If the idea of a world ruled by Reason weren’t so appealing, no one would pretend to live in one. We learn a lot of universal laws in high school, like Newton’s, that are lies, at least, insofar as they claim to be universal, but also useful, insofar as they are what let us live in absurdity. The pool table is an unusually rational space; there, classical mechanics works with exemplary consistency, something I find comforting, because if I don’t do what I want to do there, which is almost always, I know it’s my fault, always, comforting, for me, because I like having room for improvement — it makes it a lot more fun to keep playing.
Pool isn’t the same game as snooker — rules, table size, outfits, etc. — but its insights are comparable. In an essay about the snooker genius Ronnie O’Sullivan, who makes unintelligible decisions both at and away from the snooker table, Sally Rooney writes:
it would be strange if any athlete in any sport could really explain what they do. Certainly we don’t expect them to start theorizing the conservation of angular momentum. And yet we also don’t tend to describe most sportspeople as “savants.” Why not? Perhaps because their abilities—throwing, jumping, catching—basically strike us as exaggerations of our own.
She waits until the end of the essay to pivot this to writing, but since she already did, we can start there: I don’t agree with everything Mao Zedong has ever said or done, though I will always go to bat for his idea that the people who do stuff are the people to trust about the stuff they do, something that seems intuitive to almost anyone ever who has been alive and done stuff, at least so long as you are discussing those domains of human stuffdoing that require hard work, thought, and discipline, on top of continual study of, and humility towards, the rich, multimillennial tradition of others doing stuff in that domain, e.g., physics, but perhaps not art, I’ve learned. I’d blame Amerikkkan anti-intellectualism, but even in mid-twentieth century France, Alain Robbe-Grillet reports,
the myths of the nineteenth century retain all their power; the great novelist, the “genius,” is a kind of unconscious monster, irresponsible and fate-ridden, even slightly stupid, who emits “messages” which only the reader may decipher. Anything that risks obscuring the writer’s judgment is more or less accepted as favoring the full flowering of his work. Alcoholism, poverty, drugs, mystical passion, madness have so encumbered the more or less romanticized biographies of artists that it henceforth seems quite natural to see them as necessities of the creator’s sad condition, to see, in any case, an antinomy between creation and consciousness. . . The novelist, more than a creator in the strict sense, is thus a simple mediator between ordinary mortals and an obscure power, a force beyond humanity, an eternal spirit, a god. . . .
Sometimes being unconscious appeals, but unfortunately, one thing I’ve learned playing pool is that even those of us who exist merely as the universe’s karaoke mic still have to call our shots: smashing a cluster of balls into a four-rail ricochet that, somehow, works out for you is fun enough, when you’re just fucking around with the beautiful divas you met at the bar, but when a self-serious player has decided that the new bar theme is self-seriousness, you’ll soon discover that all you’ve done is make a “shit” or “slop” shot, meaning you’re still going to lose your turn, as well as some respect, possibly.
For those who believe in the concept, it’s the nature of genius to be not understood. Here’s Rooney again:
How does Ronnie O’Sullivan do what he does? The kind of problem that mathematicians and engineers have to labor over with differential equations—the kind of problem complex enough to make a laptop overheat and crash—simply discloses itself to him at a glance. The puzzle presents itself in the form of its own solution, a task that, in the act of calculation, completes itself. The calculation is there in the gesture of his arm; and the gesture becomes the shot, the tap, the click, the ball rolling neatly into the pocket.
Rooney is, of course, right about this aspect of billiards genius: the success of a shot retroactively justifies its taking. O’Sullivan’s billiards peer, in the adjacent world of pool, is Efren “Bata” Reyes, who is generally accepted to be the greatest pool player of all time and also doubly nicknamed “The Magician” on account of his otherworldly kick and bank shots, which send balls around the table in Zs and Ws and other even more complexly mulitlinear arcs that end in the pocket. Like any magician, Reyes seems to make something out of nothing, but the shots he makes are not impossible, clearly, just unthinkable. This is true of basically all great art: it is the product of decisions you would never think to make but, having seen made, now know you can.
