Legends of the Cities of the Plain

not quite a book review

“Accountability is the corollary to grief for those of us who are responsible for harm. I shared the ways in which I have witnessed accountability as an unparalleled tool for transforming shame for our responsible parties in Common Justice. I write about the way I have become persuaded that accountability does for those of us who commit harm what the healing process does for us when we are harmed. It gives us a way to recuperate our sense of dignity, of self-worth, of connectedness, and of hope—the things we lost when we caused harm. In this work, I have come to see accountability as something that is as essential as a grieving process to restoring us to our best selves.”

—Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon (quoted in Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan, Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators)

Welcome, creatures! I am currently engaged in the modern struggle for survival, having spent three weeks trying to get internet service to this apartment. It is somehow comforting to know that this conflict of Man against Nature is one of the classic literary themes, as depicted in such works as “To Build a FiOS” and A Month in the Phone Tree.

UPDATE: Not six hours after I typed these sentences, we have wifi! If you pray, please say a prayer for Philip, who dealt with what seems to have been an extraordinarily confusing and badly-arranged previous wiring situation with an enormous amount of grace and good cheer.

Onward! I thought the list of things people lose when they cause harm, above, was quite striking, and the parallel between grieving and accountability seemed resonant and fruitful. Below you’ll find a book note, and I also wanted to show you a paragraph which got cut from my review of Danielle Evans’s recent short-story collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, in case you find it interesting (or interestingly wrong):

And these stories of investigation and reinterpretation place The Office of Historical Corrections in a tradition of African-American writing whose authors step with sardonic fury between fact and fiction. Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition is an early entry: an attempt to tell the truth about the racist coup d’etat and massacre in Wilmington, NC, in 1898. Chesnutt’s plot, with its long-lost revelatory documents and secret sisters, might seem melodramatic; its twists were partly inspired by his family history. James Baldwin’s meditation on the Atlanta child murders, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, and John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File both use criminal investigations—one recent and the other over a half-century past—to ask what purposes an investigation of violence might serve. When white investigators and black ones have totally divergent desires and hopes, but one side has public power and one side has only private fears, how can the truth be told? How can it even be known? To these questions Evans adds: Can the powerful ever tell the truth, even if what they’re saying is, “I’m sorry”? And, since we’re all powerful sometimes, what do we do if the answer is “no”?

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“There Might Be Things I Wouldn’t Understand”

One thing I’ve been reading is a new collection (it says “National Bestseller” on the cover!) called Kink. It is litfic about kinky sex. When I think about the purpose of this newsletter I do think it’s partly an exercise in self-abasement so here you go: a review.

The first four stories are okay, to me mostly notable for their insistent theme of failure to connect. (The later story “Reach” is explicitly about this.) Kink promises a more-intense intimacy, a deeper knowledge of the other person, and yet it’s always way easier for sex to give you “a sense of” connection than connection itself, this is the irony of eros, all eros is lack except when it’s prayer and when it’s prayer it often feels like lack etc etc, so far so good; I liked the illustrations of the ways kink may appear literal-minded and therefore easily-read but in fact it turns out to be a double-tongued language, with manifold meanings, every act has so many homophones, so it can make communication even more elusive than it is in litfic anyway.

BUT THEN we get Callum Angus’s “Canada” and here the collection took a real turn for me, because this one is great. It’s a quick, slicing story about a trans man whose cis lady lover dresses up in his binder and clothing for a thrill; it’s about climate change, the new mid-apocalyptic economy, about how disruptions of Nature always allow some new nature to flourish. Jay and his lady pop champagne to toast the last goose they’ll ever see. His hands, stained green from his day incinerating tomato plants destroyed by whiteflies, move on her body, and he knows what they are doing is “fruitless mating” and he thinks:

“The last goose passes over our patchwork of scorched fields, our dried-up lakes, our barren greenhouses. If geese can’t hack it here, good riddance. Good riddance to the delicate snowberry, to black-footed ferrets, to salamanders that can’t deal with rising waters. I want nothing incapable of change. I want cowbirds and milfoil. I want kudzu and knapweed and snakeheads and cheatgrass and bark beetles.”

This story is pretty much perfect, down to the final word. I will be looking for more from this guy.

Then Brandon Taylor, whom I already liked from his newsletter, tells a just elegantly-crafted traditional story of a black grad student who has a, let’s say a side hustle, as a “third” for (implied mostly or always white?) more-privileged couples. Here’s one sensual quote and one thematic, both haunting:

“Enid held the cigarette close to her lips and watched him through the sideways drift of the smoke. Grisha saw the faintest smudge of her dark lipstick. He could hear the shaft burning: a soft crackle.”

“[Nate] liked to say that there was a quiet center of gravity in every building, the fossa around which everything else orbited. That was the trick of it. The center is not a mass but a void, and everything accrues to it, converges.”

Peter Mountford’s “Impact Play” doesn’t have standout prose and is a bit more standard generally, but I liked its depiction of layers of shame. A newly-divorced man visits his cousin, bringing the woman he had an affair with when they were both married; he’s extremely undefended about the adultery, just genuinely like, “I have a lot of moral deficiencies :/ really need her tho :/”, and it’s, idk, winsome; I think people underestimate how disarming it is to just be ashamed of the shit you’re doing. Anyway he’s also ashamed of his sexual kinks, and beneath these shames (about things people often work hard to present themselves as righteously unashamed of) there’s a deeper older one, which in its specific content struck me as somewhat played even though I did like how this third shame allowed you to see the guy as a person with longstanding strategies for dealing with his life: All the layers build up over time and the pressure shapes you.

Then a story by Vanessa Clark which is porny and imho sentimental, and salutary insofar as it prevents me from pretending this collection isn’t what it is.

And then the story that took my breath away, and which I quoted as the header for this section, Garth Greenwell’s “Gospodar.” This is the germinating story for the collection, about a tense and violent encounter between a foreigner in Bulgaria and a man in an apartment. I’m gonna get sentimental my ownself about this story and say it captures the feeling of knowing yourself a small person in a big world, a youthful and alone and humiliated feeling, where you’ve spent so long in purely internal monologue that all your sentences come out too long, too many commas and too many “I”s, and you’re old enough to know that you can’t change but not old enough to realize you might change anyway. It ends with our narrator outside again and stumbling, and because there are hints of religious longing in this story imho (imho!!) I will say that he’s one of those people who are looked after only by God.

I meant to finish the collection before sending this but tbh I’m drunk with power (literally? Is wifi “power” in the like electrical power sense?) so I’m sending now and will make any further notes next time.

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icmyi

In addition to the Danielle Evans review, I also wrote up the new Candyman. Lol and I was rushing to finish it before I had to leave the library so I forgot to mention one of the slyest & best lines, when Anthony says to a blasé and needlingly racist art critic, “You want to be a part of the work, don’t you?”

There’s a whole other essay to be written about the desire of both audience and artist to think that simply experiencing or making art in some way forces us into the stories the art is about—stories of subjection, but also stories of power. This was an undercurrent in Chosen Spirits too, I thought: The privileged characters keep trying to place themselves in situations where they’re, let’s say, vulnerable to becoming politically-active, but you don’t get to choose when and how you can make change.

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