My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/24/20 "This Wasted Life"

"Why can’t I stop this wasted life/Please take my freedom, I can’t use it right/Make me a moron who doesn’t know/This wasted life I’m stumbling through." Happy Memorial Day Weekend. Florida has fired the person responsible for tracking COVID and has reopened the beaches. The official death toll for the US has not quite hit 100,000, but with Florida and Georgia openly fudging the numbers, it's surely already higher than that. And people are going back out, celebrating the holiday weekend. Sure, some of them are doing it to "own the libs," as if a virus cares about your politics, but a lot of them are going out because they trust authorities saying that it's safe. And I've already said that, already talked about the tragedy of that betrayal. But where is the opposition, the voices from the other side saying, "we won't lie to you"? If the only options are death or despair, I too would want to be a moron and not know. -5/24/20. "This Wasted Life" from Glasgow Friday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/23/20 "The Daze"

"I didn’t think of an end or where it began and there was no pressure/It was like a cloud under that bright light path walking through the trees." What is the endpoint of this journal? What is the endpoint of the pandemic? One of the purposes of keeping this journal and keeping the requirement of listening to a Jandek album every day is to have that constant sense of the additional considerations. Even as things open up, at best we'll have normal life plus the pandemic. I have Jandek. What will I hear, what will it be, how will it manifest? It's glib to compare COVID to a deep dive into an artist's catalog (and rude to Jandek), but it's the act of isolating with the music and contemplation of the pandemic that I'm talking about. That's the connection and parallel. And just as with the pandemic, I have to ask what the endpoint is. I own 77 albums of 96 total. Does this end when I've heard them all, or when corona is over? Is there any end? -5/23/20. "The Daze" from The Myth of Blue Icicles (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/22/20 "Sorry, Sorry"

"I’m sorry, sorry/I can’t think positive/I can’t dream of a future/It’s today my getting through." America is reopening so that means there was a mass shooting. A man opened fire at an Arizona mall, specifically targeting couples. The mayor said that, as places start to reopen, you can expect violence like this again. Do not surrender to fear and please keep shopping. "I can't dream of a future" if this is the world we're being told to expect. You can't shelter-in-place to protect yourself from dying to the disease because that will hurt the economy and you can't stay inside to avoid shooters cause that will hurt the economy. The government can't do anything to prevent you from dying because that would generate expectations that the government works for you. Besides, dying is good for the economy--funeral expenses, hotel rooms for visiting mourners, and your job filled by one of the 40 million unemployed. Die for Mammon, die for Moloch. -5/22/20. "Sorry, Sorry" from Brooklyn Wednesday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/21/20 "Afternoon of Insensitivity: Part Five"

"Another day of not knowing/Not knowing what it’s about or what to do/There’s nothing to do/Is it just go outside and you’ll find something to do/It appears we make the things to do." Do we believe in possibility anymore? The rhetoric of politicians being useless liars predominates, but it's coupled with despair as if they were ever anything else. All this outrage over "failures of leadership," but did you want to be led? Do you want to be ruled? My colleague argued that one reason Korea never went on lockdown is that the people don't trust the government--and not in the performative way Americans don't trust the government; Koreans rallied in the streets and put the last president in jail. In the pandemic, Koreans didn't look to be led, they took actions to protect each other on their own. That the government facilitated their actions is why it has popular support. The people led. -5/21/20. "Afternoon of Insensitivity: Part Five" from Manhattan Tuesday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/20/20 "The Ruins of Adventure"

"I hate that I got any responsibility/I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to walk/But maybe if I walk I’ll escape talk/If I can be alone I’ll live through this." My students came back to school today and all pretense of social distancing went right out the window. And why wouldn't it? The children have been more locked down than anyone else in Korea. Three months without being near their closest friends, and this is a touchy culture. These children don't just hug, they hang upon each other, lean upon each other, entwine themselves with each other--in a non-erotic way. Students walk with their arms braided together. Three months without touching anyone, without being touched and reminded that you exist because you've been felt. I saw them mobbing each other as I left and I thought, there is no way we escape a 2nd wave, but here, and only here, would I be willing to think the cure is worse than the disease. -5/20/20. "The Ruins of Adventure" from The Ruins of Adventure (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/19/20 "Lithe Body"

"How could I send you all that I made/When I didn’t make it, it made me/And now I have something to contend with/A process enabled/The mission of a moving character." I watched the Cold War thriller Fail Safe today. I'm returning to the Cold War a lot lately, from watching Stranger Things with my students last year, to prepping research for a story about the Satanic Panic, to reflecting on the parallels between our present pandemic moment of deprivation and the threat of Soviet dystopia coupled with letting AIDS brutalize the triple "H" populations: Haitians, homos, and heroin addicts. The film is interesting for being disavowed by the Department of Defense, but it feels like propaganda now. The central message is that the political leadership is composed of competent figures wrestling with the moral consequences of their actions. History, through Stanislav Petrov, shows that we were instead saved by workers who ignored idiot orders. -5/19/20. "Lithe Body" from Austin Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/18/20 "The Cell: Part Three"

"What do I have/An insight from the past/So contrite, knowledge/Some bastion I guard/Some shade." I've been reading Adorno's Minima Moralia (slowly. I sit down to read in the evening and Kindle says I have 5 hours left. An hour later, I have 5 hours left). He says, "He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange." Is this not a summation of the pleasure of Jandek: the impenetrability of the project, its perpetual isolation from the mainstream, is what's compelling. There will never be a communal experience of Jandek, just your experience. Likewise the pandemic, despite being global, is a personal experience. How have you survived, how have you coped, who have you lost? There are great acts of community, there always are in crisis, but I'm thinking of the comment, "If we were all in this together, we wouldn't be in this together." -5/18/20. "The Cell: Part Three" from Glasgow Monday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/17/20 "My Own Way"

"I don’t need a window/To see what’s outside/I don’t need to be out there." I had plans to go on a long bike ride today but then I overslept and decided to stay in instead. I tried to make a loaf of bread, but screwed up the recipe so it came out all deflated. Then I streamed a little on Twitch. None of this is in response to the pandemic, it's just my normal life. What's it say of me that the stereotype of what people have been doing under self-isolation is my typical weekend? I was talking with a colleague yesterday about Korea's transition from its "self-isolation" program to "distancing in daily life." We couldn't see how the new policy was different from what we'd been instructed to do from the beginning. I've asked before, what becomes normal, but that applies to good things as well. In the wake of this, how many of us will persist in a calmer, more meditative life? -5/17/20. "My Own Way" from What Else Does the Time Mean (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/16/20 "Mangled and Dead"

"I’ll shoot you in the head/You’ll be mangled and dead/I’ll blow the smoke, walk away/Can’t you be my friend/Tell me you like me." Some of the paid protesters at the reopen America rallies organized by the administration have tested positive for COVID-19. Just one rally was posting numbers comparable to the Itaewon cluster. It's hard to feel anything toward them, sympathy or schadenfreude. They want the sympathy but will accept scorn: at least the latter gives them an enemy. And that's the strange duality of these protests. They're gathering and wailing, "our businesses, our housecleaning, our haircuts, pity us!" But since they arrive armed, there's the additional message "or we'll kill you." Now they're getting sick and the general reaction is a shrug and, "that'll happen." They won't get any sympathy for the very real suffering they and their families will go through, and they won't have anyone to call out for being mean about it. No one cares what happens to them. -5/16/20. "Mangled and Dead" from Newcastle Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/15/20 "Khartoum"

"Make me a slow moving creature without complexities/I don’t want my mind to go/To a thousand places." I slept through my alarm this morning and had to teach my first class from home. It was just like Monday and Tuesday again when I was under voluntary quarantine. The leitmotif of this pandemic is repetition, the recognition of the same horrors and responses again and again. Like Walter Benjamin said, "That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe." I wrote yesterday about the return to blaming China instead of addressing the problem. In the US, daily cases and deaths are rising again. We're moving in circles. Even Jandek is sitting in place, this album just alternate versions of songs from the previous one. And I want to be that "slow moving creature" absolved of the responsibility of recognizing the repetitions. -5/15/20. "Khartoum" from Khartoum Variations (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/14/20 "Fragmentation"

