Weston Cutter's Blog, page 23

From Socrates to the Apocalypse: new stuff from Paul Johnson and Peter Heller

Socrates: A Man for our Times, by Paul Johnson

In the world of philosophy, Socrates is something of a conundrum: while he is widely regarded as the father of philosophy, he never actually wrote anyhing, or at least nothing that has survived from antiquity. Pretty much everything we know about him comes to us from the works of others, namely Plato, a devout follower of of the Athenian sage. Unfortunately, many of Plato’s works distort or misrepresent Socrates’ teachings to suit his own hypotheses. And this bugs the hell out of Paul Johnson.

Not that this is necessarily surprising coming from the author of such critically acclaimed works as A History of Christianity and Modern Times: Johnson expects from other historians the same uncompromising honesty with which he approaches his own writing, and he has no problem calling out those he sees as failing in this regard. And so it makes sense that he would devote a large part of Socrates: A Man for Our Times to clarifying the inaccuracies surrounding the eponymous philosopher’s life, including the bizarre circumstances surrounding his execution (Johnson devotes a significant chunk of the book to the 24 hours preceding the philosopher’s death). The vigor with which Johnson approaches this task underscores his immense respect for the intellectual realm at large: his prose is accessible, though not at the expense of the ideas’ integrity, and the protrait of Socrates he presents to us is as vivid as I’ve ever seen–though, to be fair, I know very little about Greek philosophy. But this kind of what makes the book so remarkable: Johnson exalts Socrates for his repeated claim that he didn’t actually know anything, that he was simply inquisitive, a lifelong Athenian patriot whose days were spent strolling through town, talking with whomever he happened to cross paths with. Endlessly fascinated by human behavior, Socrates’ primary–maybe even only–goal was determining what it means to be “a good person.” While the book does not necessarily advocate any one form of moral philosophy, Johnson still praises Socrates’ position of moral absolutism: “Socrates says plainly in Crito, ‘It is never right to do wrong, or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.’ It is this clear view that marks the point at which Socrates turns his back on moral relativism, in any guise or circumstances…If you know a thing is wrong, never do it, ever.”

In addition to an biography of Socrates, the book is also a brief history of Athens itself, though in this regard it doesn’t hold up quite as well. Johnson casts a big net here, touching on everything from Greek theater to the Peloponesian War to the Greeks’ general views on homosexuality, all in 200 pages. No surprise then that some of these minor forays seem tacked on, unnecessary, maybe even a little distracting at times. Of course, I have no doubt that all of these things played a role in Socrates’ worldview, it’s just not made quite clear how.

Nonetheless, Socrates: A Man for Our Times is a stunning read. Johnson writes not only for long-time scholars of philosophy but also for anyone who’s ever questioned the very nature of human existence. If you’re looking for an overview of Western philosophy, this is an excellent starting point.

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller

A flu-like virus has wiped out something like 99% of the world’s population. Gangs of grizzled marauders roam the country, raping and pillaging and generally being end-of-the-world-style nasty. Those who have somehow retained their sense of civility have armed themselves and hunkered down on secluded farms or military strongholds or, in the case Hig–our narrator in The Dog Stars–a small regional airport. Having lost his wife to the unnamed illness, Hig now shares the considerable plot of land with his neighbor Bangley, a survival expert whose cold and unfeeling demeanor balance out Hig’s own overtrusting tendencies (he makes regular supply visits to a colony of disease-ridden Mennonites, much to Bangley’s frustration) nicely. Oh, and there’s a dog too, of course, a blue healer named Jasper–because every post-apocalyptic survivor story needs a dog.

Which is to say that author Peter Heller isn’t exactly breaking new ground here, though he seems to understand this, which I think contributes to the book’s success. Told from Hig’s first-person POV, the book offers few details regarding the superflu in question; even Hig seems to understand that what he’s experienced, however terrible it may have been, really isn’t anything new in a narrative sense. What we get instead is a gritty but hopeful exploration of human frailty and the strive to maintain a sense of identity in the wake unspeakable disaster. Like most post-apocalyptic stories, The Dog Stars focuses heavily on themes of isolation, using a stream-of-consciousness voice to emphasize this feeling. It’s an interesting tactic, once that highlights Heller’s poetic sensibilities, though at times it gets confusing, especially when it comes to dialogue:

The words are easy to remember: just the title over and over. Followed by the exhortative: We know you are here. You will become dog food like many before you.

Bangley made me add that.

Fuck no, I said. That’s unnecessary and disgusting.

Bangley just stared at me, his grin half formed.

It’s true ain’t it? Ain’t it Hig?

Hit me like a punch.

Add it, he said. This isn’t some debutante ball.

Indisputably, the book owes a lot to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,  which is a hard to act to follow and which, consequently, establishes some very high standards. Luckily, The Dog Stars meets most of these (the ones that count, anyway ['cept for that whole Pulitzer Prize thing]); it’s a unique spin on some well-tread territory, and while the prose can be jarring and hard to follow, it serves the story well, making for a rewarding read.

