Lydia Davis and Letters

by Weston Cutter

Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

I wish, like James Wood, I could remember the moment I first experienced Lydia Davis (assumedly, Eggers remembers the first moment, too), but I can’t. I know I saw her name in some other author’s interview, and I know that the first thing of Davis’s that I loved wasn’t, in fact, one of her electrical and mercurial stories, but her novel The End of the Story, which knocked me several steps up or down from wherever I was—that was like 10 years ago.

Surely you know Lydia Davis—MacArthur grantee, published everywhere, Auster’s ex-, Proust translator, and now, thanks to FSG, someone whose work (the majority of it—all the stories, anyway) you can buy in one fell hard-cover swoop.

You probably saw the Woods’ effusivity a couple weeks back about Davis, and regardless of the surprise that Woods like someone like Davis’s writing, I think he’s pretty spot-on in characterizing her work as deeply, astonishingly of-the-self/selfish. Even the trickiest of her stories, the ones that only barely adhere as ‘story’ (at least as typically conceived), demand some narrative self underlying all of it. Here, from Samuel Johnson is Indignant, is the entirety of “They Take Turns Using a Word They Like”:

“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman.

“It is extraordinary,” says the other.

Seriously: just dig that little bit. Start with the fact that the mundanity of the situation totally upends or ironically shatters the word they’re bothering to repeat, but past that it’s better: that title, and how we’re left aware, because of it, that speech (and, from there, that interest, that evaluation of what’s ordinary and extra-) may or may not have something purely to do with pleasure, with using a word we like. Plus there’s the social construct around it, too: maybe we love and hate who we love and hate simply because we’re all fond of words similarly, akin to how we gravitate toward those with whom we share interests in sports teams.

All this, I fully submit, is headier and more involved than a ‘typical’ short story’s gonna ask of the reader, but Davis is, I think it’s fair and safe to say, absolutely loading her stories with these sorts of questions and ideas—is loading her stories up to seem and read like the top steps of ladders descending into considerations we likely haven’t had. It’s, of course, dicey to ask readers to this stuff—the threat of over-filligree-ing things and the (perceived or actual) snootiness of making story after story so cerebral. However: Davis is a master of exactly this stuff, and her stories end up less like what some of us may like stories to end up like (solid, rest-on-able, character/plot/theme/etc) and more like whispers you turn in an attempt to hear and keep just missing. Maybe that’s the highest compliment: there’s no fiction writer today more involved with building and inventing mystery. Buy the book.

Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon

I liked lots of Mallon’s Yours Ever through the first 146 pages, but page 147 was what knocked me flat out:

“In the  realm of love, however, e-mail’s most peculiar characteristic is the way it so often

becomes not a means to romance but the entirety of any involvement. The e-ffairs into

which so many postmodern people stumble are, like the chaste pen-palships of times past,

relationships sufficient unto themselves, whereas epistolary romances traditionally sought

their own extinction—the moment when physical separation would end, along with each

party’s need to write to the other.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the insight astounded me, and I realized that though I’d been largely enjoying the first half of Mallon’s book, I hadn’t really noticed the complexity and depth at work re: letter writing.

Let’s say this: Mallon’s Yours Ever is probably as valuable a book as anybody on the anti-Kindle bandwagon could hope for. Not that he’s expressly plowing any of that territory, but it’s hard to read Yours Ever without feeling, page-by-page, some distant dinging tang of ache not for letters themselves, but for the system and style and manner they were embedded within (not to sound too old or fuddy-duddy or anything, but you read this and then cut to some local story about teenagers sexting each other and you sort of go mentally hobbled).

Here’s how the book works: in nine chapters, organized by theme (Absence to Friendship to Advice to Complaint to Love to Spirit to Confession to War to Prison), the reader’s given essentially a long and awesome walk through people s/he should already be interested in, or, with just the right stimulant, will be—we get F. Scott Fitzgerald and Meghan Daum, get Rilke and Clemens/Twain, get Heloise and Abelard, Freud and Jung, and Hanff and Doel (84, Charing Cross Road). Maybe most interestingly and excitingly, Richard Nixon comes through, by the end, as one of the most compellingly interesting characters in the book.

