“The speaker of a poem must be like a sac spider that ties itself down so its babies can eat its body.” – Lee Seong-bok, ‘Indeterminate Inflorescence’
You don’t have to read books. They take a long time and make you concentrate. Pretty arrogant of them, frankly. There’s something good for your brain in reading books, though. I’m not going to say books are better than movies or well-made TV shows or video games, in terms of narrative delivery and escapism and fun, but sincerely: I believe it is good for you to read a book every once in while.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
This week, I read a book that celebrates language in all its idiosyncrasies and power and beauty. I also read a book half by accident (more on that in a minute) that nevertheless worked some magic on me, spin cycled me until my heart felt cleaner. Made me grateful to have read it. I’m talking, of course, about Indeterminate Inflorescene by Lee Seong-bok and Heaven by Mieko Kawakami.
Indeterminate Inflorescence by Lee Seong-bok, translated by Anton Hur: the kind of book you devour in a week for your blog, this is not. There are 470 aphorisms from the poet about poetry, collected by the poet’s students, and they will all stop you like a construction barricade. This is a book you keep on your desk—desk, not shelf—and pick up whenever your writing starts to feel like too many leaves on a sewer grate during a summer shower. Or for poetry readers, this a great reference book on how to approach a poem. It reminds us why we read sometimes poetry, sometimes read novels, and sometimes read instruction manuals.
This is also, I recognize from the description above, the kind of corny shit your well-meaning but clueless grandmother gets you for Christmas when you say you’re majoring in creative writing. Thanks, Grandma, I really needed Madeline Albright reminding me to breathe before picking up a pen. Reader, that sort of book this is not. This is a good book.
Some favorites:
40: “When writing poetry, you need to roll the words around your mouth like candy. Beethover is said to have gotten the theme for a quartet piece when he overheard a debtor shouting, ‘I don’t have any money!’”
41: “‘Mug’ is a more vibrant word than ‘face.’ Vernacular language is living language. Profanities and slang are poetic treasure chests.”
130: “There’s a story about the sun and the wind betting on how to take the clothes off a man. If prose is the method in which the wind whips off the clothes, poetry is the sun’s method. Because poetry uses indirect methods like levers and pulleys, it can exert a greater strength.”
198: “Poetry is a near-death experience and a practice of death. Just as there can be no expectations of death, don’t expect anything from poetry. Poetry is something no one can do anything about.”
225: “A poem is the short journey from the known to the unknown. That journey creates knowledge, and when we return from that journey, we’ve become a different person.”
331: “In the wide blue ocean, the fisherperson is at a loss as to where a net should be cast; this desperation, regret, triviality, and futility are the very colors and skills of poetry.”
412: “Just a fisherman cannot predict what they’ll catch, no one knows what will show up in their writing. Instead, try to maintain an attitude of discovering things without searching for them. Planning and predicting are only the beginning of things.”
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami: dudes, idk if my brain’s synapses didn’t make the purple-to-red transfer at Belmont, but when I first heard about this, I heard it was a hurricane novel. I’m really interested in disaster novels, especially ones grounded in realism rather than dystopia. Reader, this is not a hurricane novel. This is a pretty graphic and brutal middle school bullying novel. No question, I would have avoided it like Dale and Brennan avoiding that way home. I am not normally one to shy away from difficult subjects, and I (very luckily) don’t have bullying PTSD, but it is the kind of topic that is difficult for me to steel myself against.
By no means was I a popular kid in school, but I Had Friends (brag) and Loved Learning (nerd) and therefore kind of enjoyed school, even amidst teen angst. Stories of people having different experiences hurts to hear, and you can psychoanalyze whether that’s for “as a parent” reasons or “I had plenty of friends who did experience bullying and the hours we teenagers spent on AIM trying to convince each other life was worth living is still a sore wound” reasons, but a big thing is it just really fuckin bums me out when people have school experiences like Kojima or Heaven’s unnamed narrator (I will not be referring to him as “Eyes,” the only epithet he’s given, thanks to a lazy eye. Solidarity, as a one-eyed person myself).
