John Proctor on listening to Steven Church's Ultrasonic

“In this book, essays become sounding lines, explorations, probes and tests, each one a map of what lies below the surface; and the form is meant to mimic the way our thinking sometimes moves between points of engagement—navigating in the dark by means of echolocation, bouncing from one idea to another, searching and seeing through sound.” 

Author’s Note to Ultrasonic

I’ve always wanted, though I didn’t always know I wanted, to write more like a song than a story. I’m tempted to say Steven Church does this, but on second thought this explanation might be looking at these essays from the wrong end of the earpiece: I think he writes like I listen to a song.

Take, for example, “Seven Fathoms Down.” This might be the essay that most thoroughly elucidates Church’s note on his technique for these essays. In seven parts, each ostensibly going deeper into Church’s mind as it circles its subject(s)—which might be the derivation of the word “cockle,” or sound-based synesthesis, or the life cycle of the catfish, or the word “fathom” itself—Church comes to a realization of sorts as his “subject,” a drowned boy Church saw dredged from the bottom of a lake in his childhood, is just beginning to resound:

I believe most of us are fishing for ghosts—those spectral ideas about life and death that hover at the edge of our consciousness or just beneath the surface of our waking life. Sight promises knowledge; but perhaps it’s only by closing our eyes and listening, by echo-navigating through the landscape of memory that we can explore the unseen terrain below.

I hear—I mean read—sentences like this, and the sensation is a lot like the one I get singing along to my favorite songs: the words, at that moment at least, are mine. I might even steal them, paraphrase them, forget who originally wrote them, but they will continue to resound in my own voice.

*

That thing about always wanting to write like a song? Not entirely true. When I started calling myself a writer, I thought of the word as synonymous with storyteller. And when I started calling myself a nonfiction writer, I wanted to shoehorn this newish conception of myself into the rules (as I saw them) of storytelling—progress, conflict, rising action, resolution. But the essays found myself loving are different. They circle or weave, or go for walks or stand in place. They do flips between literal and figurative, concrete and allegorical, small human and humanity-at-large. Whereas telling a story, to paraphrase Nabokov, is essentially a process of world-making, essaying is a process of weaving oneself into the existing world.

In “It Begins with a Knock at the Door,” by far the most overtly narrative piece in Ultrasonic, Church essays this weaving of himself into the lives of his neighbors while also calling himself on his moves, both as a person and as a writer:

[I] knew nothing of these people as real people. [I] only imagined, speculated, predicted what couldn’t be predicted about them as characters…They needed [my] help not because [I] was funny or good at storytelling, certainly not because they need [my] sympathy or jokes or essays, but because [I] was big enough to pull Larry out of a bathtub.

…

I didn’t want the story to end this way. When I told it later to friends or family I often didn’t get this far, never making it to the part where there is no easy resolution, or where the resolution seems all too predictable and sad…We all wanted to believe that everything was the same, believe that the story never changed and was always funny and weird and safe…We all enjoyed the luxury of humorous distance.

…

…[B]ut I had no control over this scene or the larger story, no agency through imagination, because it was all impossibly, uncontrollably, and tragically true.

To me, as an essayist and a lover of essays, these asides from the story, these refrains from the action and the plot, are more engrossing than the story itself, perhaps because, in talking to himself, Church is letting me in on his process of mythmaking, his role in the creation of the story he tells on the page and the one he tells and retells out loud. I think of my own stories, and the differences between the way I tell them to friends who share a part in them, or to students to elucidate a point, or to strangers in writing.

I spent my childhood thinking both myth and song sprung forth from a mysterious part of someone else—never myself—and that was part of the joy I took in them: the aura of other people’s experience. In pulling himself out of the process, in establishing his own culpability in the straining of truth into personal mythology, Church does something that I find very hard to do as a writer: he is critic of his own story, even in the process of telling it.

*

I’ve been trying for years to locate the person who said, and of course I’m paraphrasing, Writers write to stop time. Maybe it was Frank Conroy—that would make such perfect sense—though I’ve for years attributed it in my mind to Bob Dylan. In any case, many of Church’s Ultrasonic essays don’t just stop time, they romp through it. The most obvious example is probably “Auscultation,” an essay divided not into parts but into chambers, sending its narrative threads—the invention and development of the stethoscope, the entrapment of miners in a coal mine shaft in Utah in 2007, the fetal development of Church’s daughter—pulsing through them.

The development and birth of Church’s daughter in fact could be cited as one of the main narrative threads—or perhaps chords?—connecting many of the essays within the book’s covers. A father of two girls, I found myself humming the universal refrain of worry, circumspection, and paradigm-shifting that the birth of a child produces.

I also have to confess: I read Ultrasonic while deep into the process of collecting my own essays into my first book. I’m pretty sure this made me more attuned to its style, its form (both within the essays and within the collection of them), the words themselves; in other words, I read it to teach me, to nourish me as a writer. But I couldn’t help being entrapped in Church’s sound-web, empathizing with him as a person at least as much as I did with him as a writer.

*

I apologize, both to Steven Church and to his current and potential readers, if this review has become just as much about me as it is about his book of essays. I can only say that I felt, reading Ultrasonic, like his essays were as much about me as they were about him.

I should say here that I went to the same high school Church did—he was a senior when I was a sophomore—though we never knew each other then. I discovered his work when Patrick Madden read something I was writing about being thoroughly traumatized by Eighties nuclear-holocaust miniseries The Day After as a child, and said I should read Church’s The Day After The Day After. Reading it reiterated a foundational principle for me as a writer: that my own experience isn’t that exceptional, that the words I write, the stories I tell, are not unique as words or stories; someone has told them before or will after me, and (in Church’s case with The Day After The Day After) probably better. I’m refraining from quoting Ecclesiastes here.

Even now, I’m surprised to think that I went through high school without knowing Church. I thought I knew everyone. Actually, I knew very few people, but I did know of them, from poring over the yearbook and the school newspaper, taking in as many of the names and faces and stories in our gigantic school that would fit into my hormone-addled mind. I did know his brother Matt, or at least I knew of him. Matt was in my grade, and I seem to remember envying him. He seemed, to me then, at ease with himself, and most of the people we both knew seemed at ease around him. A good guy.

Matt’s death his freshman year of college is the subject his brother Steven circles around in “Crown and Shoulder,” using the two bookends of the title as sounding lines to find himself and the reader at the shoulder of the highway in Indiana where his brother’s car, full of friends, ran headlong into a tree. I read this essay within days of reading Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Documents,” in which D’Ambrosio sketches a tragic outline of one brother’s suicide, another’s mental illness, and his father’s breakdown through the letters they either sent or left him. I keep thinking, even now, How many sentences of personal essays are littered with the bones of dead brothers?

This question, for me, is not entirely critical. One essay I wrote last year that I’m currently revising is ostensibly about my collegiate running career, but it is really about my brother Jeremy, who was found hanging from a bedsheet when he was ten years old, and my father’s grief at Jeremy’s death, and my other brother Brian’s grief at the loss of his own first, stillborn son.

In “Crown and Shoulder,” Church says, “When I say to grieve, I mean my response to the intransitive, to die…And I mean the object, the intransitive form of the verb. I grieve his death.” He also says, “I don’t really know the exact cause of his death.” I still haven’t found the words to describe my feeling towards my brother’s death, or even to give an accurate account of it. I use the passive voice to describe the way he died—he was found hanging, rather than hanged himself—as I don’t want to imply agency. The local obituary listed his death as a suicide, but ten-year-olds don’t kill themselves, do they? I saddle the death of my other brother’s son to it, implying in my mind some sort of family curse that I don’t think my father or my brother Brian would agree to or appreciate.

I’ve been planning on going back to that essay, circling around the hours and days and months and years of my brother’s death, and the echoes that still ring down through my fragmented family. I’m going to finally do that next month.

Now this month.

Immediately after I finish this.



John Proctor lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, two daughters, and Chihuahua. He’s written memoir, fiction, poetry, criticism, and just about everything in the space between them, which he tends now to collect under the generic term “essay.” His work has been published in The Normal School, The Austin Review, DIAGRAM, Superstition Review, Underwater New York, Defunct, New Madrid, Numero Cinq, McSweeney’s, Trouser Press, New York Cool, and the Gotham Gazette, and is forthcoming in The Weeklings. He serves as Online Editor for Hunger Mountain Journal of the Arts and Dad for All Seasons columnist for the blog A Child Grows in Brooklyn, and teaches writing, media studies, and communication theory at Manhattanville College. You can find him online at NotThatJohnProctor.com/.

J.C. Hallman: The Shriek from the Coffin

The Shriek from the Coffin

or

How to Read Essays With Pleasure

*

J.C. Hallman

*

*

One of the problems of the pleasure argument for reading is that there are many different kinds of reading pleasure, and not all of them can co-exist. For example, the argument that reading is a pleasure on the order of a Hollywood movie or a rollercoaster (both quite keen pleasures, by the way) doesn’t really jibe with the kind of pleasure I want to describe here, which is the pleasure of finding small hints of a writer’s literary aesthetic embedded in the essays he or she produces. This pleasure is not compatible with the books-as-excitement pleasure because it amounts to the spark of insight that leads, ultimately, to what I’m doing here, writing something of, ahem, a critical nature in reply, and, frankly, you’d be hard pressed to find many people who would risk conflating the writing or reading of a piece of criticism with The Cyclone at Coney Island (which actually batters you around a good bit—my advice: wear shoulder pads on The Cyclone).

    A few years ago, I set out to write a book about the essayist and novelist Nicholson Baker, B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal. What was odd about B & Me, in its conception, was that I hadn’t read any Baker at all when I sat down to start writing about him, and the idea was that no one had ever chronicled a literary relationship from its moment literary conception, that moment when you realize there is a writer out there in the world that you should read, and so you read them. What that meant was that I could read Nicholson Baker “in order,” that is, in the order in which his work was actually produced. I wasn’t able to sustain this for the entire book – I bet you couldn’t either – but what it meant was that some of the very first Baker I read was a series of essays from the early eighties, “The Size of Thoughts,” “Rarity,” and “Changes of Mind,” all of which first appeared in The Atlantic. It wasn’t until I started in on his novels, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, that I realized how very important these essays were to his career. And what I want to propose here is that this exercise in “deep reading” revealed a very keen, but not much discussed, kind of pleasure: an echoing resonance between Baker’s novels and his essays.