As with much contemporary writing, Rooney’s essay is haunted by the specter of Artificial Intelligence, which seems like a contemporary concern, although, as many have said, is really just the specter of capitalist fungibility, having acquired a new, more corporate wardrobe: there are people who derogatorily refer to others as “luddites,” believing they are unthinkingly opposed to the existence of new technology on the basis of its newness, who do so seemingly because they support new technology on the basis of its newness, and these are both groups of people who should think more: the 19th-century English textile workers who smashed lots of machines and are the origin of the word luddite did so because they thought those machines would make their lives worse. Writers tend to be some of the workers most precious about being replaced by AI, I’d imagine, in part, because when you care about the writing you do, it feels so deeply personal, even as writing is, in some sense, the easiest thing in the world to reproduce: ctrl-A, ctrl-C, ctrl-V — simple as.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about this in 1939 called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and it’s written as a review of the work of the fictional author Pierre Menard, which focuses mainly on his attempt to rewrite, word for word, the real author Miguel de Cervantes’ real novel Don Quixote. For any reader interested in the world that exists outside the pages of the two novels, they would read differently, as Pierre Menard and Miguel de Cervantes were not the same person, and thus their saying the same things would, in their different contexts, read differently. Now that I don’t have the gel stiletto nails I was rocking for a second, I can type pretty fast again, but certainly, computers can type much faster than either I or the infinitely many typewriting monkeys I keep in a hypothetical room for the purposes of illustration, and I’m sure that one day, the computer people will figure out a way to have computers produce writing that is identical to mine, not in the sense of being literally the same, but in the sense of being analogously “good.” It’s just it would read differently because a computer wrote it: computers don’t aim their shots the same way humans do, which would make this writing, in pool terms, “slop.”
Writing is often conflated with thinking, although the former is, like many other things, just the latter put in a medium. For O’Sullivan or Reyes, the “calculation is there in the gesture of his arm,” and the calculations I or any other writer make when we write are those that become legible when they are there in words. Historically, Literature has been one of the more distinguished ways to put your thinking in a medium, although I will say that dedicating my life to it has made it absurdly easy to appreciate almost every other attempt to do the same. Pool balls and words are not so different, at the end of the day; it’s true there are many more words than there are pool balls, but thankfully, writing is a lot more one dimensional: one distinctive feature of writing, for me, is that it is perhaps the most linear art: in visual art, the artist knows that it’s legal within the rules of the form for the viewer to look up and down and left and right in any order they choose; in music, listeners can only legally travel through the song in one direction, but multiple sounds can be happening at the same time, adding spatiality; writing is much more straightforward: you follow me there.
I am often proud of what I do with words, but I don’t believe in the concept of genius. I sincerely believe that everyone could do something analogous to what I do with writing, either in writing or otherwise. Why shouldn’t I? I do it; other people do it; others still are doing things with writing that show me there’s still plenty of room left to improve. To date, one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had as a writer was reading another young writer’s novel, and the two of us agreeing that while our respective novels went in very different directions, they went equal lengths. Wujuu, I remember thinking, The Novel!
Magicians are famous for never revealing their secrets, which seems like a crazy thing to do if you are a person who wants more magic in the world. I believe in human capability, so I have no doubt that the software people could link up with the robotics people and one day create an android that plays pool just like The Magician; I’m sure they could also link up with the biotech people and make it look exactly like Reyes, even recreating that incredible smile he smiles when the improbable shot, which he was confident enough would go in to take, does, in fact, go in. I find this smile of his so endearing, embodying the simple joy of having done it again; he took the nickname “Bata,” the Filipino word for “child,” because there was another Efren Reyes, but his love of the game is legibly infused with this childlike joy, the kind that is best preserved in art — I guess if I didn’t know the person I was looking at was an android, and they did all this, I would feel equally endeared, and the same goes for an analogously enjoyable novel written by a machine, but that seems like a silly thought experiment: there’s much more about art I’m interested in than consumer satisfaction.
