TURBINE | KAPOHAU

June 13

In between clients today, I have picked up Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy. Wow. Such entertainment. In comparison to many of the books and essays I’ve recently read, I find her gaudy extravagant descriptions and eccentric hilarious characters so enjoyable. It’s a delight to read, and definitely a bit nuts!

Notes to self so far:

• Keenly observe the huge part that dramatic scene/micro vignettes play in her story.
• I love her raunchy over the top descriptions but they never stop coming, to such an extent that I find myself skimming over them. This may reflect more about my attention capacity at this present moment more than anything else.

June 17

Three quarters of the way through Priestdaddy, and just when I’m really starting to tire of the unceasingly Disney-chrome descriptions and one liners, there’s a voice change and I’m hooked again. Ironically, the chapter is called ‘Voice’. In it, she moves away from her uber original and hilarious outward gaze at others and wanders into territory that feels more personal, and less wry or light-hearted.

Lockwood’s talking about how she learned to sing but really she’s sharing how she became a writer, how she uncovered her voice. The format changes completely – very short paragraphs with four full spaces in between. To me, the form change marks that this is all-important. She certainly goes into more intense (if that’s even possible) territory by bringing up her suicide attempt as a teenager. And as she carries onward, it feels like her voice, even when it returns to more of that wry tone with which we are well familiar, is also broader, deeper, more resonant. Although this particular chapter and the suicide story deal with topics quite far in the past, the insertion of it here certainly feels meant to cue the reader that the narrator is developing, changing.    

Love this:

‘I thought a voice had to be about what you could do. It wasn’t until I heard Billy Holiday that I realised a voice could be a collection of compensations for things you couldn’t do. It could be an ingenuity … The great singers were also the great interpreters. [Billy] had just a single octave, and she made it her lifelong subject. I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an added dimension, which is pain.’

Something I’ve noticed about Lockwood is that she’s a not a stickler for consistency. Her chapters are quite varied lengths and she leaps around in topic and time as suits, while still maintaining a thread that marches on in horizontal time towards the publication of this book. I like that.

June 18

Last night I started Meadowlands by Louise Glück. OMG.

I was struck immediately by the tone of the first poem – ‘Penelope’. Sardonic, wry, hints of love, hints of hate. I know nothing about this collection at all but I can tell it’s about a marriage, and a complicated one. THIS line:

Soon
he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime,
suntanned from his time away, wanting
his grilled chicken. 

The poem is called ‘Penelope’s Song’ but you get the sense immediately that this is not the story of a dutiful, pining wife. This wife has been waiting, for a husband who has disappeared, and she has clear and definite thoughts about it. I love the way it ends … to get his attention she must shake the boughs of the tree (with rage, with frustration, but also with hopelessness because what would he care?) and the hinted-at-fantasy of the falling needles marring his beautiful face, which I intimate is not an entirely unpleasant imagining on her part. SO GOOD.

The presenting of the mythic alongside the mundane and contemporary is powerful. It reminds us that Glück’s themes of love, loss, longing, nostalgia, resentment, regret have ancient origins and her work simply continues a story that is as old as humankind.

Her voice takes on the tone of this heightened awareness which makes it only more trustworthy, true, and almost impossible not to find resonance or some sense of understanding with.

The poem ‘Quiet Evening’ is where Glück does this so well – elevating the ordinary into the realm of the mythic and archetypal. The couple become a symbol of all lovers who have inhabited the sad beautiful loneliness of a long term relationship, with its precious momentary closeness-es and its interminable heart rending silences.

I realise that much of what she does so brilliantly in this exploration of relationship is what I am trying to capture in my stumbling, basic prose. Her work flies and I am limping after, entranced.

June 21

Love the inclusion of the child’s perspective in Meadowlands. It breaks up the tension between the husband/wife theme and adds a layer of nuance to understanding relationship, from someone else intimately involved but who is at more of a distance, and with their own hopes and agenda. I enjoy that she touches on this not in the real realm but in the mythic, with Telemachus. From ‘Telemachus’ Dilemma’:

they are
my parents, consequently
I see them together,
sometimes inclining to
husband and wife, other times
to opposing forces.

Brilliant.

It is powerful to get a lateral look at a central subject. Thinking on this and wondering how I can incorporate it into my own essays …

June 23

Brief craft interlude …  chapter headings from Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark …. Filing away for remembering.

• Work from a plan. Index large parts of your work.
• Use dialogue as a form of action. Dialogue advances narrative, thickens the plot.
• Reveal traits of character. Let scenes, details, and dialogue tell the story.
• Place odd and interesting things next to each other.
• Foreshadow dramatic events and powerful conclusions. [Plant important clues early on]
• To generate suspense, use internal cliff-hangers. [Divide the work into sections, each separate
• from the others by a visual marker, each with a bit of drama at the end, a reward for the reader and a reason to plunge forward.]
• Build your work around a key question. Good questions drive good stories.

And, I have finally finished Priestdaddy, which was wonderful. I really enjoyed that this memoir emerged out of an 8-12 week period where the author moved back in with her family. That timeframe and the circumstances that took her back home anchor the ever-revolving doorway of memories that emerge and the kooky characters that flow in and out of the narrative in Disney-chrome colour.

Lockwood has a clear consistent voice for the first half of the book but then, as mentioned above, things turn a shade more serious and another more reflective voice also emerges and begins to interrupt, to both support and challenge the other. I love the way this reflects reality, the fact that we have multiple facets to our voice and sometimes they overlap, or one overshadows the other. It’s almost like with her change of voice she broke through her defences to get at something new.