I’ve been thinking a lot about the so-called attention economy lately, thanks in part to the book I’m reading now, Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, as well as what was probably my favorite of the books I read this year, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. (The latter came out in 2019, and everyone else including Obama recommended it back then, but if you couldn’t tell from the fact that I’m starting a Substack on the final day of 2022, I am chronically three years late to everything.)
For reasons nobody cares about, I decided to get off social media a long time ago, with minor exceptions. Being off feels noticeably better, and I don’t miss many things about it. But it has probably been bad for my writing career to not have any professional online presence, and I do miss the ability to recommend things that I like to other people who might like them. And I’ve been wanting to write in a more public and consistent way, without having to go through the rigmarole of traditional publishing channels—something people could actually read, for free, if they want to. I’m imagining this newsletter as a way to do that.
The question of why you would read it is one reason I haven’t started this sooner; as a longtime nonfiction writer and professor, I’m skeptical of the narcissism involved in a venture like this. The best answer is probably if you’re also interested in or engaged with the things I write, read, teach, and think about for a living—nonfiction and/or true crime books, memoirs, essays, podcasts, documentaries, and so on.
Anyone who’d be reading this likely knows me in some capacity, but just in case, I’m a creative writing professor at Oregon State. I’ve been teaching nonfiction at the college level for more than a decade, and a few years ago, while writing a book about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, I started teaching a popular true crime class, which has led to a sort of secondary expertise in that genre, although I have complicated feelings about it.
This won’t just be about nonfiction, though. I read a fair amount of fiction, too—my MFA is in fiction, and I taught it for a few years before wandering off into memoirland. I sometimes teach and make podcasts. I grew up working-class in rural Arizona, where I was a first-generation college student, which is something of a rarity among professors, so my writing here, like all of my writing, will probably involve class, especially as it relates to academia and publishing. I originally planned to be a sports journalist, so both sports and journalism are on the table. And although I have no musical knowledge or talent, and suspect taste, I often write about it, anyway.
I’m going to try to post once a month, and to keep it relatively brief and at least marginally professional. But it’s free, so set your expectations accordingly.
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This year, for the first time, I kept a list of the books I read, not including anything directly work-related, student thesises or things I taught. I found the list-keeping useful, if a little demoralizing: I finished 24, a lot fewer than I hoped. I blame both Ulysses—which I read this year because I happened to be in Dublin on Bloomsday—and Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey’s 600-page Faulknerian opus, which I read because I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for seven years now, and it seemed like I sort of had to. Together those two took me like three months, so I don’t want to spend more time writing about them here.
Some standouts, in no particular order: Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose, Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, Ander Monson’s Predator, Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha, and Erika Wurth’s White Horse.
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A few days before Christmas, I had to buy books for a present. In Corvallis, I generally start at our local indie bookstore, Grass Roots, one of the town’s true gems.
One of the books I was looking for was Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller, which I was happy to find at Grass Roots, if a bit surprised. In the Southwest, where I’m mostly from, Silko is generally understood to be one of the great living American writers; around here, at least in my experience, less so. She also seems more known for her novels Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead than for Storyteller, a hybrid work that’s hard to describe. (For what it’s worth, my copy does not specify a genre.)
I first read Storyteller in a grad class on Native literature at the University of Arizona. Their American Indian Studies program is legendary, and while I was getting my MFA, I was lucky enough to take AIS classes with both N. Scott Momaday and Luci Tapahonso. A lot of the books I read in those classes have stayed with me since, Storyteller most of all.
Critics in other disciplines have a lot of other observations to make about it, but from the perspective of “creative nonfiction” (a term I loathe, a topic for another time), I’m most interested in how Storyteller does so many things—blurring fact and fiction, various kinds of fragmentation, including poetry and photographs alongside prose, incorporating a variety of sources, and all sorts of craft decisions that subvert and frustrate narrative expectations—that would be lauded as innovative decades later when (mostly white) writers did similar things and called it the lyric essay or the new nonfiction or whatever.
Anyway, if you haven’t read Storyteller, you should. I bought the 2012 Penguin Books reissue for my friend, but if you can find it, I recommend the original 1981 Arcade edition in the horizontal format:
(One last thing: I also love that Silko includes the poem “Long Time Ago,” which appeared in Ceremony four years before, in Storyteller, too. Putting the same poem in two different books is such a writer flex.)
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One of my resolutions for 2022 was to watch more documentaries. (I will probably be mentioning some in future newsletters; consider yourselves warned.) And I did watch or re-watch a lot that I wound up liking: Sherman’s March, Gimme Shelter, Man With a Movie Camera, Salesman, Harlan County USA, Roger & Me, The Thin Blue Line.
I just finished Adam Curtis’ six-part, eight-hour 2021 BBC documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head. It’s hard to say what it’s about: Western society since WWII, the rise of individualism, AI, Chinese history, the future, and Tupac, among many other things. (Curtis apparently called it “an emotional history of the modern world.”) It’s very lyric and collage-y, very ecstatic truth. It reminded me of both Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which seems sadly unavailable to view outside of art museums. (I stumbled into a public showing of the latter at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2014, watched for an hour, and had one of those rare transcendent experiences that are the reason I go to art museums despite knowing next to nothing about art.)
I enjoyed Can’t Get You Out of My Head’s sort of hallucinatory incoherence, and it’s both educational and frightening, but it’s probably not for everyone. Also, again, it’s eight hours long.
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In closing, I wanted to share some of my favorite music of 2022—meaning what I listened to this year, not that it came out this year—so here’s a playlist. Happy New Year.