John Proctor – Numéro Cinq

The Answer I Found in a Fortune Cookie: Toward a Digital Conception of Nonfiction — John Proctor

Nov 302011

The Answer I Found in a Fortune Cookie:

Toward a Digital Conception of Nonfiction

By John Proctor

I don’t know whether this is an ancient Chinese proverb or a mass-manufactured brainchild of an underpaid copywriter somewhere in Chicago. I do know that it was inside my fortune cookie after I had lunch at Hunan Delight about a year ago, and it changed the way I look at nonfiction. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to gather meaning from mass-produced slips of paper, but isn’t that what books are made of? I come from a family of electricians and mechanics, and though I can barely keep the oil changed in my car and frequently need my wife’s help to operate my MacBook, I know this much: Digital circuits work in bits of information, each bit working into the systematic logic of the circuit. If any bit doesn’t logically fit, the circuit will malfunction. Each bit, though, works in a continuous strand, but has its own infinitely variable sequential order. I teach a class on convergent media, and one of the things we talk about is how digital online media have changed the way we read, and think. One of the ways we talk about this is by making a distinction between “analog reading,” in which a person reads something from beginning to end without stopping, and “digital reading,” in which a reader stops to analyze a piece of writing into interlocked units. The first reading of anything is usually mostly analog; subsequent readings, if they happen, are usually digital.

Two years ago, I started writing creative nonfiction in earnest. My first and most looming problem was that I didn’t really know what creative nonfiction was. I’d spent most of my life writing journals, poetry, criticism, fiction, and some freelance journalism, in that basic order. When I applied to MFA programs, most were in fiction. I’d seen the term “creative nonfiction” in passing, and had mostly thought it an unjust term – if it’s creative, can it be truly called nonfiction? And if it’s nonfiction, where’s the room for creativity on the writer’s part? Nonetheless, I was finding myself drawn more and more to nonfiction – about my own life, but also the world I saw around me. In the movie Sideways, a man tells the main character, a novel writer, “I like nonfiction. There is so much to know about this world. I think you read something somebody just invented, waste of time.” I found myself agreeing with the nonfiction reader. But I still felt a bit justified in distrusting a genre that is younger than I am – Lee Gutkind, the “Godfather of CNF,” says he’s been using the term “creative nonfiction” loosely since the 1970s, and the National Endowment for the Arts made the term official in 1983 in order to justify handing out fellowships for it.

That’s where the fortune cookie comes in. If the nonfiction writer’s subject is the world, and his or her place in it, the first responsibility of the writer is to reduce the world into workable units. Much like a reader must read something numerous times to piece out the analog parts and then find the digital circuit at work, the nonfiction writer must find the story-units in the world and then fit them into a working digital circuit of the writing. In telling the myriad stories the world and the self contain, one of the writer’s first steps is shaping and condensing systematic and narrative units. For our purposes here I’ll coin the term “digital nonfiction” for this process – if an essay or a memoir or a news story (and, universally, the world) can be thought of as a digital circuit, and if all the millions and millions of stories are the analog parts, then the creativity of the nonfiction writer is primarily on how the writer sorts – or lists – those analog stories.

The Day After the Memoir: An Interview with Steven Church — John Proctor

Jul 292011

Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me, Theoretical Killings, and most recently The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst. His essays have been published widely and his piece, “Auscultation” was selected for the forthcoming 2011 Best American Essays.

His latest work of memoir/criticism/personal essay (we’ll get to the issue of genre in the interview), The Day After The Day After, delves deeply into Kansas culture, Cold War paranoia, and Church’s own psyche, primarily using the mostly-forgotten Eighties scare-flick The Day After, which was filmed in our shared hometown, Lawrence, Kansas.

We went to the same high school in Kansas – I was a sophomore when Church was a senior – but didn’t know each other. I later met Church through his writing when Patrick Madden introduced me to his work. I’d written my own piece that mentioned my own memories of The Day After, and Madden must have wondered what kind of hold this film had on an entire generation of Kansans.

The movie’s effects on the youth of Lawrence at the time were intense and twofold. First, anyone who remembers seeing the film will remember the sheer dread of watching the fictional town of Lawrence blown to smithereens and permanently irradiated in the movie. But second, the reality of the movie’s filming left a permanent impression on an entire generation of Lawrencians, as the entire town was involved. Children were dressed up as radiation victims, the downtown was temporarily “demolished,” and a college town that considers itself a shining light of progressive values in the nation’s most conservative state was asked by the film crew to act as downhome and traditional as possible to fit the fiction of the movie’s narrative.

The Day After The Day After is a meditation on this confluence of fiction and nonfiction, giving fictional characters from the film an almost mythical significance in his own understanding of the world. I began my interview with Church with this thin line between fiction and nonfiction in mind.

– John Proctor

The Day After the Memoir: An Interview with Steven Church

By John Proctor

JP – One paragraph from The Day After The Day After in particular gave me a deeper understanding of my relationship to Kansas and my relationship to my own work as a nonfiction writer:

“The Kansas I know is like a long novel I finished years ago, a novel of which I remember every word. It was a great story, filled with wonderful characters and compelling plotlines, but it was epic and psychologically cumbersome and, in many ways, mostly fiction.” (180)

SC – Glad you liked that. It took me a while to reach that understanding of home. I think those lines came pretty late in the writing/revision process. It probably took writing the book to realize what I wanted to say about Kansas. Some people in Lawrence didn’t appreciate my “negative” view of home, even questioning whether I’d made up stuff about the Days of Rage, firebombings, etc. Thing is, I don’t see it as negative, just honest. Lawrence has an underbelly and if it’s going to be a character in my book, I have to make it a well-rounded character, have to expose that belly.

JP – To me, at least if we’re speaking of the book on a macro level, Danny Dahlberg seems a logical starting point, as his ghost permeates all four parts of the book, most notably in the “Dahlberg Variations” that serve as interludes from the main narrative and allow you to do some things outside the limitations of your own point of view and story. Perhaps I’ll allow you to describe who Danny Dahlberg is, and how you used him in the text.

SC – Interestingly enough those were some of the first sections I wrote for the book, long ago, mostly just playing around. He is, obviously, a significant character in the film, if only because of the metaphorical significance of his being blinded by the blast [Which can be seen at the 1:10 mark of the nuclear attack scene below – JP]. And he becomes for me both a kind of blind oracle, a Tiresias figure, and an alternate self. I used him initially as a kind of experiment, a fictional device designed to allow me to explore the extreme edges of one’s reactions to the film. And I guess that’s a big part of my process, at least in my first three books, that use of fiction to essay or explore certain ideas. Probably some of that comes from my training in fiction writing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2H1E02iMHg]
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The Immortality of the Crab: Nonfiction — John Proctor

Jun 242011

The Immortality of the Crab

By John Proctor

…and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock
in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency
is to refuse to face things as long as possible
by retiring into an infantile dream…
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”

It’s 3AM, I must be lonely.
—Matchbox 20

Two days a week between mid-June and mid-October, I wake up at 3:00am without an alarm clock, thinking about crabs. I get dressed in the dark while my wife sleeps and feel my heart beating, hands twitching, mouth grinning involuntarily. I walk out to my car, where my traps, handlines, and bucket are already packed, and I head out to the sea, thinking about blue crabs. I drive toward the end of the earth and then walk out with my equipment, where the sea meets me at the edge of the pier. Sometimes a lighthouse searches in the distance; most times I see black islands shadow the water in the twilight; a few times I notice the dockside lights of boats whose captains beat me to the water. The morning mistral’s brisk song chills even the hottest midsummer night. On the pier I am all alone with the sea, surrounded by millions of ravenous blue crabs.

