He Crashed Me and I Couldn’t Stop Reading

by Weston Cutter

It’s always this way, right? The books you don’t expect to care much about end up being righteously distracting and time-consuming and etc.? Maybe 2 months ago I got, all within several days of each other, the upcoming Ander Monson (the nonfiction, not the poetry), and the new Ted Conover, and the new Tony Hoagland, any of which would’ve been week-making books in any context, and yet the book I kept tracking back to, picking up and hauling ass through, was one called He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back. A book about, I’m not joking, Nascar.

On the one hand, it could be entirely possible that I enjoyed He Crashed Me so much because of its novelty, because I know next to nothing about Nascar and so was simply enraptured by the foreign world I’d till then not bothered glimpsing. I suppose it’s possible I ended up enjoying the book so much, too, because the time period covered in the book correlates closely to the date of my birth, and I’m as self-obsessed as anyone, and so I just got buzzed off thinking what the world was like when I was just arriving in it.

Of course it’s none of that: what it is is that there’s a guy named Mark Bechtel and he’s written a book that’s sympathetically gorgeous (the story pivots around the 1979 Nascar season, which happens to be the year in which, to use the supporting-material-ish claim, Everything Changed in the World of Nascar. Maybe surprisingly, maybe not, Nascar’s emergence as a national-interest story and/or sport came at the juncture of some elegantly complex coincidences, not least of which was a monumental snowstorm that kept people indoors and a legenday race being filmed life, and a new Republican president who had more cowboy-ish charm than any president in recent memory.

But it’s not, ultimately, the endlessly interesting corroborating color-commentary picture-completing notes which Bechtel includes which make the book such a thrill (though they’re phenomenal, phenomenal details—dude goes into music [Willie, Waylon], talks the history of Daytona [driving on sand], references the cultural touchstones that also happened to bubble up simultaneously with Nascar [Dukes of Hazzard real obviously], everything). No, the book’s a thrill for that oldest reason: the folks involved. And the reader gets absolutely everybody–the Allison brothers, Darrell Waltrip (and, eventually, later, his brother Michael), big Bill French (he’s the old granddaddy, the guy who literally organized Nascar) and his son, Bill jr. There’s Carl Yarborough, who Bechtel does an amazing job of making the most decently endearing cantankerous prick around (it’s impossible not to love the guy; he’s one of those characters who, were this a novel, would be the reason people sped quickly through the novel in the first place).

Plus of course the reason ’79 was such a big deal was that it was the meeting of the King, Richard Petty (who would, that year, win the Nascar title after some time in the wilderness), and the upstart rookie, Dale Earnhardt. I’m as media-saturated as everybody, and I spent monumental hours getting daily doses of television commercials as a kid, and so I’d always know Petty just as a dude who made some spray-and-wash thing for cars; about Earnhardt, I knew just that he was #3, that he died in a crash, and that most of the folks who drove around with a small #3 decal on their rear windows were folks I likely wouldn’t be having a beer with anytime soon.

And, of course, both men were/are far more than that—were/are riveting, fascinating people, were wildly, wildly talented men (talented in all sorts of ways, not least of which is the way in which the King and Earnhardt built teams around themselves; given the hugely hen-pecky and territorial and mercenery behind-the-scenes folks at Nascar, anyone getting a functioning team together feels like a small miracle in this book). They’re both, absolutely, the “feudin’, fightin’, good ol’ boys” of the book’s subtitle. There’s tons to say about these two racers—about their styles and their backgrounds, about how the dynamic between the two made a fascinating and engaging book not just possible but made said book feel sort of inevitably magnetic—but skip my words and get to the real ones–get to the book.

Because this, then, is the real magic of books: now I want to have a beer with those folks who love Nascar, those who’ve affixed small #3 decals to their rear windows. I still don’t think I could sit understand a Nascar race as I watched it—I know the driver who crosses the line first wins, but the mechanics and skill involved still elude me, even just as a theoretical understanding of them, elude me—but I’m a hell of a lot more interested in all of it, and I’m engaged, and I’m now, like so many other Americans, tuned in to this event, this sport, this thing. Even if you’d like nothing more than to spend the rest of your life without wasting a single calorie of concern on Nascar, you still owe it to yourself and to Mark Bechtel to read this book. It’s magic.