    This continued throughout his career. For example, a scene in The Fermata, in which the monstrous boy-masturbator Arno Strine perfects his time-stopping ability with a complicated system of thread passing through his fingertip calluses (yanked by the agitating post of a washing machine), echoes the film projector imagery of “The Projector,” an essay Baker published in The New Yorker within weeks of the publication of The Fermata. Similarly, Jay and Ben, the hapless comedy team that semi-conspires to murder George W. Bush in the much-maligned 2004 assassination farce Checkpoint, often find themselves straying off topic to discuss Ben’s writerly work on “Cold War themes,” which, as it turns out, is a pretty perfect description of whole range of nonfiction that Baker himself produced from the mid-nineties through the turn of the millennium.

    I don’t think this is merely a case of recycling material. Because it’s not always retroactive. When I began reading the footnotes for which The Mezzanine is famous (and which are the prototype of the footnote fad more commonly associated with David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz, and a host of other shameless imitators), I experienced the sharp joy of a repetition sounding from “Rarity,” published five years before The Mezzanine hit the shelves: “the ecstasy of arriving at something underappreciated at the end of a briareous ramification of footnotes.” And imagine my joy—my pleasure—when I stumbled across a plea for rhyming poetry from Paul Chowder in The Anthologist, and recognized it as an idea published twenty-five years earlier, in an essay of Baker’s called “Reading Aloud”:

And there were the suspect intonation patterns, the I’m-reading-aloud patterns—especially at poetry readings, where talented and untalented alike, understandably wishing in the absence of rhyme, to give an audible analogue of the ragged left and right margins in their typed or printed original, resorted to syllable-punching rhythms and studiously unresolved final cadences… (italics mine)

    These kinds of repetitions aren’t only forward-looking, either. The critic Doug Phillips, in a remarkable recent piece about Eliot’s plays published in Text and Presentation, documents the temporal somersaults of a writer commenting on his or her own work:

Like any good philosopher-cum-poet-cum-playwright-cum-essayist-cum Nobel Prize Winner, Eliot thought the Real important enough to at least take a peek, and so he devised a strategy for doing so, via verse drama. While he laid the groundwork in his early essay “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” (1921), Eliot would wait some thirty years to really flesh things out in an essay called, simply, “Poetry and Drama.” Perhaps he needed first to put into practice what he could only theorize early on, and so in the intervening years wrote five of his seven plays, all in verse. Whatever the case, “Poetry and Drama” appeared just after The Cocktail Party in 1951, the very year that Lacan would begin holding his now famous seminars, all of them in some way concerned with the Real, and the truth of our desire.

It would seem, then, that essays serve, for the multi-genre writer, as a kind of navigational fixation system, a way of setting the course of one’s blind and wandering submersible, the yellow submarine in which we all live and work. In an essay, a writer states an aesthetic hypothesis that is then tested, proved, or warped into new hypotheses in other work. 

    But what explains the pleasure of the reader peeking, as it were, behind the wizard’s curtain? Ours is an age in which those who are compelled to indulge the critical reflex are more or less required to ignore the writer in favor of his or her text. This is true in spite of the fact that the same critics who claim to respond to text alone show a preternatural interest in writers’ biographies, particularly those aspects of a writer’s life that are not detailed in essays and interviews. (Poor Henry James’s sexuality is the classic example of this, in spite of the fact that sexuality is not among the many controversial subjects he addressed in his work.) Indeed, the critic, however fired into frenzy he or she might have been by Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” will not hesitate to stretch tortured inferences between a writer’s work and their life, particularly when some prurient suggestion, held together by strained sinews of logic and association, is of the sort that is likely to land in a journal just obscure enough for their tenure file. For me, it’s quite different. I am not much interested in aspects of writers’ lives that they do not attest to themselves, and I very much want to hear them anticipate, and retroactively assess, the nature of their creations. Indeed, it seems to me that essays in which writers fess up to their aesthetic intentions is a way of ensuring that posterity understands that they knew what they were doing, that their productions have not simply downloaded into their minds from the creative ether. In the larger context of the long and dubious history of criticism, then, the essay may be a writer’s shriek from inside the coffin for which “The Death of the Author” served only as the final nail.

    So—the pleasure. The pleasure for me, reading Baker, is what I find to be the true pleasure of reading. It’s not entertainment. Nor is it any masochistic drive toward tribulation based on a misguided notion of reading as transcendent self-flagellation. It’s this: When you read a writer’s essays anticipating or reflecting on their other work, you sink deep not only into their psyche but into their process, you enter into their plans, their hopes, their doubts, and celebrations, and regrets. You no longer watch the process, you are part of it, quite as if you rode the rollercoaster, and then sat down for a lovely chat with its architect. Would that not add to the thrill?

*

J.C. Hallman is the author of a number of books. His study of Nicholson Baker, B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal, comes out in March, and is available here. He lives in New York City.

Shaelyn Smith: The Goal is to Claim a Suit

It feels late. I am visiting a friend in New York. We walk through light snow across Broadway, headed to some dive, some Upper West Side billiard bar. We consider simultaneously accessing both the critical & creative articulations of emotion. We move slowly in the cold, but slow is not static. “People don’t explode,” writes Susan Stewart.

Danny and I order beers; talk around what is quiet, silent, unbearable. How this affects our experiences. We get quarters to shove into the pool table. After John Cage dies, Merce Cunningham muses, “on the one hand, I come home at the end of the day, & John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home & John’s not there.” These two sides to a thing that is one thing. What can we know of internal combustion, spontaneity, formation of the effable, the perpetual, the sound of it? On the one hand, each piece matters. On the other hand, each piece matters. Danny racks the balls.

*

In “A Manifesto For Cyborgs” Donna Haraway argues for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and responsibility in their construction.” Good writing, I think, does this—it takes pleasure in confusing boundaries, but also takes responsibility for constructing them. As nonfiction editor for Black Warrior Review, I value that which forages new ground where none thought new ground could be found. I appreciate refrain from pulling us along for a direct purpose, but rather that which suspends us in moments of both utter disbelief, and the etching out of how we come to believe. In the same way, I like the associative that meanders a territory of meaning, rather than that which simply wanders without specific purpose. I thrive on delicate balance of the direct and the indirect, the fabricated and the normative, the natural and the unnatural. As a writer of nonfiction, I don’t want to be scared to admit that in the production there is also reproduction, and that in the knowing, there is ultimately an unknown. As people, I think we must understand that often the personal is political, but not always. That the political is, also, not always personal. We must be comfortable both blurring these boundaries and unpacking them, and feel confident enough to rest in a place of discomfort or dissatisfaction.

*

These are your hands, formulating this triangular rainbow in space. John Ashbery says, “I could think only of my own ideas, though you surely have your separate, private being in some place I will never walk through.” That divine presence of thine own ideas. We say, it’s your go. We hand over the pool cue. That divided preservation of time and space.

That said, everything fails. Why attempt in the first place? I break. The balls scatter. It’s not about the rejection of closure, but rather the reiteration thereof. Try, know you will fail. Still try. There’s a way to return to something, to mop again & again a mess, but when returning to something, we bring something else with us, & leave thus with a new thing as well. No matter how stubborn. It’s not about revision; it’s about re-appropriation. That’s the reason we learn to laugh. That’s the reason we fall in love. John Cage says there are only two sounds that mean nothing—laughter & silence.

My father always asks me why I would waste my time re-reading or re-watching things. Danny sinks the eight, re-racks the balls. In the repetition there is a rejection of closure, but also a reconstruction & reinterpretation of meaning. What it means to close something, but moreso what it means to be close to the thing you have learned to close. A girl I used to babysit would have me read the same book to her over & over, sometimes as many as 14 times in a row. This book is about a badger, & the badger’s younger sister has a birthday party under the dining room table. Ionie had the whole thing memorized; she was three years old. I would ask her why? why again? She would say, because I love it. What I think she meant about love is a thing repeated, a thing with grandiose & innate expectations that can be broken afresh, again, & again, & again.

*

To avert a silence that could be static, I move faster. Take a shot & miss. Imagine listening to a record on the wrong speed. The hyper-speed cartoon voice. This is where I’m learning to be deliberate. This might be more about performance than intention. Take a sip of beer, take a deep breath, take another shot & win. Tracey Emin makes a distinction regarding her work, that there is a difference between an exhibitionist & a person who exhibits; that in exhibition the work exonerates its creator. We say art. We say perfection. We say silence. Emin sits by herself in a dirty bed of her own making.

Stewart writes: “the grotesque body thus can be effected by the exaggeration of its internal elements.” A ball flies off the table from a bum hit. We must go in search of this piece, take the parts as a whole. Nothing individually, inherently, has less weight or importance than any other. Abstraction, we say. Emotive, we say. The composition thereof becomes the narrative heat of the art.

The lights dim. We consider what could be considered GROTESQUE. From the root hidden place. A secret typically imbues shock, or something like it. Illicit, we say. Someone sinks the 8-ball before the end of the game. Who wins, we ask. Plenty of beautiful things remain hidden. The suffix indicates exaggeration & what is this moment, but some exaggerated notion of an emotion, a reaction. Here: hyperbole. Here: a hyperbola forms on an axis—a point of origin.

*

My best friend and I spent most of our early twenties shooting pool. We both had just graduated college with degrees that held little prospect for careers. It was the recession; we worked in restaurants. Though these endless post-shift nights of constant games we learned english, we learned how to rack, we learned how to drink, how to flirt, how to bet. We learned poker faces we would begin to use in the world outside the dark confines of the Alley Bar. We learned how to lie, how to cheat, how to hide, but we also learned how to be honest, how to let go, how to love one another. We learned angles and deflection, we learned how to take whiskey shots without squinching up our faces. We learned tangents and dialects and swerves. We learned jump shots and geometries and smooth transitions from one topic to the next. We learned how to stand on the footrest beneath the bar and lean our crossed arms over the top to push up our breasts. We learned that in the world of dive bars, and the world of dive bar games, we must learn the rules, but we also learned to make our own rules, and insist on responsibility for that making.

