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Hi, I’m Rawn. I’m honored today to be able to share my inaugural piece as The Hinternet’s new culture critic.
I admit this isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be when I applied for the position. You see, I spend an awful lot of time on the internet, just like all of you reading this, to the extent that at this point I have trouble hearing “culture” at all without “reaching for my revolver”, so to speak, which is to say without mentally adding a “wars” to the end. I thought they were recruiting me to share speculations about J.D. Vance’s Illuminati ring, or lists of the many ways Taylor Swift aids and abets white supremacy, or gleeful dissection of an Epstein e-mail seeming to hint at a history of sodomitic trysts between old Bubba Clinton and our current sitting president. But of course I should have known: this is JSR’s project, after all, and he would never wish to descend into such dirty business as that. So, instead of culture wars, upon being hired Managing Editor Hélène Le Goff asked me whether I might be willing to cover the novels shortlisted for this year’s Prix Goncourt.
“This year’s pre-what now?” I asked, and she could see I had no idea what she was talking about. She froze for a second, visibly winced, and then hissed at me: “Just write what you know.”
I’m happy to comply. The truth is what I mostly know is the inside of this house, especially the attic, where I spend most of my time rummaging through the contents of these old cardboard boxes: the shoehorn collections; the Reader’s Digest condensed large-print editions of Rob Roy, Anne of Green Gables, The Three Musketeers; Edgar Cayce Speaks, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter-Skelter, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock; commemorative plates from annual gatherings of the Woodland chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, with the names of the Grand Matrons inscribed along the edges of a pentagram: “Patty, Bunny, Edna, Viv, Maureen. 1983.”
Downstairs the boarders remain slumped on the couch, all light dimmed by Minions bedsheets adapted into makeshift curtains, both virtually immobilized by their weight, fixed permanently on Fox News, eating TV dinners. “Remember Hungry-Mans?” the one says to the other. “Which one did I always get?”
“You always got the Salisbury steak,” the other replies. “With mashed potatoes, green beans, and apple cobbler.”
“That was a long time ago.”
It sure was. I think those were discontinued even before I stopped going out, and that was definitely a long time ago. You see, other than a recent stay in France, where I went for my orientation/security clearance as a new Hinternet employee —which was only made possible by HLG’s manipulation, extraordinary as it was temporary, of the laws of both physics and pneumatics—, I have been housebound now for 36 years.
And no, I am not wearing an ankle-monitor, nor does this have anything to do with a restraining order or other correctional or probationary limitation of my motions. I was never accused of any wrongdoing or negligence at all.
And to be perfectly honest I do still go out, “nightwalking”, as they say, like the Friulian peasants used to do on their stalks of fennel. I go down to the plaza where the Mar-Val used to be, and I move again down the aisle with the Corn Pops, Fruity Pebbles, Lucky Charms, Count Chocula, Cap’n Crunch, Sugar Smacks, Boo-Berry Crunch; and back up the aisle with the RC, Diet-Rite, Mountain Dew, Fresca, Wallaby Squash, Orange Crush, Squirt, and Tab; and onward to the rack at the end with the Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, Ho-Hos, and powdered Donettes, and the Sno-Balls shrouded in coconut shavings. I go out and over to where Mister M’s once was, and I sit again in a booth padded with sparkling vinyl, and I make as if I am ordering Pigs-in-a-Blanket (sausage links rolled in pancakes), and I deliberate between the brown and the clear bottles of Karo corn syrup.
I suppose all of that is technically imaginary, nothing but an ambulatio animae. Anyone can do it, really, if they wish. What is real is my ongoing inventory of the attic, which, no matter how diligent I am in cataloguing its holdings, always seems to churn up something new: a nearly complete Fashion Plates set that somehow I never noticed before, a Stretch Armstrong still hemorrhaging the rubber-cement-like stuff that makes up his essence, a Strawberry Shortcake Berry Bake Shop, a grotesque and battered Mon Chi-Chi neotenous gorilla or whatever it’s supposed to be. Of less certain status, as regards the real and the unreal, is the memory of the commercial jingles that these artifacts always revive in me: “♫ Strawberry Shortcake / Huckleberry Pie… ♪”, “♪ Mon Chi-Chi / Mon Chi-Chi / Oh so soft and cuddly… ♫”, and so on. On the internet sometimes I encounter Neo-Pythagoreans who continue to maintain that, at bottom, the universe is made up not of particles or energy, but of musical harmonies, and when these old songs come back to me (“the songs of my people”, I joke to myself), it seems to me they are surely right.
