Posts tagged with the rumpus
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![The Last Book I Loved: Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series from The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). This is the final installment of Tumblr Storyboard’s version, but you can still submit to The Rumpus for publication! Thanks for reading.
I came across a Facebook post recently in which someone offered W.B. Yeats’ poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as encouragement for a peer going through a quarter-life crisis. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats writes. It’s a feeling everyone has at some point, but for a twentysomething in the midst of an identity crisis, it sounded especially appropriate.
Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name.
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It was Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, not Yeats’ poem, that has been my totem throughout my 20s, because she has that gift that all great writers do of hitting on universal truths by admitting very personal ones. “One of the mixed blessings of being 20 and 21 and even 23 is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before,” she writes in “Goodbye to All That,” an essay about her time in New York in her 20s.
Reading that sentence for the first time at 21 and knowing, at some level, that she was right, was not nearly as comforting as realizing that there was an antidote to feeling young and confused — and that antidote was narrative. As Didion writes in another equally brilliant collection, The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life.
I don’t recall why I first picked it up, but I can still conjure up the musty smell of the paperback I borrowed from the University College London library and the jarring contrast of being engrossed in Didion’s 1950s New York during a train ride between London and Manchester.
Mostly, I remember how homesick I felt reading Didion’s take on the American dream at a time in my life when, living far away from home for the first time, I was finally figuring out my own national identity. The irony of this feeling is that Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t what you would call a “feel-good” read. Most of the essays are set in California in the 60s, some of them are reportage on Haight-Ashbury hippies and Howard Hughes, and others are personal reflections on Didion’s life in exile from a California that “resembles Eden,” where “it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished.”
Throughout the book, Didion is constantly shuttling between the coasts, back and forth from this promised land. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” in which Didion reports on a woman who murders her husband, she writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” California stands in for the American dream: Its streets are always paved with gold, but its promise is never attainable. Didion’s writing — and her whole concept of California — nonetheless operates on the premise that all things are possible, because they have to be:
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
But Didion’s California (and New York, for that matter) is a promise that never delivers, which she nonetheless can’t seem to give it up. She admits, “Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.” I understood that differently upon first reading it in England — during a semester abroad in which all time was suspended for me and all post-graduate futures infinitely possible — than I do during my fourth year of racking up frequent flier miles on the US Airways shuttle between DC and Boston.
It’s a romantic point of view to hold when you come from a place that makes you feel exiled for living outside it, and in that sense my hometown of Boston and Didion’s Sacramento have much in common.
Mostly, I keep reading and rereading these essays because Joan Didion is a writer’s writer. In the spirit of her declaration in “Goodbye to All That,” I have to imagine that there are many other twentysomething writers out there with dog-eared copies of this book, but since I haven’t met them yet, I continued to think I was the only one for years after I discovered her. More recently, I have taken to recommending her to anyone whose literary taste I’m trying to judge. I lent a friend my copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem once with the earnest warning, “If you don’t read this, we can’t be friends,” and during the months while I waited for him to return it, I sometimes worried that I would have to cut him off.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place or sense of time or sense of self. It’s for “the quiet ones” that people always tell you to beware. Didion is all of these things, but especially the last:
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
It’s easy to forget that line in the preface once the essays about Charles Manson and John Wayne give way to more personal ones about Didion’s relationship with her hometown and her grapples with self-esteem. It’s easy to think instead that the stories she tells of her struggles with depression are unvarnished, but at some point you have to ask: Why is this self-proclaimed shy, aloof reporter spilling so many of her secrets?
Her power to mythologize is so great that it must extend even to the stories she tells of her own life. Early in “Goodbye to All That,” Didion writes, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” But by writing years later, she already knows the ending; she alone controls the narrative. In life, sure, it’s easy to concede that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” but writing is different from life, and the contrast between the two in Slouching Towards Bethlehem makes the former a much more appealing occupation.
— Kara Hadge](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d116063cbe56c089cf4fc7d577efe4fd/tumblr_mklejntVhV1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series from The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). This is the final installment of Tumblr Storyboard’s version, but you can still submit to The Rumpus for publication! Thanks for reading.
