Sifting through the Creases in Twain’s “About Smells”

Scratched onto the corner of my desk on the first day of junior high were the words “Sucking Mr. Patterson”, underneath which was a drawing of a part of anatomy that I would not recognize for several more years (in full disclosure, I also didn’t know what “sucking” entailed, only that it was most likely derogative). When I got home, I did not tell my parents about this message sent to me by some unknown student so confident in his assertion – so convinced that this image should be preserved for the next generation – that he chiseled it into the desk over what must have been several class days. I have, indeed, never told anyone about this message, and yet it is the first memory that surfaces whenever I sit at a desk I have never sat in before, or sharpen a new pencil. The words on the desk sounded coarse whenever I tried to rehearse saying it out loud then, and so I stuck with other memories, other images. Yet the words are as tangible as if I were running my finger over them now, as I did so often then.

Such was the memory that surfaced upon reading “About Smells”, a brief essay by Mark Twain that appeared in a May 1870 version of The Galaxy. In this essay Twain responds to a recent sermon given by Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage, a prominent Presbyterian minister during the mid- to late-19^th century. In his sermon, Talmage declares that the “working man”, should he wish to avoid making “one-half of Christendom sick at their stomach”, should bathe himself properly before attending service. He concludes by stating that he himself will “have nothing to do with this work of evangelization” if this issue continues to persist. Twain – in typical ironic fashion – responds to Talmage by pointing out the necessarily vulgar work of the original followers of Jesus (“St. Matthew without stocking or sandals; St. Jerome bare headed, and with a coarse brown blanket robe dragging the ground”). Addressing the belief that Jesus himself was a carpenter – a Mike Rowe-level dirty job that doubtless generated its fair share of smelly individuals – Twain insinuates that Talmage would not make for a very effective disciple, regardless of his fresh pine smell.

With regards to analysis, it is not, I believe, relevant to spend time expounding upon the thread of sarcasm that runs rampant within this particular Twain essay, as said sarcasm is not only a generally agreed upon marker of the author’s style, but also a component that has been run into the ground by academic analyses. It would thus be more beneficial for this brief platform that I find myself standing upon today to attempt to illuminate the connections that may be made between Twain’s 19^th century censure and the 21^st century essayist – a title that many of us are still attempting to claim for our own.

In describing the differences between the church’s early predecessors and their eventual mutant offspring Talmage, Twain deduces that the real disparity is that “Dr. T. has had advantages which Paul and Peter and the others could not and did not have. There was a lack of polish about them, and a looseness of etiquette, and a want of exclusiveness, which one cannot help noticing” (emphasis mine). Here, Twain is recognizably contrasting the very words that Talmage may have used to describe himself – polish, etiquette, exclusiveness – with the negation of their meaning – lack, looseness, want. In so doing, Twain is attempting to collapse the ethereal quality of Talmage’s church environment by pointing out that the church itself once belonged to those same “working men” that he now rejects.

What, then, can we – as writers, as readers, as living, breathing templates of today’s “essay”, which sways Jenga-like with each new contribution – take from Twain’s “About Smells”? Namely, that we must remember that the essay must not only acknowledge the “villainous odour” of everyday life, but also invite said odour onto the page itself. Too often young writers – I’m including myself in this category – tend to edit their pieces to within an inch of their lives, sometimes cutting out the more unpleasant steps of their writing process in order to reserve room for other, more pleasing components. This is periodically done, unfortunately, for the sake of misguided artistry (“An artist finds beauty in everything.” “An artist thrives on heartbreak because it spurs tragically beautiful poetry.”). On and on, until nothing survives but the mindless repetition of dried tears and brave faces.

Too often I find myself wanting to skip over the ugly details hidden in the creases of my writing, not because they are too difficult to give flesh to, but because they are simply unappealing to my sensory lens. By avoiding these details, however, I neglect to acknowledge the benefits of turning the toaster over to see the crumbs – it is these crumbs that, like Twain’s church predecessors, construct the very foundation of what we as essayists should be attempting to do through our work, which is to dig deeper into the folds of life, acknowledging that no space – not even holy ones – are immune to the scent of work, of real heartbreak, of the simple confusion of not knowing how to manage grief. Those readers who are unable or unwilling to locate the beauty in their own troubles will find no solace in the writer’s neglect of these troubles; they will look elsewhere for another who is willing to acknowledge the exposed pain that comes before the acceptance, only because they themselves are dwelling in that pain, that messiness.

A modern adaptation of the writer’s grasp on the grotesque can be seen in the following excerpt from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”, taken from a point in the narrative when the speaker remembers a doomed last-ditch attempt at reconciliation with her then-boyfriend, Law:

Everything I know about love and its necessities   

I learned in that one moment   

when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon   

at a man who no longer cherished me.   

There was no area of my mind

not appalled by this action, no part of my body   

that could have done otherwise.

