An Elegy for China

This is not an easy novel to pin down, as it strives to push the boundaries of what constitutes a novel.

Part memoir, part metafiction, part travelogue, part ethnographic exploration, part political, part ecological and environmental, part history of the Cultural Revolution, part the realities of post-Mao China, part folklore, part poetry, part mythology, part nightmares and dreams, part songs and revelries, part seduction, part sexual misadventures, part aphorisms, but, mostly, it's a profound meditation on life.

I read it on my Kindle and was highlighting so often that it became almost ridiculous. So many passages that I wish I could keep in my memory forever. I'd love to post them all in here, but there's just too much, so I'll try to pepper in appropriate ones.

The story of four[?] people referred to by using only pronouns. There is I and You, the novel told in first and second person, shifting between these nearly every other chapter, and then there is He and She, who are externals. Within the novel, it's actually stated best, as an entire chapter is, in a way, about the composition of the novel.

"It's just like in the book where you is the reflection of I and he is the back of you, the shadow of a shadow."

And that sentence there sums up the whole of the characters. If you can call it a plot, it is the Quixotic journey of a wanderer, referred to as I, traveling through the mountains of China, talking to the people of small villages, learning their culture, their songs, their dances. The shift into second person recounts a man wandering through the mountains and the women he encounters and the love he feels, even when he doesn't. Eventually these narratives, which are sort of free floated and meandering become indistinguishable as the novel quagmires [in a good way] and all the threads loosen and bleed into one another, somehow making it better, making all of life captured more perfectly, more beautifully, more fully.

There are great passages of love, of what it means, of what it is, of what it wants to be and how it tries to get there. Some beautiful and some heartbreaking and some absurd and some frustrating: it's perfect. It's one of the most true accounts, I think, of what real love is.

"'Don't, don't say anything!' She holds you in her embrace and you silently merge with her body."

That is the summation of sex in the novel. There's no sensationalism, no graphic descriptions of the act, just odd moments of poetry to capture the perfection of the physical manifestations of love.

"'Talk about something,' she urges by your ear. 'What shall I talk about?' 'Anything.'"

And that there, in many ways, is the center of it all, of what love is in this novel. The will to go on, without reason, just to keep talking, to keep holding, to keep being. And much of the novel is just continuing, even after reason's run out.

There is a powerful sense of nature throughout and the narrator often begins with a reflection on the scenery and this reflection collapses inward into his own psychology, where the mountain mist that surrounds him becomes the ghosts of his past and present closing in on him. He begins with a completely external description that gradually just kind of falls and collapses upon him. They're truly beautiful passages and I've highlighted so many that it's too much to sort through at the moment.

Wandering through the mountains alone, there is a great sense of loneliness in the novel and it is in many ways tragic, as it recounts the environmental suicide caused by bad policies since the Cultural Revolution, and then, too, all the displacement and fear caused by it.

It is, in many ways, I think, an elegy for China. The narrator is very frustrated, frustrated to the point of hopelessness, yet he keeps going. He has lost all meaning, and so he searches for it everywhere, endlessly, It is the story of a man who loves his country but has had his country turn its back on him. He is completely alone, in self-exile, partly to save his life from the government, partly because of this loss.

To quote Beckett: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

It is beautiful and it is epic. It is one of those rare novels that tries to capture the totality of life, and, maybe, gets there.

"Everyone has memories they treasure. Not all memories are worth treasuring."

"I remember you."

I picked up Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather again and opened to that page before it starts where all it says is, "I remember you," and I was hooked all over again, for the third time, never the last time, and the next thing I knew, the sun was rising and my heart was breaking, but in a good way, the way that resurrects you, that shows you everything you forgot to pay attention to, forgot to remember, and I closed it because it was done, again, finished for the third time, and I could’ve turned back to page one and began again, which is how the first two readings happened, in consecutive days, because this book burns you, burrows deep, and smolders, lives, reconnects cells, and balances chemistry.

If I had had this book when I was sixteen, I wonder if things would’ve been different. I wonder if this could’ve saved me the way Crime and Punishment brought me a sort of salvation, though it had to first consume and destroy me. This book, though, Ledfeather, it will save a life, it will change a life, and it will whisper to you across a century, through the forgotten dreams and lives, and the face of Doby Saxon will forever cling to the retinas, his face whited out by headlights, his hand reaching through the windshield, and you’ll fall apart with his story.

