26. November Please
To read is to be full! Tice Cin, Jen Craig, Rachel Cusk (+ exhaustion, pleasure, et al)
To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.
- Natalie Diaz
Welcome back to Letter Please, the monthly newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere
In November I wasn’t much of a person, I was more of a worker. Not only the work-for-wages type, but also the work-for-deliverance type. A person in need of deliverance is still a person, but the worker monicker suited me fine. After experiencing some shocks and changes I was adrift and wincing. I needed peace, and I needed it fast. I opened a book parcel from Compound Press and the postcard tucked inside read YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. Yes, quite. All month long I wanted to hear my own whispers on the wind and know what I was thinking of myself. Too bad that was physically impossible, but I did have books:
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Jen Craig’s novel Panthers and the Museum of Fire is about a creatively stunted autofictional Jen, who must return her dead friend Sarah’s manuscript to Sarah’s sister Pamela. Jen initially has no intention to read it, but when Pamela calls Jen and asks that Sarah’s manuscript be returned “unread if possible” Jen of course turns around and devours it late into the night. Everything changes. The manuscript awakens in Jen an intense creative euphoria, launching the digressive book of rangy observations that we are now reading, “the kind of writing that, in the past, I would never have had the nerve or sufficient limitations on my thoughts to attempt”. Trivial moments and images become pivotal, including the mundane road sign that the manuscript is named for. The book sees Jen walk the streets of Sydney, but it is not exactly a love letter to the city. At one point the narrator reports that, “I had arrived at a beachside suburb which, far from exciting me, depressed me to the core”.
[A digression of my own: like Australia, New Zealand is another country where living without wealth is effectively criminalised. The ocean itself is beautiful but there aren’t otherwise a lot of beautiful public spaces. Public transport sucks. Rents are high and houses are assets, often held in bulk. Food is ruled by a mean duopoly. The city is spaghetti roads sandwiched between strip malls. The island is a retirement village for those who are deluded enough to think they’ve played their cards right, but who were merely dealt all the cards.]
Rachel Cusk’s Outline likely needs no introduction, but this sun-baked Athenian decathlon of conversations offers up a narrator fiercely attuned to the insecurities and delusions of her interlocutors. “It was apparent” is a favourite phrase for the master observer. Keeping cool and detached about her own powers of insight, the narrator suspends overt judgement only to casually skewer her companion with a merciless behavioural description. Cleverness is so often a mechanism of self-protection. The narrator observes others with keen detail yet only gestures to her own divorce at arm’s length. The gestural limit, however, is not a character-driven psychological avoidance, but a limit baked into the form of the book, and into each of our lives: there can be no self-observation in a vacuum. We need other people, including strangers, especially after a loss. The novel sees a self grappling with new loss and solitude, and sees that self seeing itself inside of or inflected against the people she so porously meets.
Poet and musician Tice Cin’s debut novel Keeping the House also avoids the solipsism of a single self. The novel is polyvocal and glitching. The typesetting includes Turkish translations as annotations; the interpretations are a living voice alongside the characters. We never know how long one voice will host or be in charge of the narrative, or how much time we’ll get to spend in one period before the book shuttles us off to another time and voice. The book hosts love scenes that are thwarted by fractured mental health and the time-traveling glitches of PTSD. “Our talking has made time slip away” and “time has become too big for us”. Absences and intrusions rule. Food rules, too. The book opens with cooking (“meals that slid oil into you”), the garden is a touchpoint, and both the book’s multigenerational form and its smuggling plot depend upon an unexpected hero: the layers of a cabbage. The book is a love letter to Tottenham. It is also a love letter to the single mums of the world, generating camp potential with every would-be-masculine move. I want to keep living the ebbs and crescendos of Cin’s writing. “Dancing as exercise: carry on till you’re gasping”.
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There were more books but that’s enough. I’m exhausted. Are you exhausted? We’re at the close of another month and the nature of the threat of another new variant is an open question. When the omicron news first dropped my first response was to laugh. An iffy kind of reaction, I realised that whatever barometer I had once used to consider consequences and make decisions had been lost somewhere over the course of the past few months. In the UK I kept wondering how to grieve mass death inside a social system where nobody takes responsibility for it. I wanted to wring pleasures from life and I also wanted to mourn. I wanted it all, for the living and the dead. I’m not yet sure about my relationship to pleasure and mourning here. But in the meantime the moon appears over the island each night, like an old bleached bone.
Until next time,
H x
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