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)