59. Frightening the boar
October 6th, 2024
—
I sometimes think about this newsletter like one of those water features in Japanese gardens. If you’ve never seen one, there’s a hollowed-out bamboo tube that rests on a pivot just beyond its balance point, and it slowly gets filled with water. Eventually the weight of the water causes the tube to tip, emptying out its contents and swinging back, hitting a stone and making a satisfying thock. The internet tells me these are called sōzu, but belong to wider category of devices called shishi-odoshi—literally ‘deer-frightening’ or ‘boar-frightening’—intended to scare pests away from your garden.
I don’t have a pest problem, or even a garden for that matter. But I always send these emails after a slow trickle of feeling has reached critical mass—I’ve found something essential or profound, and I finally feel like I can justifiably thock into your inboxes and share it. Except lately, it feels like the tube has sprung a leak—nothing fills me up. I am beset by boars. But perhaps that’s fine.
Jessica Pratt’s record Here in the Pitch came out earlier this year, but feels absolutely unmoored in time. It’s a dreamy, otherworldly, reverb-heavy half hour of songs that sound like a cosmic waiting room. It’s loosely a kind of 60s psychedelic folk with touches of bossa nova, but reducing it to neat categories feels like trying to put clothes on a ghost. All I know is there’s a bari sax or some sort of woodwind in the chorus of ‘Better Hate’ that is the answer to something. All I know is that there’s a lyric in ‘World on a String’ that goes, “I want to be the sunlight of the century,” and that about covers it. All I know is that several times this year I’ve been suffering from what Ursula K. Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven calls “...pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul,” and this is the record that I’ve turned to.
Wandering around suburban Portland in the wake of the XOXO Festival, wondering how I’ll ever find a similar creative community in the UK; meandering through the East Village in New York, numbly reckoning with some tragic news; happily getting soaked through at Edinburgh in 2 in the morning, walking home alone after seeing a rowdy variety show; heaving myself out of the flat earlier if only to spite a wave of chronic pain telling me I can’t. Something about this record sounds like an end credits consolation, tailor-made for rudderless floating through an uncertain moment—a moment where you’re waiting for a thock that doesn’t come, and meanwhile all you can do is make friends with the boar.
—
Dept. of Enthusiasm is a charmingly sporadic email from me, Jez Burrows. You can read some past issues, or sign up below.
© 2020–2025 · Powered by Buttondown