Good morning Hank, it’s Tuesday. Little bit of a stressful day around here.
31 years after having their stadium taken away from them, AFC Wimbledon are back
home at last playing their first game today at the new Plough Lane stadium.
It’s an incredible accomplishment, a stadium built and owned by the fans.
I’m so excited. There’s also an election. If you’re eligible to vote in the United
States, please do. You can find your polling place and
more at vote.org. Ok, I’m going to make a video
about something else. Back in March we did a liveshow fundraiser that I
did not at the time realize was going to be my last experience of the old normal.
And after the show, someone whose name unfortunately I do not remember
came up to me and handed me this: an art project called “Alaska for Looking.”
This is the entire text of my first novel Looking for Alaska, but rearranged into
alphabetical order. So it begins with all the numbers in the book, and then quite a lot
of a’s because apparently I love an indefinite article. And so just before the
world I thought I knew turned into a strange, dizzying, uncanny version of itself,
someone handed me a novel I thought I knew turned into a strange, dizzying, uncanny
version of itself. I last read Looking for Alaska in 2004 when I was 26 years old.
I do not enjoy reading my work after it has been published, partly because it’s very
frustrating not to be able to change anything and partly because, you know, there are lots
of other books I’d like to be able to read. 16 years later I don’t really feel qualified
to comment on Looking for Alaska, but Alaska for Looking is fascinating.
Like for example, here at the end of the letter ‘h’ it reads hygenic hyperventilating
hypothetical hysteria i i i i i. Which would not be a bad title for
my autobiography. Like, hygienic hyperventilating hypothetical hysteria
is my overwhelming response to 2020. It’s just such a good line. One of those
lines that you wish you had written, until you realize that you did write it, just not in
the right order. In fact, reading a book alphabetized leads to all kind of wonderful
combinations, how ‘again’ leads to ‘against.’ Or ‘wrong’ into ‘wrote’ or ‘lonely’
into ‘long.’
Seeing the book this way, it’s a story of huddled hugs and smirking smoke.
And then there are the little things I was reminded of, like when writing Alaska I was
obsessed with symmetry, like the number of days in the first part of the book had to
be
exactly equal to the number of days in the second part of the book, and so on.
But I also did all of these silly little things to please the weird worship of symmetry, like
having the word ‘remembered’ appear exactly one more time than the word ‘forgotten.’
And it was nice to be reminded of that, if only because 16 years later I can
celebrate not being quite so beholden to symmetrical obsession. To read a
book alphabetically is to understand its preoccupations but not its narrative.
Like in Alaska for Looking I have no idea who anyone is, or what happens to them.
But I can tell the story is about school, and before, and after. And labyrinths.
And that’s actually not so different from how stories survive in my head, like
I don’t remember the plot of most of the books I’ve read, only how they made me
feel and why they mattered to me. Now of course, an alphabetized book
doesn’t tell the whole story. But reading through this, I did feel like it was telling
me a story. A story about me and me and me, and you and you and you,
and time and time and time. The end of Alaska for Looking will
not make sense to people who haven’t read the book, but if you have you’ll
know how strangely lovely and wrenching it is. The alphabetized book ends like this:
zen zero zipped zoo zoo zoo zoo. Which is not such a bad way of saying
goodbye to that story. Hank, I now return to my hygienic hyperventilating
hypothetical hysteria. I will see you on Friday.
This video contains a clue just like all my recent videos do. The clue leads
to a secret livestream and was repeated 4 times toward the end of this video.