Ahoy from Crisptown, population: Everyone in Japan. The summer is done. Thank glorious gods be, the summer is done. (Mostly.) I can feel my brain starting to solidify again, returning to its natural state after three months of relentless broiled liquefaction.
In honor of sane mercury and humidity readings, I’m heading off on a 200-kilometer walk and running a pop-up newsletter: (the entire walk is) Between Two Mountains starts on October 2 (Which is today! I meant to send this three weeks ago, then last week, and then yesterday, but here were are, me on the Shinkansen en route to Nagoya, finally sending it, a few hours before I start walking.). You can sign up here. For those keeping track, this is my first “real” walk since May 2024, when I walked the Tōkaidō at an Edo era pace (about forty klicks a day). It’s been too long!
That’s not to say I haven’t been on escapades or other walks or working my butt off. I’ve walked with Kevin and co. in Walk & Talk style in England last October and Spain this past March. I launched the Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa in Morioka last November, which was its own big, weird adventure (doing ninety minutes of live Saturday morning TV being the peak). I’ve done a bunch of monthly J-Wave radio shows. I did a photography pop-up in February called About a Nightingale, from which came the photobook OTHER THING. I was a UNIQLO pizza toast model. I flew to LA to sit down with Rich Roll. I spent all of May and most of June on tour for TBOT. I walked through Shibuya so you don’t have to. Two weeks ago I did a taidan (discussion) with the Mayor of Toyama City, and the big headline was: “Deep-fried pickles put Toyama on the map?!” (They asked me: What’s the best thing you ate in Toyama, and I responded with the most interesting thing: deep friend pickles, much to their sadness.) And I’ve spent this summer trying (and failing, failing so, so, so hard — ha ha ha!) to recover from it all.
So, busy, yes (busy with good things!), but not much solo walking. I am SO READY to head out on a solo walk.
On the TBOT update front, thank you everyone who has left reviews on Amazon (which, besides Goodreads, seems to be the only place reader reviews happen? Am I missing somewhere?). If you’ve read the book and don’t mind leaving a review, please do. Thank you!
And thank you to everyone writing in with the kind notes / DMs / messages, and for all the podcast / event invites. I’m having to say no to almost all of them, simply by dint of physics and spacetime, but I treat them as a signal that our “vector” is “directionally correct,” as the dorks say.
Oh, also, I released a podcast (which took not an inconsiderable amount of time and money to produce …) of the conversations I had on tour in May and June. It’s called Things Become a Podcast (of course). Available:
All the chats were great fun, but if you only have time for one, maybe my chat with Robin Sloan (which has the best audio quality for some reason) at the fantabulous Booksmith in SF is the one to do.
Also, I’ve managed to finally (I think?) import 500 copies of TBOT into Japan (thanks Kawashima-san!!), so I can start thinking about doing events. Considering an event in Tokyo in January. Would you show up?
Meanwhile, these last few swelterdome months, I’ve spent many a morning reading, which, it turns out, adds up:
Reread Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard which still bedazzles; it’s sort of the ultimate erudite form of a walking pop-up newsletter, refined and polished for a thousand hours into a diamond; it would have loved to have met Matthiessen!
A human very dear to me gifted me a first edition of William Saroyan’s Papa You’re Crazy, which was just a wonderful little read; bizarre in so many ways, not the least of which how it makes you reflect on the relative “simplicity” of life back in the 50s for certain corners of America; reading about living on the beachfront in Malibu on a writer’s income, buying a car for a few bucks, driving up to SF on a whim with your boy, etcetera; it’s a pretty heartening book about a slightly off-kilter shape of fatherhood, written in an interesting way; I am a fan of books of this length
Speaking of shorter books, Eliot Peper has a new novella out, Ensorcelled. (Yes, he got the name from me ha ha) A little book-shaped blast of what can happen when you pay attention, drop the distractions, and really look at the world; now I want to write a novella
Continuing in the vein of not-very-long books, I reread Yasunari Kawabata’sSnow Country (pictured above; first edition UK) which is a book that requires a tremendous amount of cultural understanding to fully grok; rereading it made me want to go and work through the Japanese edition just to see what kind of nuance is being lost; still impressive in English, but I found myself reading between the lines frequently
Read, finally, Ray Nayler’s novel The Mountain in the Sea, which was fabulous (as many, many friends have been pointing out for a few years); lots to love, mix of Ross Andersen of The Atlantic science geekery mixed with Gibsonian future punk fun; also further justified my five+-year self-ban on eating octopii
Reread Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which is truly an insane book (one I like, I should say); but I’m quite surprised by how highly rated it is (in Amazon reviews), considering how obtuse it can be; in my memory of it, there was more walking, in reality there is very little “walking;” interesting to note this time around: LOTS of parallels between English countryside rot in the 80s and Japanese countryside rot now; something about the persnicketiness of the prose and a few side comments inspired me to write on the back page of the book: I think Sebald may have been a serial killer; got me thinking about fiction / non-fiction, and along with Eliot’s book, is making me want to do something less strictly bound to fact; I also appreciate that this book has no genre “label”
