Dec 2, Brenda Miller on Jill Christman

Being December 2, we present the excellent essayist Brenda Miller, writing about a short-short essay by Jill Christman.

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I’ve always been enamored of the short-short essay form. In a short-short (or “flash”) essay, there’s little room for abstract thought or cliché or long-winded setups—no runway on which to build up one’s courage—and so experience is shaped to give precedence to image, scene, detail, subtle metaphor, not necessarily to “feelings” or bare emotion. In one such essay, “The Sloth,” by Jill Christman (originally published in Brevity magazine), we see that the impetus for writing may have its roots in deep emotion, but the writing goes beyond that, finds the mettle to explore this emotion through keen observation, precise language, and organic metaphor. It begins:

There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the water, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.

Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and looking up, expecting something small, I saw my first three-toed sloth.

Notice how Christman’s description of grief is not so much an emotional feeling as a physical one: “no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.” She gives us the context for this situation quickly—a fiancée killed—but her most effective move is that she does not start with that line. No, we start with a fact external to her own experience, a physical fact that will become the focal point for Christman’s overarching metaphor. With this ostensibly simple move, Christman shows us that she has the perspective to translate experience into artifact, and she is not screwing up her courage so much as becoming keenly interested in the connections between her own inner state of mind and the images the outer world provides her. Noticing the sloth, the narrator takes herself out of introspection and so, in the end, this story becomes not a polemic about her own personal grief, but about new insights into the nature of grief, an articulation that does not necessarily arise from one’s own experience, but from a literary re-imagining of that experience:

I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed green with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch. Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden walls, I watched the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And then still reaching.

What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the snail, the tortoise—they move faster. Much. This slow seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.

These paragraphs end the short essay. From a statement of fact about an equilibrium of temperature, we come full circle, but this fact is now imbued with much more meaning. Because the essay is so short, every image must be precise, every word must further the narrator’s discovery in a focused and measured way. The essay must move like the sloth—slowly, deliberately—opening up space for this grief to manifest in the reader’s own heart. Christman didn’t need courage; she needed that sloth. She needed that sloth to carry the weight of her grief for her, and eventually for us.

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Brenda Miller is the author of Listening Against the Stone (Skinner House Books, 2011), Blessing of the Animals (EWU Press, 2009), Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002), and co-author of Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes and has been published in numerous journals. She is a Professor of English at Western Washington University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review. Her latest book The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, co-authored with poet Holly J. Hughes, was released in 2012 from Skinner House Books.

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&: this post is an excerpt from Miller's "A Case Against Courage," originally published in The Writer's Chronicle, Oct/Nov 2011.

Dec 1, Ander Monson on Cybele Knowles & Yngwie Malmsteen

Ander Monson begins our 2012 Advent Calendar below!

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Having spent the morning listening to Yngwie Malmsteen's first album, Rising Force (try "Now Your Ships Are Burned" or "As Above, So Below") on vinyl, I'm not completely sure why. Here it is in its many glories:

Well, it's advent, or it's almost advent (technically it begins tomorrow), and I assembled our artificial Christmas tree, bought from Target a decade ago, and now stored neatly in a giant plastic container, disassembled in color-coded piles of faux spruce. There's something pleasurable about the system and assembly, even as I seem to have messed up my wrists a bit with the repetitive turning and untwisting motion as I brought the fake wireframe limbs to a semblance of a tree. I found Rising Force on vinyl yesterday at the St. Vincent de Paul. My brother was apeshit for Yngwie Malmsteen when he was young. He was into all these guitar gods, and Malmsteen had the benefit of being Swedish, so maybe there's some ethnic favoritism there, since we Monsons are predisposed to our northern forebears. Too, this Malmsteen album is chockablock with classical motifs, and reminds me of my frozen childhood, and so these combined somehow seem Christmasy to me.

I'm not particularly into Christmas, and not religious, but I like advent. Well, I like form in general, and what is advent if not a form applied to count the days until Christmas. Days themselves are nothing if not a form. We wake, sleep, find sun, do things, repeat. And then there's the advent calendar that I find dear, a way to organize a series of bits of writing. It's been a while since we've been here on Essay Daily, it seems like, and we're going to be offering you an advent calendar of essayists writing about other essayists, one a day, until Christmas. Then there will be more to come in the new year.

