I debated between this and Lucius' equally propulsive "Don't Just Sit There" (both of which are regulars on my longform running playlist). I went with "How Loud Your Heart Gets" because mine does get pretty loud, especially while running. Also, remember: "The things we know, we just don't know."
Can't wait for the new album to drop in March! In the meantime, I'll listen to their Tiny Desk concert at least once a week.
If you've never heard of Staten Island's Budos Band, think Iron Butterfly meets Rocky, at least on their latest album Burnt Offering. Pretty much the whole album is on my longform pathos-laden running playlist, but I'll just include the particularly creepy and badass title track here.
[And for a Staten Island double dose, step to 2DopeBoyz' mixtape The Wudos[!] Band.]
On a morning with a surplus of fresh snow, it just made sense to make some snow ice cream. My wife suggested we do something different, maybe pineapple ice, and my first thought was, with coconut milk, of course.
Pouring the pineapple juice into the snow, I immediately thought of Frank Zappa.
So, with his immortal inspiration, I present my recipe for The (Not-)Deadly(-at-All) Yellow Snow:
INGREDIENTS:
Snow
1 can of condensed coconut milk
Pineapple juice
A bit of vanilla
Some agave nectar to sweeten it a bit (you could probably use maple syrup, sugar, or whatever here, or nothing at all if you like it tart)
Mix it all up in a bowl, sucka.
(I'm just making this up as I go, so I don't yet have the measurements completely figured out, except that I used one can of coconut milk and molded the ingredients from there.)
It ends up looking pretty much like regular snow ice cream, so make sure to enjoy the yellow snow aspect, preferably while listening to Apostrophe in its entirety with children who get the humor, while making it.
My daughters found a robot toy on the way to school today, then afterschool ballet class was cancelled. So, naturally, we've spent our afterschool time so far today having the robot practice positions.
(NOTE: I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the positions. They undoubtedly lost something in translation from ballet teacher to six-year-old and three-year-old to robot.)
First Position
Second Position
Third Position
Fourth Position
Fifth Position
As my wife and I were processing Bowie's passing this morning, she said, "One thing: He never looked back. He was always moving forward, never resting on whatever he'd just done, on what people expected from him."
I can't help noting the irony that his songs that have been heaviest in my rotation for the past couple months are covers, both from Bruce's first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. I don't know what this means - probably nothing, but I find myself doing what I always do when an artist whose work I love dies: Going to work that's closest to me, and starting there toward an understanding that the artist's work is now complete, reflecting a voice silenced but not silent.
I think this might be The Year of Big Reading for me. My friend Michael, on finishing all of Proust, has decided to start a Moby Dick reading club, so I'm on board with that. And on my friend Baldur's recommendation I embarked on Karl Ove Knausgaard's epic 6-volume My Struggle over the past week. And according to this New Yorker piece by Joshua Rothman I really can't read Knausgaard without also reading Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan novel series, so I'm picking up the first volume of that this week. Along with essays and research for my own work, that should constitute my reading for the year.
Also, after resolving to get back into running form this time last year, I can now pronounce myself In Shape. So, this year I'm resolving to run at least 1,000 miles. A fairly modest goal, but I've never been a high mileage guy.
So what I'm saying is, If Melville, Knausgaard, Ferrante, and/or 1,000 miles are on any of your To Do (or Done) lists, we must talk profusely.
REDUX ON THE VOLUME AS TIME CAPSULE:
"As it turns out, technology is a major subject of most of the BAE introductions, particularly the latter years, and in many of our essayists’ responses to these anthologies, whether we’re lamenting the speed and shallowness of the culture and what that means for the sort of thinking that we seem to want to venerate, or whether it’s marveling at the quickness with which essays are now published and proliferate online, to write about time and the essay is to write about technology. If technology is a familiar subject for essays, more promising to me is the underwritten idea of the essay as technology, what exactly it does—what it used to do, what it still does, how it compresses and elides and sometimes seems to entirely stop time. And what it means for these yearly anthologies to encapsulate some little sample of the culture, no matter how flawed or weird or wack or idiosyncratic or limiting. Either way, some essays rise up and are preserved, remembered slightly better here."
ON FINDING AND READING IT SECONDHAND:
"You can almost always tell, when shopping secondhand, which books came from the same person; they get shelved together by inertia more often than not, and they're often the same vintage, or with similar aging patterns. One time at another Tucson thrift store, Savers, I bought nearly sixty poetry collections, many by former colleagues of mine at Arizona, books sadly out of print and often-enough forgotten, all from the same reader, obviously, maybe someone who gave up on poetry, or gave up on the poetry that people at Arizona wrote in the 1980s and 1990s. Inside one copy was a draft of a poem. I bought them all and read them. It's depressing mentioning this...
...
"Did the reader keep the others in the series and choose only these to weed? And why? Did they only have these nine and tire of them? Did they find themselves suddenly in their lives at a point with no use for essays, or the essays of yesterday? Did they get past thinking about considerations of Best? Did they just tire of keeping up with the series or the essay or contemporary writing? Or did they simply die and just have all their books donated without order or thought?...If I could I would have loved to have asked the reader (or reader’s surviving spouse or child or friend or passing stranger or bookseller recruited for the task) to reflect on the decision of this donation, to essay the occasion of donating these nine different years of Best American Essays this day to this Goodwill."
ON A DECLINED ARGUMENT:
"Then, too, there’s Annie Dillard, and while I’d love for this to be my opportunity to essay against Annie Dillard, a sea turtle crossed with National Public Radio, today is not that day; I kind of can’t get my anger (or my pleasure) up for this particular piece."
AND FINALLY, THE EPIPHANY AND SUMMATION:
"This was a thought I'd never had before reading [BAE 1999], but one that felt obvious to me now: essays are conversations. They're messages. We are speaking to one another, aren't we, even if the one to whom we speak is no longer alive. We're not just publishing these essays into the void.
...
"What I like is the opportunity for reflection that Advent offers us, and the rigor of the calendar. It’s a little chamber that we make here in this space on Essay Daily and ask you to skim off just a little of your consciousness as you graze by en route to the rest of your lives, and leave it here with us for a moment. We’ll take just ten percent of the processing time of the moments it takes you to engage with us. That’s the pleasure of essay (or of literature and art in general), isn’t it? That it takes us over for a little while? The more forceful the art, the more of us it occupies in the moment when we’re encountering it. The craftier the art, perhaps the less overt, but the more of itself it leaves behind."
As expected, the final advent gift by Editor Ander Monson is a real treat, and a great bookend to the series. Read the rest here!
ON ONE BAE CONTRIBUTOR:
"The worst I can say about Annie Dillard is that she is, more or less, a regular person. Or this might just be rumor?"
ON ONE BAE NOTABLE:
"Some people are destined for greatness, literary or otherwise, and some are stuck, forever, middling, where exactly? Here? Where is here? I don't know—it's not even on the fucking map. Fuck."
SPOILER: Annie's the Contributor, and Craig's the Notable. Read about their convergence here!
ON LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIPS:
"When I come to a book, I want very badly to love it deeply, to find myself enthralled and enraptured by it, to have new avenues of intimacy and perception opened within my mind, to come away ecstatic and electrified. If this is not possible, the next thing I want is to really fucking hate it, to be able to cast the book down in disgust and point at it with a baleful, imperious finger as I declaim that this shit right here is exactly what is wrong with essays/art/the academy/the world/etc etc etc. The Best American Essays 1997, edited by humorist Ian Frazier, denies me both of these experiences."
ON TITLES:
"...[I]t was difficult not to think of this collection as The Fourth State of Matter & Other Essays rather than as The Best American Essays of 1997."
ON ESSAYING VS. THE ESSAY:
"This is, I think, what we mean when we talk about essay-as-a-verb, when we talk about the mind of the author being consubstantial with the text (or however that damned Montaigne quote goes), what Ian Frazier meant in the introduction, when he talked about “the voice unspooling in the essay’s present time”. Those of us who write essays unspool ourselves in this weird, intimate, idiosyncratic sphere, and the best essays from BAE 97 tended to be the ones who directly owned up to that."
Read the rest (by Essay Daily's NEW MANAGING EDITOR!!!) here!
ON ATWAN:
"In the essay, Atwan has found a “durable” and capacious art, practice, map for a key trajectory of American literature, and corrective to what he sees as the strictures of writing and thinking in school."
"...[W]e increasingly appreciate him as a thinker who has worked hard to develop a high tolerance for his own uncertainty, especially about essays; at the same time, he holds himself accountable for trying to articulate his own ideas about essays as they deepen, become obsolete, or get replaced by better ones. At key moments—the most fruitful in these forewords—he highlights challenges we face as we try to read in ways that change us, write essays that cannot be graded by a machine, have ideas of our own, tell truths in nonfiction, and name touchstone qualities of essays so that we can learn from one another about them."
"For Atwan, cultivating better readers is a challenging task, but one that literary works—and essays as much as any—need in order to thrive, regardless of whether readers encounter those works in print or online. Some of the responsibility for teaching readers resides with authors and editors."
"If there can be people who are “true essayists,” there might be something called, “true essays,” although the kind of truth at stake here has nothing to do with verifiable events, or fact-checked episodes that essayists relate. This truth is about whether there is a genre that we can call “essay” and be relatively confident that we can communicate our understanding to others. Atwan returns repeatedly in this series to four qualities we can find in all essays that have lasted beyond their moment of composition: 1) they explore original ideas about specific topics; 2) they include the vivid presence of the writer who readers can discern and track; and 3) they incorporate moments of both self-awareness and skepticism primarily through reflection; and 4) they resist what Atwan calls “standardization” in content or form."
AND ON A MISPLACED DIALECTIC:
"The impulses of logos and eros need not be at odds with one another in essays, and, in fact, if an essayist hopes to make something lasting in her or his work, they cannot be."
This is a true Christmas feast in honor of perhaps the most important living advocate of the essay. Read the rest here!
...OR, MORE SPECIFICALLY, SUSAN STRAIGHT'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE VOLUME AND HER CONTINUING, NECESSARY CONTRIBUTION TO RACE RELATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES:
"I want to look at The Best American Essays 2011 by considering a single essay, but first, there’s another essay we need to discuss. Earlier this month, in the aftermath of the shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, The New York Times published a piece by Susan Straight, who lives ten miles from the site of the carnage, in Riverside.
...
"What I’m talking about is empathy, what I’m talking about is writing between the lines. What I’m talking about is framing everything through the filter of the human, both victims and perpetrators alike. For Straight, the key element is less terrorism than proximity; 'Wednesday,' she tells us, 'I watched as a mass shooting unfolded on the street where my mother had recent heart surgery, where yards and fences looked so familiar from the aerial view. A place I know.' The essay ends with her ex-husband, calling from a street in San Bernardino, where he is waiting to be picked up by his company’s van. 'I get scared,' he says. 'I wanted you to know where I was, in case I get shot. Out here, I never know. A black guy thinks I’m in a gang, a Latino guy thinks I’m in a gang, a cop thinks I did something. It could be a white guy who just doesn’t like me. … Then I get in the van and have to hear the radio turned to Rush Limbaugh, and I know he hates me.'"
"'Travels with My Ex' involves the same man, the same relationship, the same unspoken fears. After their daughter gets pulled over, Straight swings into action; 'My job,' she writes, 'is to be the short blond mom.' She approaches the officer, explains the family caravan. 'We’re on our way to the beach for a birthday party!' she chirps. 'Her dad and I didn’t want to get separated, ’cause we might never see each other again!' We’ve all been there: this move, or assertion of parental status, this stepping in to take care of our kids. But Straight is also walking directly into a minefield of race and privilege, which has ramifications beyond what is happening alongside the road. 'The little women,' she confides, 'hate when I do this. They imitate me viciously afterward. They hate that I have to do it and that I am good at it.' To help her kids, in other words, she has to bear the burden of their approbation, their disgrace."
...
"One of the requirements of essay writing is to bare these moments, to show our vulnerability and our shame. This, too, is part of the mechanism of empathy, the way it opens up a territory we all share. When I read such a passage—as when I read the expression of her ex-husband’s fear on that San Bernardino corner—I identify, even though this is not my experience. I identify because I have done the same thing for my children, presented the same face to authority, the same uncertain grin. This is what an essay does, uncovers the commonalities between us by revealing the specificity of the author’s life. The universal particular, let’s call it, as in: The more specific or particular an essay is, the more universal it becomes. I think of Straight, trying to make sense of the massacre in San Bernardino or trying to protect her daughter, and I see myself. In that act of revealing, she turns the mirror back on us."
And by the way, I just saw we have three bonus days of BAE advent after Christmas! In the words of Cousin Eddie Griswold, "Clark, that's the gift that keeps on givin'."
In case you missed or just want to listen to them all in order to, you know, get you in the Christmas spirit, I wrapped up all 12 More Days of Miserable Christmas songs in one nice little package in my Annotated Playlists. enjoy!
I might be fairly sporadic in my updates these next few days (Ho, ho, ho), but I'm planning on collecting all my pathos-laden running playlist from this year soon as well. Then I can proceed with my New Year's resolution to seem more happy to people who don't know me.
ON ANTHOLOGIES AS CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS:
"...[B]efore that day I had never heard of Louise Bogan—I a graduate student keenly interested in modernist poetry, she a modernist poet who rearranged the chemicals in my brain. I had taken courses in modernist poetry. Why hadn’t I heard of Bogan? The answer was simple—no one had included her on a syllabus. I realized that I knew only what I had been given to know, that there were specific hands and tastes and interests and blind spots and chemicals assembling what was put before me in anthologies and textbooks to document the writing of a period, of a genre, of history. So too, professors would choose what their classes would read and not read. There was nothing inevitable or impersonal about their selections. Books are made things, as are magazines and literary journals, and particular people determine what particular people to put inside them."
ON WOMEN (HERSELF INCLUDED) IN BAE:
"I undertook a survey to ascertain the counts of men and women authors chosen by the volume’s editor in each issue of the BAE series. The title of most lopsided arbiter falls to Stephen Jay Gould, who in 2002, among twenty-four essays, included four by women. 20:4. I’m sorry to report that his numbers are not outliers. I was surprised when I returned to the best of 1993 to find that Joseph Epstein included only five essays by women (17:5)—surprised because one of mine, “Hair,” made the cut. It hadn’t occurred to me to notice the number of women in the volume. Had I done so, I would have counted myself a rarified thing. This omission of thinking says something about me, that I was simply happy to make it against the odds. I’m not unique in this response. Women have too often accepted paltry representation, pleased to be represented at all."
ON CHERYL STRAYED AS CHEMIST AND CARTOGRAPHER:
"Strayed is notable for the range of sources in her volume, which is perhaps greater than that of any other BAE editor. She covers a spectrum of publications in all their wild variety, from standard-bearers like the New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, and Paris Review to the well-known literary journals River Teeth, The Sun, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Granta, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Normal School, and Hotel Amerika, and on to some relative newcomers. Strayed is expansive in her judgments—with one arm she embraces a seasoned pro like Alice Munro and with the other welcomes a newcomer like Vicki Weiqi Yang in South Loop Review, a little-known literary journal that has since gone defunct. She is sweeping in her tastes, giving us rapid glimpses of the terrain, like Camilla in Virgil or Pope. Rather than immersing us in the New Yorker style, she guides us across a literary region that she herself has constructed."
ON AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY:
"Why would anyone care about my birth or the birth of my daughter? I’m not a somebody, not a king or army captain with death on his hands. I am no statesman, haven’t invented a cure. I’m Shakespeare’s sister without a famous brother, more likely to be found at the side of the road than have roads named after me. Who would care about my origins, how I began or the story I tell my daughter about her birth? Birth is as common as dirt, as common as death. Bah to my matrilineage, this story of rewriting an old script—that’s blah!
"But this stopping, this lifting up of one’s head to ask whether what matters to me matters to anyone else must be worked through. If it isn’t, then silence. The working through, the doing battle with one’s place in the world, one’s voice, becomes part of the essay, the base line thrumming below what the essay is about."
Like many other Essay Daily advent gifts, this is just a really great essay. You should read the entire thing here, even after the holidays.
ON DFW AND TOTAL NOISE:
"...a triage of what he calls the Total Noise of American culture is exactly what Wallace has achieved in the 2007 anthology, where along with revelations of the now infamous doings at Abu Ghraib prison we hear about the sexualization of children, the abuse of nonhuman animals, the historical horrors of warfare, the widening gap between the very wealthy and the very needy, and the destruction of the planet to the point where the final essay in the volume, Edward O. Wilson’s beautiful 'Apocalypse Now,' sounds like a prayer: God help us."
This one definitely rankled me a bit, as it's a generally positive review of one of my least favorite BAE volumes and a gentle argument in favor of two pieces included in the anthology that I think are just not that good as nonfiction. But, in Blew's own words, "Oh, I won’t give it away! Read it yourself!"
ON ESSAY AS SLOW BURN:
"Surely, most of us can understand the difference between accessing a text and reading it, and the essay, with its flexible structure, nuanced language, and leisurely pace, is still the ideal form for slow reading."
...
"The essays chosen by these editors do not seem “dated” because the problems the writers tackled haven’t gone away (in fact, most are with us in a more serious way), and with that comes the need for even slower thinking, reading, writing, and understanding."
ON TEACHING THE ESSAY IN 2000:
"The essays I taught in 2000 are annotated in green ink. In class, I must have pointed out the writers’ strategies in story-telling and argumentation, the choices they made in style (my favorite sentences are underlined with a star next to them: I must have read them aloud in class), the evocative details they used, the sly way they managed to avoid going down narrative or ideological paths in which they might have gotten hopelessly lost, while still giving the impression that everything important has been covered. At least that’s what I assume from the notes. I can’t recall a single lesson I’d planned. I was afraid of my students because no matter what I said about the essays in the book or about the essays they wrote, no one ever seemed surprised. A few were clearly worried from time to time, but that’s not the same thing. I remember wishing that at least one student, just once or twice a semester, would allow herself or himself to appear naïve or clueless: that is to say, taken aback by some information or advice she or he didn’t already know.
...
"The culmination of the repeated journey isn’t control, sophistication, or mastery. In [Mary Gordon's] moment [in "Rome: The Visible City"] of joy, or grace, this narrator is overtaken by surprise. She is at once wise and clueless. That—I think—was what I wanted my students in 2000 to understand."
ON READING AS ETERNAL RETURN:
"Revisiting Gordon’s essay about revisiting Rome, re-reading Gass’s essay about re-reading his favorite books, I am taking a tour of my own past as well as the essays’. I can return to the pleasure of weaving and un-weaving the same cloth (the point of Penelope’s task, I remember, was NOT to finish)."
Breeds of Misery: Every one imaginable.
Best/Worst Verse: "Christmas is hell on earth, I know nothing worse than to be depressed and be told to be happy...Now I will say good-bye, no one will cry. Christmas goes on without me. My life is now complete, so I'll go to sleep, forever, and ever, and ever."
And now, for the season's Grand Finale...The Most. Miserable. Christmas. Song. EVER.
I just discovered the Vandals' Christmas album this year - it's perhaps the most miserable Christmas album ever, though most of the songs (like "A Gun for Christmas," or "Christmas Time for My Penis") are fairly light and jokey. Not this one: even after the song is over and the narrator has ostensibly performed the title act, you get a good two minutes of fadeout sound effects to ponder the lifeless body hanging from the symbol of everlasting life. This song probably fits into a budding subgenre a friend and I have been recently envisioning as mope porn, or maybe mopecore, notable for complete and willful immersion in the artful rendering of suffering and grief. I think this art form serves a valuable therapeutic function, especially around the holidays, of allowing a space for us to explore our darkest, most self-defeating impulses without acting on them. That, my friends, is my gift to you.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
(If this isn't enough yuletide misery for you, check out last year in my Annotated Playlists.)
ON THE ESSAY AS LEGIT LIT GENRE:
"This is, to my mind, a respectful description and an enthusiastic endorsement of the essay (at its best) as a legitimate form of literature—something all writers of creative/literary nonfiction aspire to. And I think it’s a truthful claim to say that, today, many essays and writers have achieved that status. Still, I want to remind readers that in the early 1990s, the genre was considered to be a literary stepchild of sorts."
ON GOOD STARTS:
"We all know what the landscape of literary/creative nonfiction looks like today: the wide-ranging diversity of works and writers, the growing number of blogs, online and print journals, writing contests, MFA programs, and small, independent presses that publish everything from experimental to traditional works of literary nonfiction. And some of those “notable” writers who, back then, I’d never heard of, are now among my closest teaching and writing colleagues. Plus, some are considered to be amongst our very best writers of literary/creative nonfiction."
Breeds of Misery: Wistful nostalgia, sincere and mature regret
Best/Worst Verse: "And I'm sitting, sitting on the top of the stairs and you're crying out on the towpath by the river with all the swans and all the people walking by. And all of a sudden I'm stuck with an urge to unlock a door with a key that's too big for my hands, and I drop it, and it falls at your feet. Come on, come on, it's there at your feet."
I can sincerely say that no song gets me closer to that sob lurking at the back of my throat than this one. I think of it almost like a Lydia Davis story - a few physical but not too specific images placed aligned with each other, collaborating for the sole purpose of breaking your damn heart. Almost every triplet stanza of this song is its own memory-world, open to each of us, there at our feet.
(If this isn't enough yuletide misery for you, check out last year in my Annotated Playlists.)
ON TIME AND THE OBVIOUS FOR AMERICAN ESSAYS WRITTEN IN 2001:
"This BAE edition is obsessed with time. Although each edition of the BAE is distinguished by its moment, this BAE seems more interest in pointing out the difference between the past and present. It seems intent on focusing on what has gone wrong in the now and what we have lost from the then. It is a collection of essays that, written in the year that the twin towers fell, are uncertain whether there will be a future, perhaps not even a present, we must eulogize the past."
ON TIME AND THE WORLD AFTER 2001:
"It’s not quite that terrorism has brought us together (there is no ‘us’ except in that they are also us) but that terrorism, or terror, wraps around the globe as warmly as carbon dioxide does."
ON BAE2002 AS BOOKMARK:
"The BAE doesn’t always function as a placeholder for the very year. It doesn’t always function as a slice of the American brain as featured on an MRI. But this edition marks a distinction between what was and what might be. Not knowing what might be, it hides under the covers of what once was.
...
"I wondered about not only the way this edition had been selected and organized but also how in 13 years, how I understood the essay differently, the 9/11 attacks differently, the importance of diversity differently. It’s a bit programmatic but still a glimpse, MRI-like, into a slice of this edition’s brain."
...And the second half: ANOTHER FOUND ESSAY CULLED FROM FAVORITE LINES!!! Read the whole thing here!
ON GAWKER VS. BAE2012 EDITOR DAVID BROOKS:
"I love reading the BAE series; each year’s edition sits wrapped under my Christmas tree, each essay within, its own nested gift. But I also love reading Gawker. The site brews my cynicism and outrage (the instant coffees of emotions) and inspires my inclinations towards social activism, while allowing me to remain entirely passive and procrastinatory. It seduces me and so this is my problem: Gawker really, really doesn’t like David Brooks. And so I’ve found, neither do I.
...
"But it also seems worth noting that the attributes on which the website most frequently wants to skewer Brooks—that he’s a bit of a gasbag who populates his writing with truisms and frames his social science with off-the-cuff stories instead of actual data—are the very qualities which we praise the essayist for possessing: the anecdotal, the digressive, the carefree lack of expertise.
...
"And in his analysis of the halcyon years of the mid-20th century American essay, Brooks notes 'the best essays…had lost the pomposity while retaining some grandeur and scope. They were rigorous without being narrow and academic. They were polemical without being partisan. They were countercultural without being sloppy. They were reckless but also learned.' Try aligning that—'countercultural without being sloppy'—with Gawker’s content, and you can score a point for Brooks."
ON THE ESSAYIST AS FRIEND:
"I love the idea of the essayist as friend and conversationalist dispensing anecdotal knowledge, and I love the essayist writing for a we, because after all a you is just trying to reach an I and we’re in this together. But sometimes I wonder what friendly conversationalists might hide. For the world also contains false friends and I grow suspicious of essays that pat me paternally on the shoulders and tell me they know what’s good for me. "
ON THE ESSAYIST AS LOVER:
"Here's Doty again: 'When you have a lot of sex, sex becomes increasingly less narrative.' If that’s true, why can’t it also be the case for when we have a lot of essays? "