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)