If you're into advent calendars, too, check out DIAGRAM's advent calendar this year, too. Here's a link to the first one (which links to the other days as we progress).

Anyhow. We have lots of interesting writers who are going to be chiming in here this month and after, but since I only got around to this idea a couple days ago, no one signed up for the first couple days of advent. So I'll be here a ramblin' to fire up the engines.

Today I'd like to talk a bit about an essay by Cybele Knowles in the new issue of The Destroyer, hopefully while you're listening to Yngwie Malmsteen via Youtube. I heard her read it a couple years ago at Antigone Books in Tucson. I hadn't read her essays at all, though I like her stories (here's one I've published). It's hard to resist from the title ("I Think It's Great that You Want to Give Your Wife Orgasms"), and it's a personal immersion in her time working at a Tucson (I think I recognize the place, though it's unnamed) sex shop. The subject matter's weird enough to start us off, but it's not what really appeals to me about the essay, which is the way it quick-shifts between tones from the amusingly conversational ("I’m sorry, I can’t describe it better than that; it’s a small, rubbery vibrating pyramid, and you sit on it") to a lyric riff like "I sincerely want to help Snow White: she’s so pretty, and so sad about so many things—sad about her friends the dwarves and the lack of social acceptance they face due to their congenital stunting; sad about the speech-therapy kids she works with, and the discrimination they face due to their speech impediments; sad about the boyfriend who will never be her prince unless he shapes up in bed—so I think hard." The essay manages to be both comic and sad, always a killer mix, and becomes about connections, failed, missed, and otherwise.

The characters we meet (Snow White as Speech Pathology Student, a "midnight amphetamine queen making a mess of the racks we just finished straightening") offer a lot of the pleasure here, as you'd imagine, and, what's more, they're treated tenderly, and they win you over (well, they win our Cybele writer/persona/speaker over, proxy in any essay for us). It takes what's offered and obvious, the easy subjects for cultural critique: the "male masturbation aids...GLOW UR3 PUSSY, FUTUROTIC PUSSY N ASS, JJ’S INTIMATE PASSAGES, JESSE’S STROKER TRIO" but doesn't settle for laughs. Good essays never settle for laughs. Another essayist might have made this world more about fakeness and realness, the fiction of the I in essay, the ways in which we construct the self/avatar for readers, but I'm real glad she didn't. Instead it stays on the human, sad interactions with customers, a brief excursion into her own history, and, maybe more interestingly, this bit of interiority:

People say to me, “I could never talk to strangers about their sex lives.” I, on the other hand, sought out the proficiency. Why? I don’t know. What a crazy thing to want to do. I think maybe I wanted to connect with others about sex, but without any actual sex, and from an unfair position of power. However it happened, now that I talk to strangers about their sex lives, I think of it as my arcane power: the mastery of one small challenge in the huge, fractal, unbeatable test of life. The pursuit of arcane power rarely looks reasonable from the outside. Some people wrestle alligators. Some people die trying to climb Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world—which makes for an apt metaphor, because arcane power is a kind of summiting.

I don't want to crush the essay into its component parts, since its goodness is its seamless assembly. You know it's made, an artificial thing—how can it not be?—but the important thing is that it feels real. You can put some lights on it and let it stand in for Christmas, or childhood, or love, or whatever else. Almost every homemade Malmsteen Youtube video is adorned with comments like "who the hell can dislike this" or "anyone woh doesn't like malmsteen can go f**k themselves!" I concur.

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Ander Monson curates Essay Daily and is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. Find him here if you're of the mind.

An Essay Daily Advent Calendar

is just about to start in this very space, friends.

We've been on down time for a while but are going to be presenting posts, each day this December until Christmas (it's an advent calendar of sorts), of essayists talking about an essay that they're most excited about at present.

Authors to be presented include Amy Benson, Barrie Jean Borich, Simmons Buntin, Steven Church, Chris Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Noam Dorr, Hannah Ensor, T. Fleischmann, Joshua Foster, Melissa Gutierrez, BJ Hollars, Julie Lauterbach-Colby, Allie Leach, David LeGault, Sean Lovelace, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, Dinty W. Moore, Lisa O'Neill, Elena Passarello, Lia Purpura, Craig Reinbold, Morgan Sherburne, Jill Talbot, Nicole Walker, and Kirk Wisland. More to come—but in the meantime we'll debut the first essay on 12/1.

