Isak

Beautiful Things Seen This Year: 2

 

This year, I made my first visit to the home of the writer for whom this website is named. Her home at the foot of the Ngong Hills is now a museum. Most of her four-thousand-acre coffee farm has been carved up, though you can explore a bit more of the landscape by visiting the former farm house in a space now known as the coffee gardens -- there's a pricey bed-and-breakfast there, and wonderful coffee. It is a favorite of visitors.

It was this writer who first turned my mind to Kenya more than ten years ago. Her storytelling incited me to look for the books of authors native to East Africa, like Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Grace Ogot, Binyavanga Wainana, Billy Kahora and the other writers of Kwani. When I started this website, which has become a fierce chronicle for me over the last going-on-six years, I wrote this:

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea."

There's truth in Isak Dinesen's words, and also romance. After all, one might suggest that food and shelter could also be useful on occasion.

Dinesen, whose true name was Karen Blixen, was a Danish woman who operated a coffee farm in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. Her famed storytelling eventually emerged on paper. Out of Africa was her favorite of her many books "because it is true." But she was also a prolific writer of dark-edged tales -- long, luxurious stories that rattle and creak and slant reality with unabashed verve.

I don't mean to imply, by naming this website after her, that Isak will be a tribute site, or a research site, or a bio site. Rather, Isak is a space to celebrate tales and truth in the curious, loving way that embodies the spirit of the writer for which it is named.

By tales, I mean fiction (especially short fiction), as well as other literary and artistic narratives. By truth, I mean the world in which we live. I especially have my eye on creative social justice.

And I take the word "celebrating" in Isak's tagline seriously. The name "Isak," after all, means "laughter," as Dinesen was fond of pointing out. While there is so much to fear for in this world, and, dare I say, an equal amount to fear in the artistic world, it's impossible to ignore the causes for joy and hope.

Let's explore them together.

In the late spring of this year, it felt almost precarious to walk into her house, creak my feet along the wood, finger the limp lace of her old bedspread, look over the swath of land to the hills -- now filled with trees, though cleared for coffee farming in her time. I sat at the mill-stone in the back of her house (above), a stone that had a "tragic history", as she wrote in Out of Africa. It had been the upper mill-stone of a mill where two Indians were murdered.

After the murder nobody dared to take over the mill, it was empty and silent for a long time, and I had the stone brought to my house to form a table-top, to remind me of Denmark. The Indian millers told me that their mill-stone had come over the Sea of Bombay, as the stones of Africa are not hard enough for grinding. On the top side a pattern was carved, and it had a few large brown spots on it, which my houseboys held to be the blood of the Indians, that would never come off. The mill-stone table in a way constituted the centre of the farm, for I used to sit behind it in all my dealings with the (Kikuyu). From the stone seat behind the mill-stone, I and Denys Finch-Hatton had one New Year seen the moon and the planets of Venus and Jupiter all close together, in a group in the sky; it was such a radiant sight that you could hardly believe it to be real, and I have never seen it again.

 

Over time, I've become more attuned to Isak's colonial attitudes toward native Kenyans. She was, after all, a white European woman with a title who had come to take space in a country that the British still considered their protectorate. By the time she left, Kenya was still more than thirty years from independence. Indeed, Isak would never see Kenya call itself its own: she died in 1962, a year before uhuru day.

I know that. It's why I feel abashed sometimes in talking about what I find moving in Isak's writing, all the same. There is something I love in the quietly reverent way she understands the world, her habit of capitalizing the names of animals: Lion, Giraffe. There is something in her blurring of the practical and imaginary worlds, the spirit and the tactile. She is watchful, and her words seem distilled through the highlands air, carrying colors that are "dry and burnt, like the colours of pottery."

From Out of Africa:

