Quarter in Review: On the A****-G****, Residential Electricity, Deserves, Nostalgia, and Agnès Varda
This guy I know told me he had been thinking about how different his life would be if he had gone to a small private liberal arts college instead of the local commuter school. He said, “I want a bunch of us with mostly the same thoughts.” He said, “I want ilk and professional connections.” He said, “All I’ve got is this and everybody else.”
We are in our middling thirties, this guy and me, a good ways away from any college days. I also went to the local commuter school. I went twice, in fact, the second time being for graduate school. For a while, I called graduate school “art school.” This same while, I tried convincing myself and others of my a****-g**** bonafides before deciding I just was not up for it anymore.
Until this summer, when I started rewiring my house. I am doing it slowly and room by room, abandoning the one-hundred-year-old knobs and tubes. What had happened was I discovered uncapped live wires dangling freely inside the walls and suspect splices, such as two wires loosely electrical-taped together, in surprise junction boxes hidden throughout the basement and attic. Probably, I am trading these fire hazards for others. I am not an electrician. J— reminds me of this relentlessly. But I am affordable and available.
With this whole house rewire I am managing, finally, to induce in myself and others the radiant discomfort and dread I want to with my writing but can’t. I am for hours every day staring at the lightbulbs, checking for flickers, and feeling the light switches for warmth. I listen for arcing, smell for arcing. What does electricity smell like? Blue, I imagine, and deceptively cold. When the power goes out, is it something I have done? I check the neighbors’ windows for glow.
I am a pretty regular neighbor, I think; not especially good or bad. Our houses are too close together. If one catches fire, so will all the rest. The neighbors would be right to be concerned. When I see them see me, I am certain they are. Because one day my house will catch fire and everybody knows how come. As I examine the receptacles for signs of melting and the plaster for scorch marks, I explain to J— I am at my aesthetic peak.
I expect this ends up something I share with a “class” when inevitably I am “teaching” “creative writing” to mostly uninterested young people (I enrolled in a “creative writing” “class” at the local commuter school because it was the only alternative to the surveys of British literature) and mostly uninteresting adults in an attempt to, perversely, maintain an appearance of being a “legitimate” “writer” and “artist” in times of lean to no production, such as when, say, one ill-advisedly purchases a poorly wired house on the east side of Cleveland and must, themself, remedy the situation, a humorous anecdote about how come my house and all the rest of the houses in my neighborhood caught fire and how those around me suffered deeply and irrevocably, and for what?
“The ‘what’ is what this ‘class’ is about,” I will announce with as much gravity as I can muster.
But let me walk back a couple things.
First, those quotes around the words class, teaching, creative writing, writer, and artist.
Next, the whole phrase “uninteresting adults” because in the history of living this has not ever been true.
I thought I would come off interesting in the way I want to be interesting, which, turns out, isn’t very.
What I mean is when I tell people I am writing a Bernhardian novel and background my Zoom calls with Hollis Frampton stills, big whoop!
And don’t bother clicking this link to the Substack I have been squatting on for a year in case I absolutely must have thoughts on AI and publishing.
I am not going to ask where is the a****-g****? Is anybody trying to be a****-g****? We already know the answers, even if we do not know the particulars. Anyhow, it seems like by the time we know where or who, it is done for. As soon as the pitch is pitched it is over.
I don’t blame New York City. I don’t blame the cost of living there or the fascists and whatnot. I have never even been to New York City.
Maybe you know Cleveland or don’t. Maybe you have been here and didn’t notice. I am this way with Indiana.
I am here to tell you we have sure been up to some things around these parts.
“Maybe it’s an American thing to put yourself physically into the argument in your head—present yourself as an adventurer among the metaphors, so to speak.” This is from Sean Alan Cleary’s “The Uncanny Valley of America’s British Language,” wherein (mostly white) Americans’ perceptions of (mostly white) Britishness and the British language—here received pronunciation or RP, which is “essentially the BBC standardized language of the English middle and upper classes”—is discussed. Cleary writes, in part, from an as yet underrepresented perspective of a high school teacher, increasingly one of the vocations to which those who have not adjuncted themselves into oblivion flee (might I also suggest your local unionized public library?):
If you listen to what’s actually taught in most English classes, you’d be hard pressed to believe [a] claim of neutrality. Not because there’s so much propagandizing going on, but because at the core of literature teaching is the tenet that all representation contains a set of values either explicitly, or implicitly, held by its creator.