I am drawn back to this passage because it so vividly offers space to the physical monstrousness of one person’s heartbreak, without attempting to package it in a way that the rich, poetic language eclipses the vulgarity of the scene. Carson’s nakedness – both metaphorical and literal – invites the “villainous odour” of the situation to enter the room. In so doing, Carson (like St. Matthew, like St. Jerome) addresses the fact that life is often messy, and vulgar, and once too often not present anywhere on the page. The essay, unlike fiction, has not only the capacity but the obligation to expose what can only be exposed on our watch, which is the understanding that to sacrifice the grotesque (the strange smell wafting from across the pews, for example) at the alter of aesthetics is to avoid altogether what can be learned by dwelling upon the crude words on a desk, left by a stranger whom we may never meet.  

E-mail from Bonnie J. Rough

Ok Ander, I just accepted the Blogger invitation to post on Essay Daily and then I faced the fact that for a second embarrassing time in a row, I have to let the opportunity go to someone else. I have a rare opportunity to write for the month of September in Amsterdam, and I am going to accept it and focus intensely on my current book project. I realize you probably won't bother with inviting me anymore to contribute to Essay Daily, but when I have something, maybe I can just query you. I hope you won't mind my adding that I really am not a big flake, but I am a mom of young children with a delicate balance in my work life. I say no to things I want very much to do. Anyway, perhaps sometime, this very predicament itself could lend a fresh thought to Essay Daily, although I fear it wouldn't strike quite the right scholarly tone. But, for example: I'm right now in the Dordogne very close to Montaigne's chateau and library, and I confess I have found myself thinking of the father of the essay and how decadent it might have been for him to be the father of the essay instead of the caregiver of his daughter, because an essay waits patiently and never interrupts with anything but a gift. Sarah Bakewell's scholarship about Montaigne in How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer describes his distress at interruptions in the year of his riding accident (1569 or 1570): "He was thirty-six at this time, and felt he had a lot to escape from. Following his father's death, he had inherited full responsibility for the family chateau and estate in the Dordogne. It was beautiful land, in an area covered, then as now, by vineyards, soft hills, villages, and tracts of forest. But for Montaigne it represented the burden of duty. On the estate, someone was always plucking at his sleeve, wanting something or finding fault with things he had done. He was the seigneur; everything came back to him." 

This burden of duty explains why Montaigne's library and writing room stood in a tower separate from the chateau, and also why he loved to escape on horseback to find solitude in the vignobles and walnut groves. Would that little mouths crying for peaches and saucissons could wait as patiently as the servants, I thought grumpily after I read this, resenting neither my daughters nor my partner but the idea of Montaigne working--essaying--more or less as he pleased. 

Because I was jealous, I plunged into uglier thoughts: Western intellectuals worship too many bright personages who may in fact not have been particularly genius but only had extra time to ramble their brains. I even dared to think that the essay, inasmuch as it challenges the essayist to try, to attempt, really doesn't stretch one intellectually or existentially so much as parenthood. Maybe motherhood in particular. And so I had my own backward little insight, as I looked up from wiping tiny sticky hands to glance out over the green Dordogne just as our seigneur did those 450 years ago: I get more haughty about my status as a mother than about my identity as a writer, perhaps in the same way that a servant might privately disdain of the master of the house. Such coddling! I'll think, shaking my head, imagining my essayist self on the other side of the river, perched over bear rugs in a tower, surrounded by books and favored quotations, quill poised. In comparison, domestic work is harder and the pay is less (if you can imagine). And yet, one accomplishes the job rather honorably. It always both surprises and disappoints me to feel a strange frustrated pride in that, a small-minded sour-grapes kind of comfort. 

So those are my curmudgeonly thoughts on the essay at the moment, perhaps not in the right spirit for the blog, but you can decide. 

Warm wishes, 

Bonnie

Bonnie J. Rough is the author of the 2011 Minnesota Book Award-winning memoir Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA. Her essays have appeared in numerous periodicals including The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Sun, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Defunct, Brevity, Identity Theory, and Sweet: A Literary Confection, as well as anthologies including The Best Creative Nonfiction, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and Modern Love. She teaches in the Ashland University low-residency MFA program in creative writing, and she is a prose editor for Versal, an award-winning international journal of literature and art based in Amsterdam. Both abroad and at home in Seattle, she is at work on Mama Bare, her second nonfiction book. 

Amy Butcher: Preserving Activity Within The Art Of Essaying

I’m interested in the strange, the abstract and the archaic. As an editor, I find I turn to nonfiction not for absolute authority or the permission to feel a specific way—indeed, that’s another impulse altogether—but to be taken on a journey, to feel a story as it arrives, to emerge into a clearing where, as Vivian Gornick so eloquently puts it, “the sense of things is larger than it was before.” 

It’s not an easy feat.

As a writer and reader in my own right, I understand—or at least, have some small sense—of the complexities and impediments in crafting a successful, evocative essay. There is, for example, the essay’s story and its equally unique storyteller—a fact that's often overlook by outsiders to our genre or those just dipping their feet into the proverbial genre pool—and it can be difficult to discern whether the narrative voice selected best services the subject—and essay—that follows. As the editor of Defunct, an online-only journal that publishes flash nonfiction on all things—you guessed it—antiquated, that mode of voice is most important: it's what sets apart, in my mind, the good essays from the lackluster. In Allison Green’s forthcoming “Séance,” out on October 15th as part of Defunct's sixth issue, a handful of 1970s tween girls sit in a basement, attempting to resurrect the spirit of John F. Kennedy. Their sleeping bags are “spread across mattresses on the floor,” the girls are “perched on the edges of [their] mattresses in flannel pajamas,” and their “stockinged feet [are] on a frayed square of green carpet.” The reader is instantly transported into the unique point-of-view of a young girl’s Friday evening, a simultaneous nightmare of peer pressure and preteen yearning. Green writes, “Who among us brought the séance lore? Not me. But we all went along, closing our eyes and holding the sweaty fingers of our neighbors.” The essay—both its experience and how the way it is expressed is fun, pleasurable, and entertaining. Later, when the girls cry out at their own futility, an older and unmistakably wiser Green reflects, “I was crying for more than my young self; I had absorbed my parents’ feelings. My tears were vicarious tears; I wanted to feel a pain as deep as theirs.”

There’s also, of course, form, and this is something I’m increasingly interested in as an editor, especially considering the founding nature of Defunct: to salvage the dead, resurrect the past, and quell the existential unease of nostalgia. Founded by Robin Hemley—our beloved former editor-in-chief who's recently assumed the role of Publisher as he embarks on an exciting new job in Singapore—Defunct asks of essayists that their work reflect the way the world used to be, or perhaps what we wish it would become, and while the subject of defunctness is in itself plentiful—teen crushes and fads and objects, antiquated social norms and civilizations—it’s easy for essayists to fall into the tired trap of wistfulness and nostalgia. The work must move beyond the reminiscent voice and melancholic yearning to the clearing Gornick asserts: the place where something meaningful is imparted upon a reader. As editor, I want to feel the pain of Pluto’s abrupt demotion, see the child angry at the inaccuracy of outdated textbooks, experience the heartache as Britney Spears takes a razor to her soft, blond head—the metaphorical shedding of her once sane self. And how better to do that but through experimentation with form?

It’s what fascinated me most in my edification of the essay as a graduate student at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program: the many shapes the essay can take. A site such as this doesn’t need a reminder that the essay is, after all—and has been since its inception—an attempt, a trial, an experiment, but as an editor and avid reader, I’m moved most by essays that uphold that artful process—essays in which the act of essaying itself has not been lost in a quest for elegance of language or loftiness of prose. It was one of the most meaningful lessons imparted on me as a student of The Essay Prize, a course run simultaneously by Ander Monson at the University of Arizona and John D'Agata at Iowa; the course was designed around a foundation by the same name that seeks to annually celebrate essays that best exemplify the “activity of a text” rather than its “status as a dispensary of information.”

We’re into that, as well. As a writer, I know firsthand the relative ease with which one can fall into the trap of predictability over complication, and what moves me most as an editor are essays that question that narrative path and deviate from the expected. Take, for example, Ander Monson’s 2012 Defunct essay, “Questions for Megatherium,” structured as an open letter to a long-defunct ancestral reptile whose appendages resemble human hands reaching out, grasping, clutching. While it’d be easy for Monson to reflect stoically and from afar, he instead essays through a series of queries both practical and poetic. “If you knew,” he writes, “you would be modeled by a company called Paleocraft in resin 10,000 years after your death, at 1/35 scale, what would you think?” And, later, “Was your world filled with sadness or with hope, if you know what those things are? Is happiness knowing you will be remembered as a monster? What do you know of happiness, of fatness, of the poetry of pain?” Monson doesn’t lose sight of the physical act of essaying; his work is both heartfelt and endearing, entertaining and amusing, and the vessel he utilizes—an open letter form—is surprisingly effective.

It’s something I hope we’ll see more of in future issues: sharp works that employ form as a compliment to content. We’re always hungry for experiments in voice and style, in language and chronology, and in fact recently established a separate call specifically for multimedia works—essays that employ illustrations, audio, and film to further encapsulate a defunct experience. We release our sixth issue next month, and in one of the essays I’m most excited about—our first-ever animated work, "Papel Picasdo," by Los Angeles-based artist Javier Barboza—readers will witness a sense of romantic disenchantment through a series of hand-drawn illustrations. Each, Barboza explains in his accompanying artist’s statement, were torn by hand and serve to articulate the nightmare that is the loss of a couple's future.