From November to June, I dream about blue crabs. Sometimes I’m back in Kansas fishing for catfish in the Wakarusa River where I spent so much time as a kid. I’m walking along the cliff overlooking the river, with the wild heather and cattails up to my armpits. I look down into the water from the edge where the grass meets the red clay, and I can see everything. Below the surface, huge flatheads are curled up in their red clay mudholes, or in the hollows of submerged tree stumps. And all along the edge of the river I see thousands of turquoise claws, all busy at work – good little members of the working poor, snapping up stray shiners, collecting detritus in the mud, and building fortresses from everything they find. Sometimes I’m so far up that I can see the Wakarusa River flowing into the sea, disregarding – and this is the great thing about dreams – that crabs and catfish generally don’t coexist, especially in Kansas. What’s important is the work they do, the order they make from the chaos. I don’t even try to catch them – I just watch, as the crabs and the catfish build their homes in the muddy water.

* * *

In one of my favorite scenes from the ‘90s sitcom Mad About You, Helen Hunt walks in on Paul Reiser, and he’s sitting comfortably in his chair, doing – well, nothing. He’s staring off into space, and she asks him for help with some random chore. “I’m busy,” he tells her. She does a double take, and then asks incredulously what he’s busy doing. “I’m working,” he replies. She asks him what he’s working on. “I’m thinking.” He’s a filmmaker, a profession only slightly less physically lazy than writing, if only because of the heavy equipment. In this scene, Paul’s thinking is rather heavy. “I’m developing ideas,” he says. “The less it looks like I’m doing, the harder I’m actually working.”

There is a Spanish expression for Paul’s labor – pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo, or thinking about the immortality of the crab. Basically, if you’re standing around doing nothing and someone asks you what you’re doing, instead of admitting you’re not doing much of anything, simply tell that person you’re thinking about the immortality of the crab. And thinking, done well, is hard work.

What It’s Like Living Here — John Proctor in New York City

Mar 042011

What it’s like living here

by John Proctor

Every Monday and Thursday during the school year, I get up at 4:30 and commute via subway from Park Slope, Brooklyn to Grand Central Terminal, the Metro North commuter train from Grand Central to White Plains, and the Bee-Line bus from White Plains to Purchase, New York, where I teach at Manhattanville College. Having a wife and child while trying to maintain my pre-offspring reading and writing schedule can be difficult, and the train gives me a chunk of mostly unaccosted reading and writing time. Also, I’ve found that I’m rarely so aware – of my thoughts, of my surroundings – as I am at 5:00 in the morning in a moving vehicle that I don’t have to steer.

For the first time since I moved to New York City in 2000, I live in a neighborhood – Park Slope – that rarely makes me feel physically unsafe. It’s a popular site for movie shoots that want an “old Brooklyn” feel, but the only hint of crime that I’ve experienced are break-ins of my car if I leave it unlocked.

Park Slope, in the springtime

No matter the time of year, whether the waning days of summer at the start of the school year or the dark heart of winter when the second semester is just getting underway, I exit our three-story brick apartment building into a near-total darkness, broken up every 50 feet or so with the dim yellow arcs of streetlamps. Our block is mostly old three-story linoleum-sided buildings, with a sprinkling of ultra-modern condos that sit half-empty, waiting for the housing market to recover. We hope the market stays bad forever, so we’ll always have streetside parking. Some blocks near ours have actual gaslight lamps. These lamps seem to be in keeping with the “historic district” designation that Park Slope shares with Beacon Hill in Boston and New Orleans’ French Quarter.

Montaigne’s Motifs, Part 4: We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means, Looking Also at Albert Goldbarth’s ‘Griffin’ — John Proctor

Dec 052010

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth in a four-part series of essays on Montaigne.

To read the entire series, CLICK HERE.

————

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
– Semisonic, “Closing Time”

On this, the last for now of my studies of Montaigne’s motifs, I thought it fitting to discuss his dislike for succinctly wrapping things up. It makes sense, then, that the last of Montaigne’s Essays is also the least singular in topic, and the most far-ranging in scope. And it’s also interesting that the first in order of Montaigne’s Essays, written more than a decade earlier, is titled “We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means” – even then, when his essays were generally shorter and more singular in topic and theme, he was pushing the singularity of individual experience as the most important facet of truth (a notion much less popular in the late sixteenth century than it is now). This is perhaps one reason he’s now accepted as the fountainhead of the form – he put the “personal” in the personal essay.

That I am ending my Montaigne series on the fourth entry, one short of the promised five, only serves to reinforce this point – one cannot predict where our own experience will take us, or for how long, which Montaigne essentially says in “On Experience,” the final in his Essays:

I, unconcerned and ignorant within this universe, allow myself to be governed by this world’s general law, which I shall know sufficiently when I feel it. (374)

Personal, learned experience as the only conveyor of truth is an idea Montaigne examines playfully through much of “On Experience”:

Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern…Is a man not stupid if he remembers having been so wrong in his judgement yet does not become deeply distrustful of it afterward?…To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing: we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads. (375-376)

With this we come to perhaps an important attribute of the personal essay, and nonfiction in general, which sets it apart from the novel for instance, which serves its reality in a delineated framework, as Nabokov describes in “Good Readers and Good Writers” from his Lectures on Literature:

We should always remember that the work of art [Nabokov is referring to the novel here, specifically Madame Bovary] is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. (1)

This, to me, is one of the great pleasures of the novel – at the end of a great (or even good) novel, one feels a sense of loss at having finished it, at leaving the fictional world it’s created. But unlike the novel as Nabokov describes it here, the essay never ends at its end. There is always another essay to write, as long as there is another human to write about human experience, continuing to assay and refine our collective understanding through the individual thought and expression of that understanding. Closure, then, is not something essayists, and essay readers, try to find in the essay, but rather what they try to escape.

This brings us, again, back to “Of Experience.” In it Montaigne ponders verisimilitude and enstrangement (“Nature does not makes things ‘one’ as much as unlikeness makes them other: Nature has bound herself to make nothing ‘other’ which is not unlike”), gives opinions on law which seem to predict Locke’s, ponders whether truth is watered down in interpretation and fragmentation, of course contemplates himself extensively (herein lies the line, reacting to Aristotle, “I study myself more than any subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.” ), repeats his distrust of medicine he began in earlier essays, and stresses the importance of habit in sleeping, diet, and bowel movements.

I’d like to focus the last of my commentary on the last 20 or so pages of the essay, as Montaigne weaves a few threads together here, providing a thematic crescendo for both the essay and his Essays, without ever acknowledging an end to his work. For 10 pages, he directly alternates a rather lighthearted discussion of food, class and serenity with a frank meditation on his own aging; some highlights:

I have decided never again to run: it is enough for me if I can drag myself along. Nor do I lament the natural decline which has me in its grip – no more do I lament that my lifespan is not as long and massive as an oak’s. (404)

There are men who groan and suffer for want of beef or ham in the midst of partridge! Good for them: that is to be a gourmet among gourmets: it is a weak ill-favored taste which finds insipid those ordinary everyday foods…The essence of that vice consists in failing to enjoy what others do and in taking anxious care over your diet…let boys be fashioned by fortune to the natural laws of the common people; let them become accustomed to frugal and severely simple fare, so that they have to clamber down from austerity rather than scrambling up to it. (405-406)

God shows mercy to those from whom he takes away life a little at a time: that is the sole advantage of growing old; the last death which you die will be all the less total and painful: it will only be killing off half a man, or a quarter…Everywhere death intermingles and merges with our life: our decline anticipates its hour and even forces itself upon our very progress. (407-408)

A man who wants a regimen which serves him must not allow it to go on and on; for we become conditioned to it; our strength is benumbed by it…Thus are men undermined when they allow themselves to become encumbered with restricted diets and to cling to them superstitiously. They need to go farther and farther on, and then farther still. There is no end to it. (410)

Perhaps I should apply Montaigne’s advice to my quoting, though I might like to continue further with the juxtaposition as his two intertwined conversations dovetail into a beautifully rendered exposition on the last few pages of Montaigne’s philosophy of the essay’s, humanity’s, and time itself’s boundless nature:

I who boast that I so sedulously and individually welcome the pleasures of this life find virtually nothing but wind in them when I examine them in detail. But then we too are nothing but wind. And the wind (more wise than we are) delights in its rustling and blowing, and is content with its own role without yearning for qualities which are nothing to do with it such as immovability or density. (413-414)

This meditation gains a great splendour by a comparison of my condition with that of others. And so I pass in review, from hundreds of aspects, those whom fortune or their own mistakes sweep off into tempestuous seas, as well as those, closer to my own case, who accept their good fortune with such languid unconcern. Those folk really do ‘pass’ their time: they pass beyond the present and the things they have in order to put themselves in bondage to hope and to those shadows and vain ghosts which their imagination holds out to them – the more you chase them, the faster and farther they run away…so too your only purpose in chasing after them, your only gain, lies in the chase. (421)

* * *

Albert Goldbarth’s “Griffin,” like Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” is more interested in connections than endings. Like Joe Brainard, who was a visual artist first and a writer second, Albert Goldbarth is not known primarily as an essayist but as a poet. I haven’t read any of his poetry, but that presumption surprises me, especially since the Wikipedia on him entry notes his “distinctively ‘talky’ style,” which could also be said about Montaigne. I discovered Goldbarth while reconning TheDiagram.com’s “hybrid essay” contest last year; I had no idea what a hybrid essay was, and TheDiagram recommended that anyone who, like me, wasn’t familiar with the loose formal requirements of the form read Goldbarth’s “Griffin.” So I did.

The griffin, or gryphon, is a mythical lion/eagle hybrid, and Goldbarth uses it to explore the beginnings and endings of things – relationships, civilizations, boundaries – using the Griffin’s own lack of a clear, defined type or species as the archetype of transcendence – in being two things at once, it is neither and both of them, and something more than either:

And in fact the griffin and all of its kin – all of the hybridizedopposites, from real-life hermaphrodites to the fabled goat-footed people of northern Scythia and the dog-headed tribes of western Libya – hold a psychological value. They lead us through the horrors and astonishments of realizing that all of us lead dichotomized lives, and all of us…are the stuff of amazing weddings, some metaphorical, some literal. (22)

The essay, a meditation on convergence and divergence, floats associatively through time, space, and tone. Starting with “This seems to be the summer of com-, recom-, and uncombining,” Goldbarth introduces the reader to his friends Arthur and Martha, who are recently separated. Arthur has moved out and Goldbarth is taking a walk with Martha, who is telling him about Arthur’s stated need to find himself. Throughout the essay Goldbarth recounts the jolt this separation gives to the stability of his circle of friends – they had, after all, merged Arthur and Martha linguistically, calling them Marthur and Artha. In a moment of especially close self-examination Goldbarth, speaking of his friends, intimates a sense of the role of the nonfiction writer that echoes Montaigne:

Ah, yes. If only friends were characters, whose lives abide by authorly rules of beauty and whose suffering could, at the very least, be explained away in those acceptable terms. But I’m at a loss for advice, now, here, in the park, as the light and the branches deal out the scenery of our friendship. (10)

Goldbarth also explores the erotic poetry of Catullus and Ovid in an attempt to contextualize his friends’ breakup, but also to explore whether it’s ever possible, or advisable, to completely merge oneself with another:

So: what is and what isn’t a proper coupling? We could say that the definition of those two states is what a culture exists for. (5)

Besides the Griffin, Goldbarth explores some more popular myths – Adam and Eve, vampires, werewolves, Springsteen’s New Jersey – in an attempt to justify and/or nullify humanity’s tendency toward wedlock, and its attendant fear of death. This makes me think of Olympia Dukakis’s famous interaction with Danny Aiello in Moonstruck, when she asks him why men chase women – he evades the question by alluding to Adam’s missing rib then finally, when she continues pressing him, he says, “I dunno. Maybe because they fear death?” “That’s it!” she says. “That’s the reason. Thank you – thank you, for answering my question.” Of course, her question was also her answer. I bring this in because Goldbarth spends a substantial portion of the essay exploring our connections with each other as attempts to connect with something greater than ourselves, something that perhaps is as conflicted as we are:

Maybe a people’s God is required to be so whole, and his people so unreservedly pledged to a mimetic wholeness, only because some last remaining intention-node in the back of the brain suspects that in reality the Creator of this universe is conflicted in his own wants and intentions. To suspect such a frightening thing is to need immediately to deny it, with every atom of our zealousness. (37)

I’m listening to Bruce’s song “The River” right now, from the album of the same name – by a strange coincidence, they’re playing it at the coffee house while I’m writing about an essay that devotes multiple pages to Bruce’s Jersey mythology. Like many of the songs on the album, it’s about an unhappy marriage. In the climactic verse leading into the last chorus, the narrator remembers taking his wife to the reservoir in the summer before their discontent:

At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And hold her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?

Perhaps I’ve gone a little off topic. But perhaps not – perhaps, by diverting from the stated topic, I’ve attempted what both Montaigne and Goldbarth do. Allowing free rein to thought is, perhaps, an escape from the beginnings and the ends – a chase after the thoughts that will escape into the ether if they don’t cross the boundary, as Lou Reed once said, of the lifetime between thought and expression.

—John Proctor

The Video Art of Christine Dehne — John Proctor

Nov 242010

John Proctor introduces video artist Christine Dehne and her work. This is something else. Amazing, strange, obsessive, hilarious, provocative work. Attentive to small domestic changes & acts. Edging into surrealism and experiment, absent context and frame, in a way. Yes, terrifying, for a writer, to think of giving up so much interpretive cushion. Makes me twitchy, the idea of not being able to explain my characters. Something to think about as NC dabbles in word & photo essays, off the page poetry, photoems and such.

The Video Art of Christine Dehne

By John Proctor

When I met Christine Dehne in 2007, she was at work on a project in which she was recording cell phone conversations in public places. She had just moved to New York City a few months before and was using the project as a way of exploring and learning about the city. I asked her once if she was recording our conversations. She responded with something about us not being in a public space, but the message was clear: “Don’t flatter yourself, pal.”

Christine eventually finished that piece as a sound collage, with a video map of the city as the visual. The piece is less concerned with forming any narrative than with capturing voices, isolating them, and shaping them into a work of art with a logic of its own — in essence, making them strange. The piece has shown at Arizona Digital Media Investigations in Flagstaff, the Heritage Film Festival in Baltimore, and Sweet Lorraine Gallery in Brooklyn. You can see and hear it online here.

Dehne studied Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps his best-known work is his 1917 “Fountain,” which was simply a “found” urinal he submitted as art for an exhibit that promised everything submitted would be accepted. Duchamp’s intention was to make the statement that anything could be art, if brought out of its utilitarian framework and examined as art.

Dehne recent piece “Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter as a Fountain” is an indirect descendent of Duchamp’s “Fountain.” “Portrait” evolved from the multi-year lifelog of her pregnancy and motherhood of our daughter Amalia. It refers directly back to Bruce Nauman‘s “Self-Portrait as a Fountain,” which itself, intentionally or not, refers back to Duchamp’s “Fountain.” Dehne’s 31-second video slowly, meditatively lingers on Amalia’s chin as she, well, drools like a fountain.

The first piece in her lifelog series, “Everyone Told Me the World Would Look Different,” begins completely out of focus, slowly “awakening” to the world of an ear. About a minute into 1-minute, 17-second video, we hear the sound of a binky being sucked and see, for the first time, Amalia’s face.

One fascinating aspect of Dehne’s work is her complete reliance on the object and the empathy it can evoke in an audience. To me, this is a terrifying concept — I’ve always relied on the drive of the narrative to pull me and the audience through, and especially expected it in the film work I’d been exposed to before meeting Christine. To think of video as a non-linear, concentric medium is, I guess like reading non-narrative, lyric poetry.

Before we were married, Dehne began working on a series of short pieces involving her (and by now our) dog Pants and decided to use him to symbolize her own domesticating instincts, creating a series of ultra-short film loops with Pants as a stand-in for her. The dog became a metaphor and also a work-based connection between me and Christine’s art. She eventually showed these pieces together at the “In Home: In Response” show in Baltimore, but the most erudite criticism, in my opinion, came from our friend David Marshall:

What range! I laughed. I cried. Despite his somewhat proletarian appellation, Pants epitomizes nobility. He’s a veritable Lipizzaner of the canine world. His form and tireless pursuit of perfection in “20 minutes” awed and delighted me. His (dare i say it?) dogged search for truth in “30 minutes” was inspiring. His courage and sheer animal magnetism in doing an interspecies homo-erotic love scene left me panting for more.

You can share the love here.

—John Proctor

2010 First Annual Memoir-in-a-Box Contest: THE WINNER!

Sep 282010

Steven Axelrod in repose

The winner of the first Numéro Cinq Memoir-in-a-Box Contest is Steven Axelrod for his divorce memoir Memoir in a Box.

The judges had a very difficult time picking between Axelrod’s entry and John Proctor’s I Was Young When I Left Home which had the ring of brutal truth, blow after blow delivered in a terse, telegraphic style suffused with the ironies of accumulation and juxtaposition. In nine chapters, John created a total picture of the family situation out of which he dragged himself to Brooklyn, marriage and fatherhood. That’s a great story. But the judges have a weakness for the NC virtues of wit and arrogance and could not resist similes such as “It was like living in Chernobyl as desperate Russians were starting to do again now: ignoring the obvious and waiting for the symptoms to show” and “She went to Grad school and I followed her like a horse clopping after another horse.” And lines like “I wanted to be fully included in my exclusion, in complete control of my helplessness.” Axelrod consistently delivers one linguistic delight after another. His grammar is complex, dramatic and close to impeccable. Every line is a surprise.

This was a beautiful contest. The judges are still haunted by Lené Gary’s narrative of a poisoned (literally) life and they loved Giovanna Marcus’s polyamorous adventures (if you don’t want to be part of the harem, date other people!) and Adam Arvidson’s sad and reluctant (every line seems dragged from the darkness) memoir of his father’s alcoholism and Jennifer Nelson’s poignant death-of-a-marriage narrative (from joy and hope to infidelity in nine chapters). All is change, all is dust.

Who’d have thought a little contest like this would inspire such fierce prose?

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For all the entries, look here. For the finalists, look here. For the People’s Choice winner, look here.

Read the winning memoir!->

Montaigne’s Motifs, Part 2: The Dialectic of List and Story, with Joe Brainard in Tow — John Proctor

Sep 242010

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a four-part series of essays on Montaigne.

To read the entire series, CLICK HERE.

———–

Life is not a constant thing, it’s only made of short stories
I couldn’t even tell you where I’m from…I’m guided by the voices I’ve perfected.

Neko Case, “Guided by Wire”

I have to admit I totally cribbed the title for this part from John D. O’Banion’s book Reorienting Rhetoric: The Dialectic of List and Story, a review of which is linked in an early Numero Cinq post. I’m currently ingesting this book, which attempts to reclaim narrative discourse (which he dubs “story”) as an essential half of the dialectic of rhetorical theory, the other half being analytical thought (he calls this “list”). I’ve found it mind-expanding on every level of my own writing – I just replace “rhetorical theory” with “creative nonfiction.” I also wrote an earlier post called “7 Things I Learned from Reading 15 ‘List Essays’” which explored this dialectic before I actually started reading O’Banion’s book.

Montaigne understood this dialectic intuitively centuries before it was given a name. Every essay of his I’ve read (I’m now up to eleven) sidles effortlessly between his own thoughts and condensed narratives, so much so that the two are sometimes indistinguishable. His thoughts range from the aphoristic to personal (the subject of last month’s post), and most of the narratives are either summaries of things he’s read or accounts from his own life. One result of the fluid shifting from systematized “list” (his own thoughts) and “story” (which are, again, mostly short and condensed narratives) is that Montaigne’s essays don’t really seem like “essays” in the modern, systematized sense, but neither do they seem like narrative memoir or history . They are in effect, to borrow from Shklovsky, enstranged – they seem not normal, not scannable, not easily explained or summarized.

Perhaps this has something to do with Montaigne’s own reading habits. Despite dying roughly 400 years before the advent of the internet, Montaigne managed to surround himself with continual media stimuli. A gregarious, well-traveled statesman during a time of civil war in France before settling into mayorship of his hometown of Bordeaux, he also was an early beneficiary of the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press 80 years earlier, with a library with which he converses in his essays as fluidly as the many contemporary, living people in his town and country at the time. Thus, writers, statesmen, and local townsfolk bustle in and out of his work, sometimes seemingly without thought to logical or narrative structure – that is, until readers—and millions have read him in the last 430 years—realize that the structure is uniquely Montaigne’s. By the end of his three books of essays, Montaigne changes his mind about some things, solidifies his opinions and viewpoints on others – all within the confines of his strange, shapeshifting, personal systematic method of thought.

Take briefly, for our purposes here, “To philosophize is to learn how to die” from Book I of his essays. Though he begins the essay with three pages expounding on pleasure as the ultimate goal of wisdom, Montaigne’s melancholic mood while writing the essay is quite obvious from the fourth page on, as he approaches death from every angle he can find:

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. (24)

And with this singular determination of thought, Montaigne tells of Egyptians bringing mummified corpses to the dinner table with them (24); the pagan practice of placing their graveyards next to the temples “so that this continual spectacle of bones, tombs and funerals should remind us of our human condition” (27); his own personal admission that he most fears death when he’s at his healthiest (28); tiny creatures in the Hypanis River who live only one day (“those which die at eight in the morning die in youth; those which die at five in the evening die of senility”) (30); Chiron refusing immortality when he found out how long it would last (35); and many, many more examples – too many to list, really. All of this is of course unified not by a specific thesis but by the Great Unifier itself:

Yes, but all leave life in the same circumstances, young and old alike. (21)

For a great majority of Montaigne’s essays I’ve read so far, narrative plays a subservient role to Montaigne’s personal system of discourse – he has thoughts and runs with them, employing personal anecdote and epic story in service to this thought. One notable exception I’ve found so far is “On the Cannibals,” which seems to do the inverse. Most of that essay – about 80% by my estimation – gives extended narratives of warring “savage” tribes in Palestine, the continent of Africa, and elsewhere that European explorers where writing about in disgust at the time. He keeps his own comments relatively infrequent. Actually, his “comments” are mostly stories from European antiquity that mirror the acts that his contemporaries were dismissing as savage. Interestingly, in Chapter 8 of Reorienting Rhetoric , “The Rejection of Narration,” O’Banion speaks to a tendency among sociologists to rely too heavily on listing and systematizing tribal cultures, most of them oral cultures whose primary mode of thought is narrative. This attempt to systematize tribal narratives leads to ethnocentrism:

By ethnocentrism [sociologist Jack Goody] means a “framework” of thought, including presuppositions, preconceived classification systems, and unnecessary and unconsciously held limitations of perspective. (156)

Compare this, then, to one of the few instances of commentary in “Of the Cannibals”:

…every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. (82)

Here, then, is an example of Montaigne traversing the limitations of his own culture’s systematic thought by employing, when writing of “savage” tribal cultures, their primary mode of discourse – narrative. While this example reveals the limitations of systematic thought, the modern example of I Remember tells Joe Brainard’s own personal narrative as a list.

It’s not surprising after reading even one page of I Remember that Joe Brainard was primarily a visual collage artist and secondarily a writer (to his own mind, at least) – his list-memoir is a pastiche of over a thousand descriptive images, short narratives, inversions, fantasies, revelations, and name checks, all tied together only by the fact that all begin with the words “I remember.” Brainard arranges them rarely with any apparent care for narrative cohesion – rather, he piles image upon image, memory upon memory, until the memories, almost by sheer weight, combine and condense into a vibrant, sometimes hilarious, sometimes gross, sometimes heartrending portrait of a gay youth in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Fifties who moves to New York City and becomes part of a major art movement.

When reading various “list essays,” one question continually nagged at me: Could anyone pull this off in a book-length work? I asked this question to Patrick Madden at the July residency, and he asked me if I’d ever heard of Joe Brainard. I’d heard the name, but didn’t know much about him – to my shame, it turns out. Brainard was an integral part of the New York School of poetry (not the New York School of art and painting, to whose aesthetic movement his artwork bore little resemblance) and, living in New York City and fancying myself a novice historian, I’m now duly embarrassed that Brainard has eluded me until now. I Remember is not just a book but a compilation – he published many of the entries in smaller, chapbook-like editions through the Seventies, including I Remember, I Remember More, and More I Remember More.

If Brainard’s memory is a wide horizon, he swathes the disparate elements into bundles in multiple ways. Due to the list format he uses to relay those memories, I found in myself a tendency to delineate his memories into categories, or simply “areas.” I’ll attempt to and elucidate many of these areas in due time, but before that it’s important to grasp two elements they all share:

Brainard is a lingual minimalist. All of his memory-paragraphs are short, with almost no modifiers (i.e., adjectives or adverbs).
Every memory is separated by both an tab indent and a line break.

Now, to briefly return to Shklovsky. These two stylistic choices work together to remove each memory from the linear horizon, to decontextualize it, to make it strange:

The purpose of the image is not to draw our understanding closer to that which the image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive the object in a special way, in short, to lead us to a “vision of this object rather than mere “recognition.” (Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” Theory of Prose p10)

Brainard frees each individual memory from its original context, and forces it to stand naked, competing with thousands more naked memories before and after it for the reader’s attention. Sometimes there is a vague, free-associative sense of the memories’ relationships to each other, as in these four short paragraphs:

I remember chalk.

I remember when green chalkboards were new.

I remember a backdrop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.

I remember how much I tried to like Van Gogh. And how much, finally, I did like him. And how much, now, I can’t stand him. [28]

But much more often the memories are estranged from each other, leaving the associations to the reader. These reader associations can be personal, whether a recognition of objects, emotions, or references in the memories. They can also be connections inferred between the memories – I, for example, noticed that Brainard remembered “the outhouse and a Sears and Roebuck catalog “ on page 24, then on page 60 “a ringworm epidemic and being scared to death that I would get it,” and I remembered a recent show on NPR where a scientist described his lifetime contribution to his field – the discovery in the fifties that ringworms were spread primarily through fecal remnants that bare feet stepped into on their way to the outhouse.

Now, about those categories. At first I was going to number each memory and list the occurrences of each major area of experience, maybe even make a nice circle graph that would reveal something about the balance of the memories or some logic in their ordering, but I soon realized that 1) that’s a lot of work, 2) it would be a little too nurturing of my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and 3) most importantly, such itemization would do a disservice to the intuitive, spontaneous quality of the work Brainard has created. So instead, in light if the impulsive nature of the book itself, I decided to simply open the book at random with my notecard of categories/areas in hand, pick a memory, and explain how it elucidates at least one of the categories I’ve deduced from my first reading. (The categories are in italics.)

“I remember a tower on top of a building in Tulsa that changed colors every few minutes. But only green and yellow and white.” (104)
This simple, airtight description of an object is something Brainard repeats many, many times throughout the book. Sometimes these objects come before over after an event or action that gives them context, but many times, like this one which comes right after a series of memories involving the barber shop, the context is quite loose. It’s followed by a memory about the hat store, so the only inference I could imagine would be an aesthetic or metaphoric connection of the tower atop the building and the hat atop the head. Which actually makes a strange sense, given Brainard’s penchant for visual collage which is apparent here and elsewhere in the book though his visual description of colors.

“I remember (after school) soda fountain shops with booths, and a jukebox, but only in the movies.” (143)
I really love this one, because it does, in three lines, many of the things Brainard does so well throughout the book – he remembers something from his childhood, then inverts it into something else, thus commenting in the influence TV had (has) on his perspective (he was, after all, raised in the golden age of television).

“I remember a boy I once made love with and after it was all over he asked me if I believed in God.” (20)
Actual self-contained narratives are relatively sparse in the book, and as seen here, are sparse within themselves when they do appear. But here we have a story, in a sentence, that merges (so to speak) two of Brainard’s main concerns throughout the book, sexual discovery and god and religion. While many of his other descriptions of sexual encounters are graphic and non-erotic, this one is actually both sweet and ironic. It’s one of the few times his idealized view of love and romance shares space with the reality of his own experience.

“I remember a story about a couple who owned a diner. The husband murdered his wife and ground her up into hamburger meat. Then one day a man was eating a hamburger at the diner and he came across a piece of her fingernail. That’s how the husband got caught.” (59)
This might be called cheating, if there were rules – not an actual memory but a memory of a communal myth, made especially delectable by the nature of the myth. I mean, who hasn’t heard a story, growing up, about something disturbing going on at the fast food joint? (My mother used to tell me McDonald’s made their burgers from worms, a legend so ubiquitous that Snopes.com devoted a page to disproving it.) This memory/legend also combines Brainard’s fascination with the disgusting and his sense of humor with his sometimes morbid, sometimes elegiac, always matter-of-fact mention of death.

“I remember feeling sorry for black people, not because I thought they were persecuted, but because I thought they were ugly.”
Holy mackerel. I have to say, this one actually made me stop reading for a minute when I first read it. Here is something you’re not supposed to admit remembering, a racially charged episode where the primary cultural plotline of his time, the Civil Rights Movement, assumes secondary importance to the child’s simplistic, external view of the world. More than most, this particular memory walks a fine line between honest and asinine.

The wonderful irony of both Montaigne’s essays and Brainard’s I Remember is that both, through intuitive enstrangement of normal, everyday language, achieve their own sort of “magical realism,” for lack of a less-used term. Where Montaigne achieves this through seamless juxtaposition of the personal narrative and grand, almost omniscient statements, Brainard makes his own personal experiences epic by singling them out and alienating them from each other, and using clean, sparse language to relay them.

Serendipitiously (for me, if not for the topic of the piece), I read a recent article on TheRumpus.net about Kevin Morrissey, the Virginia Quarterly editor whose suicide has attracted national media attention. In this devastating, sad essay, Steve Almond uses a list format similar in style to Brainard’s to trace the narrative of Morrissey’s death and the aftermath, and also to question a publishing industry that’s becoming more and more bottom line-driven, writers and editors – himself included – who sometimes forget amidst the seas of rejection letters (and our own narcissism) why we write:

We’re going to destroy ourselves as a species if we lose the capacity to imagine the suffering of others. One way to do this – the best way – is via our imaginations, via storytelling. It’s our job to help spread that particular virus, in our work and our lives. The point isn’t to take sides. There are no sides. There’s just the one side. And we’re all on it. [Read it all]

—John Proctor

2010 Numéro Cinq Memoir-in-a-Box Finalists

Sep 232010

The judges are dumbstruck (all right–their usual state) at the daring and profundity of the entries in the first ever Memoir-in-a-Box contest. These memoirs are searing, honest, startling and bold. Amazing work of the sort we did not expect. Honour to all the entries. If, as the psychologist James Pennebaker says, there is healing in writing the trauma down, the judges hope you have all found solace in putting these words on the page (in the box). (We were disappointed that no one felt boxed in, but perhaps it was better to avoid the obvious.) But then it’s also true that if you’re not willing to put it out there, then you’re better off writing fiction. This year’s entries all passed the test of nerve and honesty. They all have a great subject–themselves and the drama of life.

Read the finalists below.

The First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box/Memoir-in-a-Box Contest

Aug 242010

Jacob, the contrarian, during the EPE (Photo by Jonah Glover)

Inspiration

[Augusto] Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:

When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”

Brevity was, to say the least, an important concept for Monterroso. His essay “Fecundity” is included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. It reads in full:

Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.

—from Tom McCartan’s Crib notes on “What Bolaño Read”

The Contest

Okay, the long-awaited next Numéro Cinq literary contest, The First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box/Memoir-in-a-Box Contest. The rules are pretty simple this time. You have to write an entire (don’t cut corners) novel or a memoir (personal narrative) consisting of 9 (a mystic number) chapters and each chapter can be no more than 5 lines long. (By lines, I mean the number of lines that appear on the comment box on the blog.) Fewer lines if you can. Try to remember what a novel is like: at least a couple of characters or more (usually), a conflict, development through a series of dramatic actions, etc. Alternatively, try to remember what a memoir looks like: a first person narrator (and a couple of other people or more), a thematically continuous narrative line often based on a conflict and or theme, development through a series of dramatic moments or incidents, etc. Indicate on your entry whether it is fiction or non-fiction (there will be separate prizes). (Note that in the Monterroso story quoted above there ARE two characters, the guy and the dinosaur.)

The contest is open to any living, sentient being in the universe. It is not limited to people who are already on the blog or VCFA students or former students. Everyone is welcome, and also welcome to join in other conversations or suggest topics.

Entries will be accepted between September 1 and September 15, 2010 (midnight), and should be written in English (Gary) and attached as comments to this post (the usual practice at NC).

Remember the values we hold dear here at Numéro Cinq: WIT & ARROGANCE. Remember Gordon Lish’s phrase ATTACK SENTENCES!

P.S. Anyone who mentions the insidious phrase “flash fiction” will have his or her comment deleted from the blog. I mean this! Delete it from your minds. This is not a flash fiction contest.

Burroughs & Son: Memoir — John Proctor

May 242010

William S. Burroughs & James Grauerholz in Lawrence, Kansas

When I was in grade school, William S. Burroughs visited my house. At least I think so. Strange old men with secrets were fairly commonplace in Lawrence, Kansas. Old Man Puckett, our octogenarian next door neighbor on Delaware Street, lived alone in squalor for all the time we knew him, until he was robbed and murdered in his home. The men who killed him found little of value, but it was obvious they were looking for something. After the crime, police searched his house extensively, and after removing the floorboards they found just shy of $100,000 hidden. Old Man Puckett came to our door once trying to get us to sign some sort of petition. When he tried to come in the door without my parents’ permission, my bulldog just about ripped his arm off. My mother brought him in and wrapped his arm in gauze, but he refused to go to the hospital.

Old Man Burroughs was better prepared when he came knocking. When mother opened the door and my bulldog growled, he simply waved his cane at her and she slunk back away from him. He spoke slowly and lucidly to my mother, accusing me of trespassing on his property and chasing his cats. This was probably true – I chased every cat I saw, and so did my bulldog. My father glowered in the corner, but didn’t open his mouth.

Old Man Burroughs didn’t say a word directly to me until he’d laid out his case to my parents. He then looked directly into me. “You should know,” he said, “that I’m quite proficient with a handgun.”

Burroughs and I came into Lawrence from opposite ends. He was at the end of a life lived fuller than most, and I was just beginning mine. Both of us were bewildered. He arrived in 1981, when I was eight years old. He seems to have spent most of the eighties fluctuating between the peace of an old warrior retiring to his cottage and deep depression. His friends had left him and the anti-establishment movement he’d helped found had been co-opted by the establishment. He grudgingly accepted his induction into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983, and went home broke. He tried to get Ginsberg, Gysin, Giorno, and the rest of them to come visit him, but they mostly scoffed, referring to his new home in Kansas as Nowheresville.

For the life lived outside the communal graces of religion, family, and conventional sexuality, he was now paying in loneliness. His closest friends were the brood of cats he gathered around his house on Learnard Street. By 1987 he’d finished The Western Lands, the final volume of his Red Night trilogy, in which he supposedly gathered the loose ends of his previous work into a cohesive mythology. I haven’t read the trilogy. I have, however, read The Cat Inside, a brief and surprisingly tender volume he published in 1986 about his beloved brood. In one passage he recounts a series of dreams he has about Ruski and Fletch, his first cats, in which their heads are on the bodies of children. He doesn’t know how to take care of children but he vows to protect them, saying, “It is the function of the guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.” I’m now very sorry if I tormented his cats.

When I left home at 17, I discovered William S. Burroughs – the writer, not the old man. It wasn’t until I heard a recording of him reading that I made the connection between the two. I read Naked Lunch three times, desperately trying to make heads or tails of it. Like most other male college English majors, I became obsessed with the Beats. But mostly, I loved, still love, the voice of William Burroughs. It was at once weathered and sarcastic, two attributes I assumed of myself way too early. But that’s what it was – William S. Burroughs was who I wanted to be, the literary tradition I wanted to come from, and I’ll even say it – the father I wished I had. His death in August of 1997, just a couple short months after Ginsburg’s, officially ended the Beat Generation, though it had long been usurped and bowdlerized by its own legend. I eventually wrote my graduate thesis on the influence of Naked Lunch on film and popular culture, but I wanted much more than that to write about the influence of William S. Burroughs on me.

Burroughs had a son of his own, Billy Burroughs. I’m continually surprised at how few people know this – or even believe it – when I mention it. But it’s easy to understand why, really. Not even taking into account his homosexuality, Burroughs just doesn’t seem like father material. He had, after all, shot the boy’s mother. And he in fact wasn’t much of a father to Billy, mostly allowing his own parents to raise him. Billy went to stay with his father in Tangiers where, according to an article Billy wrote for Esquire, Burroughs allowed at least one of his friends to molest his son. Billy wrote that article shortly before he died at age 33, saying that his father had poisoned his life. He did, though, read and reread his father’s books – I imagine this was a way to feel close to his shadow-father – and cherished every scrap of affection his father threw him, like the Rimbaud copy mailed to him when he reached puberty, the glass-cased Amazonian butterflies , and the shrunken heads mailed from Africa. Billy also wrote two novels. While his father was recovering from his heroin addiction, Billy became an alcoholic of the most extreme sort, vomiting blood while having dinner with Ginsberg, needing an experimental liver transplant, and eventually dying alone in a ditch in Florida. William Burroughs was in New York when Ginsberg called and told him. That was 1981, the year Burroughs moved to Lawrence. Burroughs fell back into methadone and/or heroin use around that time, and was addicted for the rest of his life.

