Patch #29: Dystopian novels, Quora wisdom, and J Dilla
A reading diary (of sorts) from the summer
1.
Once, I googled a life-related question about aging — an existential entreaty thrown into the networked void despite the expectation of getting an unhinged bit of Reddit advice or a push for supplements or an ad for Vshred in return. The specific question was: Why does time seem to move faster as we age?
Posing such a question to the digital gods is akin to a kind of teenage prayer (née riot). Alone in the screenglow, we ask the same questions we once scribbled in our precious notebooks (and how ardently) about the point of existence, the ability to feel, how to love with all of our hearts: eternal inquiries heaped upon an internet which increasingly resembles nothing so much as a mountain of burning shit and plastic. We type with gusto what in public would call for humility and reverence: is something wrong with me? Am I a good parent? Usually, the question reveals far more about our state of mind than the answer.
But in this particular case I’m recalling about the question of aging and the passage of time, the query resulted in a Quora response that, miracle of miracles, I still think about. I can’t seem to repeat the exact response, but I remember it like this: when we’re young, we’re far more prone to experience something — or many somethings — for the first time. I interpreted the use of young in the broad sense, encompassing everything from early childhood to early parenthood; from the first time we fall in love with a song to the the first time we fall in love with a person; from the first time we break someone’s heart to the first time we tell our children that their feelings of heartbreak will pass.
When we’re young, we experience many firsts, but as we age, these firsts begin to diminish and our perception of the passage of time accelerates. At first, it is imperceptible. In the rush of years that define the time of parenting young children, for example, we look with nostalgia on the time before our hours were consumed with parenting, imagining how glorious a surplus of time might feel. But what we don’t realize — or at least I didn’t realize — was that these days of early parenting represented the twilight of the great novel experience surplus, whereafter the rush of novelty would slow and the searching out of it would switch from passive to active. They grow up so fast, we all say to each other, cliché be damned. We can think of no better response, and it is preferable to the underlying truth: which is that our time is running out.
2.
Over the summer, when I was reading, traveling, and generally shirking my writing practice, one of the novels I read and loved was The Memory Police by Japanese novelist Yōko Ogawa. Reading the book itself is kind of a novel experience, even for someone who loves dystopian and fantastical fictions (think Bruno Schulz, Knut Hamsun, Sven Holm). Of the many pleasures of reading on vacation, one I enjoy especially is reading about the end of the world in a hammock, buffeted by tropical breezes.
But even this alone doesn’t explain the enduring allure of The Memory Police, a book that is a perfectly imaginative and lovely read, but really stands out in the way that it transcends the sum of its gifts by being, well, memorable. The natural phrase is too clever by half, and imprecise besides, because what one remembers is not quite as corporeal as an actual memory; it’s more like the memory of an especially haunting and resonant dream.
The protagonist of The Memory Police is a novelist, and she goes about the usual daily sufferings of her chosen vocation in the home where she grew up on a small and nameless island. Her routine unfolds without major incident, but gradually we learn the island is controlled by an authoritarian ruling body — the titular Memory Police — who periodically “disappear” the recollections of the citizens under their jurisdiction. The things that disappear include flowers, books, birds, and other objects and entities that are somehow even more essential. Most forget the things that have been erased almost instantly — when it’s gone, it’s gone — but for a select few the memories linger. These folks, the novelists’s mother included, are soon rounded up and taken away by the shiny-booted bureaucrats to “camps” whose horrors are left to the reader’s imagination.
Months after finishing this book, I’m still thinking about it. Far from the tropics and jacked in, once again, to the daily drumbeat of my personalized news feeds, it occurs to me the novel’s potency might stem from its indirect grappling with the expanding doom loops of information and experience one encounters in the course of a regular day. This begs a bit of explanation. The loops I’m thinking about are algorithmic, and their influence is not so much decadent as it is inane.1
I have written about digital amnesia before — the idea, more or less, that we remember little of what we spend time doing online due to the lack of sensory layers and surprises we encounter — but in reflecting about this concept, I feel I have insufficiently captured the causal centrality of the algorithm in the phenomenon. The algorithm drives amnesia due to the inherent predictability of its choices and the way it engenders what Venkatesh Rao has referred to as “reactionary nostalgia” for the unworn paths one was more likely to find in a prior time.2
In The Memory Police, we see what it is like to no longer remember, with accuracy, this prior time: to walk through a ghost world where all traces of the past have been removed. The resonance is unfortunate, but unavoidable — its spirit captured in a recent essay by Justin E.H. Smith: “I sit at home, and I read and write, and I literally have trouble comprehending that the world still exists.”3 But the world does exist, of course, and The Memory Police is unique in its exploration of what’s required to endure amongst the ruins — namely our connections to other people and our willingness to, per Beckett, go on.
In one moment of the novel, the novelist and an old man — once a ferry mechanic until the boats were disappeared — discuss how to orient to what has been lost.
Old Man: “…I’ve even managed to go on living here on the boat, where I’m most comfortable. I’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Narrator: But not one memory of the ferry remains here. It’s nothing more than a floating scrap of iron. That doesn’t make you sad?”
Old Man: “It’s true, I know, that there are more gaps in the island than there used to be. When I was a child, the whole place seemed…how can I put this?…a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn’t worry.”
Easy enough for him to say. But I do see the logic, even if its comforts are chilling.
Before I found the shape of what you’re reading, I wrote thousands of words about amnesia and apocalypse plots. I wanted to find an insight in their combination, a reason popular fictions like Station Eleven and The Last of Us and Severance strike a chord with modern audiences. In the same way that some speculated the amnesia plots so often found in late forties films spoke to soldiers returning home to a world they no longer recognized, I wanted to find a through line between the end of time and the forgetting of the past.
But every era has its amnesia plots and imaginations of the apocalypse are nothing new. In trying to find the link between them, I began to wonder if the use of these tropes was nothing more than a way to move the story forward. Homer, after all, did have his lotus eaters, and one source I found claims there were over 60 films about amnesia in the 1910s, 50 in the 1920s, 40 in the 1930s, and 70 in the 1940s. As the author David Bordwell wryly notes in an article on the same subject, “amnesia is rare in real life but common in movies.”4
The path turned out to be a dead end: a hunt for a connection that was not there. The thing I was looking for was less about amnesia and apocalypse and more about finding inspiration in a world that, vexingly, continues to resemble itself even as it evolves into something unrecognizable. The failure is not so much a failure of memory, but a failure of imagination.5
3.
The last book I read this summer was Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm. I’ve long been a fan of Dilla’s, and have a big place in my heart for productions like The Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia, Slum Village’s Fantastic, No. 2, and the posthumously released Donuts, which served as the headphone soundtrack for a good year of my Chicago bike commutes in the mid oughts. I sometimes think about how thrilling it was to love this music and live two blocks from the famous Chicago record store Dusty Groove, where, for a time, new Dilla productions seemed to arrive, like magic, every Friday. I used to pick up these new albums and then pore over the liner notes and artwork while I ate tacos at La Pasadita — trying in vain to keep the new jackets pristine.
But even though Dilla has touched so many records in my collection, I don’t think I fully appreciated his contribution to music and his relationship to time until I read Charnas’s book.
As is often commented, the singular thing about Dilla was his ability to use machines to reproduce the sound of human error — to filter, loop, and sample without making the resulting productions feel stilted or predictable. Indeed, Dilla designed mistakes into his productions to actively undermine the metronome-like cadence of his drum machine. He realized that these tiny imperfections, layered into composition, would create the texture, feel, and emotional heft of live musicians far better than the drum machine’s one-touch “quantization” function. In other words, he found a way to make technological tools feel more human.
Charnas speculates that this sensibility emerged, in part, from the chaotic geography and influences of Detroit, where Augustus Woodward’s elegant radial street design morphed into something far more chaotic.
What was it like to grow up in a place that forces you to take inexplicable turns that lead to nowhere? Where you find yourself almost always in some really ugly corners? How do you make sense of that map? J Dilla took all of the places of the city’s history, put them into his machine, and — as one can do only with a machine— slammed them against one another. Grid against grid.
So often, it feels like the choice between embracing or shunning technology is an impossible binary, that we can’t take advantage of its wonders without also accepting its considerable downsides. But in Charnas’s book, we find the articulation of another orientation: a way to bend the machines by breaking them; to transform their outputs into something new, something undiscovered, something human. Lest we miss the point, Charnas spells it out explicitly:
Technology is doing something strange to human beings. As we move further into the Machine Age, we’ll continue to have to find our humanity within it, to find a way to maximize its potential for the positive. Are you punching through the grid or are you trapped in it? J Dilla was his generation’s first great grid jumper, master of mazes, navigator of crossroads. His music reflected the ability to live in discomfort, the certainty of uncertainty, the ease of unease, and the suspense in waiting for a resolution that may or may not come when you expect it.
I can think of no better way to end this patch than that.
This week’s recommendations:
Reading: Language Model UXes in 2027, vishnumenon
Listening: Mabgate, by Mabgate
Music credits for article audio:
Opening Theme: “Synth pop with 4 on the floor” by mesostic via Wikimedia Commons
Closing Theme: “Comfort in Uncertainty” by bbatv via Wikimedia Commons
This is a reference to the following quote by Daniel J. Boorstin: “While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent.” Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Vintage Books, 1962.
I heard about this second-hand so do not have a link to the framework
Smith, Justin E.H. “My Generation: Anthem for a Forgotten Cohort.” Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Magazine Foundation, September 2023
Bordwell, David. “The Amnesia Plot: How 1940s Films Reinvented the Ways Stories Are Told Onscreen.” Lapham’s Quarterly, 25 Oct. 2017
It is a sentiment best expressed in another another apocalyptic book I read over the summer, Sven Holm’s Termush. The book, originally published in 1967, is about a group of wealthy survivors riding out the nuclear apocalypse in a resort. One passage expressed by the narrator stuck with me after reading the book:
We did not envisage quite such a ruthless change in our environment. But one of the reasons for our feelings of weakness may be that things have retained their outward appearance, now that the disaster has happened. Without knowing it, we put our faith in the disaster; we thought that our panic would be justified if we had to use symbols as violent as those our imagination needed earlier. But we came back from our stay in the shelters to find a world changed less than a summer thunderstorm would have changed it. And now when we have a profound need for imagination and insight, none of us seems to have the power to satisfy it.
Holm, Sven. Termush. Faber Editions, 2023.