The women must not be shown next to the machines
A weird strategy for avoiding sensitivities, the culture shock of opening Twitter in an agrarian society, writing that makes me want to quit writing, and how to tell if you liked a place.
If something happens to me, I want you to live as happily as possible and completely as yourself.
That’s what Eva said to me shortly before we’d be away from each other for a month.
At first I thought about the humanity of coming up with a thing like that and then I thought about a body being tossed over the handlebars of a motorbike at high speed. Then the thought ended and I was back in the room with Eva where she was looking at me with pleading eyes and holding my hands like she was asking for forgiveness, telling me to be safe. I said I would but of course I couldn’t say it hard enough. One time she told me that being far apart makes her feel like half a yin-yang sign and in this moment I knew exactly what she meant. When your girlfriend says something sweet to you and your reaction is to mourn her while she’s still alive, it’s a reminder that your heart is in a place where it can be broken.
My first stop in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh City where there’s a museum containing all sorts of evil machinery from the war. Walking among the tanks and jets and bombs, it’s easy to tell who’s read a book about the war and who’s only familiar with the Hollywood version of events. Some carry themselves as if at a funeral while others are shouting things like, “Hey, Rick, Check it out!” with two thumbs up next to a barrel of Agent Orange. I think a lot of people, when they think of war, they can imagine a person getting shot or exploding only in a vague way—here was a person and, after some commotion, now they’re a body. But when you see these machines, your flesh feels vulnerable next to their densely packed atoms. You can picture vividly how the stuff that’s supposed to be inside your body can suddenly end up on the outside.
I kept thinking about how a place can be home to the most savage human behaviour and then it just goes back to normal once the big dicks are done swinging and the memoirs come out saying, Oops, sorry. There was one photo in the museum I’ll never forget. In it, four armed soldiers are standing next to four captives who are crouching naked in a field: “Had it been peacetime, they would have been friends.”
When I’m in another country and people ask where I’m from, I like to switch up my answers to see which goes further. Sometimes I say Canada, sometimes Germany. (I’ve spent about half my life living in each). In Vietnam, it’s usually better to say Canada because many people have a relative there. In Huế, I found myself in a conversation with a man whose uncle lives in Vancouver. The man told me he was a medic in the South Vietnamese army until the communists jailed him after Saigon fell or was liberated, depending on your perspective. He spent three years in prison and was subsequently depatriated. So he came to Hue to start teaching in the countryside. “They erased me,” he said. “To the Vietnamese government, I don’t exist.” Now 70, he has no pension, no entitlements. He asked if I could imagine being born in a country that no longer exists. I said that I did, even though I was only seven months old when East Germany ceased operations. This seemed to please him. “I don’t need buildings,” he said. “I don’t need cars. I don’t need noise. I am happy with the lights in my garden.”
“Everybody dies early or late,” he said a little later, unprompted. I agreed. He then suggested we take a ride on his motorbike, to which I also agreed. He said he wanted to show me the real Vietnam, as if everything I’d seen up to that point had been fake. We watched a man raking mud, which he liked. He seemed disdainful of anyone who worked in a building taller than three stories, unless they were laying cement or wires or pipes. We drove to a beach where he asked a woman to cook us some fish over a fire that hadn’t yet materialized. In the meantime, I drank about a million beers, give or take a few. He asked if I could play him some of the music I listened to and it just happens that I have a playlist for exactly such an occasion. It’s called ‘for cooking fish’, which he kept calling “cooking for fish.” We listened to the music, ate the fish, and talked mostly through an app. Then he drove me home and said he’s glad the floods are gone for another year.
Sometimes I don’t know if I liked or disliked a city or if it was just somewhere a bunch of experiences took place. I think you can tell by paying attention to how you feel when you leave. Do you look forward or do you yearn for something in the recent past? Flying out of Huế, I looked longingly out the window until we touched down in Hanoi. The feeling was nebulous and impossible to locate, like the centre of a cloud.
One day some others and I were motorbiking through the mountains in Northern Vietnam when we had to pull over because someone got a flat tire. It might be a while, we were told, and so a nearby man offered us some freshly grilled rats to hold us over. He asked how spicy we’d like them and if we’d eat by hand or whether he should get us some forks. Most of the others were all like, Oh my god, what the fuck? about it but I didn’t see why the rodents should taste any different from any other hastily charred meat, which they didn’t. Besides, it seemed ridiculous to have any qualms about the cuisine when I ate at McDonald’s just a few days earlier. There’s no way I could have refused a free-range rat from down there in the valley when so much of what I eat has no discernible natural or geographic origin. Here’s a great article about all that.
Anyway, I wanted to mention that because even though I was eating rats and seeing four-year-olds working in agriculture, by far the biggest culture shock was opening Twitter in a place like this. Imagine being in one of the most remote parts of South East Asia and someone’s child had just handed you a cornstalk saying, “This is a great vegetable because you just put seed in earth and then nature,” gesturing broadly to emphasize the word Nature, and then right after that your finger taps a little blue square and suddenly you’re confronted by millions of people trying to get you worked up about an ill-advised editorial decision by a luxury fashion brand. Seeing the word Balenciaga on my screen was like a weird glitch. How fucking dumb, I thought. The people who were outraged weren’t serious, the people who apologized weren’t serious, and in the end no one seriously cares. This happens all the time now, of course, so naturally I thought of Balk’s Three Laws:
Everything you hate about the Internet is actually everything you hate about people.
The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.
If you think the Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.
