Four Things

1. “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” begins the voice of the late David Berman on Silver Jews’ American Water, an album written in a vein similar to what I love about my favorite short fiction, at once succeeding to fascinate and refusing to explain. It is one of the only pieces of music I can remember feeling as though I am reading as much as I am listening to it. Each song on the album’s track list is a small tale of big unhappiness, told joyfully, and irreverently, and with a striking vividness. “I love to see a rainbow from a garden hose / Lit up like the blood of a centerfold / I love the city and the city rain / Suburban kids with biblical names.”

2. I honestly don’t know what to make of the fact that Dan Erickson’s Severance, a show which is essentially about the danger and difficulty of labor organizing in the face of modern technology’s encroachments into the human body, is streaming on Apple TV. What I will say is that, if you still have access to that platform’s free one-month trial, you won’t find a better show to use it on, and you’ll be done with Season 1 long before the month is up.

3. McConnell’s mint chip ice cream.

4. In preparation for next week’s graduation ceremonies, I shoplifted my cap and gown from the Columbia University Student Store. In this, the final week of my undergraduate career, I can recommend nothing more than biting the institutional hand which claims to feed you, through the practice of larceny on any scale you can comfortably manage. Every Saturday, for example, some MBA class gets lunch catered to them in the Business School on the Manhattanville campus. Ostensibly, the food is reserved for them, but I’ve never been caught, not on my second helping, not even on my third. (If you like Indian, especially, take what I’m saying seriously). This is small stuff; what I mean to say, broadly, is take as many resources as you can from this place while you’re still here. As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten outline in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, there is one way to interact with and from inside the university without investing in it, and that way is as its robber.