Syntax Club: "XVIII. She"; "XIX. From the Archaic to the Fast Self"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon has a strange flash of...confusion, insight, something relating to the sight of Herakles' mother's bedroom and the word she; Herakles' grandmother speaks at some length about Woolf, Freud, and magma; our senses of interiority and exteriority start to coalesce in a more coherent way around these central volcanic images: interior as hot, as pressure, as waiting to burst, maybe?; Geryon kind of gets dumped, though the full heft of this won't totally hit him for a little bit.

Questions

What's the significance of She?
The sight of the bedroom itself is striking to this adolescent boy in an obvious way--it's full of ~overtly feminine things~! But there's something slightly deeper at work with regards to Geryon's sense of self, of inside, and how that relates to his understanding of gender (think back to the slow ascent up the stairs we saw a few sections back). I don't quite have a totally secure read on it yet, but feel free to offer up thoughts of your own.

How should we read Archaic and Fast Self?
This is a formative moment for Geryon, right? A moment of transition, maybe, one way of being has ended and another has begun. The relationship with Herakles' has thrust him into the realm of romantic suffering quite suddenly, and so he leaves behind the archaic, the old times of his youth, for the fast self, the stable, fixed self of the present moment. But note too that there's a potential ambiguity here--you can read an implicit {Self} as attached to Archaic, which, given the opening aphorism about reality as a sound might open up some more interesting avenues for us to think about. And note too the whole range of senses fast might mean here: alternatively quick, stable, morally loose, scandalous, etc.

What's up with Freud and Woolf in these ramblings?
An occasion for Carson to do some Carson-ing, first and foremost (love it or hate it, sweeping, expansive recombinations of Big Name literary & historical figures is one of her main *deals*). But also a good jumping off point for our internal-external thinking--probably not a coincidence that these are Ms. "Existence is a Semi-Transparent Envelope of Consciousness" and Mr. "Popularized the Idea of the Unconscious."

And lava and interiority?
Yeah, there's a lot of pressure resting on this metaphor. We'll see more volcano stuff later on, but I think these sections are where the metaphors finally start to congeal in a helpful way for me.

How is Geryon a man in transition?
Obviously there's the transition to adulthood, but we might think about other ways to: a figure written by a transitional author (Stesichoros); a figure transitioning between literary modes (Carson's fake Greek poetry vs. her novel-in-verse); and of course he is a man interested in sex with other men, and those are always liminal figures of a sort.

Sentences

Who am I? He had been here before in the dark on the stairs with his hands out
groping for a switch--he hit it
and the room sprang towards him like an angry surf with its unappeasable debris
of woman liquors, he saw a slip
a dropped magazine combs baby powder a stack of phone books a bowl of pearls
a teacup with water in it himself
in the mirror cruel as a slash of lipstick--he banged the light off. (57)

So much going on here! The use of asyndeton (deliberate omission of conjunctions) in that long list of unappeasable debris is an excellent way of mirroring the psychology of this teenaged boy seeing such a room. But I also find the structure fascinating, especially that loooooong second sentence. We have 4 basic elements to it, each structured around he {verb}: 1) he had been here 2) he hit it 3) he saw 4) he banged the light off. The parallelism allows a sprawling, massive sentence to feel both smooth, neat, quick, and even in a way well-ordered. (I know I keep banging on about parallelism, and making such a big deal out of a simple syntactical device might seem pedestrian or sophomoric to many readers, but I really do think sentence mechanics are under-discussed in CNF spheres, so I'm going to keep banging away). I like the way the middle pair are joined with just a single comma, and I like how that pair is attached via a dash: 1--2,3--4, basically. A nice patterning.


Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not to just keep yelling. (60)

My friend Lela liked this sentence so much she made it her Twitter bio when she first read it, so I'll let her speak a few words: "A very succinct way of talking about the manner some of us live in the world versus maybe the manner we should live in, in terms of imposing ourselves on reality or listening to it, and I think accomplishing that almost self-helpy idea through this metaphor is pretty graceful."


where hardworking dawn monkeys (60)

Dawn is what struck me here; the time of a day (a feature of the setting) is re-attributed to an agent acting within the setting. Carson keeps sliding the role of adjectives around on us (think back to, say, boy neck for comparison): moving atmospheric information to those acting in the atmosphere.