"a rare sort of book"

Perplexing and mystifying, frenetic and endlessly engaging, The Orange Eats Creeps is a rare sort of book, the kind that's hard to compare. Many see the influence of Burroughs, which is fair, I think, because she takes that cut-up technique and pushes it as far as it can go, to awesome effect. It has that same kind of wild energy, that frenetic and ecstatic prose that completely swallows the reader and gets her/him lost within, but never caring.

The prose is such a pleasure, constantly surprising, constantly reinventing. It's a book that teaches you how to read it by pushing you in the deep end. To be honest, what happens, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you in clear detail. It certainly deserves a second read, maybe a third, but, I imagine, it's one of those great books that gets better with each read, rather than tired. First read is for the ride, and all subsequent reads are for understanding where you start, which direction you're heading, and how you get there.

My favorite book of 2010: A true original.

The Most Perfect Thing I've Ever Read: Richard Grossman's The Book of Lazarus

This novel is a puzzle or maybe a labyrinth as much as it is a scrapbook of the dead.

I had always dreamt of a book that can be read in any order, and this is that book. I'd recommend reading it from beginning to end, but I'm certain it can be read in any order, by simply flicking to a new section and beginning, then on to another and another until all is read.

It's a novel that defies easy categorization and is likely considered a difficult read by many, with its enigmatic poetry and aphorisms and its singular perfect contribution to literature: a seventy page sentence fragment that is surreal, beautiful, and wholly consuming. It, in my mind, is the most perfect thing I've ever read.

The novel is tied together by a noirish novella that gives, in simple terms, the plot, though the plot is incidental to the greater work. Very much something where the novel is infinitely more than the sum of its somewhat disparate, albeit connected, parts.

Grossman has captured so much in this by giving so little, or, rather, by being particular with what he gives. He has taken the narrative apart, thrown bits in different directions to float where they will, and in this process of deconstructing, he has filled it, created so much that could never have been there before. Fleeting scraps of the dead bundled together to make something like life.

Put My Head In Your Lap

The sixteen short-short stories in Claudia Smith's “Put Your Head In My Lap” (Future Tense Books, 2009) convey such tenderness it's difficult not to develop a big-ass lump in my throat, the kind that causes tears to well and fall. This is a collection to read alone, wrapped in a blanket beside a crackling fire, a steaming cup of tea nearby. But beware: anyone who's had a prior relationship with heartbreak will re-experience that sorrow, those losses. Proceed, however, and be brave. Your reward is to discover prose that resonates with simplicity, prose that prompts aching and, subsequently, hope. You will want to reach for someone dear; you will want to dial up an old friend and catch up, someone whose voice once soothed. This is the complication in Smith's writing: her words remind us of our pain, but the pain reminds us, inspires us, to reconcile with that, or those, we have lost.

(I should mention here that this review first appeared in The Chapbook Review, and when given this opportunity to write about PYHIML again, I decided that I said it all best before. What I'll add here is simply this: Anything Claudia Smith writes, I'll buy and read with interest, knowing I'm guaranteed to have a large, satisfying read, made up of small doses of tiny stories. And now, back to the review.)

In “Submarine Dreams,” a mother says, simply, “We came here a year ago. I was hopeful.” An obvious, but unstated, divorce later, she closes this story with the lines: “My son sleeps with me now. I sing to him, Mariposa, sweet dreams, butterfly, close your eyes. It's a bad pattern to set, isn't it?” and I'm not sure if she's addressing us or her departed husband. “Good luck,” she sings, because her son “gets scared, dreaming, at night.”

In the next story, “Valentine,” the narrator recalls how she and an unnamed “you” first fell in love; after falling “asleep together on the floor,” she kisses his forehead. She says, “I did it suddenly and softly, startling myself,” and I, too, am startled by her admission. It seems so natural, that kiss. And yet, it “was like touching the wings of a creature you couldn't see but knew to be beautiful simply from the feel.” Startling, as well, what she does next: “I stood up and walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the street. It was cold and I wasn't wearing a coat, but I kept walking anyway, thinking I couldn't go back there because you'd be gone.”

A fiction professor once told me -- and this is some of the best advice I've ever been on the receiving end of -- that physical objects are best utilized when they pull double, or even triple, duty. What he meant was that a coat can just be a coat, sure, but when it actually means something more than that, magic is born. The magic in this particular coat is that, of course, it is back at the apartment, beyond reach; what's more, it tells us something about this narrator -- that she's willing to go without it, despite the chill, because the physical consequences are nothing compared to the emotional; to return to her apartment, to find her object of affection gone, will leave her more bare than she already is, and the idea and fear of such exposure is something she's unwilling, just yet, to face. Interesting, then, that this particular story opens with the line, “You once gave me an apple off a tree, and I thought about its significance, and wondered if you meant something by that, or if you were just handing me an apple.” An apple, a coat, a sleeping son: in Smith's careful hands, they are more than anything we've ever encountered; they are precious cargo, worthy of quiet meditation and further exploration.

