The Old Lady Pipes Up

Hey Everyone,

First off, glad to be up and started on this.

Second, I'm such a novice that it took me about ten minutes to figure out how to create a new post, and I only read the comments two seconds ago. But the perfect is the enemy of the done, right?

But so anyway. Seth, your post got me thinking better about some things that have been milling around in my head. I’ve been reading As I Lay Dying lately, very slowly, and it’s my first Faulkner (I know, slap my wrist with a ruler). I agree that there’s something exhilerating about the mess and the fog, and then passages like this one come out:

“When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal.

“And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get back up and go to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could maybe see a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older.”

Holy shit. I’m sure a good thesis could be written about the water bucket serving as a portal for Darl’s perception to attain a celestial narrative outlook, or something, but I just feel the world up to my gums when he says, ‘Water should never be drunk from metal.’ That’s true—metal cups set your teeth on edge.

Frankly, all the stuff about transporting matriarchs across rivers and having logs rise like Jesus Christ out of the water and smashing wagons and boys burning down barns is great, but give me passages like the above and I am thrilled to the soles of my feet, and also sustained in an important way. This writing is so good but purposefully small, I think.

So I haven’t read All the Sad Young Literary Men, but I know what you mean about flawless frigid writing. It doesn’t make you want to sing your own song, it makes you want to have every clause airtight so no one can criticize your erudition or technique or whatever. And I don’t know whether Gessen is a victim of his own critique or explodes the idea of adversarial (hoo, hah, phew, he’s exhausted me already).

But I want to say that the remedy doesn’t have to be the big smoking crashing (baggy) monsters, but just RISK, no matter where it comes from.

No question, I’m a crashing monster fan. Moby Dick, Brothers Karamozov, Iliad, Infinite Jest; sign me up and call me an ostentatious goober. But these days I need books to help me against blandness and oblivion, and so short, risky, intensely felt stuff feels very important to me.

I know everyone’s tired of the name, but I’m putting Chekhov up there, and Marilynne Robinson, John Cheever, Wells Tower, Amy Hempel, Nicholson Baker, and (insert your favorite lyrical poet’s name here).

This work calls out, ‘pay attention to the details as though your life depends on it, because it does.’ Reading this intensely meditative stuff sharpens up your eyes in a world that gets dangerously bland when your eyes get dull. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about our epic talk in the Saturn, but I know it had something to do with sensing things as keenly as possible.

And then making this kind of work, getting down into the grain of the words and shaving them into shape, creating people out of ladders of molecules, that’s a big deal. And it doesn’t have to be long or messy to get over the walls that separate people’s minds, it just has to be strange.

We can have quiet conversations at dinner parties instead of sword fighting in the streets of Saint Petersburg and still be engaged in the most important and riskiest of tasks. Writing about drinking from a cedar bucket is a big risk. I don’t know if I would take it.

And now it seems like my next book should be some Bolaño. I need some insides turned out, I think.