place. Thanks to everyone making it good.
On a lark, I rewatched Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) the other night. (Referenced in TBOT p. 105, BTW.) Wow. Gosh, yes, this is a great film. (Duh.) A little Rashōmon (1950) energy going on, but this viewing, what struck me more than the great performances by Takashi Shimura and Shinichi Himori, or the tight story, or Yūnosuke Itō’s amazing face, was the cinematography and precision of camera movements. If Ozu is plop-the-camera-down-on-the-tatami-and-let-the-dad-and-daughter-have-a-moment guy, then Kusosawa is the let’s dolly-this-sucker guy, mixed with some pretty long no-cut scenes. The “office lady” played by Miki Odagiri is the real standout. She had a couple scenes where she cycles through emotions like a flip book, and you’re with her the whole way. Bonus: seeing Tokyo in this moment of post-war messiness (the offices are gorgeous in their paper chaos and naked light bulbs; and some public offices still looked like that until recently) is a lot of fun. The protagonist’s all-night tryst with the city is fabulous — jeez, I wish we had some dance clubs like that today. And of course the script’s structure works — that Rashōmon retelling through the eyes of others. It handily earns its two-and-a-half hour runtime. (A few years ago I briefly mentioned the British remake, Living (2022) in this newsletter, also fabulous and worth watching in succession.)
HBO seems to have a great collection of Kurosawa, BTW, if you’re wondering where you can stream it.
I also watched My Architect (2003), a strange documentary made by the “bastard” son of American architect Louis Khan. It’s far less about Khan’s buildings and more about what it means for a man to father three families simultaneously, and what that does to the single mothers / children, and how hungry a child can be for a father figure (as a kid who basically had no dad, believe me kids who had good dads: you have no idea the gaping hole left behind by an absent father). It also makes you consider the social “norms” about what it means to “be a man” in the 70s or 80s and how “you didn’t ask a man about such things” (whether he was being terrible to women) as his rabbi says. Also: Can you be a “brilliant artist” and not a dick? It’s complicated. Simultaneously, it’s moving to see the director of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad begin crying as he recounts what Khan’s building means to Bangladesh. Humans = messy.
Dwight Garner makes me want to read anything he writes about, and now he’s got me wanting to read Wendy Cope.
Ross Andersen put me on to Ellen Meloy’s (pictured above doing her best Cassie Marketos dgaf impression) Eating Stone, and I’m loving it.™ A mix of McPhee and McFarlane and Dillard; who writes about sheep this poetically?: “Year after year, the river cliffs held their absence, air empty of blood and breath. The sheep were gone.” Only to follow up with: “His scrotum is the size of a ripe cantaloupe — a cantaloupe from Texas.” Yeah, I’m with ya, I’m along for this ride, Ellen.
Meanwhile, in Tech Land: Congrats to the Figma team on their IPO. I see this mainly as: Fast software wins. (It’s obviously more than that, but …) It’s good to see. The thing that struck me when Dylan showed me the prototype back in 2012 (and the reason I started using it right away once it was in usable form in 2013) was how fast it was. Crazy fast. In the browser. What?! How fast it was to move around — the software had a kind of felicity to it that Adobe lacked (that Adobe seemed genetically incapable of achieving) — its broad canvas. My heart sank when the Adobe acquisition was announced in 2022: Noooooooo (but, I get it, you have a fiduciary duty as a startup and $20B is nothing to sneeze at). So, to see Figma IPO at several multiples above the Adobe valuation is: a heartening thing. Figma is still the “visual” app I use most, daily even; it’s what I prototype book layouts in, and it’s what I use for photography culls with photo editors. I’d do all my print layout in it, too, if it supported such a thing. Using InDesign feels like crawling back into the ocean and going protozoa. Congrats to the team — what a hell of an earned moment. Now keep building, ya lovely, talented (wealthy) dorks.
Thank you, readers out there — as always — for your support by joining SPECIAL PROJECTS, buying my fine art books, Things Become Other Things, and leaving reviews for TBOT on sites like Amazon. It all adds up. I have some big walks and projects planned for the fall / winter, and this is fuel for that work. Thank you for making this possible.
Aside: I sat down last night and did some serious note-taking / brainstorming / “temp checking” on my next four books. They’re all right there to be done. Let’s go go go.
OK, as the winds of a glancing typhoon stir the air on my balcony, it’s back to thinking about bookshelves, editing podcasts, and catching up on more delinquent essays.
