Surprise As Muscle Stimulant

by Weston Cutter

            True: seven years ago, one of the first books I ever got to review was John D’Agata’s stunning, mind-changing, genre-shifting/-defining Next American Essay. It’s one of maybe four essential anthologies I can think of; it’s for sure the best non-fiction anthology ever, and I can’t imagine the insanely great book that’d have to come along to unseat it.

            Also true: I’ve read maybe ten graphic novels in my entire life, and I’m beginning to realize that I’ve held back on them because…well, I don’t know. Certainly something of it’s my BS snobbery re: pictures on the page of a book, but that’s not everything. I think, in all honesty, that I haven’t read graphic novels  because, in a way, I haven’t known how.

            And keeping to the truth thing: both John D’Agata and Josh Neufeld are, with their books The Lost Origins of the Essay and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, involved in teaching readers how to read. If that sounds at all patronizing, I’d encourage you to try to remember the books that’ve meant the most to you, and to remember that almost all of them taught you something new not just about the world, or language, but about how to read to begin with.

            D’Agata’s is the easier of the two to parse, at least for me: there may be nobody working better or harder to push at perceived notions of what an essay is. Just as intimidating biographical background: he’s edited two anthologies now; he wrote Halls of Fame and has a book coming about Yucca Mountain (his Iowa bio site [yes, he teaches Creative Nonfiction at the U of Iowa--the Writer's Workshop] says the book’ll be called The Lifespan of a Fact, but Amazon and the Norton catalog say it’ll be called About a Mountain); he’s an editor at Seneca Review.

            All of which is impressive enough, but the trait that makes D’Agata a national treasure is his restlessness; not unlike dear old unstoppable Eliot Weinberger, D’Agata somehow perfectly balances the drive for novelty and strangeness—for experimentation—with an aesthetic appeal that makes his work, both as an author and as an editor (though it’d likely be more fair to call his task in the anthologies more akin to a curator) freakishly readable and fun. For those who haven’t dipped at all into the anthologies (both, for the record, published by the world’s best press), D’Agata writes directly to the reader, as guide, before each essay. From the first such entry in Lost Origins, titled “To The Reader”

            “It’s embarrassing, of course, to think nonfiction destroyed the world, especially since some readers are still suspicious of the form: a genre that is merely a dispensary of data—not a true expression of one’s dreams, ideas, or fears. But I think this misperception is prevalent today because we haven’t yet laid claim to an alternative tradition. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes. So this is a book that will try to offer the reader a clear objective: I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce.”

            Take a second to sit back and gasp at the audacious honesty of that—D’Agata’s willingness to admit the lack of clarity inherent in reading nonfiction; the gutsy staking of a claim that is that last sentence. Take a second, if you want, to consider why you yourself read nonfiction, what you want from the form.

            I don’t know if I’ve already had so much Kool-Aid that the conclusion’s foregone for me, but, honestly, D’Agata’s Lost Origins of the Essay seems as surprising and encouraging a book as I can conceive of. Like the best work (art or music or poetry or whatever), you’re somehow compelled, though the work, to wonder about stuff, and then you’re somehow given not answers but examples or ideas which resonate with the questions and curiosities you’ve been introduced to. That’s a dicey and convoluted way of saying: I’ve never read any Heraclitus before, but I have now, and somehow, pages and pages later, I felt some similar flame running through Yoshida Kenko’s In all things I yearn for the the past, and, even later, felt some shocking, wild and connecting element in Michael Butor’s Egypt (which might be the best essay in the book, if one was gonna get silly enough to try to even use that word).

            Every single essay in this book is worth the price of the book itself, but the chief and cohesive magic, I think, is D’Agata’s. One of those dumb litmus tests that seems occasionally to be run is the question “what’ll be read in 50 years?” If it’s not D’Agata’s anthologies, we’ll be in bigger trouble than we need to be.

            And then there’s Josh Neufeld‘s A.D., which was one of the best reads I’ve had in some time for all sorts of reasons. First and simplest, the thing’s just stunningly good-looking, is well-drawn and -put-together, has been given great treatment by Pantheon, etc.

