I’ve collected whoever’s in here for their dedication to a moment that bends, not in a “gay” way but you know how when you’re walking towards the horizon it seemingly dips. And you feel something. That’s pathetic. It’s an empathetic thing. The light shifts and biologically we turn too. People get different.
Eileen Myles, who compiled the 100+ entries in Pathetic Literature, is an award-winning poet and has taught a graduate seminar on “Pathetic Literature” at UCSD; I humbly and happily acknowledge them as the expert on this topic. Filled with poems, essays, excerpts from novels and other musings, I took my time with this collection — reading a couple here and there in between other books — and I have to admit that that was partly because not everything here worked for me; some entries I found downright tedious; many I found exceptional. I grant that, as the expert on the topic, Myles has collected the works that they have found “frothy”, but I suspect that — if the metric is “writing that makes you feel something” — I might collect something different; this has the feel of a subjective anthology, and it didn’t always work for me personally. I can’t give a four star “I love it” rating (my own subjective opinion), but I am not sorry to having picked this up and been exposed to such a compelling range of thought. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
From the first entry, I felt provoked: This poem by Alice Notley (I believe a mentor of Myles’) is here in its entirety (and is the kind of thing that suggests that I will never truly understand poetry):
All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever wanted,
and still do.
So, while that left me scratching my head over what I was in store for, I was delightfully dipped and swerved by the second entry: the short work we’re the only colored people here by Gwendolyn Brooks, in which a Black couple chooses to attend a typically whites-only movie theatre in 1945 despite what the others might think of them, “She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.” I was completely empathetically engaged in that story, as well as, later, shaken up by If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes:
As long as I knew I was going to kill him, nothing could bother me. They could beat my head to a bloody pulp and kick my guts through my spine. But they couldn’t hurt me, no matter what they did. I had a peckerwood’s life in the palm of my hand and that made all the difference.
I was upset by Joe Proulx in An Obituary (wherein a man is trying to seduce another man while telling stories from his time as an American soldier in Iraq):
The children drowned to death in boiling water, their silhouettes frozen on the walls from the heat of the initial impact, their flesh and eyeballs stuck to the cement forever. My colleagues and I toured what were once some of the world’s leading hospitals, hospitals which had been transformed into hovels of hospice — not on accident, by collateral damage, or due to lack of national export, but by calculated efforts on the part of the Clinton administration, whose bombs were targeting public hospitals, sewage treatment plants, and water filtration systems — policy meant, in the words of Clinton’s secretary of Defense, to accelerate the effect of sanctions.
And I was absolutely delighted by Jack Halberstam’s hilarious takedown of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle:
Thank god I am a white man, I thought, and I don’t have to engage in the tiresome jockeying for position that marks the work of homosexuals and women. No, a white man can just sit down and write and he writes his way into the whole world! The fact that this “world” also comprises mostly other white men in no way invalidates the labor, the art, the craft, the sublimity of what we write. In fact, by building on each other and on the work that came before us, we can bypass the petty squabbles of the others and just dig into the important stuff — like whether to eat cornflakes or museli for breakfast, how best to appreciate pornography and what to do about the crazy women who pursue us.
I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be unsettled by The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan (and although I hadn’t heard of him before, what I eventually learned about his life and art certainly caused a dip in my horizon):
4/ 25/ 95 Letterman. Couch. Drugs. How we do drag on. Getting hard to breathe again. Thought I was doing much better. It never lasts. My mood has been better, though. And I’ve got a renewed interest in sex, mostly fantasizing about this alligator clip thing, and trying it out a little bit with a couple of clips here and there, those jagged little teeth biting into my tender spots as I grab hold of something like the bed rail and squeeze until the pain floats off a little, turns sweet almost, and then it’s time for another. It’s almost like eating hot chili peppers, except these taste buds are in my balls.
There were entries from well-known figures — from Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; entries from Borges, Kafka, Victor Hugo, and this poem from Rumi which did stir me:
Yesterday I went to him full of dismay.
He sat silently, not asking what was wrong.
I looked at him, waiting for him to ask,
“How were you yesterday without my luminous face?”
My friend instead was looking at the ground.
Meaning to say, Be like the ground, humble
and wordless.
I bowed and kissed the ground.
Meaning to say, I am like the ground, drunk
and amazed.
It’s hard to give a flavour of this collection overall — passages quoted are mostly things I liked, while some things I didn’t like went on for mind numbing pages and pages — but again, this is Myles’ project and presumably conforms to Myles’ tastes and I’m glad it exists.