In the next story, “Half,” the unnamed narrator wears a locket her mother-in-law gave her; inside the locket, her husband's black hair. She says, “I wore the locket at all times, even when I took a shower. I thought about the thin layer of gold between his lock and the flesh on my collarbone.” A locket, hair, a collarbone: again, the familiarity of such physical objects is recast in such a way that readers can't help but ponder their symbolic meanings; again, Smith's words—their simplicity, their frankness, the magic of their admissions, their very utterances—become more than words; they become experiences, revealed to us. And are we worthy? When else have we been handed such trust? I can't say I've ever felt such a connection to a writer's (dare I say?) soul.

In “Marks,” a woman learns the meaning of what it is to be touched, to be the one who does the touching. The father of her child has “a strawberry mark behind his left shoulder. When she traces it, he stands up and goes to lie down on the stone floor in the bathroom. She watches him through the opened door.” The door here, a physical object that can be opened or closed, is, while open, closed. The threshold is uncrossable. Her touch has gone, worse than unnoticed, unwanted. And from worse to worst, after they have had sex; and all she can do is continue to watch him until, when “he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child.” And then it is up to us to learn the meaning of a touch, and when we read that she “would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him,” there is only a deep sense of loss, something unexplainably clear -- this is what it is to want to reach out, this is what it is to stop yourself.

I can feel my throat tightening now. Who wouldn't? Fitting, then, that the final story in the collection, “Ice,” opens with this: “They will break one another's hearts -- well, at least, he will break hers, she's not sure now about his.” And having read the other stories in the meantime, we, too, can't help but be unsure about his, though we do know the fate of hers. Which is why, I'm sure, I opened this review with the word “tenderness.” If these aren't prime examples, I don't know what else I can offer in my desperate urging that will compel you to buy this chapbook. It is required reading for any human being; perhaps, more specifically, any woman whose life hasn't quite turned out the way she hoped it would at some youthful age when she was freshly scrubbed and innocent. We may still be freshly scrubbed, but the scrubbing, over the years, will have certainly taken on a different purpose: no longer to cleanse but to cast away the sorrows of our past and current lives. Claudia Smith understands this; and I can't help but think because she's been there. So tonight, wrapped in a blanket and with a cup of tea nearby, I will raise it to her and hope that as I blow away steam, so too will I blow away her hurt, if only for even a moment.

Manipulations of the World: On The Lyric Essay

For something that should not be tricky, non-fiction is tricky. Of course, there’s the issue of telling the truth -- a contract that is signed the second that something is described as “non-fiction” or “memoir”:  that the author will not steer you wrong, that the story being told is as close as humanly possible to what actually happened, that the feelings felt are accurate.

This is what we expect from our non-fiction and it is why many protect the sanctity of the genre vehemently -- the truth, simply, is more valuable. Horror films gain credibility and add an extra element of terror when the phrase “based on true events” is put before the cold open of a family peacefully eating dinner in a lake cabin. We are more emotionally stirred when we believe that someone has gone through something, has “lived to tell”, can speak from experience.

However, the concept of non-fiction is flawed in this way as well: thus the birth of the phrase “creative non-fiction,” which if you mention to anyone who is not in the writing community (I’m looking at you, family friends and clever uncles) they will believe it to be an oxymoron -- that things that are true cannot be creative, that truth is the direct opposite of creating something new of value.

This, of course, is laughably false: even by providing a timeline or a list of facts one is presenting the truth in a scripted form -- the choice of font, the decision of spacing, the way everything fits on the page. Yet at what point does the piece gain the distinction of being a “lyric essay”?

David Shields’ Reality Hunger has become the ur-book for the modern-day lyric essay: a blur of quotations and insights into writing, technology, persona, our relationship with the other with brief sprinkles of narrative intertwined. When we choose to enter a piece of fiction or when we read a poem, we are asked to suspend belief in order to find ourselves entranced in the language as well as the narrative:  we are certainly still in our chairs or couches reading, but we will allow ourselves to get caught up in what is being weaved.

The lyric does this as well -- the reader is immersed in language and synthesis: the knowledge that what we are being told is true, yet the way we are being told these truths are masked in some sort of artifice -- that instead of being immersed in narrative and plot, we are immersed in structure: what words repeat themselves, the speed of the language varying, phrases meant to express the intangible in a tangible way.

