San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
In poetry, prose, taking a shot at racism
“You resist the performance. of otherness. when writing this book,” writes Truong Tran in “Book of the Other: Small in Comparison,” adding: “you insist on saying to your reader. that this is not outrage. the performance of anger. but rather anger. the clenching of your fist.”
“Book of the Other” — a collection of “essays. prose. poems. and antipoems” — is a clenched fist. It’s a study in text crafted to unsettle the contract between reader and authorial speaker, asserting that it’s the reader who has some explaining to do, rather than the other way around.
“dear white. that you are neither singular nor universal. friend nor enemy. you will see yourself in what ive written. as only you can see yourself.”
Broken into eight sections (from “the book of silence” to “the book of beginning” and “an afterword of sorts”), “Book of the Other” is presented in fragments, some short and longer blocks of text, and some cascading stanzas, written without capitalization or punctuation other than the period. The effect is staccato and mesmeric, as if every sentence were leaned forward, pointing.
“you will not put yourself on display. you say in this book. youre saying this out loud. you think you are looking. you think you know. but the fact is. i am looking at you.”
The backbone of the work is Tran’s experience as a teacher and being passed over for tenure-track positions at an unnamed university; in at least one instance, passed over for a white man with less teaching experience:
“this is entirely true you have been made a finalist for three tenure track jobs at this very university where you have been teaching as a lecturer for the past twelve years three times you have been made a finalist over the past twelve years and three times you have been denied a tenure track job this is entirely true”
Though this story and the institutional racism found in academia are central to the book, Tran tells Kaya Press that “Book of the Other” is not about academia per se. “The metaphorical violence I am speaking of is connected to the physical violence we are seeing in this time. Is this about academia? No. This is about living.” And, at the same time, it is heavily implied throughout the book that its core narrative was inspired by real-life events.
Tran is the decorated author of six books of poetry, as well as an artist monograph and a
City Lights presents Truong Tran in conversation with Muriel Leung of Kaya Press: Virtual event. 6 p.m. Dec. 1. Free. Registration required. www.citylights.com
Book of the Other
By Truong Tran
(Kaya Press; 236 pages; $18.95)
children’s book, though he is perhaps foremost a visual artist. References to his art dapple “Book of the Other,” adding a thrilling Googleable dimension, and one that hints at literary kinship with cross-genre antecedents in the art-essay sphere. Tran’s defiance of genre, though, is an important part of this book as a whole: By intentionally pressing against the rules of accepted forms, he asks that they expand, rather than make his words contract to fit inside. “This book is about the possibilities of writing,” Tran told Kaya Press. “The book is prose, poems, antipoems, and essays because it is important that I as an immigrant writing in the english language can stake such a claim.”
Genevieve Walker is a nonfiction writer and editor based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Hodinkee, Take Shape, GQ , Bon Appétit, Real Life, Guernica and others.
Every reader knows you can follow a good narrator anywhere — to the grocery store, to the DMV, to the chemo transfusion center, through birth and death. In writing, there is nothing more powerful than good company. And novelist Ann Patchett is, above all, marvelous company.
Her new essay collection, “These Precious Days,” gathers together revised versions of published essays and a few new ones, turning her extraordinary powers as a writer to the lovely, unremarkable business of day-to-day living — walking the dog, cleaning out the closets, cooking a Thanksgiving turkey, caring for a dying friend. Several essays exist in the same chronological period but do not intersect, creating a sort of narrative origami, with stories folding back on one another but not interlocking.
The backbone of the collection is her three longer essays — “Three Fathers,” “There Are No Children Here” and “These Precious Days.” All speak to different parts of Patchett’s identity as a writer, and “Three Fathers” (my favorite; everyone will have a different one) is the most explicit about the forces that made her the writer she is. Her dad never wanted her to be a writer, her stepdad never wanted her to be anything else, and her mother’s third husband, Darrell, is the
only one who just loves and asks nothing of her. But none of these dads’ roles is as simple or has the impact you would imagine.
It was her father’s concern that writing was a one-way ticket to failure that “made me fierce,” Patchett writes. “Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women.” Amen to that. She is also clear that the disagreements with her father exist separately from their love. “Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive,” she writes.
