An Earlier Life, Essays by Brenda Miller is an excellent book with good writing, in mostly short essays. She comes out of the legacy of Judith KitchenAn Earlier Life, Essays by Brenda Miller is an excellent book with good writing, in mostly short essays. She comes out of the legacy of Judith Kitchen, an early short creative nonfiction writer with a long history teaching writing. Miller carried on this tradition also being a teacher who wrote.
Some quotes or lines that resonate: "For now our bodies are just one big craving, ..." from Change "You eat your Cocoa Puffs. Your mother washes the dishes, puts away the missing children." from Dark Angel "1978. I'm eighteen years old and getting to leave home for the first time. I'm going to Berkeley, and Berkeley still conjures up images of children gone a little wild amid clouds of patchouli and smoke. It will be a turbulent year for the Bay Area—the preacher, Jim Jones, even at this moment, is leading his followers to their death in South America, and I'll be packing up the Pinto to head into the city, into the thick of it." from Tender "...I did believe, fervently, even when the angel had been on furlough a long while. I did stupid things, but something kept me safe. Safe enough to see what would happen next." from Bright Angel "In Aleut, Alaska means, "the object toward which the action is directed." from Understand "In her installation, The Sound of Cells Dividing, Geraldine Ondrizek invites us into small, cellular rooms made of translucent paper, where we're allowed an auditory glimpse of what the body sound like. Our bodies emit music, something mathematicians have known all along. The artist has recorded the way a needle can play our cells like a phonograph, the pitches of music harmonizing, disharmonizing. We sit inside one paper fort, and then another, to listen entranced." from Regeneration
"In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, musicians ascribed to each key its own particular emotional color. In a German treatise written in 1806, the key of D major is described as "the key of triumph, of Hallelujahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing." By contrast, the key of D# minor incites "feelings of the anxiety of the soul's deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. . . . If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key."" from Surface Tension In relationship to this I recently went to the play "My Lord What A Night," based on a hypothetical conversation between Marion Anderson and Albert Einstein, in which one thing they discussed was the key of D sharp as a soothing, calming of anxiety, note. The play is excellent and a good recounting of history, if you get a chance to see it, do go.
The end of the book has an Epilogue section of letters titled, We Regret to Inform You.
Given the shortness of the essays, when I put the book down for several days it was always enjoyable to pick it up and continue reading without feeling separated or lost. Her book on writing, Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and publishing Creative Nonfiction, is excellent. I will read more of her books. ...more
Streaming Now: Postcards from The Thing That Is Happening, is a collection of journal entrees which she calls postcards written through the pandemic. Streaming Now: Postcards from The Thing That Is Happening, is a collection of journal entrees which she calls postcards written through the pandemic. I was introduced to Laurie Stone's substack by a writing friend and followed. She comments on movies, writers, and popular culture, along with philosophy and international writers, in a way that is engaging even if the reader has not seen or read what she is writing about.
She used to write for the Village Voice, I'm sure I read many of her pieces when I lived in NYC. In a later section titled "Catering," she writes, "I got fired from the Voice when I was fifty-three. I was ready to leave. A door closes: a great jagged gap in your inner life opens. I was never ready to leave. It was 1999. I had been writing for the paper since 1974."
In the opening of the book is a statement in italics about the book: "When my sister was dying, I would walk in the city mornings and sit on a bench and write what came to mind, and I got to thinking of these exercises as "postcards." I was writing to her from a specific place and also writing to everyone from anywhere." This is what this book evolved from.
Quotes "On the phone the other day, a friend asked if there was a future, and I said there was a future with a narrative that has been broken. It's good this narrative has been broken. It's good this narrative has been broken. In the narrative that has been broken, people ignored the way so many things they wanted required the suffering of others." (HUDSON, New York, September 29, 2020)
"It's not as if I've fallen out of love with his films. [Jean-Luc Godard] To fall out of love, you need the wear and tear of daily life, or the sudden awareness you have been living in a place where you do not know the language and have been wrong about the words." . . . "The job of a woman in the world Godard depicts is to pretend not to see the contempt in which women are held. It's a full-time job. It's sometimes all any woman has time to do to get through life." . . . "When we bought the house where we live, I didn't understand what was needed to make it work. It was like falling in love—which is more or less resistance to feeling doom." (HUDSON, New York, December 4, 2020)
"Some things have been rattling around in my head I wish I could talk to you about. In the past, when we went into the streets, it felt like we were in conversation with a government, however repungnant its policies. We thought we could actually produce change, and we did: Johnson decided not to run again. Nixon resigned. Abortion became a legal right. Now, marching feels like running the old game with the old rules, when none of this exists anymore. It feels like accepting some kind of framework where oligarchic feudal terrorism is considered a government and we stand for that government's tolerance of protest." (Postcard to Ann Snitow (1943-2019))...more
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