It was, again, no mere episode of nightwalking that brought me to Quimper for my Hinternet onboarding, of course. It was such an incredible trip. On the way back I even got to spend two nights in Paris, where I mostly lurked, without destination, in the narrow old alleys of the Upper Marais, scanning all the Chinese fabric-and-sequin wholesale shops with their strangely placed apostrophes: Lili’Déco, Frip’Star, Frères Xiu Tissu’World, Mode’Shop Import. At some point I turned a corner and happened on an event, a gathering, at a gallery of some sort, all bright and white, with revelers spilling out in the street, smoking, vaping, holding plastic cups of wine.
It is a launch for something called
. I go inside. There is an energetic, happy man in a suit, and I hear someone calling him Kyle. The magazine is his baby, I soon gather. Ambitious young people are lining up to meet him, nervously wedging into their small-talk hints of an aspiration to submit something for publication, maybe, if you guys are willing to have a look? This Kyle is absolutely magnanimous, and this big-city literary event is the real thing… at least as far as I know. But what do I know?I hover past conversations concerning Gaza, Donetsk, and many other things I don’t understand: Laurent Mauvignier, Quentin Meillassoux, the ongoing Prime Ministerial musical chairs in this country’s politics, the assassination of Dulcie September, the Algerians felled into the Seine, the Jews rounded up at the Vélodrome d’hiver. In one group someone is claiming he recently took the “sluice cruise” from the Canal St. Martin down to the Porte de Plaisance at Bastille. He says that if you peer into one of the peripheral tunnels of the subterranean waterway at exactly the right moment, likely somewhere just past Filles du Calvaire, you can still see a sign, written in Fraktur, with the single word: 𝔄𝔲𝔰𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔤. “They should maybe get around to removing that,” he says as the others titter.
There is a clutch of young people debating which metro line is the most “haunted”, and all seem to be converging on the idea that it can only be the 7-bis, which, they say, has the look and feel of some dinky 1970s “people-mover”, with plastic pastel seats that call to mind nothing so much as a Duran Duran album cover. The young man says that on repeated occasions he has got on at Louis Blanc, moved up past Jaurès, Bolivar, Place des Fêtes, Botzaris, Danube, only to close his eyes for an instant and somehow, against every known law of nature, in spite of the fact that the train has not ceased to move in a continuous line without any turns, to find himself back at Botzaris again. “It just doesn’t make any sense!” he exclaims, and the others squeal with delight.
Then I hover around some more, and I see another groupuscule of people dressed in those over-the-top posthuman black costumes from right off the Fashion Week runway, Balenciaga or McQueen or whatever. They look so tired. They look like androids. Like ghosts. And I am about to stop to listen in on what they have to say for themselves when I catch a fortuitous glimpse, near the coat-check, of none other than JSR, drinking from a can of Coke Zero, with that ridiculous new long hair I’d been told about, balding, with a forehead the size of a Klingon’s, blithely holding forth to two women, each with a flute of champagne and each wearing a sequined blouse: « Je m’en fous si ça fait vieillot, si c’est ‘corny’ ou pas, » he is saying, « il faut lire Steinbeck pour comprendre pourquoi et comment la Californie est devenue ce qu’elle est. Les Raisins de la colère, Des Souris et des hommes. Il faut, il faut, il faut ! C’est hyperimportant ! ».
It seems I was not just moving at random through the streets of the Marais — I had a destination, even if I was not consciously aware of it. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that HLG was consciously aware, that she had been guiding my every turn, as she knew that the best way to kick-start my output for The Hinternet was to arrange this little reunion, or at least the closest thing to a reunion possible under the circumstances, between Justin and me. He had once been my best friend, after all, and he was about to become my boss, in a manner of speaking. Yet I had not so much as laid eyes on him in over 36 years.
