There was a time on literary Twitter when everyone adulated the poet-turned-novelist. A bevy of these writers were coming out with new books, and there was a common and strangely unquestioned refrain of, “Well, of course poets would make better novelists than even novelists themselves.” I have several of my own contentions with that claim, least of which is that narrative is its own skill that isn’t necessarily equivalent to managing the flow of a poem, which requires a different skill altogether. (What that skill is, I couldn’t tell you myself, as I don’t know it — there’s a reason I could never cut it as a poet.) Most stridently, it’s a claim that cheapens both parties’ work, and overall flattens the art of writing, a medium that positively overflows with an abundance of techniques, and ways to use them.
I’m reminded of the blurbs that decorate John Keene’s debut novel, Annotations, which glowingly use the language of poetry to describe his work: prose with “poem-like compression,” a novel with “poetic meditations.” I’d like to think that prose is capable of encompassing what we consider in the purlieu of poetry without these strict genre divisions, and I think it’s also a bit of a disservice to Annotations. Its prose is kinetic, decisive, sharp, its sharpness winking with bewildering specificity. Keene does not wait for you to catch up (a quality I highly admire in a writer) — he speeds ahead, sending up snapshots, names, images, cultural references in a quick and private associative game that I imagine only Keene will be privy to the whole landscape of. Like catching, out of context, glimpses of a stranger’s home movies, through someone else’s window, on your way home yourself. These snapshots are interspersed with analytical considerations from an unspecified “future self” ruminating on the nature of memory, recollection, and identity formation (“Comprehension does not hinge upon an image”; “Our dreams are but hulls for our souls”; “Brief observation of any personality proves that human existence cannot be reduced to a science”). Characters are present in the text but mostly through a rotation of various personal pronouns — “you,” “he,” “they,” “we,” “she” — uncertain as to whom these recollections belong for everyone but the narrator, who is always engaged on the page in the process of reflection.
Keene’s style is not merely an exercise to flex writerly prowess (though, of course, it is this too; more on this later), or to approximate delineated poetry. This, too, is a way to write prose — to simulate the journeying and spiraling of thought (reminiscent of modernist projects) — to create, even, an affect of the experience of memory — not just to record the memory proper into the archives of our mental cataloging, but to explain the act of remembering, how the brain might retrieve information and jump from image to image, as a fly might flit from fruit to engorged fruit. I would argue, even, that this style is unique to prose, dependent on prosaic format, in that it bucks the chronology of narrative, which is assumed as default by every contemporary reader, and deconstructs what we think of narrative and even chronology itself.
For writing prose, too, is an act. Not a simple record but a process made tangible by restricting various far-flung thoughts, images, references, pulled from the amorphous soup of one’s brain, and tying these together by apparent force of will. That Annotations is pure construct, one in which its author shows you its architectural bones and undergirding, is part and parcel with its memory-mythmaking. Prose can be like this, he says. Prose can be experiment, and texture, and treatise, and methodology — language has the strength of architecture to try it. (So much of contemporary prose lacks this knowledge, which is why reviewers have resorted to the language of poetry. Can we not try to rescue this art?)
Crucially, Annotations is a construct of marginalia, as put forth by its very first chapter title, “Notes, Inscribed Initially in the Narrow, Running Margin.” This is the basis of its sociopolitical setting; halfway through the novel, the narrator refers to Toynbee’s thesis that “St. Louis had consisted of an originary Creole core” subsumed by “successive waves of English Southerners and Yankees, then Irish, and later Germans.” Various anecdotes that take place across the narrator’s childhood, but especially Missouri, insist on local histories that are often only recorded by the memories of the people who once lived there, whose sublunary existences, whose Black communities, were subject to erasure and overwriting by the whites who supplanted them with an “official” archive. Even place, location, brick-and-mortar buildings, are as impermanent, prone to fraying, as memory. To any student of racialized history in the United States, such stories about the transience of Black communities are familiar. Keene resists a cloying emphasis on tragedy, however, and insists that such an “effect” is “novelistic,” however bittersweet. “Oh, Saint Louis,” he writes, “such a colored town, a minefield of myth and memory.”
