Review of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"

This fiction novel is written in epistolary form by a son to his illiterate mother. The story pulls back layers of generational abuse, trauma, sexual identity, and loss of life in Connecticut. The letters follow a rough timeline tracing his grandmother, mother, then his life, but in the sporadic manner of memory slowly recalled. 

 

At it's worst: An atmospheric emotional experience, waxing poetic to a point it's nauseating, something akin to reading Jenny Holzer truisms for pages on end; a redundant stream-of-conscious.

At it's best: A poet's precision in detailing generational trauma, particular pain, and making meaning out of the mundane; raw emotion that will make sure you are as painfully aware of the brutality of the world as the narrator.

The stark diction and attention to details of Vuong's writing style grab you from the beginning. Details of domestic abuse are given as if they are commonplace, yet nothing much is predictable. It's an emotional upheaval of the life of a family who has survived war, racism, and working at nail salons - but only barely.

At some points he reminds me of Cormac McCarthy with normalized descriptions of brutal pain, and at others the panic of Richard Siken, whom the author Ocean Vuang credits in his Acknowledgements page. All three authors seem to say 

"I am comfortable in this discomfort, so much so I will make it glaring. You, too, will hurt like me." 

But the same style that tempts also repells. 

 

The truisms are constant - and then exhausting. There is no climax. The closest we get is the scene where he comes out to his mother, but it was punctuated by so many interruptions of background noise that I could feel my blood pressure rise.

just write the scene, I thought.

I don't need to know the details of every person who walks into the store. I don't care how many kids there are, or what field trip they came from, or which ones are mourning a bad dream. Just tell me what you are trying to say. 

 

Some moments wax so poetic it's nauseating. I want to take out the paragraphs about buffaloes running off of cliffs and diabetics selling Cutco, take out the lines of being "blazed in the blood of light" and a living room being "miserable with laughter" and replace it with something less cloying.

To lift my weighty review, I will share my favorite paragraph of the novel.

"I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. The have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American's sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, "It's been an honor to serve my country." (pg. 181). 

 

The novel is chock-full of similar paragraphs that drop out of the novel and into a tumblr text-post seamlessly. Flip open the book, point to a page, and you've got your next clever photo caption. Here's an easy one:

"The truth is we don't have to die if we don't feel like it.

Just kidding."

As Dwight Garner of The New York Times puts it, it's mostly "filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities." The pithy lines try to touch on everything; that is to say, they say nothing.

Difference in Definition Between Sex & Gender

Please feel free to add your own notes and comparisons. Perhaps one day I will come back and give biblical references for my thoughts, but do not count on it.

Gender: outward expression

Sex: deeply personal, private

Gender: outward trappings, clothing, communities and customs by which to behave

Sex: requires surgery or mutilation to change; can be deformed at/before birth or later in life. Always painful to change - there is blood. 

Gender: changes by stepping into the closet, so to say. Acting. Clothing, the requirements for which may change from year to year.

I give no ruling to say that this is an absolute. But I do say clearly that there is a difference between the two, and the fact of sex and the notion of gender are mutually exclusive, though they do often correspond. But that is a different subject.

A Comparison of Poems Written 20 Years Apart

In the following I will be comparing the first two stanzas of two different poems by Joy Davidman.
I am doing this in an attempt to highlight a shift in a poet's writing that I have sensed but never articulated: that if they start off tightly wound, they loosen up through the years.

This is in no way conclusive. I have been reading through A Naked Tree by Joy Davidman (Ed. Don W. King, Eerdman's press) and I couldn't really get through it. Mostly, I couldn't sit through all the poems of her earlier years, 1930's or so. She was not in her juvenile-qualifying years at this time, she was in her 20's at the time of writing them. But there is something in the writing that is stressed and stressed-over like the first writings of a blossoming poet that wants very much to be good.

"And Rainbow Wings"

If in my dream you wore a monstrous shape,

Some unimaginable beast of death

To part my little body and my breath,

An iron dragon or distorted ape;

If your strong semblance came in lust to rape

A flesh that flowers to this consummation,

Or brought an illusory adoration,

Sleep would become enchantment and escape."   (May 1934)

The first two stanzas here are more sound than feeling: see the alliteration; feel the shape of your mouth as you read it out loud; ask yourself what tangible senses you pick up on.
The story here (and I by no means think every poem needs a narrative or plot, but please hold back your critics of my critiquing, please) is abstract. Sure, dreams are abstract, but the senses are so unattended to that I do not know where to place my attention. Should I be thinking about the ape, the flesh, or the escape? Why does my mouth find distaste in saying "illusory adoration"?
This poem gets me nowhere except impressed with how things sound next to each other. 

