I rented a lake house over Labor Day weekend with my gf and two of her friends, and I started Swimming in the Dark (Tomasz Jedowski) because it seemed like the most “beach read”-appropriate on my reading list. By which I mean it seemed like a great opportunity to make up for not reading it when my sister lent it to me a year ago when I was going to a friend’s rental on Fire Island and was told it’d be good for the beach then and that “I’d look cool”). Reading lists are a constant exercise in guilt! Welcome to ReadOnly.
The cover of the book kind of hilariously pitches it as “Imagine Call Me By Your Name set in Communist Poland”, and… yep, that’s what we have here. It’s kind of bleak marketing to pitch any sad gay romance as a CMBYN-like, but it’s also not surprising this is the world we live in. The further I get into it and the longer I sit with it, although I like it, it really isn’t much like Call Me By Your Name at all, either in terms of writing (the prose is merely fine, does a lot of finding clunky alternatives for the word “said” out of fear of repetition - one of those things I can’t unsee once I see it, while Call Me By Your Name has some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read) or in terms of the structure of the romance. Swimming in the Dark is its own thing: a gay couple gradually realizing they have nothing in common aside from the fact that they’re both gay, and live during a time where it’s a minor miracle to have found anyone to be with, whatever hoop-jumping constitutes said “being with”.
You turned to me, seemingly encouraged. “I could try to get you work in my department once I’m settled.”
I shook my head. “No.” You looked at me, as if expecting an explanation. For a moment, neither one of us spoke. “Did you hear about the food prices?” I finally asked.
You nodded and looked away.
“And?” I probed. Now the silence was yours.
“And what?” You shrugged. “If they do it, it needs to be done.”
The narrator is disillusioned with Communist Poland; the love interest has the wealth and connections where the system works well enough for him where he doesn’t get what all this complaining is about. I read this on a rented lake house during a 4-day weekend, enjoying my non-taxing read and clearly on the wrong side of history.
It’s weird to read a book about a crumbling country in a different kind of crumbling country. It’s not new to feel like my brain is on fire every time I look at the internet, but the Georgia AG RICO charges against the Cop City protestors are so extra fucked, so indicative of a country that exists merely to crush. From Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World last week:
In short the Georgia AG has filed RICO charges against 61 members of a broad spectrum of disparate individuals and groups protesting the construction of Cop City in Atlanta. Among the charges in this attempt to paint peaceful protestors as part of a lawless anarchist group focused on overthrowing society as we know it (that's not really an exaggeration of how they are described in the indictment which you can read here) are acts so simple as handing out fliers or publishing zines or reimbursing other individuals for expenses for food and gas through mutual aid as if any of that were the same thing as purchasing weapons for a terrorist group or say conspiring to overthrow the United States government.
…
Rather ominously the state has indicated the date of the beginning of the so-called conspiracy as being May 25, 2020 the day George Floyd was killed. That suggests they may look to roll up other protestors against police violence into this charade.
All together it's a shocking (although not really) assault on our civil liberties and an attempt to criminalize the act of protesting itself. And we can probably expect similar conspiracy type cases being brought against people who aid others in getting an abortion in the months to come.
And hold that up against the frustration in Swimming in the Dark:
I thought of Mother, of her pointless life, her passivity. Of the years she’d spent listening to the radio, explaining her truths to me, and all of it for what? She’d died a submissive employee at the Electricity Office and had never dared to speak up or live out any of her ideas.
Swimming in the Dark’s topic of living under communism in Poland gave my brain the obvious nudge to pick up Disco Elysium again, a game inspired by living under communism in Estonia. I also recently came across an incredible analysis of the game from a player who grew up in Iraq that does a much better job than I could, from my position, of why reading these stories of falling-apart countries isn’t nihilistic, but recentering:
I grew up in Iraq. When people hear this in the US, where I now live, they usually say: "Wow...that must have been hard."
I mean? I guess? I've been a couple hundred meters from ISIS bombings. The government is spectacularly dysfunctional. You never know when the electricity might be on. Most summer days are 50 C. The tap water is salty.
And I also love the wonky little generators people wire everywhere. I love the weird shark statue with Saddam torn off the top. I love the guys fishing in the river despite the fact that it's greenish black. I love how excited everyone gets about the government building one tiny new overpass. I also love the random overpass sitting in the desert connected to zero roads. I love hearing our friend giggle as my dad ribs him for driving a Toyota Hilux, a favorite of terrorists transporting weapons. I love the stray cats that carefully pick their way over the barbed wire on our walls. I love the people that run towards a bombing instead of away because they want to help the survivors. I love the guy who fixed my glasses with a wrong-sized screw because he lived through sanctions and doesn't need dumb things like correctly-sized screws.