If remembering is an act of resistance, then what of the act of misremembering? What I find clever about Annotations’ style and format is its ability to fit its multi-threaded, complex conceits into a single book. All run towards the question of the narrator’s identity formation — what memories, experiences, influences make a person? What, early on, hammers certain nails into place? Keene’s narrator cites literature as an integral factor, but also, maybe, lying, which is a kind of escape, or a form of writing. What’s the difference, after all, between myth and mendacity, between fiction and formation? Keene’s lines are often slippery, loop back into themselves, e.g.: “Desire, among other things, derives its force from repetition, or so your general pattern of behavior would lead you to believe.” The origin of things is tricky to parse, and words, beliefs, literature, can be a lie that transforms the truth. Here is where his verbal abilities shine — in the double meanings, in the wordplay, in his refusal to be pinned down to one meaning — in writing as a mode of inquiry. Sometimes this requires, as we do in fiction, being slant with the truth: “The genius lies, in the execution.” (A line so genius it has never left my brain since I read it.)
For Keene, again, is deeply aware that literature is something constructed, that even memoir is not equivalent to true memory. That the act of writing prose is an artificial one, that to write a novel that purports to simulate the neurological phenomenon of memory naturally invites all kinds of falsities, contrivances, and misconstrued remembrances. His project attempts to surface “that vital image” out of the “muck,” but of Annotations, there are many images. All and none are vital. “Your cognizance linked these as a chain of incidents… but what you sought, like any artist, were the very events themselves.”
Annotations culminates as an artist’s dedicated excavation of self, though it is difficult, nigh impossible, to contain an entire life in words. “Always the desire to be loved formed the nucleus,” Keene writes, “about which other events and moments, positive, negative, or otherwise, whirred like the elementary particles… Were these accounts, as was projected for this aesthetic project, selected and set down as carefully as tesseracts, the cumulative effect would approximate that of a living, dazzling, eighteen-panel mosaic.”
commentsWhat does productivity mean as a citizen living in the heart of an ailing Leviathan, whose violent death throes threaten the livelihoods of everyone else on the planet? What do personal accomplishments mean in the seventh year of a worldwide, disabling pandemic?
I can’t help but be cynical about everyone’s year-end round-ups on Substack, especially as fellow beneficiaries of Western imperialism. I find it hard to celebrate my own life, as many victories as I’ve had, when the Earth continues to die around us. Of course, I wish to be — to feel — joyous, and I wish for others to be, to feel so too. But there is something pernicious here, the idea that personal betterment, that progressive career advancement, that fashioning oneself into a happier, more productive member of one's society, is a necessary feature of one's life. That it is something that supersedes the betterment of society itself. A friend of mine during high school was a Radiohead fan, and she hung a poster in her room that read, "FITTER, HAPPIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE." At the time, as a supremely depressed teenager, it felt like a cruel inside joke, a kind of cosmic sarcasm known between only me and Radiohead, whom I'm never listened to. I still think about that poster to this day, when people urge me to think practically about my life, to fashion myself into someone fitter, happier, more productive.
Is it worth the cost? (And I mean the lives at stake here.) Is it a measure of health to be sane in a sick society?
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For the most part, I don't like to talking to or consorting with other writers. Not because I think there's nothing left for me to learn, or that I do not need "community," but that every writer thinks that their vision of the world is some rarefied and unique blessing that needs to be remarked upon as often as possible, an affliction from which I admit I am not spared. Regardless, this attitude flavors every interaction; the average writer scouts for some interpretation, insight, or expression that "lifts," that impresses the listener, that leaves some indelible memory upon the conversation so that its progenitor, when they settle down at home for the night, may consider planting some version of their words in a future story (an act that I, once again, am not exempt from). I much prefer talking to people who don't consider themselves to be much of a writer at all. Their words are much more forthright, honest. Even if they themself are not so much a forthright or honest person (in the way that we all, to some degree, try to present some favorable version of ourselves), I find their words to be less deceptive. Everyone apologizes to me, when they know that I'm a writer, that they can't express themselves eloquently, or with any pretty words. I don't think the apology is necessary. I think rather the reverse, that I should apologize, that I should stop trying to write essays into conversations, that my presence should demand some imposition on language at all.
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I philosophize at length in my diary, and occasionally, I will eke out a nugget of wisdom that feels worth sharing. Here's one below.
