life as literature

THAT WAS A DAY. It was the seventh of May. It was gray, mildly humid, the exhausted underbelly of a spring that had otherwise been pined after all winter. I know the date because I sent a letter on May 7. It read, “I’m sitting here in Tartu at her cafe, it has been completely redone.” There was more on top, but some of it is too incriminating to go into, even in this kind of story.

How had I even arrived at the place? My path was certain, to cut across one street, then another. In Tartu, the streets are wide and obvious. Follow them down to the bus station. If you have time to spare, wander through the market and along the river, take a picture, mind your own business. But while my mind was minding its own business, my feet carried me in another direction, here.

Why did I come here? She probably drank coffee in this cafe every day. Multiple times, in fact.

“I once sat right here with Fred Jüssi,” I wrote to my friend. “Just like this. And he took me aside, and said, ‘All of the things you think are so important in this life actually aren’t.’ Or something like that.” The old naturalist had told me other things, like how he knew when to initiate love and when to break it. “When it’s time to burn it all!” I wondered why Jüssi had told me those things.

But this was a love that didn’t seem burnable. It outlasted others. She was the woman you think about when you are in the arms of other women. You stare at the ceiling, her name on your lips.

I had gone to the cafe because I knew she worked there. There was thus a chance I might see her. “Admittedly stalkerish,” I wrote. “At the same time, I just wanted to cross paths with her, or more like put myself in her path, just to see what happens. I am curious.” This was my reasoning.

I wasn’t really dangerous, anyway, I thought. I was just sitting there drinking carbonated water.

Someone decided to play the Bee Gees at that moment, as if the whole pathetic scene couldn’t get any more weird and ridiculous. It was “More Than a Woman.” “But she is more than a woman,” I typed. I imagined her appearing in slow-motion, her hair glistening like the cosmos.

“She is young, but she knows that I like her and seems unfazed by it,” I wrote away in the cafe. “And I specifically like her for that reason. No need to discuss anything. It’s been understood.”

Or so I imagined, because she wasn’t there that day, and I didn’t have the nerve to seek her out.

I left the cafe thinking about that scene in Tender is the Night where Dick follows Rosemary to the set of her latest film and calls her from a phone booth from around the corner. Where every sane, sober-thinking man would have said no, he said yes, on total impulse. I knew that story was true, at least at heart, and was really about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the actress Lois Moran. “I went there because I knew Fitzgerald would do exactly that,” I later confided in my friend. “Because Fitzgerald wasn’t always a good person, but at least he was alive. Fitzgerald would have gone.”

When did life become literature? Or had it always been this way? I remember when she first emerged into view, lurking at first on the periphery, just another cafe girl. But slowly, she took shape, the eyes, the lips, the fingers with their silver rings. I could sense her when she brought me my drinks. I didn’t even have to look up, and sometimes when I did, her cheeks were rosy. I measured my affection for her in the reams of sentences these moments produced. My notebook served as a kind of romantic barometer; the better the writing, the deeper the feeling. Fitzgerald would have approved, I thought. Somewhere he was looking down at me, or up at me. Scott. Somewhere he was scribbling into his notebooks about some lovely young woman just like this.

And then one day, while marching back into town, I stepped into the cafe and demanded to know her name. Sometimes I wonder where that impulse came from. She told me her name, of course. This was a name I learned to take very good care of. I would never say it. I kept it hidden away.

Scott Fitzgerald emerged into my world in a similar way. First he was a wispy apparition, later he took full form. The Great Gatsby was compulsory reading in any high school literature course. There, in the halls of a brick high school, deep in the Nineties, our teacher, Mr. O’Connor, who refused to retire, taught us about Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Lost Generation. But I know these faces, I thought. These are people like us. When I looked around the room, I could see them sitting there. It wasn’t hard to imagine Hemingway as the brooding student to my left, with the smart answers. It wasn’t hard to imagine Fitzgerald by the door, a well-dressed preppie, always ready with a poetic line. I knew Fitzgerald before I knew him. He had just been waiting.

After Mr. O’Connor’s heart attack, we had a succession of substitute teachers. One of them, a gray-haired woman who wore a red turtleneck, started to call me “F. Scott” because of my style. I took it as the greatest compliment. To be a proper F. Scott, one needed a Zelda, a lifelong muse. Wasn’t it Scott Fitzgerald who taught me that people were material? That experiences were to be transformed into story? Scott shamelessly stole from his wife’s diary, sometimes word for word. There’s the “beautiful little fool” line that he smuggled into The Great Gatsby. But supposedly whole sections of 1922’s The Beautiful and Damned were lifted from Zelda Fitzgerald’s diary.

Scott was outraged when Zelda published her own book, Save Me the Waltz in 1932. She had used up all the material that he had been harvesting for his novel in progress Tender is the Night.

As Zelda, who provided counterpoint to Scott’s story arc, wrote, “Plagiarism begins at home.”

One day, as I was passing the cafe in autumn, I saw her in the window. When she looked up, there was a kind of oceanic shift in all the big waters around me. Sometimes I would write all day there by the window, and she would work too. “Well,” I would say, “hakkab jälle pihta.” “Jõudu tööle,” she would whisper and float off. Sometimes I would see her wandering around town, wearing sunglasses, listening to music. She would disappear around a corner, and I would watch her reflection in the windows she passed, until she vanished completely. But I was happy.

Then there was that day on the bus, the bus day, which happened at the end of August one summer when we were both heading to Tartu. I had disavowed any hopes of pursuing her, or anyone for that matter, but there she was. She sat across from me. I was too nervous to move. I wouldn’t even move my head. But other than greeting her, I felt her presence the entire way. I heard her munch on her damned juusturoll, acquired from a supermarket bakery (I often saw her in supermarkets) and the crumpling of the greasy paper in her hands as she took another bite. I could almost taste the crumbs as she did. I could make out just at the periphery of my vision, the whiteness of her shoes. She always wore those shoes. So many Estonians had shoes like those.

She was so ordinary in every way, and I would see women from behind everywhere who looked just like her. But none of them were her. She was sitting right there and all I could do was hide in my notebook, writing about her. What do you say to a woman who inspires you to write? Do you give her your messy first drafts? When we exited into the city, loud with traffic and the clanging of drills and jackhammers, we walked a while in the sun. She was going her way, I was going mine. She had exams. I had a conference. “Cool,” she said, blinking up at me. “Not really,” I said. She was just a young woman. What did I expect? Ecstasy? Euphoria? More poetry? I didn’t even know. All of this mythmaking was getting a bit too mythological for its own good. I did feel elated though. I felt a little like Fitzgerald. Later, I told the driver as I watched her once again recede into the streets of the city, “Can you believe I love that girl? I barely know who she is.”

The driver glanced in the rear view mirror. He said nothing back, but he must have understood.

There are only a few recordings of Scott Fitzgerald’s voice, by the way. Some were recorded in California in 1940, the last year of his short life. His voice is just as you would imagine it to be. A breathy tenor that lingers melodiously on the vowels. The voice of an old and dear friend. There is also a film of Fitzgerald in 1922, when he was just 26, the wunderkind of This Side of Paradise, writing at a desk in a garden, the sun against his features, at the height of his powers. Fitzgerald wrote and rewrote. This was his method. He pressed on, no matter the challenge.

Or so I like to think. For this is another myth of Fitzgerald that haunts me, along with his famous drunken antics, such as the time he and Zelda asked guests at a swanky Hollywood party in 1927 to hand over their watches for a magic trick and then went to the kitchen and boiled them in the tomato sauce. That when Fitzgerald awakened from another spree, he put on his tie and sat at his typewriter. Even when Zelda was institutionalized, and Fitzgerald’s career was dead, and he was in debt and living in dollar-a-night hotels in the South, he was still typing. Maybe it isn’t true, but, at his nadir, Fitzgerald did write “Crazy Sunday,” “Babylon Revisited,” and “The Crack-Up.”