When I say he was my best friend I do not necessarily mean I was his best friend. I doubt he was ever capable of such a thing. In a way, for me to join The Hinternet as an underling is really just to resume a very old arrangement, one that I’ve known practically my whole life, and for whatever reason seems to suit me. In first grade, at every recess, he and I would climb to the top of a little cement hillock on the playground, which we both held to resemble the dorsal mound of a brontosaurus, so that he could roll me down, curled up inside an empty GoodYear tire that had been made available to us as some kind of recreational accessory. I always flopped out at the bottom, spinning around and dizzy, uncertain whether I was resentful or proud that he had chosen me as his very own Laïka, uncertain whether I wanted him to do it to me again.
In seventh grade I recall a pointless skit we put on, purportedly in fulfillment of the requirements for that year’s “English” class. We were both police detectives of some sort, and we both had on trench coats and fedoras. We were investigating some kind of drug crime, and he had an endless reserve of derogatory one-liners intended to belittle my abilities as an investigator. “You don’t know smack from sugar,” he would declaim in front of the entire class. “You don’t know coke from Pepsi.”
Then in ninth grade he veered off into a world of esoteric obsessions in which, increasingly, I found I could have no place — Jack Chick tracts, Tijuana bibles, the Church of the SubGenius, Lydia Lunch, Annie Sprinkle, God knows what. He proposed to start a ‘zine, which for some reason he called Interruptus, and recruited me as a contributor, only to reject my work, systematically, as “lame”. The truth is we were already almost entirely estranged by the time I… well, by the time things changed.
That was the extent of our reunion. We did not speak, but I can at least say that just drawing near to him put me back into that old frame of mind and cast of heart. I was ready to get back into the tire again.
Hélène saw to my transit home, somehow, though I can’t say I have any real recollection of how it worked. I do have a vague memory, as if in a dream, of taking a series of public conveyances: the RER B from the Gare du Nord, express all the way to the Parc des Expositions, then Charles de Gaulle, then the CDGVAL to Terminal 1, then a moving sidewalk through a tunnel that looked like it was made of pure asbestos sprayed out of a hose, then an escalator that moves slowly through an absolutely filthy transparent-plastic tube, then of course an airplane, then BART to Richmond, then Amtrak to Sacramento, then Regional Transit Bus No. 80 out of Downtown, through Del Paso Heights, up Marysville Boulevard, past the old McClellan Air Force base where the spy planes used to land, up Dry Creek Boulevard, past the waterski lakes, past the Cigarettes Cheaper, past the Grange Hall, past the Klan house, past the house where grandpa and I used to go to play horseshoes —all these places were still there!—, past that one house where in 1988 Marnie got alcohol poisoning and was pulling up her skirt and making obscene gestures and laughing maniacally and singing A-Ha’s “Take on Me” as the first-aid crew lifted her into the ambulance, which, while heartbreaking, may also have been the first and only moment I ever felt the throb of love; then past the high school, past the Archway Frostee, past Anderson’s Feed & Seed, then to the stop at M Street, just a few yards down from my sweet, safe attic. No one spoke to me throughout this entire journey, nor of course did I ever have to prove, by showing a ticket, the validity of my claim to a seat. But let no one say I did not in fact make a real journey, by ordinary means, across the globe — again, all thanks to Hélène.
And now I’m back to my inventory — the only thing I really know, and so the only thing I can really write about (manipulating the surrounding electrical field, as I’ve learned to do, so as to simulate the function of a keyboard). I know I was supposed to be writing about “culture”, but Hélène has given me the green light, so I may as well just continue on what is plainly the only real beat I’ll ever have.