Further, if you end up getting so taken by Bechtel’s fantastic tale that you’re suddenly bound and determined to go out and see ever Nascar race you can, you need to pick up the just-released The Ultimate NASCAR Insider’s Track Guide by Liz Allison. Why must you pick this book up? Because there’s literally no question I can think of about the actual physical event of going to a Nascar race that isn’t answered within its pages. Want pizza in Daytona? Want a massage in Bristol? Want to know where to take your ailing dog while in Long Pond, Pennsylvania? All these answers: in this book. The resourcefulness of this book seems just about limitless.

Three Rounds : New Poetry

by Weston Cutter

Heather McHugh’s Upgraded to Serious

There’s a magic laughter running through McHugh’s stuff, all the time, and laughter might not even be the right word: there’s just this delight, someone clearly enjoying the wobble and burstability of language. The first stanza of her poem “Glass House”:

Everything obeyed our laws and

we just went on self-improving

till a window gave us pause and

there the outside world was, moving.

Forget for a second the nice/beautiful metric symmetry: this sort of sad funniness, this song-of-those-in-charge-but-not-feeling-enough—that’s this book’s schtick or MO. I say schtick cautiously: one of the things that’s most fun about McHugh’s stuff is also the element that invites danger, and that is that she’s fantastically, hilariously gifted with language play and how to structure it. From “Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork”:

I love him so, this animal I pray

was treated kindly. Let me pay as much as even

greater pig-lovers see fit

to guarantee him that. As for his fat,

I’d give up years yes years of my

own life for such

a gulpable semblable.

It’s gorgeous and witty and quick off the tongue like a good curse—the pray/pay, fit/that/fat, gulpable/semlable (and, note: those-in-charge-but-not-feeling-enough: this book’s quite a few playful fingers pointed at the Emperor in his clothes, snickering); however, once you’ve seen some of these poems, you can sort of see what might be coming. To be clear: that’s not inherently a bad thing, it’s just a diminished potential surprise. Still: it’s hard—impossible—to argue with McHugh’s great playfulness, and there’s, as ever, zero arguing with Copper Canyon.

Pulleys and Locomotion by Rachel Galvin

I’ll admit it: this book is beyond my reach. Here’s what’s hard: I don’t know if that’s the intention. Galvin’s fantastically interesting and strong poems are well-made machines (look at the book’s title), but, like a dope, I’m not sure what the machines want, or are making, or how I’m supposed to use them. I know we’re not supposed to admit this stuff re: poetry—we’re not supposed to say I don’t get this, it’s beyond my grasp—but, well, here we are.

And here’s why it actually sort of hurts, lines like these (from “Scenic Overlook One Hundred Yards”):

At a roadside Park ‘n Eat we spoke of what it takes

to unfurl a belief of this size. And maintain it.

I was convinced it was a buzz saw,

or something unzipped, but

it could have been the blue mountains

laying their wagers.

There’s so much to love about that—the delicate off-harmony background music of the words not-quite-meeting/mixing, the verbal insecurity about the relationship between the mountains and or/faith and/or buzz saw/unzipped thing, or just a sound, whatever. Basically: I want very much to get and feel more from and in Rachel Galvin’s work. I’ll be reading her next book. I’ll keep reading this one (which, for the record, is from Black Lawrence Press and is incredible, as they are—I only recently started paying attention but should have been this whole time). I’ll take any hints anyone’s willing to offer.

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland

Honestly, I’m sort of including this book only because I must, because Hoagland comes out with a new book, what, every five years? and each one feels insanely necessary, and you read them and you can’t even understand how you went through life without these poems. I don’t know any poet who is making stuff that feels this way—and there’s not even a word to capture what “this way” means. Dig the start of his “Expensive Hotel”:

When the middle-class black family in the carpeted hall

passes the immigrant housekeeper from BElize, oh

that is an interesting moment. One pair of eyes is lowered.

That’s how you know you are part

of a master race—when someone

humbles themselves without even having to be asked.