Jeremy Jackson + AM Homes

I Will Not Leave You Comfortless by Jeremy Jackson

Among my all-time top-five novels is Life at These Speeds by (not the actor) Jeremy Jackson. I was recommended the thing in I think Third Coast in like ’04 or something, way way back, and the book is a story about a high schooler whose life is massively upside-downed, and the story is his way of (literally) running through into some new way of living. Nothing I can here say will be enough: the book is as good a debut as I’ve ever read, and I hope if I ever publish a novel it comes close to being as tender and true. My only frustration is that Jeremy Jackson has, since Life at These Speeds, not published as much as I’d like in the styles I’d choose: he publishes YA stuff under a different name, and has another novel called In Summer which didn’t match up to his earlier one, and he’s the author of several cookbooks. That’s all great, but I was hugely excited when Milkweed announced they’d be publishing his I Will Not Leave You Comfortless, a memoir about his eleventh year, about the year his sister left home and his grandmother died.

I’ll admit that I’m not the ideal reader for a book with that as its focus—I’m not much a memoir dude, and I’m even less someone keenly taken by soft, sentimental tales of youth and loss. Just doesn’t much do it for me. And yet: I was into Jackson’s book all the way through for this almost magic grace in the paragraphs, in the structure of the thing. Here’s a paragraph at random so you’ve some sense of what I mean:

At the end of third grade, Michelle Marquis moved away. This was a maddening injustice and the cause of a gew weeks of specific heartbreak and a summer of a more generalized sense of loss. I had dreams about riding the bus with her, laughing with her, then watching her step off the bus onto a dusty gravel road and knowing I wouldn’t see her again. But as soon as school resumed—fourth grade, last year—the pain evaporated as it became apparent that Toni was more wonderful and radiant than ever, as if she were now Toni times two. For fourth grade, we ended up in the same class again, and that was the year we almost got married.

That paragraph’s finely representative, honestly: if you’re charmed by the innocence at work, and if you’re taken in by this almost welcome feeling of gladness as emotional precision is reached for and settled on, this book’s for you. If the above seems coy or cloying in its childishness, this book’ll wear on you. I found myself in a maybe 70/30 split: I was mostly taken by the innocence, though it’s ultimately a marathoner’s task to hang with the emotional upheaval of an 11-year-old’s lifechanging year, or maybe not a marathoner’s task but something, anyway, that demands a sweetness, a shut-out-the-world perspective I had a hard time summoning some days. Still: it’s a very good book. Even more still: I still want another novel that swings as hard for the fences as his first did.

 

May We Be Forgiven by A.M.Homes

 

I like Homes a whole awful lot. I taught her “Things You Should Know” yesterday in my intro to lit class as an example of masterful, masterfully compressed fiction. I think she’s lights-out good sometimes—mostly, yes, in her stories. All this as lead-up to say that I was as excited about her latest novel, May We Be Forgiven, as I could’ve been when I found it was coming, and also to say that it was easily the biggest let-down of a book this fall.

Here’s the set-up: Harold Silver, 48, Nixon scholar and prof at a NY college, engages in an affair with his brother’s wife; brother gets in a car accident which orphans a young boy; brother soon thereafter kills his own wife in unclear mental condition; Harold takes over his brother’s life, basically, living in his house, being parental to the kids, engages in online-organized hook-ups, is a sort of flatly-drawn academic (unfinished book! feckless! dim!), loses his job. I don’t know. I do know this book is emphatically not made for readers like me: folks who, for instance, expect a 48 year old college prof who claims “I am after all in the business of knowing about things,” to know, sure, that a piece of furniture is Ethan Allen (which he does) but also to know what a fucking Hello Kitty backpack is as well (which he does not). Also: that that character wouldn’t call mammaries boobies, which he does. Ultimately the problem with the novel is that Harold’s an unbelievable character, to say nothing of the fact that all the characters in here are ultimately not very likeable, either. I’ve been thinking lots about this, lately, honestly: I’m reading James Meeks’s The Heart Broke In, which’ll be reviewed here shortly, but unless the ending’s a total cluster, it’s gonna be in my running for best novel of the second half of 2012. It’s huge-hearted, massively satisfying, rich with detail and charaacters who are both likeable and not—but, and this is the key, the unlikeable characters are folks the reader can at least empathize with. That’s the trick with May We Be Forgiven: I couldn’t for a second empathize with doltish, lost Harold. I hate to sound like some aw-shucks midwesterner, but this book seems made for east coast folks—a winning, accurate little jag of accurate rendering of sorts of lives that perhaps exist there. To these ears, however, the thing reads frustratingly vapid.

What it Means to be Schtickless

An Interview With Glen Phillips

Back in 2010, we talked with Glen Phillips (Toad the Wet Sprocket, Mutual Admiration Society) about his craft, his influences, and a little bit about footwear (really). We recently caught back up with the singer/songwriter to talk a little bit about how he got into music, as well as his plans for the future.

CB: Give us a little background info on how you got into songwriting and performance. Toad formed while you were in high school, where you actively studied music, is that correct?

GP: I met the rest of the Toad guys in high school theater (Our Town and Oklahoma, specifically). They were seniors and I was a freshman. I was in choir but was much more of a theater person. I started at the city college at age 16 and by then switched over more to music studies. We started touring when I was 18.

CB: You had plans to become an actor when you were younger. How do you think your interest in drama has informed your songwriting? Do you view them as distinct spheres of your life, or there some crossover?

GP: My parents and brother studied at USC Berkeley. I was the non-academic black sheep; I studied a little at SBCC. I was almost anti-theater within the band. We went at music in a way that was much more about personal authenticity and honesty. Maybe that was a reaction to how theatrical a lot of music was at the time – if we had any schtick it was that we were hoping to be schtickless…

CB: How do you feel your work has evolved since then, if at all?

