Unpacking My Library
Also: bad times at my old workplace, a new essay, why I'm anti-list, Shoah, hometown movies, etc
It’s been a minute. The nice thing about taking a break this long is that I’m now too late to weigh in on any of the political events or literary debates that have happened since June. I’ve also learned that I gain more followers not posting. I should take time off more often! Instead I’m going to write a long post about nothing in particular. This will probably be the last one of these for a while—next month I might switch things up around here, but more on that next month.
I spent a lot of that break working on the novel.1 I also moved again, wrapping up a peripatetic year by settling into a guesthouse in North Portland that will hopefully be home for the next year, at least. And I finally cleared out my storage unit, which meant dealing with those twenty-six boxes of books.
My old house was three times the size of this one, and I only kept one bookcase. Something had to give. So I got rid of roughly half my library, keeping only the books that were signed, seemed hard to replace, had sentimental or research value, or that I hadn’t yet read and thought I might. It was easier than I expected.
One of the reasons it was easy is that around 2008, I was meeting with Tobias Wolff in his office at Stanford, talking about books, when he started flipping through a Rolodex on his desk. I’d assumed it was an antediluvian way of storing contact information, but he told me it was where he kept notes on books he read. Like many things he said to me back then, it seemed both simple and brilliant, the sort of thing I should’ve thought of but hadn’t. Until then I’d been taking notes in the books themselves, like a barbarian, and losing the notes whenever I lent or lost the book.
Since then I’ve written notes for every book I read on five-by-eight index cards, which I keep in a card file. They’re the perfect size to fit inside all but the smallest books, and it works as a bookmark, too. And I don’t need to keep the actual books around anymore, taking up so much space. My notes are mostly incoherent and/or obvious, but that’s not the point—the main point is to make it easy to find a passage if I need to, to reread or teach or quote in an essay. Now I recommend it to all of my students. If you need an efficient way to take notes, give it a try.
I had already written the above when I heard what’s happening back on the Farm. The Stanford Creative Writing Department just laid off twenty-three Jones Lecturers. My former colleague Tom Kealey wrote an overview of the situation, and gave more details a few hours ago, as I write this. I haven’t seen a list of who got laid off, but I’m afraid some of my friends might be on it.
I was a lecturer there from 2009-2011.2 As I recall, the process of hiring (and un-hiring) for those positions has always been opaque, arbitrary, and controversial, and contracts were often not renewed with little warning or explanation; I know that because it happened to me.3 And I’d heard that things had gone downhill since the sudden passing of Eavan Boland, the beloved and formidable director of the program when I was there. But I was still shocked to hear that the department decided to fire all of its lecturers en masse. That seems insane. I would hate to see good people and good teachers lose jobs they’ve done well for a long time, and I hope whoever’s in charge4 does the right thing and reconsiders.
For people with no connection to it, this might seem like an internecine issue, but I think it points to ominous trends across academia. It doesn’t make any sense to fire so many faculty when the department already can’t satisfy student demand for the classes they teach. So why would they do it?
I’m guessing the answer lies in this line from Tom’s second post:
• The Jones Lecturers asked for a raise in 2023 (many lecturers made around $52,000), and exactly a year later, all of the lecturers who asked for a pay raise were told they’d be fired.
Coincidentally, I recently published an essay that mentions my time as a lecturer at Stanford, and the financial reality of trying to live on that salary in the Bay Area. It’s in the most recent issue of New England Review. Lit Hub later ran it online. (Warning: it’s even longer than this post.)
Mostly, though, it’s about the polygraph, or “lie detector,” and my experience of being polygraphed a few weeks before my memoir came out. I felt dubious about publishing it online, because of its length, and for the same reasons I feel dubious about publishing pretty much anything online. But I also feel like it’s one of the best things I’ve written, thanks in large part to NER’s editors, who helped me cut it down a lot and improved it in many other ways.
I lied. I am going to weigh in on one other literary debate. While I was in the process of unpacking all those books, I wound up in a conversation with two writer friends about that New York Times list from a while back, which forced me to actually scroll through it. I did not like that list.
It’s not so much that list in particular. I hate all book lists. They’re meaningless, arbitrary, and stupid, designed to drive traffic, move units, and further the absurd credentialism of contemporary book culture.5 With all due respect to her work—I loved Honeymoon in Vegas as a kid, and I did watch all of Sex and the City—if I want to know the best books of the last however long, I’m not going to ask Sarah Jessica Parker.6
Whenever I read yet another “best” books list, I find myself reverting to my college job as a copy editor and rewriting the headlines. The Best Books by My Friends, Acquaintances, and People Who Might Return a Favor. The Best Books According to People Who Only Read Novels Published by Major New York Presses. The Best Books Whose Authors Paid Independent Publicists Tens of Thousands of Dollars to Get on Lists Like This One. And so on. That makes them both less offensive and a lot more accurate.