*

When I was young I was intriguingly terrified of the fat woman in floral cotton pants that stood outside of the 24-hour Wal-Mart to smoke cigarettes. My mother was not a very feminine person. She never taught me about make up or menstruation or sex or flirting or dating or dressing. My mother would take me with her to her volunteer shifts at the local food co-op with her long-haired, hippy friends who smoked pot and didn’t wear bras. My aunts were very practical women. My maternal grandmother passed away before I really got to know her. My paternal grandmother was a very stern Irish Catholic woman with enormous tits who rapped my knuckles with a knife for being improper at the dinner table. No one really taught me how to be a woman. No one really taught me how to be a man, either. My first friends were boys, most of who ended up queer. Most of my early female friends grew up queer, too. As a child, gender never really meant much to me. I played dress up with my father’s clothes more often than skirts and heels. I made my brother wear those:

Drugged up and decorous. I tell him he needs to be me and I tell him I need to be him. I am six years old, it is winter; I have figured out the camera. I have figured out what is allowed and what is not allowed, some age of reason. I am interested in gender and genitals. I have figured out how to figure this out, to get around the margins. Here put on this dress, I say. Here put on these shoes, I say. Here put on these pearls, I say. Now you are a girl, I say. Here hold this camera, I say. Jump-shot. I put on construction gloves, a ski mask, a flannel shirt and work boots. My tiny body totally eclipsed. I speak, muffled, but I imagine it goes, Now you are me and I am you. You are a girl and I am a boy. Now you dance, I say. That is what girls do. He does, he’s two and he spins and spins in his heels, his nightgown, his play make-up, some plastic jewelry, some unsung music. Dancing, he falls, cracking his two-year old skull on the corner of the cedar dressing trunk. He will be scared of this trunk for years. I will drink grape juice and tell him to stop crying and act more like an adult. The faint fuzz of my upper lip stained a deep purple, I will put my hand on my hip and tell him to act more like a man.

These women of my formative life taught me how to be quiet, silent, unbearable.

*

In “Why I Write” Joan Didion says “in many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind…there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” This is how I want to feel when I read your work; I want to enter your private space, but in order to do this properly you must force me to first encounter, pass through, and call into question my own private space.

That vast and biased territory. That undergrowth of confusion and indecision. That rotting mess of detritus we step over again & again & again.

Bully me into recognition. Bully me off the table so that I may learn how I must improve for the next round. Drink me under the table so I can go home and take responsibility for my own construction.

It’s the oldest trick in the book, and it gets me every time.

*

A woman I dated in New York told me she could see all of the pain I had ever felt present in my face. I took this as a compliment. Faces and work have a lot to do with one another. I respect faces that carry their pain out blatant. I respect faces that refuse to hide anything. I respect faces that construct their own kind of beauty out of all the dirty things that have happened, faces that make the grotesque seem quite feminine, faces that don’t apologize for their scars or tears or bruises. This is the most vulnerable kind of respect. These things may not seem beautiful, but they are honest, and honesty is the most beautiful thing we can share.

*

Eventually, it stops snowing. Danny & I shoot another game; share another pitcher. Later, he will send me an essay on Pound’s final canto, concluding that there’s “a sense that Pound didn’t err at all, rather that people seem to get the project wrong.” Your hands close around it.



Shaelyn Smith grew up in northern Michigan and now lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she currently serves as the nonfiction editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her work can be found in storySouth, The Rumpus, Sonora Review and Forklift, Ohio.

Peter Grandbois on the essential art of failing

Ode to Failure

“Francia Russell, the director of the school, said to me, “You’re perfect for ‘Clara,’ because you are much more of an actress than a dancer.”

It was a condescending compliment. I couldn’t handle her honesty, but I did appreciate it. That’s why, at sixteen, when Francia Russell told me the most I could hope for as a ballet dancer was as a corps member in some Midwestern third-tier company, I decided to quit. My excuse was that I would act. But really something inside died. An ex-dancer knows what I mean. When I left ballet, I left my identity. None of my dance classmates phones. I had succumbed to failure.

— From Renee D’Aoust’s essay “Body of a Dancer"

We are the kings of catastrophe, the queens of ineptitude. Princes and princesses of disappointment. We pile the shattered bones of our missteps on the pyre of our imperfections. Our national anthem sings of soot-black air and beaten dogs. We pledge allegiance to distant shores we will never reach and storms that drag us away from any sight of land.

At the club where I fence in Columbus, there is a woman in her early fifties who recently started fencing because two of her three children wanted to fence. She took up sabre, the fastest weapon, a weapon with no room for error. She has been a regular at the club for the past two years, fencing two to three nights a week and going to nearly every tournament. She almost always loses. She is always beautiful.

       Beautiful in the way pages fluttering in the breeze are beautiful, in the way snow clinging to the railing outside the window is beautiful, in the way a bird unable to find a branch to land on is beautiful. I watch her and often wonder why she does it, fencing against kids a third her age, all of whom are faster, more agile. I know why I do it, but I, at least, have decades of fencing experience, muscle memory to rely on, even if those memories are twenty years old. She takes last place in tournament after tournament. And after, she smiles and talks of how next time she’ll do better.

       A gentleman at my club in his forties also took up fencing because his son wanted to do it. Fencing does not come easy. The movements are unnatural. It takes years of training for them to become normal, much less second nature. The old adage is that fencing takes one lifetime to learn the basics, another to master them. I watch this gentleman struggle through his footwork, his upper body bobbing back and forth like those clown faced punching bags. When he parries, it looks as if he is swatting at you. His attack appears more of a semi-controlled fall. He’s always smiling. He tells me he loves the sport and wants to become as good as he can.
       That’s it, isn’t it? To be as good as we can. That’s the best we can hope for as we get older. I fenced my first division one national championship in 1988 when I was twenty-four years old. I came in last place. I told myself it would never happen again. I was young. I could afford that luxury. It didn’t happen again. Over the next two years I worked my way from being one hundred and eighty first to placing somewhere in the fifties and sixties. A year after that, I made the top sixteen for the first time in my life. After that, many top eights or top fours. I had the time and the energy and the drive. When we’re older, we’re lucky to have one of those. Never all three. So we work hard and hope to be as good as we can. 

We, none of us, expected to fail. And yet we do. Every day. We fail despite our best efforts. We measure ourselves against that failure. Maybe this time we won’t lose quite as badly. Maybe this time we’ll have made our opponents work at least a little bit for their touches. Maybe this time we won't be quite so sore the next morning. Maybe we won’t have the usual aches and pains. Maybe we’ll be able to get out of bed. To walk down stairs. To sit. Without pain.

A flick attack in fencing involves cranking the arm and throwing the weapon forward with a whip so that the blade bends and the point hits the opponent’s back. It used to be my bread and butter. It takes a lot of arm strength. I remember the first time I tried flicking when I came back to fencing at forty-eight. I slapped my opponent across the shoulder. I apologized. I tried again, and apologized again. I couldn’t generate the torque required to bend the blade enough. No matter. Two years into my return to fencing and I have “Tennis Elbow.” It’s difficult enough to attack with a straight arm now, much less attempt a “flick.” If I did, the pain shooting up my arm would force me to drop my foil. In veteran’s fencing, practice doesn’t always lead to improvement. It often makes you worse. Wisdom is to know your limitations and work within them.

       Twenty years ago, I was famous for running my opponents down. My nickname was “the rhino.” When I first tried to fence with my old run and gun style, I nearly tripped and fell. My hip went out on me. My knees gave way. My body told me its limitations. I didn’t listen much the first year, but I’ve learned to listen since. My game is different than it was twenty years ago. For the first time in my fencing career, I use the clock. I take my time and instead of attacking, I offer false openings designed to draw my opponent out so I can capitalize on my hand, which thankfully remains quick. My legs are another matter. 

We drag our wings through dark, cloudless nights, the moon flailing our corpse. We open our mouths to song and hear nothing but a dry rasp. We lift our feet in dance but find them tied down by the low sound of distant bells. Time stops, and we fall backward, teetering on the edge of our regrets. We pull our coats tighter at the throat amidst the ash falling from our hair. We are the fathers of the big flop, the masters of miscarriage. We are the butchers of botchery, and the disciples of disaster. We court failure as if there were nothing else in the world we’d rather be doing.

I started and restarted this essay four times before I got it “right.” I still don’t know if I have it “right.” The curse of age is that you know enough to know you are wrong far more often than you are right. The old Japanese proverb: Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. To know, too, that no matter how much you work at it, no matter how much effort you put in, you may never get it “right.” It is also a blessing because at some point you free yourself to be as good as you can.

       When I wrote my first novel, I was a relatively young thirty-eight and oh so lucky. I didn’t know what I was doing. The fool’s blessing. I sat down every day at my computer and simply wrote. I completed the first draft in six months, then spent the next six months revising it. I probably put the novel through three drafts total. I sent the novel out to a round of publishers and the first email response I received was an acceptance. I didn’t know enough to know how rare it all was. My second novel took four and a half years to write. I have over forty different drafts saved on my computer. The novel was rejected forty-five times before it found a home. My third novel took five years to write, had a similar amount of drafts and after forty plus rejections is still looking for a home. Writing doesn’t get easier. When we write, we think we are “approaching truth,” but the older you get, the more you realize how elusive that “truth” is. Even if you find it, you understand how difficult it is to express. I remember the summer I began writing that third novel. I wrote to page sixty, then stopped, trashed it and started again. I repeated this process at least four or five times until I found the voice and the form necessary for the story I wanted, no needed, to tell. Even when I found the voice and form, writing wasn’t necessarily easier. I just knew what I had to do. But knowing and doing are sometimes as different as a boy and his father. Whether it gets published or not, I consider that novel my finest work, and my biggest failure.
       Several years ago at a library in Sacramento, while sitting on a panel and talking about writing, someone asked how I defined “success” as a writer. I’d never thought about it before and so wasn’t ready for the question, and was even less prepared for the answer. At the time, I only had two books out. The first had won many awards, been seriously reviewed, was under contract to be made into a movie, and had sold several thousand copies. The second had sold maybe four hundred copies. I told the audience that the second was a much bigger success to me, though it would probably be deemed a failure by every such metric we use in America. I told them there were two reasons why: the first was that even though many more people had read my first book, I’d received a few personal emails from people regarding my second book saying how it had changed their lives. In other words, I marked success not by how many readers I had but by how deeply a few readers received it. Finally, I was more pleased with the writing in my second book than in my first. In other words, I’d met my own standard in that book, not the standards of somebody else.