My Grandpa Light, my mother’s father, died in 1997, a few months before Burroughs. I loved him, but I didn’t cry at his funeral the way I cried in my apartment that August. My Grandpa Proctor, my adoptive father’s father, died just last October. He’d had lung cancer for about a year. I hadn’t gone back to see him because he wanted me to reconcile with his son, whom I’d chosen not to see since my mother divorced him. When I said I couldn’t Grandpa Proctor disowned me, via email. But I went back to Kansas when he was pissing blood and treatments were stopped. I didn’t know if he’d let me in when I showed up on his doorstep. But he did. He was old, and broken, and wanted to talk. So we talked – about his job as the first union projector operator at the theater downtown, and how all his sons got smallpox the same summer when they lived on 19^th Street and they had to quarantine the house and have the rest of the family stay out at the shack on Lone Star Lake. I remembered that shack – we used to spend our summers there when I was in early grade school. It was only about half the size of the loft apartment my wife and I were sharing when my grandpa got cancer, but somehow my grandparents fit all three of their sons, parents, siblings, and their families into it. I asked him what happened to that old place.

At Lone Star Lake – my grandpa (far left), adoptive father (middle), and uncles (photo courtesy of my Aunt Carol)

“Oh, we sold that place sometime round ‘85, to some old artist type, name of Burroughs. You probably heard of him.” He then told me how this artist type didn’t even do much out there after he bought it, just rowed out to the middle of the lake and sat all day. “And get this,” Grandpa told me, “I sold it to him for under $30,000. Now just two years ago the owners sold it for $160,000 to some guy in England, just because that old Burroughs lived there.” I didn’t believe him when he told me, but I googled it and found the eBay listing. I even found a journal entry from Burroughs himself about our shack:

I got me this cabin out on the lake. Got it cheap since I was able to put up cash, which the owners needed to put down on another house they is buying out in the country. Could easy sell it now, but what for? A few thousand profit? Nowadays what can you do with that kinda money? My neighbor tells me right in front of my dock (I’ve got access, and that is the thing matters here on the lake… a dock, see!), well, my neighbor tells me that right in front of my dock is the best catfish fishing in the lake, but I don’t want to catch a catfish…I could cope with a bass, or better, some bluegills — half pound, as tasty fish as a man can eat — fresh from the lake, and I got me an aluminum flat bottom boat, ten foot long, $270…a real bargain. I likes to row out in the middle of the lake and just let the boat drift…

So there it is. Burroughs spent the last years of his life in the middle of the lake of my youth. I won’t even venture a guess as to what he thought about out there, but I do know that less than a month before he died in 1997 he wrote in his journal:

Mother, Dad, Mort, Billy – I failed them all –

And I don’t know what conclusions to draw from that, what lesson there is to be learned, what connections there are to make. I’m now 36 years old, three years older than Billy Burroughs was when the weight of his father’s legacy ravaged his liver and landed him in a ditch in Florida, but less than half as old as William Burroughs was when he exited the world addicted, without a family, and adrift alone in the middle of a lake so muddy my wife refuses to set foot in it. I have a daughter now, who will be a year old in just a couple of weeks. Somehow I’m glad she’s not a son.

Burroughs, rowing in Lone Star Lake

— John Proctor

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7 Things I Learned from Reading 15 List Essays — John Proctor

May 132010

This past month I’ve read and re-read fifteen short pieces, each of which might be called a list essay. I say this with the confession that before last month I didn’t even know such a form existed. I did, though, find myself writing in it and blindly starting to lay out some basic precepts as I wrote, then trying to identify them in other essays. I can’t precisely identify the methods I used in finding the essays I chose, except to say that I searched through my non-fiction anthologies for essays that looked like the ones I was writing (and I mean “looked” in the most physical sense – I tried to find essays that resembled lists), googled the term “list essay,” and asked everyone I knew if they could think of possible examples. Perhaps rather haphazardly, I found and read the following “list essays”:

Leonard Michaels, “In the Fifties”
Wayne Koestenbaum, “My ’80s”
Jonathan Lethem, “13, 1977, 21” [from Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist; also the anthology The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction]
Susan Allen Toth, “Going to the Movies” [from Harper’s Magazine, May 1980; also The Fourth Genre anthology]
Carol Paik, “A Few Things I Know About Softball” [from Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 2007, also The Fourth Genre anthology]
Debra Marquart, “Some Things I Know About That Day”
Wendy Rawlings, “Virtually Romance: A Discourse on Love in the Information Age”
Nancy Lord, “I Met a Man Who Has Seen the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and This Is What He Told Me” [from Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2007, also The Fourth Genre anthology]
Michele Morano, “Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood” [from Morano’s Grammar Lessons, also The Fourth Genre anthology]
Meriwether Clarke, “The Grimm Brothers: A List Essay”
Sei Shonagon, “Hateful Things” [from Shonagon’s Pillow Book, also The Art of the Personal Essay anthology]
Christopher Smart, “My Cat Jeoffry” [from Smart’s Jubilate Agno]
Brenda Miller, “Table of Figures” [from Miller’s Blessing of the Animals, also The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol.3]
Anonymous, “(names have been changed)” [from The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol.3]
Dawnelle Wilkie, “What Comes Out” [from The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol.3]
Tim Bascom, “Community College”

In reading at these essays I tried to establish certain “rules” that the pieces seemed to share, and found that in fact this motley crew did have some common characteristics. I also should note that I’m looking at the pieces in terms of their connections to this form, not as individual pieces, so all references to them will be in terms of how they illustrate the precepts of the form. So here’s what I learned:

That the term “List Essay” might not be precisely correct. David Blakesley wrote a review of Reinventing Rhetoric: The Dialectic of List and Story by John D. O’Banion, in which he sums up O’Banion’s admixture of the list story like this:

List is the form of discourse utilized by logic or systematic thought; story is the form utilized by narratival thought… In their application, “List records scientific truth, with logic providing tests of a List’s accuracy and universality. Story embodies aesthetic ‘truth’ (meaning), with narration providing guidance in revealing and discovering such situationally bound meaning.”

It’s important to point out here that the list essay is a different entity than the list story, since technically the essay is a non-fiction form that usually contains elements of both systematic and narrative style. So by this reasoning, almost every essay is to some degree a systematic-narratival or list-story essay – the only “list essays” would be the ones that don’t employ any narrative. With this in mind, I’d propose the title systematic narrative essay. Aesthetically it’s not as concise as “list essay,” but I think it actually rolls off the tongue quite nicely. And the process itself of reading a bunch of unrelated essays and attempting to delineate precepts that they all follow is itself an example of the tightrope walk between narrative thought and systematic application, as each of these essays does tell a story, most of them intensely personal, and my attempt here is to figure out some analogous connections between their systematic methods of telling those narratives.

