Friday, 27 August 2022

Favorites:
A Street of Splendid Strangers, Leslie Jamison
Driving as a Metaphor, Rachel Cusk
How to Bartend, Rabih Alameddine

* Part 2 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

Neither CT nor I felt this collection was very strong. Still, I decided to go back to my notes and produce a summary for my favorites.My aim was to select five of the two dozen essays in the book, but I was able to muster enthusiasm for only 3, and of those there was only one I’d say I found a delightful read.

A Street of Splendid Strangers, Leslie Jamison, 2019

Leslie Jamison is  the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams; she also directs the non-fiction concentration in writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. The title comes from a lovely essay be G K Chesterton:

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure… You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers. ”

—G. K. Chesterton,

The essay begins obliquely:

“When I was young, the beauty of church always belonged to other people: the believers. They saw the same stained glass I saw, but when its jeweled light cut their skin into kaleidoscopic colors, they somehow belong in that light in a way I never would. The could feel the lilt and soar of the hymns as truth, as collective yearning, as a tin-can telephone connecting them to God. That’s what I told myself. I told myself I was alien to that beauty – I’d never be anything but an interloper lurking just outside its grace.”

—Leslie Jamison, 2019

As it develops, it turns out that the essay is a review of a photographic exhibition of the work of Gary Winograd at the Brooklyn Museum. She describes her experience entering the exhibit “its immediate sense of invitation as if a door had been carved in a wall, leading to some new world, and now I could cross into it – or perhaps simply see more clearly that I’d been living in that miraculous world all along. ” As she describes the photographs, the invocation of Chesterton’s ‘splendid strangers’ becomes apparent: “These photographs seemed born of a gaze that regarded strangers with faith – in their beauty, in their humanity, in their radiance – and suggested a radical innocence.” She writes movingly of the exhibition, and leaves me wishing that I’d seen it, as well as wanting to know more of Gary Winograd. And also leaves me wishing to read more of her work. The latter is certainly possible, and I shall watch for an opportunity for the former. 

Rachel Cusk, Driving as a Metaphor, 2019

Rachel Cusk is a British-Canadian writer and professor. Cusk has written eleven novels, four works of non-fiction, and has won over a dozen awards and received much critical notice. The essay has a nice beginning: “Where I live, there is always someone driving slowly on the road ahead.” For me, it immediately creates a feeling of recognition, and sympathy. Then it goes on to characterized the roads, lined with hedges, as “narrow and burrow-like,” which grabs my interest. A strong beginning. But then, for me, it kind gradually loses interest. Through a mildly interesting discussion of the interaction of roads with towns, to the paucity of signals that motorists give to indicate their intentions,  to the question of elderly drivers, losing steam with each curve. There is a strong bit near the end about being trapped on the expressway, but the ending itself seems unexpected and abrupt.  

“Where I live, there is always someone driving slowly on the road ahead. This is by the sea in the English countryside, and the roads are narrow and burrow-like, with high hedges on either side to protect the fields from the costal winds. The roads are digressive in character, rarely traveling directly to a specific location. They branch across the flat fields like veins. ”

—Rachel Cusk, 2019

“I wanted to pull over but the inescapable fact was that I had to remain on the motorway in order to get off it. On that wide, gray, unfamiliar road, swept along by the anarchic tumult of speeding cars, every moment seemed to contain the possibility of disaster, of killing or being killed: it was as if driving were a story that I had suddenly stopped believing in, and without that belief I was being overwhelmed by the horror of reality.” 

—Rachel Cusk, 2019

How to Bartend, Rabih Alameddine, 2019

This essay, by an engineer turned writer and painter, reads more like a story. It is about life as a gay man in San Francisco in the 90’s. The beginning didn’t work for me – it struck me as a bit hackneyed, and a bit trying-too-hard-to-be-funny, in a self-deprecating way. Once it gets going, there’s an engaging story about – not quite a friendship – but an extended interaction between a reluctant gay bartender and a group of Irish construction workers united by bavardage and soccer. It goes back and forth between the story set in the bar, and flashes of life that includes soccer tournaments and glimpses of the impact (that is, deaths of friends and associates) of the Aides epidemic of the 90’s. 

“Memory is the mother’s womb we float in as we age, what sustains us in our final days.”

—Rabih Alameddine, 2019

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