The book is, in the best way, an active a physical reminder—not necessarily just of the stuffy, mannered times past, when letters were easier and more common (and the USPS, subsequently, not quite in such an intense budget crunch), but of a time when more people bothered reflecting, bothered putting pencil to paper and transforming thought into narrative (insert start of argument here re: how the infinite amount of space now available for writing diminishes it—one blog’s just as good as the next and etc.). If the book works for most of us the way I’d expect it does or will, you’ll want, at the end, to write to someone you care about, and maybe offer a book recommendation.

Bragging

by Weston Cutter

In case anybody cares at all, some other places I’ve had stuff recently online:

Apostrophe Cast

BOMBlog

Review of Steve Langan’s “Meet Me at the Happy Bar” at Make Magazine

 

(I apologize for the self-love, but figure this is probably the right thing to do)

Joan Silber + Sally Mann: Time and Husbandry

by Weston Cutter

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber

America’s best press has been putting out these slim little books for a bit now, and this last batch (and the next few) seem like the best ones yet. That’s not a knock on what’s come before, but, seriously, how can you go wrong with Joan Silber? The woman’s a dynamite writer of fiction and, it turns out now, a writer of non-fiction, too.

I know all of us who teach this stuff love to talk about questions of craft when making fiction, and it’s a pleasant little delusion, to talk as if we actually understand how these issues of craft work, but the truth is, by and large, we don’t quite know how they work. Character? Setting? These things we load up and charge, but we rarely have the pure gimlet-eyed glance we proclaim in class as necessary to execute fiction masterfully.

Even more complex: time in fiction. The ways in which sentences do or don’t sing, and in which keys. Put it this way: a class in which elements of craft are emphasized and studied would be a breeze compared to a class in which, say, one were to read Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff back to back in an attempt to understand how time fundamentally works in their short fiction. It’s a minefield, unmitigated disaster: from the first sentence, the writer either writes “he said” or “he says” or “he will say” or some other conjugation, but how does one even delicately approach that loaded world of choice?

I’ve yet to see a more lucid and delicate and well-written account of this sort of consideration than Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction (I didn’t read Birkets’ Art of Time in Memoir, so apologies if that’s just as good and I’m simply a poorly-read heel), and I will absolutely admit that the book, in the best ways, doesn’t offer answers: this is not an entry-level book in which one can suss out tics or tendencies which could help a story’s momentum. No, the book’s a stellar complexifier, a whisk in milk: Silber’s thin book blasts wide and open ideas of time and momentum in a story, and the reader will, at the book’s end, be unable not to, somewhere deep inside, hear new tickings each time some book of fiction’s cracked. And, as ever, all praise to Graywolf for having the luxurious daring to put out these strange and life-changing little books.

 

Proud Flesh by Sally Mann, with a contribution form CD Wright

If you don’t like Sally Mann, there are only two explanations: 1. You aren’t familiar with her work, or 2. You’re wrong. Here’s who’s keeping American photography as lively and great as anyone could hope. It’s diminishing to call her stuff more backwoods stuff “like a southern Diane Arbus” or this latest collection “like Sarah Moon’s stuff but more emotional,” but those little aesthetic touchstones are mildly helpful in this context.

What you need to know, more than anything else, is that Sally Mann’s photography is chronically at work trying to get at and into stuff through photography, in ways that, in all honesty, seem to me most reminiscent of some of the stuff Avedon did. They’re entirely different artists, of course, but there should be, somewhere, some well-written and -thought-out piece that examines the split in photography among those whose work is fundamentally capturative and/or topical in nature vs those whose work is probing or examining in nature. If it seems a silly distinction, pick up a copy of, say, Vanity Fair, in which the pictures are all lovely but are also, essentially, time-capturing in nature: here’s Tom Hanks like this, Stephanie Seymour as that, etc.

Not so Sally Mann: this collection of images documents the body of her husband, and Mann’s got a sympathetic eye anyway, but, honestly, this collection is about as tender and loving a series of photographs as imaginable. Who other than a spouse can so carefully, lovingly capture another’s body with such delicacy, such concern? And to charge this instance further: Sally Mann and her husband Larry have been married 40 years, and he has muscular dystrophy.