In “There Are No Children Here,” Patchett describes her early, unshakable knowledge that she did not want to have kids. When she marries at 41, friends and acquaintances rush to tell her she still has time, and the essay — funny, deft, narratively rich — captures how unnerved our society is by women who are childless by choice, how uncomfortable it makes us when people don’t want the same things we do. Her friends’ husbands tell her she needs children, and “I suspect it had less to do with my best interests and more to do with the fact that I made them nervous walking around the world unencumbered. I was setting a bad example,” she writes.
The essay also gives us insight into one of Patchett’s hidden gifts as a writer — she does not give a fig about what other people think. “How I came not to care about other people’s opinions is something of a mystery even to me. I was born with a compass. It was the luck of the draw.”
Interestingly, the collection’s title essay is the only one I struggled with. It reveals the moving, headlong friendship between Patchett and Tom Hanks’ assistant Sooki (yes, you read that right), whom Patchett befriends when Hanks is recording the audiobook
These Precious Days By Ann Patchett (HarperCollins; 320 pages; $26.99)
for one of her novels. Through many twists and turns, Sooki ends up quarantining with Patchett and her husband, Karl, during the beginning of COVID, so she can participate in a medical trial for pancreatic cancer.
Patchett is well aware of what she has here — a meditation on friendship with a woman who has terminal cancer during a lethal pandemic. But this essay felt less metabolized than her other work, as if the emotions had not yet cooled. Her hunger to capture Sooki on paper, knowing her subject is gold, practically smokes off the page, and
HarperCollins presents Ann Patchett in conversation with Laura Dern: Virtual event. 6 p.m. Dec. 2. Ticket required; donation or purchase of book includes ticket. www.book passage.com
that threw me. It’s a strange story, and a surprising one, taking a hard left at the end I didn’t see coming. Maybe that’s Patchett’s point. Even as a writer, you can think you’re in one story, and then suddenly you’re in another. As for me, I learned that contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to love a story to be desperate to know how it ends.
Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow
and the Future of Chasing Snow.” A decade and a half after her initial foray to the mountains, Hansman returned to the vagabond lifestyle to investigate the past and future of this singular obsession.
American ski bums owe much to the 10th Mountain Division, skiing soldiers dispatched to Europe’s peaks during World War II who returned home to open dozens of new resorts, democratizing the sport through cheap lift tickets. The resorts needed young daredevils to run their operations. Choose the life of a ski bum, Hansman writes, and “you could drop out of polite society while dropping into a world where the most valuable currency was skill and nerve.” (Of course, it never hurts if you’re white, male and wealthy enough to afford dropping out.)
Today you’ll know ski bums by their bizarre rituals, fierce independence and near-religious devotion to snow. “Powder Days” often reads like an entertaining ethnography, as Hansman introduces us to characters like Bridger Bowl’s Marcus Fuller, who performs “aprèspuncture” on friends after days on the slopes in Montana; and Palisades Tahoe’s “KT Cheryl” (her nickname derives from the KT chairlift), who has missed first chair on a powder day only a couple of times in the past 30 years, “despite the hordes of young bros who try to beat her to the lineup.”
Many ski bums are motivated by a desire to be closer to nature. Dolores LaChapelle, a pioneer of powder skiing, called this deep ecology, which Hansman interprets as “moving downhill, in balance with gravity” as “a way to understand our place in the ecosystem.”
But a host of sinister forces threatens these mountain ecosystems: Climate change means fewer snowflakes accumulate every year. Resort towns balloon with millionaires even as housing for workers dwindles. Corporate consolidation has stripped ski towns of their local flavor.
Hansman, a veteran ski journalist and the author of “Downriver,” serves as an apt guide through this wilderness: Her criticisms of the industry are blade-sharp, yet her passion for the sport shimmers on every page, with prose as smooth as a turn in dry powder.
In her quest to uncover whether ski bums stand a chance, Hansman might have made more of an insight gleaned from the Aspen Snowmass resort’s senior vice president of sustainability, Auden Schendler: To save ski towns, we need to embrace collectivism, “to make decisions that are for the good of society.”
It might be time for ski bums to shed their lone-wolf personas and band together to tackle the ills plaguing the ski industry.