eat beautiful
plus an nytimes debut baby
I haven’t written in a long time1, and I have been eating a lot of convenience-store sushi. The two things feel related somehow. Like I’m eating this just-OK food for more money than I wanted to spend on a snack (right now: 6 pieces, Spicy Tuna Roll, $9.48) because I don’t stop to plan out enough time to make something real and solid and good.
But that pre-packaged sushi that’s been languishing in a refrigerator all day really slaps (yes, I know, food can’t slap) when you’re hungry and slipping into the campus store right before it closes, and an aproned man is yelling, One minute to use meal points, and the way he says minute sounds like min-ought and this distracts you so much for a second you just stand there, considering if the word you heard was minute or some strange other possibility. You know exactly how the sushi is going to taste, that’s the joy. The cold gluey rice, a little too sweet (ingredients: water, white rice, sugar, distilled vinegar, salt, rice vinegar, citric acid, brown sugar), the Technicolor-green wasabi that’s actually horseradish, the pickled ginger you eat in one gulp before you rip open the soy sauce packet and dip sushi with your fingers. Now you’re done and it’s kind of sticky in your throat. How sustainable is it to eat fish, anyway? How much mercury can you eat before it fucks you up?
At Gatwick Airport the two choices were Pret a Manger or a fast-casual sushi place called Itsu (tagline: Eat Beautiful) and you know now to boycott Pret so you ate salmon sushi at Itsu and you knew from the light color that it was farmed. You used to feel that eating no meat except for seafood was sort of justifiable: it was socially easy because no one has sympathy for fish (though you do feel a visceral fear at their dead eyes, regarding you from beds of ice in grocery store display cases), and it seemed like catching them out of the ocean was a different process than all the mass breeding and killing and shooting up with antibiotics and grinding one’s dead family’s carcasses into feed that happens to sentient beings in factory farming. But then you learn about how these fish farms pump them full of antibiotics and crazy diseases proliferate and pollution disperses from the fish farms into broader waterways and you’re really not a very superior person for eating salmon teriyaki instead of chicken teriyaki are you. Before Gatwick there was JFK, Tuna and Salmon Traveler’s Special, $19. What alchemy made metal-laden corpses such convenient airport food?
This morning the critic Brian Dillon taught a full room about writing criticism. We did a sentence-level exercise. He told us when Joan Didion was writing captions for Vogue she would have been writing to a character count, not a word count. That her editor would have slashed her sentences relentlessly down. We took a short, spare magazine caption by Joan Didion, and imagined what a baroque, earlier version might have looked like. I thought we were supposed to take just a minute on it, dashed something off, and then looked around bemusedly.
We have ten minutes, R. whispered to me.
For a sentence? I said dubiously.
I did eventually write much more, but I’m thinking about how my knee-jerk response was that ten minutes was indulgent and excessive. There’s something about writing a prospectus that makes me write as a process of transcription — getting ideas out of my head and onto paper — far more than the shapeshifting that it can be. I worry that consideration is the enemy of speed — caught between aesthetic optimization and clarity of meaning, what I want and what I need. I understand why Dillon used Didion as writer par excellence; she has such sparse effective prose, honed by editors and her own diligence (typing out pages of Hemingway to emulate him, for instance). But I don’t actually like Didion that much. I’ve always found her writing hard-edged and tight-lipped. I don’t love Hemingway either. I read “Hills Like White Elephants” in college and didn’t realize what it was about until the lecturer started explaining. At the time I felt dumb but now I think if your subtext is that sub who are you really writing for?
Anyway if the convenience store sushi is the food that gets you through when you’re going from place to place and can’t really stop it’s a decent metaphor for the writing I’ve been doing in scraps, like this —
🍣 March 20, 2024: Foucault’s oeuvre and the genre of travel writing are both prone to making magisterial declarations about history and the character of a people. This was a thought I had while reading Juan Villoro’s book Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico, an essay collection that (true to its titular promise) soars vertiginously between neighborhoods, eras, and topics. Reading the book while in CDMX augmented the experience of travel; while reading the chapter where he introduces the city’s “cafe class,” lambastes the onomatopoeic chains (Vips, Toks), and tells the story of the House of Tiles (per Villoro, built by a Spanish count as a big f-you to his dad, who once told him he couldn’t even build a house from tiles), we went on a walk to the House of Tiles and walked through the Sanborns there, up the steps, onto the crooked second floor gazing out at the atrium.
Two adults on vacation with each other: each becomes a parent to the other in turn. I’m hungry! Tired, my eyes hurt, contacts have dried out in the dusty wind whipping our faces in the backs of Ubers or Didis where drivers cough such hacking coughs and take such hairpin turns we daren’t close the window. He’s disappointed, first Palacio Nacional is closed for the week because of demonstrations and then Templo Mayor’s ticketing system is down, kaput, there’s nothing for it; Maybe in twenty minutes, says the guard, forty-five minutes ago. Mexican nationals and CDMX residents get in for free, so we stand awkwardly by the impotent ticket kiosks before giving up and leaving. Sorry dear, I say to him. In restaurants we try to entertain each other, the way I see parents pull toys and screens out of their limitless purses and backpacks, I say, Here’s your book, he says, Here’s your journal if you want to sketch. I carry the hand sanitizer, he orders in Spanish.
🍣 April 7th, 2024: One of the things I love about R. (which is probably also something I love about myself) is how just now as a man was passing by telling his group of friends something about someone “fucking that gross-ass gremlin” R. turned to me and repeated an impression of the man saying “fucking that gross-ass gremlin” which means he was arrested by it, how it sounded. It’s a nice intimacy to be arrested by the same things. See also Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain.”
🍣 April 8, 2024: vermont sights
on a small hill: snowmobile named “GOD,” stenciled on in the race car font. for sale by owner.
a golden-roofed barn church, “The place where the sheep come to be fed” emblazoned on the side
a low-rider vintage mercedes, vanity plate reading SLOVAK, setting off sparks on the road as its bumper dragged
The critic Becca Rothfeld wrote pretty negatively about fragmentary writing in her book All Things Are Too Small: in her essay “More is More,” she describes women’s autofiction about mothering and relationships largely written in fragments as deviations from standards for good art. Step away from the kitchen and write an actual novel, she pleads. One day I will spend more than ten minutes on a sentence, maybe I’ll spend a whole day. Till then, I am here with the empty plastic box from my reliably mid sushi, and my stomach is full.
got an (appropriately, short) passage published in NYTimes Magazine about my favorite critic — peep #11 in “The Messages That Led to Love”
friend & housemate D. declared “this is what it feels like to live in the heart of empire”
cover image: Kintaro with Carp, 19th C. Japan, Met Collection
outside of school and personal correspondence