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I think there are four experiences one can have that divorces oneself from the body: being sexually assaulted or raped, being trans/nonbinary, being considered ugly/disfigured/undesirable by broader society, and being disabled. So many of these experiences overlap. One comes to view one's own body as a burden, perhaps even separate. As an object that everyone else is begging you to discard of. They don't tell you it's because they want to own you. The insidious worm inside the average human's mind seeks to dominate the outcast, because the outcast is a reminder of their own fear of being outcast. That is why the proud and indignant outcast is particularly reviled -- proof that one is caged by one's own cowardice, proof that if one bothered to look at oneself straight-on without turning away, one would only find a small, shivering coward. Too many people are cowards in this world. They seek to destroy the mirrors.
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Yesterday I attended a community picnic and brought, as I usually try to do, some of my zines, as well as zine-making materials. I do it for a selfish reason -- because bringing an activity is usually a good way to talk to new people (great tip for folks with social anxiety) -- but also because I genuinely love to introduce people to this low effort method of creating art, and because I love to make a little art project alongside other people making their own little art projects. One of the zines I brought along was one I made about making art for oneself and one's own satisfaction, which I felt was an appropriate theme for the activity, and many were encouraged by this idea. I was excited and happy to see folks actually engaging with their thoughts, feelings, and ideas to make their own little zines to take home -- and it made me think of the ripple effects of this, the perhaps long-term implications of teaching folks how to harness an outlet for expression.
Zines may seem a little frivolous to the uninitiated, but as any knowledgeable zine maker or collector knows, zines cover a broad array of themes and topics, and many are even educational. They have certainly been helpful to the trans and disabled communities, whose health is often ignored and sidelined by mainstream medical establishment, and so must trade information along informal networks. Still, I thought about how any amount of text can be tough to read these days -- even for me -- in a media environment of short-form video, which is how many zines and books with important information gets left by the wayside. Is video now the best way to communicate information? I thought about the futility of zinesters trying to make COVID public health information more accessible, only to be ignored by those they're trying to educate.
What if we could think of zines in a different light -- not as information receptacle, but as a method? I've been seeing a lot more YouTube videos and tweets about how to "fix your brain" and retrain it to hold deep focus -- so that we can watch longer movies, read more difficult books, etc. There were quite a few picnic attendees who read through my text-heavy "Start Making Art For Yourself" zine right there on the spot, and completed their own zine not long after. Clearly there is interest and drive to read, and perhaps even more so, to create something with one's own hands.
If you think of zines as small, little books, then perhaps zines can be use as a retraining tool for those who wish to read (and write!) longer books but presently feel unable to. You can read a zine, even one that is text-heavy and 30 pages long, easily within an hour. Make it a goal to read one zine per day, even per week. Something is better than nothing. And maybe you can resolve to make one per week as well. I pitched zine-making to some of the picnic attendees as the perfect project for ADHD satisfaction -- you can see an entire project from beginning to end in as little as 20 minutes if you so please, but even the more complex zines take just a few hours. As I once learned from other artists long ago, training yourself to finish projects is just as important as training yourself on technical skill, maybe even more so. The effects here will be cumulative. The more you read and the more you make, the more you will be able to regain your attentiveness for the world, to reject the fast-paced and overwhelming glut of the attention economy, and the more time and energy you will have for your own life.
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I love a good side quest; in fact, as someone with frenetic ADHD, it can be argued that side quests are my main mode of experiencing daily life (especially now as I'm gainfully unemployed). In the past month I've notched off the following:
- ran around the city picking up organizational furniture, plants, and a sewing machine off FB marketplace
- made a couple of different types of kimchi, embarked on a brief week of Korean culinary adventures
- related: got back into learning Korean again
- got back into zine-making and am exploring formats outside of the 8-fold
- am trying to get back into book-binding as well
- started futzing around with coding my personal website again (of which this blog is a single component)
- dashed around the city visiting and helping various friends
- created two Twitter side accounts for different hobbies/interests
- am conceptualizing a return to filmmaking (small-scale, experimental)
(These bullet points make no grammatical sense.)
This is just what happens when I don't have the structure of a job or schooling to gird my days, and I used to really fret about this, feeling as though my weeks or months off were wasted with nothing to show for it, but to be honest, I think I prefer it this way. I feel freer, happier (and I do have the financial privilege not to worry, for now). A little structure is good, but I find that structure also deeply stultifies me -- so much of my busy work or academic career has been limping through time "trying to get through it," and any time I have actually managed to finish a creative pursuit during this time, it is because I actively shirked work to do what I wanted instead. Work/school is only useful insofar as acting as the dreaded leviathan that I procrastinate with joy, and otherwise, with the limited energy I have, it drains me.
