My Jandek Plague Journal: 3/24/20 "No Mind Was a Good Mind"

Part One: "I made a mistake/and came here today." "But I'm here anyway/pounding at your door/half-dead and forsaken/I did it to myself/I made a mistake/It's my problem now/I'll live through this/dragging my body along." Part Two: "I guess I'll go and hide inside/I don't know why I ever came out." Because it's Tuesday, I choose a Tuesday album and keep getting lyrics about shame resulting from a refusal to stay away. I'm thinking about my own self-isolation practice, how it's my daily routine anyway, but that I was still glib about it. I was going to go to the movies tonight, but received a text this morning encouraging citizens to power through these next two weeks; we've almost got it beat. Meanwhile, the US administration is considering calling off all the social distancing because it's hurting the economy. Apparatchiks are already doing the media rounds saying some deaths are acceptable. -3/24/20. "No Mind Was a Good Mind" from London Tuesday (lyrics) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 3/23/20 Where Do You Go From Here

Largely instrumental, lyrics all repetitions of/variations on "Make up your mind/Decide." People on Twitter joke about the virus giving the US the choice between socialism and barbarism while the Republican congress tries to thread the needle of propping up the economy while not funding the de facto general strike that's now going on. The US is where it is now because it renewed its commitment to white supremacy 4 years ago. Preparations should have begun when the outbreak emerged in China, but it was just those yellow bastards being backwards, that can't happen to the likes of us. Same again with Korea who demonstrated how to address and conquer this. Even Italy who are white, but not quite, could prompt action. Now the US looks to be the least capable of responding, requiring international aid to survive as the administration focuses its efforts on blaming the barbarians. Meanwhile, the citizens are deciding upon mutual support and the shape of the world to come. -3/23/20. Where Do You Go From Here (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 3/22/20 "This is a Death Dream"

Listened while waiting in Nampo for a friend who's leaving the country. They have no fear about being admitted to the US, but the flights out of Korea and Japan keep getting canceled. "This is a death dream in the daytime" indeed. Noon on a Sunday, the fashion street is largely unpopulated, depopulated even. Jandek's atonal chord progression sounds like music done wrong, filtered through some veil of the uncanny, and it's a fitting soundtrack for this space. As foreigners, as expats, we're already in a liminal space: here but not of this place, possessing claims to homelands we've disavowed. We're ghosts haunting this landscape, my friends trying to find the light as they move from this world to the next. We haunt not just the land here, but the imagination as well, visible representations of a foreign infection, the transformative germ. When we're in the classroom, is this exposure or inoculation? "I go to the cemetery buildings in search of books and never do I find the right one." Ghosts that we are, we have no way to record our tales. -March 22, 2020. "This is a Death Dream" from Nine-Thirty (lyrics) (one week later)