Constant Little Skirmishes: On Damion Searls’ “Analog Days” and Gail Scott’s “Furniture Music”

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Looking around at the unfolding present, whether one focuses on rampant austerity, police killings, domestic lawfare against the vulnerable, or war crimes abroad, one starts to spiral. How did we get here? When did this all begin? What’s happening? What the fuck? 

From a certain, and certainly correct perspective, we know that it was ever thus. Law enforcement has always performed extrajudicial executions. We have never had equality. Life—at least for some—has always been too hard, too short, too expensive, and too scary. But even this fatalism demands a little precision: it’s important to trace the history of our moment, to track what happened and to whom, to pick up the dropped threads of a shredded social fabric. 

Fortunately, two luminaries, Damion Searls and Gail Scott, have each offered an account of the leadup to the American present. Searls’s debut novella Analog Days (Coffee House Press, 2025) and Scott’s nonfictional Furniture Music (Wave Books, 2023) document the immediate past, tracking developments in the news. Broken into sections set off by dates, they describe particular social scenes, interspersing these with a record of what was really happening—political campaigns and poetry readings; elections, protests, weird weather; mass shootings, meals out, long walks, cops committing murder. Although Analog Days is classified as fiction and Furniture Music as memoir, the two are remarkably similar in their citational impulses, documentary attention, and compressed, juxtapository prose. They read like notations of an unfolding now, gathering textual traces of what was taking place, and how it felt in the moment. They capture that dizzy sense of escalation so many of us feel in looking around at all this.

Searls is the author or translator of more than sixty books, which include his own poetry and philosophy, a biography of Herman Rorschach, and translations of works by Jon Fosse, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charlotte Beradt, Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, Ariane Koch, and many others. Scott, for her part, is a novelist, an essayist, a translator, and an experimental prose writer. She was the sole anglophone member of the famed La théorie, un dimanche (“theory, a Sunday”) group convened by Nicole Brossard, one of the most important writers of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Together, the group—comprised of Scott, Brossard, France Théoret, Louky Bersianik, Louise Dupré and Louise Cotnoir—read and discussed emergent theoretical writing, and created formally experimental texts that focused on the challenge of inscribing the shifting, changeable relationships between bodies, languages, and politics.  

Analog Days is written in the form of a diary covering the period from June 21 through July 20, 2016. It follows a vaguely-traced group of friends, as well as the news cycle. Within its first few pages, the novella documents the murder of the British Member of Parliament Jo Cox by a white supremacist; moments from the end, it records that “Day One of the Republican National Convention was yesterday.” The narrator is a freelance coder living in New York again after some time away: “I’d left New York for a while but never left New York … I have never left the houses, the streets, the neighborhoods where I grew up,” he explains. As its title suggests, Analog Days obsesses over the processes of record-making and the technologies through which life is taken down and made into art. The narrator suffers two injured feet, remembers going to the record store, talks to his friends—“Pam and Chris, Edward, Jennifer, Gideon, Josh and Ben, Scott, Anne-Sofie, Iris, Jeon.” He overhears coffee shop conversations, keeps grocery lists, and thinks about William Blake—these are all the minutiae of life amid the months just prior to Trump’s first election.  

Furniture Music details a similar, but somewhat longer period: the time that Scott spent in New York from 2008-2012, funded by a Québec government arts grant. It ends with a coda dated “11/16.” The memoir offers her outsider’s perspective on the insistently hopeful Obama era, juxtaposing what then appeared to be a progressive shift in American politics with the concomitant rightward turns in Canada and in Québec. The book also reads as a roman à clef tracking the social relations of a particular slice of the (now-older) feminist and not-just-feminist poetry scenes in New York: “Male poets at one end of table. Talking to each other. Women at other. Mostly queer. You hearing Lang-Po say again: ‘Bank bailouts = corporate government fascism.’ You like him.” The title Furniture Music comes from a group of compositions by Erik Satie, which were later taken up by John Cage, Brian Eno, and others. Deliberately repetitive, these were designed to be ambient-only and ignorable. (Indeed, they were ignored for multiple decades until Cage started to perform them.) Scott is experimenting with a written version of Satie’s concept: “Trotting up Bowery, under Obama campaign portrait-posters. Somewhere between Che-style socialist + American super-hero design. FURNITURE MUSIC’s playing pale-eyed right-wing robot-haircut cozy North’s BITUMEN FAMILY COMPACT”—here, Stephen Harper, the “pale-eyed right-wing robot-haircut”-sporting former Canadian Prime Minister, and his precipitous escalation of extraction from the Alberta tar sands, are registered only as ambient noise—mere background to the brighter, poster-sized excitement swirling around Obama. So, like Analog Days, Scott’s book offers an experiment in political art: what comes into the foreground, and what remains in the background? How does documenting the present torque sentence, paragraph, genre? 

