I would argue, and maybe I do, that in summation most books don’t have standalone sex appeal. There’s a certain kind of book where, when people ask what you’re reading, you have to relay the sort of intangible riffing that makes up the book. I love autofiction, but it’s usually hard to relay secondhand, almost embarrassingly so. It’s not satisfying to describe or, I imagine, to listen to. But when people have asked me what I’ve been reading while I’ve been reading The Flamethrowers, it’s been a good way into conversation - the book has clear and fixed points. Motorcycles; Nevada land art movement; a pseudo-punk violent political movement called the Motherfuckers; a rich, older, famous artist, Italian boyfriend who supposedly rejects his blood money inheritance; a one night tryst with an insufferable but enigmatic other famous artist that I am annoyingly transfixed by, just as Kushner intended; film stock; diner waitress best friend; a young protagonist nicknamed Reno. We never learn her real name. In the way that we’re forced to shape our reality based on what we know, her nickname is her real name. I wonder if Rachel Kushner gave her a real name in her head as she was writing, like we did in high school musicals as minor chorus characters with no backstory in the script. But then again, maybe Reno has no name in her author’s head, and so maybe she, in the novel, is hurtling towards the embodiment of her nickname the same way I was chassé-ing towards someone I had a crush on while trying to embody my made up backstory that Jessica had given me during our take five.

In something I read or listened to recently (I’m having hard time remembering where lines are sourced from these days) there was a quote from some 18th century writer, Samuel Johnson: “a novel is a small tale, generally of love.”

Novels seem totally daunting, in many ways. Their length suggests that they give some complete answer to life, or at least to a question found therein. And I think the good ones do, in a way that is almost natural, smaller than you’d expect. Indiscernibly linked to no particular moment of revelation, but rather a sequence of smaller, backdoor revelations. The pressure of short fiction or nonfiction isn’t there, in that they aren’t compressed. You have so much room to move around. And in the same way that I used to roll my eyes as a child at Disney movies which purported the secret power to whatever the struggle was, was LOVE, I kind of roll my eyes at the idea that a novel is always about love. But then, the more I think about it the truer it seems, even as I roll my eyes at my own earnestness. Because love can be a clean little word, transparent, grafted onto a great many things.

Last week I was in the kitchen of the only other house I’ve gone into in months, another house in town that has friends in it. One night I stood with one of them on a Friday after work while he ate sliced deli meat and fruit gummies and ice cream sandwiches after a day of pouring concrete. I can’t remember the lead up, but we were talking about something in scattered jaunty tones, nonserious, and then he said, “Well, all we do is for love. It’s why we eat, why we sleep, why we go to work.” A moment I’m reminded of how much context matters. Many people could have said this, have said this. But something about him saying it right then with an ice cream sandwich in hand and dirty coveralls on surprised me so much that it made it seem more true. It made me wonder what he had to gain from saying this to me. The answer was obviously nothing, which again, made the sentiment seem more true.

Yesterday I walked around a gloomy wet night listening to the podcast “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Episode 2 is a conversation between Alice Notley and Precious Okoyomon, two poets. Imagine not choosing love, Precious says at one point, “the consequence is literally death.” Alice says that to love is to love everyone, even people you think are bad, have been bad, have done bad things. Because if you don’t, then it’s just “your definitions winning out over someone else’s, and that’s no way to live,” she says. Then it’s nothing. It makes me think of a person as a small thing in the throws of a much larger cosmic context, being tossed around. That kind of thought makes forgiveness seem more attainable. Sandro, at one point in The Flamethrowers, seems to believe a less-generous version of Alice’s idea: “People only tended to allow for their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.”

Alice describes how when her husband had prostate cancer, her interest in finding new places for the mind to go became more acute. She describes how they would lie in bed together and attempt to co-dream. To enter a trance that they could share. Dreaming is experiencing, she says. This is something I’ve always agreed with. She reads a poem in the podcast of one occurrence of this co-dreaming, where there were rubies and roses representing souls, and snakes were something that were potentially wise, potentially poisonous, potentially healing. She and her husband, in the trance-state, couldn’t distinguish which.