"The form of a corporation is delimited/Why is it so vernacular/When you talk to a man/How do you get through." I saw that the Streets had a new track out when I went to listen to Jandek and turned it off when I got to the line about eating "uncooked bat." A quick read-through of the lyrics shows no criticism of a failed government response. Likewise, two days ago Bryan Adams posted his outrage at his tour being canceled due to "bat eating [...] bastards." These moments are notable because they show fascist language and ideas seeping into pop culture. It's evidence of people, consciously or unconsciously, falling in line. Fault doesn't lie in the still questionable origin of the virus, it lies in the response to it. Every country knew this was coming with the start of the new year. The return to deflecting blame onto China instead of implementing a functional plan shows that 5 months in, they still don't have one. -5/14/20. "Fragmentation" from Khartoum (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/13/20 "It's Forever"

"Arrest yourself, don’t wait any longer/Cause yourself to cease/Stop and think about it." Itaewon is shaping up to be the new cluster site in Korea and it's sparking backlash against the expected populations: foreigners and the LGBTQ community. Just like yesterday, when solidarity was shed in the face of safety, the Itaewon cluster is emerging as an opportunity to justify preexisting bigotries. Coincidentally, I just taught a lesson on fascist speech using a Philosophy Tube video. He says when fascists say Jews run the world, they're not really saying that. They're saying they want to persecute Jews. Likewise, when Koreans start singling out foreigners and LGBTQ people as pandemic threats, they don't really believe that either. They're saying they want to have a designated underclass that can be used and abused when convenient because some people should be chattel. -5/13/20. "It's Forever" from Raining Down Diamonds (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/12/20 "Not Even Water"

"Not even water/Crossed my lips/I’m a gone, goner, goner/Hanging out to dry." And as soon as my quarantine moment starts, it's over. My colleague's test came back negative this morning so it's back to the office tomorrow. I can't even pretend to have suffered any dearth of comfort: I spent two lovely spring days inside reading comics, watching movies, and baking cookies. Along with the test results came the crumbling of the pretense of solidarity. My other colleagues sent the testee messages excoriating them for being insufficiently contrite about the situation. Sure, the testee was worried that they might have caught the plague, but did they even consider what that might do their colleagues' career prospects? As with so much of this pandemic, it's so absurd and grotesque that it has to be fabricated, but I watched the conversation play out live. This is reality now. -5/12/20. "Not Even Water" from Glasgow Sunday (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/11/20 "When I See You Again"

"Wondering what your enthusiasm is gonna be like/When I see you again/I got a good feeling about it." First day of teaching from quarantine and it was like starting over again. I floundered as all my teaching material was back at the school and all my tech that I'm so familiar with failed in new ways when paired with the school's software. Most shocking though was the downtime: between classes I did my ironing, prepared food for the rest of the week, and had a better lunch than I could have had at work. It illuminated how much of life is wasted at the job and how life away from work is impoverished by it. I want to meet my students in person again--this online teaching is a half measure at best--but how much better life could be if I only had to be at work when I worked. That's probably another reason for the push to reopen the US and UK: don't let people realize how much better their lives would be with less work. -5/11/20. "When I See You Again" from When I Took That Train (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/10/20 "I Gave My Eternity"

"I’m off for the day/I shut out the lights/I watched the day pass/And in these moments/I intermittently escape/To that space around my epicenter." After all the time watching things happen in the US, I am finally under quarantine. Is this the pandemic equivalent of sympathy weight? It's not due to anything I did fortunately--I'd hate to carry the burden of thinking I'd infected anyone by being irresponsible. Instead a colleague went to Itaewon last weekend and that's become the most recent exposure cluster. So they were taken out for testing today and we're all teaching from home tomorrow and maybe Tuesday. If the test comes back positive, things proceed from there. How quickly it's addressed and resolved, though. We'll have results tomorrow and then will act on that information. My time in quarantine may be over before I can grow sick of it. -5/10/20. "I Gave My Eternity" from A Kingdom He Likes (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/9/20 "The Slow Burn"

"Go away and fall down dead/And when you’re all gone/I’ll live in peace in a house that’s not burned down." Everyone's trying to move backwards to live in the time before. If we reopen the economy, we can return to the time before coronavirus. If we vote for Biden, we can return to the time before this administration. If you believe in MAGA, we can go back to the time before everything wrong. America consistently fails to regard the future as a place arrived at by moving through the past. We never acknowledge where we were or what we've done so we never move forward. "Normal," both pre-COVID and 4 years ago, was people dying because they couldn't go to the doctor. That's still the case. And both candidates are promising to maintain that state of affairs. The tragedy of the pandemic, like every American tragedy, is that it's not remarkable. The crisis lies in who we've always been. -5/9/20. "The Slow Burn" from The Door Behind (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/8/20 "I Met You"