I’m good friends with a stripper who is very coy about sharing her writing with me, or, equivalently, I’m good friends with a writer who pole dances a lot — either way, we often discourse. Sometime last year, I asked her why she liked pole dancing, and she gave me an explanation she thought banal and I thought profound; hopefully, I haven’t totally butchered it:
I like doing cool, elegant stuff on the pole.
We had this conversation when I was entering a period of my life in which I was writing lots of essays, and I thought that literarily stripping would be an interesting direction to go in: I like doing cool and elegant stuff with my brain, and if I can use a mix of fantasy, persona, skill, and elegance to do things I think are cool, and which other people like and hopefully want to throw money at, awesome, lit, love that! I am not a shy person anymore, but I am still an extremely self-conscious one, and I have found this literary stripping experience both incredibly thrilling and incredibly taxing. I have often wondered why literary critics remove themselves from their essays, as it tends to be fodder for the only things they can say about their subjects that their subjects don’t already say, but I do get the impulse, even if I still don’t think they should indulge it.
Before I started transitioning, I didn’t understand — and deeply resented — the trans women who strutted through the world, demanding attention; when I became a trans woman, I felt the same way: I get more than enough of this every time I slink outside, I thought to myself, why would I ever want more? I suppose, with the clarity of hindsight, I can see how I didn’t think I had anything worth paying attention to, and how that was bad. It has been nine years since I have left my house without encountering someone staring at me in a way that suggests they would prefer that I wasn’t there, outside, or perhaps at all. These looks can feel like papercuts, and the verbal harassment I still routinely encounter once felt like knifecuts, although it feels like nothing now, maybe just a dull breeze: a few days ago, I was walking in my neighborhood, where people outside are often yelling, sometimes in Spanish, and merely the fact of my existence led one of them to lose his train of thought and yell something that translates roughly to,
But it’s a man and a woman, WHAT IS GOING ON?
something that did lead me to finally accept that I prefer interesting anecdotes to being seen as a woman by strangers. I don’t really care how people who don’t know me see me, as they don’t know me, and if someone who did know me told me they saw me as a man, it would only hurt because I would know that they shared that with me intending for it to do so. I could see how getting sexually assaulted in public would feel like getting stabbed, though for me, it was more like that anime trope of the slash that only becomes visible when the swordsperson, having already slashed past the victim, sheathes their sword, viz., an immense pain, on a delay.
“Gay pride” is, like all other clichés, something you need life experience to activate. The gay icon I most admire, in this respect, is Bugs Bunny, a transvestite faggot, if ever there was one. Even in the early years of transition, which is sort of a kid-in-a-candy-store type moment for white, 20-something-year-old internet addicts who want to say slurs, I always felt strange calling myself a faggot: for one, obviously; for another, I’m a dyke, and not the kind who fucks men. There was a game I often had to play as a kid in Texas called “Smear the Queer,” which was a lot simpler than pool: everyone tried to tackle whoever was “the queer.” It is a game that I was physically built for, being tall and “husky,” but constitutionally not: I am almost categorically opposed to violence, something I think most people would say about themselves, with the caveat of “unless it’s necessary,” but I might have a narrower view of what constitutes “necessary,” certainly among those who look up to Mao as often as I do. He is, without question, one of the world’s most quotable swimmers, but there are many other people who inspire me, like Bugs Bunny, whose transvestite faggotry, much like mine, seems to well up out of an immense love of fun — as you watch Bugs dance through the world like he owns it, smirking, genderbending, proud, it’s easy enough to forget that he’s like that because people are always pointing guns at him.
An interesting thing about playing pool a lot in dive bars is that the dive bar pool table is also a space where classical gender mechanics seem to work fairly exemplarily: men become Men, and often expect me to be a Woman. I have realized that the pool table is another place to feel cool and elegant, but feeling cool and elegant in my body is something that has never before been a part of my life: I enjoy being the gay person I often am around the pool table, in part because when I step up to take the shot, I become someone else, someone maybe elegant and maybe cool who — at least around the people I tend to play with, friends and not — does seem to know what she’s doing.