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, but it couldn’t be done without the terrific contributions of our authors and the steadfast diligence of our editorial staff. We’re a small group, and we exist because we care. Because we love and wish to promote the essay's continued emergence and its ongoing evolution. In our five-year tenure, we’ve had the unique privilege of publishing work by many admirable contemporary essayists—among them, Lia Purpura, David Shields, Ryan Van Meter, Roxane Gay, Joe Wenderoth, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Dinty W. Moore, Joe Bonomo, Chris Offutt, Marion Winik and the aforementioned Ander Monson—and we’ve garnered the attention of both The Atlantic and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. We've held readings, conference panels and book fair booths in Iowa City, Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago and Melbourne, Australia, but what I’m most proud of is the ways in which our contributors have responded to our call with unparalleled enthusiasm: reflecting whimsically on the art of raking and cursive writing, the Jart and the Jheri curl, their childhood backyard, country, culture or even continent. It's what makes our work rewording as editors and readers, and what sustains us as practitioners as we seek careers in this inspired genre.

This fall, we’ll debut twelve evocative and heartbreaking essays on pay phones and cooking trends, distorted perceptions and carnivals, cities composed of tents and the call-to-arms nature of the word “Hark!,” and of course, we hope you’ll join us. And, if the subject suits you, submit to our spring issue.

*

Amy Butcher is the editor of Defunct, a journal of flash nonfiction founded by Robin Hemley. Prior to her promotion, she served for four years as inaugural Managing Editor and organized events, panels and readings in Iowa City, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., and Melbourne, Australia. She is a recent recipient of the Olive B. O'Connor Creative Writing Fellowship at Colgate University, a recent graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, and a recent recipient of an International Research Award from the Stanley Foundation. Her own essays and short stories have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Tin House, Salon, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, The Indiana Review, The North American Review, The Colorado Review, American Short Fiction, Hobart, Vela, and Brevity, among others.

Jill Christman on Jo Ann Beard

5 Reasons I Can’t Stop Reading & Teaching
Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter"

1) This is an essay that never gets old.  If you read it seventeen years ago, in 1996 when “The Fourth State of Matter” first appeared in The New Yorker, or later when it was reprinted at the center of Jo Ann Beard’s collection The Boys of My Youth (Little, Brown, & Co, 1998), read it again.  Then proceed to step two and don’t blame me for any spoilers.

2) The beginning: In graduate school I had the privilege of studying narrative structure with the novelist John Keeble who argued that the first page of anything should contain the concerns of the entire work. Tapping the board with a piece of chalk, Keeble explained that a writer working hard at her job would tighten that first page so a reader could touch it anywhere and the meaning would resonate across the fiction like sound across the taut skin of a drum. “Look at the first scene in ‘The Fourth State of Matter,’” I instruct my students. “All the way to the break. Knowing what you know now, how can you see that this opening scene contains the concerns of the whole essay?” From the first word, the essayist has the opportunity to teach us how to read the essay she has placed in our hands: how does Beard make the most of that opportunity?

“The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline, barking. Wake up.” As readers, we are prodded into motion in at least three ways:there’s the difficult rowing through the “complicated dream,” and the call to action—“Wake up”—from the insistent dog, as well as the invitation to wade into metaphor. Here we go.

As first-time readers, we can’t fully know from these three leading sentences that we’ve entered an essayistic world bound by one unifying, central metaphor (plasma, the fourth state of matter) and five meticulously threaded concerns—a dying collie with a Maserati muzzle, an attic of marauding squirrels, a wayward husband, an editorial gig with a best friend in a physics lab, and a horrific mass shooting—but even in those first thirty-three words, we’re touching the ancient dog, difficult dreams from which we might not wake, the idea of a shoreline and the hard to reach space beyond it, and the love between a woman and her dog. Even in these preliminary gestures, we have the sense of all there is to lose as we travel into the essay with our just-waking narrator.

Likewise, moving sentence-by-sentence to the first scene break, we discover that it’s all here somewhere in three opening paragraphs disguised as a simple scene in which the narrator takes her geriatric, weak-bladdered dog out into the yard for a nighttime pee—the betraying husband who used to love the collie (and the narrator); the sense of direction and mapping (echoed later in the scrupulous recreation of the shooting); the restless squirrels and the expanding universe; the Milky Way’s smearing light and the erased chalkboard we’ll encounter later in the physics lab with her friend, Chris; the not yet fully comprehended news that the lives of her space-physicist companions are already ticking down; and the time-posted routine of woman and dog, bonded and bound, in the dying game. It’s all there, and it’s a great lesson in beginnings.

3) The middle: As a writer of nonfiction, I try to heed Nabokov’s charge to make meaning of this crazy world through the identification of patterns and connections. In Speak, Memory Nabokov sidesteps time and chooses to "follow the thematic design, of pattern and order, through [his] life”: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.” Here, Beard weaves five seemingly disparate, but finally inextricable concerns—and we do not trip. We walk with her.

Here is an exercise I do with my students: breaking them into five groups, I assign each group one of the concerns above—dog, squirrels, husband, friend in physics, or shooting—and charge each group with the task of a) tracing their element through the essay (in large and small ways), b) connecting their element to the binding metaphor of plasma, and c) arguing why their thread is the most vital and urgent strand in thinking about what the essay is really about. (Hint: the shooting will not always win. Every group has a chance here.)

What the students discover is that Beard refuses to privilege one species of trauma or loss over another, and in this refusal invites us into a space of deep grief where we consider our own losses and plasmatic stillness; in other words, through the conscious patterning of images, concerns, and closely observed scenes, Beard opens up a place for the reader to have an experience. Obviously, the 1991 University of Iowa physics lab shooting—which older readers will remember—is the biggest event in this essay, and yet, Beard doesn't let it take over. The collie matters. The squirrels matter. The wandering husband and her friendships matter. Love and loss matter.

4) The beginning, middle, and end—in that order. What really interests me in “The Fourth State of Matter” are not the subjects of Beard’s narrative, but the way her mind works: the way she sees and the way she filters what she sees through her interesting brain. Life doesn’t come with plot, nor do we get credit for our lives, and I propose that much of this essay’s success lies in the way Beard controls time and pacing as she transforms life into art.

I get that as real people we cannot reasonably (and sanely) partition our daily lives into clean strips—e.g., today you're helping a terminally ill friend, so you don't have to feed the dog or finish that article or call your mother—and although our narrated selves often require just that kind of thematic division, the remarkable thing to me here is that I feel as if I’ve entered the folds of Beard's brain, working with her as she tries to locate patterns in the chaos, to find a place to rest between marriage and divorce, liquid and solid, love and loss, life and death. Whether she's a grieving woman prone on her couch, stretching out her “dog arm” to nudge the collie out for a pee, or the dispassionate reporter piecing together the grim details of the shooting, Beard’s journey with the animals and the people she loves always, always feels urgent and necessary. In this way, “The Fourth State of Matter” does what Virginia Woolf says a good essay must: “draw its curtain round us. . .”—“a curtain that shuts us in, not out.”

5) The end: "In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we're in a pocket of silence. We're in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the Earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of silence, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.” Chris is gone, the husband is gone, the squirrels are gone, and the collie—her "peer," her "colleague"—will be leaving soon. Jo Ann is hanging motionless in all this, and as a reader, I hold my breath (I really do, every time) and listen.

*

Jill Christman’s memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction in 2001 and was reissued in paperback by the University of Georgia Press in Fall 2011. Recent essays have appeared in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Descant, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review, Literary Mama, River Teeth, and many other journals, magazines, and anthologies. She teaches creative nonfiction in Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program and at Ball State University in Muncie where she lives with her husband, writer Mark Neely, and their two children.

Seneca Review: Three Editors Take The Essay “Beyond Category”

One of the great things about Seneca Review, we feel, is the blurring of the boundaries between and among genres. We tend to order the magazine’s content for this purpose. Starting with our last issue, we decided to stop making a genre distinction between the “poetry” and the “lyric essays.” Eventually, it became too difficult and probably too unnecessary for us to do so.

The work we publish happens mostly in the borderlands between the two to begin with—the interstices or fusions of poetry and essay, of one genre and another. That’s often what excites us most. So we wanted to harness that preference and push it a few steps farther. We don’t like to be stagnant even in our editorial preferences, so we wanted to push ourselves and SR into a new space.

We wanted to start crossing bigger lines of genre and form. Not just between poetry and essays but between writing and visual art, between analog and digital. Not that this is exactly new, but it is surprisingly absent in the majority of literary magazines around. Though, our Lyric Essay Special Issue did feature photographs that we considered essays—still, we felt like that was just a start. We wanted to cross lines of form in a much more concerted way.

We asked ourselves, what if we collected just hybrids and outliers and anachronisms? Work that went beyond the lyric essay, beyond the prose poem, beyond just words or just images even. We wanted to let the essay happen in the porous, often unsaid context its always been in: intermingling with experimental typography, splicings, documentary poetics, visual-textual hybrids, collage, live coding, new media, old media with new applications, audio, video, bio-art, book arts, and the like.

In other words, we wanted to invite poignantly difficult work into SR. That was the impetus of our upcoming special issue Beyond Category. To accommodate the type of dual or multiple media work we’re looking for, the special issue will appear simultaneously in print and online. To have a nexus point or gathering place for writers and artists working in more than a single medium or working in an original way in a single medium felt pivotal to us.

It also seemed vital to have a particularly hybrid editorial approach to our Beyond Category special issue. So we three of us on the masthead—Kathryn Cowles (poetry editor), Joshua Unikel (assistant editor), and David Weiss (editor). All three of us work several forms—from radio essay to installation art, text-and-image to graphic design, new media to pen-and-ink drawing—and we all make work that’s in-between, so it made sense for the three of us to team up for this one.

In fact, gravitating toward work that’s “beyond category” is a rather natural progression for SR as far as we see it. From the 1970s until the late 90s, we focused exclusively on poetry. Since 1997, we’ve championed and published the lyric essay. A large part of each issue now is devoted to the more experimental forms of creative nonfiction. For the past five years, we’ve let the essay reflect back at itself by publishing online interviews on the lyric essay with practitioners whose work is simultaneously appearing in the magazine – writers like Thalia Field, Stephen Kuusisto, Brian Christian, Christine Hume, Aaron Kunin and Dan Beachy-Quick.

