Short Updates & 'The Universal Solvent'
Come with me to Fall 1974.
WHAT I’M WORKING ON FEBRUARY 2025
If you’re a paid subscriber, I’m working on a special treat to send your way as a thank-you: a standalone illustrated book entitled PERFUME FROM A SHIPWRECK. It consists of a short essay with accompanying illustrations. If you’re interested in this, you can sign up as a paid subscriber and it’ll be my pleasure to send you a copy!
Shortly, I hope to announce the release of a NEW BOOK entitled WORLD EXHIBITION, which will be available for pre-order. It’s a collection of illustrated short stories that I’ve been excited to share for quite some time, and interestingly enough the framing device involves a visit to the Altadena Library of my youth. The release is to be accompanied by a SHORT ANIMATED FILM which I’m very excited to share as well.
I’m currently editing and preparing to send an illustrated novel to agents/publishers, while also working on an illustrated adventure novel for young adults involving a lost library, a forgotten TV show, and a giant forest.
I’ve also finished up a new album FERNS IN AMERICA. It's a beatless ambient album with touches of a hazy, private-press feel, and I hope to share it with you soon.
THE UNIVERSAL SOLVENT
A small university lecture hall, Fall 1974. An assortment of undergraduates sit on stadium-style seats of smooth wood, many garbed in the various signifiers of contemporary counterculture: permutations of unkempt hair, mustaches and beards, ‘fros and ponytails, adorned with beads and fringe and shirts with screen-dyed slogans. Some resemble Marxist revolutionaries, others grizzled young mountain trappers, others simply the grown-up children of the suburbs which they mostly all are.
They are waiting for the lecturer to arrive. He is late.
He appears ten minutes past the hour. He is in his early forties, with long, stringy hair and sideburns. He wears a red beanie and an ocher polyester shirt, dark-brown corduroy pants and leather boots.
He clears his throat and begins:
Why am I here? Why me, I mean? Why is that you’re sitting there and I’m the one in the center of the rotunda? Because I am the teacher. But what is a teacher, what is a student? Why am I here? My life has been a series of unearned privileges, of stumbling into positions I didn’t earn, or earned only by accident. You come here to learn history. But this is what I have to say to you: history is unknowable.
I began my career as a history teacher, a young graduate from a respected and wizened institution. I was very much like you here. I taught history to undergraduates at a small liberal-arts college in Ohio, but within the first year, I began to wonder how I knew the things I was teaching were true. I started to doubt the sweeping narratives, the arc of human triumph I sought to inscribe in the classroom air as I spoke to my students. This fundamental uncertainty grew and grew, and I found to my alarm I had no way of quelling its growth, of keeping my own questions at bay. It was like a great balloon swelling, swelling, until it pushed out all other concerns.
I spoke of my doubts and fears to men I respected, to colleagues and mentors alike. But no one could answer my gnawing distrust. I misgave everything within the systems of men. I realized the only possible relief, the only panacea to the illness which had taken me, was to hear an answer from outside the world, from beyond the world of human culture and its machinations.
And strangely, as I began to share these thoughts, I found people lauded my doubt, that they praised me even as I corroded the fundamentals of their lives. It seemed to me they had been looking for an excuse to reject the inherited philosophies of their fathers, a means to escape the claims of morality upon their lives, and they seized upon what I was saying without realizing the dire nature of what was said. Eagerly they clamored for more, more of a substance with the power to devour the very earth.
Yes, devour the earth. For my doubt has become now a universal solvent, corroding the very container which holds it. I speak of my own mind. It is gone, its chambers filled by the darkness that now oozes its bounds, poring forth from every intellectual orifice. And now, I will share that same tincture with you.
A student sitting three rows back, wearing a modest ‘fro and black turtleneck, leans forward to a friend and whispers: why are we listening to this guy?
Thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, please do tell a friend. And if you want more, may I humbly recommend to you my first novel, The Forest Museum.