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.
Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from the earth's core on the inside to meet
the cold air of the world and stop,
as we do, just in time. The autobiography,
which Geryon worked on from the age of five to the age of fourty-four,
had recently taken the form of a 
photographic essay. (60)

Register shifts, obviously--moving again from thinking about the interior in geologic & technical terms (crust, proportionately thinner, kilograms of force) to aesthetic & metaphysical ones (soul, autobiography). I do especially like the juxtaposition of the sentence about the autobiography with the one about force, and how she refrains from "explaining" that particular move (and interesting too to think about how acquire a broader, larger narrative distance every time the autobiography comes up). Just in time, as well as that fact that we are a thing that stop, has a lot of potential valences; play around with the meaning in your head a bit and a lot of avenues start to open up, no?

Geryon's heart and lungs were a black crust. (62)

In Geryon's autobiography
this page has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with a white ribbon.
He has titled it "Jealous of My Little Sensations." (62)

These two are also interesting in terms of distance and register--we move from a very intense, very close, very emotive black crust which unifies Geryon's experience directly with the volcanic metaphors to a more distant view requiring us to do a bit more intepretation or speculation about an older Geryon (after all, he didn't make the photograph in that exact moment, right?). Tracking Geryon's relationship to time and how that intersects with the narrative and/or lyric distance might be a good project.

Exercises

1--2,3--4
Compose a sentence with a structure mirroring that of Caron's long sentence describing Geryon entering the room. Pick a single subject, 4 different verbs, and unite them in a single sentence where the 2nd and 3 clauses are penned in with dashes & joined by a comma.

Adjectival Sliding
Move information about setting or atmosphere to instead describe an actor within that setting or atmosphere (see: dawn monkeys).

*

Next week's plan (assuming I don't get off schedule again):
Tuesday: AA and Memory Burn
Wednesday: Fruit Bowl and Water
Thursday: Freedom

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery

Syntax Club: "XVI. Grooming"; "XVII. Walls"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon and Herakles have what seems to be their first major sexual encounter (implied as an oral one) which leaves Geryon feeling not as a wounded angel but instead a magnetic person; i.e., the sexual encounter is a locus of agency and power--but it should be noted that many readers interpret the title ("Grooming") given to the sexual encounter as a complicating factor. Immediately after their sexual encounter, we see Geryon and Herakles at work painting the town red via rambunctious, perhaps pretentious graffiti; this nocturnal behavior ultimately emphasizes Geryon's limits and (perhaps inevitable, structural, cosmically fixed) distance from Herakles.

Questions

Does Carson's occasional use of the 1st person plural relate to the essayistic vibes this book sometimes gives you, Will?

Probably, I think--take a look at the opening of "Grooming"; that's a sweeping move, alright, and the use of the 1st person plural we makes it impossible to not at least consider the sentence in light of nonfiction, or hybrid, or metafictive, or "all of the above" spaces. I guess you could call it an authorial or narratorial interjection, but it's not doing the work we typically associate with those interjections in "normal" or "traditional" or "realist" fiction, so I'm inclined to read it in a hybrid way. Especially since this particular moment feels in some ways akin to her aphoristic gestures.

What do we make of the title "Grooming"?

It refers most literally to the goofy gorilla game they play together, clearly, but given Geryon's history there are obvious possible tensions to this word when used to introduce a sexual experience. Though, of course, Carson also wants us to bear in mind that Geryon isn't that wounded angel figure. Feel free to share thoughts on how it should be read if you are so inclined.

Sentences

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this. (54)

Wildly expansive, 1st person plural sense of involvement, a lush breathlessness to that final phrase. Thoroughly Carsonian.

Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue (54)

A straightforward simile in terms of structure, and easy enough in terms of connotation (silk seems a neat fit for a young lover), but Carson wants to keep us on our toes--and she delays the twist until the very end. Did you think this simile demarcating the opening bounds of this heated sexual experience would end in red? You were wrong; interesting how Carson withholds the pivot until the last word of that concluding prepositional phrase.

Geryon thinks for some reason of going into a barn
first thing in the morning
when sunlight strikes a bale of raw hay still we from the night. (54)

I adore the sheer strangeness of this mental moment, and how she guilelessly leans into it (thinks for some reason) instead of explaining it.