I don’t believe a muse has to remain one though. She’s never just a heroine, a source of material. No, I think a muse must remain a person. A real person, a flesh-and-blood human being, with weepy moods, highs and lows, career highlights, dreams, traumas, and memories. A person to be cared for, despite all the words that are written about her. For as much as Scott was helping himself to Zelda’s diary for his literary projects, he did love her. When he arrived in California again in 1937, looking for work, and people remarked how his intense eyes appeared as if he was viewing the very openings of hell, I think it was the agony of seeing Zelda institutionalized that made them appear that way. I believe Scott did love Sheilah Graham, the English columnist with a colorful past and with whom he spent the last few years of his life in Hollywood. Scott turned Sheilah Graham into the main character in the novel he was working on, The Last Tycoon. Because to write about someone is to love them too. In a writerly, Scott Fitzgerald kind of way.

Scott died a few days before Christmas in 1940, a chain-smoker who guzzled Coca Cola and had been suffering from alcoholism for years. He stood up in Sheilah Graham’s apartment and dropped dead on the floor, a tragic figure. In the terms of the obtuse Estonian media, the man had what could be called an ootamatu terviserike.

One cold winter evening, I found myself on a lonely train platform, surrounded by forest, when a southbound train pulled up for a stop. There she sat. I could see her through the window, totally alone, staring out into the black darkness. How strange, I thought at that moment. To have her delivered to me, at this moment, like this.

First, I went and hid in another wagon on the train. But then I gave myself a little pep talk as the train rattled through the night and she sat there in her seat. “You can only keep running away from yourself for so long,” I lectured myself. “Something put her on this train. Go talk to her.”

Which I did. I wonder what we looked like, the sight of this enormous man seated across from a young woman who was half his size and half his age. The writer, denuded of his pens and notebooks, was forced to make conversation with his muse. She was all there. Her fox-like eyes, her silver rings. She was staring out the windows of wintertime Estonia, lost in her own story. Maybe she was writing poetry in her heart about another young man. Maybe I was some minor character. When we arrived at the station, it was flurrying, frost had formed on the platform. It occurred to me that this was like the scene of a novel. Such a scene demanded good dialogue.

“You know,” I said, affecting my most romantic posturing. “I do happen to like you very much.”

The young woman looked up curiously at the big man in the jacket beside her and said nothing.

“But do you want to know why I like you?”

The young woman shrugged a bit, as if to say, mul pole õrna aimugi. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“I like to watch you when you listen to music,” I said. “You seem to be lost in another world.”

“That’s because music lifts us up,” she whispered. “Music can take us into other dimensions.”

The young woman put on her headphones again after that, tightened her coat, and walked home. I stood there for a while as the snow swept down. My hands were shaking then, both from the cold air and because I had been so bold to live out such a wonderful scene. Fitzgerald himself couldn’t have written it better on a $1,000-a-week screenwriter’s salary. It was just too perfect.

The Estonian version of this piece appears in the autumn 2026 edition of Edasi magazine. Special thanks to Robert Westbrook, the son of Sheilah Graham and author of Infinite Lies, who helped me with this story.

execution

I DIDN’T NOTICE her presence until after the execution. Her father had died well, as well as any man could have died that way. At the after-party for the execution, there were representatives from the various ministries present. They were all well-coiffed and well attired. These executions were turning out to be networking opportunities for the politically ambitious. The wine was poured. The flesh was pressed. You might have forgotten that the guillotine’s blade had once again fallen on a poor man’s shaven neck. What even was his crime?

And there she was, standing off to the side, quietly munching on something. Dulcinea, the daughter of a disgraced ex-aristocrat. “I’m sorry about your father,” I told her. She said nothing. For even in this time of mourning, Dulcinea would still not speak to me. Not a word. Not for years. When I expressed my condolences, Dulcinea stared out into space, as if she was vaguely aware of a far-off vibration. She wore a close-fitting linen dress with a gold sash. Her straw-colored hair was done simply but perfectly in the modern fashion. She was sad though.

Later, when I got on the bus back to Tallinn, I noticed her in the back seat, with her brother slumped over sleeping in her lap. He was only eight or nine years old. She stroked his hair and he slept. It was an awful fate. All of their belongings were spread around in bags and boxes.

Again, I said hello, but she said nothing. I began to suspect that I no longer existed on this plane. It was as if I had died too and not yet become aware of it. The day had a cool gray pallor to it as the bus rolled into Kassisaba. Such a grim and dull day. I could see all the houses along the streets. Life moved briskly forward. People had to go to work. People had to live their lives.

At the next stop, Dulcinea, still in her linen dress, woke up her brother and they disembarked. She realized then, in her glacial silence, that she was unable to carry their things. With panic in her blue eyes, she turned to me and said, “Are you coming with us or not?” I was shocked to hear her voice. It was as if I had fallen through the space-time continuum. Naturally, I said yes.

riverhead

MY FACE PRESSED against the glass; my face pressed against the glass. Again morning, my eyes open, and my face is pressed against the glass. I open one eye, then the other. They are both goopy, the glass has a veneer of sand grime on its outside. The glass is old. In a small font, Made in Czechoslovakia is printed in one corner. Surely, I’ve been drooling all over myself. I must have nodded off after the train left Narva Station behind. Where are we? Rakvere?

“Riverhead,” comes the husky voice over the speakers. “Riverhead Station, next stop.” I sit up. Have I been sleeping so long? Who knows how many hours it takes to travel from Narva to Riverhead on Long Island by train. I notice my old knapsack next to me. A twenty-something man is seated beside me, staring into stale air. He’s sipping from a 40-ounce of Olde English. The train pulls into Riverhead station, and I can see all of those houses that sprawl along the avenues and boulevards. There’s the courthouse, the bank, and I know exactly where to walk if you want to go to the aquarium. In fact, I decide I will head over there first. To see the seals.

As we disembark, I can see two women I know from Viljandi. One of them is Esmeralda. What is she doing in Riverhead? Of all godforsaken places? She is with Birgit, the festival organizer. They are walking with purpose. Maybe they have come here to recruit acts for next year’s festival? Esmeralda is milk white, she’s dressed in a green tank top, and her brown hair is up. She looks like she is sleepwalking. Her eyes are all strange and filmy. I call out to her as she strides in the direction of the aquarium. “Where are you going?” I yell. “Please come back.”

border point

THE NARVA BORDER POINT, the frontier between Estonia and the Russian Federation, the west and the east, the war and the non-war. But it’s a fine October day, with good sunshine, a mostly cloudless sky, a sweet-tasting fresh wind that whips over the invisible line of demarcation, and the dark river waters below that carve one vast landmass from the other.

I stand at the foot of the white Hermann Fortress, but when I look up, I see Montauk Lighthouse. The air does smell strangely of salt. There are seagulls crying along the old stone walls. I enter the lighthouse and proceed through a series of glass doors. The Estonian border guards are at their desks, clad in their navy uniforms, emblazoned with the three gold lions.

Off to the left, I can see a room which, upon closer inspection, appears to be a small Orthodox chapel. Inside, the priest is administering Communion. The candles are burning, and the incense fogs the air, so that even the glass looks foggy. The church is full of old Russian grandmothers and border guards. They are praying quietly. Some are singing. Just then, a border agent comes down the metal steps of the lighthouse, dressed in the light blue shirt of the Russian border guard. She has glasses, dyed red hair. She brushes by me, indifferent to my presence. From the corner of my eye, I can see her name stitched on her breast. Ivanova.

On the other side of the lighthouse castle border station, there is another door that opens into a green yard. The grass is still very green, even though it is October. There isn’t a tree anywhere, a seat anywhere. There isn’t another living soul to be seen or heard. This is the intermediate zone, the no man’s land between the Republic of Estonia and the Russian Federation. I walk about at ease. Then I go back to Estonia, again through the lighthouse. The Russian grandmothers and border guards are still praying peacefully. “Let them pray,” I think.

omelette

AT THE CRACK OF DAWN, I descended the steps to make my daughter an omelette before she went to school. My feet slid across the smooth wood floor toward the kitchenette. I began to make preparations. I liked to get the frying pan sizzling hot, gurgling with butter before adding the eggs. When I turned on the light, I could see that she was back. She told me I could go.

