August Books

Here we are again: another month, the summer rolls on, a heat wave is breaking over New York City, I am sweating all day, and my only solace is to gaze upon the beauty of books. And with that, here are the books I bought in the month of August.

All of the books.

Books by women of color.

Books by women.

Books by white dudes.

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.