That the force that drives the essay is at least as much concept as plot. The list essay could be called a non-fiction concept story. In eleven of the 15 essays I read, the concept was even stated in the title:

“Community College”

“Table of Figures”

“Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood”

“A Few Things I Know About Softball”

“I Met a Man Who Has Seen the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and This Is What He Told Me”

“Going to the Movies”

“My ‘80s”

“In the Fifties”

“The Search for Marvin Gardens”

“The Grimm Brothers: A List Essay”

“Virtually Romance: A Discourse on Love in the Information Age”

And in the other three the concept was subtly, almost secretly implicit:

“A Few Things About That Day” [about an abortion]

“What Comes Out” [about an abortion clinic]

“(names have been changed)” [about an 11-year-old girl with HIV, presumably from her stepfather or uncle)

The importance of this is that not just the action, but the structure itself of each essay revolves around the concept. And “revolve” is a good word for it, as very few of the list essays I’ve read follow a linear narrative, and even the ones that generally do, like “A Few Things I Know About Softball,” “Community College,” and “The Grimm Brothers: A List Essay,” break up the narrative with systematic stylistic devices. In “…About Softball” Paik breaks up the sections with headings like “Lesson1: Put your body in front of the ball,” “Lesson 2: Catch with both hands,” and so forth. “Community College” reads like a log book of a college lecturer, with headings for each of the 16 weeks of the semester. “The Grimm Brothers” injects social, literary, and historical critique into a skeletal summary of the brothers’ lives, attempting to draw conclusions as to how they wrote the fairy tales that have become part of Western culture’s collective unconscious.. In Jonathan Lethem’s “13, 1997, 21” he tells the story of watching Star Wars twenty-one times at the age of thirteen when it came out in the summer of 1977, and even the form serves the content – it’s told in twenty-one short, concentric sections.

That they can be panoramic in scope or ultra zoomed in, sometimes both at the same time. The panoramic view allows essayists to think of their subjects on a macro level. In Michaels’s “In the Fifties” and Wayne Koestenbaum’s “My ‘80s,” both writers use the decade to frame events in their own coming-of-age stories. Both relate literary and cultural touchstones associated with the respective decades – Michaels using Dylan Thomas, McCarthyism and Greenwich Village bohemians and Koestenbaum using Tama Janowitz, AIDS, and the Greenwich Village gay subculture – to private events in their own lives. This juxtaposition gives these private events an epic scope. Conversely, in “The Grimm Brothers: A List Essay,” Meriwether Clarke uses 53 ultra-short paragraphs (1-3 lines each) seemingly to remove the epic-ness of the Grimm Brothers’ legend, simply relaying fact after fact about their lives and work. I’ve found the zoomed-in approach less common in list essays. But, like on Debra Marquart’s “Some Things About That Day” in which she lists everything she remembers about the day she had an abortion, the process of listing everything one remembers about one event can reveal to the writer and the reader why this event has defined the writer. The essay is only two pages, eleven paragraphs of 4-6 lines each. In the third paragraph, she finds it “difficult to remember the order in which things happened.” In the seventh paragraph she recounts telling her husband she was pregnant and him asking, “Is it mine?” And in the last paragraph she arrives home from the procedure to find him watching the NBA playoffs and telling her how brave she is. This isn’t the only action of the short essay, but I point it out because it reveals the importance of this day as a reflection of the days before and after it. Also, in “13, 1977, 21” Lethem attempts, through the prism of the systematic retelling of his pre-teen obsession with Star Wars, to come to grips with his mother’s death at the time and his own budding sexuality. Which brings me to the next thing I’ve learned:

That the form is a great way for the writer to get grip on material, how it fits together. So many of the essays I read seem to be working themselves out either implicitly or explicitly in the process of listing and arranging all the individual parts. In “Going to the Movies,” Toth, in three brief numbered sections, tells of three different men she goes to the movies with, how they watch movies, and how she watches movies with them. Each of these is reactive, starting with the men’s names (“Aaron takes me only to art films.” “Bob takes me only to movies that he thinks have a redeeming social conscience.” “Sam likes movies that are entertaining.”) and portraying herself only in her semi-romantic relationships to them. Then, in the fourth and final section, she tells of going to the movies alone, putting her feet up, and singing along to musicals with happy endings, where “the men and women always like each other.” It is through the systematic, quantified analysis of the men she goes to the movies with that she finds her own place in the narrative. In “The Subjunctive Mood” Morano employs a 2^nd-person perspective to simulate a Spanish language lesson, which she beautifully interweaves with her on-and-off relationship with a suicidal man while living in Spain: “This is the when, the while, the until. The before and after.The real and the unreal in a precarious balance…But at least the final rule of usage is simple, self-contained, one you can commit to memory: Certain independent clauses exist only in the subjunctive mood, lacing optimism with resignation, hope with heartache.” “Community College” also uses this teacher’s perspective to frame his narrative in time and space, logging his students’ actions strictly from their interactions with him as their writing teacher. By Week 16 – Finals Week – he knows probably more about the students’ personal lives than he wants to, and the Week-by-Week log of their failures, excuses, and minor triumphs shows as well as any essay I’ve read the unique relationship a college professor has with his or her students.

That they’re generally pretty short. The title of one, “I Met a Man Who Has Seen the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and This Is What He Told Me,” is nearly as long as any of the nine sections. The longest essay here by far, “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” clocks in at a whopping eight pages, and is by far the shortest piece by John McPhee I’ve read. I’m going to test this precept this summer in reading what seems like a book-length systematic narrative, The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, in which he writes about reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for a year and arranges the book as A-Z mock entries.

That the language of the form is generally spare, implying connections that the reader must infer from the systematic framework the essay sets up. A good example of this is the pair of essays, “What Comes Out” and “Some Things About That Day.” As stated earlier, both center conceptually on abortion. But they deal from opposite sides of the plate glass window, Marquart recounting her own experience getting an abortion and Wilkie recounting the life of the health care worker assisting with the abortions. Both are short, unassuming, and quietly heartbreaking, and neither says what is implied. Wilkie even starts the essay by telling the reader, “We do not talk about What Comes Out,” then clinically and unsparingly takes the reader through the process the health care workers go through in removing and disposing of it. Marquart, in two brief pages, reconstructs from hazy memory the same process , stating that “My friend tried to soften it for me afterwards. Just say you had a procedure, dear.” So, for both, perhaps the United States’ most heated contemporary political debate becomes simply a procedure to get something out. The human narrative is embedded in the systematic procedure.

That the form, while contemporary, is not without antecedents. I recently discovered “Hateful Things” from the “pillow book” of 10-Century Japanese matron and snob Sei Shonagon, which as advertised is a list of things she hates, including pretentious people, inkstones that malfunction, and men who leave after overnight trysts without saying goodbye. She even states, “Sometimes one greatly dislikes a person for no particular reason – and then that person goes and does something hateful.”

“My Cat Jeoffry,” a poem, is perhaps the piece I remember most from my undergraduate early English literature survey course. Its systematic structure is rigid – 74 lines, every one starting with “For,” all praising his beloved cat. Smart was obviously insane and did in fact spend a good portion of his life in an asylum, but the 74 lines of “My Cat Jeoffrey” do give a loose, loving, altogether unique narrative portrait.

Coda

I went out to lunch this week at Hunan Delight, my new favorite place in Park Slope for cheap Chinese, and when I opened my fortune cookie at the end of lunch it read:

Digital circuits are made from analog parts.

I’m not usually one to assume meaning in mass-produced slips of paper, but this one spoke to me. I come from a family of electricians and mechanics, and though I can barely keep the oil changed in my car and frequently need my wife to help me operate my Macbook, I know this much: Digital circuits work in bits of information, each bit working into the systematic logic of the circuit; if any bit doesn’t logically fit, the circuit will malfunction. Each bit, though, works in a continuous strain, and thus has its own infinitely variable narrative order. I teach a class on convergent media, and one of the things we talk about is how digital (online) media have changed the way we read, and think. With the rise of non-fiction as a predominant form in publishing market, perhaps the systematic-narrative, or list essay, is both a response and a reflection of this change.

—John Proctor

First Ever Numéro Cinq Literary Contest

Mar 152010

THE FIRST EVER NUMÉRO CINQ APHORISM CONTEST

Submissions March 15-31, 2010

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Submissions must be no more than 150 words in length

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