So now in the 2010s, we’re continuing what’s actually always been in our editorial mindset: keep it current and keep it quality. This is simply our way of doing so in the Age of Information, at a time when it’s become almost impossible to think about the essay in a vacuum, literary or otherwise.

Our Beyond Category special issue is slated for this January. The deadline for submissions is October 31. To submit, send your hybrids and outliers to our Submittable page.

Feel free to contact us with queries via email at SenecaReview@hws.edu.

—Kathryn Cowles, Joshua Unikel, David Weiss

Kathryn Cowles is a poetry editor at the Seneca Review. Cowles has her PhD from the University of Utah. Her book of poetry Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bear Star Press, 2008) won the Brunsman Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared recently in Drunken Boat, Free Verse, The Offending Adam, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.

Joshua Unikel is the assistant editor of the Seneca Review. Unikel has an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently, he is an MFA candidate in the University at Buffalo’s Visual Studies Program. His art has shown recently in New York and Buffalo. His writing has appeared recently in [PANK], Sonora Review, Fugue, and Booth.

David Weiss is the editor at the Seneca Review. Weiss is the author of a recent book of poems, GNOMON, two previous collections of poems, The Fourth Part of the World and The Pail of Steam, and a novel, The Mensch, which was published by Mid-List Press as a winner in their first novel contest. He has also published numerous essays on poetry.

Tommy Mira y Lopez: On Puzzlement

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For many years I was not an animal person, but recently I adopted a kitten. Once skittish, he has warmed up—as I write, he trots across my keyboard and tries to type this essay for me. I was also not always an essayist, yet now I find myself the nonfiction editor at Sonora Review. In trying to figure out what I’ve gotten myself into, I turn more and more to Philip Lopate. He has a knack for putting the overwhelmed at ease. “The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy,” he writes in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay. “Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue—a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.” Good advice, I would argue, for how we approach both cat and essay.

I keep Lopate in mind as I read and write essays. I have my good and bad habits when it comes to these. A good habit I have is to look for a sense of wonder in an essay, to appreciate the moment it becomes puzzled. This is not the same as an essay’s puzzle exactly. It is not a code or structure one must either put together or break apart (though it can be that), but something slightly more ineffable: a puzzlement perhaps, if that weren’t such a vague term. I think of it as the moment an essay realizes it’s walking a strange and complicated terrain and asks itself, not with panic, but with wonder, with puzzlement, “How the hell did I get here and how do I get back out?”

A bad habit I more frequently have is to think of essays as stories. This is a common slip, I believe. Too often at Sonora Review I find myself reading a story calling itself an essay, a string of memories masquerading as memoir. We have a basic urge to tell stories, but this can consume our better sense: we comb our minds for the relatable and loudspeaker our individual experience so that it speaks for the general, but this does not necessarily mean we have hit on a collective truth (look no further than here for proof: see how I have made the I a We). Yes, we tell stories in order to live, but we also tell them in order to announce that we live. Or, rather, to announce that we suffer since life is often synonymous with suffering. Yet a litany of sufferings can devolve into a list of complaints. It is then I find myself plodding up or down that narrative hill, reading or writing a one-sided story of unfortunate events, each equally distasteful, each leading to the same predictable pit.

As a reader of submissions, I find I am inevitably self-involved. I ask that the writer sets up the relationship Lopate discusses, the “friendship based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.” I desire this not so that the writer/friend can recite her problems, but so that I can see her suffering or her life as my own. Self-serving, indeed. The writer relates something not for me to see it as she would, but the opposite—so that she sees it as I would see it, so that she is able to speak for me, to beat me to the punch and puzzle out the very thing that was on my mind. Given this intimacy and anticipation between reader and writer, I am able to appreciate the puzzlement and wonder within the writer’s mind, what F. Scott Fitzgerald (via Lopate) calls “the test of a first-rate intelligence”: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Here are two essays in Sonora Review’s catalog that come to mind as embodying a sense of wonder and puzzlement. The first is Andrew Johnson’s “Two Crows”, which appears in the most recent issue, no. 63. In this essay, Johnson details (what else) two crows he encounters, except that neither is really a crow: the first is a figment of his young son’s imagination and the second actually just a crow’s head lying on the grass, an object Johnson nearly kicks on his walk across campus. A bizarre, if not potentially gimmicky juxtaposition, but one that Johnson pulls off. Here is the moment where I am sold, where I fall on board with his thinking:

“The next morning the first crow is back at breakfast, up on the shelf. My wife’s back is to the shelf, so she doesn’t see it. My son has moved on, thinking of other things. But I can still see it there, hovering over us, waiting for what, thinking of what? Watching this place where we eat breakfast and foolishly plan our days before they fully begin, the place where we try to get new starts. The place where in the evenings we sit again, tired, weary from the day’s needs, disappointed in our failed attempts. The crow might sense something of this.”