“I cut short my trip,” she said. “You can go now.” “But I promised her an omelette,” I told her. “A mushroom omelette. She was looking forward to it.” “I have some workmen showing up soon,” she said, reaching out to stop my hand from cracking an egg. “Would you just go? Please?”

I took a step back. “No,” I told her. “I promised her an omelette, she’s having an omelette. I am making her an omelette today.” There were animals all around the house. Cats, dogs. Out on the terrace, I could see some musk oxen lazing in the morning sun. “Why do you have musk oxen?” I asked. “This is my house!” she said. Then, with a more urgent tone, “Could you leave?”

There came a knock at the door, some workmen came in in white overalls and white painter’s hats. They set up a ladder and began to prepare to paint the ceiling. But after them marched more men. Some younger types, who looked like boy band singers. Others gray, with beards, speaking of literature. They began to fill the house from top to bottom with their chatter. These were her men. One of them looked like Ben Affleck, the actor. “You didn’t tell me you were dating Ben Affleck,” I said. “That’s Tarmo,” she said. “He just looks like Ben Affleck.”

Soon the house was brimming with other men. I had just wanted to make an omelette. “You have to go,” she said. “You’re no longer needed here.” “But it’s my child. I have a right to make her breakfast.” “Would you please just leave?” she implored me. I did no such thing. Instead, I reached for a bottle of moonshine, drank it down in sad, heavy gulps. Soon I was stinking.

“You fool!” she said. “How are you supposed to drive when you’ve been drinking?” She sank into a chair, sat opposite me. She became her younger form now, blonde, with those crazy eyes. “You need to find another woman,” she told me. “It’s been long enough. That will make everything better.” For a moment, I followed the arc of her logic. Then I realized her logic had led me here, to this house. “What are you, some kind of oracle?” I said. “You know, I gave you everything,” she said, with a slight disgust. “Without me, you’d be back where I found you.”

“Fine then,” I said. Omelette unmade, I crumpled through the door into the morning light. I felt like garbage. Pure, limping garbage. And I had no idea where this place was. For a moment, I was reminded of the rainy streets of Beijing, and how I had been lost just like this, and a friendly Chinese had waved to me through a misty cafe window. I felt free that day in Beijing.

ikea tower

IT WAS A TOWER. The Ikea Tower. Why it was called that was a mystery. No element of it was made by Ikea. Maybe some of the furniture in the conference room on the 80th floor. The tower was designed to move with the wind. To stand in its conference area was to feel as if one was flying. We were so high up in the air that I couldn’t see the ground down beneath the cloud cover. The movement of the clouds between the legs of the tower made it seem as if we were a ship upon white seas. When I rode the elevator to the conference, I always made sure to look at the buttons. You know how terrified I am of heights. I watched those red buttons.

Later, back at my hotel, I slept in. It had been a long week, and I woke up around noon. I knew I was going to be late for the press conference. Where even was this place? My mind said it was Helsinki, but it looked like Amsterdam, with some elements of Copenhagen stitched in. Of course, I wound up talking to the redhead at the front desk, with her silver earrings and silver brooch. She sparkled like a Celtic warrioress. That went on for far too long, and so I was doubly late. I ran to catch a departing gondola and rode it through the city. Its doors opened and I got out, but I was on a terrace. The furniture was certainly made by Ikea. Simple, white.

Young Scandinavian Arabs were seated around, playing chess.

I got back on the next gondola and was carried to the canal, where I got onto a crowded ferry. I could see the red-brick buildings of the town hall and the national treasury. I tried to take a photo of the town hall, with its golden steeple, which looked just like Pauluse kirik in Tartu, but also like the Københavns Rådhus. What even was this city? Certainly, it was still Helsinki. Or was it? Before I could get a good shot, the ferry arrived to port and we disembarked at last.

