Glacial Errata, No. 47

One

I don’t normally use this newsletter to promote my own stuff, but this week I’m sharing a long piece I wrote that appeared last month in Josh Glenn’s HiLoBrow. It’s titled “Without Care: Notes on the Devoid, a 21st Century Gothic,” and it’s four installments, so you can read it in small, bite-sized chunks if you’d like. But through the course of putting this piece together, I gathered a bunch of images to illustrate this idea of the Devoid, only some of which made it into the piece. So I’m mostly sharing more images here, because they’re weird and I find them upsetting, and also then maybe they’ll entice you to read the piece if you haven’t already….

Two

From Part One:

“It became evident immediately that we could not stay there. It was easy enough to say that the room was shabby, but it was more than that — it appeared to have been put together by someone with only the vaguest notion of how humans live. Or, as though someone was attempting to approximate the first apartment of a college student — the random assemblage of second hand furniture, the absolute disregard of placement and quality, the utter disinterest of anything that might make a space feel homey or livable.”

Three

From Part Two:

“Along those lines, one could also add to the list of places one is likely to find the Devoid: hallways, stairwells, passageways of any kind. Waiting rooms — both in the literal sense, but also, in a more general sense, places where waiting happens, places that are not purpose built so much as designated as temporary spaces.”

Four

From Part Three:

“Despite the obvious work and thought that had gone into the project, many of Schneider’s rooms felt emptied out of any kind of human touch: nothing felt right, or lived in, or even the kind of thing one could live in. The space both bore all the hallmarks of what a house or dwelling might consist of — here was a bed, and an end table, and a lamp — and yet everything felt off, as though it had not been created by a human so much as some other force that misunderstood humanity in some basic sense, or as though someone who had never been inside a home had been given vague instructions on how to build one.”

Five

From Part Four:

“Normally, when we look at photographs of a private home, it appears as either comforting — revealing and enlightening, giving us a glimpse of a domestic space, with all its trappings — or lurid, with an attendant sense of voyeurism. But the rushed, hurried real estate photographs that accompany certain listings defeat both of these impulses. Their effect is to render hidden, intimate domestic spaces as neither homey nor titillating, but simply as functional, a presentation of furniture and possessions that the viewer must see past. It is not quite unheimlich, uncanny, which Freud defined as the familiar made strange. Because nothing is particularly strange in these images. Rather, it is the familiar made empty, a hollowing out that is somehow even more unsettling.”

(If this interests you at all, the writer Matt Maxwell—whom I know on Bluesky as Critical Nostalgia and is a truly fascinating person—wrote a long response to this on his site, Highway 62: read it here.)