I’m not particularly drawn to biographies, and certainly not music biographies, but I make exceptions for Elvis. I was also swayed because I have heard Peter Guralnick’s books praised many times. Most satisfying about Last Train to Memphis, volume one of Guralnick’s two volume biography of Elvis Presley, was Guralnick’s ability to humanize his subject. The persona of Elvis, years after his death, is such a caricature, even a joke, that it can be hard to remember that there was a real, living, breathing person named Elvis Presley. The book contained what were, for me, some fantastic revelations. For one, Elvis was nearly done in when he was a youngster, not by the difficulties of his quest for fame, but by the swiftness with which it arrived. In a year’s time, he went from being a nobody to being one of the most recognizable faces in the country, a man whose presence literally caused riots whenever he appeared in public. For Elvis, it was a major struggle simply to adjust to this new life. Television documentaries and magazine articles often mention in passing that Elvis’ music and persona caused quite a stir, moral outrage even, when he appeared on the scene in the 1950s. Such stories sound quaint and exaggerated in this day and age, but with the context provided by Guralnick, I was able to see how groundbreaking Elvis really was, both musically and socially. Finally, I was enthralled by Guralnick’s portraits of Elvis’ supporting cast, quirky characters like Elvis’ mother Gladys, his manager Colonel Tom Parker, and the guy who gave him his first big break, Sam Phillips. The book rekindled my love, as it surely will rekindle yours, for the early days of rock and roll, and it left me with a serious hankering to read volume two of the biography, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley sometime real soon.
A Review of Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick
All This Hyperconscious Bad Faith: Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ‘The Dream of My Return’
If he could get healthy, and stop drinking, he might find a girl with a sweet ass, like his wife.
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Occupy Parnassus!: Kirill Medvedev’s ‘It’s No Good’
1.
In the fall of 2011, as the first protesters began assembling in Zuccotti Park, a different sort of occupation was underway in my apartment. My son had just turned one, and another kid was due in the spring. My life now consisted largely of early-morning adjunct gigs, late-night sessions banging my head against the writing desk, and afternoons measured out in the tiny spoons used to scrape the last bits of Gerber from the jar. Also: NPR. Lots of NPR.
By late September, the top of each hour brought new details about the methods and motives of “Occupy Wall Street.” Here, it seemed, was the cause I’d spent my twenties longing to throw my body behind. But now that it had materialized, there was a catch: mine was no longer the only body I was responsible for. I could take my son with me to the demonstrations, but did I really trust the NYPD to lay off the pepper spray, should he rattle the bars of our protest pen?
Plus who would take care of him if I got carted off to jail? Not his mother, whose nine-to-five job was our primary means of keeping the fridge stocked and the rent paid, and whose sick days would convert to precious maternity leave come the spring. There was always daycare, of course…but, then, as a would-be placard-carrying member of the 99%, I couldn't even afford the hours of daycare I was already paying for. And here I ran up against the first great fallacy of the mainstream media's OWS coverage. Of course the occupation as such was heavy on students, the unemployed, and men who looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Wavy Gravy. Stroller-pushing contingent-workers like me were constrained from spending all day and night at Zuccotti by the very conditions that made them want to do so. Thus does insecurity—financial, physical, psychological—become the stick that keeps us on the rutted path of late capitalism. (Consumer electronics being the carrot.)
Then again, another of the things too often glossed over in accounts of Occupy Wall Street is that it wasn't a top-down program, whose output was a certain number of sleeping bags on the pavement. Rather, it was a piece of tactical hardware designed to execute any app deemed useful by its users—techno-utopian cant made collectivist flesh. This should have been apparent to anyone who spent more than half an hour down at Zuccotti. At first, you'd see the modest size of the occupation, relative to the number of cameras trained on it, and you'd think, Wait: Is this it? Then, out of nowhere, thousands of union electricians would appear, or affordable-housing advocates, or undergraduates, or, more likely, all of the above, and another drive or meeting or march would whir into motion. (As Michael Greenberg has noted in The New York Review of Books, those circuits would be reactivated after Hurricane Sandy to channel vital aid to the Rockaways.)
By October, my son and I had found our own way to take part. With his mother's blessing, we pursued a sunshine policy, steering clear of martial-sounding or geographically marginal events in favor of those well-publicized enough to ensure my small comrade wouldn't become another casualty on YouTube. We marched on Citigroup. We marched on JPMorgan Chase. We repaired to Zuccotti for pizza and purée, and then we marched some more. Well, I marched; he rode.
One memorable afternoon, in the company of a whole holy host of freaks and straights, aging lefties and juvie anarchists, friends from other events and perfect strangers—plus, this being a Saturday, my wife—we even took over Times Square. It was the same rainbow coalition I'd observed a decade earlier, marching against the Iraq War. In 2002, though, in the streets of D.C., everyone seemed to recognize that the switches on the war-making machinery had already been thrown. You could sense the inertia in the way the message decayed into calls for the abolition of the WTO and the World Bank, the liberation of Palestine and Mumia. Those chants that managed to break through the discord rang hollow off executive buildings emptied for the weekend.
By contrast, the message of Occupy Wall Street was so clear and so obvious as to subsume any ancillary concerns. Obviousness, in fact, may be why Occupy Wall Street proved such an effective counterweight to the Tea Party movement, with only a fraction of the money and organization and time. It takes great resources of all three to persuade Americans that Keynesian deficit spending is the source of our ills, because it's total horseshit, whereas it takes very little to remind people of what they’ve already discovered in the most grinding, empirical way to be true: As an allocator of resources, our economic system is needlessly unjust, and getting more so by the day. And when the hoary old cry went up from Times Square—"We are unstoppable; another world is possible"—this, too, felt self-evident, assertion and evocation in a single stroke. For here was a halter-topped woman with frizzy hair leading thousands of people in social democratic chants from atop someone's shoulders, and here was the commercial center of the world coming disobediently to a halt. Here were tourists taking buttons from engagé tweens and affixing them to jackets that would soon travel back to every corner of America. And here it all was again, up on the giant news screens overhead, the peak of a "high and beautiful wave" (to crib from Hunter S. Thompson). Under all those lights, we seemed to be waking, however briefly, from a long bad dream.
2.
Notwithstanding the Monday-morning harrumphs of the commentariat, that autumn of idealism has left behind consequences of the most solid, realpolitik kind. The ongoing debate over whether creditors—i.e., capital—or borrowers—i.e., you and me—will bear the losses of the Great Recession has been permanently rebalanced, to the great annoyance of the business class. (Last December’s $43-million PR push was not so much about how to “Fix the Debt” as about whom to affix it to.) On its own terms, though, the Occupy project remains incomplete. When we argue over whether to set top marginal tax rates at 35% or 39.6%, or what to do about the sequester, or the class politics of Girls, we have turned from debates about an unjust system to debates within it. And though the possibility of “another world” has been preserved from total eclipse, it now seems hazy again, as if glimpsed from the far side of sleep. We need some outside force to jolt us back awake.
All of which is a very roundabout way of trying to explain why It's No Good, the first major English-language publication of the writing of Kirill Medvedev, is so necessary, and so timely. Medvedev is a Moscow-based poet in his late 30s, and the book, the latest entry in Ugly Duckling Presse’s redoubtable Eastern European Poets Series (and the first to be published jointly with N+1), assembles English translations of his most important “poems/essays/actions” from over the last fifteen years. This was a period of radicalization for Medvedev, and the work amounts to a guerilla attack on the stagnation of Russian cultural life in the new millennium. By itself, this would make It’s No Good an invaluable document. But for readers beyond the old Iron Curtain, there’s a further twist of the knife: as with the best science fiction, the outrageous world Medvedev brings so vividly to life starts to sound awfully like our own.
An introduction by editor Keith Gessen sets the scene for Medvedev’s evolution. In “the years of mature Putinism, between about 2003 and 2008,” he explains, the atmosphere in Russia was one of “boredom, suffocation, and surrender...”
Nothing happened. No one wanted anything to happen. "Stability" was the word of the day and in service of this stability people were willing to give up a great deal. The liberal opposition that still made appearances in the New York Times not only had no real presence...[but was] also permanently discredited.
In the texts that follow, Medvedev will link this surrender to two mutually reinforcing phenomena, one political, one aesthetic. On one side was a problem of ignorance: Members of his generation, the first to come of age after the fall of Communism, "spent the 1990s not really knowing what politics was,” he writes. “We lived outside it; we never believed it could affect our private lives.” On the other side was a problem of sophistication: literature, which might have enlarged those private lives, had become content merely to reproduce them.
An exemplar here was the poet and impresario Dmitri Kuzmin, who published Medvedev's early poems in his magazine, Vavilon...and who hovers over It's No Good as a sort of Oedipal-Hegelian father figure, to be rebelled against and absorbed. A long, valedictory “essay-memoir” two-thirds of the way through the book may put some readers in mind of McSweeney’s circa 2003:
The central literary tendency of Vavilon was the so-called "new sincerity": the appeal to personal experience (childhood; romantic and sexual encounters; family life) to the exclusion of social and political experience, justifying this by appealing to its authenticity (personal, emotional, etc.)
Of course, Russia’s liberalizing culture industry had no more difficulty assimilating Vavilon’s “authenticity” than the Politburo did assimilating social realism. As Medvedev sees it, this was art as gesture, as narcotic, as commodity, "a series of irresponsible infantile games and so-called independent intellectual proclamations - covering the terrain specifically assigned to such proclamations."
The poems that make up the bulk of It’s No Good burst out of that terrain like bombshells. Superficially, their debt to Kuzmin is obvious. Medvedev’s voice, as translated by Gessen and others, is resolutely direct, colloquial, and personal. At times, it sounds like a Muscovite Frank O'Hara. "I don't know why / I decided to work / at the nightclub Sexton / when I was eighteen," begins one poem. Says another: "I really like when / a series of arches in moscow run /one after the other /creating their own kind of tunnel / out of arches." As with O’Hara, the specificity of reference almost overwhelms argument; viewed from a certain angle, Medvedev’s poems might seem merely a catalogue of people, buildings, and foodstuffs signifying life for a young cosmopolite. Yet read him at any length (the poems are rarely under three pages, and sometimes swell to dozens), and it becomes impossible to confuse his urbanism with urbanity, or, as he puts it, “dignified aloofness” to the wider world. Medvedev complains, of one Vavilon-affiliated contemporary: “a person in his poems is always / returning from work / moving around the glaring twilit / cityscape / given shape by information streams.” His own Moscow resists such streamlined shapes. It is “glaring” in a different sense, made discontinuous by eruptions of frustration, pessimism, and rage. One moment, it’s true, we may be among the office towers, cruising through a catalogue
of everyone who turned out to be a computer genius
of everyone who became an assistant
to editors-in-chief
or a designer
for major fashion magazines....
But then suddenly, we are hearing
of all the half-drunk and stunted intellectuals
who (unlike me)
matured too early,
then burned out,
of everyone who found work in the morgue
of everyone who did time in jail
then died of an overdose
of everyone who worked at
the politician kirienko’s campaign headquarters
and then joined his permanent team.
The closing descent from threnody back to sarcasm bespeaks the scale of Medvedev’s loss of faith in that distinctly Russian class formation, the “intelligentsia.” These were the people who were supposed to lead his country out of its slumber and instead discovered a taste for Ambien. But the dramatic expansion of the point-of-view, the deepening of emotion, and the Beatnik anaphora holding it all together produce a countervailing movement: One feels the quickening of an almost spiritual belief. Medvedev wants his poetry not only to “appeal to personal experience,” but to transfigure it, to break it open, to disclose what is underneath. And what is underneath, he insists, is always already political. The meticulously name-checked fruits of bourgeois existence—parties, nightclubs, careers, and even much of contemporary art—are underwritten by exploitation, militarism, and a more nebulous brand of postmodern unfreedom. Reader, you are hereby called to consciousness. Or at least deprived of an alibi.
Alongside Medvedev’s messianic streak runs a notable impatience with the formal strictures of Russian lyric poetry—the elegant prosody of Anna Akhmatova or his beloved Joseph Brodsky. Gessen’s introduction presents these tendencies as merely coincident. But really, I think, one compels the other. Trained at Moscow’s famed Gorky Literary Institute, Medvedev has a considerable, if well-disguised, capacity for artifice—for finding Pushkin in the punkish. Still, his conception of poetry is one of vision, rather than of craft. This helps explain the porousness (some might say sameness) of these largely untitled poems, which tend to flow together into a single Poem. It also helps explain their peculiar rhythms, and their general aversion to beauty. They gather force not by rhetorical turns, but by incantation, as Medvedev strains “to see without distortion by one’s social position, without limitations by one’s artistic milieu.” The results are frequently startling:
we dance around others' misfortunes like mischievous wolves like some sort of
lascivious bats in a frenzy
we make our way toward them by the light of bonfires on the outskirts of town
through desolate fields of garbage
we fall on them swoop down throw ourselves at them with all of our might oozing
the syrupy poison of empathy.
Which isn’t to say that the artist-monk can’t be funny, because Medvedev’s puckish streak runs deep. It surfaces sometimes at the expense of others ("as a janitor / I was always beyond suspicion"), but more often at the expense of his own ambitions. One of my favorite poems in the collection concludes on a note of perfectly serious ridiculousness, or ridiculous seriousness:
misha is going to do everything right
in this life,
whereas I'm going to continue sitting here
deep in shit
with my principles.
3.
In 2004, Medvedev’s principles led him to make an unusual move: he renounced copyright to his own oeuvre. Henceforth, he declared in his “Manifesto on Copyright,” his poems would cease to be grist for the culture industry. They would appear on his website, and on facebook and LiveJournal, but reprinting them “in any anthologies, collections, or other kinds of publications” would be “consider[ed]...a disgusting manipulative action by one or another cultural force.” They were to be published
ONLY AS A SEPARATE BOOK, collected and edited according to the desires of the publisher, released in a PIRATE EDITION, that is to say, WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR, WITHOUT ANY CONTRACTS OR AGREEMENTS.
The “Manifesto on Copyright” marks a hinge moment in the book, and in Medvedev’s career. Immediately before comes the longest, finest poem in the book (“Europe”) and an incendiary essay called “My Fascism.” The poems that follow the manifesto are thinner—at times they feel like Medvedev doing Medvedev—but the critical essays, by way of compensation, grow richer and more prophetic.
In the piece on Kuzmin and especially in “Literature Will Be Tested,” from 2007, Medvedev begins to articulate a dialectical vision of a new global humanism. Its acolytes, he argues, must preserve “postmodernism’s irrepressible critical outlook.” At the same time, Medvedev departs from the main body of post-’68 critical thought by insisting on the value of “grand narratives and global concepts.” To forego them, he says, is to accede to “an idealized consensus between the goals of ‘diversity’ and the interests of the global marketplace.”
And as he pursues the links between the stagnation he’s been confronting in Moscow and the larger, global situation, parallels that have heretofore been sub rosa become explicit. For Russia isn’t the only place where the notion of a life beyond politics gained traction after the collapse of Communism. “The end of history,” we called this period in the U.S. And what were the results? Open-ended war, accelerated environmental destruction, and the further consolidation of class power. History, history, and more history. Meanwhile, “the idea of ‘contemporary art'” grew ever more attenuated, as every imaginable gesture of “authenticity,” literary or otherwise, became a fungible commodity—one whose sale or purchase gets broadcast to your social network. “You can’t change the world that way,” Medvedev reminds us. “You can’t rise to the next level of existence that way.”
After the bracing cynicism of some of the poems, this formulation might sound preachy. But as a craftsman and as a human being, Medvedev knows he must make the political personal, even as the arrow also runs the other way. Taken as a whole, then, It’s No Good is less a sermon on change than a narrative enactment of it. In aesthetic terms, the distinctions among poems and essays and actions come to seem as provisional as those subtitular backslashes suggest; there’s criticism in the poetry, poetry in the criticism, and action in all of it. And in political terms, we get a portrait of the poet’s awakening to futility where he’d thought there was power, and vice versa. The thing might as well be a Bolaño novel...albeit one with a happier ending.
In another of his more unguarded moments, Medvedev confesses
I think it was genuine contact--
when two completely different people
begin to understand one another
in my opinion this
is a real event
in art and in life.
It’s No Good is just such an event. It awakens us to the contingency of contemporary reality’s ceaseless argument for itself, and to what might still be possible outside it. Archimedes famously said something like, Give me a place to stand, and a long enough lever, and I'll move the world. Kirill Medvedev and his translators have given American readers another place to stand, a kind of Zuccotti of the mind. Now if only we can keep our grip on the lever.
Bonus Link: Four poems from It's No Good
Image sources: stevendepolo, dominic bartolini, Poster Boy NYC
Women in Clothes: A Collaborative Endeavor
1.
Sipping Champagne at my kitchen table on a hot August night, I flipped through the fat book, Women In Clothes. There was my little blurb, which made me cringe only a little to see in print, in which I talk about how, after my boyfriend telling me I needed to dress better, I went out the next day and spent $250 on clothes. My confession was right there alongside other similar personal confessions from over six hundred women around the world. Women In Clothes is a crowd-sourced, multi-form anthology consisting mostly of survey responses from regular, everyday women (like me) as well as from famous intellectual-artsy women (including Lena Dunham, if you needed me to even tell you that; you’ll find Eileen Myles and Roxanne Gay in there, as well). The survey answers, which are cleverly organized, are supplemented by essays from and transcribed conversations between similar such intellectual-artsy women, and wonderfully minimalistic and eclectic photo essays made up of personal collections, ranging from nail polish to handmade guitar straps to ear plugs.
Women In Clothes is the result of a collaboration between authors Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, and visual artist Leanne Shapton. It is a striking endeavor in that it is, as mentioned before, verifiably “crowd-sourced” and contains no input from anyone who could be considered a style icon, although a former fashion model and a prominent fashion critic are amongst those who contributed survey responses. The book is, in this sense, a truly contemporary item, representing an age brought along through the Internet’s dominance, in which all opinions are valid, and sharing private thoughts and practices is acceptable.
Right away, I enjoyed the book’s overall light-heartedness, its tiny glimpses into people’s metaphorical and physical closets, and its whimsical and eye-pleasing artwork. Then I flipped to an interview with human rights journalist Mac McClelland, and read, on page 174:
And H&M, oh my god, I can’t even be in an H&M, I feel like I’m having a heart attack in there. It smells like . . . To me it smells like diesel or something—gas fumes and textile chemicals. Urban Outfitters—I have the same thing. Every time I walk in there I’m just like, oh my god, it smells like plastic and chemicals and bad news and bad politics and I just (laughs) I don’t want to be there.
I paused, looking down at my outfit, which consisted of two summer staples: an Aztec-print tube top from Urban Outfitters, and a striped skirt from H&M.
2.
In cities like New York, a capital of both the fashion and art worlds, there is no limit to how well-dressed a woman can be—and not just fashionably so, but also and perhaps of greater import, uniquely and singularly so. It’s a competition to be at the height of stylishness, and yet appear to have risen there almost effortlessly. Despite this competitive veneer, however, when prompted for fashion advice, women may extend solidarity. Occasionally, minding one’s own business on the subway, a tap on the shoulder will interrupt.
“Excuse me, do you mind if I ask where you got that?”
The information will be received with a grateful smile—unless the store named is someplace expensive, like Anthropologie, in which case there might be a slight roll of the eyes.
If fashion is divisive, then literature may be the opposite. It creates camaraderie. Female authors I have never met, or have brushed with in New York, are in my imagination my colleagues, as if we are somehow expressing different facets of the same contemporary voice. Reading a work by a female author that relates to the world you live in is like having a therapist who speaks to you in poetry: it doesn’t make things necessarily clearer, but it makes them beautiful and interesting. (Of course, such bonds may exist only in my imagination; one well-known female author whose work I admired—and who contributed to Women In Clothes—not only ignored my e-mails seeking her advice on a project, but seemed physically pained when I tried to speak to her about it at a magazine party.)
Last fall, I saw a co-worker who I didn’t know very well on a lunch break, reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? I ran over and hugged her, so glad that she was sharing this magical literary treat. Had she been wearing the same dress as me, the reaction would have been much different: a snide glance instead of a hug.
3.
A pivotal scene in How Should a Person Be? occurs following a trip to Art Basel Miami during which the narrator, Sheila, purchases the same yellow dress that her best friend Margaux has just decided to buy. Back in Toronto, Sheila receives an e-mail from Margaux confessing that she is upset about the incident. She has even decided to give the dress away.