The further we descend into end-stage capitalism, the more desperately I flail at ways to make me feel human, or alive. I suspect I am not the only one. May all of our days be filled with such wondrous and free-wheeling exploration soon, without needing to cede anything in return.
commentsI am arrested again by the thought, stock-still in my midday reading, that I should be writing letters to other people, only to whom, I don't know. I have friends to write to, in theory, but is the kind of letter I want to write (daydreaming, full of yearning, hopelessly cloud-like) something that wants to be received? Out of the blue to get a letter like this in the mail — no topic, rambling, where the ends don't meet — I too would be knocked briefly off-balance, breathless. Part of this impulse is that I simply enjoy the physicality of paper and all its participations in the literary (I have this burgeoning interest in bookbinding that I'm attempting to foster), and part of is that I like to tell people what I think, despite those thoughts being sometimes considered strange to others outside myself. It's why inside me remains the mid-2000s atavistic desire to blog: a letter with no respondent, a missive to the world. This letter was meant for anyone who stumbles across it. A digital message in a bottle.
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or, romantic narrative as some kind of restorative justice
Now I am not speaking of real life; we should all know the perils of entering a relationship (platonic, romantic, or otherwise) in order to “fix” someone, or accepting abusive or unhealthy dynamics in intimate settings. I like romance in fiction because the best romantic narratives take all that is thorny, tangled, dangerous, and vulnerable about love, any kind of love, and makes its characters endure what we would not want to ourselves, or are simply not ready for. I like that fiction is a safe space (much like roleplaying — sexual or otherwise) to simulate ideas, fantasies, or emotional journeys, bringing cathartic release. And as a die-hard for the trope known as the “childhood friends to enemies to lovers” dynamic, I have been thinking for years now about romantic narratives as a kind of model towards restorative justice, particularly how one could make amends and patch up a relationship once based in enmity to the extent that one would love fiercely, deeply, irrevocably, with perhaps the wound as a strange genesis for utmost trust, and pain as the catalyst for desire.
The easy answer is that love exists in the same plane as hate, and that anger is just another type of passion. But I am not so sure. As a notoriously forgiving person myself, I still would find it difficult to love someone who deeply angered me to the point of hatred. I maintain some of these emotional boundaries for my own safety. And there have been countless times while reading a romance where the main couple reconciled but I could never forgive the half who wronged, the slight too raw, too close to home, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough. After all, we enjoy a romance that feels earned.
I am speaking now about a specific personal preference. To me, the appeal lies in more than just the shifting growth of a relationship, more than just the amends one makes in the name of love — though of course those are vital aspects as well — I like a romance that has something to say about the world around them. I suspect many do. I suspect that the popularity of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s works, for example, is precisely because her characters are indivisible from the political worlds that envelop them. The political is emotional. Political, not because her work professes to have some left-right politics legible to our contemporary world, but because her narratives are always oriented against authority, against propriety and tradition for tradition’s sake, against saving face above doing the right thing. Strip any of her works to their bare bones, and there you’ll see two characters who attempt to carve out, against the wishes of higher orders, their own sense of peace and freedom in the world. A peace that is simple and yet so vociferously denied to them. This is a metaphor for many things, but above all, it is a metaphor for queerness, woven into her works at this atomic level. In The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, the characters are even oriented against authorial power. The book (and the book within the book) traps Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu in its own designs, and part of the joy is in the meta-fiction, in your own partaking of these genre tropes and archetypes, and in the characters’ clever (intentional or unintentional) subversions of how those tropes play out. (In other words, “What if I loved you so much it changed the narrative,” type of shit).
