I am not being long-winded. I am cutting and pasting
dangerously.
*
Here is what I wrote
about Eric LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing
from Emergency Press in an essay in a collection I’m writing about finding
beauty in the gutter:
I woke up this morning,
having gone to sleep thinking about some lines Eric Lemay wrote in his book,
“In Praise of Nothing.” He’s writing about returning to Ohio as now-married
man, having grown up in this town in Ohio (Athens?) but had moved to New York
for a decade or so. The essay is about how he feels like two people at once,
or, rather, feels as if his old self was never interrupted. That his old life
and his current life are parallels, nearly one-in-the-same, but different
because he observes both selves as if from outer space. He witnesses his past
life and his current life from a dissociated distance. “Every time we went [to
the lake] I wondered if I’d entered that pattern, if I was my younger self or
the self in my swimsuit.” But that sense of dislocation, of dissociation falls
apart when a thunderstorm hits at the lake he visited in his past life, at the
lake he is visiting in his current life.
One
afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came up. It was like
a message from a far-off country that I’d once lived in and left for good. The
momentous feeling that arrives with an electrical disturbance over a lake in
America hasn’t changed in any important respect. This was the sublimes, still
the sublime. The whole thing was overwhelming, the overcast clouds that rolled
in and the general worry on the beach about whether it’d rain. Then before long
(there was no question now) a dark greening of the sky, and a lull in
everything that has made life tick; and then the way the leaves suddenly turned
up and showed their silver sides with the coming of a breeze across the water,
and the premonitory rumble (67).
There is no more
wondering who is who. The essay ends with LeMay saying, “suddenly I felt the
joy of my youth.”
In the feeling, in the moment, in the beauty of those
leaves-turned-silver, the fractured self comes together in one trembling,
unified mass. It didn’t matter if it was the LeMay or any other book or
painting or actual silver shimmering. What mattered was the notice.
*
I already wrote here
about Zoologies, but here’s something
I wrote in an essay about “Fiction Is Just Nonfiction That Hasn’t Happened Yet”
Are
dreams nonfiction? In Alison Hawthorne Deming’s collection of essays, Zoologies, she intersperses dreams
between her experience and research driven essays on animals. The experiential
essays attempt to hold still the rapidly decaying world, even rejoicing in the
crush of beauty against annihilation. But every six or seven essays, Deming
will dip into a dream.
I recently dreamed of a woman who was
holding a cougar kitten in her arms, its head resting beside her cheek, as a
mother would carry and comfort a human baby with unbridled tenderness. She was
a no-nonsense woman with close-cropped hair and khaki clothes, the kind of
woman who might show up on television to introduce zoo animals to a populations
starving for animal beauty. In the dream a group of friends or colleagues were
in the room. Some were surprised to see a cougar in their midst. Another said,
Oh, yes, they walk through this yard all the time. Another replied, Well, sure,
but you know they’re endangered. The woman cuddling the cougar said, I don’t
think I will miss them when they are gone. The dissonance between her actions
and her words woke me from the dream. I wasn’t angry at her and I did not judge
her for the statement. I knew her life was full of many concerns that took
precedence over imagining such a loss and holding it close (Zoologies 88).
She renders this dream-scape so
realistically, so representatively, so mimetically. The dream, a cluster of
paradoxes and inconsistencies, tragedies and sentimentalities, doesn’t make
sense. But the scene makes sense. You can picture the woman. You can picture
the cougar. The dream is where the real stakes are best represented. In other
essays, Deming uses equally precise and illustrative language but it’s the
wildness of the dreams that require a focus so tight that the wildness of the
dream is made tame. Is it nonfiction? Maybe. The dream is at least rendered
true. The language and syntax is that of organized narrative. The dream, and
what’s at stake in the dream, cannot risk being unseen. So she turns what might
have been a paratactic dream, using hypotactic sentences, into a cinematic
scene. She evokes the television. She makes sure her reader is sure to see it.
*
This Are the Tweets I
tweeted about Ander Monson’s Letter to a Future Lover in backwards order—which I just started so
have only tweeted bits from early on in the book:
(Last one for tonight). "Still, I want
to know your name, what makes you go, why you play this strange."
"The Defacer" @angermonsoon
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of them. To be a deer is to be infested. To
be a dear is to be infested by another, to be written to, to be addressed,
to... @angermonsoon
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"Everything is a carrier. Like words,
most deer, whether farmed or wild, cay parasites, echoes of meaning and
memory..... @angermonsoon
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*
This is what I wrote
about BJ Hollars Dispatches from the Drowning in an upcoming review in Diagram:
And that’s the question
that propelled me through the entire book. If, in nonfiction, we’re not
scouring for fact, not trying to decide what details are accurate and what
invented, then why read? Or, then, does one turn on one’s fiction brain and
read for plot and character? Hollars already admitted you will find sustained
versions of neither here.
*
These are the books upon
which I haven’t written but hope to next year:
T. Clutch Fleischmann’s Syzygy on shadows, light and
extra-curricular dating.
Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost on food, obsession,
and wanting to touch stuff you probably shouldn’t touch.
Eula Biss’s On Immunity which is an excellent book
but not very genre bending which is fine but strange to me that it’s not.
Still, I loved this book for its research and its careful polemic and its very
gorgeous writing. Maybe the excellence of those three things make it a hybrid?
Justin Hocking’s The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld
for its water-wise obsession and its wondrously well-woven whales.
Dinah Lenney's The Object Parade for its synecdoche and its metonym.
Barrie Jean Borich's Body Geographic for its maps and its love songs.
*
What I’m looking forward
to reading next year:
Steven Church’s Ultrasonic
Ned Stuckey-French’s The American Essay in the American Century
Jill Talbot’s The Way We Weren’t forthcoming from
Counterpoint.
John Gallaher’s In A Landscape which is supposedly
poetry but I would like to read it as both essay and poem.
William Bradley’s Fractals from Lavender Ink Press.
Patrick Madden and David
Lazar’s After Montaigne (in which I
have an essay but haven’t read the other essayists’ essays).
Andy Fitch’s Sixty Morning Walks from Ugly Duckling
Presse.
And all the books listed
here that I haven’t read yet!
NICOLE WALKER’s Quench Your Thirst with Salt won the Zone
3 Award for Creative Nonfiction and was released in June 2013. She is the
author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street 2010) and edited, with Margot
Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, (Bloomsbury, 2013) and with Rebecca
Campbell—7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s
Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from
the National Endowment from the Arts, she’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and
Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona where
it rains like the Pacific Northwest, but only in July.
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