One night, after midnight, he suddenly walked into my bedroom with a hurricane-lamp in his hand, silent, as if on duty. It must have been only a short time after he first came into my house, for he was very small: he stood by my  bedside like a dark bat that had strayed into the room, with very big spreading ears, or like a small African Will-o'-the-wisp, with his lamp in his hand. He spoke to me very solemnly, "Msabu," he said, "I think you had better get up." I sat up in bed bewildered: I thought that if anything serious had happened, it would have been Farah who would have to come to fetch me, but when I told Kamante to go away again, he did not move. "Msabu," he said again, "I think you had better get up. I think that God is coming." When I heard this, I did get up, and asked him why he thought so. He gravely led me into the dining-room which looked West, towards the hills. From the door-windows I now saw a strange phenomenon. There was a big grass-fire going on, out in the hills, and the grass was burning all the way from the hill-top to the plain: when seen from the house it was a nearly vertical line. It did indeed look as if some gigantic figure was moving and coming towards us. I stood for some time and looked at it, with Kamante watching by my side, then I began to explain the thing to him. I meant to quiet him, for I thought that he had been terribly frightened. But the explanation did not seem to make much impression on him one way or the other: he clearly took his mission to have been fulfilled when he had called me. "Well yes," he said, "it may be so. But I thought that you had better get up in case it was God coming."

It was a beautiful thing to see this home, to move my body through it, to wave my hand in the kitchen air and slide my feet along the porch, to honor the stories incited by this haunted space -- hers, mine, ten thousand others.

Beautiful Things Seen This Year: 1

There are too many to total, certainly, but it is nonetheless a joy to tinker with the beautiful things I've seen this past year. Here are two moments that catch me exclaiming in hushed joy at the world I found myself in. The first video is from Nakuru, Kenya, which is a Rift Valley city just south of the equator. Special feature: commentary from my Kenyan roommate with her outlandish British accent. The second video is from a sanctuary for young elephants and rhinos in Nairobi, Kenya.

Come with me. Let's exhale together.

 

 

 

 

 

Philly Loves Sonia Sanchez

Sonya Sanchez has been selected as the first poet laureate of the city of Philadelphia. Sanchez, 77, will serve a two-year term starting in January with a $2,500 per-year stipend. Mayor Michael Nutter conceived the laureate idea because "Poetry is an extraordinary and powerful art form, and our great city is filled with an astonishing array of poets who help us to better understand our lives." From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"People are saying, 'This makes sense, because people have been calling you the unofficial poet laureate for years,' " Sanchez said. "And I say, 'Well, the people are always way ahead of the government.' "

{...}

"That Philadelphia has taken this step, declaring the importance of poetry to civic life and polity, makes me very happy," said Al Filreis, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and faculty director of Kelly Writers House who is also a member of the selection committee. "I've lived in the city for 26 years now and have never felt our poetry to be as diversely alive as it is now."

Sonia Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama, raised and college-educated in New York City, taught in San Francisco, and moved to Philadelphia in 1976. She is the author of a lot of books of poetry, including Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999) and Does your house have lions? (1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award. Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984) won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She is also a playwright, the author of children's books, and an anthology editor.

Vladimir Nabokov's TV Interview About Lolita

“I don’t wish to touch hearts and I don't even want to affect minds very much. What I want to produce is really that little sob in the spine of the artist reader.”

 

 

Lionel Trilling also participates in the discussion on the CBC. The second part of the interview can be seen here.

Via A Murder of Crows.

Speaking: Virginia Woolf

"What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her — you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can.

"She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it —-she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: 'My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.' And she made as if to guide my pen.

"I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money — shall we say five hundred pounds a year?— so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed.

"Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."

 

-- Virginia Woolf, from "Professions for Women," an essay included in The Death of the Moth. This essay was originally a paper Woolf read to the Women's Service League in response to its request for her to speak to them about "the employment of women."

 

 

Famed for her novels and essays, English author Virginia Woolf was also the co-founder of Hogarth Press. With Hogarth, Woolf published many of her own modernist novels, as well as T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and other writers and artists. Her final book was a biography of artist Roger Fry. Woolf's writing is translated in over 50 languages. Jorge Luis Borges is among her translators.

 

Related:

• "Virginia Woolf: Not As Dumb As You Thought"
• "Book Review: Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas"
• "Speaking: Virginia Woolf" (To the Lighthouse)
• "Isak Video Series: Four Books"
• "Woolf, Rhys, and O'Connor ... Oh My!"
• "The Final Four"
• "A Reading List for Writers of Narrative Nonfiction"

Book Review: A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Fifteen years after he graduated from the Devon School, Gene returns to his polished and prosperous boarding school in New England. The rainy occasion prompts him to remember his last seasons as a student, particularly the summer of 1942, when he was sixteen. In these days, Gene's friendship with the charismatic Phineas dominated his mind and being. He and other Devon students understood that once they collect their diploma, they will be shuffled off to war. This era of Latin classes and baseball games are, then, both bucolic and doomed. When present-day Gene chooses to visit the "fearful sites" of a certain marble staircase and a certain foreboding tree by the river, we readers understand that things don't end well in A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

Devon, incidentally, is an imagined version of Phillips Exeter Academy, where Knowles graduated from in 1945. Phillips Exeter's website features an essay by Knowles discussing his experience with the school and (some of) the real-life rhymes in the novel.

I had hopes for this book. I'm intrigued by the "separate peace" of the title, that eerily transient time of late boyhood during a global war. The adults among this young generation fear for their death and injury, and they say so, while at the same time indulging their last, late, spurts of childishness.

In this vein, Knowles presents fascinating questions about the nature of the "enemy," and about how easily we are lured into violently opposing another being. Phineas is out of step in this. He invents a game called "blitzball" in which there is no winner. When he unofficially breaks a school swimming record, he has no desire to recreate the feat and have his name replace the previous record-holder. He wants to be a soldier, but Gene believes he will make a terrible one -- more likely to invite the Germans over to their side of the trench for a game of ball.

I was also intrigued to see how Knowles, writing in 1959, worked with the homoeroticism in the fraught relationship between Gene and Phineas. But from the beginning, this novel is ultimately too blatant for me to be happy with it. The textual chatter works from the edges in, dissolving the story's substance. It has all the subtlety of a stubbed toe.

In language dripping with nostalgia before it is earned, everything falls into type: Gene is 'the introverted one,' Phineas is 'the daredevil,' the charmer who gets away with everything. The tension and darkness that enters their romantically-tinged friendship comes thick with exposition. When a retrospective first-person narrator positions everything in his story as emblematic, including himself, the story is overwhelmed with a sense of narcissism and entitlement.

A Separate Peace is the author's first novel; I wish it weren't. I wish John Knowles had written enough before this to trust his story, so he wouldn't feel he needed to blare out the themes in hyper-literal narration.

My opinion appears to be in the minority. This slim book was a bestseller for more than thirty years and a finalist for the National Book Award. 

Book Review: The Delighted States by Adam Thirlwell

There are a select number books where I audibly exhale when I realize the paragraph I'm reading is the last one. I actively miss its pages when I'm no longer reading them. Moby-Dick was one. So was War and Peace, and Out Stealing Horses, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. These aren't necessarily my favorite books -- but they cast a particularly spacious mood. They became intimately entangled with my life by virtue of me spending a lot of time with them, carrying them in my bag or in my hands, reading them in bed and in other people's homes. After they are done, I feel them like a phantom limb.

I feel The Delighted States. Or, as the full throwback subtitle of Adam Thirlwell's book puts it: "a book of novels, romances, and their unknown translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents, and accompanied by maps, portraits, squiggles, illustrations, and a variety of helpful indexes." This nonfiction book of blinding brilliance and rare pleasures -- one that I will easily name as a favorite -- orients itself on questions of literature in translation. How does style translate, or not translate, across not only language, but also time and country, politics and personality? What does it mean to be influenced by a writer from another language? How does translation wrangle up the relationship between form and content? How does the map of the imagination match up with the map(s) of our literal world?

Thirlwell, a novelist and translator himself, simmers with these questions alongside the likes of Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Vladmir Nabokov, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Saul Bellow, Anton Chekhov, Denis Diderot, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Balzac, Nikolai Gogol, and Bohumal Hrabal, among others. Thirlwell is concerned not so much with what is lost in translation, but what is found: the peculiar magic of a writer's style communicating itself to readers even through the mediating work of the translator. He contradicts the familiar ethos that you can't really get a novel if you do not read it in its original language. Instead, Thirlwell puts forward his belief in literature's multiplicities: it is not one thing, and it never was. The majesty of the novel survives misinterpretation. At the same time -- and this is the tension that spans the 500+ pages of The Delighted States -- the novel's "uncanny specificity" is essential.

The Delighted States centers on style as something not constructed out of words, but of a vantage on the world. It is vision, not language. Much of style survives, even in the most terrible translations. This is what fascinates Thirlwell, and what drives his long, lingering and not at all linear meditation on originality.

But here is the true genius of The Delighted States: its form manifests its meaning. This book about style is intentional about shaping its style. Thirlwell moves through his huge questions not through the traditional nonfiction techniques of chronology or argument. He moves thematically, with an associative logic. He calls real-life people his characters -- a gesture toward his sweeping formal intentions. Consider this progression of the opening sections. (Note that "chapters" are about a page or two in length).

