Hello odradeks,
This week, a little later than intended, we are sharing with you ‘Diary Machine’.
Several weeks ago, we put out an open call for diary entries: to “be as objective and spare as possible.” Frequently, we receive writing submissions that are strangled by notions of ‘writerliness’, of the idea that literature must be some heightened form of language, different to our everyday speech. The diary machine was our attempt at encouraging a more immediate, less self-conscious writing that finds enjoyment in what T S Eliot, I think, called ‘the music of the street’.
Because of the amount of fantastic submissions we received we will be splitting our consideration of the diary into a two newsletters, with a second instalment on the theme to appear next week, with slightly different, more considered takes on the diary form, including a critical engagement with the diary entry as a genre.
Thank you to this issue’s contributors for trusting us with their work. In order of their appearing:
Odette Fangstrem-Ward, Éadbhard C. Ó Duinn, Sheree Shatsky, L. Haiman, A. P. Murphy, Navina Donata Baur, Jordan Novak, Warrick Sony, A.J.
Thanks so much for reading this week!
Noah Lee Swann
by Noah Lee Swann
The idea of a diary machine, or diary dispenser, was to generate, snap shots of lives without the intervention of any preconceptions of ‘good writing’ or (heaven forbid) ‘serious literature’. We received these entries from around the world: New Zealand, Germany, South Africa, London, Florida. And the result was more successful than we had intended.
What unites the diary entries are their similarities in temperament, their shared, unpretentious attention and interest in being in the world. I found myself interested in reading the entries chronologically. That is, seeing them in temporal relation to each other, and so have arranged them in this way. There are entries written within an hour of each other on the same exact day but thousands of kilometres apart. There are other entires written on the same date but several years apart. Or, written at the same time but a single day apart, so that the diary machine becomes a kind of relay of consciousness of a living world, trading places, times, subjectivities. A.J, for example, submitted an entry from Queensland, New Zealand on the 8 July 2024, and so, with this in mind, I found the same “8 July” in my own diary from four years earlier (my first day in London).
At this point in time, Trump on his throne, it feels especially poignant to read such, small, unassuming and tentative signatures of human idiosyncrasies. They are like new, green shoots rising from an inhospitable asphalt.
As Odradek we are always interested in writing that is created in a single gesture, so to speak, with all its errata laid out, still in the trance of experience, before editing, refinement, and most especially, before taste. We love reading grocery lists, to-do lists, Whatsapp conversations, voicenotes, casual texts, captions, ephemera that evidence of life and character. Writing that lies still, almost absent of the performance of being a person with a name and certain likes and dislikes. We enjoy this kind of fluidity because it feels honest to life rather than to nations, ideas, categories or meanings. With its specific typos or grammatical errors, presumptions, anxieties and fantasies, the diary machine is simply a device to record or translate snippets of experience. Like a camera or barometer it does very little; it just sounds back an affirmation; resounds with the ‘yes’ of everything that happens - the commotion of birds.
Odette Ward - UK, 8 January 2025
Wed 8 Jan 2025. Abraco coffee shop. 13:08. Dalston Kingsland Road. London.
Writing with ridiculous bright yellow nails. It’s bright outside. Bright and cold. The cafe is full w/people on their laptops. Outside, the cold sunlight makes long shadows. It’s a slight golden or yellowed light. Cold but not white. Weak not unoptimistic or sympathetic.
“No, I’m in Dalston", says a girl with short blonde hair. She’s on the phone, speaking softly. The man beside her is also on the phone speaking Korean.
“The cafe I wanted to go to didn’t allow laptops — which is fair.”
We are packed in here. Outside a pregnant woman w/glasses, who I will doubtless forget, stands drinking a takeaway coffee.
“I really want to see Nosferatu", says the woman next to me.
I am thinking about diaries. I was re-reading some of my old ones and couldn’t believe how little I remembered. How only the entries themselves are what’s left of the experience. It’s sad. How much we lose + forget. Fills me with hopelessness sometimes thinking like this. — how can we hope to change anything of these ghastly cycles of war and despotism when I won’t even remember this. This — this now — in five years I would have forgotten it all. The light, the girl on the phone, the Korean man, the pregnant woman.
“OK; I’m going to send an invoice + go to the bank,” says the woman with the short hair, before hanging up. I will forget you too.
Éadbhard C. Ó Duinn - USA, 11 January 2025
January 10th, 9:03 EST; Home, Tolland Green, Tolland, Connecticut. Clear but very cold (-3 C)
The whir of cars rushing past, all far exceeding the residential speed limit. The furnace just rumbled to life.
The computer fans glow neon blue (my son’s choice). Coffee cup is half empty. The trees are tilting at severe angles in the unusually strong gusts.
Hannah the cat is curled up tightly on the sofa. The jet black sheen of her fur catching the precious morning light.
Sheree Shatsky - USA, 11 January 2025
Sat. 11 Jan. 9:02 am. Florida, east coast. Home, lounging with Bob, aka a cat. It’s sixty drizzling degrees outside.