It’s an astonishing collection—one of those things which, once you see it, you cannot fundamentally get back to who you were before. Mann’s got a terribly interesting mini-essay about the whole thing here, and it’s worth reading and perusing the pictures just to get a sense of this stuff, and to hear her own take on these things, but the truth is, the pictures, largely, speak for themselves: Proud Flesh is, in magical ways, a work grounded in dialogue—between Mann and her husband, between the viewer and Mann’s husband and, most frighteningly, between the reader and him/herself and his/her own ideas of what it means to look at a beloved.

As if you needed further inducement to own this book, C. D. Wright‘s intro is, like the rest of her stuff, mysterious and wild and canny and twisty and liquidly electric. Surely someone you know needs this book right now: buy it and have it on hand when the time arises to pass it along.

Dear Lover: Matthew Ryan

by Jeremy Griffin

It seems fitting that I was introduced to Matthew Ryan’s music by the same dude who first got me into the Replacements years prior, not simply because of the influence that the Mats have had on Ryan—though I guess there’s that, too—but because both artists have, in a very similar fashion, fundamentally altered the way I think about music, what it can do. Much like the Replacements, Ryan is one of those few artists whose music actually does something to the listener. What I mean is, there’s a staggering earnestness that makes it feel important and real and that also makes it impossible to discuss without thinking about first kisses and missed opportunities and all of that gushy sentimental business that, whether we’d like to admit it or not, invariably make us who we are.

And that’s sort of what his latest album Dear Lover is all about, how all of that sob-inducing crap that makes romance such a fiasco is also precisely what also makes it worthwhile. These are love songs in the best sense of the term, meaning that they aren’t songs about what we think love should be like but what it is actually like, as exemplified in the title track, “Dear Lover”: I could be your superhero/ I could be your biggest disappointment…Most of us start out just thinking it’s east/ When the hardest thing you’ll do is remember how to smile, girl.

Over the course of his career, Ryan has increasingly sought to fuse elements of his original roots rock sound with the revamped eighties’ musical aesthetic employed by bands like the Killers and Bloc Party, the result of which has been/is a catalogue of songs whose dimensionality is so pronounced you want to put your fist through it. Dear Lover alternates between synth-heavy pop tunes and meditative acoustic ballads, though it’s the humid growl of fuzzed-out guitars the allows the songs to reach their critical mass, as in tracks like “The Wilderness,” “City Life,” and “We Are Snowmen,” whose resolutions culminate in the form of bright, shuddering crescendos.

Ultimately, it’s Ryan’s voice that gives the album its weight. To call his voice is gravelly would be a phenomenal understatement. Rather, he sounds like someone who’s spent the past three weeks straight screaming at the top of his lungs, pausing every so often for a shot of bourbon and a Pall Mall. And it works! This is because he’s not necessarily trying to channel any Dylanesque phantoms, like some of his contemporaries. With the blossoming indie-and-alt-country scene popping out droves of stylishly grizzled folk singers whose overly rehearsed rasps belie the fact that most of them have only recently completed puberty, it’s easy for the listener to lose the thread of authenticity. But the distinctiveness of Ryan’s voice, the combination of gruffness and fragility, simply underscores the often heart-rending honesty of his music.

I read a review of this album (actually, it was more of a review of a performance Ryan gave in Chicago during which he talked about the recording process of Dear Lover and played the album over the club stereo system) in which the writer suggested that the work of any musician was inherently honest, because, I guess, that’s just what musicians do, or something to that effect, and naturally I couldn’t help but roll my eyes; it seems to me that part of what makes albums like Dear Lover feel so gut-clenchingly sincere is the fact that so much stuff out there feels the exact opposite. And I’m not trying to make the case that “bad” music, such as it is, is intrinsically insincere (I’ve always hated that hipsterish notion that people who make “bad” music are somehow lying to me; I have no doubt that the dudes in Smashmouth really, truly believe they’re being “honest”). All I’m saying is that part of what makes Good music really matter is the feeling that the artist or whoever is handing you something valuable and authentic, that they’re telling you something you actually need to hear. It’s a tricky thing to pull off, but that’s how I feel when I listen to Dear Lover: that in some way I’m better off for it.