But what does the political have to do with romance, you may ask. Or my claims about romantic narrative as a mechanism for restorative justice. Out of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s books, there is possibly no better example than Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, its own title a clever misdirect for how we should see its main character. For Wei Wuxian does not originate nor wield demonic cultivation; “grandmaster” of such is a moniker beset upon him by the elders of the cultivation world, who wish to spoil his reputation for daring to rebel against their unfair edicts. He represents this kind of anti-authoritarian thinking, while his eventual love interest, Lan Wangji, has a “by-the-book,” traditionalist approach to life. Because he has seen and felt the consequences of his parents flouting rules for personal values (and for love), he chooses to live his life with the strictest sense of self-control. At first, he and Wei Wuxian clash, obviously at loggerheads. Critically, though, they meet as teenagers, that volatile and impressionable time of life, and as Lan Wangji comes to know Wei Wuxian as a person, comes to understand Wei Wuxian’s thoughts, feelings, and history, it changes him. Over the course of the series, sometimes unbeknownst to Wei Wuxian himself, Lan Wangji sidesteps rules or even defies orders for Wei Wuxian, at the cost of his own body. Scars and brands serve as visible reminders of the kind of safety and comfort that he, a high-ranking noble in the cultivation world, has had to give up. This is the crux of it, I think — that the same sacrifices of self you make for love are also ones you do to make amends, and to fight for another’s agency, in and of itself a political act. Even after he reunites with Wei Wuxian and they resolve some of their past misunderstandings, Lan Wangji’s goal never is to find some role or position in polite society for Wei Wuxian to step into. Their relationship (at least to me) remains evasive, out of the grasp of authority, a bit of safety eked out from living between the rules, a kind of loophole limbo.
Wei Wuxian, for his part, isn’t faultless either. A story like this resists funneling its characters into easy moralities. Wei Wuxian harms, kills, and makes mistakes that harm and kill people. But the narrative says he is redeemable because he wants to be. In The Untamed (the live-action adaptation), he says (and I’m grossly paraphrasing) to his nephew that saying “sorry” and “thank you” is the hardest thing you’ll have to learn as an adult, but it’s worth it. That sentiment has stayed with me. A character like Wei Wuxian has descended to the depths of darkness and succumbed to all of his worst impulses, but he is still ruled by the desire to do good by all the people he loves, and to apologize to those that are owed. May we all retain such nobility of heart.
The political framework of a story creates the emotional power of romance, or you could even argue for the reverse. A romance story requires two characters at its center, and when you create one, they are where you start. Politics is about power, and romance, whether we like to admit it or not, is about power — or the relinquishing of power to another, or an exchange of power, so that one can exist in equilibrium (or what comes close to it) with another. Recently I read the Captive Prince series and deposited about two weeks’ worth of brainpower into thinking only about these books, so I can say that Captive Prince, even more directly than Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s works, is about power. The series begins with a vast imbalance of power, one character a prince, the other forced into enslavement to said prince (and is also secretly a prince; the series still centers around royalty and isn’t the most airtight interrogation of power, but I don’t think it pretends to be, either). Captive Prince is exhilarating because it starts here and asks you to imagine how true love might arise from abjection. It is about doing the worst thing imaginable to the other and still, despite that, or even because of it, finding commonality. Who but your former enemy can understand the loneliness, the anger, the hatred; there is a shared intimacy in being the only two people who know “what it’s like.” In real life, this is called a “trauma bond” and is heavily advised against, but in fiction, characters get to represent the best of our emotions. I like that Damen and Laurent don’t paper over the ways they’ve hurt each other, but it becomes part of them, their story. Things that, for better or for worse, have changed them irrevocably, and could not be this version of themselves without. They retain the best of themselves despite the abuse they’ve endured or caused each other and that is how they proceed in a trusting, romantic love, and they also try to be true, benevolent rulers. I don’t think it’s very realistic, and like I said, it doesn’t have to be. Fiction is a simulation or mirror — I can say that both characters are more than the harm they’ve caused, and then maybe I can say this about real people, too.
I think about this topic, perhaps an inordinate amount, as someone who will not forgive the people who have deeply harmed me but wishes them well. There are people I’ve reached an understanding with and remain in my life in at least a periphery sense, but there are those I do not let re-enter my life because I had done so in the past and it had cost me, again and again. People don’t change easily. I don’t either. I explained to friends recently that I can have nine out of ten relationships in my life be mutually fulfilling, but if the one goes badly and hurts me, it’s the only one I’ll remember. I try not to be like this. The trick is to remember that I’m very loved. The trick is not to listen to the lonely and vicious twelve-year-old inside me who thinks that being hated gives me latitude for my viciousness. The copious amounts of romance I read and watch, maybe, is for that kid — to remind them that after the long and painful route of being hurt, there is love at the end of it.
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