Read Richard Flanigan’s Question 7, recommended by a reader, definitely in conversation with Sebald; a beautiful virtuosic book that mostly succeeds (especially given the scope of ambition); on his father: “His tragedy, he told me another time, was to leave the working class but never arrive in the middle class. His triumph, I see now, was to survive.”; another choice quote: “What if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed and thereby some equality, some equilibrium restored, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen?” … it turns out, and continues to hold true: Nothing is more exciting to me, or feels more consequential in the last several hundred years of our history, than nuclear energy discovery and deployment
Speaking of which, I read a 1973 piece by John McPhee called The Curve of Binding Energy, a book-length profile of Theodore B. Taylor on where the nuclear industry was in the 70s, the threat of dirty bombs, terrorism, the lackadaisical security at most plutonium production plants, and more; it is riveting and it makes me sad that we don’t have the same infrastructure in place to support journalism like this today; it’s actually out as a book, which I should pick up
I read Joe Westermoreland’s exceptional memoir (so-called “novel”; again: those lines) — Tramps Like Us (has there ever been a more ’70s book cover?) — about coming out in the 70s and coming of age as the HIV (“gay cancer”) crisis began to pick up in SF in the 80s; man, this guy writes with such direct, un-sentimentality, that you can’t help but love him, despite the recklessness of it all; I have many gay friends of Joe’s age, and I don’t think anything has helped me empathize with that generation as much as this book; it’s also hilarious, “When I got there I couldn’t see because the overhead light was off and the room was filled with guys having sex.”; “Straight parties made me nervous.”; and so REFRESHINGLY matter-of-fact about sex and drugs (resisting wholly the impulse to “poeticize” the acts): “We went to his house right up from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury and smoked another morphine-soaked joint. He puked for a while and then we fucked until the sun came up. He lived close to my job so I walked to work from there. I was out of it all day.”; and even passages like this, which manage to get to some group-truth without dousing it in dewey-eyed blargh:
It was at that moment, in the middle of my crowded living room, when I realized that everyone at this party had one thing in common. We were all refugees from one kind of torment or another and could never go back home. Home was something in the future that had yet to be created, not someplace in the past. I felt like we might never be rich or famous, but at that one moment, when Donna Summer was playing on the stereo and everyone was dancing and singing along, there was a feeling of success. Of victory. We had all come out of our own separate nightmares to a place where just being ourselves was okay, not dangerous. That was a strange new feeling, reason alone to celebrate.
… anyway, I love this book
I also read one very dorky book: Apple in China, by Patrick McGee, which, I think should be required reading for anyone reading this on a smartphone; it’s simply awe-inspiring how China went from manufacturing very little just twenty-five years ago, to manufacturing EVERYTHING, to a scale and degree of precision that no one else in the world can match; and how Apple catalyzed so much of that push, starting with the iPod and then moving into iPhones and everything else; the geopolitical weirdness we find ourselves in today is in no small part because of Apple and their unquenchable thirst for more scale at lowers costs; I’m not sure any of this is a good thing executed at the speed at which it happened
This doc of Paul Thomas Anderson making Magnolia is amazing. You can actually see him do cocaine in a few scenes. Which explains, perhaps, why it’s one of his weakest films (IMO). But amazing to see process in action, and to think about how young he was (28-ish) while writing/directing it. Makes me want to try directing a film! (Minus the cocaine.)
Another golden doc, this one more recent: LISTERS, a punk-rock skateboarding film about birding. This is what YouTube was made for. I had no intention of watching this whole thing, and yet I did. And it is the sort of film that couldn’t have been made 20 years ago, certainly not with that quality of bird footage. I kvetched the other day on Threads: “Imagine making a … YouTube video without a sponsor.” And this is what I meant: Just make things. The whole of the world is feeling evermore polished in evermore boring ways; three cheers for punk birding.
In that vein, this is one of the weirder YouTube channels (Uri Tuchman) and it’s great.
Speaking of dorks, if you want to subscribe to the ultimate in classic camera dork blogs, the camera repair company, Kanto Camera, has a regularly-updated daily blog about the most minute details of lenses, bodies, repair, meter calibration, and more. This is some good old fashioned internetting.
Buddy Sam Anderson interviews The Rock (archive). Sam has the best job, and is the best person in the world doing it (writing epic profiles). Again, as I lamented above, I wish Sam were doing this in 1976 so he’d be given about 5x the length; I can only imagine, with great sadness, how much gold was left on the editing room floor.
Random film recommendation: Weapons was … fabulous? More thriller than “horror,” and the title sells it so short as to be confounding as to why the studio let it through. Let’s just say: I haven’t had this much fun watching a movie in a long, long time. What was up with that floating AR-15 though?
Conversely, I experienced extreme stress watching something else: Adolescence. It’s as good as folks say. Holy crap. What a thing. It’s amazing how much garbage streaming services produce, and then something like this — competent across every element of filmmaking — appears. Is this the “make a thousand pots instead of just one great pot” theory in practice vis-a-vis near-infinite streaming funding?
If you’re wondering what the network theory behind everyone seeming like they’re an asshole online is, Veritasium has some math for you.