Lord deliver us from the ugly hands of “success.” Take us, instead, down the road of failure in the trunk of a dead car. We beseech you to protect us from paths with a pot of gold at the end, roads that appear too easy. Let us wake to the blank page each and every day and not be sure how to fill it. Let us enter our daily tournament knowing each and every person there can beat us. We ask that you pluck out our eyes so that our black sockets can roll back into heaven. Grant us scorched earth that our dying weeds might grow. Only then can we know strength. Only then can we understand character.

As in writing and fencing, the longer I live, the less I realize I understand. The more I realize how much of my life is defined by failure, how failure defines me. You can’t go through life without making mistakes, and I’ve made more than my share. A ruined first marriage. A nearly ruined second. I have failed to keep up with so many, many friends. Failed to listen to myself at key points in my life. And yet I would argue that these failures are not even the important ones. The ones we see clearly, the ones we remember right away, those shape us, but less so than we think. It’s the thousand little failures we ignore each day that really make us who we are, and nowhere is that more clear than in parenting.

       As a father with two teenage girls and a headstrong ten-year-old boy, I’ve almost completely given up. Children have no lack of compunction in letting you know when you’ve fallen short of the mark. The teen who reminds you of the promise you failed to keep or the conversation you failed to hear or the fact that you failed to understand her need for a break from piano practice or homework. The child who reminds you that you failed to see when he needed help or when he didn’t need help, when he wanted your love and when he didn’t. To give your teen a kiss or a hug when they don’t want it can sting worse than a bad book review. 
       But parenting is only one part of a very long day. I fail to play with my dogs enough. I fail to pay the bills on time, to keep the house clean, to maintain the yard and clean the garage, to keep up the deck and the exterior paint. I fail to prepare enough for the classes I teach and spend enough time on the papers I grade. I fail to get the cars in for a tune up or an oil change or a tire rotation or to check the battery. I fail to love my wife enough. I fail to sleep at night so I can be rested for my failure the next day. Failure to be as good as I can be. 
       And yet, I wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s not quite true. Rather, I know there is no other way. In fencing, I will always lose more bouts than I will win, at least if I’m pushing myself. In parenting, I know if my kids love me all the time, something is wrong. I haven’t done my job. I’ve tried too hard to be their friend. In writing, if my book is reviewed in the New York Times (Don’t worry, my books will never be reviewed in the New York Times), I know I’ve failed to express the deepest part of who I am, my vision of the world. For good or ill, our lives are measured by our mistakes. 

We are the rulers of ruin. We are the tyrants of tragedy. We court calamity at every turn. We wake to upheaval and work through confusion. Mayhem, havoc, pandemonium are our middle names. We live for discouragement. We pray to be washed up, washed out, let down and defeated. We settle for setback and know in our bones that we’ll spend far more time in the anticlimax than the climax. We are born thinking we are conquerors but we die knowing life is a rout. 

So why do I fence? Why return to a sport in which I have no hope of being as good as I once was, a sport where I’ll be reminded of my failures, my shortcomings every day? It is the great lesson of getting old: to accept that we are ninety percent failure in blood and bone, that we take last place more often than not, that we are all desperately trying to be as good as we can be. The body is the first to remind us when at thirty our backs start to go out from time to time and our arms aren’t quite as strong as they used to be. At forty, our legs don’t quite carry us with the same grace. By the time you reach fifty, if you don’t understand that you’ve failed at nearly everything, you’ve either got your head in the sand or you never set your bar high enough in the first place. Failure is necessary for growth.

       That lesson can be the hardest of our lives: to know that we live on a receding shoreline and that soon everything will abandon us. Grace lies in looking out from that shore, knowing no one will come, but standing there anyway. We live in an age of instant gratification. In all my years of coaching, I’ve seen hundreds of young students come to fencing thinking they want to be Aragorn or Luke Skywalker, then quitting a month later when they realize they can’t be instantly good at it. They lack the necessary character. As a professor, I get email after email from students trying to convince me I should let them into my classes: “I have a passion for the short story.” “I have a passion for poetry.” “A passion for words.” “A passion for writing.” They love the word passion, mistaking that for character. And yet, when I tell them to come on the first day and see if a spot opens up, none of them show. How quickly their passion fades when things are not certain, when life is not handed to them. Much of the fault lies in youth. Character is born from pain and sacrifice. Discipline and time. Above all, time. Age understands the way in which character is tindered in work, ignited by failure.
       Our culture celebrates winning above all else. We call our sports figures heroes, as if somehow they’ve sacrificed for us. Maybe they have. Maybe the ten thousand hours they sacrificed practicing, trying to get better, wasn’t really for them, but for us, so that we would have a model of perfection and grace. Maybe. But I’ll take the people who don’t make the six and seven figure salaries, the people who don’t make the news. I’ll take the woman who doesn’t win a bout but keeps getting up and donning her mask anyway. I’ll take the old man I used to fence with in Denver, who was always the first to arrive at the club and the last to leave. He was dying of cancer, and though his legs could barely move, he was the only one to never take a break. “Do you want to fence?” he would say with a smile. And how could you refuse. His hand was still quick. He knew what it meant to fence as good as you can. He lived it. And for a moment, when you fenced with him, you lived it, too. Despite youth. Despite the false promise of what lay ahead. You hoped that someday you would understand enough to make a parry riposte the way he could. Simple. Without thought to the past or the future. Without a worry about who you were or who you would become. 

We are the memory of winter. We are the dying bird sputtering over the ground. We are an open mouth without sound, an abandoned car at the bottom of a ravine. We are the last drops of rain to fill the muddy tracks. We are the long night when the rain doesn’t stop. We understand our lot. Still, we return again and again. And we won’t stop. Not ever.  



Peter Grandbois is the author of two novels, The Gravedigger and Nahoonkara, a memoir, The Arsenic Lobster, a collection of short fictions, Domestic Disturbances, and three novella collections or “monster double features”—Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville, and The Girl on the Swing. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, and New York. He is an associate editor at Boulevard and fiction co-editor at Phantom Drift. He teaches at Denison University in Ohio.

Sian Prior: Dear David Foster Wallace

‘I have seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lame projectile vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-hour beat of the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977 ...’


Dear David Foster Wallace,

I have lugged a heavy heart over the Snowy Mountains, breathless with grief, and later planned how to turn my personal lovelorn anguish into profitable literary activity.

I have enticed my aging mother into a small canoe, observed as her face turned the colour of talcum powder while we paddled towards an ever receding East Timorese island and later pondered how to convert her distress into a witty ‘bad travel’ column.

I have visited a cyclone-wrecked Queensland coastal town and gathered quotes illustrative of the resilience of the human spirit while sitting in the local doctor’s surgery nursing a bladder infection and feeling anything but resilient.

I have lain awake and alone in a Balinese beachside bamboo hut, sipping from duty- free bottles of vodka in an effort to banish insomnia, while concocting a solo travel tale of meditative, curative relaxation.

I have camped at an indigenous eco-tourism resort in the Kimberley and plotted how to convert my trip into a feature article powerful enough to prevent a nearby indigenous heritage trail from being obliterated by an oil and gas refinery.

I have trundled around southwest Western Australia with teenage stepchildren mentally re-writing our family holiday, editing out their moods and inserting instead an angle about a pilgrimage to the corners of places.

I have tiptoed across the luminescent sand of a dry lake bed at sunset, trying to avoid stepping on sixty thousand year old human remains, memorizing the exact phrases uttered by our loquacious tour guide so I could create a caricature of him that would make my readers giggle.

In my efforts to create memorable stories that would make people want to pack a bag, join an airport queue and catch a plane to wherever I’ve just been, I have taken the truth and applied a hole-punch to it. I have gathered the facts and ‘told them slant’.

I have observed my suitcase-wheeling self as if through the mirrored window of a border police interview room, looking for signs and symptoms, tics and traits that will serve my story well, whichever story I’m fixing to tell.

Heartbroken writer. Nerdy writer. City stressed writer. Nature loving writer. Mother loving writer. Amateur paleontologist writer. Fictional portraits, all of them, painted with a palette of facts. Avatars of myself uniquely designed to make my readers want to do what I’ve done, see what I’ve seen.

I have not made stuff up. Yes I have left stuff out, yes I have re-ordered stuff, but I have not told lies.

I have acknowledged the blur, fashioned the narrative, created the patterns and connections that may have ‘seemed at the time to be absent from the events the words describe’.

But have I failed you, David Foster Wallace?

I read your essay ‘Shipping Out’ – your anti-‘essaymercial’ essay about all the un-fun supposedly-fun things you’d never do again on a cruise ship – and I feel ashamed.

When you describe the employee who receives a bollocking from the bosses when you won’t allow him to carry your bag up the port hallway of Deck 10, or the banal conversations you overhear at your dinner table night after night, or your ‘dickering over trinkets with malnourished children’, I feel reproached.

Surely this is Truth with a capital T. Surely this is writing in which ‘the writer has reckoned with the self’.

Surely because you tell us about the ugliness that you found beneath the sparkling veneer of beauty, your writing is more authentic than my carefully-constructed travel articles published in newspaper lift-outs.

Surely because you tell us how miserable you were in an environment where happiness is practically mandatory, surely your writer’s voice is less artfully, less archly-fashioned than mine.

Or not.

Here’s the thing. Any personal narrative nonfiction writing requires us as writers to construct what Vivian Gornick, author of The Situation and the Story, calls a persona. This persona ‘selects (what) to observe and what to ignore’ and illuminates not just ‘the situation’ but also ‘the story’, the ‘insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say’.

Writing travel articles for mainstream media outlets like daily broadsheets and their online equivalents usually involves three mandatory tasks: finding a personal angle on the travel experience, targeting a specific readership, and accentuating the positives. Those three tasks involve editing stuff out.

The long lists you wrote at the beginning of your essay, David Foster Wallace, lists of what you observed on that hell-ship, created the illusion that you were showing and telling us Everything with a capital E. And surely if you have told us Everything you have told us the Truth with a capital T.

But you weren’t telling us Everything.