Geryon felt clear and powerful--not some wounded angel after all
but a magnetic person like Matisse
or Charlie Parker! (54)

Again and again, for a very finicky and slippery sort of work, we often get sentences that are remarkably sincere and guileless. In this case, Geryon's experience of feeling clear and powerful is given via unabashedly clear and powerful markers: wounded angel, magnetic person, and that final, totally sincere exclamation point.

That night they went out painting. (55)

A nice contrast to the previous section's opener, both in terms of syntax (long and short) and concept (dawn and night).

Geryon did an early red-winged LOVESLAVE on the garage of the priest's house (55)

Early is an interesting modifier here; it can take on several meanings in that LOVESLAVE is literally early in the sequence of graffiti they are painting in-scene and in that it implies Geryon has a category of work one might call early--we get glimpses of his future, adult, artistic career, maybe?

The night was wide open
and blowing headlights like a sea. (55)

Similes are one of the most guileless of figurative techniques generally--they take something metaphoric and use that central like to clarify the metaphor's, almost didactically giving it an unmissable hinge. But notice how she skews things again at the end. Night and sea both as wide open, sure, easy and obvious--but blowing headlights?

Geryon watched the top of Herakles' head
and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing. He looked at this fact
in mild surprise. Once in childhood
his ice cream had been eaten by a dog. Just an empty cone
in a small dramatic red fist. (56)

Small dramatic red fist has excellent internal vowel sonics. I also like that this is the only (I think?) reference to the dog in the novel-in-verse proper. And note too how Geryon's awareness of his limits returning, of his inexplicable interiority, gets a little bit of free indirect discourse treatment through the use of the fragmented nothing to say and nothing.

Exercises

Section Openers

Take something fragmented or multi-sectional and compose short, 1-sentence interludes of some kind opening each fragment or section. Strive to set up a dichotomy or schema of some kind in these openers. Play around with what thematic and structural effects you can achieve this way. See: what dawn is this & that night.

Unexpected Simile, Terminal Position

Draft a simile or two describing a feature or scene or moment or whatever in one of your current projects, and find a way to skew the simile or make it deeply unexpected towards the very end. Avoid deliberate unexpectedness in the first portion of the simile--save that pivot. See: Herakles in the heat of the blue, or the night and the sea both blowing headlights.

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Tomorrow we do She and From the Archaic to the Fast Self

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery

Syntax Club: "XIV. Red Patience"; "XV. Pair"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon finds himself inexplicably transfixed by an especially unusual volcano photograph (entitled "Red Patience" involving a fifteen minute exposure; Geryon finds that his wings are struggling anew (a pain not felt since childhood) as he and Herakles find themselves this odd pair engaged in a mutual sort of watching; in other words, our adolescent protagonist is reckoning with time, intimacy, distance, and vision.

Questions

What's valuable to an essayist here?

Probably gonna start shifting the question approach up tomorrow, since ultimately I am starting to repeat in unhelpful ways, but for now let's emphasize that these sections are doing significant work about the nature of time (long photo exposure) and the relationship between distance, sight, and intimacy (Geryon's relative inability to render himself as anything other than odd to Herakles, the ways in which his wings serve as a locus for difference, otherness, monstrosity, etc). The latter of those is something more or less all essays grapple with in a way.

Sentences

A fifteen-minute exposure that recorded both the general shape of the cone
with its surroundings (best seen by day)
and the rain of incandescent bombs tossed into the air and rolling down its slopes
(visible in the dark). (51)

Gorgeous elongation, but I'm most drawn by two things here: the sonic & connotative choice underpinning bombs (emphasizing the sudden, violent spectacle through an explosive and a plosive--that puff of air with the b providing a nice contrast to the more languid incandescent) and the ways in which the parenthetical interruptions provide a sort of dichotomy (day & night).

Geryon could see a row of pine skeletons
killed by falling ash. (51)

and ash moving down
and pines in the kill process. (51)

Skeletons killed continues the violent connotations from above, but notice how Carson recalls, extends, reworks it into willful strangeness later on: killed becomes in the kill process.

he kept going back to it.
It was not that he found it an especially pleasing photograph.
It was not that he
did not understand how such photographs are made.
He kept going back to it. (51)

Significant & effective use of repetition here (he kept going back to it; it was not that) to emphasize both the intensity with which Geryon is drawn to the photograph and the inexplicability of the draw. I like too that we get what can be called a chiasmus or antimetabole (repetition of elements in an inverted order; an AB:BA pattern; don't stress too much about which one is which, many rhetoricians and scholars use the terms inconsistently).