Alice and Precious talk about how in order for something to exist it must be first dreamed. In whatever interpretation of dream you may hold on to. I always have found my dreams to be meaningful, as if they were experiences, and in the way Alice describes them, it makes me feel they are - they are inherently experiential. I experience them the same way I experience my bodily life - sensorily, temporarily, emotionally. When I wake up in the middle of the night having had a vivid dream, it feels like I’ve just lived something. In 2015 I began trying to write down my dreams as much as I could, and have a sort of log over time now. I fall out of the practice of course, but tracking repetition over the course of five years is interesting to me. After listening to this podcast I command searched for the word snake in the document of my dreams and found that in April 2016, I dreamed that I wrote a manuscript, and “went to someone’s house in the neighbourhood in the summer at night and when I came out I opened my car door and the manuscript sat on the car seat and turned into a snake. It slithered away very fast. I didn’t mind. When I looked to the left there were a bunch of cars crashing slowly, falling into each other. A blonde family walked by.” Reading the words it’s like recalling a memory. The next time the word snake came up in the document, it was in a dream where the snake slithered out of a pile of rubies. Snakes and rubies, the same two images as Alice’s dream.

Earnestness is unfashionable right now, and I find my own earnestness to be a little unbearable at times. Reno’s narration somehow, though straightforward, never seems earnest. She’s withheld, though we know this story exclusively through her perspective, her first person narration. Her voice is measured. She’s never making a fool of herself, even when she says “It may go without saying that I was the type of person who would call a disconnected number more than once.” And still, when she admits that “enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.”

In the novel Reno is fresh, new to New York and the art scene of the seventies. An outsider who becomes invited to the inside, an ever-appealing perspective for the ease of inserting yourself into the narrative, as someone also reading it, by default on the outside. In an interview Kushner describes Reno’s fly-on-the-wall disposition as a power: “If you are inspired by the world, and open to it, it is sometimes essential to utilize your own innocence, your own lack of an ability to interpret or judge others, in order to read them properly.”

There’s a lot of talk about and claims on being young in this novel. I wonder if they are eternal claims, or era-specific. The novel is set in the seventies, and released in 2013. “You’re young,” Sandro, Reno’s older, Italian, famous artist, rich, (all the descriptors seem necessary) boyfriend says to her, “Young people are doing something even when they’re doing nothing. A young woman is a conduit. All she has to do is exist.”

Perhaps condescending, perhaps complimentary. Likely both at once. There is, I have to admit, a sort of sheen that a young person carries, or perhaps has shone on them, where doing nothing still feels like doing something significant. When I was in high school I would write in my diary religiously when something had happened. The something often appeared to be nothing, but felt like everything. Writing in jagged drunken scrawl with such urgency when I returned home from a suburban party, being drunk for the fifth or sixth time in my life, or after a particularly important walk with someone. Every single detail felt absolutely imperative to record for this reason. Something about freckles like cinnamon, some boy putting band-aids on my forehead, a long drive down a creepy country road with store-bought birthday candles in our coat pockets.

Those moments were like a bolt to The Real, as Fiona Duncan calls it, to adventure, to the Other World, as Ariana Reines calls it. A portal to experience and what lay before me, unreachable and magic, but able to be outlined by recounting these details. I know many of my friends felt this way as teenagers as well. Perhaps all of my writing now is just trying to conjure that same kind of immediacy and importance that I felt then. But as the story of my journal writing goes, after high school ended I started to become anxious about not being able to record everything I was experiencing. I couldn’t keep it all straight, couldn’t keep up with writing about it, didn’t want to. So I stopped altogether for a few years, an all or nothing pact I’d made with myself unwittingly. I started up again later, negotiating that I was allowed to record certain things, but not all things. Then again, after a particular night with someone unexpected on the roof of my Toronto apartment last fall, I did the same drunken desperate scrawl in my journal, so maybe I overestimate my own growth.

“When you’re young, being with someone else can almost seem like an event. It is an event when you’re young. But it isn’t enough. I was still young, and I wanted something else,” Reno says.

Is a new kind of adulthood blooming? Or has it been around for a long time, but I just haven’t seen it demonstrated in my real life, growing up where I did? Is it a prolonged adolescence, like articles about millennials used to talk about? Or is it that the collective reckoning of our low financial and environmental prospects mixed with suspicion of monogamy, suspicion of the heteronormative family structure, that everything which seems to tell us we have to stop having fun at a certain age, seems, when even slightly interrogated, like a house of cards?

