from "the green notebook,"
Here’sa section of a work-in-progress I’ve been composing since April, a kind of “daybook,” if you will. Other fragments have been appearing over at my substack, also. -- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Semi-trappedat my desk with boot upon broken foot, the site formerly known as Twitterprovides me with an introduction to the work of Brazilian novelist andtranslator Victor Heringer (1988-2018) through the online journal grand: The Journal of One Grand Books. I should be working on final proofs for On Beauty, but I am caught up here, instead. Heringer’s piece, “THE WALL AGAINST DEATH,” provides this as introduction: “The late Victor Heringerauthored the following crônica, a literary hybrid form of personal essay andcultural criticism popular in Brazil, four years before his death in 2018. Hereit is available in English for the first time, translated by James Young.” Thereare echoes between the nameless form of this particular notebook and Heringer’scrônica, echoes of Robert Creeley’s A Day Book (1972), all the waysthrough which writing and writers work through their thinking across aparticular blend of critical, lyric hybrid. We are not so divided, after all,however unique.
Wikipediaoffers that “Crônica or crónica is a Portuguese-language form of short writingsabout daily topics, published in newspaper or magazine columns. Crônicas areusually written in an informal, observational and sometimes humorous tone, asin an intimate conversation between writer and reader. Writers of crônicas arecalled cronistas.” I very much like the idea of that, the “intimateconversation between writer and reader,” echoing back to Robert Kroetsch’smantra of all literature as part of a much larger polyphonic conversation. And so,Heringer wrote against death, which the translation provides for him,posthumously. In that, as well. Isn’t that what we’re all doing? The push in myown writing and writing life, raised by a mother with a long-term illness that could,and even should, have taken her out multiple times across those forty-three difficultyears. I need to do these things now, I thought, at seventeen, twenty-one,twenty-seven. I don’t know how much time I might have.
RonHoward’s new Jim Henson documentary, Idea Man (2024), references a youngJim devastated by the death of his beloved brother, and the suggestion of how thispushed Jim’s future and ongoing creative endeavors. Is there ever enough timeto do all the things? As Heringer, through Young’s translation, writes:
The clearly visible,upper case letters of “I defeated death” (which, ironically, were erased a fewdays later) stayed with me. If at first I considered the gesture (all graffitiis a gesture, and Duchampian) a little inelegant, today I find it inelegant buta little fascinating (above all because it was defeated, erased). Why such astrident proclamation of a desire for transcendence?
Froman earlier draft of Christine’s Toxemia (2024): “Every body survivessomething. Or they don’t.”