His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animals they were.
With a piece of wooden plank he'd found in the basement Geryon made a back brace
and lashed the wings tight.
Then he put his jacket back on. (53)

Variance in syntactic length is what struck me here--Carson is describing a single situation/sequence of action (Geryon's wings are bothersome and so he makes a brace to restrain them) with sentence patterns more or less Short->Long->Long->Short (similar to our ABBA chiasmus action above). Interesting that Carson confines the moment of commentary (like the little mindless red animals they were) to the long and keeps the short sentences framing the whole action simple and direct.

The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. (53)

We saw a similar move to this--Geryon being a little obscured, rendered partially in terms of a moving or speaking object--in some earlier sections with the fruit bowl. Interesting that Carson chooses to repeat the move here, especially given that the next section will contain the first sexual consummation of Geryon and Herakles' relationship.

Exercises

Parenthetical Pairs
Compose a single sentence which contains two different parenthetical interludes that somehow serve as contrasts or counterpoints on the level of diction, subject, or theme (see: day and night above).

Recall and Rework
Establish a through-line of diction across several words (see: the violence implicit in skeletons, bombs, killed by falling ash, etc) and then recall and rework the same through-line later on in a passage (see: how killed becomes kill process).

Short Long Long Short
See how imitating Carson's syntactic variance affects the pacing of your own writing; describe a single sequence or action in short and long sentences according to an ABBA pattern (and maybe experiment with it the other way, too).

*

Tomorrow we do Grooming and Walls.

*

Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery

Sheryl St. Germain on Risk, Grief, Healing, and Recovery amidst a Cancelled Book Tour

I started planning an eight-week book tour for Fifty Miles in early 2019. With the help and generosity of friends and colleagues, I’d managed to put together a tour for 2020 that would span nine cities and seven states. Fifty Miles is a memoir about addiction, grief and healing that focuses on my son Gray, who died in 2014 of a heroin overdose, and my own struggles with substance abuse and recovery. I knew it was going to be difficult to read from it, night after night, but it felt important to spread some compassionate and what I hoped would be read as thoughtful lyricism about those we love who fall into the river of addiction. In conversation with a fellow poet, Ed Hirsch, who lost his own young son to drugs and wrote a poetry book inspired by him, Ed said to me that we can’t market books like these, rather we have to hope that they will fall into the hands of those that need them. I hoped this book tour might help find those hands.

The tour started with a book launch in early spring in Pittsburgh, my current home, and a reading at nearby Wilkes-Barre, home of Etruscan. I then flew to New York City for another reading. A close friend of my son, the artist, Morgan Everhart, came to this reading, which made it especially meaningful. We had used a painting she did inspired by Gray on the cover of a book of my poems that had come out in 2018, The Small Door of Your Death (Autumn House).

On March 1 we left for the first (driving) leg of the tour, with my generous husband Teake driving. We knew about the virus, but none of my events had been cancelled yet, and we hadn’t yet realized how bad it was going to get. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs was still planning to hold its conference in San Antonio, where I was scheduled to do a signing with Etruscan for Fifty Miles, so I figured it couldn’t be that bad. Two days later we were in Dallas, and things had quickly worsened. I had a reading at a bookstore there, and spent a few days with old friends and former students. I lived for 13 years in Dallas and spent my first teaching years there. I was moved to see some of the very first students I taught in the audience at the reading.  Meanwhile, more disturbing information was coming forward about COVID-19 and its danger to the elderly. We were headed to San Antonio to do the signing, then our plan was to drive to New Orleans where we had just placed my mother in an assisted living facility. We planned to spend a couple weeks in New Orleans helping my mother, selling her house and hosting an estate sale before I participated in the annual Tennessee Williams Festival.

But as we readied to leave Dallas for San Antonio, I began to have second thoughts. What if I picked something up at the conference and brought it to my mother? I decided the risk was too great, and with sadness informed Etruscan that I was going to skip AWP. Instead, we headed straight to Louisiana.