"Now that you’re here, tell me/Is it the best place you ever know/Because I’m at the best place I ever knew/And it’s just after I met you." It was warm on my walk home today, but growing overcast and windy in anticipation of the rain that's supposed to arrive tomorrow and linger all day. I listened to this album on that walk and the dissonance of Jandek and nice weather was heightened by the content of the music. The lyrics, uniquely, are hopeful, addressing a person who drew the singer away from the typical despair and isolation of these songs. That emotion is undercut or possibly ironized by the long instrumental stretches, seemingly more discordant and atonal than usual. Are these sincere expressions of affection by someone unfamiliar with the forms, or are they something sinister, the declarations of an obsessive and a stalker? When do we give up on insisting that there's hope? -5/8/20. "I Met You" from The End of it All (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/7/20 "Shadow of Leaves"

"Hey, look at all the things gone by/It’s a stream of consciousness/Except of course those green plants/Are they really really real." I haven't used the opportunity of the pandemic to write my novel. Or start my video blog. Or read all my books. Granted, I never was under lockdown. My daily life didn't change. It's easy to be too precious about creativity though. The right space, the right moment, the right mood, inspiration! There's something to be said for just cranking things out, just doing the work. Jandek demonstrates the value of doing it and just putting it out there. This song comes from his 36th album, an album where he's playing bass and seems well past the point of leaning into being the oddball outsider musician. You find your audience, your muse, by doing the work of creation. I need to sit and write my stories. -5/7/20. "Shadow of Leaves" from Shadow of Leaves (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/6/20 "I Found the Right Change"

"I’m gonna sit in my front room where nobody stays/I need to describe what’s going to stay here and/What’s going away/Don’t you have a friend who can give you space/It’s what you need right now." Everything's gearing back up at school: Saturday classes, afterschool classes, and the inevitable return of the students. Things are returning to normal. In the US, the death toll is over 72,000 with more than 2,000 people dying every day. As someone on Twitter pointed out, that's a 9/11 every 2 days. That's acceptable now. That's the new normal. 19 years ago the administration told people to go shopping so as to not let the terrorists win. Also, give up on all your freedoms so we don't have an event like that again. Now the administration says go shopping to ensure we keep getting this level of death. It's a situation so absurd that even criticizing it seems facile. -5/6/20. "I Found the Right Change" from The Gone Wait (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

New Writing Available Online

An essay I wrote documenting my experience with the coronavirus outbreak in Korea just got posted on The Enneadecameron. That blog was conceived as a 21st century version of Boccaccio's Decameron, a collection of stories presented with the framing device of them all being told by ten people waiting out the plague. Of course the blog is about the current pandemic and has its own variety of framing devices and authors. It's worth browsing through.

The call-for-submissions for The Enneadecameron is part of what prompted me to start doing the Jandek Plague Journal.

You can read my piece, "The Expat's Tale" here

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/5/20 "The Picture"

"And here I am/How did I get here/How did I make this world/I thought it out and made a plan/And the elements combined/Presto — here’s reality." I live and work in South Korea. How did that happen? I know the steps I took, the choices I made, but it still seems amazing to me that it's my reality, that it's something I could imagine as an option. Meanwhile in the US, the country I left, the place I couldn't imagine a world outside of, a document written for the administration leaked saying that if they "reopen" the economy the pandemic will persist with the daily death rate reaching 3,000 people by June. And this is accepted because nothing else can be imagined. That makes sense though. During the Cold War the only vision offered was Soviet desperation, not some competing utopianism. With the fall of the USSR, we haven't constructed a new imaginary so the world the US is building looks increasingly Soviet. -5/5/20. "The Picture" from The Place (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/4/20 "I Stepped Out of It"