Now it is Johnson and not his son who sees the imaginary crow. Yet this transfer goes unstated. Rather, Johnson allows it to merely exist, a bit foggy and puzzled but pointing towards a poignancy and an undercurrent of suffering. Yes, this essay could develop that unspoken melancholy and disappointment more, but I find Johnson’s caginess and his essaying around the deeper subject renders me more sympathetic. I applaud the vagueness and cheekiness of the last line: the crow senses something of this, but only because Johnson has invented him to do so.

The second essay is Jean Rukkila’s “Walking Through the Long Relationship”. This is an oldie (issue 12, 1987, the DFW years), but a goodie. The essay begins conventionally enough. A run through the woods leads to the essay’s premise: how a trail that moves unexpectedly can be like an essay, how getting lost along a trail or essay can actually cause us to learn more about ourselves. But then the essay diverges, not spatially as one would expect given the analogy to the trail, but temporally. Here is the opening sentence of Rukkila’s next section:

“I’m moving from living alone to living with someone again.”

Her wording is calm and measured and slightly impersonal, but the jump in time, the way she has changed the frame with which we view this essay, is dramatic. She is not so much creating a puzzle as acknowledging that one exists.

This penchant for quiet drama continues in her other section openings:

“It doesn’t look like I’ll marry. What a shame. I’d like to think I have a character for it.”

“Taking my life out of cardboard boxes again has me standing back, looking at all the wallet photographs that have ever been inside my head.”

“I was walking alone in the Lake District in England one winter.”

I like the small word choices Rukkila makes here that draw out the smallness of her solitude: “what a shame,” “a character for it”, “cardboard boxes again,” “walking alone…one winter”. The action is minimal, yet the writer’s resigned melancholy links each section much in the same way that Johnson links his two crows.

It is comforting to find these two essays in dialogue with each other, even though they are spaced a quarter of a century apart. It is comforting as well to know that name of a journal binds them together. To know that over time a journal does not necessarily need to measure itself through narrative arc, but that it can create a wider template or aggregate of information, a puzzlement perhaps, what Rukkila might call “a photograph about photography, a faded image of a collection of individual images.”

---

*

--> The essayist who once wrote an essay about getting, what else, a cat.

 

*

Thomas Mira y Lopez is a second-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. There, he is an editor at Sonora Review and Fairy Tale Review and teaches as well. Read his work online at Green Briar Review and [PANK].

Peter Jay Shippy: ANGLE ON

ANGLE ON

The birds. We see the statue in the middle of the park, but we have no idea where we are until we see the Mays Dept. Store sign.  The birds circle in flocks, never lighting on the trees.

EXT. THE FACTORY (ENTRANCE) – DAY

Jean presses a buzzer. He's admitted. He carries his bike on his shoulder.  

INT. THE FACTORY – DAY

Jean enters a broad, high-ceilinged studio. It's neat. Paintings lie on the floor.

Andy's back is turned to him. As Jean gets closer, he sees that Andy's assistant
FRANK is peeing on canvas covered with copper pigment. We hear the SOUND of the piss.  Frank holds a bottle of beer in his hand.

ANDY WARHOL
A little more to the right, Frank. OK...  Good. Now up... You got a little more?  Jean notices a bunch of Andy's wigs on a desk.

BASQUIAT
What's with the wigs?

ANDY WARHOL
I'm going to send them to my friends for Christmas presents.

BASQUIAT
You think those are good presents? Who wants an old wig?

Jean makes a grimace. He walks up to the painting Frank's peeing on.

BASQUIAT
Piss painting?

ANDY WARHOL
I wanted to make a few more of these.  Frank's been drinking this Mexican beer. It makes a good green.

BASQUIAT
How come you're not peeing on them yourself?

ANDY WARHOL
I don't like beer.

Looking down at the painting – 

BASQUIAT
If you ever want me to shit on 'em, just ask. You could finger paint.

—from Julian Schnabel’s original script, Basquiat (1997)

* * *

Basquiat’s last line didn’t make the final cut in the film about Basquiat.

In the film, Warhol responds to Basquiat’s “Piss Painting” line with, “Not piss painting, Jean. Oxidation art.”

My daughters’ favorite piece in Boston’s MFA is Warhol’s Oxidation Painting (1978):
 

 

Urine on metallic pigment in acrylic pigment on canvas.

My daughters know how it was created. Is that why it’s their favorite? They’re 5, passionate and honest even when they’re not quite truthful.

Jean makes a grimace. He walks up to the painting Frank's peeing on. 

Flag a tag as offensive. (Museum of Fine Arts website)

SAMO©

That famous tag began as a high school stoner’s joke, a collaboration between Basquiat and Al Diaz, same oh, same old, same old shit. Shit=dope.

Basquiat churned / out butter, signing each / SAMO©. Sameold. Sambo’s / soup. (Kevin Young, “Campbell’s Black Bean Soup” from To Repel Ghosts)

Frank's been drinking this Mexican beer.  It makes a good green.
The birds circle in flocks, never lighting on the trees.   