But it's almost impossible to explain this to most Americans. They picture a normal Iraqi life and think it would be their worst nightmare. So I'm used to just not sharing that part of my life, or ever seeing it in media.
So this game totally caught me off guard. We're in a setting in between apocalypses, starring an alcoholic fuckup from a corrupt occupier-aligned police force, who at best might keep a couple people from dying in a gang war. It's pretty bleak. It's also incredibly fucking joyful.
Just the prose alone is so sincere. You can't write stuff this goofy, flowery, beautiful, dumb, and moving ironically. The writers clearly love words far out of proportion to how much they might be able to actually change fundamentally broken systems.
And all the characters, the worldbuilding details, the interruptions from Shivers and Esprit de Corps, hell, all the bits and pieces of your brain. There's so much attention and thus so much love everywhere in this game for humans and what humans do. Doesn't matter if they might all get shot, blown up, or wiped clean by pale in a couple years. Doesn't matter if they brought it all on themselves. Right here, in this moment, they are human, and so they matter.
I feel like this game gets why my life in Iraq was worth living. Even if a lot of my fellow Americans think the world sure would be nicer and simpler if Iraqis just didn't exist.
And yeah I guess this is more of a roundup than my own thoughts. I don’t have much else new to say about Disco Elysium at the moment, aside from, yeah, that bit of that writeup about how the prose is good really undersells how good it is. And I know, I know, usually when I say that, what I really mean is that it’s funny:
But the writing is particularly good because of what that redditor was getting at, that it excels while knowing no matter how good it is it will never cause the change it writes about. The prose is beautiful because it doesn’t matter if the prose is beautiful - at least on the scale of the issues it’s writing about. The scale it matters on is also the scale it reminds us we truly live on.
On that theme of recentering yourself on a scale at which your life has meaning in the face of crushing systemic issues, No Escape wrote about the RICO charges - as well as KOSA, Project 2025, and generally the far right’s push to take permanent power in the United States - and what’s doable in a world in which nothing feels doable (emphasis my own):
I’m writing about this not to wallow in doomerism, but instead to implore us to organize, to do anything to stop this shit. It’s been time. Many folks have already begun doing so. It’s going to take a massive spectrum of responses and community-building and, yes, electoral bullshit to address and repudiate this rightward push. Diversity of tactics is, as always, necessary to get a freer, less repressive world that we want.
In the short term, what can we do? First of all, you’re going to have to do what you feel comfortable doing. Maybe you’re not an “organizer,” maybe in your area it’s scary or even dangerous to openly organize against the right as they are the ones in power, maybe just the size of the problem is too daunting, maybe you work a lot and can’t spare the amount of time it would take to mount a response. Bare minimum? Donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to support the Cop City defendants. Call your senator to voice your opposition to KOSA. Talk to your friends and friendly neighbors about this and ask them to do the same. Find receptive areas of your existing community and try planting seeds. Maybe some of them grow. Try to connect with already-existing groups doing the work. If you’re able to do more, if you have resources or contacts or organizing experience, do what you can. You likely didn’t need me to tell you that, though.
In the long term, I believe it’s more important than ever to build and grow communities of care that can adequately confront and withstand the state. Unions, mutual aid and direct action groups, the kind of organizational networks that would indeed make folks like the Georgia AG sweat – all of it needs to be on the table to fight back against those who would eviscerate freedom in freedom’s name.
Standard plugs zone:
I have a new review up at Kissing Dynamite of Ashley Cline’s two new chapbooks of 2023: electric infinities and cowabungaly yours at the end of the world. I liked them! You should, uh, still read the whole review though, there’s more than that.
Speaking of Kissing Dynamite, did you know I am Book Reviews Editor there? I write reviews of small press/self-published poetry books, but I also will edit your reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write! Surely everyone’s dream is writing poetry reviews under the mentorship of one half of the team behind Bad Books, Good Times. Who could ask for more
Over on Trash Garbage, a playlists and vibes blog thing I’m part of, we posted a new sleep music playlist vaguely inspired by a spam comment we got one time: let the robot bring you money while you rest. I got to write some truly off-the-wall copy for this one.
We also do a regularly updated heavy rotation playlist for Trash Garbage! We have literally never publicized this! We’re bad @ business!!!!