Daybook: Five Years

A comic about having Covid, Christian Marclay's The Clock, and reading Solvej Balle

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Because it’s been five years now since the pandemic started, I’ve been going through old notebooks from March 2020 - Dec 2020, a year that felt strangely out of time, a year where I became so oriented in one place—our sunny Berkeley apartment and the several blocks surrounding it—that I became totally disoriented.

I love journals, notebooks and diaries as a form (this newsletter is named after one of my favorite books, Daybook, a collection of journals by the artist Anne Truitt) because they show the author as always in progress; it’s a form dedicated to living and thinking through things, a form for marginalia and stream of consciousness and bits & bobs. Crafting an argument isn’t the point, proving yourself isn’t the point, telling a story isn’t the point. What is the point? Fascination, curiosity, confusion, meandering. Thinking.

I remember feeling during that year that I had no life to document anymore, that real life must be happening elsewhere, in an alternate dimension that all of us had accidentally stumbled out of. But looking back on the stray notes and comics I made during that year, it’s a nice reminder—proof—that I was still myself, and that life happened anyway, just on a scale that I was not accustomed to (both terrifyingly large and terrifyingly small). I still don’t feel like I (we?) understand how to appropriately acknowledge what happened that year and all that’s happened since then.

Below are a few journal comics from that year—but first!!

~Book Corner~

My poetry book True Mistakes has been out for about two weeks now. If you live in the Bay Area, New York, or DC, I’ll be doing some readings and events at the following places, and I’d love to see you there:

Thursday, April 10, 2025 at 7 pm - San Francisco, CA
Green Apple Books
with Leigh Lucas
More info & RSVP here

Thursday, April 17, 2025 at 7 pm - Oakland, CA
Womb House Books
with Rachel Richardson
More info & RSVP here

Tuesday, April 29th - Brooklyn, NY
Community Bookstore (Park Slope)
with Larissa Pham
More info & RSVP here

Wednesday, May 7th at 7 pm - Washington, DC
Lost City Books Spring Salon @ The Line Hotel
with Tania James, Becca Rothfeld, & Zak Salih
More info & RSVP here

Okay, now on to some feverishly drawn and nearly illegible comics from an unimaginably unhinged year. (Are you enticed??)

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Last but not least, a sweet page from my notebook after an afternoon sitting in the small, grassy, clover-filled strip in front of my apartment with my friend Alisha:

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Reading: Another Country by James Baldwin. A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner. Moving the Bones by Rick Barot.

“What Will You Do?” by Kaveh Akbar in The Nation: “This is, more than anything, a plea for principled leftists to rise en masse and not just decry but disrupt a nation helmed by gleeful genocideers. I’m writing frantically, aware my prose is ugly, overearnest, unvetted against worst-faith readers. It’s graceless, unlovely. So am I.”

“Truth Is Never Finished” by Fady Joudah in The Baffler: “And it drove them insane that they couldn’t turn off time, and they went crazy that they had colonized a time in which there was no one left for them to come after, for they did not know how to be with others outside the madness of pursuit, the sweet perfume of domination.”

“Reading During a Genocide: What Etel Adnan’s novel taught me” by Isabella Hammad in The Yale Review: “We can feel the speed with which Sitt Marie-Rose was written, close to the paroxysm of violence. After the opening prewar section about making the movie, the text tracks war’s fracturing effect on the psyche. ‘Time is dead’ for the unnamed narrator. ‘Action is fragmented into sections so that no one has an exact image of the whole process.’”