Plus that’s not doesn’t even hint at the arc the poem will, in just a couple more stanzas, take. Again: this is less a review, or a hand-waving, jumping-up-and-down, please-buy-this-book plug: this is Hoagland, one of the country’s most impressive writers, one of the poetry’s most dedicated and un-chicken-shit writers. Unincorporated Persons… is, like What Narcissism Means to Me or Donkey Gospel or Sweet Ruin, a totally American, totally necessary collection. Yes: if you don’t have it, everyone will judge you accordingly.

Rosemurgy=Magician

by Weston Cutter

I’ll admit that I’ve been holding back on doing this review. Holding back both out of just general laziness, but also out of something like fear. Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual is one of those books which, like stars, is best seen indirectly, best considered (in the classic Replacement phrase) left of the dial. Why? Well, look first at the title of the whole thing: the book’s title’s second word can either be adjective or noun, and how you split the wood there’s significant. Is this a Stranger Manual, like, the manual that comes between the Strange and the Strangest manual? Or is this Stranger Manual for strangers, and, if so, what’s the deal on that?

I don’t have answers, of course, and I wonder if Rosemurgy (who I interviewed a bit ago)(also: an interview in which she talks about the book’s title!) would even be willing to say if she read/meant the title one way or another. Becuase, see, this is the thing, dear reader: Catie Rosemurgy’s book The Stranger Manual functions somehow almost Rorschachian, something nearly symmetric. On page 11, there’s “Miss Peach Imagines She Is an Aging British Rock Star and Explains What Honesty Is”; on 61, there’s “Miss Peach Imagines She Is an Aging British Rock Star and Considers Bipedalism While Responding to a Beautiful Woman Who Has Just Said ‘I Love You’”; these represent only half of the Miss Peach/Aging British Rock Star poems in the book.

So your first hint: The Stranger Manual is graced with Miss Peach, this fictional, freewheeling, incredibly strange + appealing woman, plus lots of what happens with/to Miss Peach happens within Gold River (a town). It’s hard to talk about this stuff without sounding silly or weird, hard to talk about overtly unreal stuff in poems, because it’s the opposite of what we come to poetry for, right? We come for honesty and seriousness and intense stuff—we want the callused skin of day-to-day experience peeled back carefully, surgically snipped beautifully, and we want the thrumming muscle beneath revealed, and to do that we need some decent authorial presence, someone to be Legit and Real, right? Maybe this is just me, but it feels like much of the poetry we all read features voice stuff such as this (I’ve got a stack of 7 books of poetry here, all of which I’m to be reviewing, and I can think of none which feature a speaker who is clearly false/made up).

And so it’s both incredibly fresh (all meanings of the word) and a bit strange to get this Miss Peach woman: she’s odd and hilarious, and touchingly direct in ways, again, we’re mostly (or at least for sure I) not accustomed to finding in poems. Here’s the first three sentences of “Miss Peach Explains Promiscuity to a Toddler”:

Say this yellow square block is bored. Say she’s bored because she’s always been

a yellow square block and has always been knocked down with other yellow square blocks.

So one days she goes to the couch where she meets some blue rectangles. The idea

is to make something she hasn’t seen fall down before.

Just for that phrase—make something she hasn’t seen fall down before—would make the book worth buying, but it does even get better thereafter.

(I’m having a hard time with this. This book moved me and wowed my and for the last several months I’ve probably had it near me more than any book in a long-ish time; it’s so good it now knocks me back, makes me nervous. Maybe this: For those of us who write, there’s that grip of fear that clutches when you realize, looking through all the stuff you write, that you are, in lots of ways, all the stuff you write. Too many serious, wordy things about attachment and fear? Bingo: that’s the mirror, kid. Too jokey, an inability to hold anything? Likewise. The truth is, whether we want to admit it or not, the line between author and book is never very distinct [for tons of reasons; I'm not saying The Stranger Manual is autobiography on Ms. Rosemurgy's part; I will, however, say that this book could only be exactly what it is because of Rosemurgy's obvious and intense great humor, her willingness to have this tough tenderness, this sort of laughing intimacy]. What I’m trying to say is: this book is both ten times funnier and a dozen times sweeter than any book I can think of in the last five/ten years. I’m not kidding. This book is to good contemporary poetry what Aimee Bender’s best stories are to fiction—strange, illuminating because of difference, sexy as hell).