• Chapter i: Normandy, 1852: Two Letters from Gustave Flaubert About Style
• Chapter ii: Warsaw, 1937: Witold Grombrowicz Writes a Review
• Chapter iii: Paris, 1930: James Joyce in Paul Leon's Living Room
• Chapter iv: Paris, 1929: Samuel Beckett Writes an Essay
• Chapter v: St. Petersberg & Rome, 1842: Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin
• Chapter vi: Croisset, 1852: A Short Essay on Style  (1)

It takes a while for the reader to get used to this. Chad W. Post described it as like listening to a brilliant drunk ramble on at a pub, telling story after story with sometimes the thinnest of threads of connection. It certainly feels that way at first, and the reader is wise to sit back, loosen control, and take it in. As Thirlwell writes early on, "the history of the novel is, simultaneously, the history of an elaborate and intricate international art form -- and also a history of errors, a history of waste." His book, he indicates, fully accepts the impact of "the anachronism, the side effect" in this history -- and it does so not only in the text of the The Delighted States, but also in its form. The author's migratory narration mimics the flow of chance, error, and exile that has shaped world literature.

But after awhile, Thirlwell's associations gain substance, and his intentions become more clear. His themes gather weight as they proceed through both close readings of literary texts and a joyful accounting of the lives of writers. My fear that this book was coated in pretension dissolved, and instead I felt charmed and inspired. Thirlwell finds the most astonishing rhymes among the writers and books he features, inciting readerly delight at their discovery, while not underlining them so thickly that they become inflated with false meaning. What seems like digressions are in fact full of meaning and discovery.

This is a raveling, not an unraveling. This is a book of rabbit-holes and looking-glasses. This is a book of and by metaphor -- things being multiple things at once. After awhile, it is not the author who is intoxicated, but the reader.

The book is also noteworthy for its literal layers -- it is full of large and striking images (Nabokov sunbathing!), squiggles that are both quotations and metaphors, those "helpful indexes," and a translation by Thirlwell of Nabokov's "Mademoiselle O" that appears alongside its French version -- at the back of the book, printed in reverse. (It is one of only two stories Nabokov wrote in French.)

Little white pieces of paper are packed into my copy of The Delighted States. Here is what one of them marks:

Everything Nabokov writes is intent on exploiting the possibilities which language offers to do more than one thing at once. This medium called literature is the perfect medium for turning a person into a medium, a person to whom time does not exist. And so Nabokov's definition of poetry, in his book on Nikolai Gogol, is a definition of his own style too: 'the mysteries of the irrational as perceived through rational words.' With his magic carpet, his clear misleading sentences, Nabokov shows how two moments separated in time can be made congruent, how they can be folded on top of each other, neatly, and mystically.

Thirlwell experiments with bold statements about both style and reality that sound almost as if he's testing their truth by saying them aloud.

Real life is not utopia; it is the opposite of utopia. But because it is the opposite of utopia, it is also utopian. It is full of projects not to be real at all. Real life is diet books, time-management plans, timetables, travel brochures, interior-design magazines. It is always wishful.

Real life, therefore, is like a dream. Everything which is ordinary and everyday, like a stuffed parrot, is also latent with transfiguration.

While this is a work of literary criticism, finally, Thirlwell comes across as an enthusiastic and intelligent reader who simply wants to talk out these topics with you, in all their contradiction and slipperiness. It is a rare sort of criticism, and a beautiful one. His love for literature is palpable and awakening. I might've wished for the book to be less centered on European literature -- I'm curious how his themes would cross into literature from Asia, in particular. But, truth be told, that centering is probably essential to this impossibly broad narrative.

So it comes to this: I love this book without qualification.

Chimamanda Adiche on "DSK vs. The Maid"

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist, has a beautiful and unsettling essay in The Daily Beast about Nafissatou Diallo -- the woman who accused the World Bank's International Monetary Fund's Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape. It begins:

I know women like Nafissatou Diallo. Women who, like me, are West African but, unlike me, do not have the privilege of education or a middle-class upbringing. On television, she was familiar: the skin tone that suggested cheap bleaching creams, the ambitious hair weave, the melodrama. An American friend of mine thought her interview too theatrical and therefore unbelievable. Instead, I saw a woman speaking a non-native language, and so compensating with gestures; a woman both grateful and intimidated to finally tell her story; a woman whose way of looking at the world is vastly different from that of most of her viewers. Diallo comes from a place where melodrama is not unusual, and often suggests truth as much as lies.

(...)

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested and accused of raping Diallo in a hotel room, I applauded the American justice system: a powerless woman had reported an assault by a Big Man, and the Big Man had immediately been apprehended. In Nigeria, where I come from, this would not happen. Nor would it happen in Guinea, where Diallo comes from. Although I cringed at DSK’s “perp walk,” his arrest reminded me of what I admire about America. But the case was dismissed—not because the prosecutors were certain that DSK was innocent, but because Diallo was not a saint.

While Adichie didn't do this herself, I invite you to juxtapose what she's writing about here with her earlier declamation on "the danger of the single story." While she was then speaking primarily of literary stories, its application to this real-life narrative is bracing.

 

Via Jina Moore.

Speaking: Václav Havel

As has been widely reported, essayist and playwright Vaclav Havel died this weekend. (See this and this.) He led the Velvet Revolution and served as president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.

 

"I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence. They want to be told about this publicly….Goodwill longs to be recognized and cultivated. For it to develop and have an impact it must hear that the world does not ridicule it…..I never try to give people practical advice about how to deal with the evil around them, nor could I even if I wanted to — and yet people want to hear that decency and courage make sense, that something must be risked in the struggle against dirty tricks. They want to know that they are not alone, forgotten, written off.

-- from Václav Havel's book, Summer Meditations (1993)

 

Also by Václav Havel:

• The Garden Party and Other Plays
• Temptation: A Play in Ten Scenes
• Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice
• Disturbing the Peace
• Open Letters: Selected Prose
• To the Castle and Back
• The Beggar's Opera

 

Image Credit: The Associated Press

Book Review: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

In full disclosure, this review is partially adapted from an email conversation about this book. I read this book on the plane from Nairobi to Detroit way back in July, and it is amazing to me that I haven't posted about it yet. Note that there are spoilers in this review.

I saw the film first, and I adored it. Cormac McCarthy's dark, wiry novel is an animal that is at once alike and different than what I first saw on the screen, and to encounter it is singular and strange.

No Country for Old Men (2005) brings us to the bleary heat of the U.S. - Mexico border in 1980, where things are silent and on the brink. The title evokes W.B. Yeat's poem "Sailing to Byzantium," which goes like this:

 

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

And so, as we meet Llewelyn Moss on a morning he hunts antelope near the Rio Grande, and then encounters the bloody aftermath of a botched heroin deal and a satchel filled with two million dollars (which Moss takes), there is this thick spectre of visions and bodies, artifice, "of what is past, or passing, or to come." Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the man trying to figure things out, the man who has been at the helm of this county for decades, watching the place he knows best spiraling out in strange and brutal ways. The omniscience of the story is broken up by Bell's first-person musings, set off in italics, on what he knows and what is beyond his reach. At the center is Anton Chigurh, a psychopath with an unnerving loyalty to a particular moral code. It is he who takes to hunting Moss. And it is the blunt juxtapositions of these men's different measures of honor that fuel this artful, linguistically exciting story.

One of the most interesting tensions in No Country for Old Men is the dissonance between its mythic overtures of place and creatures, of fortune (the luck kind) and fate, its mortal stakes ... and its insistence that what is unfolding is unprecedented, a signature of changing things, an uncertain future, a narrative that resists resolution. That is, for Bell, things are paced strangely; causes don't have the anticipated effects; he keeps arriving at scenes too late, after what has happened has happened; he isn't on the same clock as his world; he doesn't get to know for sure -- let alone intervene in -- much of what is unfolding. He tries to be an actor in the events; he is forced into the role of a discomfited witness. And the brilliant thing the author does is mimic Bell's experience in the experience of the reader. We creatures accustomed to certain kinds of narratives that give us certain kinds of signs and resolutions, a familiar flow of unfolding information -- we don't get that in this book. Like Bell, it puts us on edge. This is apparent in the text itself (outside of Bell's textual speeches): the text has a sort of blinking prose style that is at once blunt and hedging. The way that Moss' death is revealed is the most obvious example of this. We find out he's dead before we're quite sure the body is his. When it is first accounted for in the text, it is abrupt and offstage; the dead body doesn't yet have a name. He's dead before we get to see how he died, and we have about a third of the book to go -- now unmoored from the person we began the book with. This is weird.