I came across a Facebook post recently in which someone offered W.B. Yeats’ poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as encouragement for a peer going through a quarter-life crisis. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats writes. It’s a feeling everyone has at some point, but for a twentysomething in the midst of an identity crisis, it sounded especially appropriate.
Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name.
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![The Last Book I Loved: ‘The Unnamed’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
When you go to the website for Joshua Ferris’s 2010 novel, The Unnamed, your screen fills with static for a second. Then it resolves into a grainy gray video of the main hall of Grand Central Terminal, like security camera footage, commuters walking to and from their trains. And then fuzzy blue circles appear over a handful of heads. When you click on one, the video pauses, and a small text bubble comes up. One says, “I look around, I wonder if I’m just sick.” Another quotes a poem by Percy Shelley. “Art thou pale for weariness / Of climbing heaven and gazing on earth/Wandering companionless / Among the stars that have a different birth.” They feel like a little of what each person has inside them, a bit of story or sorrow they keep inside themselves.
This is what Joshua Ferris’s work is — a song of this secret world. He writes about the isolation of modern life, our disconnect from the world at large and from the people around us. And he writes of the small, beautiful hopes of connection — through love, through hope, through body-breaking exertions.
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The Unnamed is about a man named Tim who cannot stop walking. Tim comes home to Connecticut one night from his job at a high-powered New York law firm and tells his wife, simply, “It’s back.” She bundles him in winter gear, packs a bag with provisions and a GPS. She finally falls asleep in the middle of the night and wakes up to find Tim gone, walked out of the house to who knows where. In the grips of this condition he is driven to walk, for hours on end, stopping only when he collapses, exhausted. No one knows why. No one has a cure.
Is it a metaphor? Maybe. Is it a conceit? Sure. But it’s a starting place. Every story has to start somewhere, and Tim’s starts with “It’s back.” For the first dozen or so pages, you don’t even know what “it” is, and the suspense builds like really good sci-fi: something is wrong, and you don’t know what. Ferris takes this conceit and builds a full, rich story about it. All of the rules — as in the best sci-fi — hold tight. All of the repercussions feel deep and true to the human heart.
Tim has a wife, Jane, and they have a daughter named Becka. Tim’s condition ravages his life, but their lives are intertwined, and so it ravages them all. Becka reads her father stories while he’s handcuffed to the bed. Jane picks him up from parking lots and police stations and curbsides, and waits for the next call when he’s gone. She worries the call will never come.
Tim is at war with his body; his legs that won’t listen. Walking forces him to shed his attachment to his career, to comfort, to any sense of plan or control. Walking takes him out into the world, first within a radius of a seven or eight hour walk from his office or his home, but then farther afield. He is completely alone. All around him, the world is falling apart.
Tim’s world is a world frighteningly like ours, with superstorms and deep snow. The winters are too cold, the summers are filled with droughts, fires, and floods. A carpet of dead bees covers Madison Square Park. Birds fall out of the sky. The great cracks in the rightness of the world hover in the background of Tim’s life — just as they do in ours. Maybe Tim’s story is set just a couple of years into our future. Maybe that’s what our world is really going to be.
The real reason I loved this book is that this world — Tim’s condition, the ailing planet — is just the backdrop of the heart of Ferris’s story to nestle into.
Little bits of The Unnamed are stuck in my head. A man clinging to a telephone pole in a flood. A daughter and her father on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A sense of loss. A sense of isolation. A sense of love. For all its desolation, for all its characters’ helplessness, it’s a hopeful book. Because even when they can’t connect, can’t reach each other’s inner world, they try. They valiantly, desperately try.
