currently reading: Suicidal by Jesse Bering
books finished:
Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen
Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young
Hey you,
I'll keep this short because you didn't sign up to hear from me twice a week –
I loved Person/a; book reviewer boy wonder Brad said it got a lot less attention than it deserved, and as usual he was right. It made me feel crazy in a way I haven't felt since I read White Fur by Jardine Libaire over a year ago.
In Person/a the object of Elizabeth Ellen's obsession is called Ian, and of course it's a work of fiction, meaning: names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental...
No, lol, the book doesn't start with that disclaimer. Novels don't have to, or they don't have to when it would be a lie.
Ian is a character in Elizabeth Ellen's novel Person/a but he's based a real person who has written real books, and what is so interesting (to me, very specifically) about Person/a is that Elizabeth and Ian are the only writers I've read who have such distinctive styles that – it's not just that I imitate them when I'm writing, but I feel myself starting to think in their voices. It is a crazy kind of power.
What I am trying to say is: it feels nice in its symmetry that these two writers, of all the writers I've read in the world, uniquely affected me and also, independently, uniquely affected each other. This is an ugly way to phrase it but it might be the clearest.
(I am sorry I'm always spelling things out for you but if all we did was write what we meant as clearly as possible I don't think we would really have novels; we certainly wouldn't have so many pretty sentences. Literature relies on opacity. They hint at this fact in literature classes at literature school.)
Speaking of Jesse Bering's new book (out 8/23) –
When I was in Toronto last summer I picked up a copy of a book called The Jokes by Stephen Thomas. There's a story in it called "The fall" that I have been thinking of since I started Suicidal. Here it is in its entirety:
A person with a) above-average self-consciousness but also b) an above-average ability to tune into other people's wavelengths is having trouble deciding what to wear, and that problem spirals into a more generalized anxiety, and she decides to email a community member. The email says: "Give me a reason to live."
She goes out to her back deck. The sun is hot and the stadium reaches above town to high heaven. Her roommate's panties have been left out in the rain and are clinging to the railing. The person feels kind of fucked, she's freaking out.
A breeze comes off the cemetery, scatters shrivelled gumwood leaves across the sidewalk, and fills the person's nostrils with sweet new air.
She thinks: "Oh my fucking God, when will the angel of mercy descend for me and pluck out my heart with a talon?"
I wanted to give you some homework anyway, and I was going to ask you to send me a poem – I'm in a poetry mood this week – but I like Stephen Thomas's prompt better. Dear community member, please reply to this newsletter and send me a reason to live.
Like a poem!
Your friend,
Smalls