Another reader suggested to me that the book relys on the idea (myth, let's say) of things being better, or at least simpler in the past -- an idea of "lost virtues" that is wrongminded and dangerous. I hear that in Bell's regretful rhetoric, which the book positions as the moral center of the novel. "Lost virtues" -- I hear sometimes that my generation 'will have to face big questions,' said in a way that implies that past generations (who grew up in the era of Vietnam and the atomic bomb and the Reformation) didn't face such questions. Different moral questions are not necessarily more difficult or more simple. Often they are not even that different. Believing otherwise is an opportunity for unlearning and simplistic blame.

I don't think I can write off the point that No Country for Old Men relies somewhat on this wrong-minded idea as part of its narrative truth. This is a great part of the novel's darkness, after all: a sense of entropy where the people we expect to intervene or interrupt the momentum in their various ways -- Moss, Bell, and a special agent  hired into the case -- end up dead or done. All that's possible, it seems, is to adapt. Virtues and values become telescoped into the singular purpose of survival.

And yet.

Especially the final parts in Bell's narration bring altitude to this terrifying idea. Again, the most striking feature in the book to me is the narrative's refusal to resolve. This "singular purpose of survival" is too simple and neat a resolution to stand in this book. Bell's final narrations unravel what might've been a tightly wound little box. (It would be that tightly wound box if we removed Bell's first-person speeches; if the novel did all his scenes in the same third-person styles he does all the others.) This takes what's happening to him, his ethos, his work, his understanding of the world and his place in it, and pushes it beyond cause-effect and into multiplicity.

This is not my usual kind of book; I both love it and feel detached from it. I find it intriguing and provoking, and I'm impressed by the potency of this rather brief tale that beautifully merges language and story. Cormac McCarthy is also a brilliant writer of nature and landscape, not only observing it but communicating the moods and shades and textures of the places we move within. He relays nature's bigness in a way that is at once ominous, majestic, awe-inspiring, unnerving, and hopeful: that is, true.

At the same time, there is more reveling in bloodiness and violence than felt necessary for the purposeful discomfort of this stripped-down novel, which therefore gives the impression of being exploitative and melodramatic. (For example: the scene where we first meet Chigurh in the custody of a police officer.) Female characters, few that they are, are rather sentimentalized. There is a fixation on naming the firearm hardware that bows to distraction.

That said, I have thought of this book often and deeply over the last few months. It has stayed with me.

Out Loud Anna

I know this TED talk went viral awhile back, particularly among the sorts of people I am particular to, but I only just now got around to watching it. And it struck me deep, resonating with my own lived life and the unsettling journey I've been on for the last year or so. (Well, a lot longer than that, of course, but the last year has been a more intentional experience.) Here is Brené Brown on the power of vulnerability:

 

 

I do this. I do this to the point of being ashamed of my own shame, distracted by shoulds; my skin tightens and itches. I'm hungry for connection, but I'm more comfortable with your vulnerability than my own. I'm a journalist, after all: I'm in the business of asking you the questions, of empathizing with your story. I ask you about your story because I am curious and because I care and because I believe you are an interesting, meaningful, and profound person whose voice matters. But turn it around and ask me things, particularly about what I feel rather than what I think, and my skin chills. I'd rather tell your story than my own. If I'm honest, I'd admit that this storytelling isn't only art to me, but catharsis.

I think this is why I've been more active, enthused, and successful in narrative nonfiction and journalism than with fiction and poetry.

I've known this about myself for a long time. And for a long time, I put the responsibility on others to recognize my vulnerable self, to draw it out of me with their attention and love, rather than risk taking the space myself. Indeed, I rather prided myself on keeping my self to myself. It seemed the mature thing to do. All my life, I've been rewarded for characteristics that are stereotypically masculine: my intellectualism, my humor, my perfectionism, my independence, my endurance, my fondness for sports; even my preference for dry drinks (gin, please) gets its share of back pats and high-fives. When I was eight, my big appetite for food was noticed: "she eats as much as her dad!" I took this as a compliment. I took to effortfully ensuring that at mealtimes, indeed, I did match my bites to his.

