Marcus/Dylan and Wings for Purchase

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings by Kim Dana Kupperman

 

Though I certainly like my share of nonfiction work, it's rare that I read collections of essays by single authors. I'll make the obvious exception for McPhee and would when Wallace dropped his, but, honestly, single-author collection of essays just haven't seemed to hold, at least to me. (for those who read them: what've been good ones? Was Lethem's? Franzen's back years ago was eh, and Chabon's seems okay; Zadie Smith's was great–I'll take it back, that's the last one I read and loved–but even that wasn't just general, it was a series of essays on books, there was a through-thread tugging that thing).

Anyway, hi. Here's what happened: I got this book way back, set it aside, and then, a month ago, was hankering to read something and wasn't thrilled with what was in front of me, so I grabbed this and holy shit did it grab back. Here's the sort of writing one confronts:

 

"We both knew that nothing was really wrong, nor was anything really right, which described as well the state of our deteriorating friendship. And we understood the known-yet-unknown state of affairs as if we had a fused consciousness and it was this manner of understanding that had drawn Irina and me together in the first place. This merged thinking would also drive us apart, as if there weren't enough space in the same perception for both of us."

 

A note: the book's subtitle is Missives from the Other Side of Silence, and while I'd like to offer some song+dance about what the book's about or what connects it or whatever, that blipped smidgen above is actually a good guide: what the book offers is Kupperman, is a woman who has a Full Self (more on that in a second), is a woman who wants to put herself against life's side in various locales and, if not understand it, at least hear the keyest pulsing. And so Kupperman talks about her mother through a recollection of the woman cleaning house and passing on the phrase Beauty hurts, and so she talks about her grandmother who lied about the place of her birth, and she talks about going to Russia and traveling through, trying to make some sense of one tributary of her heritage, and so she talks about airports and emergency levels, about domestic shelters and desire. This may or may not sound riveting, but I promise it's all riveting because of Kupperman—not because of her voice, but because of her person.

This is that thing about the Full Self. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but one of the reason I assume I don't tend toward essay collections is because, often enough, single essays can sometimes feel coy, back-turned, withheld, ironic—there's an I'm-coming-clean sense that's so hyped (by clues great and small in the text) that I can't believe it, or, worse, I believe the impulse for coming clean's more important than the coming clean. Not so with Kupperman: she's incredibly straight on the page, and by straight I mean riveting and aware and unironic and unafraid to be sincere and serious, and holy hell is this a fine, fine book. Fine enough to convince me of the goodness of a whole type of book I've been overlooking for awhile now.

 

Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus by Greil Marcus

 

Good god, speaking of Full Selves. What's to say about this book? That you're a fool not to read it, automatically, because it's Marcus? That this is 2010′s second amazing Dylan book (hello S. Wilenz's Dyan in America)? That that old line, about how if horses didn't exist humans would've invented them, applies to Dylan and Marcus, too? The fact that this book's content's been drawn from smidgens and bits stretched across decades is both a positive and a negative—the reading can sometimes be too quick, the discrete bits of info like the point at which a skipped pebble and lake meet, but the book's massive, and it becomes, page after page, accretive through speed. It's a both thing, the brevity and pace.

And Dylan! Good lord. A group of friends and I list our top 10 records at each year's end, and I've included Dylan when he's released he's last few albums, and holy shit, reading this book you can't help but be stunned with wonder that this man's done what he's done. If there's any sorrow available in/through/from this book, it's because of this: who knows how long it'll be till someone like Dylan bothers opening wide again, how many generations.