Conditions

this essay was originally written in Slovenian and published in the Literatura review in April 2024 (Literatura, 394 36, Ljubljana)

translated by the author

People tell me that Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides, Spanish lichen, grandpa’s beard) is an invasive, parasitic plant. They tell me it was brought to America by the Spanish on their ships, where it was met with such favorable climate conditions that today it displays itself in thorny waterfalls gushing from the oaks and cypress trees across the American South. The moss slowly suffocates the trees, but its beauty saves it from eradication. The landscape of trees, woven through with the grayish green tufts of hung spiderweb, suggests the warm emotion of the Caribbean and the swamp, of wooden cabins hidden deep in the jungle and sustained on pure sorcery, where nothing has yet succumbed to the monoculture of industry and concrete. In places where Spanish moss hangs from the trees, perhaps magic can still be found.

I picture it in my mind: the first shock of moss was brought to America by a homesick sailor in the crew of Ponce de Léon, the captain who sailed into the impenetrable wilderness of La Florida on his quest to locate the Fountain of Youth. What he really found were the natives, the Calusa tribe, who forcefully resisted his curiosity and wounded him so gravely with an arrow that he had to run away, dying shortly thereafter in Cuba. But not before one of his sailors chucked a fistful of moss into the jungle from the deck, burdening all the trees of the New World with the deadly finery, and with this gesture of anger or despair transformed the visual landscape of an entire continent.

I am thinking about this as I run down the sidewalks of Jacksonville at sunrise, bowing my head so the greedy fingers of the hanging moss would not pull out my earphones. It is seventy degrees out at six a.m. already, the humidity will make running impossible in an hour. I run from the neighborhood of Springfield, full of picturesque neo-Colonial houses, to the city center, where I pass the city hall, the museum and the library, then turn the corner at the Wells Fargo building onto the Main Street Bridge and cross St. Johns river, running on the reddish and beige pavestones of the embankment to the statue of the lonely sailor where I rest for a moment, stare into the murky water and enjoy the smooth glide of dolphins on the surface. The sun takes off from the land into a full circle on the hazy horizon. It is getting hot. I run back. Cops are harassing a group of young bums who set up a tent on the sidewalk in the night. I catch the scent of unwashed bodies, I observe their tousled beards, the dreadlocks of girls, all their eyes agleam with the outraged mirth of the free. The cops are all wearing sunglasses. I run on.

Back in the house I wake up Mickey, a hearing-impaired King Charles cavalier, and take him out for a walk in the neighborhood. Groups of people are playing disc golf in the park. There are “Black Lives Matter”, rainbow “Springfield is proud”, and “Everyone is welcome here” signs in all the gardens in front of all the houses. The curtains of Spanish moss are swaying in the rare gust of wind. The dog is dragging me back to the cool of the house where the air conditioner hums without pause.

I will be spending three months here, taking care of the house and the dog of the painter Kobaslija, who had withdrawn from the tropical summer of Florida with his brushes and canvasses to the luminous air of the Swiss Alps. I am alone, the master of my days, and I will be writing a novel. The conditions are ideal.

*

When I am not writing, I mostly read. Ever since I published my first novel, I am beset by a single problem. How to get one published novel to create the conditions for writing the next one. Everything I tried so far, more or less by heart, by inspiration or feeling, did not achieve the desired result. The time has come to approach the problem in the most thorough way I know. I will read a whole stack of books.

Soon I read so many I can no longer distinguish between what I had already known before and what I learned anew. In Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson I find the entire history of Anglo-American publishing from the 20th century until today. In Book Wars the same author writes about the developments of publishing in the digital environment. Knowledge is power, they say, and I suppose I am becoming strong, but I still do not know how to turn this strength into a solution. Should I create a TikTok account and spend half an hour each day dancing in a tight shirt in front of my phone with my novel in my hands? Should I publish the novel as an NFT? Should I start my own print-on-demand publishing house and sign a contract with the post office for distribution … but who will help me with the marketing? How expensive are the PR-gurus? All my ideas for promotional campaigns are slightly kooky, I would need the advice of a lawyer for most of them. Yes, I would need a lawyer and an agent and a manager, perhaps some security guards and debt collectors, and also, why not, a few bunnies for the red carpet, a couple of snow leopards on a chain and a troupe of clowns. Anything would be preferable to the weekly coffee with the editors and publishers, where I would adamantly appear as reliable and responsible and amicable and absolutely unthreatening.

In any case I find all this knowledge slightly useless. My business is literature; what use do I have for segmenting an audience and the long tail of Kindle direct publishing, the details of author’s contracts and the economic perspective of the avant-garde. What I am interested in is how to write a successful book that has not been written before and would never exist without me, and not how to write a book that would be sufficiently similar to another bestselling book to exploit its stream of attention and use the few errant drops from it to water my own. And I do not consider the artisanal novel to be bad, I am just slightly saddened it represents the pinnacle of pleasure to so many people.

(In the meantime, I read Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Riding my bike to the area called Five Points I stop at a statue in Memorial Park, dedicated to the 1700 Florida men who gave their lives in the First World War. Perhaps one of them caught a glimpse of Hans Castorp in the trenches.)

Then I read the histories of the legendary American publishing houses and the memoirs of their editors. The magnificent world of the publishing Mad men unfolds, everything is in wood and leather, there is much drinking and smoking, the typewriters clatter deep into the night and for decades they only publish white men. Roger Strauss is a Guggenheim heir, and his house can afford to mess around the market up until the nineties: Susan Sontag is the tastemaker there and she turns down Eco’s The Name of the Rose. With the help of contacts from The Paris Review founders (ahem), Farrar, Strauss & Giroux publishes a few European authors, some of which then go on to win the Nobel prize.

Meanwhile Robert Gottlieb at Simon & Schuster and Knopf gets to publish anything that grabs his attention, from pulp fiction to Catch 22, even securing the twenty-two after the original eighteen finds itself on another recently published novel. He is known for working on manuscripts together with the authors all throughout the night. I suspect one of the reasons he wrote his memoir is that his coworker at S&S, Michael Korda, published his own a few years before. Their memories contradict at several places. The long life of humanist activity playing out in a gentlemanly duel over the last word. I will remember the memoir of Daniel Menaker primarily over his bitter refrain that he was screwed out of stock options when The New Yorker was sold to the Condé Nast group. The things that weigh down our souls.

What does this all mean for me? What have I learned about my problem? I am not a cosmopolitan Jewish New Yorker, and no matter how much I wrack my head I fail to see how a Slovenian writer’s novel could attract their attention. What is the thing that a central-eastern-Balkano-European young democratic perspective could offer them? Is this even a correct question to ask? What can I offer as a millennial author from across the pond, bound to this earth by different constitutions, with differently regulated food in the supermarkets (with much less corn, Americans eat so much corn), coming from a bubble of history as ancient and with regards to the size of the world almost intimate, who spent so many years in an environment without guns, pickup trucks, or racial diversity? What kind of a cultural force do the Cleveland Slovenians represent in the United States? How many Americans would be interested in the curiosity that was Yugoslavia; how many there once left it and still miss it today, equating Tito’s federation of socialist republics with their youth?

Surely I could write a novel that would build on my specific experiences and knowledge to check enough marks for the liberal curiosity of the progressive New York audience and perhaps succeed in momentarily peeking out from the confusion of cultural histories, but would such a mercenary attitude not resemble the work of someone using a tried and tested genre structure, inscribing a few fresh elements and hoping that the people will accept the novelty as a welcome addition to something they are otherwise already completely familiar with? Like pineapple on a pizza, like ham and tomato sauce in a burek pie. My question is, then, if our unique experience of life in a culture unknown to the wider world is read by someone else as just another twist in a genre.

Because I do not want to flatter a specific segment of the audience, I am not interested in cultural exchange, the dialogue between nations, the respect that the upper middle class of one country shows to the upper middle class of another country. I create literature, I exist in the global republic of letters, and I participate in the development of an art that has always been shared by the entire human race. I will write a novel that every reader, from Kalahari to Karachi, from Phnom Penh to Port-au-Prince, will consider a novelty in the domain of the written word; my sex, nationality, religion, sexual orientation will not matter, the novel will not be a document of its author, his position in historical time or culture, not even of his language, the novel will be important for its sequence of units of meaning, which will in a theretofore unknown, sublime way cast a light on the existence of a human being. Here in Florida, I am removed from all things familiar like a camel in the Arctic. The conditions are ideal.

There are publishing houses that share my beliefs in such a literature, independent from worldly matters. The important word is modernism, the Poundian make it new. I do research. I read the history of Grove Press, the publishing house that brought D. H. Lawrence, Jean Genet, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett to the United States.