I do not want more of this poem.

Now let's look at the next poem.

"XXXV"
Poor child, who read a book of magic once,

And tried such games as walking on the waves,

Distilling essences of stars and suns,

And conjuring dead women from their graves

To skip a sarabande about you! When,

As children will, you wearied of your play
And would have sent them to their holes again,

How sad to find they would not go away!"   (May 9, 1954)

Now here we have a story. There is progression in the reader's mind from child with a book, child at the ocean, child under the stars, child in the grave yard. The settings are clear.

In eight lines I have a history of the speaker's subject: a child who was once enthralled with magic found in a book, played child-like with it, only to have a haunting consequence - be it either wisdom learned too soon or longing for the first initial rush that cannot be again played out.
The sounds of this poem, as well, are less chalked-full of syllables, but instead flow like a casual sentence. 

Whatever it is, I want more of this poem. 

The first poem seems too contrived for my liking. I feel that the speaker merely wants to use the "poetic" words they find power in rather than crafting a cohesive piece.

Has anyone else noticed a trend from strained to natural in poetry or writing? Or any other shifts in an author's style through their career?

Simone Weil's 111th Birthday

"If only I knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear...When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart."

On this day in Pair, France, 1909, Simone Weil was born.

It is only appropriate that 111 years later, as her biggest fan, I would have a headache that bordered on a migraine all day. Also in celebration of her memory I didn't have a second cookie at lunch though I could have. I still, however, had a first cookie.

For a short article, here's this Brain Pickings article. For a piece of Weil art that has a cool-girl aloofness to it that Weil would certainly never have possessed, have this.

Simone Weil refused to join the Catholic Church. This was before Vatican II.

I have not the strength of Weil to write on when I really don't have to with a pain like this behind my eyes. I cannot, in a few words on a blog, describe to you what reading Gravity and Grace, a short collection of her scattered thoughts, for the first time was like for me. But if you can recall for yourself what it feels like to find a word for a feeling that you had always felt but never known what to call - it was something like that.

If I could bring back any person from French history, I would call back Simone Weil. If all she did was insult me in French that I could hardly understand, then I would be a happy person.

Here's a rad quote on her idea of the self and how any concept of it needs to be destroyed:

"We possess nothing in the world - a mere chance can strip us of everything - except the power to say "I". That is what we have to give to God, in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish, only the destruction of the "I.""

I Don't Have Pithy Answers

Edit: I wrote my first post immediately after the event, posted it, then I slept on it, then woke up to realize what I was actually trying to say.


I've come face to face with the fact that I not only don't have all of the answers to questions on Christian theology, but what few questions I do have answered are painful for me to articulate. The former does not unsettle me - it is the latter that gave me difficulty when confronted with a Catholic priest who told me he wasn't trying to convert anyone to Christianity, that "If they are in my pew and happy, then I'm happy for them."

I'm scared that my friends who invited me to this mass may not know Jesus. What's more, I am scared that I don't know what it means to know Jesus. Last night I tried to articulate the importance of the spiritual relationship and the three-parts of spirit, soul, and body that make up a person. It was fumbling, it didn't make sense.  I couldn't get my emotional truths out of my mouth. I was dismissed.

It struck me to know that for all of my sureness in my Christianity, I could not stutter out one convincing sentence in the face of someone who was content to leave this whole Jesus thing out of the matter, telling me that making people more human was enough, that improving humanity was the goal.

I could not get out the emotions, experiences, and knowledge that was in me, so I was left staring at the things in me wondering what were they, really, after all? How useful can the knowledge I have be if I can not disseminate it - if I can not spread the Word? I could not even get words out when speaking to someone who I should be able to have the same basic understandings with, but it was like we were speaking a different language.

Dr. Tran taught it my Heritage class that Theology is a language about God.

In this regard I have learned I am as good as mute.

I will likely never be a great apologist (I give room for possibility because I'm only 23 and God can do as He fancies). I come to the discussion table with emotional truths, some of which I truly can not put into orally-spoken words without losing a bit of their gravitas and meaning. But I know that I should have been able to hold my ground on something, I should have had something memorized that was stark truth and unchangeable. None of the Creeds came to mind. Not even "Jesus Christ is the Son of God, begotten, not made."

I do not know yet how to change this. For now, this is simply a marker of where I am.