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As I Stand Living

Christopher Higgs (Goodreads Author)

4.86 · Rating details · 7 ratings · 2 reviews

In his radical memoir, As I Stand Living, Christopher Higgs uses the constraint based techniques William Faulkner employed for the construction of As I Lay Dying to create a deeply personal and philosophical portrait of the year he became a father. Blending elements of fantasy and confession, Higgs confronts parenthood by divulging his most intimate fears, secrets, sorrows In his radical memoir, As I Stand Living, Christopher Higgs uses the constraint based techniques William Faulkner employed for the construction of As I Lay Dying to create a deeply personal and philosophical portrait of the year he became a father. Blending elements of fantasy and confession, Higgs confronts parenthood by divulging his most intimate fears, secrets, sorrows, and hopes as a writer, husband, and teacher. A methodically composed and paradoxical blend of inextricably vulnerable emotion and objective fascination, As I Stand Living renders visible the tension between mediation and transparency when attempting to represent, capture, and convey a lived experience on the cusp of its future.

“Fuck understanding,” Christopher Higgs writes in his yearlong project, “live in confusion.” For Higgs, the self is not so much a mystery as an opinionated porosity. Things tumble into it—junk food, poetry, family, career, mass culture—while time is tracked by tiny rises (and on a bad day, dips) in the number of Higgs’s Twitter followers. Though purposely artless, Higgs offers some stunning passages, such as an extended rant about his probable deaths, which makes the ground of reality tremble. Simultaneously superficial and profound—like all worthwhile books—As I Stand Living is a highly-relatable manifesto against relatability.
— DODIE BELLAMY, author of When the Sick Rule the World and The TV Sutras

As its title might suggest, Christopher Higgs’s As I Stand Living takes a couple of cues from Faulkner, including the constraint under which it was written. But Higgs takes the narrative of this self-described “radical memoir” to some decidedly non-Faulknerian places, including ruminations on the LA Lakers’ playoff chances, black metal, the role of experimental poetry in life, and the fantasy epics of Terry Goodkind. The big questions of life sneak up on you as you read it, from the role of art in life to the experience of parenthood. Out of the smallest details can come revelations.
— TOBIAS CARROLL, author of Reel and Transitory

In As I Stand Living, Christopher Higgs vitalizes the memoir with irreverent intelligence and savage emotion, an emotion that preys on insecurity as much as desire, truly human emotion—cerebral and untamed. This book is a gift of hope in a dreadful time, an equal distribution of sorrow and glee.
— LILY HOANG, author of A Bestiary

In this age of the total digital equalization of every conceivable register of human experience, As I Stand Living is exemplary: the Lakers’ current standing in the playoff hunt is presented to the reader as no more or less worthy of authorial interest and documentation than a theorization of kitsch or a quick note about what the author had for dinner or updates on his academic job search. What is referred to as a “constraint” in reference to modeling the book’s composition on Faulkner’s method turns out to be truly liberating; with no plan, no map, no preconceptions, the book rushes headlong toward its own unknowable future. Along the way, Higgs dispenses with the pleasantries and strictures and familiar contrivances of narrative nonfiction for the sake of something true and honest and brazen: he allows the book to exist in its affirmative, differential, nomadic state—the state of pure becoming.
— EVAN LAVENDER-SMITH, author of Avatar ...more

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Paperback, 146 pages

Published February 22nd 2017 by Civil Coping Mechanisms

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Mar 20, 2017 BHodges rated it it was amazing

Christopher Higgs says he isn't much into irony. I believe him when he says that, so his new book "As I Stand Living" must be unintentionally ironic. I think it's ironic because his opinions about art and literature—the theory he presumably teaches his English students at California State University, Northridge—fly in the face of the book he spent a year writing. Consider this bold declaration from AISL:

"The connection between an art maker and an artwork is irrelevant. The only thing that matte Christopher Higgs says he isn't much into irony. I believe him when he says that, so his new book "As I Stand Living" must be unintentionally ironic. I think it's ironic because his opinions about art and literature—the theory he presumably teaches his English students at California State University, Northridge—fly in the face of the book he spent a year writing. Consider this bold declaration from AISL:

"The connection between an art maker and an artwork is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the relationship between the viewer and the artwork" (38).

Although he's talking specifically about visual art there, the same beliefs pop up in his scattered discussions of literature. To an online critic of his he writes: "Your odd fixation on authorial intention requires you to believe I have an intention, that if you look beyond what is written and interpret it correctly you will uncover my ideas and my motives and my meanings. How terribly presumptuous!" (64)

That's the irony. The book itself—Higgs's latest creative project—often discusses his own motives for writing, invites the reader to think about what Higgs is thinking about, uncovers his ideas and motives and meanings, and in its intimacy, establishes a relationship between the art maker and the reader. See how—

The book is like a personal journal, a stream of consciousness Higgs recorded over the course of a year between October 25, 2012 and October 25, 2013. The title is a play on Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which inspired the experiment. Higgs notes what he was reading, listening to, watching, thinking, doing, not doing. You see his insecurities, his boredom, regrets, frustration, sometimes without a scene attached and sometimes with. The shortest entries consist merely of the time of day he wrote the time of day. ("It's 12:37 AM" on page 126. Although he doesn't number the entries or demarcate them from each other, so paragraph breaks may or may not signify a new entry on any given page.) You learn accidentally that Higgs thinks 12PM is midnight (a repeated error), or about the weird meals he consumes, or about random Los Angeles Lakers updates, but you don't learn about the actual birth of his son. Occasional entries discuss the forthcoming son and later entries lovingly describe the present son (I love the entry on his son's AKA's, which said so much that resonated with me without saying much at all).

As I read AISL I couldn't help but to consider the connection between the author and the work itself—even though Higgs would hate that—because he repeatedly talks about it, and because, in a way, I think the very book itself consists precisely of that relationship. And if Higgs meant to do that ironically I'm pretty sure he would've said so in the book.

For whatever reason, I found the book compulsively readable. Maybe it was voyeur in me. Maybe it was because it made me google a bunch of stuff I never would have googled. Maybe it was because experiencing another human in Polaroid fashion, seeing time fly by, makes the mundane exhilarating. Maybe it was because I just wanted to know there was a book in the world that said something as recognizable but never otherwise noted as this:

"I have my headphones in my left ear, but I am listening to nothing" (123). ...more

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Mar 15, 2017 JD Andrews rated it it was amazing

I enjoyed this book. I found myself slowing down toward the end to baby it. At one point I had Christopher's voice in my head for a day. I enjoyed looking into the pop culture references. Many times I would stop and open up Youtube to see for myself what he was talking about. I look forward to reading more from him in the future.
-JD ...more

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About Christopher Higgs

Christopher Higgs

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(b. 1978) in Kansas, grew up in Wyoming, went to film school in Las Vegas, worked in the film industry in Los Angeles, volunteered for the Peace Corps in West Africa, received MA in English from the University of Nebraska, received MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University, received PhD in Post-1900 American Literature & Culture from Florida State University.

Author: The Complete Work ...more