Take Five: Unnamed narrators unite!
This week's collection features much more literature than usual, with books that came to me in various ways, plus a comic strip and the Ramones to round it out.
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested to check out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other time times.
1. I came to Garth Greenwell's work because he was here in Iowa City and I wanted to keep up with a lauded local author. Or I should say, I went to a reading Greenwell gave at Prairie Lights for that reason. I started reading his work because that reading was one of the most satisfying literary experiences of my life. Greenwell's voice — in both senses of the word — is singular, and now when I read his work, I hear that voice, that cadence and inflection, in my head. It makes what is already some of the most elegantly immersive prose that much more captivating. But I also just love to hear him talk about words and writing and literature. He thinks on a level I can only aspire to, yet communicates those thoughts in easily understood ways. I heard him read from and talk about his latest, Small Rain, this week. While I am only a bit of the way through, I can say it is both as satisfying as his two previous novels and also a welcome departure. This short novel tells of a poet dealing with a life-threatening medical situation during the pandemic, and while it is grounded in Greenwell's own life, it also transcends that foundation to become something more universal. Thus far, the setting is almost exclusively limited to a hospital unit, but Greenwell’s tale brightens the corners of his unnamed narrator’s expansive mind, taking the reader on a journey far beyond the boundaries of that room. Greenwell has his own Substack where he offered an excerpt from Small Rain.
2. Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel's Dayswork is an oddly compelling (and compellingly odd) little book that came to me thanks to Austin Kleon's Substack. I regularly read his Friday posts of 10 things worth sharing (and drew obvious inspiration for my own Friday posts). He recommended the novel, which tells the story of a quarantining family whose mother is obsessed with learning details of Herman Melville's life. It is clearly autofiction of a sort for this married couple, writing together during quarantine and beyond, an easily read melange of episodic notes that fuse history and family interplay. I never would have picked it up had I not had my own pandemic moment with Moby Dick, reading it as part of the "10 pages each morning" practice I adopted to read classic and/or long books. I wasn't as enamored as most — including the unnamed narrator here — as every other day I was bogged down in cetaceous discourse, and actually have found Dayswork to be more captivating. I was long a purist when it came to narrative storytelling. There was fiction and there was nonfiction, and never the twain shall meet, but when it is done well, the blending of fact and fiction, the weaving of personal narrative, reportage and fictive elements, can be a powerful storytelling device. Those uninterested in Melville may find it ponderous, but I have been fascinated, learning alongside this couple as they navigate the familiar waters of quarantine.
3. Maurice Manning's Bucolics was mentioned in a piece by Barbara Kingsolver, "Read Your Way Through Appalachia," that ran a year ago in the New York Times. I save it for months and finally read it sometime recently. The first book suggested was Manning's poetry collection from 2007. I'm a fan of Southern Gothic fiction that often overlaps with or at least resides next to the work cited by Kingsolver, so I took a chance on Manning's collection. In it's 78 untitled and unpunctuated poems, an unnamed (I’m sensing a theme this week) field hand engages in dialogue with a deity he calls "Boss," the laborer observing the elements and the deity responding with wind and rain and other elements that draw the awe, ire, and attention of the narrator. I'm about as far from spiritual or naturalistic as you can get, but this back-and-forth that renders the object of the laborer's admonitions — be it capital G "God" or Mother Nature or something in between — both an omniscient, all-encompassing force and singular, ambivalent puppet master, certainly gave me pause when contemplating the great outdoors and our place in it.
The first poem starts with
boss of the grassy green
boss of the silver puddle
how happy is my lot
to tend the green to catch
the water when it rains
by the ninth he has moved to questioning and, in spots, light admonition:
Boss ever get a slow start ever
feel like you’re at the end
of the line the end of your rope
have you ever had it up to here
It’s an interesting view of the world, and while it isn’t something I’ll come back to, I’m glad for the chance to have read it.
4. My trek through the catalog of Tom Waits has led me to Bone Machine, which was the first of his albums I heard at the time of its release. I was a college senior, and so a new Waits album was a big deal with college radio and at the college paper where I worked. Oddly, though I like the record well enough, it didn't spark a look back and only a sporadic checking in with what came after. I eventually rectified that, but what I missed was the Ramones' cover of album standout "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" that came out three years later. I have a vague recollection of the song existing, but don't remember ever actually hearing it or seeing the fairly clever video that featured the work of Daniel Clowes, who was a favorite at the time. This was 1995, so I was busy scrambling at a new job and couldn't afford cable and so didn't keep up with what was on MTV. I may have had the internet at the time, but that was when it took five minutes to load a story on the Onion website, let alone finding and playing a video, so this was all an undiscovered mystery until this week when I flipped from Waits' album to YouTube and found the Ramones' reworking in a matter of seconds. It's such a perfect Ramones song that had I not known otherwise, I could have been convinced that Waits' version was the cover.
5. It was nice to see some attention for one of my favorite comics, Ruben Bolling’s “Tom the Dancing Bug.” The New Yorker offered a profile about the strip’s creator this week. Bolling has been drawing the strip for more than 30 years, and over the past decade or so, it has come to offer some of the most incisive political commentary as Bolling repurposes children’s icons to recontextualize right-wing positions and talking points. Some of his most successful have featured Richard Scarry’s “Busytown,” such as the recent “A Busy, Busy Day at the Republican National Convention.” (click the link to be able to read everything).
One thing I hadn’t thought of before now was the toll of constantly remarking on the state of the world, of subverting the innocence of youth to make a larger point. “I still get very affected by this,” Bolling said. “My job is to appear cavalier and above it, but when I’m writing and I’m drawing, I’m definitely not. It’s very difficult.”