Weinberger, Petrosino, and Williams

by Weston Cutter

Oranges and Peanuts For Sale by Eliot Weinberger

 

            What does one even say about Eliot Weinberger anymore? That’s not rhetorical—literally, what can one say? His essays on the Iraq war are still some of the best things that’ve been written on that subject (though The Good Soldiers by D. Finkel is riveting and harrowing and might end up being the single best thing written about the whole war), and nobody I know of, writing in any genre, can cram as much surprise into her/his work than E. Weinberger crams over and over in his stuff.

            Meaning what? Meaning: the guy can write learned and accessible stuff about, say, Neidecker (which can be a tough subject to make accessible) and then turn around and write a phenomenal political and social and poetic piece about visiting China with Forrest Gander, but that’s not the half of it. The overwhelming beauty of Weinberger, to me, is most availble in the short, strange essays which are so stylistically him that it’s impossible to read one without being absolutely certain of the author.

            The title essay in this book, for instance, is one of those, but the more riveting, to me, is a bit later, and is called “In Blue.” We could spend days talking structure—Weinberger’s mastered something shockingly cool way of organizing bits of info that reads as half-Zen and half-Jenga—but just read these lines. Just look at this:

 

Blue is a snail.

In Biblical Hebrew, the word for blue is tekeleth, the name of the snail from which a blue dye was derived.

The Talmud says these snails appear only once every seventy years.

            Please know that that those three sentences comprise the entirety of section 4 of the essay “In Blue,” which essay, simply and wildly, tries to approach the color blue—starting, Weinbergerianly enough, with the line “Go back far enough and there is no blue.”

            What’s the line about travel, how it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar? Weinberger’s books are atlases, each essay a flight: you can’t see the world the same once you’ve read him.

 

Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino

 

            True or false: one of the year’s best collections of poetry gets it title from anagraming Robert Redford’s name, and features a section of poems in which the narrator and Redford are together—having coffee, talking, traveling. Let’s skip the play, actually: the answer’s obviously true, and Kiki Petrosino’s debut collection’s not only features Redford (which’d make the book interestingly cool enough just for that), but features the sorts of lines that make poetry something to believe in, something you want to pick up and hold and cheer for. Here are a few opening lines:

Sorry, but I just don’t love you

more than Dawrinism.

(from “Valentine,” though you should know there’s a whole section of them, and they’re all titled “Valentine.” This one’s the fifth.)

Or oreo, or worse.

Or spork. Or smorgasbord.

Or tender lure of colored blood

or centaur.

(“Or”)

God has spider skin and lives in secret trees. I have stood beside you, saying

this, as you reach into the cupboard for another stack of dry noodles.

(“You Have Made a Career of Not Listening”)

            The list goes on. You have to read it all to believe what she’s capable of. The great thrill and dazzle of the book, though, is that Petrosino’s like some megic, futuristic battery, charging up the daily glunky stuff of life and giving it not just power or light or shine but a verve that keeps sparking long after you’ve read the poems. True: I got this book this summer and had to travel quite a bit, and of all the books I kept wishing I hadn’t put away in boxes, this was one of the ones I wished for most.

 

Stories in Stone by David B. Williams

            Subtitled Travels Through Urban Geology, David Williams’s book is a startling delight for at least two reasons. First, it’s just clever as all get-out: instead of talking about specific buildings, and instead of tracing the history of a single type of building material through the ages, Williams, in ten chapters, covers a huge swath of different stone—from different cities, used for different reasons on and in different buildings all over the country. That story alone would be fascinatingly great.

            But Stories in Stone is actually far more than that, and this has (of course, as ever) to do with nonfiction and voice: Williams not just loves these different types of stones, but this book came from an ache, a sort of geographic homesickness. Here, from Williams’s preface:

            “When my wife, Marjorie, decided to pursue her master’s degree, we moved to Boston. I hated the first few months. Where I had once traipsed through quiet sandstone canyons, surrounded by thousand-foot-tall cliffs of rock, I now walked through shadowy canyons crated by buildings. Where I once hiked on desolate trails, I now crossed busy streets. For the first time in many years I felt disconnected from the natural world.

            And then I noticed Boston’s buildings. Half-bullion-year-old slates abutted 150,000-year-old travertines. Sandstone that formed in Connecticut sat on top of marble that formed in Italy…As I began to notice the stone in buildings, I found the geologic stories that could provide the connection to wildness I had lost.”

            It’d be impossible to under-stress the importance of Williams’s realization, or the joy he clearly felt in reconnecting with his beloved stone. If that sounds hokey or sappy, well, maybe it is, but let’s be honest: what the world, and especially the publishing industry, needs more of are books in which authors care deeply and sincerely about that which they write of. Williams, in Stories in Stone, has written what feels like a love letter—to a world he’d feared lost, and the celebratory relief he seems to have felt on discovering that he still had a way to access what he loved is contagious and enthralling.

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.

More Catch-up

by Weston Cutter

 

Bodies by Susie Orbach

            The ideas in this book are actually so startling that, once you read it, you sort of can’t imagine thinking about bodies in the same way again. Orbach, for those not in the know (which group included, until real recently, this reviewer), wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue in 1978 and has the sorts of accolades that make one feel really, really dumb for not having known/read her stuff before. But! But, now, Picador’s come out with Bodies, part of it’s Big Ideas/small books series (Zizek’s Violence, Lukes’ Moral Relativism), and this is what you should be reading for nonfiction, right now.

            Because Orbach actually reads, to me, as pretty prophetic: we’re probably right at the edge of the time in which our perceptions of our bodies are more about process than product—Orbach sees that switch shifting rapidly (think plastic surgery and bioethical decisions and etc), and she backs herself up convincingly. However, that’s not even the book’s real scope: the book’s real scope is to examine case studies—the guy who wanted to amputate his healthy legs, the guy who hates wearing his clothes and so rips everything off as of returning home from work each day—and try to trace the incredibly complex and weird territory of body-as-thing, as object.

            I’ll here fully admit that I think Orbach’s is terrifyingly insightful, and she writes of a world I can imagine with uncomfortable ease, and so perhaps I’m simply biased toward this book because it is, in all sorts of ways, speaking to me; that said, I’m almost sure that this is one of those books which will be riveting and thought-exploding for everyone, those who agree, those who disagree, those who haven’t for even a second thought about the subject of bodies. Orbach says: start thinking.

 

Trespass by Amy Irvine

            Oh good lord. Seriously, the less I say about this, the better. You know Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World? Imagine that book, except now it’s written by the trickster, and the trickster’s a woman, and the place she’s writing in and from is Utah, and the writing’s so good and pure and direct and true (somehow—it’s hard to really explain) that single sentences within this thing will make you full as a full meal would. It’s a book that’s so of itself there’s nothing to fairly compare it to, nothing to put it bedside next to, just like this. Trespass is like Trespass, and it’s worth every atom of energy you spend getting and reading it.

 

The Winter Sun by Fanny Howe

            Actually, talk about a book that’s so of itself: Fanny Howe’s “Notes on a Vocation” might be a good companion to Irvine’s Trespass in that both books are, in the different ways, about between-areas, about places (psychic, mental, emotional, whatever) that are neither all one thing or all another (it’s that Dickinson line, holding her hands out to let infinity pass through). Howe writes like a more emotionally-accessible Eliot Weinberger (about whose essay’s enough love cannot possibly ever be shown)—she uses silence and pause and declension not just within the text but between texts, blocking paragraphs off with white space, making the material feel like things snatched.

            I want to say, too, that I’m no huge fan of memoirs (though I just read David Gilmour’s Film Club and couldn’t stop laughing and loving it), but Fanny Howe and Amy Irvine have, together, in the last few months, come out with two phenomenal examples of what the form’s capable of. And so maybe that’s the real gift of The Winter Sun (and also Trespass)–you get to believe again. 

Three Great New Non

by Weston Cutter

 

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

 

You know that line Vonnegut said about Leonard, how it felt reading him as if he’d set out for the men’s room but had found instead the smartest man who ever lived? The line hit me so hard because it’s how I felt with Leonard, too: dude just dropped everything in his essays. Reading John Leonard the first time seems like an experience akin to reading, say, Wallace or Powers for the first time, or hearing Westerberg or Miles Davis. Choose yr analogy.

And here’s the great part: Clive James is offers just the same buzz. This shit’s incredible! You cannot believe how interesting and compelling he is, how he can offer what feels like the entire world in a book this (relatively) small. Cultural Amnesia’s something an encyclopedia of cultural artists (mostly men) some of whom you’ve heard of (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Proust) and plenty you haven’t (and of course it’s those entries that taste most spectacular: it’s like finding a new path up the mountain, discovering these other artists to pay attention to).