GP: I hope I’m a much better writer. Maybe less mainstream (and certainly less known), but I feel like I have some command of the form now, and haven’t run out of material. If it doesn’t evolve there isn’t much of a reason to do it, at least for me.

CB: What do you strive to accomplish with your music?

GP: I want to write songs that make people cry. Don’t care if it’s happy or sad tears, just as long as I can occasionally communicate well enough to make somebody feel something real and intense.

CB: You’ve said before that many of the themes in your music come from your lifelong battles with anxiety and depression. I wonder if you could talk about that a little, how you use music as a way to cope with those things. Are there certain songs of yours that best illustrate this struggle?

GP: I’ve written quite a few songs around the subject of depression. The one that nobody thinks about is “All I Want” – it’s about how rare and fleeting clarity can be. It’s much more about being sad than being joyful. People who don’t get depressed seem to think that depression comes from situations. The heart of depression isn’t about plot lines, it’s about a particular combination of body chemistry and ruminative thought habits. The chemistry is a hard one to fix permanently, but the thought processes can be changed, which makes the low dips shorter and less damaging. Plenty to be learned in there. Writing and listening to music help a lot. Science has helped even more – learning how memory and stress work allow you to look at the thought processes more objectively, instead of getting lost in my own (largely fictional) depressive story.

CB: As of 2011, you were working on a film musical with a friend of yours. How is that going? Any plans for it yet?

GP: Abandoned!

CB: What is the view out your window right now?

GP: An avocado tree and a couple sheds.

*

Third of Three

Alright, quick shameless promo stuff: this year’s been fairly good on the chapbook front. There’s +/- from Greying Ghost, which is still available (and, sincerely, is beautiful: as object, the thing’s just great, literally wrapped in maps). There’s (0,0) from Floating Wolf Quarterly, which series is run by the badass Christopher Louvet and which pairs chapbooks between emerging and established writers, and my thing’s lucky enough to keep company with BHicok’s Exuberance. And now there’s this.

What that is is my new chapbook from New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM, and it’s called All Black Everything which, yes, is a title lifted from a Jay-Z song, and which, like the book of stories, features a cover by the great Michael Wille. I believe copies of this are shipping now presently. I just got my copies and this thing’s gorgeous, maybe the thing I’m most proud of, publishing-wise. Anyway, back to regularly scheduled book-reviewing soon, but here’s the other side of this stuff.

A Lost + Sentimental Solipsist

I really, really liked Found Magazine when it started—I was just out of college, working at a bookstore, and I heard about it I don’t know where, but I was on it pronto, got the first three issues, loved them more as objects than as collections of things simply because the notion of Found, while great, is basically a gimmick: a magazine of found stuff! On the one hand: awesome—there are some amazing, amazing things they’ve found and posted (the note above, which has now been in my life/world for ten years and still I can’t shake it), and you can easily lose solid chunks of time browsing what must be called detritus (or, at least, someone’s detritus). But what Found also is, and revels in, is a sort of slap-dashy, everything-tells-a-story-man sort of vibe, which (I at least) can get tired by: eventually one has to recognize that notes like the one above are truly amazing, and that’s incredible, and that things like, say, a toad’s skin don’t matter in the same way (the same way meaning, roughly, as an object which hints at a depth of narrative and human feeling). If you’re like me, Found is badass when it does the former and an utter whatever when it does the latter. Unfortunately, of course, much of what they’ve used and posted, by necessity, has to be the latter: there’s just more of it. There simply aren’t that many fucking documents in existence that offer glimpses of real human depth and feeling, or at least not that many lost+found examples of such.

So: Found was, as of pretty early on, something that felt like a thing which was very cool in one very narrow, niche-y way, and to a specific demographic (those young or innocent enough to believe in sort of movie-magic stuff; folks who, like lots of my friends, had very clear notions of dealbreak aspects re: future spouses which, looking back, were deeply [but credulously] silly—nobody should toss out a potential mate because s/he doesn’t have a certain Rolling Stones album, or hasn’t seen a certain Truffaut film, or whatever). That doesn’t diminish it, it’s just that it only offered a small spectrum of sustenance. Here’s why I even bring all that up: Davy Rothbart is the editor and creator of Found Magazine, and he’s been a contributor to This American Life for a good while, and he’s had a book of stories—The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas—published, and he now has a book of essays, My Heart is an Idiot, published as well—it’s out as of last week. Here’s the very very best thing I can say about Rothbart’s writing, and this book: I wanted very much to like it. Also: the moments in the book which truly are an attempt to be about things other than Davy Rothbart himself—those moments are sometimes quite good, and fun to read.

The problem, however—and it’s an overwhelming problem, and I want to be clear from the start that this is maybe the worst book I’ve read in the last couple years, and its badness has everything to do with failing in a very very specific way that I loathe and fear for reasons that’ll become shortly enough plenty clear—is that Rothbart’s My Heart is an Idiot is a book in which Davy Rothbart processes the world, over and over and entirely, through his own consciousness, his own experience. That is all. That is everything (this is also why Found has always, to me, struck me as vaguely creepy: in ordering the ephemera, Rothbart + co can’t help but stamp their narrative, human choices onto the objects, onto the overall story they’re building—that perfect note, pictured above? One needs a sort of wet optimism to see it the way the Found folks want you to; could it not just as easily be a creepy note scribbled by someone stalking someone else? Could each repeated yes actually be about something darker than just an affirmation of the author’s love for this other? Answer to both: of course, it just depends if you want to read the note with your innocence as the chief light to guide you by).

