seventy-fourth (2023-05-01)
“what an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in”― simone de beauvoir, in the woman destroyed
this week’s theme is travel - through space, time, and self
poem (click here for my full list of poems on the docket for 2023)
e.e. cummings, “yes is a pleasant country”
as one does, i went through an e.e. cummings phase when learning to love poetry. now i find much of his work uncomfortably cheesy but this one is still a favorite. i’m endeared to the sense of traveling in the present and opening to possibilities and multiplicities with love as the enduring thread.
books
flights by olga tokarczuk, 2007
i am genuinely very unsure of what happened in this book. it’s wide ranging and ambitious, which i always appreciate, and occasionally beautiful and melancholic, but the vignettes felt disjointed and disorienting. this might be intentional (see this excellent review) as the disparate pieces are tied via themes of place, mobility, groundlessness, and so-called “travel-psychology.” i think i’d love this book if i could be walked through it in a college class or by an overeager book club president, but without a guide i’m paradoxically lost. i’ve heard her other book "drive your plow over the bones of the dead” is great so i’d like to try that (and points for the overwrought fiona apple-esque title).
a life’s work by rachel cusk, 2001
Birth is not merely that which divides women from men. It also divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed.
i’ve read a lot of cusk’s fiction but this is the first nonfiction i’ve read and it was incredible. cusk writes of the deeply unpleasant losses inherent in pregnancy and motherhood and resists any medicalization of her experience - what others might sum up as post-partum depression or anxiety she describes in existential angst and captivity. this book, frequently described as a war diary, was vilified for resisting the narrative of frazzled yet wholesomely grateful motherhood. i love this times review and cusk’s own reflections on the value-laden misperceptions critics cast at her.
pond by claire-louise bennett, 2015
this collection of stories - the second i’ve read of bennett’s - is a lovely counterpart to cusk because cusk deals primarily in other people and relationships and bennett deals almost solely in objects as proxies for the unhinged nature of the narrator’s mind. this new yorker review by jia tolentino is fantastic and captures what i loved - the narrator becomes osmotic to her surroundings and falls apart, rots, is glued back together, and is altogether undistinguishable from the transience and decay that surrounds her, surrounds all of us.
articles
choose your own rachel cusk, by heidi julavits, in the cut, 2017
She no longer believes in narrative. Because she is female, and a mother, her time is not her own. She’s not interested in the view of life that promotes being yourself and being comfortable with being yourself. She is not a social hugger. She is not late for her lunch date.
after reading a life’s work, i was desperate to get further inside cusk’s head. i am fascinated and discontented by cusk (and similar authors like shelia heti) who write autofiction yet cloak themselves in layers of incomprehensibility. i love how impossible cusk feels, how unyielding she is to more conventional ways of being known, even though i imagine it is frustrating to have her as a friend or teacher. there is a double-bind women writers who write about themselves are caught in and i find all of cusk’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions a profound form of protest.
book signing
claire dederer signing monsters, in conversation with jessica hopper, at the book cellar, 2023
terrible picture by me - because i was a bit starstruck by the pairing of dederer and hopper
despite half-heartedly roasting claire dederer’s memoir a few weeks ago, i went to a reading of her new book, monsters, with my friend caroline. dederer was so vibrant and clear and systematic in describing the throughline of her book that i immediately felt guilty for not liking her memoir (as a sidenote, monsters is an expansion of this great article dederer published in 2017). i’m struck by the impossibility of separating the art from the problematic artist (dederer wanted to title the book ‘the stain’ because knowledge of an artist’s wrongdoing permeates their work, whether we want it to or not) but also the way dederer is in touch with love - love of the art itself and the complicated feelings that arise from the mix of love and derision. i’m excited and nervous to read and be challenged by this.
thanks for reading - more to come -
bria