The book’s a knockout, by the way, not because it’s a compendium of folks we should know more about; we’ve got those books, and largely they’re boring books (half-connected issue: can the phrase “Why ______ Matters” be banned forever from published-book use? Is there any more condescending phrase? Can anyone offer an example of something which has absolutely no value, something that’s of no matter?). No, what James does is take something seemingly small about the artist/thinker/whoever in question—a snatch of dialogue from Michael Mann’s Heat, for instance—and unfold it, smoothing it out, fitting it anew onto the reader’s mental image of the world and saying no, look at it with this in mind.

Oh my god, it’s fun. Seriously. This book came out in hardcover last year and I feel embarrassed that I didn’t buy it then. So, so good. So rich and rewarding and a great candidate for that smallest of categories: Books Which Will Make You a Better Person.

 

Clawing at the Limits of Cool by Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington

 

When I was 16 I entered this huge Beatles phase, and it just so happened that at the same time there was a book published that chronicled what the Beatles did as a band every single day from their first practice until their breakup. I’m not kidding. I loved the thing. I bring it up here only to make clear that I’m as much a completist as they come (like tracking down all out-takes available (like anywhere) by any musician I really dig), and so anything, anything at all, about Coltrane and Davis, either separately or together as members of the quintet that basically reshaped what jazz could or would be in the US in the second half of the 20th century, anything having to do with either of those men and I’m in. Seriously, if there was a Coltrane cereal, I’d get a box.

What’s most stellar about Griffin’s and Washington’s book is that, like Clive James, these people bring in the whole world when talking about jazz, about Coltrane and Davis—which, of course, is how all music must be understood, before a backdrop of the country and cultural moment in which the music was made and worked toward, but it’s a rarity to get as thorough a view of the world as Griffin and Washington offer. Just as great, though, is the consideration of this artistic collaboration’s result and legacy. The best art seems inevitable: this must be so. You can’t imagine, say, Ralph Ellison writing anything other than Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? to finish his masterwork, and yet we know there must have been something, some work toward that. Jazz has been this country’s most interesting and (I’d argue) self-aware/exploring art, and no matter what you think of jazz, if you care about it and want to know more, you have to read this book; you have to know about Davis’ and Coltrane’s moment (years, but I mean historical moment) together.

 

Active Boundaries by Michael Palmer

 

It didn’t even occur to me when I decided to review all three of these books together that they each, in their way, attempt to gather the whole world—attempt to view the world through a certain pattern or lens, maybe, is the better way to say it—and yet it’s obvious as rain now.

Palmer’s a poet, considered (I’m pretty sure) one of the Language Poets; he lives in San Francisco, regardless (I’m not huge on the whole grouping/naming thing, though if it matters, the Language poets sort of came from (again, from what I can tell) the Objectivists, with a bit of Black Mountain poets mixed in as well). Palmer’s stuff is, I think, wildly, weirdly fascinating and engaging though, to be fair, it’s also pretty tough, demanding in the best way: his poetry asks much of the reader (and rewards attention and commitment handsomely). I happen to like, if not lots of his actual work, then for sure his quizzing and careful engagement with the world and language (apologies for the grad school tone, but it’s true: read Notes for Echo Lake), and so I’m just hopelessly biased toward his nonfiction: it offers the whizzing, puzzling mind on something of a still surface (nonfiction—even the craziest, Jenny Boully-like nonfiction—being a bunch easier (I think) to grapple with than poetry (that’s not to indicate a preference, by the way, not that it matters)).

And so Active Boundaries offers thoughts on Duncan, Oppen, Whitman, Paz. “On the Sustaining of Culture in Dark Times,” is worth the price of admission for the whole book, though you could just as easily say that about “The Danish Notebook,” which is just…it’s hard to even grapple with the power of that piece. There’s a handful (three or four, depending on how you count) of pieces that stretch awesomely around whole mountains of poetry and poetics, and if, on reading those pieces, you don’t end up with nine or ten new books you’re itching to get from the library, you’re already lost, friend.

Nonfiction like this—like James up above, and Eliot Weinberger, and Ander Monson’s stuff, to some degree—nonfiction that allows entrance into an active, articulate, searching mind has got to be one of the great accomplishment not just of these writers, but of language itself. If you do it right, you’ll be worn out, mentally fatigued, after finishing Palmer’s stuff, and the exhaustion will, like physical exercise, mean (of course) that you’re getting stronger. Read. (And, as usual: three (more) cheers for New Directions.)