Just as Scott’s citation of Satie cues our attention to sound, so the title Analog Days prompts us to attend to non-digital processes of measuring and recording. One character, for example, is “trying to find a publisher for the world’s first print blog. He called it a plog.” This character, Mark, also “runs unplugged field trips. People pay him to walk them around a neighborhood and encourage them to talk or daydream and forbid them from taking out their phones. He calls these outings analog days.” The tone toward Mark and his plog is a bit sarcastic, but the phrase “analog days” is obviously important. It cycles back into view when the narrator remembers “the last record store I passed when I was walking on pain-free feet.” A neighborhood institution, it was called Popwax, and it was having a sale: “Analog Days,” “40% off all LPs and cassettes.” According to Mark-the-plogger, “it means something different to walk or bike across the country after cars and planes; it means something different to mail a letter now that there’s email; so too writing.” Even if Mark’s a little strident, a little silly, he’s hit on something: a few pages prior, the narrator notes that the experience of the weather, which used to be mediated only by “an analog thermometer nailed to the frame outside” the window “now … too is political.” Listening to a record or a cassette is different after streaming; so is the weather after weather apps, or after—during—climate change. In taking the form of a diary, an analog recording of the narrator’s days, Searls’s novella registers this uneasy shift, where something seemingly normal jolts into significance, or into urgency.

We’re used to thinking of the word “analog” as the opposite of the word “digital,” but this is only one of its meanings. “Analog” also refers to mechanisms or devices that carry or represent information via “continuously variable physical quantities” (to cite Merriam-Webster). Maybe it makes sense to think of this novella as representing the continuous variability of the physical, as documenting material change. Rather than putting too much stock in Mark’s polemicisms about getting off the Internet, we can think of Analog Days as a project devoted to tracking continuous material and discursive variations over a set period of time, the month just after the summer solstice, just after Trump’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate. Witness the juxtaposition between the end of the diary entry about Mark’s plog and the beginning of the one that follows it:

We don’t see [Mark] as much as the rest of the group, but he doesn’t seem to mind not hearing about things. When he’s in the mood we get phone calls from his landline. We try to keep our evenings at the bar phone-free, when he’s here, to be polite. 

The child was crying for his shovel, Anne-Sofie said, he wanted to shovel and 

sweep the clouds. 

June 25, 2016 Saturday

Fresno police shot and killed Dylan Noble after pulling over his pickup truck in response to reports of a man with a rifle. Noble (white, 19) stepped out of his truck with, police say, one arm behind his back. He was shot four times and found not to be carrying a gun. 

After a few days the swelling has gone down but my foot still has large zones of black, ankle to mid-sole on both the inside and the outside.

The enjambment—or jump cuts?—between the narrator’s two diary entries and between the subjects he discusses juxtaposes and paratactically connects his private life, his friend group, his conversations and anecdotes, with the police violence that becomes a public event. Dylan Noble was a real person, and he was really shot four times by the police on June 25, 2016. Searls’s syntax perfectly mirrors that of a news report. These are the events that shape our always-developing sense of what it means to live in society. One minute we’re thinking about a weird friend, then remembering what someone else said about a child’s goals and emotions; the next we’re confronted with an alert that the cops shot someone who was found to be carrying nothing more than a small plastic container. And then we’re in pain. Is that unrelated? This is our strange time. This is a way to keep track, to document an ordinary slice of a year, to have a record so that we can remember a moment when things accelerated toward crisis. 

Similar to the publication of Analog Days in Coffee House’s NVLA series, Furniture Music was published by Wave Books, which, despite its URL—www.wavepoetry.com—has published a good deal of experimental prose. Its catalogue features Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Tisa Bryant, and other prose writers whose work tends to be most strongly prized by poets, and whose formal strategies, like the paratactic cuts in Analog Days, are often closer to poetry’s enjambment or juxtaposition than they are to the standard, sterile moves of conventional literary fiction. Adapting the words of the late poet Joshua Clover, Scott explains the creative challenge that she and other experimental prose writers confront: “narrative is out there somewhere—but it is processed into structure before it can appear.” In Furniture Music she skirts the established, industrial, Kraft Singles-style techniques, finding other ways to document what happened and who was there. Her memoir is heavily citational, gathering events from the customs kiosk, the poetry world, the streets of Montréal, New York galleries, and the world’s various halls of power. Down the outer margin of each page, we find the names of those whose texts are quoted or paraphrased in her own: Charles Baudelaire, Charles Bernstein, Barack Obama, Giorgio Agamben, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Harryette Mullen, Tim Dlugos, M. NourbeSe Philip, Bernadette Mayer, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn (to cite only those appearing from pages 104-110).