"I stopped the world/And I stepped out of it/I cut a clean path/I stepped out of it/I’ve gone and stepped out of everything." Today felt like one of the first days of summer, where it's not just warming but warm and you bear visible sweat from any time outside. I walked to the bank to take care of some business, luxuriating in the sun while also worrying that my sweat would make me look feverish. The pandemic is not yet over, but Korea continues its path of relaxation. Plans have been announced to let students start attending school in person again, gradually, grade-by-grade. My students will start arriving next Wednesday, and how will they feel about finally emerging? My students are focused on international affairs, global interactions, and see their futures in that context. Internationalism and isolation have both become so different during this pandemic. How do they imagine their future now? -5/4/20. "I Stepped Out of It" from The Humility of Pain (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/3/20 "It Seems Forever"

"I’ll hold out a light/Let it shine for you/If nobody sees it/I still do what I do/I tried to be happy/What a foolish thing." My Canadian friend says they've been having strange, vivid dreams, bordering on nightmares since the lockdown began. I had my own batch last night including the rapist I met in grad school. When I woke up, I looked him up online. He has his PhD now and a full-time teaching job. His published papers use the language of organizing and solidarity. It feels like he's living an echo of the life I once aspired to, like he crept in by hiding in the shadow I cast and seized it from me. Right now I'm in the midst of Adorno claiming the modern world, infected with fascism, perverted "solidarity" from the noble human impulse to a code word indicating loyalty to a team. There's a hollowness to institutions populated by shadows, even if I once aspired to membership. -5/3/20. "It Seems Forever" from I Threw You Away (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/2/20 "In the Cave"

"We paid/We surely did pay/I’m gonna get out of it/By going into it more/I’m gonna get out of it." One week after reopening, Georgia had 1,000 new coronavirus cases in one day. Photos circulated of people gathering in large groups to watch the Blue Angels fly overhead. The easy response to this is sneering contempt, but something else underlies both details: faith in authority. People gathering again and the 1,000 new cases come from believing the message that it's safe to start going outside again. The other details don't matter: doctors saying it's not safe, the governor saying he's reopening even though more people will die, all people hear is "we're reopening" and assume it's safe because surely leaders wouldn't put people's lives at risk that way. What's on display is a betrayal of these people's faith in their fellow citizen and their painfully present need to be a community again. -5/2/20. "In the Cave" from Worthless Recluse (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/1/20 "One Last Chance"

"It crept and I saw it all along the way/It came on bit by bit/And I knew it all along/The only difference is now/It’s gone too far." When did we stop talking about the virus, about ventilators and PPE and flattening the curve? The paid protesters of the "reopen" movement escalated things today by staging an armed takeover of the Michigan statehouse. When Black people did that in California, Reagan banned open carry with the support of the NRA. Today, the white protesters didn't even face pushback from the gathered police (who, with what we know of white supremacy, were presumably coordinating with the protesters). Meanwhile, at the other protests around the country funded and organized by the administration's factotums, people held up signs reading, "Work is Freedom." The phrase has popped up at several locations meaning it was suggested from the top. In the original German, it's "Arbeit Macht Frei," from the gates of Auschwitz. -5/1/20. "One Last Chance" from This Narrow Road (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/30/20 "It's Your House"

"I got this dream of my house/The one you gave me in my mind/I’m ready for the house/Let me build my house." The first of 3 a capella albums from Jandek and the first album of the 21st Century. The lyrics reach back to the beginning of all this, constantly repeating "ready for the house," the title of the first album. There is an Ouroboros quality to this, a sense of Burroughs' cut-ups, that this may all be one text that we're constantly dipping back into, never seeing the whole or a real chronology, just repetitions of details that may be connections or may be what we've already seen. To counter the fact that US coronavirus deaths have surpassed the US death toll in Vietnam, we hear that the people dying would have died anyway. Is this the new talking point or are old talking points resurfacing in my feed? I've heard the claim that some people's deaths count less before. -4/30/20. "It's Your House" from Put My Dream On This Planet (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/29/20 "Falling Down Deep"

"The journey is over, I’m falling down deep/I have no more promises to keep/This the feeling that won’t go away/This is the last time of the day." I'd like to think that this is over, that we can draw a curtain across these plague reflections, but that's precisely the feeling that won't go away, the sense of déjà vu, that what was declared has manifested, that we've already done this. Some states are reopening May 1st, and that hasn't happened yet. That's Friday, but the declaration evokes its own despair so visceral and complete that it feels like we already went off that cliff. There's still two days til we see the precipice. Likewise, the rent is due on the first, once again. No one can pay it because no one's getting paid, but that doesn't seem to factor. So how much organizing has there been for a rent strike? Friday is May Day, International Labor Day. Will people get into the holiday spirit? -4/29/20. "Falling Down Deeep" from The Beginning (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/28/20 "New Town"