All these authors are giant artists to my mind, I cannot imagine any of them ever gave much thought to the demands of the market, their expression must have been a pure consequence of the needs of their creative genius. But Barney Rosset, the director of the publishing house, skillfully exploits the legal proceedings of countering censorship and turns The Lover of Lady Chatterley into a bestseller after a lengthy trial, and then does the same with Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. I read a long chapter on choosing the right photograph for the cover of Beckett’s trilogy: how to introduce to a culture, obsessed with the image, a European author whose works echo the great moral crash of Europe after the wars and the holocaust. A black turtleneck, a wrinkle-ridden face, the eyes, staring into the infinity of the inhumane. The book does not sell (perhaps they should have used that photo in profile or put a cigarette in Beckett’s his hand), so Rosset decides to stage Waiting for Godot in New York. A theater performance as part of a marketing campaign for a book, why not? He notices that the play is frequented by students, already warmed up by existentialism and now entranced by the theater of the absurd, so he turns his focus to universities and sends the text to the play to student theater groups all across the country. Soon, professors begin to write scholarship on Beckett, their studies convince a few famous authors to admit they consider Beckett an influence, and presto, a literary star is born.

The atmosphere in the house is growing darker, an afternoon tropical thunderstorm is on the way. So, is there in the global literary canon of the postwar 20th century even a single author who was not put there by professional marketers, working with admen and academia? Is literature even literature, the entirety of all texts of above average quality and artistic value, or is literature just that percent of all these exceeding texts that were lucky to be created by someone whose figure at some point served the needs of the dominant culture? The white man from a great European culture who survived the war. The white man from a great European culture who suffered for the subversiveness of his ideas, the misery of his childhood, whose works had exposed the right themes or displayed a style that the academia knew how to interpret as progress, or a worldview that the future had taken for its own, or was at least aware, due to his upbringing and education, which themes or ideas to keep hidden. Will there never be a Slovenian Nabokov, because all our nobility was killed off in the wars? Do we not have a Slovenian Aleksander Hemon simply because we did not spill enough blood during the breakup of Yugoslavia? An ugly question, an unfair question. A curtain of rain is pulled on the quaint streets of Springfield.

*

There is a wonderful scene in the movie Mulholland Drive by the American director David Lynch, with which every creator in the grips of self-doubt can identify whenever they ponder on how a person comes to success within the contemporary creative industries. In the scene, there are six men in a room, and another behind a glass listening to the conversation through a speaker. A beige envelope containing a photograph of a young actress slides across the table. The oldest man says, this is the girl, and asks for an espresso. The young director protests. His older coworker tries to calm him down. The oldest man’s assistant says it is not a suggestion, but a done deal. This is the girl. Two men praise the espresso to the oldest man, it was ordered especially from him. The waiter brings the cup, the oldest man quietly asks for a napkin and repeats his request. The young director resists. This is the girl. The eldest man takes a sip of espresso and lets it spill from his mouth down the napkin. The two men make excuses, they were told this was the best espresso in the world. The young director is outraged, what the hell is going on. The assistant of the eldest man stands up and lets out a primal scream.

This is how, a creator concludes, one achieves success in the contemporary creative industries. There is no discernible logic at play, everything proceeds as in a fever dream, with no reason or luck, not even coincidence. The archetypal images from our lizard brains order the events based on the laws of the primordial world, everything is shamanism, devouring, regurgitation. You enter the formless dark to find the Fountain of Youth, and deadly, poisonous arrows come flying your way, so you chuck a fistful of moss from your homeland into the dark before fleeing, maliciously hoping it takes root.

(When the British acquired Florida after their victory over the Spanish in the Seven Years War in 1763, they quickly built a road leading from St. Augustine – the oldest continuously settled European town on the new continent – to Georgia. The road was called King’s Road and it crossed St. Johns River at the narrowest point of its lower course. Because innumerable herds of cattle crossed the river there, they called the settlement surrounding the narrow point Cow Ford.)

To become D. H. Lawrence, Beckett, Nabokov: is this even possible? Or are these unattainable dreams, dreamt by a man just to set the approximate course of his striving? I will make an effort somewhere in that direction, create what will be made possible for me to create, and then, when I am no longer in this world to be able to ruin something with my life, perhaps at some point with my “work and character” become a useful reference point for a broader cultural enterprise of a certain academic, political, or commercial venture, and thus become etched into the memory of the world for a generation or two as someone that counts. This is where I find the narrowest part of the moon river. This is where I will cross.