Everyone filed into the metro. I could watch their heads disappear as they rode the escalator down. I saw their shadows vanish. Somehow I found a tram that delivered me to the foot of that enormous tower. Up the tube-like elevator again, staring at the buttons. They needed the article immediately following the press conference. I could feel the tower move with the strong winds. There was a woman in the elevator who I knew from Estonia. She was dressed in business attire. She had one of those names that no one outside of Estonia could pronounce, like Õie, Ülle, or Krõõt. “How do you do it?” Õie asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

eiko ojala’s mind notes

THE FIRST QUESTION that came to mind when I stepped into Rüki Galleri to see Eiko Ojala’s new exhibition was: “Is Eiko a woman or a man?” With a name like that, it would probably be a man, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe she was Japanese? Like Miho, Yoko, Eiko. The woman behind the counter told me that Eiko Ojala was a man and an all-around nice guy. “In my opinion, he’s quite friendly,” she added. Her name was Inessa. So, Eiko and Inessa — these were my main characters.

Rüki Galerii was once stored rye flour. The gallery is located behind the new SEB bank on Tartu Street in the heart of Viljandi. The place is wide and spacious, and precisely for that reason ideal for experiencing Eiko’s exhibition “Mind Notes.”

The technique here is pigment print. At first glance, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. It looks as if someone has cut figures out of paper and glued them all together. But that’s not the case. It’s simply a 3D effect. There are various shapes: men, women; some are lying down, some dancing, some running together, some standing under an umbrella. Incidentally, the figures do look Japanese. They have black hair. Pale skin. There is indeed something Japanese about them. Even though Eiko Ojala is an Estonian man.

There are two buckets on the right. One on the left. Seeing them, I asked Inessa if the roof was leaking. Inessa said no. The buckets were part of the exhibition, she explained.

Inessa also tells me that Eiko Ojala is a famous artist: “His pictures have even appeared in The New Yorker.” And not only. The Washington Post. National Geographic. Time. Le Monde. Wired. Politico. It’s a great honor that “Mind Notes” is here, in Rüki, in the quiet small town of Viljandi.

In the corner are information sheets in Estonian and English describing the concept of the exhibition. These images speak about the body: how the body reacts even when consciousness ignores it. Disturbances, fatigue, comfort. The Silicon Valley “live-to-work” mentality is one influence. The fiction of Franz Kafka is another. How authority functions through spaces, processes, and customs, and how a person goes along with it until they no longer perceive that this is how they are behaving.

Ojala’s human figures express this through restless poses. They are strange, admittedly. They bring to mind characters from the film Backrooms, though it’s hard to say why. Also Playmobil toy people. The prices are high. A picture of people standing together under an umbrella costs 1,500 euros. But these are not exactly the kind of pictures you hang on your bathroom wall. At the same time, they are unique and, in that sense, welcome. After all, when you go to an exhibition, you expect something different. Something new.

I think a visitor who comes here will not be disappointed.

Looking at these images — for example, a dancing person — I’m reminded of old drawings of shamans, where someone “flies” together with some spirit. Like in old Tibetan art, where the gods strike different poses. Overall, the exhibition is a haunting, strange place. Inessa says it reminds her of the series Severance, which depicts a gloomy biotechnology company whose employees have undergone a severance procedure that separates a person’s memories between work and personal life. That seems about right.

Later, when I wrote to Eiko, he sent me the text he read at the exhibition opening in August. He adds that this was actually his first solo exhibition and therefore especially personal.

“As the name suggests, ‘Mind Notes’ — these works are connected to our senses and how we notice and interpret the messages they send us,” he wrote. “Especially in situations where we don’t pay attention to ourselves. Or rather, one could ask whether we notice those messages at all. The claim of this exhibition is that, as it were, we don’t.”

And the buckets? They symbolize repetition. At first, the visitor notices that there are three buckets of water. But over time, the water quietly evaporates. They become part of the exhibition’s rhythm.