Because you had come to tell us about the fear and lure of death, a ‘story’ about existential despair in a ‘situation’ where you were meant to be re-discovering the allure of life. Your chosen persona was the unhappy camper. Your travel writer’s hole-punch was hard at work, just as mine has been, only in reverse: you were taking out the good bits and leaving us with the disappointments, the dislocation, the dystopia.

And you were paid to write this essay, just as I have been paid for my travel articles, and just as the writer you criticise in your essay, Frank Conroy from the Iowa Writers Workshop, was paid for his article written about the same trip you took, an article, in his case, about the pleasures of cruising.

Your editors at Harpers probably knew you were an agoraphobic aqua-phobic shark- phobic misanthropic vulnerable lonely guy when they commissioned you to write a piece about being in an environment where all of those fears and vulnerabilities would be exposed.

They got the product they paid for.

So perhaps none of us are lacking in sincerity. Perhaps we are all producing stories according to the dictates of house style and who is to say which of us is the most truthful, the most authentic?

Perhaps behind every first-person narrated travel story lies a ghost story, the story behind the ‘story behind the situation’, peopled by an infinite number of ghostly versions of ourselves and those we write about, all of us trapped in every different millisecond of our journeys, in every possible persona, embodying every fleeting mood or anxiety or transcendent moment of pleasure that we experience on that cruise ship or in that Timorese canoe or on that cyclone-ravaged beach, all of us ghost travellers waiting for our version of events to be recognised and acknowledged and written down as The Truth.

Waiting in vain, because for most stories, one persona is enough.

But why does the Truth still matter? Why can the question of authenticity cause us to feel shame when we’re writing nonfiction? Why do I need to reassure myself that while I’ve edited stuff in and out in my travel articles, I haven’t made stuff up?

Is it simply that no one trusts and no one likes a phony?

Another David, David Shields, has gathered together no less than 618 relevant quotes in order to demolish such quaint notions as ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ in nonfiction in his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. In a section entitled ‘reality’ Shields has inserted this quote:

That person over there? He’s doing one thing, thinking something else. Life is never false, and acting can be. Any person who comes in here as a customer is not phony, whereas if a guy comes in posing as a customer, there might be something phony about it, and the reason it’s phony is that he’s really thinking, How am I doing? Do they like me?

In the end, David Foster Wallace, are we all just hoping that our readers will like us?

And that if they like us, we will like ourselves?

Having a lovely time, wish you were still here. 


All the best, Sian


*


Dear Sian,

Many thanks for your postcard. These days it seems practically everybody is interested in writing about me but very few bother to write to me. And almost nobody sends postcards any more.

It’s early morning here but I have decided to skip the Buffet’n’Bainmarie Breakfast (it’s the same stuff every morning) and stay in my cabin to respond to the thoughts you outlined in your correspondence. To be honest, I’m surprised by how hung up you seem to be on this idea of ‘authenticity’. Surely post-modernism put an end to that particular fetish, along with those other antiquated concepts you referred to, ‘truth’ and ‘sincerity’.

But I noticed (because now I can see Everything) that in your travels you recently visited the Musée Quai Branly in Paris, a museum dedicated to exhibiting the material artefacts of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. I also noticed (because now I can feel Everything) how uncomfortable you felt in that environment, how you were simultaneously entranced by the exoticism of the exhibits, seduced by the romance of Otherness embodied by the collection, emotionally persuaded by the framing of these cultures as somehow irreducibly authentic, at the same time as you were critical of the commodification of authenticity the collection represented. I heard (because now I can hear Everything) you and your friend deriding the ‘authentic’ products in the museum shop (a veritable smorgasbord of woven, dotted, carved, strung, beaded baubles and bling) as ‘exo-merch’.

I also observed you when you visited that Balinese fishing village (the one where you drank yourself to sleep) and saw how worried you were about whether the publication of your travel article would help to wash away the ‘authentic’ lifestyle of those people as effectively as the rising tides of climate change that you wrote about in your piece. I heard the internal monologue in which you debated with yourself about whether the business your article might bring to the village would be ‘good’ for the locals or whether this was a fiction you told yourself to salve your conscience, a case of attitudinal in-authenticity, aka bad faith.

You must have noticed that although the post-modernists switched off authenticity’s life-support system, the tourism industry continues to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Tourism councils continue to set ‘Authenticity guidelines’ and the like for their members who are in the business of business. This is because the business people understand that the tourists with the cameras slung around their necks still crave this stuff like infants crave their mother’s milk. Those tourists still project their appetite for something that tastes like authenticity onto the people, places and things they’re photographing. And most travel editors, understanding this appetite as keenly as the business people who fill their publication’s advertising slots, still privilege the features that deliver textual ‘exo-merch’ to their readers.

There are limits, though. As you pointed out, my Harpers editor was willing to indulge my penchant for making long lists of the ways in which I suffered on this ship on my first visit. That was more the exception than the rule. Although vivid descriptions of the colourful lifestyles of The Other are generally pleasing to travel editors, ‘authentic’ descriptions of an author’s mental suffering are not usually warmly welcomed by the editors of colourful lifestyle magazines. I remember (because now I can read Everything) the email your editor sent you when you pitched her your travel article about mountain climbing as a cure for grief. She agreed to publish the article but only if you would ‘take out a few of the over-the-top grief references.’ She knew that there was a limit to her readers’ appetite for your ‘authentic’ feelings of sadness and loss, and that above all they would want to know that you had triumphed over those feelings.

Do you recall, on the visit to Queensland’s Mission Beach that you referred to in your postcard, how you marveled at the giant concrete cassowary that greeted you as you drove into town? Do you remember how you told your friend that it was an example of a ‘shire promotional grotesque’, a type of illusionistic tourist attraction for which the state of Queensland is famous? And how you related the story of the first time you’d visited Mission Beach when the bus driver had persuaded some thrilled Japanese backpackers that the concrete cassowary was life-size and that the real things were man-eaters? Do you remember lecturing your friend about how the history of illusionism extends back to the wall paintings of Pompeii, where real structures vanished behind trompe l’oeil murals, but how in this instance the idea of the real (emu-sized) cassowary vanishes behind the more exotic giant creature artificially constructed for the tourist’s imagination?

Perhaps the traveller’s so-called appetite for ‘authenticity’ is more akin to our appetite for the Giant Cassowary and the Big Pineapple. It’s an appetite for the mystification or for the aggrandisement of reality. We want to be sold a fantasy; we want the ‘drag’ version of life; we want to have access to what Andy Warhol once described as an ‘archive of the ideal’.

The book you mention by the other David, David Shields, has been described by its author as a manifesto for ‘reality’. Because I am on a pleasure cruiser and there is pressure here to keep things pleasant, I will try not to dwell on the unpleasant fact that Shields once referred to my ‘authorial presence’ as ‘that heavy breathing’. Reality Hunger is a book whose back page blurb promises that it seeks to ‘tear up the old culture in search of something new and more authentic’. What a confusing and contradictory image, given how we have usually equated ‘old’ cultures with ‘authentic’ cultures (as you saw in the Musée Quai Branly in Paris). Shields’ book cites the example of the inclusion of ‘larger and larger chunks of “reality”’ in television as evidence for our appetite for the real, the authentic. But surely reality television shows like Big Brother are to real life what the giant concrete cassowary is to a real cassowary, an artificially constructed, overblown edifice designed to offer viewers a delicious cocktail: the illusion of reality mixed with the pleasure of masquerade.

I am also trying not to dwell on my unpleasant suspicion that, judging from the material you quoted in your postcard, you suspect I might be a phony. According to several dictionaries I’ve consulted (I have a lot of time on my hands here) the term first appeared at the turn of the 19th century. It came from the word ‘fawney’, which referred to gilt rings that swindlers would shine up and sell as genuine gold rings to unsuspecting buyers. The word came to be used for anything that was fake or not genuine. Given the admissions you made in your postcard about how prettily you have shined up your own travel experiences for your editors, perhaps we’re both equally vulnerable to the accusation of phoniness. You’ve been shining up brass and I’ve been tarnishing gold. I’d say we’re square.

As for ‘liking ourselves’, I wish you luck in that endeavour. It’s a battle I lost some time ago.

I will close now because Petra the cleaner is knocking at my door and I need to vacate so she can shine up my cabin for me.

Please write again. All distractions are welcome. As the brochure for this cruise promises, here we do Absolutely Nothing.

Regards,

David Foster Wallace



** This essay was originally published in TEXT in October 2013. Works cited in these letters come from the following: p. 2 Foster Wallace 1996: 33, Shields 2010: 63; p. 3 Shields 2010: 65, Foster Wallace 1996: 34, Monson 2010:14, Gornick 2001: 13; p. 4 Gornick in Shields 2010: 53; p. 6 Ross 1989: 165, Powell 2011, Shields 2010: 3; p. 7 Harper 2012.



Works cited
Dickinson, E 1868 ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’, in D Shields (ed) 2010 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, New York: Alfred A Knopf, 63

Gornick, V 2001 The Situation and the Story, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Harper, D 2012 Online etymology dictionary, sponsored words, at http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=phony (accessed 15 March 2013)

Monson, A 2010 ‘Voir dire’, in Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, Minneapolis: Graywolf P

Raban, J 1987 For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling, 1968-1987, New York: Picador/Pan Books, in D Shields 2010 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, New York: Alfred A Knopf, 65

Ross, A 1989 No Respect: Intellectuals and Pop Culture, New York: Routledge

Wallace, DF 1996 ‘Shipping Out: on the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise’, Harper’s magazine, 292, 33–6



Sian Prior is an Australian writer and broadcaster. She teaches nonfiction and journalism at RMIT University and has run workshops for a range of writers’ centres. She has had short stories and essays published in the Sleepers almanac edition 7, Visible Ink, Meanjin literary magazine, TEXT journal, Rex Journal of New Writing and the Penguin anthology Women of letters. Her first book, Shy: a memoir (Text Publishing), was released in June 2014.

Sian Prior on Ander Monson's "Voir Dire" and figuring out what's at stake

Out the front of my house stands a eucalypt whose bark is the same flesh-pink as those giant human babies sculpted by Ron Mueck. At least, right now it is. Sometimes the bark is as grey and slit-scored as a medical student’s cadaver. Every day there is an imperceptible change in the colour of the tree and sometimes months pass before I notice the transition. About twice a year the slits peel back and the tree does a slow-motion striptease for me, shedding its curled fragments all over my garden. In between long stints at my desk I head outside to sweep the dry scrolls off the path. It is a comforting Sisyphean ritual.