But no matter which side I find myself on, my problem remains unresolved. What will it be made possible for me to create? I can get up at five, workout and go for a run, eat healthy, think cleanly, and write well, and yet one of my novels will not create the conditions to write the next one. Five hundred words in the morning, five hundred in the afternoon. Discipline + “keep your calling in mind, suffer without peace”. Five thousand words a week, perhaps three thousand that work. Three months of ideal conditions make for somewhere around forty thousand words. The Ice Saints have one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Ten months of ideal conditions are required just for the sentences. Structure? Intuition. Content? Ten years of reading, memory and imagination. Material conditions? What remains from the last work, a stipend, an advance on the next book, the cobbling together with random texts and translations that in any case pay only for the time I spent on them or not even that. Mental conditions? Farewell, dear mind. Industrial conditions? The balance of power between the publisher and the author is so disproportionate there is always the lingering feeling someone is doing you a favor for deigning to publish your work. The conditions of reception? The novel arrives on a landscape of precarious youth who would much prefer to write novels than reviews and have to force themselves to read the five hundred pages for a pittance, then pretend they can contextualize the work within a culture so opaque, so arbitrary, so dependent on the current mood of the public, that it might as well be completely in the hands of six old men who spend their days drooling with espresso.

(After the British were defeated in the American War for Independence, they returned Florida to the Spanish, who proved unable to set up effective governance on the territory. The Seminole tribe, formed in the 18th century from the remnants of the Florida natives and the other native tribes that were pushed into Spanish Florida by the westward expansion of the United States, by now had the entire peninsula for themselves. They soon began harassing the merchant routes of the American south, attacking plantations and freeing slaves, offering them shelter in Florida. General Andrew Jackson, the hero of New Orleans, was called to pacify the tribe. In an infamously cruel way, and despite the objections of Spaniards who considered this an assault on their empire, he succeeded. The Spanish relinquished Florida to the Americans in 1821, Jackson became the military governor of the newly acquired territory and Cow Ford, where herds of cows might have theoretically spent all this time grazing unperturbed, was renamed, in honor of the cruel man, Jacksonville. In the days I am writing a novel there, the city celebrates its bicentennial with giant fireworks and massive open-air concerts.)

*

The dog survived, the house is clean and the grass is cut, the novel is advancing nicely, and I have learned nothing. I still have no idea how to get one novel to create the conditions for the next one. On one of my final morning walks with Mickey I snip a forearm length strand of Spanish moss from a tree to take as a keepsake. I store it in a Ziploc bag. As a responsible person that does not wish to introduce an invasive species into our ecosystem (my carbon footprint is horrible as it is), I do some research while loitering at the airports on my way home.

Tillandsia usneoides, Spanish moss, Spanish lichen, grandpa’s beard, is not a moss, is not a lichen, and is not a parasite. It is an epiphyte, an air plant that does not grow roots in the earth and uses the trees solely for support. It supplies water and food for itself through its leaves and steals none from the tree. Old trees sometimes buckle under its weight and shade, but its presence otherwise generates favorable microclimate to help the trees grow under the scorching tropical sun. And it is not even Spanish. Its home is exactly wherever it can be found: in the Caribbean, the American South, in Central and South America. There is no chance it would spread in the crowns of Slovenian spruces, since the conditions here are lacking: it dislikes the cold. The natives called it “hair of the trees” and the French called it “Spanish beard”, because it resembled the beards of the conquistadors. In time it became Spanish moss. So much for relying on what the people tell me.

Back at home I keep on writing. I am also finishing up my translation of DeLillo’s Libra. I have plenty of work to do, the conditions are fairly reasonable. Still on my hunt for the man behind the publishing curtain I read memoirs of Slovenian publishers: Tone Pavček’s The House of Cankar’s Covenant (or: All my secretaries) and Milan Matos’s The House of Big Stories. I write an essay “A House Without Books”, which gets me yelled at by Uroš Zupan at an opening of a punk exhibition in Cankar’s Home, because I interpreted him writing that he did not get a chance to say goodbye to Tomaž Šalamun as meaning that he did not attend his funeral. I invite him for a beer to clear things up, but he does not respond. The essay goes unaddressed. I am writing. We work through the translation one more time with an editor. With another editor we work through The Ice Saints; I have a few chapters and an ending left to write. I still do not know how the book will end. I take Libra with me to an island in August and work through it again. Under the Perseid showers I am thinking about what to do with the fate of Leon Kalan, the protagonist of The Ice Saints.

