No Clowns, Plenty of Hauntings
Carriage Return, 10/17/2016
Carriage Return is The Ribbon’s (more or less) weekly round-up of useful links from around the literary web. A reset for your week, tabs to open, and perhaps some context for your next book browsing visit, wherever you are.
In tending to the fantastic influx of fall titles, we’ve been derelict in our semi-weekly duty to bring you Carriage Return! So please enjoy this super-sized edition.
You might be familiar with the great Lapham’s Quarterly, whose physical issues — collecting writings across time on a common, topical theme — we have trouble keeping in stock. The most recent issue? Flesh:
Much of the history of ideas about our condition is devoted to puzzling out the contrasts between the brutish constraints of our embodiment and our seemingly disembodied capacity to think, which projects us into abstract realms, away from our mortal, fragile, messy bodies. It is not enough that we can create mathematics, music, physics, and writing, in which bodily needs are silenced and sometimes transcended; we must also wonder about this very capacity. We are animals at once conscious, aware of finitude, and locked into corruptible flesh.
Whether or not you’re able to procure the this quarter’s installment, you can find Noga Arikha’s enlightening historical overview of “the eternal dance of Eros and Thanatos,” how the mind has figured, throughout time, as an ethereal ghost of our mortal body, right here.
For two summers, I slept in a haunted house, while teaching poetry there through a writing program. The teachers and I had all sorts of encounters with the spirits in the house, but for me, seeing the ghost during my first summer there was the most important event. Nothing other than seeing a ghost has been as instrumental in my thinking about the materiality of the shared imagination and its importance in poetry.
So says the phenomenal Dorthea Lasky regarding the necessity of poetry’s “belief in a shared, material imagination” over at JSTOR Daily. Essential to your deep (or fleeting!) interests in those subjects. Lasky’s most recent poetry collection, Rome, is available in paperback.
“At eighty-seven, I am solitary,” writes the poet Donald Hall. He now lives alone in the first floor of his family’s farm house, originally built in 1803:
Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.
The full article, and his haunting reflection on the lingering grief over the loss of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, 21 years ago, is in this week’s New Yorker. Donald Hall’s most recent work, Essays After Eighty, is available in paperback.
Do personas haunt us?
While a goodly amount of writers are busy trying to decide whether or not Bob Dylan deserves a Nobel Prize in literature (Dylan himself seems to have no comment), just who “Bob Dylan” is behind his many masks remains — even after belabored Hollywood meditations on the very subject — a mystery.
But at the very least we might chart the protean song man’s effect on the culture at large.
Several years ago, writing in The New Inquiry, Rob Horning wondered if Dylan’s much dismissed “Born Again” phase in the late ’70s and early ’80s informed a particular political psyche noticeable today:
by espousing an absolutist rhetoric that admits of no possible nuance in one’s worldview, Dylan seems only to enhance the mystery of his “real” thoughts. Some wrote off Dylan’s turn to fundamentalism as willful idiosyncrasy, despite his carrying on with two more proselytizing, Bible-saturated records, Saved and Shot of Love. In retrospect it seems even harder to believe he was ever entirely in earnest about his conversion. Was he actually trying to make an oblique and far-reaching comment on America’s growing intolerance and frustration with vicissitudes of pluralism and liberal tolerance? Was he documenting how far an artist must now go to convey any sort of conviction, or was he making a mockery of the very notion of conviction?
The full article is here. We might add there is no shortage of fascinating investigations on Dylan as a religious thinker (and actor).
And earlier this fall in Jezebel, Catherine Nichols re-framed the messy (and notably plagiarized) Chronicles as, in fact, an incredible feat of memoir:
I spent years looking at anything Dylan said about himself askance, the way many people do. Either we believe him and he’s tricking us, or it’s something true and nearly impossible to decode, in which case we’re fools again. Before reading Chronicles, I thought any attitude of certainty toward a book that’s mostly plagiarized or invented would make me either a dupe or a fool. But in his writing I could finally see that Dylan’s mental fingerprints couldn’t possibly be a code or a trick.
It was certainly the intention of Elena Ferrante that we readers not know anything about who, exactly, is behind the pen name. That is until the author suffered a recent, and controversial, public unmasking.
“What is it we want from our authors?” asks Dayna Tortorici in an n+1 online exclusive. “Too much, and of the wrong sort”:
since when has a novelist’s right to privacy depended on her promise never to lie? Writers are not politicians. Their work does not hinge on the perfect alignment of what they say about themselves and what biographers, journalists, and tax specialists may uncover through public records. Nor are they memoirists, who owe it to their readers — and to their writing — to be who they say they are.
Melissa Broder, the author of poetry collections Scarecreone and Last Sext among others, as well as staff favorite essay collection So Sad Today, was interviewed recently at the growing archive that is The Creative Independent.
Asked about the differences between crafting a poem and crafting a tweet for her massively successful, dark, and formerly anonymous account So Sad Today, Broder dispensed sage advice:
When I edit a poem I ask “is this true?” and what I mean by true is not truth in a reality sense, but true as in does it feel right in my bones. Whereas with a tweet I’m mostly asking is this good or funny. And if you ask that too much about anything it turns to shit.
The full interview is here.
“Going home is a strange process, especially if you’ve never been there before,” writes Derek Palacio, Author of the stellar The Mortifications, another staff favorite.
Over at fellow Medium publication Electric Literature, he recommends ten books that “grapple in beautiful ways with the complex phenomenon of going home”:
Margaret Atwood’s Hagseed is reviewed in the Los Angles Review of Books:
Atwood is at her bewitching best in this gripping tale of betrayal and revenge that, incidentally, also displays her deep knowledge of The Tempest.
Our event with her on Friday is sold out, sadly, but copies of the book on our shelves now.
One upcoming event not yet sold out is an evening with Jonathan Safran Foer. The author recently spoke with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air. The broadcast and transcript is here.
Finally, the Best American books are out. Jonathan Franzen edited the Best American Essays edition for this year. And, oh yeah, our very own bookseller and Event Coordinator Mairead Small Staid received notable mention for her essay in the Georgia Review, Mad Pieces.