My freshman year of college, I took an “Ethical Theory” class with a new-ish philosophy professor, a man in his late 30s or early 40s, who, when I told him that I played a lot of pool in the dorms, told me that
proficiency at pool is the sign of a youth squandered.
I assume he said this because pool is a game, and games are understood to be self-contained fun and nothing more, although it is true that the person who plays games is free to do other stuff too, so perhaps he could’ve stood to play more pool.
The writer Flann O’Brien once said:
Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before – usually said much better.
This is a funny thing for a writer as singular as him to say, although it is kind of true, I guess, in the way that every pool player plays essentially the same game. For sure, there are other ways to play billiards, and other places you might play pool, just as there are many other ways to pole dance that do not involve being a stripper: on YouTube, for example, you can watch many a pole competition, in which people do many undeniably impressive and artful things on the pole, although as my friend once suggested, mid-discourse, when removed from the social context in which much of the art was developed, and presented for the sake of competition, it tends to be less interesting, something that I agree with, despite my never having stepped into a strip club; I feel the same way about pool, which is more fun to play in a bar, among friends and fun, than in a tournament, where there are new stresses, plus what must be a very strict rule about having to wear boring shirts. It’s also true of Literature, I guess. That’s a lot less fun when you do it for a trophy.
A strange thing happened when I published my first novel, School, which came out in September of 2023 and begins with a self-immolation, climaxes with a long manifesto in which the knowingly self-insert-y writer says the state of Israel has inherited the white supremacist logics of Nazi Germany, and ends with a large campus protest, which is that that was all stuff that then sort of actually happened. As I thought about how that was unrelated but weird, I came up with the idea for my second book, It’s the Characters!, a book about someone trying to live her normal life while the fictional characters in her world enter her world to kill their authors. Having thought a lot about what I did in my first novel while I did it, and after, I wrote the second book trying to do something else: School is a book about trying to make sense of the world using maximalism, and the novel literally collapses under the weight of its ambition; It’s the Characters! is a novel about how you can’t ignore the world through minimalism. Many of the vignettes in that second book, like the one where a teenager in a passing car tries to call the narrator a faggot, only to have his voice crack, are things that literally happened to me — for a year, I would jot down things like this in a note in my phone titled “Anecdotes,” something I did because I thought it would make for an interesting novel, and also an interesting life. My writing and my life have never been very separate, something I proved to myself with a surprise third book that came shortly after It’s the Characters!, titled In the Forum of Madness, an essay collection that takes its title from an 1857 work of nonfiction by Fitz Hugh Ludlow called The Hasheesh Eater, which, in tandem, alluded to some major parts of my life; I wrote many of those essays as the safe and comfortable life I had built for myself, much like that of the narrator of It’s the Characters!, collapsed.
Lately, the nearly omnipotent stinker that’s been deviously animating my life has been a lot less patient. The essay that you are reading right now was intended to be the antepenultimate in the first half of a book I am working on, titled Lost in the Shower. The one that precedes it, “The Oft-Humbled Eunuch Is Once More, On the Subject of Desire, Humbled, Again,” began with a joke about how I couldn’t get fingered, but then, while I was writing that essay, I did get fingered, which prompted some meaningful thinking about the nature of contingency and made me reflect, ambivalently, on the project of integrating my life and my writing so closely. As I was sketching out the arc of this essay, two things I wasn’t expecting to happen happened: the first is that I got the thing I had most desperately wanted in my life, which was something that, seeing how desperately I wanted it, I had tried to force myself to believe I would never get, meaning that when I did get it, I entered a few days of the kind of peace I imagine everyone who has ever been alive wants but knows better than to expect; the next thing was that someone I loved with a depth I felt I hadn’t yet expressed to them died.
Robert Hass begins his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” by saying
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
I’ve read this poem, sometimes multiple times in a row, during probably three or four different periods of my life, and I’ve always felt pretty neutral about it, in the way that writing that is clearly good, but not presently hitting, makes you feel; as I read it this time, I realized that I had forgotten the lines that immediately follow,
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea.
which perfectly encapsulate all the thinking I have done in the past few years.