But that’s two paragraphs of intro for a book that deserves more, because even though it is a subject I’d typically avoid, I am so glad I read this book. It’s incredibly tender, incredibly moving, and, in addition to being moving, profoundly unsettling. It does that thing literature does, where it presents with a situation frankly and straightforwardly and offers no easy answers, no lasting solutions. But it is a narrative, and there are changes—I saw some reviewer call the narrator “flat,” and I wholeheartedly disagree. The narrator is passive, sometimes to a frustrating degree. But this is a short novel that (forgive me) starts in media res—much like the frog-in-the-pot feeling I imagine bullying victims must feel, you don’t get a chance to adjust before something horrible happens. So while I very much reject Kojima’s assertion that she and the narrator are bullying victims because they are supposed to be, I understand passivity and immobility in the face of unbelievable cruelty. Anytime I felt frustrated, I took it as a cue to empathize with the narrator more.
Because within the 177 pages of this novel lies some of the most breathtaking cruelty I’ve ever seen committed to paper. And I’ve read Blood Meridian and various histories of the United States. The bullies here are as violent and unfeeling as Anton Chigurh or The Judge. Yuk yuk, and I thought my middle school years were bad, blah blah. It’s a hard topic to sit with, and as such, I’m grateful Mieko wrote such a thorough, tender mediation on the subject. I’m glad I read it. I’m not in a hurry to read it again soon.
LINKS!
Got excited about reading up there and forgot to mention I’m in Mexico City right now. As such, I’ve pre-written this and scheduled it. If anything wild happened since Tuesday, don’t tell me. Picture me in front of a mural eating lengua tacos. You want something listen to? Brendan recently turned me on to Kevin Abstract and Brockhampton, so how about “Tennessee” by Kevin Abstract feat. Lil Nas X?
New from my beloved in on John Leo’s This Is Not A Place Of Honor, how apocalyptic thinking applies to utopia. and our responsbilities to each other when we live through an apocalypse.
When I get back from Mexico City, I will be checking out Kie-Gol-Lanee, the Oaxacan restaurant in Uptown that serves chapulines, aka crispy grasshoppers. Marnie Shure at Block Club with the article destined straight for a monologue only your Youth Pastor will find funny on Gutfeld!, as the homie Arin Arcady said.
The SFF scene isn’t my main jam, but as an H writer1, I frequently enjoy visiting my nerdy cousins for an evening of throwing down 20-sides and debating how we’d re-write any Star Wars trilogy that isn’t the orig. So I was incredibly sad to learn of Bards and Sages, a publisher of table-top role playing games, novels, and a magazine had to close their doors after getting too bogged down by AI submissions. Samantha Cole at 404 Media reports. This isn’t hard: if you care about art, if you care about humanity, if you care about the environment—don’t use AI. Not even once. It’s like heroin, but it’s killed more jobs.
The disproportionately violent crackdown on campus protests has echoes of Standing Rock, Alleen Brown writes in Drilled and Center for Media and Democracy. I wasn’t at the Standing Rock protests, but I remember Obama’s silence on them feeling like a bad omen before the Trump election. Probably no connection to now, though.
Aight we’re closing out with NOT ONE BUT TWO super fun links. First: it’s possible that the Mososaur evolved more than once. You know the big sea dragon dinosaur that ate everything in Jurassic World? It’s like a crocodile, except with Vince Carter’s vertical and the size of an apartment building? Riley Black at Smithsonian tells us these, like whales, began as landlubbers who “seem to have committed to marine life multiple times,” as paleontologist Amelia Zietlow says. Instead of asking people if they’ve committed their life to Christ, ask them useful questions, like “how many times have you committed to marine life?”
BONUS SIXTH LINK TO CLOSE OUT ON FUN: Chicago Music’s Own Leor Galil, often found at Reader, is starting a series on his personal newsletter, Object Permanence, wherein he interviews people who have been in songs by Wesley Willis. This interview is with Matt Heaton, guitarist for The Flavor Channel and subject of a song off Double Door.
BONUS SEVENTH AND ALSO FUN LINK: U Chicago fellows and residents have moved to unionize. Coming from Pinochet University, this is huge.
What’re you still doing here? Personally, I’m in Mexico City. Picture me blissing out to guitar music, tamale in one hand and elote in the other.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. You don’t deserve to be treated the way the worst customers are treating you, and please do not listen to Kojima. Human beings aren’t supposed to treat each other that way.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
for everyone with a life that somehow doesn’t include the nerdiest corners of genre writing, “SFFH” stands for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.