*

One day in the fall, Twitter informs me that Dan Sinykin is about to publish a book called Big Fiction, subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. The thesis of the book is that the economic reality of the publishing industry has an outsized influence on the content of the literature published by the industry. The conditions under which literature is made have a greater influence on the final form of the published novel than the individual author’s vision; the vision is expressed after being sifted through an ever-larger number of sieves of the publishing production, and the awareness of them defines and influences the authorial conception. A number of feedback loops appear: the authors create with all the hurdles of the market system that the novel will have to skillfully transcend in mind, and all the participants in the process have a very practical influence on the final version of the text at each hurdle before letting it through. The thesis interests me, perhaps it would shed some light on my problem.

I read the author’s first work, American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse, where he interprets literary works through the prism of broader economic conditions in the American society in the second half of the 20th century. Authors have responded to the dismantling of the social safety net, the dwindling of the middle class, the neoliberal dismemberment of the commons, the degradation of ecosystems and the apparently unstoppable climate change, with fantasies of the apocalypse, of a total breakdown of the social order, since apocalypse became the only way they could imagine things ever becoming better. The optimism or even the realism of gradual progress no longer convinced anyone, and disillusioned authors began to imagine destructive visions. I think of the well-known quote that in its many varieties made its way from Fredric Jameson through Mark Fisher even to Slavoj Žižek: that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

(In Florida I watch Crimes of the Future, a new movie by the Canadian director David Cronenberg: his entire opus offers convincing proof he has no real difficulties with imagining the end of capitalism, though it is perhaps true that viewers cannot interpret his visions of the future in any other way than that the world has since ended as well.)

In Big Fiction, Sinykin’s horizon narrows from the economic underpinnings of the entire society to the more manageable landscape of the publishing industry, and he explores the ways how publishing’s economic structure displays itself in the published works. The narrative begins with a brief overview of the history of Anglo-American publishing that I already know from Thompson’s Merchants of Culture. He locates a pivotal moment in 1990, when André Schiffrin is fired as the director of the publishing company Random House. Schiffrin is the last from the old guard of publishers, who knew how to defend their publishing program from the demands of the corporate managers, who still published leftists and aesthetes and played the role of a humanist intellectual by publicly opposing the cruelest policies of the state. After him, there is no longer anyone among the leading cadre of the five, soon four, largest publishing houses (comprising more than half of the global publishing market), who would publicly resist the market as the sole arbiter of literary value.

And yet the idea of literary value not dependent only on the number of sold copies stubbornly remains. In the eighties, a number of smaller presses arrive at the scene, consciously moving away from the narrowmindedness of the New York’s literary world and each in their own way carrying on with the mission of publishing literature whose success is not measured exclusively in sales. They are all more or less on the eternal brink of extinction, dependent on the National Endowment for the Arts, which will soon be starved to irrelevance by the conservative forces in one of the ensuing American cultural wars, and a small number of wealthy literary enthusiasts.

In the nineties, after a long march through the institutions, the concept of multiculturalism becomes a broadly adopted rallying cry of progressive forces, and a few bright publishers get the idea to turn their publishing houses into non-profit organizations and convince the liberal wealthy to cover their costs of operation. The non-profit publishers become a refuge for minority authors who tell white America their multicultural stories, but must remain vigilant that their eventual anger or radical politics would not too greatly disturb those who finance the publishers. The authors become public performers of their identities and use satirical barbs to gently prod the expectations of white readers, wishing to peek through the windows of their neighbors.

(At the time of this writing, you can go see the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction in the theater. The movie was made after Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, published in 2001 and mocking the expectations the audience has from the writing of black authors in a bitterly profound way.)

Sinykin singles out the publishing house W. W. Norton as a kind of hybrid between the approaches. Norton is owned by its employees since the sixties and can finance its independent literary program with its textbook program and a sporadic bestseller. It is a place where the editors still have a shot at convincing their coworkers with their taste and can afford to try out the market with novelties which the larger houses would disregard from the outset. A couple of success stories are Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk and Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, two novels that capture the anxious aggression of generation X as it bides its farewell to youth.

So, in essence: the market, identity, or a cultural moment. A well plotted and not too demanding text within a well-defined genre and a clear audience profile. A soppily inspiring, tragic, or a comically stinging narrative on the travails of minorities in the world of majorities. A white man from the edge of society who challenges the world in a way that a new generation considers fresh. Have I learned anything new?