We hope to also present excerpts or the entireties of the essays in question under the doctrine of some sort of rockin' fair use.

No one probably has ever called fair use rockin'. It's okay. Stay with us—

& finally, Judith Schalansky's ESSAY PRIZE winner interview etc.

is up at the Essay Prize website. Happily, we might add. And at last. And maybe interesting to consider in terms of the puffed-up Internetted brouhaha sparked by John D'Agata's The Lifespan of a Fact (Craig's lovely post is just below this one on Essay Daily, and if you can still get it up to care about the conversation, here are three links on the LA Review of Books: one, an introduction to the convo and a great little anthology that just came out, Essayists on the Essay, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French; two, a post by one of the main progenitors of the genre and catch-all term "creative nonfiction," Lee Gutkind; and three, an irritable response to all of this by myself).

From the interview, Schalansky notes that "I didn’t, in fact, invent anything at all. And the parts set in italics are actual quotes. I could write a footnote for every detail. But I don’t know whether or not they’d be true; this doesn’t interest me. The island stories are closely based on the personal reports of certain authors, whom I made into protagonists. Partly to preserve their authorship, and partly to make their experiences palpable."

Fact-checker to the OR, stat!

Or not.

John D'Agata Breaks Rules, Windows

Why aren’t we spending more time talking about how suave John D’Agata looks in his author photos, how buff, or what nice hair he has, or how he could totally be cast as Fox Mulder’s foxy kid brother? We could be speculating about his dresser full of simple, well-fitted t-shirts, or why he’s not sporting an earring, yet, but we’re not. We’re not talking about any of these things, because apparently these are not the facts that interest us (at least not, generally, in public). No, here, we are interested in John D’Agata, writer, provocateur.

We are interested in Facts, facts, FACTS, “facts”: The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and (fact-checked by) Jim Fingal.

I’m going to assume that most people (in the world) are familiar with the ensuing controversy, and not spend a lot of time laying down the facts, such as they are. So if you haven’t already, you should probably at least check out the excerpt published in February’s Harper’s, this (pretty scathing) review from Laura Miller, a senior writer at Salon.com, this string of posts on Brevity’s blog, and if you are so inclined, I would even recommend the actual book itself. Boiled down, our essential question here is: What is sacrosanct in Nonfiction, if not the genre’s adherence to Fact? Sub-question: Is John D’Agata ruining Nonfiction as we know it, i.e. should we hate John D’Agata for fudging facts?

Answer: I don’t know. I’m still on the fence myself, am waiting to be pushed or pulled one way or the other. However, several of my Intro to Creative Nonfiction students have weighed in, and as their opinions are not yet clouded by visions of D’Agata’s (literary) musculature, they’ve managed to raise some good points that I’d like to put forth:

Discussing the Salon.com review, Eric, a junior in Interdisciplinary Studies, suggested, “The whole thing is really a faked conversation aimed at proving a point about what the lyric essay is, its purpose, and usefulness. As readers, we should probably find this more entertaining than controversial. Laura Miller is taking things way too seriously.”

Admittedly, Miller advances some sound arguments against what D’Agata has done, and she aptly describes the artistic and moral merits of proper fact-checking. But she also harps, again and again, on the (yes, inane) grandstanding being done by both D’Agata and fact-checker Fingal, and in doing so, she kind of misses the point: It’s a farce.

To be fair, Harper’s got us off on the wrong foot. Miller herself recognizes that “several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion” and that the excerpt the magazine published “is not a fair representation of the book.” But still, it snared us all. We got so caught up in Why is Fingal so anal? and Can D’Agata possibly be such an ass? that we’ve forgotten to dig deeper, to try to discover what is really going on here. Eric is right: The Lifespan of a Fact is a two-fold defense of the lyric essay, on the surface a defense of altering facts for the sake of poetry (which you can buy or not; this is being hotly debated elsewhere), but also, underneath, it is an implicit defense of the economy of the lyric essay, and the assertion that “similitude often seems more revealing than verisimilitude.”

The boneheaded back and forth between the two is a ruse, is subterfuge, is masking the fact that the book is more than the mere document it posits itself to be. Rather it is, itself, an essay. Of course. And recognizing this, perhaps we should focus less on what the piece says, and more on how it performs.