            And the story—who doesn’t still want to hear about Katrina? Without getting too political, has there been a greater source of domestic shame in the last decade plus? Could there be? I feel like the general awareness of what happened is “there was a big storm,” which, while certainly true, doesn’t come close to what happened there.

            So, of course: thank god for Neufeld, and for Dave Eggers, and for everybody else doing good work to get all aspects of the narrative of that particular and horrific event disseminated. Here’s a dangerous and tricky question: what do you remember about Katrina? Remember people went to the Superdome? Remember that police at a bridge turned survivors away, forcing them to back to New Orleans? Remember the supposed roving bands of gangs and murderers and etc?

            All of these questions and recollections: all of them are infinitely more complex than what’s officially recalled or recorded. Those bands of gangs and armed folks? Neufeld’s presenting them in a different view, a (maybe) new light. Those people who stayed in the city despite the Mayor’s urging for everyone to leave? They weren’t all hopelessly silly and dumb or anything else: they simply made decisions based on info anyone who wasn’t from NO couldn’t totally get.

            Which is the real magic Neufeld’s pulled in his book: he’s giving the storm in a new (to me) context. It’s got lots to do with the fact that this is a graphic novel: the temptation to simply read the words and, therefore, digest the ‘story’ is fine, but flawed: the narrative—words and pictures—unfolds in such a meticulous, inter-woven way that I can’t imagine a straight non-fiction book coming close to packing the same whallop.

            Plus there’s a question of speed. Graphic novels should, I thought, take less time to read than a regular novel would. While that’s to some degree true, I was awed by how Neufeld’s complex, engaging drawings forced me to move more slowly—how I was forced to quite honestly read more than I was used to reading (if you’re used to reading graphic novels, you already know all of this).

            Anyway, there’s plenty more, but the way to cover all that’s left to cover is for you to either go online and read A.D. or for you to go the store and buy it and read it. Those are the options.

To The Kitchen

by Weston Cutter

            Jason Sheehan’s Cooking Dirty is, in lots of ways, a book I’ve been waiting for for a long-ish time–a book I’d guess anyone who’s waitered in a restaurant’s waited for for a bit. It’s not that there haven’t been decent books about restaurants before; Debra Ginsberg’s Waiting is pretty decent, and Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster is one of the best accounts I’ve ever read (even if–maybe especially because–it’s fiction). But Sheehan’s book’s the first I’ve read about the actual coolest, most fun, weirdest, most interesting people working at a restaurant.

            Cooks, people. Cooks (emphatically not chefs). Go to your favorite sit-down restaurant and sneek a peak back into the kitchen—see those dudes (almost always dudes) with tattoos and long hair and piercings and visible scars (on the hands and forearms from work; elsewhere from other motives)? Those guys are the coolest people working in restaurants. Also: sometimes the scariest. Almost always: the most entertaining.

            And there’s nothing if not for endless kitchen-based entertainment in the majority of Cooking Dirty. Fist-fights, fires, deep-fried hands: check, check, and check. Almost-fights among kitchen workers and restaurant supply folks? Also check. Along with the fights: drugs, drinking, smoking. Again, note the nature of this ‘fun’–the scene is typically dudes in an incredibly hot area, surrounded by knives and dealing with wait-staff and front of house folk who can’t ever be relied on to be totally, um, understandable and/or dependable.

            “In the end, I always found my way back to the kitchens,” writes Sheehan about midway through the book, and this is where things get dicey—not midway through the book, but because of the fact that (and this shouldn’t even remotely surprise anyone) given the sort of personality drawn to knives and fire, drugs and disagreements, there’s lots of storming off in this book (as there’s lots of storming off among line cooks, too, to a degree). Sheehan on the type drawn to the job:

            “The problem with hiring mercenaries is this: As management, what you’re looking for are guys who can do a tough, ugly job under bad conditions and survive long enough to make a difference. You hope for things like personal leadership, capability under fire, independence, guts. But when you get right down to it, what you’re hiring are killers. People who like to kill other people. Staffing a kitchen is not a lot different. What you want are guys who can do the job. What you get are guys who like doing the job. And at the low end—in the quarter of the business where I was currently residing—what that’s going to guarantee you is a line full of fucking lunatics, right off the bat. Guys who never rose through the ranks or never wanted to. Guys who want the job precisely because it is so punishing, because so many others have failed at it and because they want to be king of the dregs. Guys who hear ‘suicide mission’ and say ‘Sign me up, boss.’”

