4.23.2025

There’s this book I’ve been reading for almost two years, Septology by the Norwegian author John Fosse who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I try to read at least a book by each winner. It’s rare an American or even English writer wins, so it makes me feel worldly and sophisticated but mostly it reminds me of how universal human experience is, how we all look pretty similar when you extract and examine another brain outside your own context.

I read about two pages a day. I'm getting close to the end and I'll probably start over again when I get there. It's immersive, like being in a simulation where you're riding around in this old painter's head as he plods through snow and relives painful memories.

He writes in long sentences that go on for days and it brings me back to the writers I used to love, the modernists who didn’t care about crap like punctuation or format or structure and how revolutionary but ultra-chic that seemed a hundred years ago, and how I used to write like that when I was a teenager and in college and it was cathartic and the few people who read it seemed to really like it even though I didn’t have much to say, or I had a lot to say but it sounded like whining because I didn’t know about anything more complicated than how things felt, but now when I use that technique and I jam it up with interesting verbs and proper nouns it creates a texture, and I don’t think I have synesthesia but I do have a textural tactile relationship with prose and when I look at a passage I can imagine running my fingers over the words and feeling the valleys and crests and the rougher and smoother points like I’m reading Braille or brushing the surface of a pile of Legos and it pleases me and makes me want to make more.

Guest Artist: BK, from the series 'An Organized Trainwreck'
https://www.instagram.com/design__by__bk?igsh=cXBpZXpyem9najdh
(full artist bio will be included in Friday's Weekly Digest)