Mid-way through the first section of the book we see that D’Agata, in paragraph 9 of the original Levi Presley article, refers to a man named Michael Gilmartin as “the public relations manager at the Stratosphere Hotel.” And Fingal, playing his role with verve, jumps on this: “Gilmartin’s official title at the Stratosphere is the ‘vice president of public relations,’ according to a press release I found, though his title could have changed since 2002. Also, this part of the essay seems to be told from the point of view of the present looking back, so maybe we should refer to him as the ‘public relations manager at the time’?” (emphasis mine). As if batting off a t-ball stand, D’Agata replies, “No, that’s ridiculously clunky. Leave it alone. And please don’t offer to do any more writing for me, thank you.”

No, that’s ridiculously clunky. That is clunky, I guess. Maybe ridiculously clunky. Maybe he/we should just tighten it up? Simplify. For clarity. Clarify. For simplicity. For better, easier ingestion and understanding. I get this, I think.

As writers of NF parsing the TOTAL NOISE of the world, we are inundated by information. And this book is a clever, clever way of giving us all of the information that research for this article dredged up—

The State of Nevada reports that there were a total of 2,762 deaths that year from cancer…887 upper respiratory cancer deaths, and 275 lower intestinal tract cancer deaths...and it should be noted that those two regions alone can include lung cancer, tracheal cancer, colon cancer, bronchial cancer, rectal cancer, and anal cancer, and that isn’t taking into account the distinct diagnoses of these cancers that are also possible…the National Cancer Institute divides “brain cancer” alone into at least nine different categories, a few of which are themselves further divided into sub-categories, like: Brain Tumor, Adult; Brain Tumor, Brain Stem Glioma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Cerebellar Astrocytoma/Malignant Glioma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Ependymoma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Medulloblastoma, Childhood; Brain Tumor, Supratentorial Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumors, Childhood… … … … …

—only to emphasize just how ridiculous it would be to try to squeeze it all into an article, an essay, whatever. Honestly, I don’t think The Lifespan of a Fact is actually meant to be read. As a book, it is ridiculous. It is a farce. But it allows D’Agata to make this point: “I really don’t think that readers would be upset if they found out that I lumped Supratentorial Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumors and Childhood Medulloblatoma together under the category of ‘a few types of cancer’”—a good point, probably. And to solicit: “Please give me a break with this shit.”

This book is an argument by reductio ad absurdum, a defense of the eloquence and thrift of D’Agata’s creation, the lyric essay. And can’t we all agree that D’Agata’s way is much neater, tidier, and maybe, ultimately, more effective at conveying the meaning inherent in the situation?

The Lifespan of a Fact embodies this argument. It is itself a comment on how we parse information, how we might begin to distill and disseminate information that matters in an honest, but also an interesting and relatable, way. In a way that might help our readers get it.

Of course, really, maybe all of this is just an argument for the attack side: If there isn’t room for everything in an essay, maybe we should simply scale back and pick the facts we do include more judiciously. Maybe John D’Agata is evil. He wanted to fit a square peg into a round hole so he shaved off the peg’s unwieldy angles. And, as suggested by another of my students, a junior studying Neurology & Cognitive Science, “If you have to change 34 to 31 for the flow of a sentence, maybe it wasn’t the best sentence to begin with.” Which is to say, I think, that lacking a perfect match, rather than round the peg, maybe D’Agata should have put more into squaring the hole. Which is to say, rather than fudge the facts to fit the project, maybe he should have adapted the project to fit the facts. After all, isn’t that the trick (and the beauty) of nonfiction: finding a way to make something wonderful with what we’re given?

I don’t know. It all seems, somehow, very complicated.

Whatever the case, I am glad someone is out there in the world throwing rocks at our windows, raising these questions with bravado and forcing us to seek answers, if not for the genre, at least for ourselves.

Re-building a brain

 

or for a high-res pdf, click [here]

Airplane Reading

After my neighbors put away their pair of insane inflatable Christmas displays—or after one of them did; the other persists and surely will until the New Year, after which point sanctions might be in order, I've been enjoying two books of essays, reading the first slowly, as I do, being Lia Purpura's Rough Likeness, which just came out from Sarabande Books. Her prose is a slow prose, a way of seeing, that knotty, highly amusing, that takes a good perambulation to digest. I'll surely write something here about it once I've finished it.