My main question, of course, was how the author himself feels about his exhibition. In general, Eiko Ojala is satisfied. “Tranquil Viljandi was the perfect place for this,” he answered me. “But no artist can ever be fully satisfied with their art. One must always keep pushing forward.”

‘Mind Notes’ opened at Rüki on 16 August and will remain through 26 September. An Estonian version of this review first appeared in Edasi. More of Eiko Ojala’s art can be seen here. And Inessa (Saarits) is an artist herself.

mill:liminal by murmer

*Into the mill. Mill:liminal is the audio accompaniment to the 2018 film The Mill, recorded at the Räpina Paper Factory in Estonia.*

MILL:LIMINAL IS NOT AN EASY RECORD to peg, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or enjoyable. In fact, it’s among the more haunting, thought-provoking, and meditative recordings I have heard in some time. Released this year by Murmer, the handle of sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley, it is the sonic accompaniment to a 35-minute film made with Daniel Edward Allen in 2018 called The Mill. To record The Mill, McGinley and Allen descended on the Räpina Paberivabrik, a paper mill in southeast Estonia that has been producing paper continuously since the 1730s. Here, the old mill’s creaks, whirs, rattles and hums are arranged into drone-like compositions distilled into seven, hypnotic tracks. McGinley reports that he was inspired to record the mill after having been a customer. Räpina produced the packaging for earlier releases, and he was drawn in by its mesmeric sounds.

McGinley’s approach to recording is very cinema verite. His sound recorders are the shaky hand holding the camera, giving you a first-person look — or in this case, listen — at what’s happening. The sounds for mill:liminal were recorded mostly with a Sennheisier MKH 30/40 boomed microphone rig connected to an SD744T hard disc portable field recorder. Additional sounds were recorded with self-constructed contact microphones and some with DPA 4060 miniature omnidirectional microphones. So what can sound like sound captured raw is actually the product of some serious technological sophistication and deep processing.

The result is unsettling, for mill:liminal sounds like consciousness melting off the slate of time. In some moments, the low and steady growl of the paper mill machinery takes on monastic tones, as if a monastery of Tibetan monks were assembled for prayer in the mountains.

It’s not hard to find parallels in McGinley’s work, but it does lead one to unexpected places. Is a man in a plaid shirt with a microphone in hand, poised to capture sounds in the field, not unlike Alan Lomax, with his field recordings of world music? McGinley does agree with that.

“I have long-standing thoughts about the world of field recording and experimental music being considered as folk music,” he says. “It’s music that has grown out of a community outside of academic circles, a sort of voice of a population.” Interestingly, he has noted that the mill, in its own way, is a living entity, as people play limited roles in maintaining its processes.

There are also sonic links to the experiments of minimalist composer La Monte Young and his Dream Syndicate. One can see how the hum of a paper mill aligns with Young’s tunings that matched the environmental sounds around him, most famously his reliance on a refrigerator’s 60-cycle electrical hum, which he considered as a foundational drone for his music. Young called the 60-cycle hum the “drone of Western civilization,” but as mill:liminal reminds us, these folk songs of machinery are all around us. If listened to, they can be a thing of beauty.

mill:liminal is available now as a digital download and will be available soon as a cd packaged in paper from the Räpina Paberivabrik. In addition to undertaking field recordings of creepy paper mills, Murmer also produces a regular weekly radio show called Framework Radio. Other recordings are available on Bandcamp.

stowaway

ON THE WAY HOME, I wound up as a stowaway, riding in the back of an old-fashioned mail bus. It had been recently refurbished, and the interior smelled of fresh pine. Crates of letters were stacked up on both sides of the coach. I knew that if I followed the north coast road, I would eventually make it home, but at some point, the road changed. It was generic and unfamiliar, and the forest here was so dense and green that I lost my bearings entirely.

There was also water on both sides of the road now, which made no sense. The south coast was a good 20 miles away. The mail bus rolled to a stop, and a wooden ladder descended mechanically from the back. Into the storage area walked the postman, wearing a striped jacket and a straw hat, as if he had just stepped out of 1910. “Another stowaway, huh?” he said.