4. i think it’s pretty standard that you don’t buy the same dress your friend is buying, but i was trying to convince myself that maybe it was okay to buy the same dress your friend is buying. you know, trying to think about it positively, hence the “we’ll wear them in our music video statement from me.”
Sheila and Margaux are not just any women; they are intellectual-artsy type women. They consider themselves serious—and often mention how glad they are to have found each other, “a girl who was as serious as me.” In a September, 2013 article in the New Yorker about Eileen Fisher, Janet Malcolm leads with this confession: “There is a wish shared by women who consider themselves serious that the clothes they wear look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than anxiously selected.” And yet the message of Women in Clothes is clear: daily fashion choices are incredibly important for most women, often involve an incredible amount of anxiety as well as a good deal of creativity and resourcefulness, and ultimately consume a good deal of our time, energy, and emotions—regardless of whether we exist in a style-conscious setting or not.
Reading Women in Clothes, I became interested in how it was a collaborative endeavor. How had a subject that I felt created anxiety and divisiveness amongst women—as it does in Heti’s novel—been channeled into a creative endeavor? How had it become something shared not only between the three editors—as well as various collaborators who worked closely with them in analyzing the surveys (Mary Mann) and designing the book (Kate Ryan)—but also by hundreds of everyday women, like me, who had become involved in its making? I reached out, via e-mail, to the book’s editors.
The project’s birth was rooted in its absence, when Heti sought and could not find a book that would explain “what women thought about when they shopped, when they put outfits together,” she wrote me. “All the books I found approached dressing from the outside, not the inside. They were so image-based, or else about a specific stylish woman, like Audrey Hepburn.” Upon this realization that the book she wanted to read did not exist, Heti began e-mailing her friends, asking them “What is your process when getting dressed in the morning?”Heidi Julavits replied with some thoughts, suggesting the subject could become a book; the next thought was to include Leanne Shapton. The three began communicating over e-mail, over time incorporating other online collaboration programs into their process: Google Hangouts, Skype, Dropbox, and Google Docs.
At a certain point, the three women convened in a Toronto hotel for several days of what Shapton dubbed “book camp,” which, Julavits wrote me, “involved basically not sleeping for three days, and at one point ending up on the floor in bathrobes eating room service soup at midnight.” All three women stated that the process of making Women in Clothes was somehow transformational on a personal level, and that collaborating resulted in a work that was greater than the sum total of each individual. “I think the book is a million times smarter than any one of us, individually. We filled in each others’ gaps,” wrote Heti. As Shapton put it, “Like a swimming medley relay ream, we each had a strong stroke, and then brought opinions and support to the others.”
I suspected that producing Women in Clothes may have made its editors more aware of their own fashion choices. To this, Julavits shared a story that took place when she and Heti were having a drink at one point during the early stages of the book. “I was tired and not feeling very chatty, but I was very actively checking out and admiring her dress, which was a vintage nightgown. We parted ways, and she wrote me a bit later to say, ‘I went home and changed out of that ridiculous dress.’ I realized that she’d misunderstood my close attention for criticism, and it made me also realize that I want to be more vocal when I see a woman who’s looking great.”
Only a week before my e-mails with the editors, I had sat in a coffee shop, my attention distracted from their book by a woman sitting near me, conversing with a friend. Everything about this woman was perfect—her oversized necklace, her silky white tank top, her casual, baggy black pants, her minimalistic make-up. She saw me eyeing her, again and again. But I said nothing. Who knows how she took my glances—perhaps as praise, but also perhaps as criticism. And these glances happen so regularly on the subway, in shops, on the street. They are, it seems, part of the secret language of being a woman—the way we constantly judge ourselves and others based on superficies and artifice.
Can a book like this counteract these tendencies, likely instilled in many of us through too much time in our teenage years reading fashion magazines, which told us how to dress and what to look like? Can it, furthermore, make us think twice before we purchase clothes that implicate us in a web of human rights violations via factories around the world, and move us toward slightly more sustainable enterprises (I won’t even get into the whole American Apparel situation here, but let it suffice to say that many humanitarian companies do exist). A book like this can probably do that work, to some extent. But what it really makes me want to do is create art in a collaborative fashion—to find ways to work with other women rather than against them. I am jealous of the editors of Women in Clothes not because they have cool clothes or great hair, or perfect bodies. I am jealous, and admire, that they found a way to work together to create something a little bit revolutionary, and then shared the experience with so many people, giving us the opportunity to contribute in ways small and large.
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Fall Book Picks (Part 1): Life Work by Donald Hall
‘Tis the season of back-to-school, back-to-work; back to various labors of love and life. In that vein, I recommend two books, in two Parts, on the subject of work – literary, intellectual, manual. Today, Part 1, I give you former Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s Life Work.
Life Work has been a beacon for me since my early days of writerdom. I came to the writer’s vocation late and from off-the-map, which has contributed to a general awkwardness around the word “work” – a word reserved, in my experience, for that which involves antagonism, obligation, and toil; and which generally refers to a physical destination as opposed to an activity. (Syntax is everything in the statement, “I am going to work.” Is the second part a verb infinitive or an adverbial prepositional phrase?) “Ok, off to the gulag,” my partner jokes wryly as he heads to his downtown office. Surely, he is going to work; what the hell will I be doing all day?
“Once, in a headlong sentence I clearly intended to say ‘life,’” Hall writes of a therapy session during dark years of marital meltdown and alcoholism, “but by mistake…said ‘work’ instead.” This recollection illuminates the theme of Hall’s beautifully crafted meditation cum memoir: the lost sense of work as integral, devotional, absorbing; distinct from labor, including but not limited to “what we do to feed ourselves and keep ourselves warm,” and, if not nobler than the toilsome sufferings of humankind through the ages – Hall cites, for example, Mexican farm laborers, 19th century merchant sailors, black American slaves – then indeed no less.
Work. I make my living at it. Almost 20 years ago I quit teaching – giving up tenure, health insurance, and annual raises […] I worked like crazy to pay tuitions and mortgages – but because I loved my work it was as if I did not work at all.
There are jobs, there are chores, and there is work.
Life Work takes the form of life (and work) in real time: “Today makes a week of Life Work.” Hall pulls back the curtain on his daily regime, his “best day”: up at 4:30, coffee, dress, drive out for the paper (this is rural New Hampshire), breakfast, then at the desk until “I feel the poetry juices drying out.” A household chore, more coffee, and on to prose. By 11am, the writing work is done; now lunch, then a short nap, after which he and his (second) wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, “know what we will do next. How nice to be old enough, living together and alone, to make love in daylight...”
If all this makes ye industrious urbanites want to retch, Hall anticipates your repulsion:
I worry that my enthusiasm over work, over the best day […] will seem to a saturnine or grumpy reader the ultimate in complacency […] Why is happiness unforgivable? […] I make for myself a golden age.
Only depressives make a golden age; or maniacs create a golden age because their dark brother lurks behind the barn.
But he does not anticipate what comes next: Part I of Life Work ends in early April; 10 days later he begins Part II, having been diagnosed, in the interim, with liver cancer.
The book shifts markedly in tone henceforth, and yet an even deeper fidelity to inquiries regarding work takes hold. “I realized I had always worked in defiance of death.” We learn of family histories (generational transitions from manual, to white-collar, to creative work), the sculptor Henry Moore’s model of work, and Hall’s journey in Christian faith (the work of the spirit). The book ends three months after it began, with Hall about to start chemotherapy: we are suspended in uncertainty with him, as he works on short projects “which absorb me as much as any work can.”
Seventeen years after publication, we know “the ending.” Hall survives cancer, but it’s his beloved wife Jane, 20-some years his junior, who dies of leukemia two years later. How profoundly prescient was Hall’s understanding of “work” as the avatar for “life,” as the two of them confront ruthless mortality together. He writes: “There is only one long-term project.”
Coming up: Part 2, in which a philosopher-motorcycle mechanic makes the case for the cognitive riches of manual work, for living concretely in an abstract world.
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Lineage of Restless Women: On Kristen Radtke’s ‘Imagine Wanting Only This’
Family is how many people understand the world, and that’s okay, but for many women, art is the key to unlocking the mysteries of life.
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