Quick Chat: ONGOINGNESS #2

I’m interested in things that seem impossible, that seem as if they can’t coexist, that are paradoxes, but I think the truest things are the ones that seem like they shouldn’t be able to coexist together. Take, for example, one of the major dilemmas in Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: do we arrive at ‘pure experience’ through language or in spite of it? I would say it’s both at the same time. 

First, let me unpack what ‘pure experience’ is referring to. In Ongoingness, ‘pure experience’ is used to mean making the most meaning out of one’s life by transcending one’s subjectivity in order to get at the essence of feelings, events, and memories. This is, of course, against the backdrop of death. Limited time compels maximum experience. 

Manguso kept detailed diary entries for 25 years because she felt that the days were too full, that she needed ‘extra days, buffer days, between the real days’ (11) in order to process what she had experienced, in order to be ready for what was next. What she wanted to achieve through her writing was ‘Language as pure experience, pure memory’ (16). The idea being that through meticulously going over the details of her experience, remembering and arranging what seems important, would make the most meaning out of her life. The fault with this, though, is that experiences never stop – one thing happens, and then another – so no one thing can be understood without the context of everything before and everything after. ‘Pure experience’ is not a collection of beginnings and ends, but of ongoingness. 

Now, let’s try to make this a little more concrete. After maintaining her meticulous diary entries, Manguso is forced to write significantly less because she has a baby. She needs to feed him, and simply watch him – these interactions are wordless. Through these wordless interactions, Manguso begins to remember things she did not even know she could. For example, on page 66, when feeding her son, she remembers a moment when food was dribbling down her face, and the food was scooped up back into her mouth. The implication is that the memory is deeply ingrained in her body, but inaccessible through language. Language is unable to encompass everything, so trying to use it to reach ‘pure experience’ is not enough, but it is something. We have this book. And for the most part, I think we read and write because we know it gets us closer to ‘pure experience.’

‘Ongoingness’ in the book as it relates to ‘pure experience’ involves language and no language. Working through language, while also allowing for the lack of language, and going against language. And in response to my previous post about this book, about whether or not having a baby is the solution to the existential crises one has about time and death, I think this paradox of language and no language helps. It seems that part of what having a baby made such an impact is the interaction of one who views things through this prism of language, and one who does not. There is a confrontation there of what language does and does not do, and what it means in that interaction. 

Okay that’s it for Ongoingness. I hope all of this made sense somehow. Let me know your thoughts!

Quick Chat: ONGOINGNESS #1

So I've already finished this lovely book to the left. I legit bought it last night, read it last night - which took me a whole 45 minutes to read. I've decided to make this a Quick Chat rather than a more long-form critical piece, because I want to reread this before I write anything too substantial, but I still needed to write something. I approached the book knowing I would love it, and oh, I did. 

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso is a memoir*...of sorts. This book is about the diary Manguso meticulously kept for 25 years: why she started it, what kept her going, and made her stop, which is (spoilerz not rly): she had a baby. The book is comprised of short meditations on the nature of time, birth, death, the past, memory. Basically, all of the BIG. IDEAS. ABOUT. HUMANITY. In the book, Manguso tries to figure out 'ongoingness': a way of accounting for the present which immediately becomes the past, and a way of being present in her experiences. It's really fascinating, and I think could be an interesting lens through which to analyze our use of social media...but that is a conversation I do not feel like having. 

From my first fevered 1AM reading of this book, I love this book. I'm really interested in this kind of memoir writing: it's deeply personal introspection that is also very removed, because Manguso is really trying to get to the exact meaning of things, which is even more interesting because that's what she wanted to do with the diaries she kept. In a review from The Atlantic, the writer says Manguso's prose feels 'twice distilled; it is whiskey rather than beer,' which is perhaps the most accurate description I could read for this book.

For now, let me leave you with a line from the book that is haunting me - which is always a beautiful and daunting feeling from a book. Towards the end of the book, Manguso, who has frantically for the past 25 years been concerned with remembering the right things so that she could make sure she was experiencing life fully, gives in and says, 'the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life' (85). I mentioned before that what sparks the end of intense diary-writing is having a child. In order to more fully participate in the life of her child and be a mother, she needed to let go of the need to obsessively document and revise her life. I have a feeling it's a little more complicated than that, or at least I hope it is, because can it really be that all of the fears she held about dying, time, and living her life fully can only be alleviated because of a baby? Are children really the answer? I don't know. That's one of the things I'm trying to think about from this book, which really does have so much in it.



*Note: My tag for this post is difficult to figure out. This book is technically a memoir, but it is more than that. It's a book that resists strict genre definition, which is fine with me. For now, and for the purposes of this blog, I will simply tag it non-fiction. This may change. I'm still deciding.

Pick-Up Line: 'It is a small country.'

Welcome to Pick-Up Line! My newest feature to this blog, in addition to my other features Interesting or Stupid?, Meta Moment, and Quick Chat, which you should catch up on *wink wink* In Pick-Up Line, I will discuss in-depth one line, or several, of a poem, or a sentence(s) of prose. I have found that when I read something, a line or two from it echoes in my mind after I've finished reading it for one reason or another. And I've named this feature Pick-Up Line to intrigue you, reader, to read the poem or book or collection. This feature will most likely feature poetry, because I think we all need more poetry in our lives, and it can be hard to get into poetry, I admit. So I'm hoping my focus on a line or two is enticing enough to have you read more poetry. Hence, my cheeky title.

Let us begin our first installment! I posted yesterday about The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché. This book is seriously beautiful, and if you can, read the whole thing. The line I will discuss from The Country Between Us is from the poem 'The Visitor,' which you can find here.

'It is a small country' (line 8)

As you might be able to tell from the title, the idea of a country is central to the text. The title implies distance, and over the course of the collection we see what physical and emotional distance can mean between people. We also see a country being made and unmade, as this book is partly about the Salvadoran Civil War. In the poem, 'The Visitor,' a country is the hand of a lover, the imagining of a hand of a lover, or the wind imagined as the breath of a lover. The wind against the walls of the prison is

                                      ...his wife's breath
slipping into his cell each night while he
imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country (lines 6-8).

There are two definitions of a country here:

1. It is a physical place, but it is the physical body and breath of his wife.
2. It is an imagined place, as Francisco is imagining the body and breath of his wife with him.

These ideas of a country are interesting because they imply that our 'citizenship' is tied with those we love. It reminds me of something Roberto Bolaño said - one of my absolute favorite authors of all-time. Bolaño was from Chile, and he grew up in various countries in Latin America. He supported the socialist regime in Chile, which was eventually overthrown by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Subsequently, he left Chile, fearing for his life, and because he was dissatisfied and antagonistic towards the prominent literary figures of Chile. Bolaño essentially put himself in exile. In his last interview ever, Bolaño said, 'My only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me.'

In Bolaño's quote, and in Forché's poem, what we're seeing is that when you are stripped of the 'country' you were born, maybe even imprisoned by that country, it calls into question your citizenship and allegiance, not in a legal sense, but an existential one: what exactly does the borders and land of a country do for you when they are seemingly against you? When to be on one side of a wall or another means imprisonment or exile? And if we take into account the idea of a country being imagined - as it is implied through Francisco imagining the wind as his wife's breath, and imagining her hand - then that problem is only exacerbated. These delineations are illusory, but in our respective societies, we all commit and agree: yes, this a country. But it is also because of those agreements that a 'small country' can be made out of relationships.

Can I also say how beautiful it is that Forché specifies a small country. The inclusion of the word provides the perfect beat to slow the line and provide space for the gravity of the word 'country' and all that it implies for the poem. Including the word 'small' also shows a tenderness to the relationship, that it is concerned with the small things of feeling someone's breath, of holding someone's hand.

Let me know your thoughts, and if you've read anything by Carolyn Forché, or Roberto Bolaño, who I ALWAYS want to talk about. 

On Whose Authority?

Recently, I decided I wanted to re-read Carolyn Forché's book of poetry The Country Between Us. I first read it a few years ago for a Creative Writing class, and wanted to revisit it because I didn't remember much about it, and I just generally need to punctuate my typically fiction-centric reading with poetry, whether it's just going back to my favorite collections and reading a few poems or (re)reading a full collection.

The Country Between Us is partly about Forché's time working as a journalist in El Salvador as it was on the cusp of a civil war in the 70s. Poems about unrest in El Salvador between its people and leaders are told along with poems about the unrest and distance between two lovers. With this book, Forché is renowned for her weaving of the 'personal' and the 'political,' which is a popular topic in literary criticism. When we talk about the personal and the political in a text, we are acknowledging that there is not as a neat a distinction as we'd like between our personal lives, even our subjectivity, and the larger world - we are saying that maybe the sensibilities or function of the two are not so different. And in the case of Forché's book, we can say that the way the personal and political function are as metaphors of each other: the political situation in El Salvador can be a metaphor for the relationship between the lovers, and vice versa. It is also good to note that Forché is known for coining the term 'poetry of witness,' meaning that poetry is necessary in dealing with things such as war and conflict, and that it is a tool for social justice.

This book is beautiful. Because it is pretty short - just 59 pages - I decided to read it out loud to myself over the course of a few days, to really savor the language and imagery. I loved reading this book, and think it definitely warrants your attention. But one thing preoccupied my reading: Forché is a white woman writing about El Salvador, and she may be one of the most known voices on the Salvadoran Civil War. Even on the back of book, there is a blurb that says,

'Latin America needs a poet to replace the man who represented in his writings the beauty, sufferings, fears and dreams of this continent: Pablo Neruda. Carolyn Forché is that voice.' -Jacobo Timerman

This praise is ridiculous. It is ridiculous to say that Latin America needs a voice that is not their own, that Latin America needs the voice of a white person from the U.S. Latin America has plenty of voices, it is up to us whether or not we listen to those voices, whether we support them and give them a platform to be heard. This is not to say that Forché is not allowed to write about El Salvador because she is not from there, or that these poems are not good because she is not from El Salvador. It is that Forché should not be considered an authority, which is what the above blurb suggests. No one author should ever be looked at as an authority on a subject - people and events are too complicated to look to one person or one perspective. Each of us has a certain amount of privilege and gaps in our understandings, which is why it is so crucial read widely and diversely. In this blurb, we can see Forché's privilege of being considered an authority on something she does not actually have authority over. And while this book is certainly beautiful and important, it does not make it the authoritative poetic text on El Salvador, or Latin America.

Read widely, read diversely, read critically, read skeptically. Some may think that reading in these ways reduces the experience of reading, but I think it enhances it, and it pushes me to read new books to love.

A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD by Sigrid Nunez

There are about 30 different conversations I could have about A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez, which is quite perfect considering that part of the undertaking of this novel is to account for the complex identities of its characters, what it means to remember the past and how the act of trying to remember and account for the past and present has a sort of prismatic effect. For the sake of you, my readers, instead of veering off into all of these conversations, I want to just interrogate the meaning of the title of the book. The title does what it should and offers an excellent gateway into the themes of the novel, and I think will make you want to read this book.

Some logistics about the novel: we have an unnamed narrator, and she guides us through the story of her parents, her childhood, and then a bit of her adult life. The narrator's father, Carlos, is half-Chinese, half-Panamanian; he was born in Panama, lived in China for 10 years, and the moved to America. Her mother, Christa, is German, and grew up in Nazi Germany. They meet in Allied-occupied German after the war. Christa gets pregnant, they marry, and move to America. So, the least we can say is their family life and identity is complicated...And in this book is a beautiful rendering of the complexities of immigrant life, being part of a mixed family, and being second-generation. 

One of the ways these complexities manifest is in the idea of fate, and there are kind of two definitions, or two sides of a coin, that we get from the novel:

1. Fate as being pulled along against your will toward something you don't necessarily want 
2. Fate as an offering up of oneself to the will of something higher 

The first idea of fate we see through the lens of the narrator's parents, especially her mom, who vocalizes how much she does not like America, should have married someone in Germany and stayed there, especially since Carlos is extremely reserved, he works too much, drinks, gambles, and generally does not talk to his wife and children. He seems broken, but never voices his feelings or thoughts. The narrator notes that her mom would wonder how she got to where she was in the first place, and would 'place her head in her hands, truly bewildered; as if she had blown here like a feather' (72).

The second idea of fate comes from the narrator talking about the years she spent doing ballet. She is obsessed with the control it offers her over her body, with the idea that through ballet one can attain the perfect body, and she would challenge and push herself to attain this. The narrator says, 'To see how long I could go without solid food (up to five days) was a favorite game. How beautiful the hollowed gut, the jutting bones. To be light as a feather, light as a soul – "a feather on the breath of God" (Saint Hildegard)' (106).

With these two ideas of fate coexisting in the novel, what we are seeing is an inconclusiveness to the direction and choices of one's life. To commit fully to one idea or the other is harmful – surely Christa bears responsibility and has made choices that led her to where she is, and for the narrator to have continued on her path to be 'light as a feather' would mean she would eventually physically not exist at all. Christa and the narrator are trying to make sense of their lives, but they will never fully be able to, and both are chasing after visions of what life could be like. To give in to visions of what it means to be married, to move to a new country, to go back to a country, to make a family, to leave a family, to become your own person, to have a body that is yours. You can make a choice, but that choice is within the context of something else – you have a choice and you don't at the same time. So looking back on their lives, Christa and the narrator must begin to attempt to understand how their choices and their circumstances are woven together. 

Let me know if you have any thoughts about this. If you know of a book that is similar in theme and content, let me know! Once again, I might write more about this book because there is just so much to talk about, and I can't stop thinking about this book.

For the Benefit of Yourself: MARIANA by Monica Dickens

After the slog that was Moby Dick, I needed healing, and so I turned to Mariana by Monica Dickens. Before I even get started on why this book was everything I needed and spectacularly written, let me list some of the things this book had going for it before I even read the first chapter:

1. Monica Dickens is Charles Dickens' great-granddaughter. While being related to Charles Dickens does not mean you are going to be a great writer, it does mean that I'm going to hope you are.
2. This book is published by a beautiful, amazing independent publisher Persephone Books. I don't remember exactly how I learned of this publisher, but all I know is I am obsessed with getting my hands on all of their books. As I said in my July Books, Persephone publishes forgotten and out-of-print books (mostly) by women. That is totally up my alley, as I am always looking to invest myself in things that celebrate women and everything they can do aka write amazing freakin' novels. 

Okay, now on to the novel. Our protagonist is Mary: she is a bit petty, selfish, lazy, and craves independence. And I love her for all of those reasons. The novel opens with Mary as a young woman, hiding away at a house in Essex in the wake of the news that her husband, a British soldier fighting in WWII, may be dead. After the first chapter, we follow Mary's life, and the various events and relationships that have led her to this point.

This novel is so feminist. All of those characteristics I used before to describe Mary, which may make you think she is a terrible person, only help to show that she is a fully-formed character. Furthermore, Dickens is not only adept at showing Mary's motivations, such that we understand her and recognize her as a human being, but also adept at showing how the pressure of the culture Mary is in has shaped her. That is what makes this an amazing feminist novel, in which we see Mary constantly attempting to gain control of her sexuality and become independent, while deeply wanting to find a husband. We see Mary go through a couple of relationships that she hopes will bring her satisfaction, and give her the kind of romance she has been dreaming of, a romance that will steady her in some way, a romance that will consume her. I do not think it is wrong to want these things, but women especially are bred to want these things above everything else, that it is a woman's ultimate purpose to need a man and to marry him. This novel is largely Mary's struggle with this, though she doesn't fully comprehend this until the end of the novel.

This leads me to the incredibly satisfying and romantic end of the novel. Little bit of spoilers ahead. Reconciling the desire, as a woman, to be with a man with being independent comes to a head for Mary because she has found out that her husband might be dead. After several failed relationships, Mary marries Sam Howard. She is sure of him, in a way she was not with her other suitors. Between the two there is immediately a deep respect and affection. They are equals in ways Mary never was with her other suitors.

At the end of the novel, after we have followed Mary from a young girl to a young woman, we now come to find out whether Sam is dead. Mary is convinced that Sam is dead. She figures since she and Sam were as close as two people could be, that she could not be wrong about this feeling. And for a brief moment, she wonders if she wishes she were dead too, but decides no, 'You couldn't die. You had to go on. When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve. It was precious. The things that happened in your life, however closely connected with other people, developed and strengthened that individuality. You became a person' (373).

What is so great about this quote is how 'trust of individuality' echoes a line from the first chapter which talks about why Mary has decided to seclude herself in the wake of her husband's potential death: '[Mary] wanted to brood; she did not want distraction. She wanted to fill the waiting-time with thoughts of him, and to keep herself aloof, as if she were holding herself in trust until he returned' (2). According to my good friend Wikipedia, trust, in the legal sense, 'is a relationship whereby property is held by one party for the benefit of another.' In the end, Mary finds herself, even though she had always thought she was just trying to find a man. In the end, Mary figures out that her experiences, her body, her thoughts, her feelings are for the benefit of herself, and not for a man.
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I seriously loved this novel, and might write something else about it. Even though I finished the novel a week ago, I am still thinking about it and want everyone to read it. 

July Books

Here are the books I bought in July. I want to share these so I can hopefully get recommendations from others, since, as a I said in this post, I am always on the hunt for new books. Please let me know if you have any recommendations, or if you've read any of these books, and have any thoughts about them!

I recently read my first Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride, and loved it, and went in search for my next Atwood, and picked this up.

I first bought this book because it is from the publisher Persephone Books, an AMAZING independent publisher that mostly publishes forgotten and out-of-print books by women. These are just hard to get a hold of in the States, as Persephone only sells in their books in the UK. You can ship them around the world, but it is expensive, you can buy them Amazon, but I am vehemently opposed to buying books on Amazon, or you can scour used book stores and hope someone has kindly donated their copies, which is how I found this book. It also helps that Monica Dickens is the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. I've already read this book, and loved it. I will be writing up on it.

I've read Carson McCullers' novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I thought was all right. I wanted to give her another try with this collection.

In college, I took a class solely on Vladimir Nabokov's work. So far I have read a ton of short stories and seven of his novels, which were all pretty great, so I want to continue chipping away at his bibliography.

This book is a gift from one of my best friends. She read it, and thought I would love it. I love receiving books as gifts, especially books that I didn't express that I wanted, but books that others think I would enjoy.

Lately, I feel like I've been hearing so much about Jeanette Winterson, and this book in particular seems to have been making the rounds on Booktube, so when I saw a used copy in perfect condition, I had to get it.

Virginia Woolf is one of my absolute favorite authors of all time, so I'm trying to make my way to reading everything she has written. Melymbrosia is interesting because it is an earlier draft of her published novel The Voyage Out. Melymbrosia was heavily edited based Woolf's friends telling her she would receive a lot of backlash because of the book's criticism of the British empire. Why would I not want to read this?





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So I'm still tinkering with ways to format these Monthly Book entries. I might just change them every time I do one, depending on the books, and whether I have something specific to say about why I bought them. I wanted to write about these books a little more because I'm really excited about them, and most are particularly meaningful to me in one way or another. But something I thought I might include is a little tally of the stores I bought them at. I want to do this to promote the amazing independent bookstores I frequent, and to kind of get a sense of where I shop. As much as this blog is for dialogue, I also want to use it to map my interests and ways of reading. Here are my bookstore tallies:

The Strand: |||
bookbook: |||