SMOG

[sus]

Okay I have been meaning for weeks now to write up catalogs SMOG zine, the idea is to liveblog reading it in real-time, like a YouTube reaction video

I'm making this basically to put a timer on the project, it is a public commitment of intent

Why should you care? Not solely because catalog is our dear friend but also because SMOG is a carefully crafted work with something to tell us. And I am going to say what that something is. Eventually

 

[woops]

Okay I have been meaning for weeks now to write up catalogs SMOG zine, the idea is to liveblog reading it in real-time, like a YouTube reaction video

I'm making this basically to put a timer on the project, it is a public commitment of intent

Why should you care? Not solely because catalog is our dear friend but also because SMOG is a carefully crafted work with something to tell us. And I am going to say what that something is. Eventually

epic thread in the making

 

[luka]

what if its rubbish?

 

[woops]

what if its rubbish?

more entertaining

 

[linebaugh]

smog is a good zine name

 

[mvuent]

smog is a good zine name

Not quite as good as bog, but close

 

[sus]

OK so first things first the orienting information

I'm going to recap this thing because I assume y'all don't have copies in front of you, and need it spelled out

So the very first thing a reader sees is the title, "A preliminary dictionary of Smog"

And then glancing down the first page, you see that it comprises a bunch of fragments, each with a small bolded single-word header in alphabetical order, e.g. "Acid," "Active," "Album," "Ally," "Alone," and "Anxiety" make up the first page

And if you look at the entries, they're first-person, they feel like a sort of surrealized autofiction at first blow. So this is a dictionary built out of a diary. That's a bit interesting isn't it. A systematization of personal experience

 

[sus]

The entries seem to be edited to different levels of polish. So one entry might be incredibly rhythmic and concise: "If the 10k is the puja, the app is the Priest." Pickup 8th note pair ("if the"), followed by six 8th notes, ("10k is the puja"), followed by an 8th note rest (marked by a comma), an 8th note pickup ("the"), and finally a bar of a quarter note ("app"), two 8th notes ("is the"), and another quarter ("priest"). Alliteration on the downbeats—puja, (a)pp, priest.

Then there are some sections that feel a bit like they were patchwritten from Wikipedia. I sometimes wish they were a little smoother, a little tighter, prosodically—but content-wise they're functional and also provide a bit of a breather from tighter, more aphoristic entries.

 

[sus]

Two of the opening entries I like:

"Ally: Look, we all know he's a cunt. But he's the favourite cunt, anyone can see that. So all the new people ally themselves to him, so that they can get ahead, not realising that they're actually being used."

"Anxiety: She found constructing the small houses was a positive way to deal with her anxiety."

 

[sus]

Most of the early entries are very short, a couple lines, maybe a paragraph. We hear about how in London, in 1952, fireworks caused five days of smog that killed 12,000 people. We learn about how smog forms. We begin to get an account, from the narrator, that feels almost like science fiction. (It reminds me of Elvia Wilk's Oval at points—this young person wandering across an urban landscape of vaguely hostile or malevolent weathers.) Most of the writing seems to be original, but some entries are commonplace quotations—there's a nice passage from Italo Calvino's 1975 "Smog."

Once when I was on acid, this girl I was tripping with, who was a bit of a mess at that point of life—she's much stabler now, thank god—hadn't slept at all the night before, she'd been at some Newark bus terminal on benzos and amphetamines, and if I've learned anything about psychs, it's that you don't take them when sleep deprived, or the world becomes a waking nightmare. Anyway, she entered the waking nightmare phase of her trip and I had the sense she was this black hole that would suck me into the void of suffering with her, and I had to get away. So I was interested that a similar metaphor appears in "Smog"! "I mean for me, at the moment, it's all about getting out of other peoples' black holes."

 

[sus]

There's some philosophical-ish discussion of nebulosity—the way smog and fog and mists have no clear boundaries, and yet are still real, and how does that work. A nearby section complements this discussion by considering the different connotative weights and implications of mist vs fog vs smog, e.g. "often associated with early morning (on moors etc)."

 

[sus]

Because most of the sections are short, it really opens up when a section—really, the definition of a word—stretches for several pages as full story. That transition is quite pleasurable, as is transitioning back to aphorism. The "Church" entry is like this, and has a couple gorgeous paragraphs that are worth typing up for those without a copy:

The pleasure seemed to derive from seeing the obvious displeasure in others. In the feeling that she could take it, she understood it, where others hadn't, couldn't, wouldn't. She had spoken earlier to a man in the queue for the toilets. One of those inane but friendly conversations about nothing in particular. They had exchanged names, talked about their day jobs. They had talked about their respective regional accents. AT the height of the music chopping and the smog coming very thick, she saw the man leaving, with a look of panic etched upon his face. Panic at first, but then shame more than anything. She knew that if she stood and took it, it would break eventually, and normal music would return at some point. If you accept that, the moment of confusion becomes extremely pleasurable.

I have witnessed God sometimes in the Church and at other times, where because of a single bright source of light within a smoky room, either I or other people have had a halo effect around their heads.