We had lots of time in the car, while driving, to listen to NPR and catch up on what was happening with the virus. Although there weren’t many cases in New Orleans yet, I began to think about how quickly it might spread there. Having been born and raised in New Orleans, I knew how important huge festivals like Mardi Gras were, but also that there were lots of spring festivals where there would be large gatherings of people. And I knew how my community there loved to drink and party and be in large crowds. As of this date Louisiana is one of the three hot spots for the virus in the U.S. with 9,150 cases and 310 deaths as of this writing, the majority of which are in the New Orleans area.

We arrived in New Orleans March 8. We sold my mother’s house on March 11, and the family went out to eat lunch—raw oysters, gumbo and po-boys—with my mother at our favorite restaurant. Meanwhile, emails from Georgia, Illinois, Iowa and Maryland slowly trickled in saying that all of my events had been cancelled.

A couple of days after we closed on the house, my mother’s assisted living facility went on lock down. We were not going to be able to see her for the forseeable future. We would learn later that a resident and staff member both tested positive for the virus, and the former would die. We hosted a two-day estate sale that weekend for my mother’s possessions, which included thousands of books and old records. I wore gloves and tried to be as careful as possible during the sale, but there were times when 40 or so people seemed crammed into my mother’s tiny house. I gave away a few copies of Fifty Miles to a few special people who took books and were interested in learning about my mother because her book collection was so vast and rich.

During the estate sale I received a communication from the organizers of the Tennessee Williams Festival that they were cancelling the festival. Meanwhile the number of confirmed cases in New Orleans was increasing drastically, and I was worried about our getting stick and being stuck in New Orleans, unable to see my mother, and in an old, tiny house with almost no furniture, still lots of books, but also heaps of rat and roach poison sprinkled everywhere. We packed up what we could, including all the copies of Fifty Miles I had hoped to sell, and started the two-day drive home. The first night on the road my husband developed a cough and 101 fever. We pushed through the next day, sharing driving. We both fell ill with flu-like symptoms for two weeks, but tested negative for COVID-19, and are feeling better now.

What started as a journey to spread the word about the epidemic of drug overdoses, inspired by personal experience and my son’s death, morphed into a journey dominated by the fear of the growing epidemic of a new virus strain. For now, my words of grief, healing and recovery are muted by a currently more aggressive disease. I’m grateful to Etruscan, and all the friends and colleagues who were willing to help try to get this book into the hands of those that need it, and hopeful that in the future this virus will lessen its grip on us and the book will fall into more hands of those that need it.

If you’re interested in learning more about Fifty Miles, take a look at this recent piece published in D Magazine.

(This brief essay was originally published in the Spring 2020 Etruscan Press newsletter; we're reprinting it here because it feels timely, and because it ties in to a conversation we'll be publishing shortly with Sheryl St. Germain. —Editors) 

---

Sheryl St. Germain has published six poetry books, three essay collections, and co-edited two anthologies.  Her latest collection of essays, Fifty Miles, appeared in January 2020 with Etruscan Press. She lives in Pittsburgh where she is co-founder of the Words Without Walls program. In addition to numerous awards for her work, including two NEA grants, in 2018 she was the recipient of The Louisiana Writer Award, presented annually by the Louisiana Center for the Book.

Syntax Club: "XII. Lava"; "XIII. Somnambula"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Apologies again for the skewed schedule, but in good news I am now ~done~ with grading for the term and ~mostly done~ with peripheral end of year tasks, so hopefully things will be smoother for the rest of the novel. Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon finds himself in a sort of strange, restless, liminal space (hot and motionless) both physically, mentally, and in terms of his relationship with Herakles. The young man is growing, pushing, breaking out, starting to crack--and we still haven't yet hit the sex or the volcano (though we will soon).

Questions

What's valuable to an essayist here?

I may alter the questions a little bit more in the future, as I feel these sections may be getting redundant as we move through the novel-in-verse. In today's readings I'm predominantly interested in that phenomenally intricate and complex thinking going on when Geryon imagines what is it like to be a woman listening in the dark and the answers we receive are placed in relation to sexual assault and the image of slow, forceful, inevitable lava.