"The last time I saw you/Was I don’t know when/That’s when I knew you/In all places I’d been." I don't have an emotional geography of Busan yet; I haven't met people in the city to form those kinds of stories yet. Philly, by the time I left it, was a space woven almost purely from associations, the memories underlying each route, all negatively tainted by the end or I was in a headspace where I could no longer walk the paths of happy memories. Maybe that made it easier to leave. I was lesson planning at work today, an online class because the echoes of the pandemic have yet to quiet down. For the first time since this started, I felt like I hit my stride, found a topic I could be expansive and engaging with while still using English in a way the students would understand. I felt like I was returning to myself, finally fitting the space I was in. -4/28/20. "New Town" from New Town (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/27/20 "Pending Doom"

"Doom/Pending doom/Pending doom/Pending doom/Pending doom/Pending doom/Pending doom." The Attorney General has said the Justice Department may join with protesters paid by the administration in lawsuits to lift states' stay-at-home orders. Is May Day still the target? Are they still trying to make everyone go back to work on International Labor Day? Can't deny the irony of picking the holiday dedicated to showing solidarity as the date you demand actions being taken in solidarity stop. That's the unspoken root of this. You can talk about Korea's test & trace policy, but there was no mandated lockdown because people did it on their own-they weren't willing to infect others. In the States, it's the petulant shrieking of tantrum-throwing children outraged that they can't kill others. That's why they bring guns to the rallies: it's to say there's one thing you may not deny them. -4/27/20. "Pending Doom" from I Woke Up (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/26/20 "Part Yesterday"

"But it’s so hard to tell you/I quit describing things/That’s what I did." Talked to family last night, caught up with how they're doing. Healthy and safe, keeping calm. Where they'd seemed frazzled a few weeks ago, they seemed all right, like they'd settled into a routine, found the new normal. Part of that comes from ignoring what the administration says: politics is the reality of lived experience and what could be further removed from that than what any president says? I said I often felt bad about leaving even though I'm so glad I left. My situation in the US was killing me, but I feel like I've abandoned everyone to their fate. The fight to have is there, and I left when that was most apparent. But what opposition would I have offered had I stayed? I wouldn't have even martyred myself to nothing, I would have remained a cog, simultaneously grinding and being ground down myself. Or am I just excusing my cowardice? -4/26/20. "Part Yesterday" from White Box Requiem (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/25/20 "Flowers On My Shirt"

"Gotta go quick ending absurd/Who says the vision is nearly blurred/Fingers fingers fingers fingers/It’s the end this time I know." I avoided mentioning "bleach" yesterday on purpose. Dwelling on each new absurdity and outrage is both pointless and the goal--constant distraction. I've already said that though. Even the acknowledgement of distraction is a distraction. Instead, we need to focus on white supremacy and genocide. The majority of COVID deaths in the US are minorities and the calls for people to return to work, and the protesters paid to say the same, began after that information started coming out. The US is facing this pandemic because it brushed it off as something happening to Asian people. Now that Americans are seeing it disproportionately affect African-Americans, they say it's not a threat, or at least not a threat to those that matter. -4/25/20. "Flowers On My Shirt" from Glad to Get Away (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)

My Jandek Plague Journal: 4/24/20 "A Real Number"

An instrumental song played on the accordion, an instrument that always has an air of a traveling carnival. Doubly so here as the song puts me in mind of the demented dance sequence in Carnival of Souls, another piece that could be considered an outsider work that appeals to those drawn to the obscure. That movie's about a haunting and today's song reminded me that this whole project began with me pitching a story about being an expat in Korea in the midst of the outbreak--the way that I was both ghost and virus, an interloper haunting their streets, making sounds of a life they dare not investigate, and infecting their children with an internationalism to prepare them for distant shores. The essay I submitted ended up taking a different, more comic tone, and the haunting migrated to these pages. Where I once thought I was the ghost, I've come to see that I'm instead the one haunted by a spectre of politics I thought I'd exorcised. -4/24/20. "A Real Number" from Graven Image (one week earlier) (one week later)