I'll go ahead and name this as my twisted internalized misogyny. Splitting open my bloody heart and laying it heavily in your hands wasn't the habit of the subtle person I fancied myself to be. And when I saw other females do what I didn't, I sometimes caught myself judging them for their tearfulness or their (it seemed to me) affect: this was a shameful way of outsourcing my own shame. Meanwhile, asking for help when I need to be taken care of -- physically or emotionally -- cut against my feeling that it is my self-sufficiency and strength that gives me worth. I fear being your burden. I fear you will say things to me just because you think I want to hear it. I fear you will try to "make it better" when I am not asking you to make anything better; I am not asking to be fixed. I fear my bloody heart bores you.

Writing all of this is to you in a public forum terrifies me more than I can say. In fact, I probably couldn't say it aloud right now if I wanted to: my tightened throat, this silent lamplit room. Writing is my other voice tonight, carrying at once both my power and my vulnerability.

I've been thinking a lot about voice lately. One of the joys of being a writer-in-residence in Detroit high schools this year is that it is pushing me to read a lot more poetry. I'm loitering with Ai, Lucille Clifton, Larry Levis, Langston Hughes, Stephen Dobyns, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Kay Ryan, searching for poems to bring with me into the classroom and share with ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-graders. And then I'm challenged to read the poems aloud to dozens of skeptical teenagers.

Now, I used to do speech competitions: you are--ahem--looking at Michigan's former state champion in oratory. But those words were my own. I wrote them, I memorized them, I rehearsed them: while god knows the performance moment brought its share of the unexpected, I was as in control as I could be. Because I felt confident in the worth of my writing, transitioning into a new way of communicating my words -- out loud -- was an experience nestled in velvet-lining. And while, sure, I did a lot of theater in high school, I settled in enthusiastic mediocrity there, nourished by a vibrant social circle centered on the stage. I was Zaneeta in "The Music Man" (no singing); Auntie Em in "The Wizard of Oz" (only required to channel a single emotion); I was Titania in "A Midsummer's Night Dream" (blankly memorized the long speeches). I didn't put a lot of purpose on my out-loud voice.

The point is, I'm not shy of speaking in public. But reading aloud these poems -- not my own words, though chosen by me --  is utterly different. I'm not making an intellectual argument, or teaching something I know a lot about, or performing as an excuse to hang out with my artsy friends in a creative setting. These poems I'm bringing to the classrooms have all the shades and textures of the most compelling art, and my high school students have only my voice to encounter them. Now, now, there is something I want to say. The stakes are higher. And in risking these poems again and again, I've become acutely aware of my discomfort with my own out-loud voice. It is an underutilized muscle. Slowly, I am beginning to recognize tones I lean on like a crutch when I read; I am surprised by sounds I didn't know I had in me. My voice stilts and tilts, as I learn what it is capable of. I am uncomfortable experiencing this under the watchful eyes of these students. I look to see if they lose interest before I'm done. But I feel purpose in these poems, and I keep speaking up.

Here's a secret. I've wanted to take singing lessons for years and years. I have been embarrassed ashamed to admit this -- because music is not an art native to me, I fear you will see it as somehow grasping or cloyingly cute, or that you will see it as me pretending to be someone I'm not. The act of singing certainly risks me literally amplifying my imperfections in front of you. But I love music. I love being around it. I love how music-making brings people together. And I want to participate in that making, in a substantive and active way.

When I was nineteen, I had a very musical set of friends and lovers. One black night I went out for a jog, and when I came circling back around East Quad, the sounds of piano and flute and guitar met me in the dark. I followed it the way I'd follow the smell of baked bread, and found myself kneeling by the yellow light from one of the windows of the dorm's basement practice rooms. My heart swelled with love to see people I adored in the little room, making music together for the sheer pleasure of it, teaching each other things, conversing in a language I couldn't speak. I settled into the soil for awhile, conscious of myself as a sort of ghost. Later, I wrote a rather melodramatic short poem about it (let's call it a "lyric," for fun) called "The Listener."

So, here I am telling you: I'm starting singing lessons next month, guided by a lovely friend who has agreed to help me set out on this fraught path. And already I've given myself the quiet task to sing one full song each day while -- for now -- safely alone in my apartment. I am curious how what I will learn about my voice will influence my writing, and I am curious about my voice for its own sake. I choose singing because it is physical, because it is communal, because it is (hopefully eventually) artistic, because it is a way to discover my own breath and my own out-loud voice -- which I don't want to be a stranger to me anymore -- and because I'm totally terrified of it. My god, what will you think when you hear me? I want to know. I need to know.