The other is a quicker, less gnarly (in a good way) read, a small book, sized for the hand and the seat back pocket, really a pair of essays, each about half the book. Checking In/Checking Out is a two-headed beast, written by Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich, ordered alphabetically (I don't know whether Checking In should happen before Checking Out, and the book is designed so that it works either way, with two covers, two ISBN codes cleverly designed into the covers so that I didn't even notice them. Even the spine could read either way. An object like a codex is hard to baffle like this, but they've done it nicely here:

Both essays are about air travel and the workings of airplanes/airports, in some ways like Alain de Botton's A Week in the Airport, at least in subject and in the meditative mode they each periodically assume. Each takes a different tack at the subject: Yakich's is the more narrative and personal, centering primarily around the passenger experience, his own fear of flying, but meandering, as essays do, to a number of other subjects including his marriage, attempts at meditation and tooling around Belgium in search of love, air crashes and air statistics, and the film Fearless. I started with Yakich since I know him better. He's the author of a recent novel and a couple kickass books of poetry and a highly amusing website which is as of this linking kind of impenetrable, not to say unentertaining.

Schaberg's is the insider view, having worked for Skywest as a "cross-utilized agent," a catch-all title for most things that need doing in airports, cleaning, baggage handling, checking people in, and so on. Schaberg's essay is setup as a collection of small anecdotes than anything else, subtitled "Seatback Pockets," "Meal Kits," "Tetris," and so on, so perhaps it's better thought of as a collection of little essays with some linkages rather than one essay. He's also the author of The Textual Life of Airports, a book of cultural criticism/literary analysis of airports as texts and the ways in which airports have registered in literature, which should give you a sense of the vision he brings to the essay. There's some memoir content in his essay/s too, though much of the real pop of it is in the descriptions of working behind the counter and in the nonpublic areas of airports, a subject fascinating to this reader at least, given the way that air travel has become mythologized in my mind in the last decade.

Much of Schaberg's essay is guided by his experience working for Skywest, and that experience is one of an initial thrill that gives way to exhaustion with repetition, all the spectacle of crawling underneath a just-landed jet squeezed out by rote. The more interesting stories become the human ones such as his odd collection of coworkers: Vicki, who slowly warms to him and starts bringing him Mountain Dew Code Reds which the two of them guzzle in secrecy, even though she is later fired for what appears to be no fault of her own; and hulking Montana cowboy Tom, who says "There are only two times when I wear a hat like that [backwards]: when I'm riding my bike, or when I'm sucking somebody off." Nice.

The essays pair in many ways, some obvious, given the subject matter, and some not (Jeff Bridges makes an appearance toward the end of both, for instance, and Yakich shows up in the end of Schaberg's essay). This is some of Yakich's best writing that I've read (though I like much of his work), and though I haven't read Schaberg's Textual Life this suggests its promise. Since it's selling for $100 at Amazon, it's meant for academic libraries rather than end-users, but don't let that dissuade you from checking out Checking In/Checking Out.

I've always been interested in airports more as liminal spaces, barely spaces at all (my first chapbook, Safety Features, was set all in airports or on airplanes), and I love to write in them. They're transitional, public but anonymous, at least for the passengers, though they do have a dearth of outlets (as, among others, Patrick Smith, who writes a column for Slate called Ask the Pilot, has noted on multiple occasions). These transitional, liminal spaces are ideal for the kind of essay thinking that de Botton does, and that Schaberg and Yakich do in this book. I'd love to have seen more of their brains on display here, see them each sprawl out a bit more (Yakich sprawls more successfully than Schaberg to my mind, though his domain is more relentlessly personal). Perhaps to suit that direction they've started a website (journal? I guess) called Airplane Reading which I'd encourage you to check out and send work to: it too is a home for some essaying (or perhaps memoiring or storying). Try flipping back and forth between each of their halves of the book and the website, and then insert some Lia Purpura for an ideal cross-training regimen. And take down your holiday decorations before you're an embarrassment to your neighbors, please. Okay, I'll give you until New Year's Day, or the 2nd if you're hungover on the 1st. I can hear the tinkling of the music still emanating from your yard.