The person we lost was as luminous in their particularity as anyone I have ever met — they burned very bright, and every day since, I have woken up to miss their light. Grief, when I am facing it, feels like the most urgent thing in the world to write about, perhaps because it feels like it’s the only thing in the world, and perhaps, also, because I know that first sense of urgency is belied by a sense of the writing’s futility. Even if it is has been said, however, there is still much to say about loss, and it is good to say it, because it is being said to the readers that are still living, however much there is still someone else I very much would like to say it to.
I think, probably, I’m too Jewish to have ever been interested in going to heaven. Life doesn’t seem very meaningful when you remove the constraint of death. There’s another Borges short story called “The Library of Babel” about an “indefinite, perhaps infinite” library made up of hexagonal rooms, each “furnished with five bookshelves,” where “each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters.” It sounds like a shitty library, in that it’d be really hard to find what you want, so you can imagine how shitty it’d be if it were actually infinite, but it is a fairly illustrative metaphor — when I was in therapy, I used to wonder when it would be time to ask my therapist if we were ready to move on to the part of therapy where I learned how to accept death, which maybe would’ve been funny for her, as it would’ve been for me, given how often I talked about suicide. A year ago, I wrote an essay about a book that no one who considers themselves “literary” is supposed to take seriously, a self-help book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, which I found rewarding to take seriously, in part because even books like that are thinking about loss. On some level, we are all trying to make sense of the fact that we were thrown into this world, only to be one day taken out. Luckily, there are many ways to make sense of this: we do put the pool balls on the table knowing we’re only going to knock them back in, e.g.
I think I’m ready to take a break from writing about my life. This is often asked of writers in 2026 Amerikkka, usually by non-writers and in a way I find to be generally underthought and alienatingly Christian; I think most people who say this are just afraid of being judged self-absorbed by others, which to me suggests they haven’t thought about their life nearly enough. I don’t write about most of what I think about in my daily life, because most of what I think about in my daily life are the real people inside it, and writing about them would be complicated. If I have written a lot about my life, it’s because I’ve needed to make sense of it: for most of my conscious life, the only gun I saw was the one I kept pointed at myself. Since I’ve stopped doing that, it’s been easy enough to see and strut by all the ones others point at me. I wish they wouldn’t do that, but I can’t make that decision for them. The only life I can live is my own, and these days, I spend much of it outside my home, in the bookstore I work at, on walks, at the pool table, with friends, or just sitting somewhere in the city I love and drawing. I’m pretty bad at drawing, but I do enjoy it, as I’ve learned I enjoy the experience of being a beginner: for months, all I drew were lines, cubes, and grids; I have since graduated to drawing stuff, and sometimes shadows. One day, I hope to draw other people, and sometime after that, maybe even ideas.
Another distinctive feature of writing for me is that its medium, language, has no physical standard to be measured against: colors, for example, are pegged to wavelengths, just as notes are pegged to frequencies, and objects have physical geometries that may or may not correspond to the ones you put on the page, this in a way that’s directly measurable. But words are nothing more than agreements between people, making language a purely social — or human — medium, one that is very abstract. With the exception of those that involve violence towards others, I do not think any sphere of human activity is better or worse than any other; I’ve chosen to be a freak about writing because writing has many concrete qualities that appeal to me and my concrete freak, something that has, of course, been mutually reinforcing. This is to say, I find it fun and meaningful, and I like that there’s always another way to do it.
Processing grief, often, can feel like making something out of nothing, although the past is not nothing, merely past. I do not know how many generations my family has been living in the Val d’Aran — a small region in Northeast Spain, Northwest Catalonia, Southern Occitania, or directly at the center of the universe, depending who you ask — but the ones still there still speak to each other in Aranés, whose relationship to Occitan is equally opinion generating; however you see it, I like to imagine that at some point in the past, one of them has said this Occitan saying
Dabant la mort èle foc nou i a cap de benjenço.
which translates as
Against death and fire there is no revenge.
It’s true, I think: there is no revenge against death, only more life — who else could all this be for, in the final analysis, but you?