My own personal vested interest is that my life be interesting (à la Little Women “we will always be interesting”) and maybe that means that the importance we attribute to “being young” might actually just be the importance of taking your life seriously, and by seriously, I mean paying attention to the specialness, fun of it, not the utility of it.

Something about that impulse to record has to do with, I think, trying to attach ephemeral experience to your embodied personhood. Sandro and Reno talk about this. They talk about how in childhood your sense of identity is not so fixed, you’re not so aware of your personhood. She says,

“The person I was before I became more readably ‘person.’ We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and yourself.”

In Fiona Duncan’s essay “Phoenix Goddess Temple” for Mal Journal, there’s a line where she’s quoting one of the religious leaders: “‘We revere the human body,’ she wrote, ‘as our gift from the Mother Goddess, which gives the soul all opportunity to play and learn on planet Earth.’”

Is play spiritual? Is that why partying feels important? One of the last bar nights I remember before the pandemic hit (how Biblical) I was out with a group of friends and my friend Emily, who is studying religion and speaks very smartly about it, asked me which of the seven deadly sins I thought I was most susceptible to. The conversation leaked to the rest of the table, and suddenly this group of people - most of whom didn’t know each other very well at all - were detailing to each other which sin they were most plagued by. It was like an ancient version of a Myers Briggs test, but explicitly based around shame. Was that a way of becoming readable? Having a fixed position to each other? It was a rare occasion of discussing shame without being embarrassed, which is like plucking gems from the ground without the dirty process of mining.

Sandro, Reno’s boyfriend, is the heir to the Moto Valera company but has snubbed this inheritance by becoming an artist in America, though, Kushner seems to imply, he is funded by this very inheritance. The novel complicates this further by detailing the extremely unethical labour practices of the motorcycle and tire company throughout its creation shortly after the First World War, up to its total industrial domination in the seventies, which results in violent worker protests and radical groups in Italy - which also happened in real life. Selective kidnappings, hostage situations. But over in New York, Sandro is attempting to avoid all this. Late in the novel there’s a brief portion of narrative from his perspective, the most illuminating of which is where he considers the soul.

“You had to maintain your hold on [your soul] vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning.”

“People weighted themselves, Sandro knew, if not with stones. A movie, a lover. Friends. Complicities. A certain amount of success [...] It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.”

This makes sense to me, this idea of holding down your soul through earthly means. We all do it, consciously or not. Ritual, though most people might not call it that, is done just for this purpose. The rituals that had given me meaning for the year before Covid hit were all completely social. I was nannying, which didn’t give me any sort of meaning. I was working for three families, oscillating between them during any given day, sometimes seeing one one day, two the next, three the next, etc. It was an impressive feat of juggling and I can finally breathe easy about it because I finally figured out how to put it on my taxes. I was hoping to explore the structure of a day through this non-traditional scheduling. It felt very lonely, professionally, in some ways because all my friends seemed to be either in school or in full time jobs that came with offices and co-workers you could have private jokes with, and the only person I could privately joke with at work was myself, gather up enough anecdotes to be entertaining at the bar. Money didn’t necessarily feel real to me, having just enough to live on, flowing and out very quickly without making any real mark. It allowed me to get cocktails, or sometimes a nice dinner. I didn’t really shop, didn’t take cabs, didn’t save. Paid my thankfully cheap rent and skimmed the rest for my rituals. The furniture of my life was the evening sprawl.

My friend Ben lived next door to me in the large Victorian type house in Toronto we shared with rotating cast members, six at a time. Ben was working for a company that made headbands for meditation. We felt and discussed often that during the course of a day, it felt necessary for there to be a climax of some kind. Often times we’d both get home from work to our permanently semi-dirty house, and end up talking in the hallway between our rooms for half an hour, standing in limbo. Ben’s window sill had these two pigeons that lived there and they’d coo, make gross feathery explosions. We would drink a lot, either in the house or we would go out for a drink. That was a ritual, a climax to the day, it gave it shape and feeling. We lived close to a bar whose history I won’t get into right now, but became a staple for that period of time the way local institutions feel like an extension of your apartment in a city. We’d end up there fairly often with different combinations of friends. Close walk in the winter, and it had red light and huge bottles with the maximum amount of melted wax from the dwindling candles. In some ways that is a simple life. Beers with friends was a climax enough. There’s something medieval about that, seen now with a bit of distance. The consistency of the evenings unfolding, and the playfulness of it, held me down during a time where I was otherwise completely untethered.

