I wanted to write something someday with that kind of first sentence and I wanted that kind of first sentence to be written to me every day for the rest of my life.

Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon

Feels important to include the sentence Laymon’s writing about here, which is from the preface to Toni Cade Bambara’s short story collection Gorilla, My Love:

It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on this page that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whipped.

Honestly what I love most about this Bambara sentence? There aren’t a lot of commas! Most long poetic sentences go hard on commas and a lot of the time they really don’t need to. I understand why a lot of writers think of the commas as rhythmic signposts but in my opinion they often actually make the rhythm worse.

I read Heavy in two sittings on Friday: the 7am Amtrak from New York to Wilmington, and the 1:35pm Amtrak from Wilmington to New York. It fucking destroyed me. It’s everything everyone has already told you about it. Calling people “geniuses” is stupid and also if this was the only thing Laymon ever wrote it would validate the MacArthur wizards granting him the title.

The sentences in Heavy do a lot of work at the level of the paragraph especially in terms of rhythm and repetition, but there are a lot of incredible sentences in there. Here’s just a few more:

I wish you could have just chosen one kind of touch, even if it was just beating me ten times a day every day.

Running a train sat orange-red in my imagination.

For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words.

There is no rapt reporting on the thousands of parents who simply love and support their children, or on the hardworking professionals at the New York Times enduring a workplace made hostile by bias—a period of forbearance that ends today.

The New York Times contributor’s letter

But the success of the Mexican wolf program is not without controversy.

“Mexican wolf program is making strides after 25 years of effort”, Grace Mack for the Tucson Sentinel

Feel like a lot of the sentences this week are very serious but this is a little bit of levity. Regular news article sentence or Mountain Goats song title, who’s to say really?

Where capital meets the sea, it creates ostentatious, brittle structures, far more likely to shatter than to move or bend.

“The Erosion of Silicon Beach”, Nina Sarnelle

Nina got in touch with me in 2021 while she was working on this project to talk about an essay I wrote in 2018 and I was so happy to see it launch earlier this year. It sprawls and meanders in ways that make the hypertext format really wonderfully intentional.

the thing about the south in southern gothic literature, and in wider popular culture for that matter, is it is not a place where people live; it is a setting for caricatures to act out ambiguous morality plays.

“#019 - grand isle (2019)” from Kit Buckley’s the unbearable weight newsletter

Kit’s documentation of his journey watching every Nicolas Cage performance committed to film is always a pleasant inbox surprise. This assessment of Faulkner/Southern Gothic has a nice resonance with this sentence in Heavy:

The first sentence in the book was a million words long, which was cool, and it used strange words like “wisteria” and “lattices”, but I didn’t know how to write like Faulkner and say anything honest about us.

He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize banquet speech

All this Faulkner/southern Gothic snark made me remember being assigned this speech in an English class in high school. Even with its annoying use of generalized “man” as stand-in for all of society, I remember liking it. I liked it more than Faulkner’s fiction (though I think we gotta give him credit for “shape to fill a lack”, truly iconic). Reading it now, I think it’s still got some great bits but I don’t know if what I get out of it is quite what Faulkner was going for.

I think what Faulkner critiques in the speech—literature that does not get at personal truths because of the overarching terror of big existential/societal truths (in that specific context, nuclear annihilation)—is just a defining challenge for conscientious writers, for artists in general: how to write about the complex systems-level shit that’s killing all of us (as Moten put it, however much more softly) while also being vulnerable and specific and honest in the way that produces poetry. How to convey that what Faulkner calls “human conflicts of the heart” are inextricable from the big hard isms and world-systems.

When Faulkner writes about “defeats in which nobody loses anything of value” I think of the wild insecurity of the op-ed columnist and people with no real stake treating the act of “just asking questions” that destroy lives as a sacred duty. When Faulkner writes about “victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion” I think of why a joke about bisexual representation in HBO’s gritty realist Mario Kart series is hilarious. I don’t think that’s what Faulkner was going for exactly.

It’s more than glibly identifying where the personal is political, is what I’m getting at. It’s a big part of what Laymon writes about; it’s why the organizing efforts of NewsGuild of New York are so needed. It’s why Nina Sarnelle got obsessed with sand for the last few years.

In addition, “glands” is also an inherently funny word (something about the “gluh” sound and the brevity of it) and while once again I don’t think this is what Faulkner was getting at I enjoy the idea of something like a glandular love song. (Jens Lekman, perhaps, could be described as a writer of glandular love songs.)