In love, in pain, in debt, in time, in Hell, in life … in general, in other words. In 1998, Ed Park was in his late twenties, and like every serious writer, he had long kept notes of observations, phrases, quotations, and whatever else struck his fancy. Presaging our current era of finger flicking — be it the Doom- or Zombie- or Shop- or even the Hopescrolling we do today — Park hit on the idea of writing a memoir consisting of hundreds of short entries, each starting with the word “In.”
What in the world, one might ask — or, to clumsily Park-ify that sentiment, In the world, what’s up with that? Well, you can get a Kindle version of Park’s latest book, Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties, and perhaps enjoy it as Witscrolling:
In the room she reads all I’ve written and wants to know who the other women are. I tell her it’s not a roman à clef. She says it better not be.
Almost three decades on, one wonders how that relationship turned out, or if it was just a quick thought-dump to stake out a scene in a budding novel or short story. How much of this “memoir” represents Ed Park’s life and how much of it is fodder for fiction? The entries sometimes stand alone, and sometimes they seemingly leapfrog, as in the second notation below that query about all those other women:
In the Waugh-Mitford letters, they say they’re “gell-gell” when they’re jealous of someone. My Anglophilic friend and I adopt this diminution-repetition.
At times, notions and questing observations coalesce into a theme, such as these three bug/mutation scenes, separated by a lone digression about comedians and also a page jump:
In the shower something small and dark scurries down my body, hits the tub with a clatter. A roach, I think, horrified. It turns out to be a plectrum that attached itself to my thigh while I slept, adhered via dream perspiration. This is not the first time that playing guitar has led to sleep and resulted in a roach scare.
…
In the mirror I see a bug crawl down my face, eliciting curses. But it’s just a dark wound in the mirror, an immobile injury to the silver. My eyes have gotten so bad that everything’s a bug.
In the raised drain-stopper I see my miniaturized face, with a long glass horn emerging from my forehead — the tap’s steady gush.
It is in these beautiful transmutations of language into imagery — a wounded mirror, a watery horn sprouting from one’s forehead — that a reader senses the future editor of the Voice Literary Supplement, later Pulitzer Prize–nominated novelist (for 2023’s Same Bed Different Dreams) and prolific genre-hopper to come.
Three Tenses will be officially released tomorrow, and while that book delves into the interiority of a writer, in a little less than two months Park will take readers on a trip to the outer limits of metafiction with The Repairer of Reputations, an updated take on the lead story in the compelling collection of mystery/horror (and, less stimulating, romance) tales found in Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 book, The King in Yellow. In this seminal, widely influential burst of cosmic weirdness, Chambers envisions the titular play driving readers and audiences mad by imparting knowledge beyond human ken, a fate somewhat echoed a century later in the addictive Infinite Jest video in David Foster Wallace’s like-titled novel, which is so entertaining it induces death by stifling any other human desires. (Coming to a streaming service near you soon, no doubt.)
In the meantime, you can look forward to Jeff Wong’s illustrations for Park’s take on Chambers’s eerie world-building, which was a major influence on H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos of gods and aliens seeking doorways through which to sow civilization-leveling chaos. Considering that we have a yellow-maned, prevaricating bloviator looking to be king these days, Park may be onto something in updating a tale in which nefarious spin doctors manipulate reality, be it through blackmail, in Chambers’s day, or distorting algorithms now.
Park does masterfully what any artist — of words, sounds, imagery, whatevs — is supposed to do in fluctuating measure: Heighten our awareness of the world, enhance it, expand it, explicate it, and, in the bargain, hopefully enlighten and even — heaven forefend — entertain us. Certainly, after partaking of Three Tenses, you will never look at, read, or maybe even say the word “in” in quite the same way, again. ❖
Ed Park will be appearing at numerous local book events over the coming weeks, including at the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side this Wednesday and Adelphi University’s Manhattan Center next Monday. Other events in and around NYC can be found on Park’s website.