In “The Reader Will Not Be Saved: On Palestinian Poetry (in Translation),” Conor Bracken explores the motivations behind two recent collections from Palestinian poets Olivia Elias and Mosab Abu Toha and an American readership that wants “the right kind of palatable challenge to their aesthetic and intellectual views”:
But consider the following three things: 1) the flashy vein of voyeuristic gawking running through contemporary poetry […] 2) the way that poets from marginalized intersectional positions have been encouraged, through certain publishing and award systems and neoliberalism’s commodification of the atomized self and the marketing lure of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of the single story,” to present via poems certain kinds of experiences and perspectives that jibe with certain permitted subversions, but not too subversively or tangentially, lest the contracts and prize money and readers go away. And 3) the frequent positioning, by the translation and publishing market, that presents writers, poets, and experiences external to the typical US experience as both perfectly representative of the culture and time period from whence they hail, and as curiosities that allow US readers a window onto the different, the foreign, the oppressed and displaced so the reader’s worldly pity can be whetted and honed.”
Not dissimilar frustrations are present in Terry Nguyen’s review of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface:
Kuang seems more determined to establish June as a run-of-the-mill racist than to develop a character with a shred of complexity or moral conviction. The narration is littered with racial fumbles; every slight feels like a moral box for Kuang to check off. June mispronounces an Asian American writer’s name on a panel and cracks a pun when corrected. She thinks all old Asian women look alike. Even her well-intentioned comments come across as thinly-veiled microaggressions.
This is not a takedown. Rather, Nguyen (and, earlier this quarter, Alyvia Weigel, among others) writes without fear of being little-Anthony-Fremonted to a nearby cornfield in “what used to be Ohio.”
Bad books deserve this.
This is not to say nobody oughtn’t be excited—e.g. Hannah Bonner on Kate Zambreno’s The Light Room, and Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo on Christine Kwon’s A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue.
Because good books have deserves, too.
Same goes for publications.
Joseph Earl Thomas put out this call via essay for pieces relating to “game-world-literature(s)” that he’s guest-editing for CRB:
My hope for this call is to ordain all kinds of sloppiness, weak theories, hard arguments and amateurism, humor and counter-intuitiveness between the folds of doctorally educated precision on one hand, and my favorite blerds who know and play culture on the other, where the seams of these two cultures meet and diverge, meet, and diverge, untidily.
Myself, I see folks affixed to their consoles and wonder if this is the convergence we have been waiting for. There are no more so-called moments to live in, just “updates,” between which I am typing ideas for this “Quarter in Review” into a “Notes app” on this phone—my console.
I think about Ray Kurzweil downing hundreds of pills in hopes of positively altering his genes and outwitting the hereditary complications of his heart to live long enough to experience this convergence. I check for updates on whether Ray Kurzweil is alive or dead (alive). Suddenly, one utterly pointless Ray Kurzweil rabbit hole later (did you know he contributed dialogue to Canadian pop-rock band Our Lady Peace’s album Spiritual Machines, which is maybe their OK Computer, if a band like Our Lady Peace can even have an OK Computer, from that annoying period of pop music when everybody was trying to have their own OK Computer?), I am thirty-six years old and behind on writing this “Quarter in Review” and now I am a little bit panicked.
Note: use Ray Kurzweil to bridge this piece from Joseph Earl Thomas’ call to Leo Kim’s “When Technology Bleeds,” a work of speculative nonfiction that introduces the chimera as the necessary mascot for our future:
The chimera is a close descendent of the cyborg, albeit one born of a warmer climate. The chimera tries to reintroduce the idea of fleshy, warm-blooded life back into a cold, “frictionless” technoculture discourse, collapsing physis and techne. It isn’t a sterile, regulated body powered by nuclear fission and covered in steel, but a cancerous thing that can easily spiral out of our control like a rogue mutated cell, a necessary reminder of just how little control we actually have. It traffics in blood and guts and slime as much as it does in lithium and silicone—biological mediums that we must center if we are to make sense of the ecological transformations and catastrophes surrounding us. Amidst the death of the green world, the chimera gives us a body with the pulse of many hearts to guide us.
Note: still a little bit panicked, needing to get from “Bleeds” to Cobi Powell’s review of Gabriel Blackwell’s Doom Town.
Note: use a “Note:” (though you already used this move two or three paragraphs ago).
Note: Of course, some consider repetition and repeatability anti-a****-g****, while others consider repetition and repeatability mucho-a****-g****.
Note: what matters is at what point does something become tedious? derivative?
Note: and does this really matter, even?
Thinking again about Alyvia Weigel’s review of Alex Aster’s Lightlark and her observations on contemporary YA’s losing battle against its own tropes:
The best protagonists are more than the character traits they have been assigned; rather than being limited to their tropes, they change the story as much as the story changes them . . . To think that the only kind of protagonist young girls may get is . . . designed to be better than everyone (yet is still instilled with a false sense of humility to create the illusion of character flaws) is disheartening.