            Sheehan backs his description of these guys up and then some. But—and here’s the diciness—the hot tempers (ha ha ha), the storming off, the antics, these things are entertaining according to an algebraic formula, something with a basically direct ratio that’d follow the line of decreasing marginal return. First time Sheehan reports on some absolute madman in the kitchen? Eye-opening and buzz-inducing. Third? Still there but less so. Sixth, seventh, tenth? The arc of excitement descends.

            Which is the only real downfall of this book, and (of course) it’s got something to do with elements of voice and etc. in nonfiction: it’s a somehow tiring read after awhile. You get to a point where you wish Sheehan would just fucking grow up (which he does, eventually—married, kid, James Beard award-winner) and quit the sucky unbalanced relationship with kitchens he after long enough develops. The more fair way to say it might be that Jason Sheehan, like anyone prone to addictions, got hooked on kitchens, and this is his account of the full-on love and eventual withdrawl and detox. The whole thing’s worth if for the thrill Sheehan clearly felt and still feels for kitchens but, like any addiction memoir, there’ll be times you’ll have to sit back and be sort of amazed by and just assume that it must’ve been better to’ve been there.

Mega updates, over and over

by Weston Cutter

Alright, let’s be totally honest: I hate multi-book reviews as much as the next book dork. I hate them for not giving each book as much space as it deserves, and for not doing any justice at all to the actual experience of reading the damn things (because what the hell could one say about, say, Lorrie Moore’s astonishingly great new one, A Gate at the Stairs, in one paragraph?), and for etc. Basically, the only good part about multi-book reviews is that you may see books coupled together in ways that bring new ideas to mind re: those books.

You could see all this coming, right? That I’m being something of an apologist, and that I’m gonna have to do multi-book reviews for a little while here just to cut through some of the backlog? Well, it’s what it is. All of these books merit much more of your time and attention than they’re here receiving; spend yr book-reading time acccordingly.

The Essays of Leonard Michaels by Leonard Michaels

 

            I’ve already and elsewhere written about how great dear old gone LM is (at least his fiction), but the moment of LM’s re-emergence has drawn out long enough now to convince FSG to come out with a book of his essays, and so every reader’s now in the exceptionally lucky position of being able to just buy two handsome, black-and-white-photograph-covered hardbacks and have a pretty good percentage of Mr. Michaels’s total output.

            Which output is, I think, more staggering for the fiction involved (seriously, those first two collections: holy cow), but the Michaels’s nonfiction’s all sorts of interesting and lucid and fun to follow. An analogy, maybe: there are drivers who are competent map-readers and there are drivers who are competent at getting lost and finding their way out of getting lost. Michaels’s best stuff is a schizy little combo of the two: he almost seduces you into believing that he’s lost, that the essay’ll just wander and he’ll find his way through, muddling and curious and eyes wide…and then you realize he actually knew exactly what he was doing, down to each last turn of phrase.

 

Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer

 

            Hold yr head hard on reading this book. In fact, that might double nicely as (the phenomenal) Two Dollar Radio‘s secret motto: hold yr head hard on reading these books (Current tagline: Books Too Loud to Ignore. Accuracy: 100%). I feel slightly late to the game with these guys–they’ve been publishing for a bit now–but they blew my mind with Mr. Mohr’s Some Things That Meant the World to Me, and now they’re publishing Wurlitzer—not just Nog, his debut (from 1968, and of course published–like all the classic cult-and-out-of-print books–by Random House), but Quake and Flats as a 69′ed edition. Someone should be keeping score; someone should be noting that Two Dollar Radio’s pushing hard + fast into rarified heights of awesomeness re: small presses (Graywolf- and McSweeney’s-level heights, honestly, and in no time).

