So it’s been just shy of five years since I started this newsletter. Wild! When I started this I was a college junior at the height of what I will remember always as “COVID Fall.” I was learning remotely, which is to say not learning; I was fresh off four months working 39 hours a week at the hell factory1; I was living in a house that was actively trying to kill me with mold2, a house I shared with objectively too many friends, but hey: My rent was $250/month!
Nightswimming was born in late November of those halcyon, borderline-hallucinogenically weird times, literal days after I had to flee the moldhouse for my very health and safety. At the time I thought I wanted to write about music, and to be fair I did want to write about music, but I quickly found out that, as much as I love great music and great music criticism, music is rarely what I find myself moved to actually write about.
As a result, this newsletter has pretty much only existed in the midst of its own identity crisis. But in the past year or so I think I’ve actually figured out what I want to write about. There’s only one catch: “Nightswimming” just aint cuttin it anymore.
Patty Dignam is a dead guy who falls out of his coffin in Ulysses. Everyone just keeps talking about Poor Dignam and for some reason it was the funniest part of the whole book to me, which is saying something.
I read Ulysses (mostly) back in February and not only I love it (and I did), but it wound up being a kind of thousand-page revelation as to how much I love books, how much I love reading, and the extent to which these are the things I find myself drawn to write about, at least in a nonfiction context like this.
Thus: Poor Dignam!
The piece I published recently about Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and Ottessa Moshfegh ought to be a good indicator of the sort of stuff I want to write more of, albeit on the headier, more labor-intensive side of things. But hey, books! Books are cool, huh?
That’s all for now, folks. More soon, b’lieve it or not.
The Old Navy at the Short Pump Mall, for all my Richmond-heads out there
And it nearly succeeded, too, but that’s a story for another day
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