But back to Rothbart and processing the entirety of his experience through his own consciousness: As many of us learn early on, this is called solipsism, and it’s a faith that you are the center of the universe, and that everyone else’s existence is ancillary to yours—everyone’s a supporting cast-member to the drama of your whims and hopes. You might be a solipsist if, for instance, in a story about a young man imprisoned for murder, you twice go out of your way to mention trying, essentially, to get laid, one of which instances happening over a lunch with folks who are interested in helping you help this young man prove his innocence and going as follows: “Lauren…[is] in her early thirties and incredibly, mind-meltingly hot, in a tight black sweater, with long black hair and a mischevious glint in her eye. Throughout our lunch, Lauren kept smiling at me and holding my gaze, making me drunk and dizzy.”

The above example’s from “The Strongest Man in the World,” Rothbart’s essay about Byron Case, an essay which, yes, is fine enough, but which, as if it’s a car he can’t help but crash, Rothbart swerves toward matters of inebriation and sex, twin pillars in the author’s existence in this overwhelmingly juvenile book. Aside from maybe three essays, the rest feature one or both—drinking and/or Rothbart’s pushy pushings toward women—to the point of nauseating the reader, not out of any disgust with the act (I dig the hell out of drinking, and, when I was single and looking for my wife, I very much enjoyed trying to find women to get acquainted with), but out of boredom, repetition. Also, one eventually feels sort of exhaustedly bad for Rothbart—as his interviewer at the Rumpus pointed out, he’s got a fuck of an affinity for women who are always tagged by one of very few adjectives: bewitching, sad, haunted, beautiful, angelic. Any reader, however, quickly picks up that Rothbart’s actually something like casting the women of his life—he literally forces all the women he pursues (with his idiot heart) into the same small mold (regardless of whether they actually fit, and so, along with the creepiness of him always needing women to form to this cookie-cutter romance shit he peddles, there’s the whole lack-of-agency he demands on the part of women, and so the book ends up being, to use his words, mind-meltingly misogynistic in the worst way: dude’s fucking clueless that, far from loving women, he’s fucking using them, over and over, awfully). Here’s the lone sentence about this subject: Rothbart also wants women to save him, to which I can only reply fucking seriously? Really?

Rothbart’s treatment of women, however, is made infinitely worse for the inclusion in My Heart is an Idiot of an essay titled “Shade,” about Rothbart’s obsession with a movie character, and how he fell in love with her, age 18 or something, and how a dozen years later he’s still obsessed with a fiction, and how, in that obsessive love and searching, he forces women to try to be just like this fake woman. Of course Rothbart presents this info, seemingly, in an attempt to verify his capital-R Romantic Cred, but it ends up reading in the essay precisely as it does here: he’s creepy, and he’s shockingly immature. The killer part of “Shade” is that it’s an essay in which Rothbart goes to (too great a) length regarding this mystical attraction to this made-up woman, and then details a romance with a fucking real, live, in-the-flesh woman with whom, through nothing more than calls and letters, he falls in love with (and she him), and they’re talking about marraige and everything else, and he finally goes out and visits her, only to—I’m not at all kidding—not find her attractive enough, and so he begs off, lies, and messes with this young woman’s life out of what amounts to frustration that his cock’s theoretical future home’s not quite the model he wished it was, a ranch instead of a mansion he saw once in a movie. Instead, of course, of actually using such an event as a springboard to fucking growing or realizing his almost innumerable flaws and idiocies, however, Rothbart stays fixated forever on this Shade chick form the movie, ending the essay convinced—I’m not making this up—that an owl which happens to be staring at him is somehow Shade, or her spirit (sure, he says “[T]hat was it for me and Shade. I’ll always love her more than anything, and I can’t help but size up any girl I hang out with and compare her to Shade, but there’s nothing much to be gained by continuing the quest. I won’t find Shade in this lifetime. Shade is dead.” All fine and good. But then the owl shows up, plus note that, somehow, Shade’s both dead and will always be the personage against whom he’ll compare all other girls.)

But wait, you’re saying, what’s wrong with drinking and talking about sex? Especially when the book is called My Heart is an Idiot? So he compares all women to this one movie girl: big deal. We all do that. Surely I should just let this go, right? This is Rothbart being Rothbart, and it’s his book of essays, right? Okay, to a degree. And I know this little frustrated screed’s coming during the tail end of the Summer of Let’s Be Nice, book-wise. But this isn’t a matter of being nice. Rothbart’s My Heart is an Idiot is a terrible read not because he is chronically fucking dumb (chronic dumbness can be fun enough), but because he un-self-awarely chronically fucking dumb, and the guts of his appeal in each of the essays is fundamentally human, emotional not rational: I’m an okay guy, he’s trying to say to you, and all I want is love, and here’s how I try to get it. That’s the rhetorical claim going on, yet not once is Rothbart remotely self-reflective: not once does Rothbart ever stop and say: well, maybe I should not be like this. Maybe I should learn from what are clearly basically chronic mistakes even though—especially though—he won’t call his mistakes mistakes. That girl he fucks over, the one he wants to turn into this movie character named Shade except she’s not pretty enough (her name is Sarah)? He doesn’t regret any of it—for Rothbart, it’s all about the experience, and that’s fine, on its own, except then the issue arises: all his experiences are the same. All of them. He meets girls, obsesses about them, fucks them over or bemoans getting fucked over, drinks too much, meets interesting people, end scene. His life and experiences are, shockingly or not, strikingly parallel to Found itself: ‘random’ ‘cool’ things collected and considered with an almost aggressive naivete and innocence and a total lack of considering other narrative alternatives.