— Jaime Green](http://24.media.tumblr.com/679563333403fa24080947b49b966176/tumblr_mkeoupnM6M1rrpm57o1_r2_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: ‘The Unnamed’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
When you go to the website for Joshua Ferris’s 2010 novel, The Unnamed, your screen fills with static for a second. Then it resolves into a grainy gray video of the main hall of Grand Central Terminal, like security camera footage, commuters walking to and from their trains. And then fuzzy blue circles appear over a handful of heads. When you click on one, the video pauses, and a small text bubble comes up. One says, “I look around, I wonder if I’m just sick.” Another quotes a poem by Percy Shelley. “Art thou pale for weariness / Of climbing heaven and gazing on earth/Wandering companionless / Among the stars that have a different birth.” They feel like a little of what each person has inside them, a bit of story or sorrow they keep inside themselves.
This is what Joshua Ferris’s work is — a song of this secret world. He writes about the isolation of modern life, our disconnect from the world at large and from the people around us. And he writes of the small, beautiful hopes of connection — through love, through hope, through body-breaking exertions.
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![The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Ernest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers — especially once-famous, forgotten ones. It took me a long time to get around to reading it, though, mainly because the back cover blurbs and reviews I read didn’t do justice to the one thing that made me love this book: Dawn Powell’s writing is so damn mean.
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A Time to Be Born takes place in New York City, in the world of journalism, in the months preceding the United States’ entry into World War II. Imagine being there: the outfits, the music, the atmosphere, the sense of foreboding, the knowledge that something big is going to happen, that we’re going to war.
Vicky Haven, a clever but self-conscious girl from Lakeville, Ohio, has had no luck in love so far. After her fiancée ran off to marry her business associate, Vicky is utterly dejected. Her best friend seeks out on her behalf the help of Amanda Keeler, a former school friend who made it big in New York — now known as Amanda Keeler Evans, after she married the biggest press mogul of the day. Amanda, said to be modeled after writer and politician Clare Booth Luce, is the archetype of the cold, beautiful, manipulative woman. This is why I love her.
In many ways, Amanda is the ideal villainess. She doesn’t own up to her modest Ohio upbringing, inventing instead a sheltered education in Europe. She shuns physical contact — she doesn’t like sex, which allows her to use it. Her awareness of her beauty helps her barter for whatever she needs. She is so un-feminist (is that a word?) that she actively hates and despises other women, their weaknesses, their mannerisms; she thinks she is the exceptional woman, the special snowflake.
And yet, despite all of Amanda’s faults, Dawn Powell still manages to make her completely, frighteningly human. Amanda is a villain, sure, but the author makes her so true to life and brushes such a brilliant portrait that I understood every one of her actions. More than once I caught myself thinking “Okay, I could do that.”
And it is not just Amanda. Every single one of the characters, primary and secondary, has this in common with the others: none are likable, but all are relatable. From the personal secretary who is sick of not getting her fair share of recognition, to the cynical, superficial bourgeois family obsessed with famous acquaintances, I understood them all. Some of them are horrible without even meaning any harm to anyone.
To me, Dawn Powell’s characters are as good as most from Balzac or Flaubert, without the annoying misogynistic, deterministic bullcrap. There, I said it. Powell does not have an agenda, such as proving that women are stupid by inventing a stupid character and pretending it was drawn only from observation. I found Powell’s writing style flawless: precise, never gushing. She shifts from one character’s point of view to the next seamlessly, allowing her well-constructed plot to slowly unfold. Some people have found A Time to Be Born funny, and I guess it is, in a laughing-to-keep-from-crying way. Others seem to be under the impression that Powell’s books are only a thinly veiled criticism of the famous New York writers of her time, but to me it is much more than that. Yes, they are timeless, but that’s not what I mean. They are also a study of the self-centeredness, the boundless selfishness of human beings, especially wealthy, famous ones — a study of the lengths people will go to, and the desperation they will fall into, when they are not able to think of anyone but themselves.
As I reread this last paragraph, I realize it sounds dismal, but this book really isn’t. For one thing, I can always find reassurance for my own little ego: “But I am not like those characters. Not me.” This mantra is what allows me to read about awful people, feel awful for a while, and then go on with my life. For another, what shines through most in all this book’s bleakness is Dawn Powell’s genius. As an aspiring writer, I know I’ve found yet another great novelist to look up to.
