Reading Assignment: May 2020

By Aaron Calvin

Reading Assignment is a new monthly series where online editor Aaron Calvin recommends essays and fiction from around the web. If you read something you think should be shared in this series, send it in an email to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil (The New Inquiry)
When an essay is written and published on the searchable internet and is returned to or rediscovered often by people due to its continued relevancy, it’s referred to as as “evergreen content.” This is, unfortunately, one of those essays.

Author Tracy O'Neill talks her new book Quotients and writing the systems novel (Assignment Magazine)
Read this short interview with Mountainview MFA faculty member Tracy O’Neill and check out her new novel, Quotients.

Abridged Abyss by Justin Taylor (Bomb Magazine)
A former faculty member and friend of the MFA demonstrates how lyrical essay writing is done in this piece centered around the loss of a beloved musician.

No One Should Have to Ignore Their Grief, Yet It’s Long Been Expected of People of Color by Nadia Owusu (Catapult)
Mountainview MFA faculty member Nadia Owusu’s column on being a woman of color in the workplace is must read writing and this installment is no different.

Sex and Sincerity by Sigrid Nunez (The New York Review of Books)
Garth Greenwell (Mountainview MFA’s visiting writer at the January 2020 residency) gets the holistic NYRB treatment, the song of his prose and poetry annotated.

Poem for May: “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay

… like making it easier
for us to breathe.

BOOKS

in

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Review by Justin Taylor, Mountainview Faculty

This past school year, I used an anthology in a few of my writing classes that I had never used before. It was The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and to be honest with you, I was not persuaded of its efficacy as a teaching tool. The selections are refreshingly offbeat, and the sheer range of the thing (1700s-2000s) is something, but the book contains a lot of typos, formatting mistakes, and errors of fact (particularly in the biographical notes for the included writers) that left me constantly second-guessing my primary course text, which is the one thing a teacher doesn’t want to have to worry about. Oates/Oxford should have hired a proofreader and a fact-checker, or, if they did, they should have fired them. Oh well.

     Still, there were some stories that I encountered for the first time in The Oxford Book that not only yielded fruitful classroom discussions and creative responses, but stuck with me after the school year ended. One such story is “Fleur” by Louise Erdrich, about a woman reputed to be a witch, and the supernatural revenge she may (or may not) have taken on a group of men who violated her. The story, which is less than ten pages long, is masterful in the way it handles point of view, as well as in the way it balances candor and subtlety. It left me eager to read more Erdrich, so I picked up Love Medicine, her debut novel, first published in 1984 (then revised and expanded in 1993, and again in 2009).

     Love Medicine takes place over roughly half a century on (and off) an Ojibwe Reservation in North Dakota. A family tree included in the front matter lays out five generations of Kashpaws, Morrisseys, Nanapushs, and Lamartines, many of whom will get to narrate one or more chapters at some point in the sprawling saga. On the family tree, a legend explains that different symbols are used to distinguish “traditional Ojibwe marriage,” “sexual affair or liaison,” and “Catholic marriage,” as well as “children born from any of the above unions” from “adopted children.” Such scale might overwhelm some readers before they’ve even begun, but don’t be scared off! The novel, for all its technical daring (leaps forward and backward in time, characters phasing in and out of primary-protagonist status) is remarkably lucid and emotionally potent. It’ll have you hooked within five pages, and in full-on binge-mode within fifty.

     I loved it so much I forced myself to slow down around the three-quarters mark, because I wasn’t ready for it to be over yet. Happily, it turned out that this was a needless precaution, because Erdrich has written several more novels set in the same community, including the Pulitzer finalist The Plague of Doves, the National Book Award-winning The Round House, and a novel called Four Souls that, as far as I know, hasn’t won anything but which caught my eye because its protagonist is Fleur Pillager, i.e. the title character of the story that first introduced me to Erdrich’s work, so I’m going to read it as soon as I find a copy. (Fleur appears in Love Medicine too, but only briefly.) 

     Philip Roth called Love Medicine “a masterpiece, written with spellbinding authenticity” and Toni Morrison rightly noted that its "beauty...saves us from being completely devastated by its power.” To these accolades I only wish to add a brief teacherly note. Love Medicine is recommended for one and all, but it will prove especially useful for students exploring that gray and intimidating borderland between the novel, the “linked collection” and the “novel-in-stories.” I’ve seen Love Medicine described as all three of these things, but Erdrich herself seems to regard it as a novel, while at the same time regarding its component parts as stories rather than as chapters. (The title story of The Red Convertible, her Collected Stories, is a chapter from this novel.) This makes sense if you think about it, given how many books she’s written about these people and this place: are not the novels themselves mere chapters in some larger book? In any case, if you’re looking for a model, Love Medicine is among the best you’ll find, because it will give you permission not to follow anyone else’s, but rather to build your own.

