My Jandek Plague Journal

What is My Jandek Plague Journal?

The short version:

Every day I listen to an album by the Houston-based avant-garde/outsider musician Jandek and use it as a writing prompt to reflect on current events related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The long version:

Cover translation: Today, my glittering times

My Jandek Plague Journal is my attempt to reflect upon and respond to the global coronavirus pandemic as it's happening. I'm a person who normally keeps a journal anyway, but it's hard to write repeatedly about one particular thing every day. Journaling is, in some ways, about the work of sorting out your own mind in response to what you've gone through that day; so my journal is largely composed of what happened at work, what my immediate plans are, and how I haven't followed through on my immediate plans. Reflections on the pandemic pop up--when my school adjusts the semester start date, when I call family back home, when a colleague gets tested--but it's not all the time, it's not every day, and it's not every page.

Part of journaling under the pandemic is thinking about anything other than the pandemic.

I had been wanting to write about the pandemic, though. We're in a unique historical moment (we are always in a unique historical moment) and I didn't want to have all the details slip by, didn't want to try to reflect on what happened long after it was done (back when it seemed like it would be done with in just a little bit). The first case of coronavirus in South Korea was on January 20th and two months later I still hadn't written anything. On top of that, a friend had passed along a link to an open call for essays and stories related to the pandemic (The Enneadecameron). I pitched an idea reflecting on how being an expat in Busan turned me into a kind of ghost wandering empty streets, the sound of my passing inspiring fear in my isolating neighbors, imagining me an unnameable thing who must not be engaged with lest my necrotic touch find them.

The final piece turned out less grim although, if possible, even more glib. (To seem less monstrous, my daily routine was self-isolation even before the pandemic and I'm taking prevention seriously). I didn't hear back from the person organizing the website, though, and thought the project either dead in the water or my pitch quietly ignored. However I was now thinking all the time about how I'd write about the pandemic, about witnessing it from Korea, and watching the situation unfold in my home country of the United States.

On March 22nd I was taking the subway to meet a friend who was flying back to the US when I saw someone wearing a black fedora which reminded me of Jandek's hat and made me think that I hadn't listened to Jandek in a while.

That's right. All this was prompted by a hat. Probably the most understandable part of anything related to the pandemic.

I pulled up my Jandek collection on my phone, hit shuffle, and went walking through the Nampo-dong shopping district while waiting for my friend to show up. I decided I would keep a coronavirus journal related to the music of Jandek and ducked into an Artbox store to find a book (because as with every aspiring writer, everything is an excuse to buy another blank book). The Plague Journal is an actual physical journal. I decided I would write a page a day using lyrics from a random Jandek song as a prompt. The content would focus on coronavirus, Korea, the United States, and fascism, the four things central to my experience of this present moment.

The April 3rd and 4th entries in the journal

I took inspiration for the format from Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's, a poetic novel told in the form of messages written on Wendy's comment cards. Each entry would be specifically one page of the journal, no more, no less (though I've fudged an extra line or two in the bottom margin), and no revisions. I wasn't going to go back and try to craft this into something special. One of the purposes of writing the journal was to just work on writing every day, to get past the block of thinking it had to be something special before it could be anything else. I don't know when I decided to start adding them to my blog, but the concept of making them first drafts and then sharing them unchanged comes from work by Tom McHenry who at one point set his computer to automatically upload whatever art he'd done by the end of the day. Each post is specially formatted to, as best I can, ape the look of the back of a Jandek record. Hence the white background and the font choices. All that is purely an affectation, purely for my enjoyment, but there's no point imagining the primary audience for this is anyone but me.

All of this makes it sound like I crafted this project beforehand, like I had (or even have) an image in mind of what the Plague Journal should be. I do not. When I started posting the entries, I purposefully scheduled them to go up a week after I'd written them with links at the bottom of each entry to go forward or back one week. One of the elements of the present moment--both in terms of the pandemic and politics--is both how quickly and how slowly things are changing. Looking back on a post from a week before feels like looking into a different age. So much happened since I wrote that, it cannot possibly have been only a week before. Simultaneously, the posts from a week before will be discussing the same issue, the same idea, the same performative moment. If I hadn't started keeping this journal, I never would have seen that cyclical element, a factor deserving its own interrogation.

The first eleven entries were based on random Jandek songs. I'd just hit shuffle on my music player and listen until I heard an interesting lyric or I'd use the shuffle function to pick a random album. In the course of four days I ended up writing about the album London Tuesday twice. Also, even though I have 77 of the 96 Jandek albums, I've never sat and listened to most of them. Since the pandemic was looking like it would be longer and stranger than I imagined, I started listening to each album in order all the way through. Other people were spending the pandemic working through their book list, watching all their recommended TV shows, playing all the video games they'd never had time for. I was spending an hour or more a day listening to Jandek.

Where does it end? I don't know. I still haven't reached the six and nine-hour-long instrumental albums. Does this project go until the end of the pandemic if there ever is one? Does it go until I run out of pages in the journal? I have, if my count is correct, 192 pages left. Does it go until I'm out of Jandek albums? That, at the moment, only takes me up to the Fourth of July.

What comes after all the plans we've made?

My Jandek Plague Journal: First Entry; All Entries