God! This book! You page through at random and get lines that just knock you sideways. Ugh. I can’t do it. The Stranger Manual is bigger and funnier and better than any review’ll try to shape it into, starting with this one. Please, please: buy this.

(you can/should see samples of C.Rosemurgy’s stuff here and here and here and here and here)

Deep Down, You Really Do Love Math, Don’t You?

by Weston Cutter

The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder

I’ll admit right at the outset that I’m made anxious by nonfiction accounts of the past in which dialogue is used, in which the principals’s heads are encroached upon and their thoughts limned and detailed. I’ll admit that this stance is largely the result of contemporary forces and fracas which have made nonfiction hard-ish to read (I’ve been reading D. Shields’s Reality Hunger; I’d've said this stuff anyway, but that slim and sledgehammering book makes it hard not to put this sort of beef up on the block just asap). And so I’ll admit that, though I was like nine types of thrilled to read Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement, I also got nervous very quickly, once I realized she’d be doing the I’m-gonna-write-from-within-Einstein’s-head-even-though-I’m-not-100%-sure-I’m-right.

Some sidenotes: If you’re into reading but you’re not into science/physics/bio/chem, shame on you. We might be living in the richest moment in terms of books regarding hard science decoded and made presentable to neither academicians nor amateurs—think of the book under review, think of 101 Theory Drive, think Einstein’s Telescope, think Why Us? That’s off the top of my head and that’s within the last 12 months. Plus there’s just the crazily fascinating fact of physics/science/etc: how can one not be made endlessly curious by a topic (quantum physics, for Gilder) about which it has been said “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”? FEYNMAN said it! Dude won a Nobel!

Back to Gilder: I was totally, totally wrong. Not only is The Age of Entanglement a totally satisfying read, it’s also one of the smartest science books I’ve read in a long-ish time, smart in a way that’s surprising at a number of levels. First, Gilder does not coddle: she’s lifting some massive weights in her telling of all the 20th century and the radical restructuring of physics, and she doesn’t for a second make it easy. Second, one would think, with daily evermore plangent noises being made about the future of publishing, that publishers might be mostly interested in the most saccharine glob that’ll slide easily down the collective gullet of us few remaining readers…but then The Age of Entanglement shows up and makes one have to believe.

And the characters! That brazen act Gilder commits right at the start, sneaking her way into the heads of those physicists—the act is vital and great and allows the reader into the fullness of a story that continues to confound (it’s hard to do justice to how ballsy and good a decision it was for Gilder to get into the heads of long-dead physicists, because describing why it’s such a good move necessitates acknowledging how sticky and dicey quantum physics is, and how much is dependent on unique and down-to-the-second views of things…it’s literally impossible to get at this. Forget the attempt; read the book). Outside parenthesis, too: read the book.

The Great Equations by Robert P. Crease

I own an old-ish book called, I think, Mathematical Mountaintops, and here, I just went and found it: it’s by John Casti and its subtitle is The Five Most Famous Problems of All Time, and I have no shame in admitting its a book I’ve spent a mess of time getting lost within, all of which should just make it obvious that a book called The Great Equations is gonna tickle and soothe and satisfy the exact same itch/bone/whatever that Mathematical Mountaintops did (since MM came out, too, we’ve seen the Poincare Conjecture proven, which should be nothing more than proof that we need and will continually and always need new math books. Hell, Fermat’s Last Theorem didn’t get fully proven by Giles till the mid-90′s, right? There should be new math books at every moment.).

I was into Robert P. Crease’s The Great Equations the minute I spotted time’s most beautiful equation on the cover—e^iπ+1=0. I know Pythagora’s theorem’s hot, I know Heisenberg’s numbers astound, but I’ll always be a sucker for e to the i pi (I’ve been told by a quite good mathematician/physicist that that equation is, actually, pretty obvious and self-evident, but who gives a crap? The Beatles early songs are, musically, pretty obvious and self-evident, too, but I still listen to those).