Sentences

Black central stalled night. (48)

Another example of effective fragmentation on Carson's part; it's an evocative atmospheric detail pared down to the smallest, tightest phrasing. Stalled is particularly interesting to describe a kind of listless evening.

He lay hot and motionless, that is, motion

was a memory he could not recover

(among others) from the bottom of the vast blind kitchen where he was buried. (48)

Although we've talked mostly about her minimalism, Carson is also perfectly willing to work (or deliberate over-work) the hell out of a sentence when it suits her purposes. Motionless is precisely the type of "tight" or "neat" descriptor that in ordinary MFA-land Craft Discourse would not be amenable to further explication or working. But Carson sticks in a that is (which is what i.e. translates to in English) and, rather than giving us just a basic explanation of the term (what one normally does with i.e.) she draws out and willfully extends the metaphoric action, converting motion to a memory and characterizing Geryon's situation as a vast blind kitchen. A move which is indulgent in the best possible way, I think.

He could feel the house of sleepers

around him like loaves on shelves. (48)

I love how unexpected and yet also plain, matter-of-fact, even guileless the loaf simile is here.

He thought of women.

What is it like to be a woman

listening in the dark?

Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She listens

to the blank space 

where his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can move as slow as

nine hours per inch.

Color and fluidity vary with its temperature from dark red and hard

(below 1,800 degrees centigrade)

to brilliant yellow and completely fluid (above 1,950 degrees centigrade).

She wonders if

he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep listening. (48)

So much going on here! I'm not going to offer a complete account of all the movement here, but roughly we get Geryon imagining life as a woman and then a voice (either Geryon's, or Carson's, or a combination there-of) thinking through the dark menace of sexual assault in terms of lava. Note the range of implications here: dark, burning, inexorable, slow, destructive, apocalyptic, inevitable (didn't Geryon have an awareness of his death from a young age? And didn't he know of the role Herakles would play before he ever met him? Again we see a sort of cosmic fixity at work, maybe). What I'm most interested in are the rapid shifts in thinking. After the simile is introduced we move to the blank space, a thinking-through of the psychology involved--but then Carson pivots us without transition or warning to a literal, scientific set of details about the movement of lava. Those sentences in the 2nd half, coming after the extended metaphor or conceit of lava has been introduced, deliberately evade "connective tissue" fleshing out the metaphor in the ways we might expect. Carson sets the simile up and then uses "raw", predominately factual details in a totally different register (brilliant yellow and above 1,9000 degrees centigrade come from a totally different world than ascent of the rapist). And then we move back again: she wonders. I find this sort of movement--shifting between registers within a given metaphoric framework but without explicit transitioning or connecting--interesting, unexpected, and rather powerful. Would love to hear more about y'all's take on this section.

Hot pressure morning. (49)

Another excellent piece of fragmentation to close us out, similar to the night which opened these two sections.

Exercises

That Is, (Over)-Working

Take a look at all the work Carson hinges on to the descriptor motionless. Write (or pull from a manuscript) a sentence or two on a topic you know well. Scan for a modifier that seems as if it does not need elaboration or essaying, like her motionless. Append a that is to the modifier and write a phrase or clause to attach which deliberately draws out or expands on the original modifier in a way that either does some serious essaying or takes the seemingly-obvious original modifier in a new, interesting, or charged direction.

Extended Metaphors & Register Shifts

Establish a conceit or extended metaphor within a few sentences (let's say ~5 max). Experiment with moving between the different elements of this framework (e.g., Carson's woman/sexual assault/lava). Try to use multiple registers of description or narration (scientific, lyric, whatever are appropriate to your materials) to correspond to the different elements of the framework. See what effects you can achieve by sharply pivoting between registers as you work through the component elements of the metaphor/conceit. Avoid treating the elements with the same style/register/tone/"voice"/whatever.

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Next week let's plan on:
Tuesday-Red Patience; Pair

Wednesday-Grooming; Walls

Thursday-She; From the Archaic Self to the Fast Self

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery

Syntax Club: "X. Sex Question"; "XI. Hades"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Apologies again for the skewed schedule, but in good news I am now ~done~ with grading for the term and ~mostly done~ with peripheral end of year tasks, so hopefully things will be smoother for the rest of the novel. Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon's relationship with Herakles approaches a new. identity-sorting fulcrum--sex--although the relationship doesn't arrive there yet, Geryon and Herakles embrace a renegade youth that is somewhere between artistic and low-grade deliquent; Geryon and Herakles prepare to visit Herakles' hometown of Hades, which features a central geographic metaphor: the volcano.