In the MFA, very near the Warhol, is my daughters’ 2nd favorite piece, “Vache (Cow),” a wire sculpture by Alexander Calder.

 

Note the coiled cow pie in the lower left. Ssssssss.

My daughters immediately caught the link between Calder and Warhol—ah, two titans of 20th century American art! Nah, pee and poop, they sang. The guard began to laugh, too. We wondered if a curator with a delightfully scatological sense of humor arranged the neighborhood

In the next room was a Pollock. In the hallway was a men’s bathroom with a replica of R. Mutt’s scandalous 1917 sculpture, “Fountain.”

Action painting, action pissing, Sacrebleu. Sacred blue. Moo.

interestingly, a famous episode in Pollock's life saw him urinate in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace at one of her parties, frustrated by the cropping of his mural to fit her wall. Perhaps Warhol was referring specifically to this irreverent moment by Pollock in these works. (Bruce Hainley, "Urine Sample")

Bark your territory. Spread that seed.

In 1961 Piero Manzoni created 90 sculptures, tin cans, filled—supposedly—with the artist’s feces.

 

You could finger paint.

…scraping / the uncanny, making / a tin thing sing. (Young, “Campbell’s Black Bean Soup”)

In 1962, Campbell’s and Warhol offered 32 varieties of soup.

Manzoni’s father, who owned a canning factory, apparently told his son that his art was shit.

Bark your territory. Spread that seed.

Merda d’artista was sold by weight at that day’s gold market price.

In 2008 a can sold for £97,250.

It makes a good green.

* * *

It's disgusting, degenerate Catholic bashing at its worst, and the hard working taxpayers of our city have no obligation to fund religious blasphemy like this. (Mayor Giuliani, on The Blessed Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili)

He painted a black Madonna with a masklike face…. He painted a delicate lavender robe across her possibly pregnant stomach, and he exposed her breasts….  He then used elephant dung to mark her bare breast and to complete the design, as if rain were falling… Where is the offense? It is in the dung. For us the word is shit, for us the excrement is unholy, defiling, disgusting. But that seems unlikely to be this artist’s meaning. He does not seem to be desecrating the Madonna—at least, this is not desecration if one views the dung as part of nature, as a sign of life moving across the floor of the world. If the dung of the great and powerful elephant is simply read as a sign of animal life, of biology in nature, as part of the color of earth-not as our Western eyes see it, but as man might once have: the smell of a human body on the heath, bowels and digestion, heart and blood, all part of the process of life itself-then perhaps this dung is not slung against the Catholic Church and its worship of the Holy Virgin, but is
used as a way to bring the African connection to animals, to nature, into the
circle of the holy and the sacrosanct. (Anne Roiphe, The New York Observer)

* * *

Late in the film about Basquiat, Basquiat visits the palatial home of Albert Milo.
The palatial home was played by the real home of Julian Schnabel. Gary Oldman played Milo, an artist. Stella Schnabel played Milo’s daughter Stella. Jeffrey Wright played Basquiat. Basquiat’s art was played by Schnabel’s exact copies of Basquiat’s art. David Bowie played Warhol.

When I first saw Bowie on the set, it was like Andy had been resurrected. (Bob Colacello)

After the film was released, Wright repudiated his role: “I think my performance was appropriated, literally, and the way I was edited was appropriated in the same way his [Basquiat's] story has been appropriated and that he was appropriated when he was alive. [...] Julian made him out to be too docile and too much of a victim and too passive and not as dangerous as he really was. It's about containing Basquiat. It's about aggrandizing himself through Basquiat's memory” (Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing in the Art World).

* * *

My paintings take up room, they make a stand. People will always react to that. Some people get inspired, others get offended. But, that’s good. I like that. (Julian Schnabel)

SAMO© as an alternative 2 playing art with the 'radical chic' sect on Daddy's $ funds. (Jean-Michel Basquiat)

* * *

Stella asks her father to fix the TV.

BASQUIAT
Hi.

STELLA
I've seen you before. I like your paintings a lot. Your hair was different. 

BASQUIAT
You like your dad's paintings?

STELLA
Some of them.

BASQUIAT
Stand still.

He draws her.

BASQUIAT (CONT'D)
See you later.

STELLA
Thanks.

He walks to the door, leaving the drawing on the floor.  Albert returns.

ALBERT MILO
Where's Jean?

STELLA
He just left.

Albert opens the door to the stairwell looking for Jean. 

He hears the sound of URINATING. 

He leans over the stairwell.

He sees Jean Michel, taking a piss on the landing.

He shuts the door quietly.

* * *

He shuts the door quietly.

Jean enters a broad, high-ceilinged studio. It's neat. Paintings lie on the floor.  

*

Peter Jay Shippy’s 4th book is A spell of songs (Saturnalia, 10/13). His work will appear in The Best American Poetry 2013. He teaches at Emerson College.