Well that's a gorgeous image, no question, but it kills me because the sentence is just a little too clunky. Like, if it could be reorganized a bit, a couple clauses moved or switched, 20-25% of the words reduced, it would be perfect. It's still a nice image. But I said what I said.

 

[sus]

Formally, the zine is a savvy entry into the modern fictive/creative writing landscape. Hybrid non-fiction, built out of fragments, and self-reflexive—i.e. you get a theory of how fragments work, both in particular (w/in the text) and in general). The way people structure organizing meanings from little metonyms. The way that, in trying to understand the deep meanings of others' metonyms, we need to climb a mountain of context.

Most of the fragments are the grasp of a tiny thing, a short point of clarity, that has come at the beginning of something, some process, some action, or at the end of something, or maybe in the middle. They are written down in a hurry, in the phone or in the notebook, so they are like the top of the mountain. It's the moment where you stop and take a proper look... But you need the going up and the coming down, all the other bits, the descriptive bits that set the scene and prepare you for the moment of clarity.

 

[sus]

Going to take a break and let people catch up. And tagging @catalog in case he's managed to miss this

 

[sus]

The lack of support for catalog is very disillusioning. I am upset on his behalf.

 

[version]

Smog, fog and mist seem to be a fixation of his. I remember him bringing it up when he was reading Against the Day and talking about the way Dean Blunt (of course) uses smoke machines at his gigs.

But interestingly, Pynchon latches onto the fog in Venice and makes this genius connection with all his maths talk:

"In Venice we have a couple of thousand words for fog: Nebbia, Nebbieta, Foschia, Caligo, Sfumato. And the speed of sound being a function of the density is different in each. In Venice, space and time, being more dependent on hearing than sight, are actually modulated by fog."

I was inspired to think about the effects of smog cos I was going to loads of gigs, particularly at the white hotel but also Dean Blunt ones, where the room is just filled with smoke, so full it's disorienting . . . And I thought about how it would concentrate your attention on the music, but I love what Pynchon says about it actually affecting sound, and had not thought that before.

Talking of smog and fragments, I was reading Guy Davenport's Heraclitus translations the other day and mist and smoke were a theme.

 

[sus]

That's good, I need to start searching his post history for keywords, situate the text in discourse and biography

 

[sus]

Smoke and water and the water cycle are major themes in process philosophy. And just non linear non object conceptions of the world. Nebulosity is a technical term in some ontological theories, which is to say that clouds are a big deal metaphorically and obvious fog is just clouds on the ground. You can stand on solid land and have your head in the sky

 

[catalog]

Hey this is great @sus thank you. I'm heading off into the hills (north pennines) this morning for a 3 day walk, so gonna log in sporadically.

What seems to happen with me in the last few years is that I latch onto some kind of theme and then it obsesses me for a long time. So it was smog from about 2017 to 2019ish and this is the result of that.

A trip to India in 2016/17 kicked it off cos I was in Delhi and there was this early morning smog which seemed to mute the city in what, to me, was quite pleasurable. But then my relatives were talking about how dangerous it was.

So it's really about the aesthetics of smog/fog/smoke.

The notebook diary entry style is cos its the way it was all written, a snatched idea here and there, usually in between going to work or walking. A few notes were written in the white hotel.

And the dictionary format came sboug because I wanted to organise those notes in a random way and then see if that structure suggested something else.

It did suggest an outline for something else, a more coherent narrative, so I pursued that and there's a whole "part 2" which continues the dictionary format but things are a little tighter because I'm writing more specifically in that order.

 

[catalog]

The entries seem to be edited to different levels of polish. So one entry might be incredibly rhythmic and concise: "If the 10k is the puja, the app is the Priest." Pickup 8th note pair ("if the"), followed by six 8th notes, ("10k is the puja"), followed by an 8th note rest (marked by a comma), an 8th note pickup ("the"), and finally a bar of a quarter note ("app"), two 8th notes ("is the"), and another quarter ("priest"). Alliteration on the downbeats—puja, (a)pp, priest.

Then there are some sections that feel a bit like they were patchwritten from Wikipedia. I sometimes wish they were a little smoother, a little tighter, prosodically—but content-wise they're functional and also provide a bit of a breather from tighter, more aphoristic entries.

The 10k as puja bit is about how I ran the Manchester 10k, it must have been 2017 and just after the bombing at the Arianna grande concert where a lot of people died.

Manchester Arena bombing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It was a big thing, I remember going out to a club and talking to another Indian guy outside and he was saying he had spent the whole day arguing in youtube comments with people making racist comments.

It kicked 9ff the whole bee tattoo craze where everyone in Manchester got tattoos of bees, the traditional symbol of Manchester

10,000 people have now had Manchester bee tattoos for charity

“It’s amazing to think in years to come someone might walk into a bar, see someone with the bee on them and instantly, even all those years on, know what it’s about.”

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk

With the run itself, I was struck at the time by how close it was to a religious experience. A lot of people were even wearing orange, that seemed to be thd colours. And you did a loop of the city centre, all the roads were closed, people cheering you on, they had a guy kick off the race with a group sing about how good Manchester was etc.

Not sure what the app bit means now tbh but you can write that bit in yourself I suppose. Generalised technology comment which has become so ubiquitous for me.