Questions

What's valuable to an essayist here?

Probably less we can learn on the broad essayistic level here in these two short sections, though there is another interesting aphoristic move at the start of the Hades section (the claim, or mantra, or whatever they spraypaint on the high school wall. Going to focus more so on sentences today.

Sentences

Cold night smell

coming in the windows. New moon floating white as a rib at the edge of the sky. (44)

There's an interesting omission here; Carson completely drops the articles most people would lead with. Not a cold night smell or the new moon--just the thing itself: cold night smell and new moon. On a "craft" level it's an easy, neat way of shortening and sharpening the sentences, but it also renders these two pieces of imagery more lyric, more ecstatic, more mythic; removing the particularizing articles has (at least for me) an effect that makes the images totalized, super-saturated, etc. Interesting to think about in light of how adjectives in this novel are, after all, latches of being (and ones unhinged or let loose by Stesichoros). And interesting too that we get night as a sort of category adjective, similar to boy neck from the Red Meat portions (I need a better phrase for this thing I keep describing so poorly!), in the first sentence, rather than cold night's smell or smell of cold night or etc.

He was fourteen.

Sex is a way of getting to know someone,

Herakles had said. he was sixteen. (44)

Strong, clear, simple use of syntactical parallelism to communicate the important and powerful difference in position between our two young gayboys in a very small number of words.

Hot unsorted parts of the question

were licking up from every crack in Geryon,

he beat at them as a nervous laugh escaped him. (44)

I love the sheer strangeness of this one--the question's parts are hot and unsorted, but also capable of licking up through cracks--images setting us up for all the fun volcano time we will have together later in the novel, maybe--but ultimately these hot unsorted parts are things to be beaten down. Again it seems Carson has a fondness for wide and fast movement when doing descriptive or metaphoric work.

Not touching

but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh. (45)

A different sort of omission: rather than removing articles Carson leaves out the actual grammatical subject of the sentence (what exactly is not touching but joined? the two boys), giving us a long fragment containing that fantastic, astonishing comparison to parallel cuts. There's a definite power to casually dropping in such a bomb.

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING

is something you know instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head

at sixteen. (46)

This particular aphoristic move exists on multiple levels: the ALL CAPS representing what is getting literally spray-painted segues to normal typography as Carson expands on the actual claim in a more essayistic fashion. Notice the way she uses you as a universal stand-in (a very common thing for us essayists, I think). And note too how it's possible to make a long, relatively elegant sentence with a minimum of punctuation.

Exercises

Omission

Compose several descriptive sentences (or select several from an existing manuscript). Experiment with re-writing them in ways that deliberately omit normal grammatical features (articles, subjects, predicates, etc). See: cold night smell and new moon, or not touching but... for examples. Play around with what tonal or thematic effects you can heighten in this way.

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Tomorrow we do Lava & Somnambula

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery

Syntax Club: "VII. Change"; "VIII. Click"; "IX. Space and Time"

Syntax Club: Autobiography of Red

Apologies again for the skewed schedule, but in good news I am now ~done~ with grading for the term and ~mostly done~ with peripheral end of year tasks, so hopefully things will be smoother for the rest of the novel. Please see here for previous installments of Syntax Club; feel free to post comments and thoughts and sentences you love here on the site or Twitter; if you try an exercise feel free to Tweet some of your results using the #SyntaxClub tag.

Frame

--How is this work essayistic, or possibly of value to essayists?
--What is distinctive, noteworthy, excellent, or interesting about the sentences in this work?

Argument

Geryon "somehow" makes it to adolescence: he meets a boy (Herakles) and finds himself immediately smitten and lovestruck. Entering adolescence somewhat complicates Geryon's family relationships, and he draws away from his mother to cling more closely to both Herakles and his new hobby/artistic discipline: photography.

Questions

What's valuable to an essayist here?