Justin Taylor is a Mountainview MFA faculty member, as well as the author of Flings, The Gospel of Anarchy, and Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.

Faculty Picks: Reed

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Justin Taylor-- Generally speaking, I always advocate for more poetry in the prose writer's reading diet. It is a great way to learn the weight of words, the value of lines. Even relatively expansive or dense poetry still has the virtue of concision, and most important of all it reminds us that there are other forms of logic and progression than simply, What happens next? Lately, I've been reading Indecency, Justin Phillip Reed's debut collection, which is about to be brand-new from Coffee House Press. In the words of Dawn Lundy Martin, "Reed's deft craft is so rare, so precise, and driven by language whose surface is texture like teeth, that it seems like freed speech into the ache of repressive histories, white gazes, and uninvited invasions." I find myself very drawn to this idea of "freed speech": how can we liberate our language from the bondage of cliched usage, lazy thinking, and harmful or retrograde presumptions--and aren't these really three ways of saying the same thing? Reed's poems are fierce and fast-moving. They are searching and raw. "what question / does the self ask at the body's behest / that time won't wring from the body itself?" he asks in "Performing a Warped Masculinity en Route to the Metro.” 

In "A Statement from No One, Incorporated," the poem's epigraph is granted unusual placement: above its title. The line is: "what is it when a death is ruled a homicide but no one is responsible for it" and it was written by the essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in response to the risible Kafkan determination by Baltimore officials that Freddie Gray, who died of injuries sustained on a so-called "rough ride" in a police van, was the victim of a homicide, but that no particular person was responsible for committing it. This is, of course, both a legal and moral impossibility. In the poem, the responsible non-entity is “incorporated”, i.e. made real, though still not human, since--despite dubious claims to the contrary--corporations are not people. Reed’s corporate entity, then, is an infernal creation—embodied but having no particular body, and therefore no locus of humanity, since whatever else we are, we are our bodies first and finally. The thing speaks in a bloodless collective voice; whining, "We are not responsible. We have not / the capacity to respond, cannot take / your call, are not obliged." Later, it ponderously intones that "We need to have a deeper dialogue / about the need for deeper dialogue[.]" 

But it would be a mistake, in heeding Reed's outrage and his sense of urgency (and heed it we should) to hurry past the beauty in these poems, of which there is plenty to be found: potent word play, intricate rhyme, and stray lines like "a smeared sweet on his cheek in the parenthesis of a grin" or "the dense streets clapped into a quick-descended stillness." Kadijah Queen says rightly of Reed's work that, "there is no separation of sound from the language it travels in, from the body that produces it, from the experience that evokes it." Indecency includes many poems in traditional structure, right alongside radical formal innovations. There are brief prose poems floating in oceans white space--"(in which all this white is my gaze)" he writes wryly--and work that extends the tradition of concrete poetry. "Portrait with Stiff Upper Lip", which I've taken a picture of and have included below, simply cannot be read "normally." The sculptural design forces our eye to move in directions to which we are unaccustomed to moving over the printed page: up instead of down, for example, or back and forth instead of one and done. You have to "read" it the way you would a piece of visual art, which, as Reed’s title makes clear, is part of his point. Whether you're looking to discover a new writer, some wild new approaches to style, or you just want to get more poetry into your reading life, I recommend Indecency. 

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Faculty Picks: Johnson, Stegner, Welty

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Benjamin Nugent--In “Strangler Bob,” the short story by Denis Johnson published in this week’s New Yorker, you find Johnson trotting out his courtly mode. It’s kind of Blanche DuBois cum Bertie Wooster, but he metes it out in such small doses that it never feels like camp. He uses it in “Dirty Wedding,” when the narrator laments, “These days had reduced us to the Rebel Motel.”  Also in “Two Men,” when the narrator bemoans the break-up of his gang: “Later on one of them got hurt when we were burglarizing a pharmacy, and the other two of us dropped him bleeding at the back entrance of the hospital and he was arrested and all the bonds were dissolved.”

In “Strangler Bob,” which takes place in jail, the narrator, Dink, says of a fellow inmate: “This time he’d been arrested for giving a man some well-deserved punishment in the dining area of the Howard Johnson’s, which he described as the wrong kind of restaurant for that.” Dink deems a prisoner who shares a low-grade hallucinogen “most generous.”