            Back to Wurlitzer’s Nog though…honestly, it’s hard to talk about this book in the exact same way it’s hard to talk about, say, Blake Butler’s stupendous Ever or about Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way or anything by Caren Beilin or Deb Olin Unferth. There’s a certain glow in the eye of people who’ve read those folks, and the spark’s untransferable. What must you know about Nog to actually just sit down with it? A dude with few memories. An octopus. The sort of breezy, scrubbed-clean takes on things (people, towns, views) one must work awfully hard to get. Here’s the nastier truth, though: none of what I can here say will come near what Wurlitzer does in the surprisingly few pages of Nog. Buy seven copies + give most of them away. Here’s a first for me: I’d urge you to go so far as to buy a Two Dollar Radio shirt. Seriously: support them any way yr able.

 

Stupid Hope by Jason Shinder

 

            Here’s sorrow: Shinder died in 2008; he was barely past 50. Here’s the hardest line to live by, but also maybe, in the end, one of the few which really mean anything or are in any way helpful: you desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering (Henri-Frédéric Amiel). Here’s something approaching courage: Stupid Hope, Jason Shinder’s third and final book of poetry, is a gutsy, gimlet-eyed, frustrating book of poetry, out now from Graywolf. Why frustrating? Because of the kind of moves he could make, the moves that are gone now. From “Killing Frost”:

 

In that private hospital room,

 

Which I paid for, I could not sleep,

because the bed was small

 

and its white sheets too thin.

 

            Dig that brutal, exhausted comedy, the double entendre of ‘paid for,’ the fact that the Frost of the title could be the poet or the wintery element. It’s all like that, page after page in this book. I’m sad as hell I didn’t know Shinder’s stuff before; I’m thrilled I do, now, at all. Life’s harder without poetry like this.

Finally, finally: back for good.

by Weston Cutter

So: how many books have you read this summer? Not enough? Never enough.

Massive apologies for the signal silence: Corduroy Books is back now, full-speed + full-power, etc.

For those keeping score at home: a friend recently had a poem picked by Kim Addonizio for inclusion in Best New Poets 2009, which book/series I’m more than a little fond of, and which news is just awesome. Congrats, Megan.

Onward!

Methland by Nick Reding

 

            So much (hugely deserved) praise got heaped so quick on this book that I can’t imagine anyone’s just now stumbling onto it through our small but well-read site, here. If you haven’t heard all the news, haven’t flipped across radio and picked up an interview with good ol’ NReding, the skinny’s that Reding, several years ago, decamped regularly in Oelwein, IA (in the northeast region of the state; ten minutes from Independence, IA, if that helps) and studied, basically, the relationship between meth and the sort of small, midwest town meth preys on as viciously as any virus.

            Oelwein’s got the usual troubles—’compromised systems’ might be the way to say it, to try to make a medical analogy more thorough—which allow meth to take such ferocious hold. The medical analogy would have to be that meth could be considered akin to pneumonia to an AIDS patient: AIDS itself doesn’t, technically, kill, but simply makes infection infinitely more probable and more lethal by orders of magnitude. Meth has had the life that it’s had—so virulently infecting midwest towns—because of social/cultural and business-practice shifts in the last two decades or so.

            So, for instance, in Oelwein: a chicken processing plant got bought out, then changed hands several times, until it eventually employed some slivery fraction of the workers it’d once employed, plus those workers got paid thin drizzle compared to what they’d once made. In towns of size, the numbers work out and the impact of such trouble is spread moore out; in small towns (Oelwein’s like 6700 strong), the numbers devastate. Enter meth: as the pick-me-up drug (meth is just speed, though hellaciously toxic, at least as its presently, black-marketly made) of choice for those workers desperate to pull double shifts to keep some money coming; as the new occupation of choice for those who’d rather risk life/limb/legality by concocting this explosive compound than straight-man it through a new, overworked life.

            The story itself—small (David) town against the huge (Goliath) brutality of this drug—is fascinating; Reding actually makes it one better by focusing on 4 key players: the town doctor, the mayor, the lawyer, and the most infamous meth user. I won’t say anything more about any of them other than that if you love the book, it’ll almost certainly be because of the vivid and human and humane and gut-wrenchingly working folks at the story’s center. Read Methland. Seriously. As soon as possible.