I have been observing this gum tree through my office window for nearly three years now, ever since moving into my new home. If I look left from the computer screen there it is, leaning away from the wind’s embrace. If I turn my head to the right I see a piece of paper stuck to the wall beside my desk, covered in bold text. The text is a long quote from an essay by Ander Monson called ‘Voir Dire’ and it begins with two questions.

How often is something actually at stake in essays, in memoirs, in most of the non fiction I read (and perhaps write), I wonder? How often is there actual risk involved, invoked? 

*        

Inspiration has become such a flaccid word. It has been so degraded by careless over-use that reading (or writing) it induces in me a faint nausea. The thesaurus offers up a bunch of insipid synonyms (stimulate, motivate, persuade, encourage, incite) but none quite replaces the original.

To breathe life into inspiration (pardon the pun) I look to its other meaning: to inhale. When in doubt, return to the body. The body’s response to the world. The body’s manifestations of the mind’s travails. Sitting at my desk these past three years, writing a memoir about shyness and grief (about how it feels to live inside a shy body, to grieve inside a breathing body) I found that by looking first to the left and then to the right I could inspire and be inspired. A bare-skinned tree for whom shedding layer after layer is as natural and uncomplicated as breathing should be for humans. And a long draft of fresh words, an astringent for the thoughts flowing from my brain to the screen. 

The action of telling is fine: kudos for you and your confession, your therapy, your bravery in releasing your story to the public. But telling is performing, even if it seems effortless. 

*

As a child my favourite game was hide and seek. I loved the strategizing, the mental measurement of small spaces, tall curtains, bulky bedclothes. I loved knowing that someone was searching for me. I loved the performance of being lost. Most of all I loved those moments just before my pursuer gave up on the search. The idea that I could draw out the suspense and then end it. I could choose when to reveal myself, and self-revelation would be followed by elation.

Monson’s essay ‘Voir Dire’ is about being lost in the no man’s land between fact and fiction. It is about the way memories peel off and fall away, leaving us vulnerable to mis-rememberings. It is about trying to find the ‘truth content’ in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. My memoir is about my attempts to make, or find, or prove, or approve of, my true self. Whatever that means.

When you are shy your natural state is in hiding. Just the thought of revealing yourself is enough to induce the anxiety at the heart of shyness: fear of negative evaluation. Your instinct is to cover up; your fear, your embarrassment, your deep certainty that you are unfit for human company. Even while you are in hiding, though, you long to be discovered. Like the human forms hidden under Michelangelo’s marble blocks, you wait for someone to chisel you out from under your rigid casing of self-consciousness. If you are lucky you will occasionally find a friend or lover with an artist’s eye and you will be discovered, and known.

With memoir, though, waiting doesn’t work. Writing is an act of will and life writing can be an act of painful self-exposure. You must choose to reveal yourself, with no guarantee of a happy ending.

I guess I want awareness, a sense that the writer has reckoned with the self, the material, as well as what it means to reveal it, and how secrets are revealed, how stories are told, that it’s not just being simply told. In short, it must make something of itself.

*

 

I’ve never met Ander Monson. If we did meet I would probably blush because that’s one of the tricks my shy body plays on me. Blushing, according to cultural theorist Elspeth Probyn, is the body’s signal that it has an investment in the encounter. It is the physical evidence of how much you care about what others think of you. (When you’re shy, you spend way too much time worrying about what others think of you.) It is shame written on the skin. Shame can ‘fall back into humiliation’, Probyn writes in Blush: faces of shame. But shame is also ‘positive in its self-evaluative role: it can even be self-transforming.’

 

The other reason I might blush is because (although Monson doesn’t know it) our words have been intimate. The bold text stuck on my wall has beckoned my words out of hiding and onto the page. No, beckon isn’t right; too gentle. Watching me through the textual prism of his essay, Monson has curled his lip every time my story failed to ‘make something of itself’. Each time I edged politely away from telling about (performing) my shame, my embarrassment, my humiliation, imaginary Monson has closed his copy of my memoir and flung it into a corner of his imaginary office. And every time I wrote and re-wrote the sentences that made me blush, every time I forced myself to apply ‘a little fucking craft’ to my raw confessions, imaginary Monson nodded approvingly then left me alone.

 

When I first began writing my memoir I could not answer the questions posed by Monson in ‘Voir Dire’. I didn’t know what was at stake, what was being risked with the telling of this story. After all, shyness is not a life-threatening condition. It is a common temperament trait that manifests as social anxiety that leads in turn to physical and mental discomfort. Curiosity about the causes of my discomfort led me to an understanding that at the heart of shyness is a profound fear of rejection.

 

Then my partner announced that he no longer wanted me.

 

Suddenly I was immersed in a fear so deep it made breathing almost impossible. Lies were confessed but more lies were told. Love was professed but love was withdrawn. I was lost in the no man’s land between fact and fiction. Now, though, I knew what was ‘at stake’: surviving the thing I feared the most. Not just surviving it, but rising far enough above it that I could write about it ‘with a little fucking craft’. That I could ‘reckon with the self’ even while the self was at risk of disappearing.

 

Last year Shy: a memoir was published in Australia. Many reviewers expressed their surprise at how self-revealing the author had been, how she had stripped herself bare for the reader. The memoir’s rawness made them feel voyeuristic. The word brave came up often in the reviews and this shy memoirist fought hard not to interpret that word as negative evaluation; is brave not code for over-reaching or self-indulgent? Imaginary Monson raised an eyebrow and murmured ‘kudos for your bravery’. I felt more exposed than ever before. Then I began hearing from readers.

 

One by one their emails came in, shy missives from people like me, people who have spent a lifetime struggling with an irrational fear of other people. They wrote about their trembling hands and their blushing cheeks and their shortness of breath. About the abject terror they felt at parties, surrounded by people they’ve never met. About feeling so exposed they wanted to hide away where no one could find them. About their Sisyphean battles with their own temperament. And they wrote about how it had felt for them to read their story in my book.

 

It was like listening to my own brain talking.

It was so empowering to hear someone talking about the things I have felt over the years and which continue to plague me.

It put a few more pieces of the puzzle together for me about my personal life.

It occasionally made me sick in the stomach with a sense of recognition of my Self.

Thank you for your courage.

 

This week I took down the Ander Monson excerpt from my wall. It has served its purpose. I have stopped thinking that perhaps brave is code for self-indulgent. Who knows if this memoir has ‘made something of itself?' By peeling back the layers of my experience I have made something useful for some other (shy) individuals. And breathing has become easier.

 

 

Works cited:

Probyn, E. (2005) Blush: faces of shame, Sydney, UNSW Press.

Monson, A. (2010) ‘Voir Dire’ Vanishing Point: Not a memoir. Minneapolis, Graywolf Press.

Prior, S (2014) Shy: a memoir, Melbourne, Text Publishing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Mueck

 

 

Sian Prior is an Australian writer and broadcaster. She teaches nonfiction and journalism at RMIT University and has run workshops for a range of writers’ centres. She has had short stories and essays published in the Sleepers almanac edition 7, Visible Ink, Meanjin literary magazine, TEXT journal, Rex Journal of New Writing and the Penguin anthology Women of letters. Her first book Shy: a memoir (Text Publishing) was released in June 2014. sianprior.com

https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/shy 

Anne Germanacos: Not many people want to have tea with the Delphic Oracle, however mesmerizing her speech.

Roland Barthes: "The writer is someone who arranges quotes and removes the quotation marks."

*

When we read an essay, we pick up on some parts and miss others. Some aspects we find intriguing, others nonsensical. Some aspects make a deep impression, while others don’t even register.

With each bite, a maceration of greens, saliva, bacteria, and other organisms travels from the field into the great distillery of the cow’s rumen.

The task is not to ‘believe’ in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it.

Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.





What is it to be home, what is it to be not-home?

If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room.





We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.

Consciousness is thus left free to switch focus from one present moment to the next, and the sense of the self as experiencer is never felt to be interrupted, even though the perchings are discontinuous. These present moments are the stuff of subjectivity during ordinary mental states.

I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.

In the early days, they would throw out a handful of feathers, which would fly upwards if they were descending, and down if ascending.

I the morning. I the day. When the air was. The air is.

She is a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand...

After the meal, the parents were allowed to go in and put their children to bed.

I did something just now that I haven’t done in years: I drank milk.

Some of my earliest memories are of saying words over and over to myself, hypnotizing myself.

’My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked...



Lots of readers get slowed up by lingering at the right, at line’s end.

The point is that she had something to say and is saying it as artfully as she possibly can. Whether or not there’s anything left of her afterwards is none of our business.

Aristotle lays out his theories in lecture form, easily accessible, whereas Ovid simply flies, and it is difficult to teach the art of flying.

We had to float.

I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore.

Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try.






A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor...

Spoken language uses a three-second rhythmic structure, with poets often writing three-second lines.

Sometimes doubt can enforce belief, because it takes the situation so seriously.

The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection.

’You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.







As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.

The religious women live in wretched buildings, compared to the monks...

When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.

They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed.






It is as though every few seconds the brain asks what’s news.

She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression.




...urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.

When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out.





(No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents.)

You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.





People who read poetry but don’t write it are like those who have just heard about the burning bush.

....the local bad folk art got its signature bright yellow pigments from the urine of cows fed on quince.

How different is the linguistic version from the originally lived one?

Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.

Left to its own devices, consciousness seems happy to just experience one thing after the next.





Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea.

Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.

It would be like trying to compare two novels by counting up their respective numbers of commas, colons and question marks.

Is it possible that it is the precise timing of the movements of a pen on the page or of reading a series of letters that allows us to write and read accurately?



The heavens are perfect. Perfection sounds round.



...if the history of the planet is represented by the distance from your nose to your outstretched fingertip then one stroke of a nail file would wipe away all human history.

The further inside one goes, the more one finds everybody.

It’s like watching a cloud and saying what it looks like, except you can make the cloud be what you say.

But the importance of knowing nothing is underrated.

Hollywood won’t take risks with unproven story lines...

I can’t help but think of ancient Rome.





There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes.

For every ounce of wax, a bee must consume about eight ounces of honey.

cotton               nottoc

If the playwright concocts a new word, then the play is no longer holding up a mirror to reality. Instead, the play is creating its own reality through language.





But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out.

...numerology is where the intellect goes to die.

...meaningful human behavior...seems to be naturally produced/performed/packaged in units of one to ten seconds.

Thus the inner circle of active participants is brought together in a communal meal, transforming horror into pleasure.

It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs.

His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.

It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him.

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a mosque that has also been a church and is not either of those, anymore.

It is a mathematical truth that there are only three geometrical figures with equal side that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons.

What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?

....what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth.....





Even though she chewed on it for nearly two hours, she could not reduce it to particles small enough to swallow.

You can’t eat a painting.

My whole life/now,/my whole life/on the tip/of a pen.

Like sugar in water, the words one employs must dissolve and altogether vanish.

And he kiss me all over like I am alive.

...is a kiss not the same as a prayer?

(.....Even now some little lyric poem is eating acidly into the fat heart of money.)

We are unaware of how it got there because we composed it unconsciously, intuitively.

Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour.

This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives?

*

Authors:

Abasiyanik, Sait Faik

Ali, Kazim

Aslan, Reza

Barnes, Julian

Bollas, Christopher

Brown, Jericho

Burkert, Walter

Carson, Anne

Daum, Meghan

Davis, Katie

Davis, Lydia

Ducornet, Rikki

Finch, Annie

Gardner, Howard

Gawande, Atul

Girard, Rene

Grossman, David

Gunderman, Richard

Hamid, Mohsin

Hammond, Claudia

Harris, Sam

Hirschfield, Jane

Hoke, Mateo

Howe, Fanny

King, Lily

Klay, Phil

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Lee, Li-Young

Lightman, Alan

Longenbach, James

Malek, Cate

Markson, David

McBride, Eimear

Mele, Nicco

Miller, Daphne

Moore, Lorrie

Orr, Gregory

Phillips, Adam

Robinson, Marilynne

Ruhl, Sarah

Sackville, Amy

Sharma, Akhil

Shavit, Ari

Sims, Laura

Solnit, Rebecca

Stern, Daniel N.

Tanizaki, Jun-ichiro

Valentine, Jean

Venkatesh, Sudhir

Wilner, Eleanor

Wiman, Christian

Windsor, Cooley

*

Titles:

100 Essays I Don’t Have the Time to Write
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
A Useless Man
A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith
Bark 
Being Mortal
Between Friends 
can’t and won’t
Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown
Euphoria
Falling Out of Time
Family Life
Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson
Farmacology
Floating City
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
In Praise of Shadows
Levels of Life
Lily
Men Explain Things to Me
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
My Bright Abyss
My Promised Land, The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
My Struggle
Orkney
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occuption
red doc
Redeployment
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World
The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath
The Faraway Nearby
The Paper Zoo
The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life
The Unspeakable
The Virtues of Poetry
Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
Understanding Religious Sacrifice
Visit Me in California
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
We Make a Life By What We Give
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

*

Abasiyanik, Sait Faik
 “I did something just now that I haven’t done in years: I drank milk.”
A Useless Man, p. 119

Ali, Kazim
“The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a mosque that has also been a church and is not either of those, anymore.”
A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, (ed. Kaminsky and Towler) p. 37

Aslan, Reza
“urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.”
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 93

Barnes, Julian
“In the early days, they would throw out a handful of feathers, which would fly upwards if they were descending, and down if ascending.”
Levels of Life, p. 10

“But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out.”
ibid., p. 118

Bollas, Christopher
“It would be like trying to compare two novels by counting up their respective numbers of commas, colons and question marks.”
Catch Them Before They Fall, The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, p. 115

Brown, Jericho
“...is a kiss not the same as a prayer?”
A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 84

Burkert, Walter
“Thus the inner circle of active participants is brought together in a communal meal, transforming horror into pleasure.”
Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Jeffrey Carter), p. 215

Carson, Anne
“....the local bad folk art got its signature bright yellow pigments from the urine of cows fed on quince.”
red doc, p. 49

“The heavens are perfect. Perfection sounds round.”
ibid., p. 27

Daum, Meghan
 “The point is that she had something to say and is saying it as artfully as she possibly can. Whether or not there’s anything left of her afterwards is none of our business.”
The Unspeakable, p. 154

Davis, Katie
“Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.”
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World, with Howard Gardner) p. 143

Davis, Lydia
“I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.”
can’t and won’t, p. 31

“cotton               nottoc”
ibid., p. 101

“Even though she chewed on it for nearly two hours, she could not reduce it to particles small enough to swallow.”
ibid., p. 50

Ducornet, Rikki
“Like sugar in water, the words one employs must dissolve and altogether vanish.”
The Deep Zoo, p. 44

Finch, Annie
“Some of my earliest memories are of saying words over and over to myself, hypnotizing myself.”
A God in the House (ed. Kaminsky and Towler), p. 175

Gardner, Howard
“Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.”
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World, with Katie Davis, p. 143

Gawande, Atul
“I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore.”
Being Mortal, p. 157

Girard, Rene
“Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour.”
from Violence and the Sacred in Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Kramer), p. 258

Grossman, David
“After the meal, the parents were allowed to go in and put their children to bed.”
Between Friends, p. 93

“My whole life/now,/my whole life/on the tip/of a pen.”
ibid., p. 169

Gunderman, Richard
“When we read an essay, we pick up on some parts and miss others. Some aspects we find intriguing, others nonsensical. Some aspects make a deep impression, while others don’t even register.
We Make a Life By What We Give, p. 91

Hamid, Mohsin
“....what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth.....”
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, p. 205

Hammond, Claudia
“Spoken language uses a three-second rhythmic structure, with poets often writing three-second lines.”
Time Warped, Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, p. 74

“It is as though every few seconds the brain asks what’s news.”
ibid., p. 76

“Is it possible that it is the precise timing of the movements of a pen on the page or of reading a series of letters that allows us to write and read accurately?”
ibid., p. 85

“...if the history of the planet is represented by the distance from your nose to your outstretched fingertip then one stroke of a nail file would wipe away all human history.”
ibid., p. 125

Harris, Sam
“Left to its own devices, consciousness seems happy to just experience one thing after the next.”
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 72

“There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes.”
“...numerology is where the intellect goes to die.”
ibid., p. 168

Hirschfield, Jane
“What is it to be home, what is it to be not-home?
A God in the House, p. 53

“You can’t eat a painting.”
ibid., p. 60

Hoke, Mateo
“As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.”
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation (ed. with Kate Malek) p. 231

“You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.”
ibid., p. 79

Howe, Fanny
“The religious women live in wretched buildings, compared to the monks...”
A God in the House, p. 110

King, Lily
“’My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked...”
Euphoria, p. 205

“'You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.”
ibid., p. 220

“They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed.”
ibid., p. 47

Klay, Phil
“When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.”
Redeployment, p. 39

Knausgaard, Karl Ove
“It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs.”
My Struggle, Book 1, p. 224

Lee, Li-Young
“People who read poetry but don’t write it are like those who have just heard about the burning bush.”
A God in the House, p. 131

Lightman, Alan
“For every ounce of wax, a bee must consume about eight ounces of honey.”
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, p.77

“It is a mathematical truth that there are only three geometrical figures with equal sides that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons.”
ibid., p. 76

Longenbach, James
“Not many people want to have tea with the Delphic Oracle, however mesmerizing her speech.”
The Virtues of Poetry, p. 59

Malek, Cate
“As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.”
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, p. 231

“You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.”
ibid., p. 79

Markson, David
“Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.”
Fare Forward, Letters from David Markson (with Laura Sims), p. 132

McBride, Eimear
“And he kiss me all over like I am alive.”
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, p. 146

“I the morning. I the day. When the air was. The air is.”
ibid., p. 190

Mele, Nicco
“Hollywood won’t take risks with unproven story lines...”
The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath, p. 11

“I can’t help but think of ancient Rome.”
ibid., p. 208

Miller, Daphne
“With each bite, a maceration of greens, saliva, bacteria, and other organisms travels from the field into the great distillery of the cow’s rumen.
Farmacology, p. 36

Moore, Lorrie
“This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives?”
Bark, p. 70

Orr, Gregory
“The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection.”
A God in the House, p. 281

Phillips, Adam
“(No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents.)”
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, p. 45

Robinson, Marilynne
“Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try.”
Lily, p. 259

“His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.”
ibid., p 253

Ruhl, Sarah
“Aristotle lays out his theories in lecture form, easily accessible, whereas Ovid simply flies, and it is difficult to teach the art of flying.”
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 33

“But the importance of knowing nothing is underrated.”
ibid., p. 39

“If the playwright concocts a new word, then the play is no longer holding up a mirror to reality. Instead, the play is creating its own reality through language.
ibid., p. 43

Sackville, Amy
“She is a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand...”
Orkney, p. 22

Sharma, Akhil
“If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room.”
Family Life, p. 38

Shavit, Ari
“When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out.”
My Promised Land, The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, p. 129

Sims, Laura
“Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.”
Fare Forward, Letters from David Markson, p. 132

Solnit, Rebecca
“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”
Men Explain Things to Me, p. 88

“She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression.”
ibid., p. 99

“Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea.”
The Faraway Nearby, p. 249

“What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?”
ibid., p. 249

Stern, Daniel N.
“Consciousness is thus left free to switch focus from one present moment to the next, and the sense of the self as experiencer is never felt to be interrupted, even though the perchings are discontinuous. These present moments are the stuff of subjectivity during ordinary mental states.”
The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life,  p. 43

“How different is the linguistic version from the originally lived one?”
ibid., p. 8

“...meaningful human behavior...seems to be naturally produced/performed/packaged in units of one to ten seconds.”
ibid., p. 44

“We are unaware of how it got there because we composed it unconsciously, intuitively.”
ibid., p. 25

Tanizaki, Jun-ichiro
“Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.”
In Praise of Shadows, p. 10

Valentine, Jean
“Sometimes doubt can enforce belief, because it takes the situation so seriously.”
A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 71