Joining Dink in Johnson County’s facility is Dundun, who also features in Johnson’s older story “Dundun.” Dink describes him thus: “Dundun’s mental space, customarily empty, had been invaded by an animal spirit.” Imagine if Johnson had gotten self-conscious and replaced the elegant “customarily” with plain old “usually.” The paragraph would have been mauled.

It’s a classic Mark Twain move, to write of coarse individuals as if they rated great tact. But see also Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, where the narrator says, “The people of Fingerbone and its environs were very much given to murder.”

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Richard Adams Carey--"In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather."

Those are the wrenching last words of Wallace Stegner’s 1972 novel Angle of Repose. The narrator is Lyman Ward, an aging historian, divorcee, and wheelchair-bound amputee. His grandfather was Oliver Ward, a brilliant engineer who took his cultivated, Eastern-educated wife Susan from mining town to hardscrabble mining town throughout the West at the end of the 19th century.

Lyman is devoting his retirement to writing the biography of his grandmother, an artist and illustrator, and of her loving, strenuous marriage—a union blighted by tragedy and recrimination in its final decades. Lyman has recriminations himself against his former wife, now abandoned by her lover and extending overtures to him. The novel is chiefly the epic story of Susan Ward, her family, and the frontier, but the present-day (1960s) struggles of her crippled, solitary, angry, but eminently humane grandson play in gorgeous counterpoint to the main plot.

Lyman Ward lives alone in his grandparents’ last home in northern California, and his description of being bathed by the neighbor lady hired to help take care of him is harrowing in its depiction of the indignities of age and disability. But the novel as a whole glows with all the courage, endurance, mercy, and love we can hope to shore against our frailties.

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Justin Talyor--I’m living down in Hattiesburg this school year as Writer-in-residence at University of Southern Mississippi, and have taken the appointment as an opportunity to get re-acquainted with Southern literature. I've been revisiting Barry Hannah and William Faulkner, exploring the early novels of Harry Crews and Thomas McGuane, teaching Lydia Peelle's excellent collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing in my contemporary lit seminar. But the greatest revelation has been Eudora Welty, who lived and wrote just up the road in Jackson. I did not know her work at all before I got here and have been making my way through her Collected Stories, vacillating between profound shame at how long I managed to stay ignorant of her and profound gratitude for the fact that I get to discover her now, while living in her home state. 

I started at the beginning of the Collected, with A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, published in 1941. The Wide Net and Other Stories followed close on its heels in 1943. I’m midway through The Golden Apples now, which appeared in 1949 and so finished out an astonishingly productive decade. I love these stories. Welty's use of voice, her sense of history and place, her delight in the grotesque, are easily in league with Faulkner. Moreover, I find her largely free of the pathological Southern sentimentalism that nags at even his greatest work (and smothers some of it). You can draw lines from Welty not only to the aforementioned Hannah and to Flannery O'Connor, but to Joy Williams and--in a story like "Moon Lake", for instance--even Christine Schutt. But the writer of whom Welty reminds me most strongly, especially in those early books, is Nathaniel Hawthorne. Stories like “A Visit of Charity,” “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” “Old Mr. Marblehall,” and “The Wide Net” put me in mind of Hawthorne’s earthy, sinister, proto-Kafkan tales such as “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and especially “Wakefield.” And one great thing about reading a Collected Stories is being able to trace the arc of its author’s development. As much as I admire and enjoy those flinty, mysterious first two books, to read The Golden Apples is to watch a natural born talent achieve true mastery of her form.  The seven connected stories it contains feel less imagined than lived, or better still, dreamed into being, as in this paragraph from “Moon Lake”:

“Luminous of course but hidden from them, Moon Lake streamed out in the night. By moonlight sometimes it seemed to run like a river. Beyond the cry of the frogs there were sounds of a boat moored somewhere, of its vague, clumsy reaching at the shore, those sounds that are recognized as being made by something sightless. When did boats have eyes--once? Nothing watched that their little part of the lake stayed roped off and protected; was it there now, the rope stretched frail-like between posts that swayed in mud? That rope was to mark how far the girls could swim. Beyond lay the deep part, some bottomless parts, said Moody. Here and there was the quicksand that stirred your footprint and kissed your heel. All snakes, harmless and harmful, were freely playing now; they put a trailing, moony division between weed and weed--bright, turning, bright and turning.”