The boarders are downstairs watching television. There is a commercial on for Progresso soup that seems to be targeting the elderly and isolated: “Progresso Soup: It Helps Break Up the Day.” Meanwhile I’m going through a box of old cassette tapes: Roger Whittaker, Anne Murray, Robert Goulet, The Oak Ridge Boys, and then a real rarity: a “cassingle” of Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart”. I turn to a carton of vinyl and begin to flip through it. I’ve been 36 years up here, yet I swear I’ve never seen any of this before: Burl Ives in overalls and a train-conductor’s cap, Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass, Steve & Eydie, the Statler Brothers’ Flowers on the Wall, Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E. There is an entire carton with nothing but K-Tel releases: Hooked on Classics, Freedom Rock, Disco Fire. I open a styrofoam cooler with the Hamm’s beer logo. I find in it not beer but old issues of Pennysaver, unopened envelopes from Publisher’s Clearing House, the sheet-music for “Mahogany”, and hundreds of laminated placemats, several of them displaying, as in a taxonomic grid, the various types of kachina doll, faceless and spectral, others depicting Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox on one unlikely adventure after another, another showing two chubby Hawaiian children in grass skirts, blissfully stirring a great pot of poi. Someone has added, on top of the lamination, four adhesive black letters, at slight angles to one another, spelling out the name RAWN. I have no memory of it.
I don’t know quite what’s got into me today, but I feel as though my current search is not haphazard. I am looking for something in particular, even if I do not know what it is. I push with a cane at the suitcases in the rafters, and a few of them fall. The first one I open is filled with books, good old books — an Everyman’s Library hardback edition of Leaves of Grass with the front cover torn off, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You with a handwritten dedication on the title page: “For our dear little girl, Christmas, 1921”. The sound of the suitcases falling has stirred the boarders, and I can hear one of them pulling down the collapsible staircase to come up and inspect. Damn!
I look up and I see other suitcases have already shifted to replace the ones I’ve brought down. I always suspected as much but somehow I never observed it directly. Maybe something changed in me, some new faculty of perception got jostled into action by my journey to France, so that now I could see clearly what had for 36 years remained purely hypothetical. The objects of my inventory were perpetually regenerating. This cache, I saw now, was infinite. I could never, not even in principle, finish the strange task that had fallen to me, and that I had never, perhaps until now, so much as thought to question.
I bring these suitcases down in turn, and find a hat case with a fine red-velvet Shriner’s fez inside, a neatly folded JC Penney electric blanket, mismatched Pyrex bowls with faded daisy patterns, a tattered copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, an assortment of fridge magnets with whimsical slogans (“I used to have an hourglass figure, but the sands have shifted”, “God bless this mess”, etc.), grandpa’s horseshoe trophies, sundry 4-H badges, a ribbon announcing 3rd prize in the mechanical-bull competition at the Country Comfort Lounge, a commemorative bicentennial glass from McDonald’s featuring the likeness of good Grimace. The stairs creak and groan, and then the skinnier boarder’s head appears through the attic floor.
“You see anything?” the fatter of the two shouts from the couch.
“Nah,” says the one on the stairs. “It’s just Rawn again.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Well it is, honey!”
“I don’t care if it is or not, I just don’t like when you say it out loud like that.”
And then he’s gone again, and the two of them are back on the couch, sitting passively as an obscene litany of side-effects pours out from a televised pharmaceutical ad. Damn, damn! I hate it when he comes to check on me! I’ve got work to do. I’ve got infinite work to do, as I now understand. In the short-term, anyhow, I’ve got something I need to find. I’m not sure what it is, but I know that it is. A Deputy Dog thermos? A Wizard of Id lunchbox? A page in a book? A sequence of grooves pressed in vinyl? A Pee-Chee folder or Trapper Keeper bearing some document or other that might finally explain my plight?
I mean, there is this one Pee-Chee whose contents I have long strained to understand. Every single word is perfectly comprehensible, but somehow I just cannot make any sense of all of them strung together. This is really nothing new though. I’ve known about it practically from the beginning.
But maybe something’s different. This impulse I’m now feeling might not be pushing me onward to uncover something new, but to return to that folder and to see if its sense might now, finally, reveal itself to me.
Let me then finish this first Hinternet piece by sharing with you —uncommented, at least for now— that troubling trove’s very most troubling document, a clipping from the Rio Linda Sentinel dated August 13, 1989:
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