Cactus Country, vibes novels, documentary binging
Also: basketball injuries and a little thanatology
If you’re in the area, I’m leading a discussion of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s first book, Gathering Moss, at the Corvallis Public Library on 5/14, as part of OSU’s Stone Award events.
It’s thesis season again. I’ve written about this time of year before, so won’t belabor the subject, but it’s my favorite time of the school year. More so this year, because Zoë Bossiere—a fellow former Tucsonan and U of A creative writing undergrad—is publishing their debut memoir, Cactus Country, later this month. I read an advance copy and loved it. I was lucky to be Zoë’s thesis adviser years ago for a different project (also great!), so it’s been nice, though not at all surprising, to see them succeed since then. (Zoë’s also managing editor at Brevity and has co-edited multiple anthologies.)
You can preorder Cactus Country here. There’s an excerpt in the current issue of The Sun, and Zoë’s reading June 3 at Powell’s.
I was talking with a writer friend last month about what we were reading and said I was almost done with the new translation of Pedro Páramo. He called it a vibes novel. I’d said the exact same thing in a different conversation a few nights before. A lot of novels I love are like that. Moby Dick, Dalloway, Blood Meridian, Autobiography of Red, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, La Maravilla.
In America, it seems like people either love Pedro Páramo or have never heard of it. A lot of writers fall in the former camp. (In his foreword, Gabriel García Márquez claims to have memorized the whole novel.) I’m one of them. I loved the new translation, although I also loved the old translations. Maybe not the first time—I remember being irritated because it was hard to follow or understand, a timeworn undergraduate response. Later, I taught Pedro Páramo in one of my first graduate courses, but I still probably didn’t understand the book well enough myself to be teaching it.
This was my third time reading it, at least; it’s possible I’m forgetting one. I don’t speak enough Spanish or know enough about the art of translation to judge the different versions. And regardless of the translation, Pedro Páramo doesn’t make a lot of sense. It has maybe a dozen point-of-view characters, living in multiple timelines spanning decades, and it switches between them at random: the living, the dead, the present, the past. Dead characters often seem more alive than the living. Lots of things happen—deaths, murders, incest, rape, a revolution—but the weather feels more important than any of them.
One big difference I immediately noticed in the new one, which the translator, Doug Weatherford, explains in a lucid note at the end, was its many different markers for speech and thought. This version uses dashes, italics, both single and double quotation marks, and those little double carats (<</>>) apparently known as guillemets. None of them seem to refer to any one mode consistently, and that makes an already disorienting novel more so.
If you can deal with that disorientation and embrace it as a vibes novel, one where you don’t always need to understand what’s happening on a moment-by-moment basis to appreciate it—like, say, Ulysses or Beloved—Pedro Páramo just sort of unlocks at a certain point and becomes a singular experience. I love it more every time I read it.
I probably wouldn’t try to teach it again—it’s often a bad idea to teach books you love too much, especially difficult ones. But if I did, I would definitely assign this wild academic article I just stumbled upon about San Gabriel, Rulfo’s childhood home and the inspiration for the book’s setting of Comala, and the “thanatological experiences” dark literary tourists have there.
I played basketball regularly for much of my life. A few years ago, the pandemic shut down my last basketball league, and then I turned 40, and figured that might be the end of my playing career. But recently I found an over-40 league and figured I’d lace them up again and see where things stand. It went OK, at first. The nice thing about being tall is that you’re always good for something, even if it is only rebounding and blocking shots.
I made it through my first game in one piece, my only goal. Then a guy asked if I could play one more. I had a bad feeling—that’s always how you get hurt—but I said yes, like an idiot. Sure enough, a few minutes in I turned to go upcourt and something popped in my heel.
I thought it was my Achilles. I’ve seen people tear theirs, on TV and once in person, and I had the classic symptoms. So I took my yearly trip to the ER. (In Portland, that’s a real experience.) Turned out it was my plantar fascia. Not a fun injury, but not one that needs surgery and a year of rehab, either. Two weeks later, as I write this, I can walk again with a minor limp. In the meantime, I’ve been laid up on the couch, watching a lot of movies.
I finally got around to Brother’s Keeper, the first film by Joe Berlinger, whose documentary series about the Clutter murders I wrote about in my last book. Brother’s Keeper is a little dated, but smart, subtle, and funnier than it has any right to be. I also watched Restrepo, which I’d avoided without really knowing why. It’s a brutal watch, and made me think a lot about combat and combat photography; it feels like an exercise in futility, trying to capture something that probably can’t be captured, but Restrepo is a really brave and interesting attempt to do that. It made me want to see Korengal, the sequel, although probably not anytime soon.
I also watched The Zone of Interest, which is uneven but kind of brilliant, and did something I thought was impossible. It made me want to revisit Night and Fog, Alain Resnais’ punishing, unforgettable 1956 documentary about Nazi concentration camps that insists on showing what Zone refuses to: the inside of Auschwitz and what happened there. I hadn’t seen it in twenty years and still remembered some specific shots.
For a much-needed change of pace, I also watched Bad Axe, a 2022 documentary about a multiracial family in the titular Michigan town trying to keep their restaurant alive in the early days of Covid. It feels like the graduate thesis of a really talented young director: raw and deeply personal, shaggily structured, callow at points but captivating in others. It might be the best thing I’ve seen about the pandemic.
I don’t remember how I wound up reading this four-year-old Jessa Crispin piece about The Topeka School and the red state/blue state divide in terms of art and culture. I don’t always agree with Crispin, but I admire her writing. This quote from the end is a good example of why:
Yet more and more barriers are erected to prevent people outside the university system, like Lerner’s Darren, from becoming literate in whatever art they’re drawn to … Cultural production, criticism, and programming are now governed, in their totality, by indoctrinated middlebrow assholes, educated beyond their intelligence, who assume that anyone from a red state won’t understand it or wouldn’t be interested.
I would argue against his position that the art world isn’t for us, us being the red state rabble. The working class, the uneducated, the failures, and the washed out. We are creators too. And we are allowed to circumvent the tastefulness of the establishment, the cultural gatekeepers, and the university powerhouse. The art world hates us, yes. But art doesn’t.
Amen.
A few other quick things:
I have a new favorite baseball prospect, a rotund southpaw strikeout artist with a magnificent nickname: behold Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson.
I don’t remember how I found Montessori Boy, a sketch comedy group with only a few videos, but I sort of love them.
Like most other middle-aged white dudes in Portland, I’ve been listening to that new Cindy Lee album a lot in the last month. It’s as good as all the hype.
I liked Errol Morris’s speech accepting the Hitchens prize last month. It’s paywalled, but here’s one of my favorite bits:
“Many of us are trying to investigate the world around us. When we think of an investigation, we think of finding out something that we didn’t know or confirming something that we might have believed without being sure whether it was true or false. But are we lying to ourselves? Is it a myth? We interview other people, talk to other people, interact with other people so we can secure our preexisting beliefs rather than finding out anything different or discovering things that might challenge those beliefs. In short, we live in a hopelessly solipsistic world.”