Anyway, I quickly realized, scrolling through that list, that I didn’t have much of a take on it, because I haven’t read most of those books. None of the top five. Only three of the top ten.7 When I finally stopped being lazy and counted, I’d only read 21 of the supposed 100 best books of this century. Maybe that says something bad about me—I’ve spent that entire timeframe studying and teaching literature and writing. I think it says more about the industry that created the list.
The lion’s share of my reading is in some way related to my job. I teach creative nonfiction and true crime, genres that are mostly ignored in literary circles. Why and how is a topic for another post, but that list is a good example of what I mean. I was heartened to see that it includes a fair amount of nonfiction. Twenty-nine books, by my count, although fewer the higher you get: only one of the top 10, and three of the top 20. (If you think eighty-five percent of the very best contemporary books are novels, you need your head examined.) But it’s not the kind of nonfiction I generally read or teach. About half of the examples on the NYT list are commercial memoirs,8 biographies of major historical figures, war histories, or other “general” nonfiction—the kind of books you buy relatives for Christmas. Only a large handful of books/authors in my professional wheelhouse made the list, and a lot of others I think are equally good or better were left out.
Another reason I haven’t read more books on that list is that I disliked a lot of the ones I have. A few of my favorite books are on it, and about half of the twenty-one I’ve read are indisputably great. But others were disappointing—lesser books by major authors, those buzzy debut novels that never live up to the hype—or just plain bad. Two of them I didn’t even finish.
Most of the books I read don’t make these sorts of lists, not because I’m some cantankerous book snob—well, not only because of that—but because they’re don’t sell well or are the wrong genre9 or they’re old. I’m currently halfway through Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, which is shaping up to be one of my favorite novels. You’re not going to find it on many lists.
I’ve mostly been reading books by friends and colleagues, which is what I usually try to do in the summer. It’s my favorite kind of reading.
Since my last post I went to the Rainier Writing Workshop residency, where I teach every summer, and which a colleague aptly described as “a family reunion where you actually like everyone.” I’ve recently read a lot of books by people I know from RWW that would be on my Best Books of 2024 So Far list.
One I mentioned last time, right before it came out: Matt Young’s End of Active Service. It’s the kind of novel I would recommend to someone with an MFA or someone I went to high school with. That may seem like a left-handed compliment, but to me it’s one of the best things you can say about a book. I also read Brian Teare’s latest, Poem Bitten By A Man, a blazingly smart, stylistically fascinating, sort of post-genre book that I bought after seeing him read from it and tore through in a few days. The same goes for torrin a. greathouse’s first book of poems, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound, which made me want to read their new one, Deed. Once I got back, I preordered Moving the Bones, the forthcoming collection by Rick Barot, as well as Trust Me, the latest novel by Scott Nadelson, both of which I got to hear them read from at the residency. (Scott and Matt are doing an event at Powell’s on 9/4.)
It’s a little early to be plugging this one, but this summer I also got to read my friend Seth’s first book, a story collection forthcoming in October, which is conveniently available for preorder. I’ve been reading drafts of some of those stories for twenty years, since we were in grad school together, so I’m excited to see it out in the world soon.
I mentioned last time that I was reading Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. (The title of this post is stolen from the first essay.) When I wrote that post I had not yet gotten to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the penultimate essay in the book, and one I’d encountered a few times before. If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it recently, you should. I’d forgotten how great it is. It would make the top three of my personal Best Essays of the Last 89 Years.
Benjamin has a remarkable ability to understand the ramifications of new technologies, even in their infancies; almost a century later, the essay seems uncannily prescient. It was also the perfect counterpart for my documentary binge. In addition to considering how image-centric culture changed the function of art, Benjamin talks at some length about film specifically, how it warps reality even as—and partly because—it presents its version of reality with such authority. His insights about film’s relationship to fascism and war, written as the Nazis rose to power, are also spookily relevant today.
I thought a lot about Benjamin’s essay as I watched Shoah, the 1985 French documentary about Nazi death camps that’s generally considered one of the best films ever made. Its director, Claude Lanzmann, famously refused to use archival footage—unlike its predecessor, Night and Fog, which I rewatched earlier this year. Shoah took more than a decade to make, and the final cut is over nine hours long. (Lanzmann later made five other films from the footage he left out.) As you might imagine, it’s a brutal watch.
One of the many fascinating things about watching it was how many of the usual questions about documentary—portrayal, fairness, narrative—crumble under the weight of the subject matter. Some of Lanzmann’s tactics might seem ethically dubious in a different film: he uses hidden camera footage to capture Nazi officers confessing to their crimes, ambushes former camp guards at work, insists on continuing interviews even as his subjects break down into tears or ask him to stop. At one point he conducts an excruciating interview with a survivor of Treblinka while he cuts hair in a busy barber shop, asking his subject to describe the gas chambers as a group of customers look on.
Another is how little Shoah cares about momentum or narrative; not only is it nine hours long, it’s also painfully slow. Interviews are translated in real time rather than dubbed or subtitled, and the delay forces the viewer to focus on the subjects’ face and voice and bearing as they speak, the way the trauma manifests physically. Shots linger for minutes on landscapes: the Polish countryside, half-demolished crematoriums, railroads. By the end, the pacing made sense: at one point a survivor mentions that Zyklon-B took up to fifteen minutes to actually kill a person.
I’m glad I watched it, but it took me a week, and I’m not itching to do it again.
I’ve watched a lot of other great movies since June. Some highlights: Chronicle of a Summer, Jeanne Dielman …, Punch Drunk Love, Nanook of the North, Don’t Look Back, Land Without Bread, Touki Bouki, The Gleaners & I, a rewatch of Lost in Translation, and Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, as well as HBO’s documentary series about Stax Records, the trailblazing Memphis music label whose restored studio I visited earlier this year.
I also randomly watched two movies set in or near my hometown. A friend who saw it on a Southwest flight alerted me to the existence of Alone in Tombstone, a short, very odd film produced by the airline. A few weeks later, I was scrolling endlessly through suggestions one night, looking for something dumb to watch, when I stumbled on El Diablo, an HBO original movie from 1990 starring Anthony Edwards, Louis Gossage Jr., and a bunch of “that guy” actors. An awkward blend of drama and comedy set in frontier Arizona, it appealed to me because it was filmed at Old Tucson Studios, before the big fire destroyed most of the original sets, and in the surrounding desert, including a lot of locations I recognized by the mountains in the background.
I was living in Tombstone at the time. (This was three years before Tombstone was filmed at many of the same locations.) There’s something about seeing that part of Arizona onscreen, its distinctive light and sky, that makes me almost unbearably nostalgic.
For the sake of my own cardiac health, I promised myself years ago—long before its author became a politician—that I wouldn’t talk, write, or think about Hillbilly Elegy anymore. But I enjoyed hearing Jessa Crispin outline the case against that fraudulent dogshit book (and some of its more literary counterparts) on her podcast. The relevant portion begins around 29:00.
One of the weird things about algorithmic culture is that I can never tell anymore if the music I want to recommend is really obvious and well-known, or some niche thing popular only among my demographics, since almost all of it has been suggested by the computer brain to which I’ve outsourced the time and effort I used to spend paying attention to music.
So maybe you already know about the recent Bill Ryder-Jones record with the name I’m not going to try to pronounce. (Spotify link here.) I’ve been wearing it out. Lately I only really listen to a handful of albums each year, over and over, for reasons I don’t want to meditate upon. This is going to be one of them.
What the hell: here’s a late-summer playlist. Not even sure I like a few of the songs, but it’s what I’ve been listening to.
This is too long already, but a few more quick things:
Anne Carson wrote about her Parkinson’s.
In all my years working at Pac-10, Pac-12, and now Pac-2 institutions, I’ve never been jealous of Washington State until earlier this week, when I learned that they have a Taco Bell Distinguished Professor.
Not sure I’ve ever recommended a video game here before, but Trek to Yomi is spectacular.
One more album (well, EP) recommendation: Baby Rose and badbadnotgood’s Slow Burn.
I just watched Sometimes I Think About Dying, a quiet indie office dramedy set on the Oregon coast. It’s slow, odd, just all-around excellent, and free on Kanopy.
Anyone who asks if it’s finished gets blocked.
Technically my position had a different title and different duties, but the application/hiring process and pay were the same, I taught the same undergrad courses, and I was (somewhat confusingly) often called a Jones Lecturer and listed on the website as one. As far as I know, my previous job no longer exists.
I wound up getting a better job, which might seem like an argument in favor of the department’s decision to limit the length of the appointments so Jones Lecturers can “hone their teaching skills and transition to a longer-term teaching career elsewhere.” But I was extraordinarily lucky to get that VAP position, and the academic job market has gotten much worse since. You can tell the departmental statement was written by people who got tenure eons ago, because they still think stable, long-term teaching careers exist elsewhere.
I noticed in Tom’s posts how the deans kept stressing that it was not their decision. Again, I have no inside knowledge here, but nothing is certain in this world except death, taxes, and that nothing bad was ever the deans’ decision.
If lists had any critical merit, we’d also be constantly subjected to lists of the worst books, something I, for one, would love to see. Also, why exactly are we having this conversation in 2024? This century’s not even old enough to rent a car!
I was more of a Miranda person, anyway.
Only one of which has any business being discussed as a best book of any century, but I’m trying not to take the bait.
This is an imperfect term to distinguish them from literary memoirs. The publishing industry insists on conflating the two, but they’re different things. Don’t get me started.
As poets I know have observed, there isn’t a single book of poetry on the entire list, unless you count Citizen. (I’m contractually obligated to claim that book for CNF.)
Not too long at all. This was a pleasurable, slow read on the porch of our rented cottage in Maine. Exactly what reading should be: a bit languid.