Look, I’m not trying to say that the book fails because it’s trying to be too happy, or that Rothbart himself should somehow get darker or anything. He can do what he likes, obviously. But I do think that a book which is ostensibly about the narrator’s chronically idiotic heart should at some point maybe attempt to address why said cardiac moronity’s transpiring, should attempt to understand it. That’s not what Rothbart’s offering, nor what he’s seemingly interested in offering, and so you’re left wondering whether the collection’s title should feature an exclamation mark: My Heart is an Idiot! Most of us, when we call someone/thing an idiot, mean it negatively, but Rothbart’s out to celebrate idiocy in its innocence and purity. Caveat emptor.

Catching Up

Dreamland by David K Randall

I loved this book, not least because I, like a significant minority, have trouble sleeping. Randall’s got real trouble sleeping (waking up in pain + not in his bed), and his troubles lead him to researching and writing this book which is, as far as I know, the easiest-entry and best primer on sleep that exists. There’s all sorts of fascinating info spilling from this thing—like the fact that, in pre-modern-times (meaning: pre-industrial-revolution), humans slept in two phases each night, with like 60-90 minutes of awake quiet time in the dark in the dead of night, or the fascinating and disturbing stories about folks who unintentionally do very consequential things in their sleep (inflicting physical harm or sexual aggression the two obv biggies)—but ultimately the book’s greatest offering of something like comfort—and it’s thin comfort, sure, but regardless—about the act of sleep itself: nobody fully understands it. Seriously. Randall cops at the start to writing this book because nobody else has yet. Sleep, like memory, is a rich and under-understood aspect of being alive, and if nothing else the book’ll make you thankful that you’re alive at present, simply for the fact that, in all likelihood, these facets of existence’ll be much more thoroughly understood in the coming decades. Signing off with the obvious joke: this book won’t put you to sleep! (thanks, I’ll be here all week).

Things That Are by Amy Leach

Just get and read this book. Start with her essay in the latest Five Dials if you want. I don’t know when I was last this undone by nonfiction. I don’t even know. “Sometimes ostriches start twirling, or running in circles on the sand. To what purpose do they twirl? Who can twig the intricated soul of the pirouetting bird?” Say it again: Who can twig the intricated soul of the pirouetting bird? This collection’s stuffed with such sentences and sentiment: you’re being led through a fascinating natural world that is the one you’re living in but is in all likelihood not the one you’re noticing, day after day. There’s an innocence to Leach’s curiousity…scratch that, that makes it sound like she’s dim or childish. Maybe this: Leach’s willing to risk something like plainness in her attempt to get at the radder, realer, stranger world that’s right there anyway, sitting there within and among the world that lots of us might consider plain. Because who really gives two shits about birds and frogs anyway? And then you read an essay by Leach and go: oh, right. I do.

Inferno, by: Dante Alghieri, drawings by Henrik Drescher, translated by Mary Jo Bang.

I’d never read the thing before, so don’t look to this review for backup re: this version’s fidelity or anything. It’s a gorgeous book + readable as all get-out: I’m not sure if that’s because I dig Bang and believe in her and am therefore much more inclined to follow her wherever she’s going, or what all’s going on. If you haven’t read this book, if you haven’t a copy in the house, get this one.

Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy ed by Alan Licht; The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970′s by Peter Doggett

I was trying to decide, reading each of these books, if they’d be remotely of interest to folks who couldn’t pull up either artist’s work, mentally, and be able to go through it while reading the book. The first book, on Will Oldham and his various personas and musics, is a long interview, and fascinating for all sort of reasons. The Bowie book, however, is a song-by-song look at the man’s output from ’69-80, which is, honestly, a pretty magnificent structural device—one tracks Bowie’s growth and change, while also tracking significant shifts and changes in the world/culture—both the large one and the musical one—merely through Bowie’s reactions. It’s a good, good book–Doggett’s writing is shockingly strong; I’ll now read him writing about *anything*–and its structure should be, I’d argue, used as a model for future books about such protean and multivalent folks like Bowie (and, honestly, Will Oldham), and I’ve decided, finally, on a hesitant no: you don’t need to know Bowie’s or Oldham’s stuff to read these books, but you sure better be prepared for some YouTubing or downloading of each artist’s output during and after your read. For real.