With the examples of authors – like Toni Morrison, who left her editor’s job at Random House when the eighties began and by the decade’s end published Beloved, a novel on the permanent scars left by slavery after the emancipation, in which Sinykin, reading the author’s memoirs alongside, locates an allegory of a Black author liberating herself from the extremely white and extremely male publishing industry; Cormac McCarthy, who could spend decades in the warm embrace of literary inclined publishers to write difficult novels that sold a few thousand copies, and in the nineties, once there was no refuge left from the exacting corporate wind, hurried with a readable narrative and published All the Pretty Horses, his first bestseller, made into a movie with Matt Damon; Stephen King, who in Misery depicts the insatiable demands of the industry and the market that leave the author no room for autonomous decisions through the character of the crazed fan Annie Wilkes; David Foster Wallace, who wrote Infinite Jest, a novel about a movie so entertaining it puts everyone who sees it into a state of catatonic bliss, at the height of the consolidation of the entertainment industry and fought against consumerist simplicity with its thousand pages of text and two hundred pages of footnotes, and yet the publishing company Little & Brown was able to turn the novel into a bestseller with a carefully designed promotional campaign, turning a generation of readers into a catatonic community who could not look away from the brick in their hands – Sinykin relentlessly draws attention to the fact that a completely autonomous authorial vision under such conditions cannot actually exist, that all literary works are in innumerable ways influenced by the broader societal and production conditions under which these works are created.

Okay. So, this is what, it appears to me now, the contemporary American novel looks like. The majority of writers hold their Master of Fine Arts degrees, having learned a high level of proficiency in language and structure, and are able to send their texts for comments to their MFA colleagues. If the response is positive, they try to find an agent to represent the text (the agents switched from fine arts after a year or two to business administration), and the agents have a pretty good idea which editor (English doctorates) likes similar texts and advise the author what changes to make for a greater chance said editor would like it, before offering it to him, then the satisfied editor, having received what they like, creates a list of works similar to the text and convinces his superiors to sign a contract with the author with the sales figures of those works. The editor then shows the text to the marketers, who advise which unprofitable wrinkles could still be ironed out by the author, before the text goes into copyediting and factchecking and then, finally being published, with a market tested cover image into the bookstores all over the country, where the book will have a week or two to make its mark, while the publicists will be inviting book critics and bloggers out to dinner. The writer receives an advance on sales in his contract: if the novel sells well, it first pays off the advance, and if it does not, the advance stays with the author, who can use it to write his next book.

This is the pressure the market system exerts on the final image of a literary novel in the United States of America, and in exchange for this endless line of compromise it enables the conditions under which the authors can create. We have no Master of Fine Arts degree in Slovenia, we have no agents, the editors do not have to rely on sales and do not discuss their books with the marketers, relying solely on their authority of taste and judgment, the literary novel is financed with state subsidies and the only pressure exerted on it is temporal: if it receives a subsidy, it must be published in the year the subsidy was received.

*

The Ice Saints must be published in the year 2023. It is fall, Libra is ready for copyediting, I am at work on the concluding chapter of Leon’s tale. A couple of versions already exist, but I do not like them yet. I feel happy that I will be able to use the money from the book and the translation to buy myself some time for the next novel and my mind is already plotting. On my 37th birthday I receive a notice on our state tax portal. I must return all the basic monthly income I received during the pandemic. The only condition to receive the basic income was that in the year 2020 your invoices were lower than in the year 2019. I check my accounts. In the year 2019 I had, with my rich, awarded, translated writer’s career, billed 1700€ of invoices, relying on stipends. In the year 2020 I asked my publisher for an advance on the novel Pixels and billed 3000€. So, it turns out that even this novel, with its five hundred pages, and the translation, with its six hundred pages, after two years of incredibly stern and disciplined work, will not be creating the conditions for the next one. I will once again be starting from zero.

To rather become an air plant, hanging off a tree, a harmless indigenous decoration of an Alpine landscape, whose eternal silence gives the passersby a chance to insult it in their ignorance with a parasite and an invasive species? An attractive thought, for a moment, perhaps, and one that I use in all its dark and heavy tones as I use most of my thoughts: to create something. And so, due to the beating his author received at the hands of the state, the poor Leon Kalan, the young boy from Škofja Loka that I sent to France when I was in Jacksonville, that I robbed of his mother when I was in Brooklyn, and that I have for a full measure beaten up twice in Ljubljana while I was writing at home, had to forget about even the most meager consolation of a happy ending to his desolate tale.

I am sorry, Leon. What can I say? The conditions were simply not there.