— Jade Marin](http://25.media.tumblr.com/ed3c3226aabb26c812d6ee1cc7d10a35/tumblr_mjpgugDIuD1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Ernest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers — especially once-famous, forgotten ones. It took me a long time to get around to reading it, though, mainly because the back cover blurbs and reviews I read didn’t do justice to the one thing that made me love this book: Dawn Powell’s writing is so damn mean.
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![The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down because the paper creases so hard it that it might as well be perforated. Dog-ear it in the opposite direction and the corner comes off entirely. The print is small and dense; and it is a 2,400 year old account of a war that gets no press. It’s not sexy like the Fall of Troy, not Homerically epic. The gods don’t factor in. The content is almost as hard to love as the way I remember myself when the book first came to me.
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I was in eighth grade and my favorite aunt and uncle were moving to a new home. They were young — my aunt Patty is 18 years younger than my father, only eleven years older than I am, and she was everything that I thought was good and exciting in this world. She introduced me to Bon Jovi, and her boyfriend, who would later become my favorite uncle Shawn, had hair as long as hers. He played the drums and loved KISS, and though I never really liked KISS, I started playing the drums because of him. What made them so magnetic, though, was that they took me seriously, always. They took me seriously enough that when they were moving, Shawn opened up his boxes of college textbooks and pulled out a few he thought I would like. One was Thucydides. I don’t remember the others, but I remember that I was the kind of young person an adult (a really groovy adult) thought would like this book. Which is to say I was a grandiose, pretentious little shit. My one defense, perhaps, was that I did actually read the Impressive Books I carried around. If I was pretentious, at least I tried to be an authentic kind of pretentious. I don’t know that I read them well, but read them I did — except Thucydides.
Even at the height of my Homer fanaticism, I don’t remember even opening this book, or even looking at the table of contents. That was 17 years ago.Three degrees. Four moves to four different states. In all of that time, I’ve done nothing more with Thucydides than shelve and unshelve it, box and unbox. Better, more well-loved books have been given away in all of those moves. It’s not even that it has sentimental value — Shawn likely doesn’t even remember that I have it. I don’t think we ever had a conversation about anything approaching the topic, either. I’ve thrown away their wedding card (and everyone else’s). Why keep this book?
The only answer I can think of is that this book was a gauntlet. It’s not that anyone threw it at my feet in challenge, but there it was, the unread reminder, until this past summer.
I was having a conversation on Twitter with a person who I have never actually met, but whose writing I admire and who I like all out of proportion to how much we actually know each other (basically not at all). He brought up The Peloponnesian Waras a personal favorite. All day every day I see people online praising and recommending books, and sometimes I read them but more often I don’t. I’m not sure what about this conversation actually made me pick up Thucydides, but I did. What I found was a strange and most welcome kind of company. It isn’t that Thucydides’ writing (albeit in translation) had anything in common with my own, but (odd as it seems) he sounds like people I know. The sentences are dry and acerbic and often palpably exasperated. In commenting on the Trojan War, Thucydides writes,
[T]here is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that had ever taken place. It is equally true that it was not on the scale of what is done in modern warfare. It is questionable whether we can have complete confidence in Homer’s figures, which, since he was a poet, were probably exaggerated.
Fucking poets (and so say many of us, particularly as we understand that, for Thucydides, the “poet” was anyone involved in the creation of story — whether it was song or play or fireside tale). I am reminded of the person who recommended the book to me, whose incredibly low threshold for bullshit is something I frankly envy. I am reminded of my graduate school friend Patrick, who was cynical, impatient, and incredibly brusque, and also one of the most intelligent, most secretly kind people I’ve ever met.
I love this book for what feel like the wrong reasons. I am used to loving books for their story or their language or the very construction of their sentences — something that says content in one way or another. But I have to admit to only the most passing interest in the matter of the Peloponnesian War. The pretentious eighth grader in me is gratified to know a bit more about it, to say “look at this knowledge I now have,” but the rest of me is often bored by the minutiae of negotiations as Thucydides relates them, and relate them he does. The book contains set speeches, the terms of treaties — as one expects a solid history to do. But there’s also a lot of commentary on the process, on the state of humanity, and Thucydides asks the same questions we are still asking. Thucydides shakes the same crotchety finger I shake at my composition students:
In investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way — even when these stories concern their own native countries … Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
And yet, Thucydides is no particularly objective recorder. In discussing his methods for relaying those speeches, he writes,
I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.
Thucydides faces the creative nonfiction writer’s dilemma but demonstrates not the slightest bit of doubt in approaching it. He has found his solution to his own satisfaction, and he pushes on, recreating long verbal missives from one camp to another, from one tyrant to the next. It is impossible to read forward with complete academic confidence, then — he confesses to taking liberties not three paragraphs beyond the imprecation to never take anything at face value. But he admits to the taking of liberties, and the prose is so emphatic, so certain. I seldom feel so convinced by myself. I wedge my fingertips between the pages and believe in osmosis.
The translator’s note in my edition, written by Rex Warner, begins, “It is difficult, pleasurable, and bold to attempt to translate Thucydides into English.” Warner’s note explores the doubt that underwrites translation as a whole, the knowledge that something will inevitably be lost in the process, but also that there is so much to be gained from the task. Warner nearly apologizes for his work, but he seems unable to keep himself from attempting the challenge of Thucydides. I like to believe that that’s what my uncle Shawn was thinking when he gave such a book to an adolescent: in reading it well before I was of an age or an experience to understand more than simply the words and events, something would inevitably be lost, if I ever even read it. Reading Thucydides would be difficult, but maybe I would feel bold in doing so, and either in the content or the undertaking, I might find something pleasurable.
I didn’t read it then, and having read it now, I don’t feel bold. The reading was difficult — I couldn’t let my attention lapse for a sentence or two, couldn’t skim if I wanted to know the fullness of the events. I did lapse, though. I did skim. Ultimately, I didn’t care as much as I wanted to about the debate at Camarina. But in Thucydides’s tone, in his interrogation of uncertain facts and his assertion of his own reconstructions, in the way the act of reading re-tied me to people — no matter how little-known or now-distant — there was familiarity and connection, and I can think of no greater pleasure.
— Holly M. Wendt](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8f58b77a94cf012daa9fd5791df4a596/tumblr_mjb78zK0d21rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down because the paper creases so hard it that it might as well be perforated. Dog-ear it in the opposite direction and the corner comes off entirely. The print is small and dense; and it is a 2,400 year old account of a war that gets no press. It’s not sexy like the Fall of Troy, not Homerically epic. The gods don’t factor in. The content is almost as hard to love as the way I remember myself when the book first came to me.
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![The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents. I don’t think it would be inappropriate to place the collection in the horror genre, if only to align it with my own desires and my love affair with horror movies. But the book certainly contains enough blood, guts, and magic to earn a place there.
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The stories are set in a world twisted by the end of days, a skewed place filled with darkness, terror, and danger. Instead of focusing on the cataclysm of the world, the book turns our attention to stories narrated by 26 different fathers struggling to raise children and create families against the backdrop of a doomed planet amidst environmental chaos. The setting gives way to imperfect fathers and kids that are born inhuman, some physically — sons born covered in fur, daughters that resemble sirens — some otherwise. The combination unglues the modern sense of parental love and authority and shows that there really is no set paradigm for raising a family.
The book is molded by Matt Bell’s writing, which is at once sad, beautiful, darkly funny, and refreshing. Bell is so steady and deliberate in the physicality of his prose that I found myself rereading passages aloud multiple times to feel the weight of each word. There is purpose and intent behind the brittle fur, the bones poking through skin, the thick clots of blood and flesh, the tears staining parents’ faces. His deeply unsettling characters feel real and sympathetic. The setting, despite its supernatural tendencies, feels wholly natural.
Parenthood is in the foreground of the blood, the dirt-borne daughters, the flesh-hungry children. The book asks questions that feel oddly universal: How do you survive and take care of your children when the world is undergoing such rapid change and chaos? How do you maintain traditional familial roles when the children you see as flawed are merely an evolving present tense, a natural part of a future that you can’t stop? What makes a “good father”?
I’ve been asking myself similar questions about fatherhood, not because I plan to be a father soon but because of how I see my father now. I see the age, the wrinkles, the years in which he would never know me, and his attempts to know me now when it feels too late. Our relationship is complicated at best. His time away from home when I was young and his rigid Korean traditions that, at times, border on xenophobia have kept him at a constant distance. Even in my adulthood, I have this inherent feeling that I will never quite match up to his expectations, and I ask myself why I need to.
I remember in kindergarten, my school had a celebration for Father’s Day. You bring your father to school — when really he’s the one bringing you — and they have a big party with food and activities. They did the same for mothers on Mother’s Day. I remember a picture of my mother and me painting a spin art piece. A sheet of stiff cardstock spinning like a record. My mother and I squeezing bits of paint onto it. I wanted so many colors until they all mixed into a muddy brown with orange and red streaks. My father and I never made it, but I remember the intention, the want for it.
We showered together that day. I think I said something or did something or was a bad son, enough to annoy him. “If you don’t want to go, we don’t have to go,” he said in the shower. He turned off the water. He dried off. He left the bathroom and turned off the light. I sat in the tub, cold. I think I cried, but I couldn’t tell with the water still on me, dripping from my hair. I knew when I stepped out that I would have to confront … something, that something bad would happen, so I stayed in the tub. I think I sat there for half an hour, naked and shaking. I remember the crack on the hinged side of the door closest to me, the white light streaming in on the other. I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t know what my father said. I know he didn’t come back for me. I know there are no pictures or spin art. I stood and trembled and dried off.
My favorite story in Cataclysm Baby is “Justina, Justine, Justise.” A man is put to trial for his adulterous crimes by his three blind daughters. They amputate his thumb, then his hand. He seeks consolation from the one daughter who defended him. “She meets my apologies with a slap, squirms free. She says, Don’t think I’m still daddy’s little girl. She says, I only defended you because no one else would. She says, In justice, we are divided, but in punishment, we are one.”
I understand their judgment, not from the perspective of the unfaithful father, but as one of the daughters, as the persecutor, the judge, the jury. I think about kindergarten and the years that followed when my father was a distant, intimidating figure, but I sympathize with the father in the story — in all the stories, really — and the pain he endures. I know the looks I give my father, the silent criticisms, the hurt he feels, and the life he missed in order to support his family. As I write this, I realize that I’m not as angry at my father as I’d thought. I am disappointed and scared of the person I’ve become and the good son I never truly was, and I am sad for the father I never truly knew. I don’t know if we will have a happy end, but Cataclysm Baby gives me hope that, even in the midst of apocalypse, there is still time to forgive, embrace, and build up from the dirt.
— Alvin Park](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d194d756c523ec2259439222b366f2ed/tumblr_mixxmpYWUN1rrpm57o1_r1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents. I don’t think it would be inappropriate to place the collection in the horror genre, if only to align it with my own desires and my love affair with horror movies. But the book certainly contains enough blood, guts, and magic to earn a place there.
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![The Last Book I Loved: The Dream Songs
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain — not even to myself. One signpost of great art, it seems to me, is that the meaning of its greatness shifts in relation to the reader over time, and my appreciation of The Dream Songs has deepened and evolved — as I expect it will to continue to for the rest of my life — in the two decades since it first came to my attention.
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In my twenties I knew that Berryman was, like me, an alcoholic, and that he committed suicide in Minneapolis in 1972, and being at an age susceptible to the romantic myth of the doomed, hard-drinking mystic, the messy glamour of the dissolute — before I came to know (that is, in real terms, hard terms, blood terms) the cost of that myth — I was intrigued. I knew too that he was considered a brilliant and impenetrable poet, an impression that was confirmed by my first casual glance into an edition of 77 Dream Songs on the shelf of my boss’s office in Cambridge.