Wallace Forever

I was never as simultaneously excited and sad about a book as I was for Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, DTMax‘s bio of David Foster Wallace, and I’m not remotely alone or unique on this: I was thrilled because it was the first bio of one of my literary heroes, and sad because the bio existed because the man no longer did. I spend so much time here talking about Wallace that I sort of forget that perhaps folks don’t even know who he is, or perhaps folks’ve started to understand him historically—he was some legend. He has after all now been gone four years as of one week from now. But here’s the thing: Wallace was huge and real, and his suicide was the rawest rip. This sounds cheesy, but it gets at something accurately: as soon as the news of his death spread (the story broke on a Friday night), the McSweeney’s website went entirely white (am I remembering this wrong? You could actually scroll down, like the whiteness was of depth and length), and instead of some cute phrase at the top (today’s: Timothy McSweeney takes his cookies straight), I think it just said Timothy McSweeney is brokenhearted or something. Maybe very very sad. The thing that was crucial, though, was the blankness of the page—McSweeney’s, which may be the most obviously in-Wallace’s-debt literary organization in the universe (in good ways, I think), just blank, as if something’d exploded and cast everythign in this huge, awful can’t-look light. Or anyway that’s the way it read to me.

And now it’s been four years, and now there are no more holy-shit essays to amaze us and force us to look at some aspect of the world in a new way, and now there’s likely no more fiction ever and The Pale King will have to be enough, and now the books-about industry for the man cranks to life (this year there’ve been now three; there was another in ’11, I think), and now every last aspect of the life and literary magic of Wallace’s life gets fast-tracked for publication, and we all read it (I’m talking the tiniest, least-consequential things: his senior thesis from Amherst, say), and and and. There’s no end to this. I bring all this up simply because…because Christ, it’s been four years, and this guy who wrote the absolute best stuff of anyone for a decade, he’s gone, and it still fucking sucks.

Which is where Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, by D. T. Max (whom I interviewed for the Kenyon Review Blog) comes in. It’s a book which will do lots of things for or to your insides, good and bad, some of which might include: make you remember how thrilling it was to read Jest in the first place (if you love Wallace for Jest, this bio will be very helpful and good; if you got into Wallace through the essays or stories, you’ll have a harder time: Jest is the only book which, ultimately, stands full straight in this book—every other book, fiction or non, is somehow a compromise; Jest is an Achievement [or at least seems one through all the correspondence Wallace did at the time] the whole way through, even as it was edited for publication); make you suddenly, deeply aware of just how huge was the depression in Wallace’s life (this is especially true if you’re not intimately familiar with clinical depression), and how huge a role the depression and its corresponding anxieties and struggles played in Wallace’s life; and, maybe, make you understand why Wallace was and will likely remain such a singular talent, and why his work is unlikely to be eclipsed in terms of heart or morality by anyone (simply because, as one can discover here, dude just cared about this stuff more than anyone, thought about it all in terms of fiction much more than anyone else I know of).

(Before going further: a piece of correspondence between Wallace and I is in Every Love Story. I wrote to Wallace, like lots of other folks, when I was in my 20s and his work hit and spoke like nothing else (the letter used in the book was one I sent basically immediately after reading Conjunctions 37, in which his “Good Old Neon” debuted and which is, I think, still a piece of fiction unlikely to be eclipsed). I bring up my involvement/inclusion in the book here just to acknowledge it—lots of us exchanged letters with the guys, and as rad as the letters were to get, and as glad as I am to have them, I’d of course burn any of them to have the man back alive, in the flesh, writing and being present for his friends and family.)

So, how is Every Love Story as an actual, you know, book? This is weird. I read the thing in a total of I think 6 hours, and I loved it, and I’m trying really, really hard to be clear with myself about how the actual book was, versus just how I thought and felt about it because of how I feel about the subject. I think this, more than anything else: Wallace was a tricky figure, or at least trickier than any of my friends or I are—there was a multivalent way of stories about the guy, according to Max’s narrative, and he provides plenty of evidence: all those times in interviews Wallace’d talk shit about something like the public perception of him, he’d be hand-wringingly hysteric about the same fact in private letters, as just one example. He lied, or led, anyway, various existences depending on audience. Maybe that was necessary for him. Hard to say. One feels a pain for Big Craig, the guy who was clearly the basis of Gately in Jest. And then one feels a sort of weird pain for having been so certain that Wallace was just inventing all this stuff, and for feeling a bit let down to discover that he wasn’t. And then maybe one feels even weirder about, say, having made such a stink about how much of a prick Richard Yates was—that bio was just merciless about him, that Blake Bailey one—only to here discover that Wallace was a pretty sizeable prick as well, and used just as much bio info in his stuff, in his way, as did poor old Yates.

So I guess what I’d like to say more than anything about Every Love Story is that it complicates the hell out of Wallace. The correspondence between he and I that’s in the book is about how one keeps doing work and believing in shit when the overwhelming evidence is that such pursuits are silly, fruitless, etc., and his response was: “This is like listening to a transcript of my own mind.” In the interview with DT Max, there was a line I didn’t include, which was this: he asked, during our phone conversation, how I felt when I got that letter from Wallace, and I told Max that I felt weirdly sort of let down. Wallace was basically just assenting to and agreeing with what I’d written in my letter, and I was 24 then, and I wanted someone to say IT GETS TOTALLY DIFFERENT LATER DON’T WORRY. But the truth was that I didn’t feel let down by the letter, or maybe I felt a little of that, but, as much as anything, I was thrilled that he said my letter to him was like a transcript of his own head. I was thrilled! My head and his head were alike! It was perfect. And I guess ultimately what Every Love Story is a Ghost Story makes any of us think is this: if we’ve fallen for Wallace, it’s because of his perfect, wonderful voice that made you feel like he was right there, smart and beside you, making you smarter, making you feel intimate, unalone. And I remember thinking, almost a decade ago, that something like that’d be a good goal, and what fun that’d be to write like that. And I suppose there’s still that enticement, to a degree, but Every Love Story makes shatteringly clear not just the cost of such effort on the part of Wallace, but also the reasons for his reaching out like that—his desire to make life be something bigger than just little games of showing off, being smart, whatever. What Every Love Story makes terribly, excruciatingly clear is how hard Wallace had to work to make his spark-casting genius secondary to his heart. Such an effort is, when you think about it, fucking incredible, and if you’re like me you’ll finish Every Love Story sniffling because of how unlikely it seems that such a combo of strength and frailty and genius and fear will come around again any time soon, and how lonesome it is without Wallace’s voice.

Other New Thing: (0,0)

For anyone who’s tracking this stuff, the second of my 3 chapbooks to hit this fall just did, and it’s at the fantastic Floating Wolf Quarterly (edited by Christopher Louvet), and it’s called (0,0) and is available here. The way FWQ works, by the by, is that less-known poets and well-known ones drop simultaneous chaps, and I had the lucky thrill + honor of having mine be released simultaneously with Bob Hicok’s Exuberance, which is, like all of Hicok’s stuff, 100% badass and amazing.

That’s all for now. New Kenyon Review blogpost–an interview with Ed Falco re his book The Family Corleone–here.

Swimming Studies + Crucibles of Youth + Young Adulthood

I thought Leanne Shaption’s Important Artifacts was the best book of 2009 by quite a margin—the most interesting and strange and lovely book imaginable, a narrative with such a deftly sure but light touch I can still (and likely will forever) remember sitting in bed on a January morning (this was in Virginia, and the day was sunny, and it was I think a Saturday) reading the thing in a spellbound fit of massive gratitude and gladness. It was, in more ways than I can here articulate, a necessary book, something that helped me put my feet back on something like the correct path after reading it. The thing’s a stunner.

So imagine the thrill on finding out Shapton’d written Swimming Studies, out from the recent-+-amazing Blue Rider Press (they’re releasing the next Jean Thompson, folks! what’s not to love?!), and that, unlike Important Artifacts, which is a fiction done in the style of an auction house’s catalog (pictures, descriptions of the lots, everything arranged in the chronology of a relationship…Lord, just writing this stuff makes me want to go back and read the thing again—please, seriously, read this book if you haven’t), unlike that, Swimming Studies is a straight (basically) nonfiction account of Shapton’s life and career as a competitive swimmer—she came close to making the Canadian Olympic team in ’88 + ’92. That, however, is a sort of obtusely unfair way to categorize Swimming Studies. Here’s (I’ll claim) the best way to understand the book: Shapton, through her youth, put a lot of her energy and goals and dreams into swimming, or at least braided those aspects of her own life into swimming. And then, having reached the finitude of what she could as a swimmer (meaning almost but not there, though Shapton’s never this maudlin or whatever in the book), swimming receded for her. Or that’s not even it, either: it just sort of ghosts, I guess. That, at least, is what it felt like for me. But so regardless: what you can do is when you look at Swimming Studies, the title, you can sub in the word from your own youth and young-adulthood (guitar, perhaps, or poetry, or chess team), or you can go ahead and sub in the word Ghost. Or maybe even Longing.

Because what Shapton’s truly doing in Swimming Studies is something like locating or contextualizing this ardent pursuit and passion from her past. It’s not, in the book, that she doesn’t like swimming anymore, but that she no longer has the relationship to it that she did before—this longed-for, hard-fought-for thing (waking up at mad hours, eating crazy meals, abjuring all sorts of social aspects), and that she somehow was almost rejected by swimming. She makes clear she had her own reservations about racing in ’92—she had, in fact, quit briefly after ’88, or tried. It’s all real complicated, and I’ll just note that the woman takes a whole mess of pages to try to articulate somehting coming even close to stating what her relationship is now with swimming—summing such a thing up here is ridiculous (Garner’s NYTimes review touches on some of this stuff, but honestly it’s just hard to get your head around it unless 1) you read the whole book, which you should, or 2) you yourself have had something in your life that was, for a long time, something you defined your time and energy because of and around, and now do not [relationships don’t quite work in this context, simply because that’s just life—most of us will try to be in relationships, and most of us will have at least one colossal fuck-up of a relationship; Swimming Studies will make sense to you if, say, you were deeply, deeply into, say, math, and you were talented and gifted at it, and encouraged to major in it, but then, once at college, you realized that the study of it offered no joy at all, despite the fact that you used to be captain of the math team in high school, and you used to actually just love doing algebra for fun, just walking around).

So there’s all that about swimming in Swimming Studies, and it’d be a good enough book if that’s all it was doing, if it was really just trying to focus on how it feels to be an adult and to look back at the massive mountain one ground one’s youth against, climbingly, but what Swimming Studies also does is try to articulate something about swimming itself, and the kinship between aesthetic and athletic pursuits, and, most profoundly to me anyway, the book deals quite a bit with fracture and solitude—with the actual sensate stuff of what obsession feels like, from the inside, the sort of blink-brief glipses one gathers of the world when one’s deeply involved in _____, be it swimming or math or making ice sculptures—any practice which demands the max limits of our own attention and concern.