Venkatesh, Sudhir
“We had to float.”
Floating City, p. 273

Wilner, Eleanor
“The further inside one goes, the more one finds everybody.”
A God in the House, p. 219

Windsor, Cooley
“Lots of readers get slowed up by lingering at the right, at line’s end.”
Visit Me in California, p. 69

“It’s like watching a cloud and saying what it looks like, except you can make the cloud be what you say.”
ibid., p. 28

Wiman, Christian
“A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor...”
My Bright Abyss, p. 89

“It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him.”
ibid., p. 106

“(.....Even now..... some little lyric poem is eating acidly into the fat heart of money.)”
ibid., p. 114

“The task is not to ‘believe’ in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it.”
ibid., p. 169

*

“Not many people want to have tea with the Delphic Oracle, however mesmerizing her speech.”
James Longenbach, The Virtues of Poetry, p. 59




“When we read an essay, we pick up on some parts and miss others. Some aspects we find intriguing, others nonsensical. Some aspects make a deep impression, while others don’t even register.
Richard Gunderman, We Make a Life By What We Give, p. 91

“With each bite, a maceration of greens, saliva, bacteria, and other organisms travels from the field into the great distillery of the cow’s rumen.
Daphne Miller, Farmacology, p. 36

“The task is not to ‘believe’ in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it.”
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p. 41

“Apps may represent the ultimate lock-in.”
Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in a Digital World, p. 143




 “What is it to be home, what is it to be not-home?
Jane Hirschfield, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 53

 “If a book said a boy walked into a room, I was aware that there was no boy and there was no room.”
Akhil Sharma, Family Life, p. 38



“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, p. 88

 “Consciousness is thus left free to switch focus from one present moment to the next, and the sense of the self as experiencer is never felt to be interrupted, even though the perchings are discontinuous. These present moments are the stuff of subjectivity during ordinary mental states.”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life,  p. 43

 “I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.”
Lydia Davis, can’t and won’t, p. 31

 “In the early days, they would throw out a handful of feathers, which would fly upwards if they were descending, and down if ascending.”
Julian Barnes, Levels of Life, p. 10

“I the morning. I the day. When the air was. The air is.”
Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, p. 190

“She is a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand...”
Amy Sackville, Orkney, p. 22

 “After the meal, the parents were allowed to go in and put their children to bed.”
David Grossman, Between Friends, p. 93

“I did something just now that I haven’t done in years: I drank milk.”
Sait Faik Abasiyanik, A Useless Man, p. 119

“Some of my earliest memories are of saying words over and over to myself, hypnotizing myself.”
Annie Finch, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 175

“’My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked...”
Lily King, Euphoria, p. 205






“Lots of readers get slowed up by lingering at the right, at line’s end.”
Cooley Windsor, Visit Me in California, p. 69

“The point is that she had something to say and is saying it as artifully as she possibly can. Whether or not there’s anything left of her aftewards is none of our business.”
Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable, p. 154

“Aristotle lays out his theories in lecture form, easily accessible, whereas Ovid simply flies, and it is difficult to teach the art of flying.”
Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 33

“We had to float.”
Sudhir Venkatesh, Floating City, p. 273

“I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore.”
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 157

“Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try.”
Marilynne Robinson, Lily, p. 259





“A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor...”
Christian Wiman, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 89

“Spoken language uses a three-second rhythmic structure, with poets often writing three-second lines.”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, p. 74

“Sometimes doubt can enforce belief, because it takes the situation so seriously.”
Jean Valentine, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 71

“The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection.”
Gregory Orr, from Kaminsky and Towler, p. 281

“’You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.”
Lily King, Euphoria, p. 220






“As a woman, I feel I should be the human shield for men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it softens things.”
ed: Kate Malek and Mateo Hoke, Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, p. 231

“The religious women live in wretched buildings, compared to the monks...”
Fanny Howe, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 110

“When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.”
Phil Klay, Redeployment, p. 39

“They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed.”
Lily King, Euphoria, p. 47

“It is as though every few seconds the brain asks what’s news.”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, p. 76

“She is calling for circumstances that do not compel the unity of identity that is a limitation or even repression.”
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, p. 99






“urbanized, Hellenized, iniquitous, and strictly stratified between those who had and those who had not.”
Reza Aslan, Zealot:: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 93

“When someone falls into the well outside town, people suck on his wet clothes when he is pulled out.”
Ari Shavit, My Promised Land, The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, p. 129






“(No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents.)”
Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, p. 45

“You kind of lose respect for them because you’ve seen them degraded. And after some time, we stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.”
ed: Kate Malek and Mateo Hoke, Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, p. 79









“People who read poetry but don’t write it are like those who have just heard about the burning bush.”
Li-Young Lee, , from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 131

“....the local bad folk art got its signature bright yellow pigments from the urine of cows fed on quince.”
Anne Carson, red doc, p. 49

“How different is the linguistic version from the originally lived one?”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 8

“Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends.”
Laura Sims, Fare Forward, Letters from David Markson, p. 132

“Left to its own devices, consciousness seems happy to just experience one thing after the next.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 72

“Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea.”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 249

“Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.”
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, p. 10

“It would be like trying to compare two novels by counting up their respective numbers of commas, colons and question marks.”
Christopher Bollas, Catch Them Before They Fall, The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, p. 115

“Is it possible that it is the precise timing of the movements of a pen on the page or of reading a series of letters that allows us to write and read accurately?”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, p. 85


“The heavens are perfect. Perfection sounds round.”
Anne Carson, red doc, p. 27


“...if the history of the planet is represented by the distance from your nose to your outstretched fingertip then one stroke of a nail file would wipe away all human history.”
Claudia Hammond, Time Warped, p. 125

“The further inside one goes, the more one finds everybody.”
Eleanor Wilner, from Kaminsky and Towler, A God in the House, p. 219

“It’s like watching a cloud and saying what it looks like, except you can make the cloud be what you say.”
Cooley Windsor, Visit Me in California, p. 28

“But the importance of knowing nothing is underrated.”
Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 39

 “Hollywood won’t take risks with unproven story lines...”
Nicco Mele, The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath, p. 11

“I can’t help but think of ancient Rome.”
Nicco Mele, The End of Big: How the Digital Revolution Makes David the New Goliath, p. 208




“There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 31

“For every ounce of wax, a bee must consume about eight ounces of honey.”
Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, p. 77

“cotton               nottoc”
Lydia Davis, can’t and won’t, p. 101

“If the playwright concocts a new word, then the play is no longer holding up a mirror to reality. Instead, the play is creating its own reality through language.
Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, p. 43






“But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out.”
Julian Barnes, Levels of Life, p. 118

“...numerology is where the intellect goes to die.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, p. 168

“...meaningful human behavior...seems to be naturally produced/performed/packaged in units of one to ten seconds.”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 44

 “Thus the inner circle of active participants is brought together in a communal meal, transforming horror into pleasure.”
Walter Burkert, Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Jeffrey Carter), p. 215

 “It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1, p. 224

 “His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.”
Marilynne Robinson, Lily, p 253

“It is no blasphemy to say that every man creates the God creating him.”
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p. 106









“The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a mosque that has also been a church and is not either of those, anymore.”
Kazim Ali, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 37


“It is a mathematical truth that there are only three geometrical figures with equal sides that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons.”
Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, p. 76

“What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 249

“....what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth.....”
Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, p. 205








“Even though she chewed on it for nearly two hours, she could not reduce it to particles small enough to swallow.”
Lydia Davis, can't and won't p. 50

“You can’t eat a painting.”
Jane Hirshfield, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 60

“My whole life/now,/my whole life/on the tip/of a pen.”
David Grossman, Falling Out of Time, p. 169

“Like sugar in water, the words one employs must dissolve and altogether vanish.”
Rikki Ducornet, The Deep Zoo, p. 44

“And he kiss me all over like I am alive.”
Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, p. 146

“...is a kiss not the same as a prayer?”
Jericho Brown, from Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towner, A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, p. 84

“(.....Even now..... some little lyric poem is eating acidly into the fat heart of money.)”
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, p. 114

“We are unaware of how it got there because we composed it unconsciously, intuitively.”
Daniel N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, p. 25

“Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour.”
Rene Girard, from Violence and the Sacred in Understanding Religious Sacrifice (ed: Kramer), p. 258

“This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives?”
Lorrie Moore, Bark, p. 70

*

nouns:
essay, milk, bed, air, days, feathers, book, apps, meal, memories, penis gourd, saliva, bacteria, field, cow’s rumen, home, house, mental states, trinket, parents, children, well, clothes, consciousness, essayists, paper, snowfall, surface, commas, colons, question marks, pen, page, letters, perfection, heavens, planet, nose, fingertip, nail file, history, everybody, readers, point, seconds, brain, circumstances, limitation, repression, women, buildings, monks, PSP, rock, bloodshed, god, reality, patience, imagination, uses, metaphor, necessities, language, structure, lines, doubt, situation, belief, feeling, resurrection, love, stomach, shield, things, cloud, nothing, Rome, Hollywood, person, wax, bee, honey, cotton, attention, moment, grief, statistics, word, mirror, language, numerology, intellect, units, seconds, circle, participants, meal, pleasure, horror, pattern, mind, lines, face, blasphemy, God, mosque, church, truth, figures, gaps, surface, squares, hexagons, equilateral triangles, openings, the unfinished, the incomplete, particles, painting, pen, sugar, kiss, prayer, poem, rites, daily life


verbs:
read, pick up, miss, find, make, register, travel, believe, perceive, represent, is, said, walk, think, recognize, switch, feel, flow, throw, fly, allow, drink, say, hypnotize, wear, squeak, have, fall, recover, suck, pull, lose, see, stop, listen, write, hear, leave, face, bring, tie, give, turn, seem, envelop, compare, count, allow, sound, go, wipe, linger, float, understand, try, perceive, take, live, treat, smash, compare, blame, ask, compel, watch, risk, help, determine, consume, concoct, hold, create, transform, swallow, fit, want, press, chew, reduce, swallow, employ, dissolve, vanish, kiss, eat, compose, serve, connect

*

Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, was published by BOA Editions in 2010. Her novel, Tribute, was published by Rescue Press in 2014. Together with her husband, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Study Program in Greece on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete for nearly thirty years. She runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco and will be an Artist-in-Residence at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts in the fall of 2015.