Also, while the book, like the best math porn, offers the straight numbers and letters for those of us so inclined to take heart and glean thrills from such things, Crease is out to bag a different beast here: dude’s helping to acknowledge and prove how equations help craft the narrative of humanity. Seem a stretch? Google how the development of calculus (a recent mathematical development, roughly) allowed new rules in architecture, or how the movement of electrons allowed, well, the computer that I’m writing this on, and that you’re (likely) reading this one, and etc. etc. etc.

It’s a dazzler of a book.

An Interview with John D’Agata

by Weston Cutter

(John D’Agata’s writing is one of the reasons why being alive in the present moment is fun and exciting. If you need a more thorough explanation of why that last sentence is true, you’re likely without two of the best anthologies ever, and/or you’re likely without two of the best pieces of literature in the last decade or so. Should you own his “About a Mountain” and “Halls of Fame“? Of course you should. Should you own “Lost Origins of the Essay” and “Next American Essay“? Obviously. We’ll run a review of his “About a Mountain” soon, but, until then, here’s an interview with the man).

Has writing always been something you’ve been drawn toward, or did you end up writing because snowboarding didn’t work out (or something like that)? And did you ever spend time working toward/in poetry and/or fiction? What ended up being the big draw for nonfiction–and, especially, the experimental sort of nonfiction you’re involved with?

It was Latin and Greek not “working out” that led me eventually into writing.  I’d been studying Classics for a long time as a kid (because my mom is funky and was always a little overly ambitious for me).  And in college I was still studying Classics—pretty much only Classics—until after I returned from a year abroad in Rome where I had been spending every day attempting to do translations.  And I actually like translating, but what I didn’t enjoy was the realization that these languages that I’d been studying privately for years with tutors were part of a world I really didn’t want to be a part of.  What I loved about Latin and Greek as a kid was that none of my friends were studying these languages, so all of the writers that I was exploring at the time—very rudimentarily, of course—felt like imaginary friends, and their texts truly did feel like a secret language.  Living in Rome for a year kind of ruined that immature fantasy for me.  So, immaturely or not, I basically abandoned Classics and started an English major.  And while trying to fulfill some electives, I bumped into creative writing, particularly essays.  It was then that I realized that essays were what I’d been reading and enjoying all along as a kid.  So it was destiny.

What/who are some of your literary and/or stylistic influences? Was there some specific book or author who pushed you into writing, and specifically into nonfiction?

Didion.  Not that I resemble her in any way as a writer, but I recall being astonished by the level of control she wielded over her essays.  And while she’s changed a lot over the past ten to twelve years as an essayist, I’m still in awe of her work.  I would say even more so perhaps, because it’s even more confident these days.

Regarding About a Mountain, did you set out to write the book that you ended up writing? If not, what was the book you were aiming to write? Or was the book initially about just the politics of putting spent nuclear fuel inside a mountain?

I set out to write a funny book, actually.  All I knew about Yucca when I started researching the mountain was that an obscure government panel had been formed about a decade earlier to investigate how to mark Yucca’s site with a warning sign whose message and medium could remain intact and coherent for 10,000 years.  I thought that that was going to be entertaining enough to carry me for a few years.  And my only real objective was to write amusingly about it.  But in the midst of researching Yucca my mom moved to Las Vegas, which is just south of the mountain.  And that suddenly changed everything.  In the book it’s suggested that it was my mom who introduced me to Yucca, but in reality I had been poking around the subject for a few years thanks to a friend who was working as a subcontractor on the project.  With my mom’s arrival in Vegas however, my attitude toward both the place and the project dramatically changed.  Because now this nuclear waste that would be headed for Yucca Mountain was going to be traveling within a dozen or so miles of my mom’s new home, and so of course the book became more political for me.  It became personal, and far less funny.  Of course, it’s still absurd, but it’s tragically so.

In terms of craft and your own writing, what’s the process like for creating/discovering the structures that you end up using?

I tend to need a form to work out of before I can begin really working on a project, but I also try to resist imposing form on subjects.  I tried forcing a pre-conceived idea of a form on this new book, for example, and it backfired.  That’s one of the reasons why it took me nine years to write About a Mountain, because I had to start over from scratch about five years after starting it.  I was trying to jam the book into a form that it simply wasn’t meant to take.  So my process is a lot of trial and error.  For me form isn’t just an affectation; it’s part of the experience of a text.  It needs to work in tandem with an essay’s argument.  Otherwise it’s just a gimmick, a distraction.