Last, Swimming Studies is fascinating writing. Garner’s right: there’s lots of poetry here, but there is also, in I think more compelling ways than I’ve seen elsewhere, a level of well-chosen vignettes that, together, make for a cohesive whole which has its own sort of absence and ache. This is hard to articulate. Here’s an example, and perhaps timely as well: some of Cat Power’s very very best stuff are songs which are very very thin, intstrument wise—her and maybe one or two other things—and the songs seems full of absence, the nothing that is of Stevens or whatever (I’ve ended up, in classes, using the phrase generative nothingness, which sort of works, but not perfectly, in this case). What I mean here is that some of the chapters of Swimming Studies will end up feeling oddly oblique, or as if they’ve only a glancing significance to the overall work, yet what Shapton creates in this sort of not-what-you-expected conglomeration of moments is a book that resonates more loudly for such choices. Here’s what I mean: toward the end, Shapton uses the line “I put the longing in belonging.” If it sounds silly or whatever here, out of context, that’s fine, but the twin pulls of the line—one part total ache, one part total comfort—are the two big lights spotlighting Swimming Studies throughout. Get the thing and read the thing. Shapton’s even more For Real than you believed.

Get in on it: Cheryl Strayed, Dear Sugar, etc.

Unless you’re living under a rock you know about Cheryl Strayed. Maybe, like me, you first found her name in this NYTimes review of her memoir Wild (because Garner is magic, and for at least this reader what he Says by and large Goes—dude’s got my number), or maybe you were aware, if only faintly, that there was this column going at the Rumpus called Dear Sugar, and that the fucking thing seemed to be tracking with every damn reader and writer you knew. Maybe this was just me. Dear Sugar really did seem everywhere for a bit, and what it was was an anonymous advice column, and so of course part of the thing’s appeal was the annonymity (in the same way, at least for me, this xTx person’s fascinating, whoever she is), but the bigger reason for Wild‘s and Dear Sugar‘s success is the same as xTx’s success: the writing’s fucking great. Here’s a paragraph at random from Wild: “I stood up when a small beat-up pickup truck packed full of people rounded the bend. It had Oregon plates. It drove straight up to us and screeched to a sudden stop a few feet away. Before the driver had even turned the engine off, the seven people and two dogs in the truck started leaping out. Ragtag and grubby, dressed in high hippy regalia, these people were unquestionably members of the Rainbow Tribe. Even the dogs were discreetly funked out in bandannas and beads. I reached to touch their furry backs as they darted past me and into the weeds.” (p. 226).

            What’s stilted and unfun about pulling quotes for book reviews is, of course, that any quote never does justice to the actual experience of reading the thing. Is the writing above glorious, rhythmically alive, sensual enough to draw the reader? I’d argue yes (as would, it should be noted, Oprah). But here’s the thing: one cannot appreciate the value and glory of Wild without breaking down and reading the whole thing, because—and I’m not mad about memoirs, not by a stretch—for the first time in a long time here is a memoir to which such words as redemptive may be applied. Such words as maybe even wise. That word, especially, seems worth considering regarding Strayed, and let’s take just a second with it.

(And I should be clear: though I’m from MN and a booster of all things MN and Midwest, and even though Strayed was there for parts of Wild‘s narrative, I don’t like her just for that reason, though it’s fair to wonder if that’s enough for me to hype the thing).

I’m about to dive back into teaching—school starts in roughly 100 or so hours from right this moment (though between me and students lies a glorious weekend and, awesomely, a BDylan concert [I know, he's not some dazzler live; I've seen him before, but one must see mythic legends while one can]) and I would guess lots of us who teach are confronted each fall with questions about utility and value regarding syllabi and our classes. Because it’s hard: I can get as pumped about fiction or poetry or whatever as I want, but, ultimately, I have to at least attempt to wrestle with the question of why is this stuff important, why someone should bother learning to read lit, to do stuff that’s ultimately not just not useful but might be considered anti-useful. And as I’ve aged I’ve become more and more convinced that the value of this stuff, of the study or practice of literature, is about empathy: art makes our insides softer, makes us more receptive to and of each other. It’s a neat trick. Lots of us, I’d guess, haven’t even noticed it happening as we’ve read our twenties or whatever away.

            This inner-softening is the most glorious thing about Strayed’s writing, and it shines hardest and brightest and sharpest in Tiny Beautiful Things, the collection of Dear Sugar writing (I can think, for the record, of exactly one other book of advice columns anyone should purchase). Because Strayed–as this unknown Sugar–absolutely exposed herself to these folks with their quesitons, and the resulting writing is lovely, but the resulting emotion—the feel of Strayed reaching out—is just transfixing. I’m not at all kidding: one of the most beautiful and moving descriptions of open, loving communication occurs in the column in which Sugar addresses a reader who happened onto her boyfriend in her panties. Sugar/Strayed’s response is as wise and empathetic as anything I’ve ever seen. She’s dazzling. There are, of course (at least for this reader) all sorts of questions raised about her willingness or ability to so expose herself because of the cushion of anonymity; that fact or aspect doesn’t change how great it all is, but it’s interesting that she was able to go so far and deep, and it’s hard not to wonder if that was possible because Google searches of her name weren’t bound to multiply exponentially in the immediate aftermath of the columns being posted. Again, this isn’t any sort of dig; if anything, it’s the opposite: Cheryl Strayed, with Dear Sugar, may have unintentionally reminded everyone of the tremendous power of anonymity, of shelving the burden of self and being able to just open up to others. Regardless: you need to read this woman. Asap.