The beauty of the lyric essay is in its playfulness and manipulation of a world -- it is play at its most primitive level: the idea of vertigo, in which sociologist Roger Caillois defines as “an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness."

To me, the lyric essay exists in a lucid world but it is being presented in a way that one is uncertain of, in the same way when you have a dream about your house: you know it is your house despite it not looking anything like your house looks, despite having dead relatives and ex-girlfriends and people from across the country all living underneath one roof.

And yet it makes sense while you’re in it: you sit at the counter and eat a slice of pizza, you listen as faces melt into other faces, as the walls change around you. It isn’t until afterward you realize the oddness of it all: the craft and attention to strange detail the dream took to make you feel these things -- sadness for those past, homesickness for a version of home. It might only be a version of the truth, yet it was presented so beautifully and honestly, you can’t help but feel and live it strongly.

Story Focus: "Watermelon" by Mary Miller

I was a choir geek in high school. Our show uniforms luckily bore no sequins (I'm not as partial to wearing sequins as Tim Jones-Yelvington), but none the less, every year the show tuxedo, the bright red and black stripes of the vest shimmering, the jazz hands, the choreography. It was really nothing like you see on Glee, and for that, I'm glad.

My choir teacher was the stereotypical effeminate male choir teacher. He was not afraid to get involved in the lives of his students, to care about them, to invite them over for voice coaching. In high school, my shoes tended to be on the shaggy side. I would wear Chuck Taylors until the canvas was in tatters. Not because I was poor (though we were), but because that shit was punk rawk in the mid-late 90s. I remember once my teacher, we'll call him Mac since his last name was particularly Scottish, quietly took me aside one day after class and asked me if I needed new shoes.

"Oh. No," I said, "I actually have a new pair at home. I just like these."

Mac looked doubtful, so I wore them the next day to prove the point, and promptly returned to the old and tattered pair until they completely fell apart.

That's just the kind of guy Mac was. But of course, when you have that kind of guy teaching at a high school, you get the stories. I was once told buy someone that they'd gone over to Mac's house for something and saw him in the pool implicatingly close with a boy. I was told by another someone to keep my guard up during my conversations with Mac in an independent study class I had with him for music theory.

You get stories like Mary Miller's "Watermelon" in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, that begins:

Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher. He had a round face and a love of boys.Before we sang, he had us lie on our backs and breathe in the icy waters.Feel the waves lick your neck, he’d say, the sting of peppermint in theback of your throat. Your boat’s collapsed and you didn’t think you’dneed a life preserver. Feel the pressure build. It builds and builds, likewhen you love someone so much your heart could burst, your heart could fucking burst under the weight of it.

After he drowned us, he’d make us form a train and rub each other’s shoulders. This went on for months and nobody saying anything.

Miller never goes so far as to say any concrete details about Mr. Fuller, and the story takes a turn to focus more on the relationship between the narrator and another troubled boy. But it's the implication in that last line that brings back all these memories of high school and Mac and how he straddled the teacher/student relationship. "Straddled" was probably a bad choice of wording there.

Mac saw my mother's obituary in the paper a couple days after she died. He made the hour drive to the parlor where her body was shown. He hugged me. He hugged me then, and he hugged me in high school--important moments like after not placing with a solo at Regionals, my breakdown in the hallway after, like after graduation. I never thought anything of it then, and I don't now. Before he left the showing, he extended his hand to shake, and when I took it, there was a $50 bill in it.

"Don't spend this on bills," he said. "Don't spend it on groceries or tuition or anything responsible. Spend it on something that'll help you forget for awhile."

He hugged me again, gave again his condolences, and left the parlor. That's the last time I saw Mac. With the money, I did what you'd expect me to do, what he probably expected me to do. I got to forget everything for a night, and I'll always thank Mac for that.

I know you're probably thinking it. You're probably thinking I'm going to turn this post on its head and tell you next how I saw him in the news a year or 2 later, accused of sexual misconduct or something of the sort. But that's not what happened. Mac is still alive, and perhaps retired now. I could pay him a visit. I probably should. Mac meant a lot to me when I needed a mentor to mean a lot to me.

I'm not sure why we were so cruel in high school, to ourselves or to those who truly want to help us become more than who we were then. I'm sure if Mac is still teaching, he still gets all the same stories told about him in hushed tones. I hope he never hears of those stories. I hope he never finds this post. I hope he stays the way he is, and continues to affect the lives of students like he affected my life, students willing to believe in him more than in the cruelty of classmates.