i'm entering my unapproachable nonfiction era
brian dillon, maria dahvana headley, my endless capacity for nerdiness
Essayism by Brian Dillon: essays about essays, except every essay is delicious, impossibly satisfying; the grass blowing on a cliff side, the murky storm closing in, a desk glowing warm with table-light, the ink, the light in the entryway catching on the lock, a smear of honey, seeing the only word to describe something like a clearing in the woods, hearing it bury itself into your sentence again again again…1
On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover Dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account of wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method; diverse meanings of the word lumber; many vignettes, published over decades, in which the writer, or her elegant stand-in, described her condition of dislocation in the city, and did it so blithely that no one guessed it was all true; a dissertation on roast pig; a heap of language; a tour of the monuments; a magazine article that in tone and structure so nearly resembles its object, or conceals it, that flummoxed readers depart in droves; a sentence you could whisper in the ear of a dying man; an essay upon essays; on the author’s brief and oblique friendship with the great jazz singer; a treatise on melancholy, also on everything else; a species of drift or dissolve, at the levels of logic and language, that time and again requires the reader to page back in wonder—how did we get from there to here?—before the writer’s skill (or perhaps his inattention); a sermon on death, preached in the poet’s final days on earth, before a picture of his own shrouded person; the metaphoric power of same: the womb a grave, the grave a whirlpool, Death’s hand stretched to save us; a long read; a short history of decay; a diary’s prompt towards self-improvement: “To sew on my buttons (+ button my lip)”; on a dancer arrayed like an insect or a ray of light; love, alphabetized; life, alphabetized; every second of a silent clown’s appearance on screen, dissected: “We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death”; on the cows outside the window: their movement and mass, their possible emotions; what happened next will amaze you; upon a time a dutiful thing, set and judged by teachers, proof because proof needed—of what?
Brian Dillon, Essayism. I put the whole paragraph because as soon as I read this I was like, ohhh I’m in for it. The style! The textures!
After finishing Essayism I started full-time work, which fully absorbed me into its calendar-sharing, self-optimizing rhythms. Three days later I finished Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley, a six month undertaking that for me, dragged in the middle but ended with a ringing clear in my head like a bell; it captured the dudes being dudes vibe. Guys being dudes, with intention. Her writing about Grendel’s mother, the dynamics of guys in bars jostling each other for attention, how her own pregnancy & motherhood gripped the whole endeavor. It reminds me of how much I loved those author’s notes at the end of manga volumes, or author’s notes in general. Early love for the autoethnography.
Here’s a little bit so you can get an idea of her modern, slangy translation:
...did all this grieving the way men do,
but, bro, no man knows, not me, not you,
how to get to goodbye. His guys tried.
They remembered the right words. Our king!
Lonely ring-wielder! Inheritor of everything!
He was our man, but every man dies.
Here he is now! Here our best boy lies!
He rode hard! He stayed thirsty! He was the man!
He was the man.
Maria Dahvana Headley, Beowulf: A New Translation
Then I underestimated how much work would start to affect my thinking. To understand what on earth folks on Twitter are talking about all the time I read Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, which I disliked, but then begrudgingly adopted some of his frameworks for file organization at work. The horror! After that I despaired about ever reading a practical self help book that I could vibe with, which is when I read How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. In the peak of my Obsidian obsession, I found a lot of relief in its structure. It was wildly nerdy without being greasy.
I wanted to get these on a page so I can move on to better, sillier books. These were few, but influential.
a john banville reference that lives in my head except slightly altered from the original interview, in this other interview with angel nafis. memories are crazy like that: