An Artist's Archeology of the Mind

From Joshua Rothman's "An Artists Archeology of the Mind" published in The New Yorker:

When Sacks was young, his family moved to Durban, a port city on the Indian Ocean. He walked to school wearing a safari suit and sandals. In the street, he passed Zulu men carrying shields and walking sticks; bare-chested African women with loads on their heads; Europeans in Western dress; Indian women in saris; black men in prison garb, laboring at the roadside with pickaxes. Sacks was on the “white” side of the color line; his ancestors, Lithuanian Jews, had come to South Africa toward the end of the nineteenth century. Still, the government included Nazi sympathizers, and, at his segregated school, bullies called him “Jew boy,” while his own lapses were met with strokes of a cane. The human world was inhuman. Meanwhile, a vast landscape surrounded him: long, deserted beaches echoing with rolling surf; grassy hills creased by ancient mountain shadows. At Durban’s port, he watched ships arrive from India, France, Japan—emissaries from an unfathomable world.

Sacks’s parents sought to resist apartheid: his father, an obstetrician, taught at a black medical school. Still, there was no escaping a sense of complicity. “I was waking up always too late in a ravishingly beautiful garden mostly run by thugs, and guess what, I was one of them,” Sacks has said. It was a relief for him, as a teen-ager, to become a competitive swimmer. His four daily hours in the pool were a ritual of solitude, discipline, exertion. Sacks went for training runs or daylong walks on the edges of towns. He was running along one of Durban’s beaches when a line unfurled in his head: “If they capture me, I have not learned to speak.” Decades later, he incorporated it into a prose poem. The line was a plea: don’t make me account for a life I don’t wish to have.

When Sacks was sixteen, he enrolled in an exchange program that would take him to America. He dreamed of California—by then he’d become a surfer—but the program placed him with a family on the west side of Detroit. It was 1967. Smoke from the race riots hung over the city; armored cars idled in the streets. Sacks read James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael—writers who had been censored at home—and, when he returned, he transferred from medical school to the political-science program at the University of Natal, a center of anti-apartheid activism. He became friends with Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, and studied with Richard Turner, an intellectual leader of the South African left. At nineteen, Sacks gave speeches and organized anti-apartheid demonstrations.

It will be AWP without me. . .

I'm such a wild-and-crazy, life-of-the-party kind of guy, I feel a need to profusely apologize every time I miss another #AWP conference, yet I also recognize the #reading and raging will go on without me. #AWP19 #AWP2019 #comic #adjunct #crime #novel #offthesauce #thewritinglife

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) March 27, 2019

#AWP2019

The two times I've been to AWP, I've been lucky enough to sit at a table at the Bookfair with copies of my novels on display in front of me and available for signing and selling. It was pleasant to see sections of Minneapolis and Los Angeles as well, and I have nothing against the myriad panels I failed to attend. The whole thing costs quite a bit of money--hotel, conference fees, airfare--so unless a publisher, university, or other organization is paying for the trip, it can feel as if the money was wasted unless it's being treated like a vacation for book-gazing and sightseeing. I'd be cautious about expecting a reward for any efforts at AWP2019. It may be that authors are using AWP connections to pick up freelance work and adjunct classes, but it's nothing that was visible to me when I participated. With luck, it's possible to sell some books and not merely get stuck with trades and giving them away.

Jessica Bruder's Nomadland for film

Jessica Bruder's Nomadland will become a film released as soon as this fall!

Firmin II

"I loved it when he talked about the revolution too, about Joe Hill, Peter Kropotkin, and the Paterson strike. One of his favorite phrases was "after the revolution." When people bought his books, he would apologize for taking their money and tell them that books were going to be free after the revolution, a public service like streetlights. He also said Jesus was a Communist, which caused some of the people to get worked up."

~~ from Firmin by Sam Savage

even "a bag of dirt"

If someone hands me a bag of dirt and tells me it’s a poem, it gets to be a poem. It might not be a poem that satisfies me intellectually or brings me any delight, I may not want to spend much time with it, but it’s a poem because the person who built it called it a poem.

— Kaveh Akbar (@KavehAkbar) March 18, 2019

Firmin by Sam Savage

"When someone is in despair and tells you how cold and unkind the world is and how much pointless suffering there is in life and how much loneliness, and you just happen to agree with him on every point, it puts you in an awkward position."

~~ from Firmin by Sam Savage

more from Bolano's Last Evenings On Earth. . .

"This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature."

~~ from "Days of 1978"


"Meanwhile I chain smoked Bali cigarettes, looking at the window at the highway and thinking about the disaster that was my life."

~~ from "Gómez Palacio" in Last Evenings On Earth

Kundera in Romania. . .

Then and again, I'm listed as "Kundera," as in, Milan, we can suppose. It's a mistake that's been made a few times, this last one in a Romanian library entry where a short story collection was printed with extremely limited circulation. My fiction has little in common with Kundera's although there is an allusion to The Joke in Fight for Your Long Day that not one reader has ever mentioned. At least in German Wikipedia, the only encyclopedia in which I appear as an "author," I'm in an entry for Kuderas, not Kunderas. I only wish I could tell you that I was the Kudera who fought the Nazis.

Bolano and the Beats

"Roberto Bolano and the Beat Connection" appeared in The New Yorker earlier this month.

Last Evenings On Earth

I've been enjoying a reread of Roberto Bolano's collection Last Evenings On Earth, including the title story which I've only read once before.

Old friends and new. . .

Lux Chen in New York City

"At night, I kept having this dream in which I went back to school to finish my doctoral degree but could not find my classroom. Once, when I finally followed the crowd into a giant, round auditorium, what greeted me was a sparkling black coffin at the center of the podium, surrounded by candles, flowers, and a children’s choir. It was not a class, but a stranger’s funeral. Or was the funeral for me?"

from Lux Chen's "How The Great Gatsby Saved My Life"

(This essay can also be read in Chinese.)

K. J. P. Garcia

"In some ways, I had to go non-stop to make any inroads into the literary world. And, I have degrees in English and linguistics. This is a fairly common story for many writers of color, endless work and limited audience/engagement. Or, when the emergence comes, it comes after many years of trying. Certainly, this may be common for any creative person but POC (People of Color) come to the shore with so much historical and linguistic cargo that we’re already at a disadvantage in the eyes of some publications who only have their ports open to certain sorts of boats." 

~~ Kenning JP García

What if I wasn't meant to be a novelist. . .

"My success, however, turned out to be the beginning of my failure, the first death throes of a dream. After all, if you never finish a novel, you save yourself finding out if it’s any good or if anyone wants to publish it. Unless you finish, you can never truly, heartbreakingly fail."

~~ Aaron Shulman