My ears are ringing. Always. I hear traffic out on the street. And birds. Blue jays. The kitchen clock is ticking. A freight train. An airplane. Dishes rattle.
The outside reflects inside on the blank tv. Open blinds. Concrete driveway. A poinsettia placed on the porch table. A hint of the cleared lot across the street. The rabbits cleared as well. One lives in the front garden. In a hutch disguised as tree debris. Every day, we study nocturnal photos snapped of the rabbit on our wildlife camera.
The feral cat, too. Passersby of the night.
L. Haiman - UK, 13 January 2025
Monday, 13 Jan, 11:15, Margate, Westbrook, 5C cloudy. My one year old’s highly articulate babble directed at my parents. A black cat just walked outside my study door. On my desk: notebook still closed, hand cream tube almost empty, rings, 0.9 mm pencil, keyboard, phone, mouse, empty coffee cup, card, laptop, fingers typing. It’s 11:20 and it feels like too much day has already happened.
A. P. Murphy - Catalonia, 13 January 2025
Monday 13 January, 12.00 noon, Barcelona, Catalonia
Weather: Clear, sunny, blinding, fresh.
Out for a mandated healthful stroll with my daughter in her wheelchair. The day is fine and fresh, there's a standard press of weekday folks around, particularly outside the corner cafe where everyone's smoking up a storm.
I have to ask a man clustered in a group on the corner to make way for the wheelchair to pass. He doesn't hear, but his colleagues, all smoking up a storm, let him know, and he moves aside.
I recognize him. Until last year he was President of our little country, but he got voted out in a snap election. His party's HQ office is on my block and they often gather at this bar to chat and plan their political comeback. No bodyguards, no entourage, just a bunch of friends from the office.
Last year, running for re-election, he was all concern when he met us at an event for disabled people. Lots of questions about my daughter: how old, what are her needs, is there anything the government could do?
Today he barely glances at her as his friend passes him a cigarette. He blows smoke over us as we pass through the small space he's opened up on the pavement outside the coffee bar.
Navina Donata Baur - Germany, 13 January 2025
Monday, 13th January at 1:44 PM local time, Hilden Old Town, NRW, Germany, Overstolz Café. Alone, but surrounded by people. Sunny, blue sky, 1°C.
A murmur of voices - people at the nearby tables are deep in animated conversation, laughing together. In the background, I hear the hard-working coffee machine grinding beans—it smells heavenly. There’s no scent I love more than that of freshly ground coffee.
I open my eyes, expecting to see this picture as if I am waking up from a dream - but I’m disappointed. I hear music that is too loud for a café of this size. I hear the coffee machine, smell the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans, and see people sitting at nearby tables staring into space or at their phones. I’m the only person sitting in this café by herself, and yet, everyone else seems so much lonelier.
No hum of voices, no lively conversations to eavesdrop on. Just loud music and solitude. A good-looking man, perhaps in his mid-forties, is sitting at a table with a woman. He’s gazing out the window—maybe watching the dog outside barking passionately at its owner. Another treat! Or maybe his fixed stare is directed at the computer shop across the street.
I glance over at it, too, and think to myself what a bleak, boring display it has.
The man reaches for his glass of freshly squeezed orange juice - his movements are elegant and calm. His fingers slowly wrap around the glass; he lifts it to his mouth and takes a sip. His gaze remains distant as his hand places the glass back down with the same deliberate care.
I turn my gaze away from him; I’ve been watching him so long that he might notice soon. The woman across from him says something, but I can’t hear her words. He straightens in his chair, a movement as if awakening from a trance, as though he’s just returned to reality. He looks at her gently and replies - she laughs.
A little less loneliness, I think, and I take a contented sip of my now lukewarm coffee.
Reassured, with a faint sense of hope for humanity, I glance down at my book: The Manifestoes of Surrealism by André Breton.
Jordan Novak - Italy, 13 January (2021?)
Wed. 13 Jan. 7:03 am. Florence, Italy. In the bedroom. Alone. Weather 51° F. Sunny.
The sound of the urban police car buzzing past our apartment. For the second day now. Wondering if there’s something going on downtown. I can hear the washer running, almost at the end of its cycle. Unlike my frigid New York dwelling, it’s warm enough for me to put my clothing on a clothesline to dry in the sunshine. I thought a lack of technology might be frustrating—but it’s been oddly soothing instead.
Outside, I hear people starting to wake up. The light starts to shine, illuminating the piazza and all the glass cafes within it. Creaking and squeaking, the candy-colored carousel starts to run (and so do the children, towards it).
Women clop along the cobblestones with their long black coats and leather boots, their bracelets chiming as they walk. There’s a work commute here, usually on foot, but there is a separate commute everyone makes for their cappuccino; the people’s fuel of choice in this beautiful country.
I leave in a few days, but I’ve only been here for a few days… Why can’t New York be more like this?
Warrick Sony - South Africa, 19 January 2025
It is 8:30 am on Sunday morning 19th January. I am in Kensington, Johannesburg and staying at P… 's house for a few weeks. Built-in the early 1900s, with pressed metal ceilings and generous proportions, her house has an incredible view, overlooking Bez Valley and most of the city's eastern side and adjoining suburbs. I can see the Hillbrow Tower, the brutalist Ponte City skyscraper and most of the ridge of Yeoville. The red roofs and brick buildings of Bez Valley are outlined by green foliage from the thousands of trees that have benefited from the recent years of extreme summer rains.
I'm told Johannesburg is the world's largest manufactured urban forest, and bird sounds are prominent, especially in the early mornings. The valley acts as an acoustic sonic amplifier, throwing up disparate voices, dog barks and motor vehicles.
A fist-sized bird foregrounds my attention in an ancient oak tree that stretches up towards my room window, a story or so above the ground. It makes a long kaaaaaar sound and has a noticeable red face with black and white wing stripes. It darts back and forth chasing insects or something, running up and down a withered tree branch.
A copy of Kenneth Newman's, fully-revised, Birds of Southern Africa (2002) is lying on the table which I open and locate the little bird on page 284. It looks like a ‘Black-collared Barbet’ of which the following is written:
The call is a loud duet, starting with a whirring 'kerrr-kerrr-kerrr' and then becoming a 'too-puddley- too-puddley-too-puddley-too-puddley….' about eight times, accompanied by wing-quivering and bobbing
A gunshot echoes across the valley. Nothing follows but a long reverberation and the "kweh-h-h" of a Lourie (p 226). The gunshot happens again about ten seconds later. No voices, no screams, nothing. And again, and again, and again, all with long intervals.
"It can't be a gunshot" I think. "what could it be?"
I move to the lounge area and open the large sliding window to see if I can make sense of it. Again and again, sometimes with longer intervals.
Could it be a panel beater perhaps, someone with a 10-pound hammer hitting steel? No, it felt percussive, explosive; more like a firework but at this time of the morning and for twenty minutes? It went on for ages.
"What the fuck?" I thought.
Yesterday evening, after hearing what I thought was a gunshot across the valley, P. said it was a firework and that gunshots differ from fireworks in that “they are usually close together. Gunshots go, "doef, doef, doef, doef," she said, “and fireworks have one bang and a silence.”
But again back to the question; who would be setting off fireworks at 8.40 am on a Sunday morning and why? Another Johannesburg WTF? moment, piling up against a whole lot of others, like: why were so many traffic lights lying on their sides; chopped down, felled like trees snapped in half, some even still blinking and alive. Why?
A.J - New Zealand, 6th July 2024
July 6, 2024, 11:08 AM, the bench outside the library, Arrowtown.
(I am writing this with freezing hands, and I still refuse to wear my gloves ahhh)
Been in Queenstown for a day, It was another thirty-minute bus ride from there to Arrowtown. It’s so cold here. Everyone warned me about the wild, freezing July winds, but I still wasn’t prepared enough. There’s also no noise of cars speeding by or the beeping sound of traffic lights. It's all very quiet.
I do hear the chatter of people here and there. “Bit of a cold day today,” “Just taking the kid to play outside,” “Well, at least the sun’s out,” “Yeah, that’s a nice sight this morning,” I hear two guys talking as I sit on a wooden bench outside the town library. They are parting ways now. Apparently, the kid was too impatient— he didn’t wanna wait for them to finish their conversation. He’s now speedily running away into the field. Go have fun, kid.
I love the library. There’s a stone wall and reading schedules written on a blackboard outside. There’s also an olive green metallic flap to return books. I went in there ten minutes ago and the blonde librarian, about 25, smiled and waved at me as soon as I stepped in. She was v polite, I hope she has a great day.
As I sit here now, six feet away from a bookshelf reading “Take a book, leave a book,”I realise I don’t wanna leave!! I’ll def come here again. I’ll also look around the museum and talk to strangers more. Everyone’s been so nice to me.
I don’t wanna be in a rush to catch a plane, ahhh!! but I still hope the bus gets here soon. Gonna be back in Auckland in the next five hours. At least it won’t be as cold.
P.S. THE PANCAKES HERE ARE AMAZING!!!
Noah Lee Swann - UK, 6th July 2020
6th July 2020 - 225 Highbury Quadrant 11:35am
Sitting on the back porch overlooking the garden. Just saw a fox disappear into the hedge. The sun is coming out now. Something rustling in the ivy. Malcolm, the cat, is sitting on the wooden table I am writing on. Cathy can be heard talking to a client or someone about something. Small flies or midges dart around and chase each other in the new light. A bird gurgles atonally. The clouds are sparse, white and fluffy. Far above sparrows or swallows soar and dip for invisible food. The trees whisper and wave. Silver sounds. A spade rakes along gravel somewhere out of sight. A hammer beats a wooden plank in the distance and sets the dogs off barking. A hooter of a car soft, muffled.
END
Oh my gosh, this is so precious!! I almost forgot about diary machine. Logged in to substack after almost a month and this was an amazing first read on my return
That was a fun read.