These were not like other poems: Within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses. The whole thing was messy, hallucinatory, and impossible to resist. It was theExile on Main Street of poetry, and I was hooked.
As the shadows over my own life lengthened, scattered phrases accrued talismanic power. “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back,” begins number 45; then, “I’m too alone. I see no end” and “Lightning fell silent where the Devil knelt.” “Hell talkt my brain awake,” says Henry, the mysterious semi-protagonist, at one point, and it seemed as fit a phrase for my existence — insomniac, deeply unhappy — as any. Safely on the other side of life again at age 32, I was given for my birthday, by my parents, a very nearly mint-condition first edition of the complete cycle: the celebrated Farrar Straus hardcover from 1968, featuring Charles Skaggs’s bold white-pink-and-green typography. The interior design, which follows the template set by the brilliant Guy Fleming for the original 1964 edition of 77 Dream Songs, is austere and beautiful, with that slightly antique feel of openness and clarity that seems particular to book design of that era. (Someday I would like an expert in the history of typography to explain to me how this is so). I have it in front of me now, paging through it as I try to capture, clumsily, the strange beauty of this half-understood work, to anatomize its appeal.
The Dream Songs collectively is many things: a record of a consciousness, a song cycle, an ongoing formalist experiment, a journal of an imaginary insanity, a high-modernist word collage, and an elegy for a generation of poets. The work as a whole is death-haunted, with each successive passing of another poet or peer — Jarrell, Roethke, Schwartz, Williams — bringing a yearning elegy, grave and often touching, as the poet bends his soul towards the haven that they have found and that he will gain only through force of self-violence. As the songs pile up and the years pass the prosody becomes starker, cleaner, marginally more transparent, yet somehow purer in its despair: the world’s longest and most eloquent suicide note. There is also an engagingly quotidian quality to the work, as in a journal: occasional mentions of the outside world, of presidents, the Cold War, the Congo, Vietnam, peek through the whirling kaleidoscope of the poet / narrator’s brain, like a slideshow of the darkening sixties playing in an adjacent room. Other songs seem to hint acidly at the growing professional and academic demands of Berryman’s career. All of this is filtered through a blurry, argumentative stream of voices that is extremely difficult to decode, Berryman’s own note — Henry is “not the poet, not me” — being of limited assistance in the matter.
Better minds than mine have tried to identify a consistent schema of speakerly identification for the Songs, which seem to be narrated from a kind of shifting first-and-a-half-person, the half-person being the poet’s unseen companion, who addresses him as “Mr. Bones” in the rhythms of a not entirely convincing African-American patois, and who may be a schizophrenic counterpart of the narrator and/or Henry. What is to my mind undeniable about the poems is the sense of mystery, of the uncanny, of a shifting, fully inhabited interior consciousness, however opaque or inaccessible, that they convey. Not everyone agrees: the great postwar critic M. L. Rosenthal, for one, thought that The Dream Songs was a step backwards for Berryman, calling it “work we must forage (in) too much on our own.”
It’s an interesting word, “forage,” and apt, for to my mind, a mental “foraging” is in fact the primary experience of reading, especially work so dense and demanding as Berryman’s. And the fruits of my expeditions into the verbal thickets left behind by this brilliant, sad, unlucky, intense man, are a paradoxically heightened sense of freedom and gratitude, an attentiveness to the air and light around me, the twinkling of the city at night, a hunger for “tasting all the secret bits of life.”
— Michael Lindgren](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7e8242f36abb1715ceec6b44e7559fe3/tumblr_mi9q25U6OL1rrpm57o1_500.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: The Dream Songs
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain — not even to myself. One signpost of great art, it seems to me, is that the meaning of its greatness shifts in relation to the reader over time, and my appreciation of The Dream Songs has deepened and evolved — as I expect it will to continue to for the rest of my life — in the two decades since it first came to my attention.
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