Weigel notes several references to the sun as being “yolky,” and yolk, seemingly, literally, falling out of the sun (“(???)”).
Which brings me to these small and whelming nostalgias I feel more of lately.
I spent a couple weeks this summer rereading the stuff I was reading ten years ago (“art school”).
From Lucy Corin’s “One Thing”: “Those two are alike as eggs, but one small, one big,” and, “They are walking into the future, into a great pink egg light.”
Says J—, when it is my turn to cook: “All you cook is eggs!”
From Corin’s “A More Practical Approach”: “He didn’t focus on the apocalypse because he couldn’t do anything about it, and when he looked around, there still appeared to be plenty of life happening.”
Still, recently experiencing actual and debilitating wildfire smoke, my eyes watering, my throat burning, my sinuses inflamed, I desired for the first time in a long time, stupidly, those cigarettes I used to smoke for no reason other than the star that appeared at the end of the filter.
Powell on the Blackwellian archetype:
[Doom Town’s] narrator has a remarkably similar voice and temper (and timbre) as the many other nameless narrators in Blackwell's recent fiction. They are verbose and digressive, aggrieved and affronted. They have a wife, also unnamed. They probably have a son, unnamed and conspicuously absent. They are struggling writers and teachers. It is tempting to regard these expressions of the central Blackwellian archetype as autofictive. And, if not autofictive, then at least as something cognizant of the impulse a reader in the early 2020s has for identifying moments of generic autofiction.
Powell on Blackwellian (not-) play:
“[P]lay,” a grad school term if there ever was one, implies release, a joyous buoyancy, an epiphenomenal evocation—but Blackwell’s narrators can’t escape the weight of referent. They are rived from the roomy comfort of the meditative, self-reflexive self and jammed back into the real, into the endless confrontation with tragedy and loss, and with failure in all its forms, personal and relational and professional and creative and paternal and spousal. The real is indifferent to whatever narratives you concoct as a guiding morality and is actively hostile to the idiosyncratic hermeneutical methods you devise for the sake of its analysis. This is not “play,” likely not even “work” or “labor.” This is instead toil.
There are not many writers like Gabriel Blackwell, but there are many writers who, like Gabriel Blackwell, remain under discussed, if at all they are discussed, despite their doing interesting stuff, innovative stuff, and despite, also, there are folks asking these certain questions I am not going to ask because we already know the answers.
Out of context, from Ellena Basada’s review of Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams’ Diego Garcia, a novel she says achieves the Beckettian eternal absence that is at once “specific” and “general”: “Stepping outside ourselves isn't the solution.”
Howard Fishman, interviewed by Olivia Lindsay Aylmer, on how his biography of Connie Converse evolved into a “weird hybrid”:
The first version of this book was a straight-up biography. No first person insertion at all. And I realized I couldn't tell the story that way, because there isn’t enough of the story to tell. There would be times when I would discover something magical and I would share that with the reader, but also there were times where I would hit a wall—I mean, there was nothing there—and then I had to share that with the reader, too.
Dong Li, interviewed by Daisuke Shen:
Sometimes it’s kind of important, [that] there’s an excess of nostalgia and longing, to find ways, to help yourself find ways to shape good thoughts and new experiences. The self is important—helping yourself express yourself in different ways, poetic or not, writing or not writing. In that sense, I never feel lonely because there are always things to do to engage yourself with.
From Aurelie Sheehan’s “Grain of Sand”:
I am writing a review of what I am writing as I write it. I am taking a stand outside of myself, like an insect watching. I am shivering with self-recognition. I am loud, even as I sit here alone in my room. I am nowhere else. I am here. The people I know scream. Everything is quiet and seductive. I can relax. I am seeking existence. I have nothing to say.
There are not many writers like Aurelie Sheehan either. She died in August. In “art school” a bunch of us solicited her for our little literary journal and she was generous enough to send us some of her dizzying and gorgeous “histories.” What a kick we all got out of this.
From one of them, called “Body of Water”:
Stream of smallness, of secrets, I remember when we were, I remember what I didn’t say, I remember what you said I said, I remember what you said, I always say what you say, I don’t remember what I said, you are a stream in me, you are stronger than—a little pebble wall, child’s things
I think I get it. Though I used to not have to try so hard to get it. I used to not have to keep looking back.
Such as, I keep misreading these preceding instances of the term “a****-g****” as “agnès-varda.”
Supposing maybe this is all anybody ought to be asking.
Where is Agnès Varda? Is anybody trying to be Agnès Varda?