The postman wasn’t angry. He fetched a few envelopes and went to stuff some mailboxes. “But where are we?” I asked him. “I thought this was Long Island.” The postman’s eyes narrowed. “You, good sir, are in the most exclusive part of Long Island. Pristine, undeveloped, inhabited by only the oldest, wealthiest families. It’s so off limits that it’s never appeared on any map.”

The postman went on. “See that, over there? That’s Fresh Pond. Most people think that’s the north shore. But out here, there’s this strip of unspoiled land, a grant to the settlers of these parts by His Majesty Charles II.” I stuck my head out of the mail bus and looked around. I saw no homes anywhere, just old-growth forest teeming with wildlife. The air here was so fresh it hurt just to breathe it. How could it be that there was a part of the island I had never seen?

“If it’s so exclusive, how do I get anywhere from here?” I asked. “I don’t think my parents know how to get here.” “Where are you going?” he asked. I told him the name of the town. “No worries,” he said, returning to the front of the bus. “I’ll drop you at the old post office. You’ll have to find your way home from there. And you can never tell anyone that you saw this place.”

manhattan

TO BE AT THE TOP of a shiny skyscraper, enclosed in metal and glass, is to experience a kind of disorientation. Maybe you are on the 11th or the 26th floor, but really, you are standing on air, walking on air, surrounded by a concrete box of walled-in oxygen. There was a party for all the program members in this Manhattan honeycomb, it took place in a modern room with a single long table. There was champagne, and champagne glasses, and Dr. Henry Kissinger was there. His bush of gray-black hair looked fine enough. He kept trying to talk to me about China. “Strange,” I told Dr. Kissinger. “I thought you were dead.” He said, in his thick accent, “Did you really think I was capable of death?”

There were a lot of beauties from the program there, in extravagant dresses. One woman stood on stage, handing out awards. A guitar appeared on the table; I was surprised I hadn’t seen it there before. It was a Fender Nocaster model, encased in silver trim. I picked up the guitar and began to pluck out a tune on its metallic strings, but when I did, it slipped from my hands and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, I noticed the headstock was gone, and foam was emerging from the top. Kissinger was there at once. He held the glass to the broken neck, and soon it was full of bubbly. “Didn’t you know that all guitars are full of champagne?” he said.

More people kept coming to the party and it was getting late, so I decided to leave. I took the elevator down. I knew I would have to make the last Long Island Railroad train to Port Jefferson. Or would my father really have to come and pick me up in Ronkonkoma? I tried to open up the schedule on my phone, but the page wouldn’t refresh. To make matters worse, when I got downstairs, I realized I had left my shoes at the party. I exited the elevator, looked over at the doorman, and asked him if I could go back up. “Do you have a pass?” he said. “Any form of identification?” “I just came out of the damn elevator,” I said. “Obviously, I’m allowed to be in the building!” The doorman looked puzzled. He knew not what to do. But procedure!

“Fine, sir,” he grumbled, “but only this one time.”

When I retrieved my shoes, I saw that Dr. Kissinger was still inside, charming young women. Then I rode the elevator down again. Outside, the Manhattan sky was a smoggy white. How odd that there were white nights in New York too? And at such a late hour. The streets were full of people in dark coats. Cars honked their way down the avenue. But when was the last train home now? Or was there a Port Authority LuxExpress to Tartu? Impossible. My phone said the next train was at 3:28 am. That was a long time to wait. I decided to call my daughter, to see if I could stay there. “But dad,” she said, “we don’t have any place for you to sleep. We’d have to pile up clothes on the floor to make you a mattress.” “That sounds fine to me,” I told her. The only problem was that I had no idea where she lived in this urban jungle. Then my phone died.

There I stood, in the streets of New York, surrounded by strangers. I considered for a moment that if there was anyone who could help me, it was Dr. Kissinger. He was older than time. He was undead. I began walking back to the building. Certainly, Dr. Kissinger would still be there. Did he ever miss a party?