At various moments, Scott folds the history of this approach to writing into her text. As her narrated self runs through the city or meets with friends at restaurants, she remembers her work with the La théorie, un dimanche group, and sometimes feels frustrated that the theoretico-literary problems they had formulated and worked to address decades ago now appear as newfangled or near-incomprehensible to those living in the purported center of the universe, from which all thinking and art apparently radiate: 

East 8^th resto. Talk turning—in wake of Belladonna event. To question, d’oú on écrit … Quest, at height of experimental feminist writing group chez nous [essentially identitary]. Now, for you. Writing subject composed, rather, of ventriloquized voices. Seen not as one “person.” But in narrative patterns of multivocal resonance. RG saying for her part. Subject stepping into narrative. Implying subject locomotion. Until able to exert agency. Outside central station. Of story. 

Days mesh, they rain. Washing piss smell off concrete. Trees turning leaves forward. To drink. Or away in repudiating wind. AC unit opposite adding soft persistent whine. Another somewhere churning/creaking. Like ancient lawnmower. Blending with ambient brouhaha. So that pores, entire body. Absorbing faintest environmental stimulus. Like those petal-faces abundantly fronting [walking West]. Greenwich dwellings. Their little faces turning this way + that. Catching sun rays floating upon breeze. You asking older male writer. You happening in on Greenwich. Friend of late William Burroughs. If old Beat having, as rumoured. Response-armoury at ready. In case of threat. Knives. Revolvers. Rifles. “Yes.” “Was he kind?” “Very or else very not.” Walking back East. Leaves blowing pleasantly. Your face also turning this way + that. Catching last rays. Piercing shadows. 

In these two paragraphs (the square brackets are Scott’s), we have a recounting of how Scott and her fellow experimental feminist writers in Montréal approached their task: rather than creating a narrator or character whose singularity distinguished them, they created texts that showed the seams of their polyvocal composition, that were not shy about being made up of many texts or voices. This was a way to root writing in the material realities of place—as she goes on to do in the next paragraph, describing the weather, the sounds of the AC humming, the people amassing weapons, just in case. 

What Analog Days and Furniture Music most obviously share is that they document these material realities in a collage-like or kaleidoscopic way. Even though one is classified as fiction and the other as a memoir, they both track what was happening then, in 2016 and in its leadup. They give a sickly sense of why or how for what is happening currently, gathering the evidence of the constant little skirmishes that have flowered into open, full-blown conflict—really, in some spots, a kind of civil war. What they document is that our now didn’t burble out of nowhere. They analyze, from an on-the-ground, everyday perspective, how institutions like media, police, or extractive industries enthusiastically undermined truth and quashed dissent long before there was Trump to blame it on. 

Both books’ sharp, compressed sentences leap and trip that decade-plus from then to now. The recent past grates against the immediate present of our reading. We can call that bleeding edge theoretical, if we don’t mistake the meaning of the word. Along with the other La théorie, un dimanche authors, Scott represents a too-often-ignored reception of so-called French theory in North America. In her introduction to the English translation, Theory, A Sunday (Belladonna*, 2013), the poet Lisa Robertson explains it this way: when members of the Anglophone scholarly establishment read the great works of what we call French theory—“from de Beauvoir to Lacan to Irigaray to Wittig to Barthes to Meschonnic”—they received this work as “an institutional discourse.” For them, these texts served to refresh technical vocabularies, retool scholarly methods, loosen disciplinary boundaries, or expand scholarly fields. But within the francophone context of Québec, and especially among its politicized feminist writers, theory landed differently. In Robertson’s words, it was “a manual and a testing ground for political revolution. It responded to conditions in real time.” So, to call Furniture Music as or Analog Days theoretical is to say that in each literature is a place to work out what’s happening, where language can be made adequate the moment’s demands, where the space between sentences or paragraphs is activated to document the nauseated knowledge we’ve accumulated: that things are getting worse, and quickly. That it was and is time to do something. 

In providing their accounts of our present’s immediate past, Searls and Scott each offer endless points of contact with the reality outside the text. They document the world in which we readers live, showing not just what it feels like but also how it works. After a long day of agitation against the latest outrage, against whichever injustice is happening today, closest to us, reading Analog Days or Furniture Music serve as a safeguard against despair. We who read, who see and notice, who document, who do something, are not alone. There are always others, alongside us. Here they are: male poets at one end of the table. Talking to each other. Women at the other end. Mostly queer. Pam and Chris, Edward, Jennifer, Gideon, Josh and Ben, Scott, Anne-Sofie, Iris, Jeon. Gail, Damion, you guys, me. We read, we think, we get up and do. The effort is longstanding, and we toil together.