One winter night at this bar there was a large formation of our friends there, a spilling of friends. A long wooden table, steaming faces. The energy transmitted between a large group of people who know each other in a variety of ways is always something I think is important, worth thinking of, interrogating, but now that that kind of revelry is an impossibility it takes on a holiness that I haven’t previously experienced in my lifetime. A personal Moment in Time becomes a historical Moment in Time. Pre-pandemic. Everyone will have these kinds of stories, too. It’s obvious, and it’s novel. Maybe it will feel less significant again once it’s all over. But the punctuation to that evening was when one of our friends got a phone call that his sister had just given birth, and he had, metaphysically and suddenly been anointed, in front of all of us, as an Uncle. Out of nowhere, birth.

This ritual of sociability did make me feel readable. Is being readably a person a comforting thing? To be readably a person has only become more complicated as it’s become related to capital - personal branding, etc. Style and clothing has this purpose, whether explicitly tied to a public “personal brand” or to a private personal style. To clothe oneself (a process I love), to style yourself towards and as a part of something, or in reaction to something, away from something. To accumulate. But you have to buy things, or make things, or at least will them into physical existence somehow, to participate in this kind of being.

Kushner writes: “There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast.”

Objects can weigh down your soul maybe, and so can money. But it’s a temporary fix.

Reno in Italy, for the second time: “It seemed to me that if you were poor and went to a foreign place, you met poor people who weren’t all that foreign to you, like the bikers and their girlfriends I’d hung around with at the squalid bar near the train station in Florence. And the opposite was probably true, too. For the rich, the world would be a series of elegantly appointed rooms, similar rooms and legible social customs, familiar categories of privilege the world over.”

Like they say, money is a country of its own.

A meme I saw the other day went something like this -

Them: good luck getting a high paying job with your art degree

Me: good luck fighting off existential terror with your spreadsheets

Admittedly quite trite. But it reminds me of being around some middle-aged adults this summer, talking about someone they know who was some big-shot financial whatever, investment banker or something, who just retired to a giant house in Muskoka and is already feeling like he wants to be working again. They were all astonished that he was already sick of retirement. As a joke, I said something like Well I guess existential dread doesn’t take long to hit. It did not get a lot of laughs.

Earlier this year I fact-checked an article written by Scott Neigh about the arms deal that Canada has made with Saudi Arabia, which to me seems to effectively sum up the economic web that forces cruelty, and acceptance of cruelty. Saudi Arabia is using the weaponry that Canadian workers are building for the war on Yemen, which is not really a war but a genocide, as classified by the UN. Where things get sticky is that classic North American conundrum (one that the colonizers of NA have obviously set us up for) which is the argument that not taking this deal is depriving working-class Canadians of good jobs. The powers that be essentially forcing working class civilians to choose between participating second hand in evil or going without employment. A tale as old as time that somehow continues to repeat itself.

What was heartening in this article, though, were the labour rights activists I spoke with to fact-check who presented an idea called “conversion,” which I hadn’t heard of. It’s been a project going on by these activists since the seventies, coincidentally. The idea is redirecting the labour of making weaponry to making things that are socially beneficial, like renewable resource manufacturing. But like most things, the problem is that trying to convince the top economic tier that making products that are socially useful over products that will make that that tier very rich… is a historically difficult argument.

Your definitions over someone else’s. In that podcast Precious and Alice talk about our collective dream. We’ve dreamed the buildings we live in, the technology we use, and we’ve all decided to believe in this dream that has been created. None of the things that have been created are an inherent part of the universe, are objective or true the way nature is. They’re dreamed into being and so, we are in the same dream. It’s because of this that the idea of dreaming a new reality than the one we’re in, is possible. Like lucid dreaming, dreaming with intention.

A choice cut, to end. Reno:

“You have time. Meaning don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit. I believed him. I felt this to be true. Some people might consider that passivity but I did not. I considered it living.”

Until next time, and the next book, thank you for reading.

xx

Emma