the green notebook :

For further excerpts of this current and ongoing work-in-progress, check out my enormously clever substack . [note: I've been out of the boot for at least two weeks now,]

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Father’sDay, I slip rushing up stairs and mangle the big toe on my right foot. Isuspect I may have broken it. I have broken my foot. I cancel a reading I wasto do in Picton this week, given it would have meant a solo three-plus hourdrive each way. I am very sore, and rather irritated: the frustrations ofcancelling a reading at all, let alone one so close to the date.

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Semi-trappedat my desk, the site formerly known as Twitter provides me with an introductionto the work of Brazilian novelist and translator Victor Heringer (1988-2018)through the online journal grand: The Journal of One Grand Books. Ishould be working on final proofs for On Beauty, but I am caught uphere, instead. Heringer’s piece, “THE WALL AGAINST DEATH,” provides this asintroduction: “The late Victor Heringer authored the following crônica, aliterary hybrid form of personal essay and cultural criticism popular inBrazil, four years before his death in 2018. Here it is available in Englishfor the first time, translated by James Young.” There are echoes between thenameless form of this particular notebook and Heringer’s crônica, echoes ofRobert Creeley’s A Day Book (1972), all the ways through which writingand writers work through their thinking across a particular 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. Andso, 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 thatcould, and even should, have taken her out multiple times across thoseforty-three difficult years. I need to do these things now, I thought, atseventeen, 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 howthis pushed Jim’s future and ongoing creative endeavors. Is there ever enoughtime to 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 few days later) stayedwith me. If at first I considered the gesture (all graffiti is a gesture, andDuchampian) a little inelegant, today I find it inelegant but a littlefascinating (above all because it was defeated, erased). Why such a stridentproclamation of a desire for transcendence?

Froman earlier draft of Christine’s Toxemia (2024): “Every body survivessomething. Or they don’t.”