We get several moments of Big Idea or Aphorism or Gesture in these sections regarding the self, the other, and distance. I don't quite have a full grasp on how these are all functioning here, but it seems to be that Carson is presenting Geryon's burgeoning relationship with Herakles as an occasion "up against" a radically different being, i.e., another person, and so a relationship which clarifies, illuminates, or re-evaluates the self. Given that our whole shtick as essayists is, well, making ourselves (or at least the activity of our minds) legible to others, these notions of identity, distance, and intimacy seem pretty relevant.

Sentences

Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches.
They were two superiors eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics. (39)

I love the interplay between these totally unexpected metaphors: kingdoms shifting downward, eels at the bottom of a tank like italics. Describing the contours of Geryon's life as kingdoms is interesting and unexpected in that throws a grandiose, mythic light back on our coming-of-age moody gayboy subject. But it also sets us up for the animal metaphor (think biology and taxonomy) when we get to eels, who eventually recognize each other as italics, sometime else entirely. There's a ton of movement here (kingdom to eels to italics in just two dozen words or so), really--although Carson tends to avoid overtly flashy syntactical pyrotechnics she definitely makes forceful and compellingly brazen moves at times.

and there it was one of those moments
that is the opposite of blindness. (39)

Describing the first romantic recognition as sight or light or something similar would feel very overplayed, but Carson achieves a similar effect through negation or opposition; she circles around the thing. I'm reminded very indirectly of apophatic or negative theology, an entire discipline based around description via opposition or negation.

The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself. (39)

A nice moment of personification (night doesn't move or scatter, after all) which creates a strong sense of atmosphere (the drizzling rain isn't just rain--it's night itself--the warm dark lull in which our two gayboys meet (where else) in a bus station.

He put Geryon's hands inside his shirt. (39)

Honestly difficult for me to think of a stronger encapsulation of gay male desire than this moment.

He had recently relinquished speech. (40)

Notice the combination of sympathy, irony, elevation, and sarcasm at work here, all jumbled together. Relinquished is a lofty way of describing teenaged sullenness, but it's also the type of phrase a clever, artistic youth might use quite seriously (compared with, say, Stephen Dedalus from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce incidentally is absolutely definitively 110& the most essayistic fiction writer in the English language, maybe someday when I have more time, more energy, or more self-loathing we can take a look at some of his stuff together)). Carson is gently mocking Geryon's behavior. But the use of such a lofty verb also brings us back to the heroic-mythic dimension Carson has created, which exists alongside and intermingled with a contemporary coming-of-age tale. It's honestly an extraordinary act of balance to be able to maintain these things, and this verb choice does an excellent job of helping with the act.

The words dropped behind him as he went banging out the screen door. (41)

Love the way the participle banging sort, of, well, bangs its way into the middle of this otherwise middle-of-the-road sentence.

Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition. (42)

Here we see a Big Idea or Aphorism or whatever--notice that as Carson leans more into the essayistic or thinky realm we start to see more gestures of involvement or implication: one's own could easily mean us, after all.

The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map. (42)

Another example of a sentence with a phenomenal amount of movement in the metaphors.

"How does distance look" is a simple direct question. (43)

Wait--since when do we get *quotation marks* in this novel? Who is speaking this, who are they targeting it to, what is prompting it, etc? The poet makes an aside as they are thinking through something, I suppose--and that's essaying, right? Anytime I write a sentence that doesn't totally suck the poets always tell me "it is really a poem at heart", so anytime they do any amount of serious thinking at all I'm going to say "it is really an essay at heart." & notice too how seamlessly the text moves back to the level of narration after this--just a simple pivot on multiple senses of the word light.

Exercises

Via Negativa

Describe an intense emotion, experience, or event through negation or opposition or contrast (see: opposite of blindness). Avoid directly referencing the thing itself.

Keep it Moving

Writing about any subject you know well, attempt 3 or more metaphoric comparisons (see: kingdoms, eels, italics) in 1-2 sentences max. Avoid "connective tissue"--let the suddenness and jarringness work in your favor if possible.

Verbs, Irony, and Sympathy

Take a sentence in a draft (a sentence you are fond of and which describes a meaningful action somehow) and rewrite it so that the verbs involved convey simultaneously a sense of sympathy/understanding for and amusement/irony/sarcasm/etc for the agent accomplishing the action.

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Tomorrow we do Sex Question and Hades--what a pair.

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Will Slattery helps curate things here on Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery