Greetings, dear subscribers!
After a prolonged hiatus, I am planning on getting this Substack up and running again with at least periodic updates from me.
The next couple of posts will be about Radiopaper, a new social media project I have been working on. I will have more to say about Radiopaper very soon, but for now you can check out the site here.
I also wanted to let you know about two recent pieces I’ve written.
First, for Compact, an article that originated as an essay on this Substack: “A World Nobody Wants”
Life in a recently built apartment is like a simulation that’s constantly glitching. Your towel bar looks like a towel bar, but it can’t hold the weight of a wet towel without falling out of the wall. Your floors look like wood, but then they start rippling or peeling back at the corners like the cheap petroleum byproduct that they are. Your doors look like they close securely, but you know that if you accidentally walked into one while checking your phone there’s a good chance you’d rip right through it. There doesn’t seem to be water inside the walls, but you can smell the mold, feel the damp behind the scratchy, echoing drywall that resembles plaster but is, in fact, made of cardboard, gypsum, and the cheapest glue in the world.
It was a fun article to write, and I was delighted that a number of people read it and shared it outside my own small world. I changed the second half of the piece significantly, to focus on a recent interest of mine: heroic pre-WWII architecture. By “heroic” I mean that it expresses a view that “human life is a grand, serious matter, and art is a fitting vessel to pour that grandeur into.” What is missing from the contemporary built environment is any expression, or even recognition, of this view.
Our civilization is slowly but inexorably extending this sort of banality over every square foot of the earth’s developable land. We don’t riot against this, because the banality of what we have built has seeped into our souls. Every building around us announces that comfort, safety, and low prices are all that matter.
For Plough, I wrote a more meditative, meandering piece, about an allegedly Satanic highway that ran through my childhood town in New Mexico:
In New Mexico no one pretends the devil does not exist, and so the name of this highway had been one of the principal subjects of local politics since it was christened in 1926, even though the name was chosen as part of a system. It didn’t help matters that the initial “S” in the sign for the Shell station in Cortez, Colorado, right along the highway, had burned out.
I go on to discuss George Washington’s grave, lost civilizations in the Ohio Valley, the extinction of charismatic megafauna, and the meaning of tradition.
Tradition is, among other things, a way of coping with the past, a form of cultural digestion. Like good digestion, it is not purely passive. One eats only at certain times, one pays attention to the little signals from one’s stomach, one takes a little wine, and so forth. In the absence of tradition-making and tradition-keeping, a society suffers from an undigested past. Such a society is haunted.
As always, thanks for reading.
—David