The book is fundamentally about communication, and at book’s end you seem to close on settling on an idea of Las Vegas as a place which induces this feeling of despair/void…yet you marched in a parade for the city (and ate its birthday cake), and seem to like it quite a bit. Was Vegas itself what you wanted to write about, the draw and repel of it? Is any of the above accurate–do you actually not like it at all, and is the book not actually about communication?

I like Vegas a lot.  My first book actually featured a few Las Vegas subjects as well.  And I marched in the city’s parade because I found out that I share a birthday with the city, which I honestly found exciting.  So while that “despair” that’s felt at the book’s conclusion is real, so is my love for Vegas.  The Las Vegas that is criticized in the book is a Vegas that, for me, is emblematic of America.  Certainly, most of America doesn’t look or feel or function like Las Vegas, which is why Las Vegas is special.  But, on the other hand, most of Las Vegas doesn’t look or feel or function like Las Vegas, which is a point that the book makes.  Las Vegas is mostly an idea, it’s a conceptual tourist destination.  I mean, it’s a real place that people visit of course, but it’s the idea of the place that people bring with them to Vegas that really makes the city what it is.  Otherwise, Las Vegas is just a town with a big amusement park at its center.  It’s not like the families that live there or the politicians that run the place have a looser sense of morality than the rest of the country.  It’s not there are no laws there.  I grew up in an adorable little seaside town of 5,000 people on Cape Cod and I can tell you without a speck of hesitation that the politics and the people of that place are a hell of a lot nastier than anything I’ve encountered in Vegas.   So I like Vegas.  It’s what we as a nation have decided to allow Vegas to represent in our culture that I find problematic.  Because what it’s representing is inside all of us.  We really do not leave it there when our vacations are over, no matter what the city’s advertisements like to tell us.  We bring that shit with us and it follows us home.

On the issue of “communication”: sure.  I think the book’s about information, personally.  But information is a form of communication, so I think that works.

Just out of curiosity, what was the initial tug for compiling the essay collections? Simply their lack, and that you had the urge to see them realized? And did you know/sense from the start that you’d end up with three massive volumes? And how unbelievably tough is the compiling/editing process involved?

I first started thinking about the anthologies in grad school.  I was in school during the late 90s, right smack in the middle of the burgeoning memoir thing.  So my interest in putting together a history of “this kind” of essaying was, admittedly, reactionary at first.  I want to demonstrate that there was more to the genre than how we seemed to be interpreting the genre at the time—and, to some extent, more to how we are still interpreting it.  So yes, it was in response to a lack.  But not just of anthologies.  There was a lack of conversation happening in the genre about our heritage as writers, or even about of our place in contemporary literature.  I was far more cocky when I started the anthologies than I am now, and I thank the gods for that.  Because I don’t think that I’d have the guts today to demand from readers what I demanded from them in that first anthology.  Although, oddly enough, I think the second anthology—which is the newest one—is the one that’s gotten more people upset.

In editing the anthologies, you said the impulse was somewhat reactionary at first.  How has the guiding principle or impulse changed since then, if at all? Do you think (in general, in publishing) there’s less an emphasis on the monumentally first-person-based stuff of a decade/decade-and-a-half ago?

No, I think the publishing world would still like nonfiction to be history, commentary, or personal writing—easily marketable categories.  It’s still uncomfortable with the more meditative stuff that has primarily comprised work in this genre throughout history.  And that’s probably one of the reasons why the book industry shifted from using “essay” as a term to describe what goes on in this genre, and started embracing “nonfiction.”  So my guiding principle hasn’t changed since I first started the anthologies.  I’m working on the last one now, and I still feel the same need to remember that there’s a lot more to this genre than the achingly boring confessional stuff that’s been overwhelming us since the 90s.

What is experimental nonfiction? Further, does a distinction like that matter that much to begin with?

The distinction doesn’t matter.  You can call this work whatever you want.  Just don’t call it “nonfiction.”

What’s the view out your window?

Hmm.  Something witty, I wish.