The last point speaks to my generation in particular because we’ve seen this thing through since the beginning. Most Millennials will remember how the internet was before the click merchants got down to business and constructed the vortex of aimless urgency which now dictates so much of our lives. In the early internet, it took a while for culture to refract through our screens before it came out again in uniquely altered forms. This prism effect happens so fast now that any distinction between the “real” world and the online world has made way for a disorienting hyperreality we’re told is just a few tweaks away from being equitable and healthy and meaningful. The unfortunate thing is that so many of us still believe it’s going to get better. Here’s an excellent case study by
of the chaotically uncertain yet crushingly predictable direction we’re heading:I’m not naive; I know the internet was never a utopia. But those of us who’ve been around long enough to remember how things were before the Engagement Era can bask in the warm glow of nostalgia while later generations can only say, I dunno, man, I wasn’t alive yet. A good thing being taken away can feel as unjust as never having had it.
A few days ago I came across an old email from a client while pulling up an invoice. It included feedback on a text I wrote about the history of a proudly Made-in-Germany kitchen appliance brand. The company is successful today partly due to a series of ads they ran in the 60s. Naturally, I included these in the text. The feedback, which came from the marketing guy, was that “the vintage ads should not have women next to the machines so as to avoid sensitivities.” I thought this was kind of ridiculous and counterproductive but waited to say so in case I was missing the necessary perspective and an actual woman might offer a Hell yeah, brother in reply to his objection. It was not to be. Present in the email chain were Rainer and Ralf and Torsten and Oliver, but no one belonging to the affronted gender. And so it was agreed that women should not be shown next to the machines.
I’m not sure there’s a revelation or a lesson here. I guess it’s just another one of those situations where nothing fundamentally changes while the people who ensure nothing changes feel like they’re affecting change. But we all know that story already. Sometimes it’s just nice to accidentally open an old email and feel gratitude for being a great distance from that moment in time. It’s like reverse nostalgia—an anti-longing, if you will.
Truth be told, writing this newsletter has been a real struggle if for no other reason than that’s what writing is. I’d write a paragraph, read it, like it briefly, then hate it and tell myself an AI could write something better, which actually might be true now. It’s been a couple of weeks since the release of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can respond to any prompt imaginable with above-average coherence and creativity. It even contains hints of a personality as well as the capacity for self-awareness, which should genuinely unsettle some folks…
It’s easy to understand why many people’s sense of wonder about such a technology quickly gives way to a sense of wondering whether they’ll be employed next Christmas. Even easier for writers, who are finely tuned to detecting existential crises. Here’s how the AI responded to one writer who reached out about his anxiety over the matter:
That sounds like it was written while sipping a mimosa from a human skull. Alas, when it comes to whole fields of work being outsourced to computer programs, we’ve Fucked Around and are about to Find Out. Still, there are plenty of ways AI can help writers, which is more than can be said about the private equity ghouls who are killing our futures far more efficiently than any machine. Content creators will undoubtedly see opportunities in optimization (their words, not mine). Reporters will be able to spend less time on research and more time on the parts of their work that require warm-blooded qualities like compassion, judgment, creativity, and courage. As for the poets, it’s always been about the process anyway.
It’s important to remember that readers aren’t just moved by great prose but also by the achievement of a human brain having put itself into words. We read because the writing reveals a person, it lets us get to know them. Take that away and the words become less interesting. Maybe writing in the future will come with a badge that tells us it was written by a human. I’m all for it.
When I read something and I’m amazed by it, I think, I can’t believe someone came up with that. This happened over and over again recently while reading Tower Wells’ ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’. Here are a few passages I highlighted:
For quite a while, we’d been nothing but an argument looking for different ways to happen.
He had slept wrong on his arms, and they’d gone numb. He tried to move them, and it was like trying to push a coin with your mind.
The sun looked orange and slick, like a canned peach.
It was a discouraging thought, and Bob slipped beneath the water with the weight of it.
The rain began, a soft silver sound
I thought of my performance on the porch, then of a good thick noose creaking as it swung.
He squinted against the wind, his face like a fist.
Far up the driveway, you can once again hear the whine of the leaf grinder starting up, a noise of startling crudeness and stupidity, an insult to the tickings and subtle movements of the living forest all around you.
I shrugged my arms. The fabric of my shirt felt new against my skin, and I shrugged one more time for the feeling.
His hair was not the usual nest. Rather, he had slicked it back with so much styling crud, it looked like a knob of fresh pavement. His shirt was a nightclub shirt of a shiny fabric, and he wore tight black jeans that tapered to a pair of feathered loafers like something stolen off an Alpine pimp.
They kissed a couple of times up there, and in the high quiet over the bright grid of the fair, it seemed to matter more somehow, to count.
You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself.
I find it amazing that someone can see a squinting face and come up with a fist; that they can see an outfit and invent the image of an Alpine pimp; that they can boil a relationship down to an argument waiting for different ways to happen. I really don’t think a computer program could be capable of such connections. How can it hear the soft, silver sound of rain? If my fear is that my writing will be made redundant, it’s because of writers like Tower Wells. And they’ve always been around.
Do you ever have that? When someone in your field does something so good you can’t comprehend it, and instead of inspiring you it just makes you want to quit and start dropshipping or something?
I guess that’s all for now. There’s one day left until the new year, so do what you can x
This was refreshing, thoughtful, and lovely to read. AI couldn't come up with "anti-longing," no shot. Wishing you a happy new year Christian.
I enjoyed reading your writing! Beautiful. I really like your thoughts on the war museum in Saigon. Thank you!