100 Words: Maria Bamford at The Den Theatre, Chicago (March 15, 2019)

All too human she comes twitching and bending and switching her voice, her shoulders, her hips, weaving and receiving the adoration of a crowd that’s found the right madness in her impressions of her stoic Minnesota mother and reticent Minnesota dad and of her own unmedicated self. The voices seethe and bubble in her, colliding physical comedy of so many conscience-struck ids, of aging pugs, her husband, her therapist, all coming to a boil on stage in front of this scalded hipster Chicago are-you-not-entertained audience sobbing out laughs. We just met a clown named Maria: grotesquely, we cry: It me.

Significant Form

"A good work of visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy: to use art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope of reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or not a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas."

—Clive Bell, Art (1913)

100 Words: NIGHT COMING TENDERLY, BLACK (2019), by Dawoud Bey, Art Institute of Chicago

The photos shimmer out their own blackness, framing day for night for day for the night of history overlaying these ordinary American scenes made sinister by the glimmering overlay of darkness visible. Lake Erie wears an ominous mask of trees and fronds, framing unknowable waters; white picket fences like gleaming rows of teeth smile out the boundaries of shadowed houses and farms. No faces, no bodies visible, save for the dim reflections of museumgoers, my own outline pricked out by the negative space of Bey’s American selfie, in which the best of us lies concealed, conducting a freedom nobody earns.

100 Words: THE FRIEND (2018), by Sigrid Nunez

More bitter than sweet, more than a hint of the reality hunger characterizing other recent forays (Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy) into the meta-literary: novels about novels, novels about what novels have become in the age of their diminishing clout, a diminishment tuned to diminished whiteness and maleness, a canny examination of what is left to fiction of authenticity in the form of Apollo, the Apollonian Great Dane at the heart of Nunez’s darkly funny negotiation of the razor’s edge between cynicism and sentimentality. Pull down thy vanity, dear dead author, and take your dog for a walk.

100 Words: WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? (2015), directed by Liz Garbus

It begins in Montreux. Sculptural, possessed by a stillness that can’t quite conceal the intensity of the vibration deep within, bowed beside the piano, the swan of her. Later, dressed in white, that uncanny dance, snake or swan, wild with knowing. That dance, that voice, that face. The hands flying not over but into the piano keyboard, piloting time and space. Mad America hurt Eunice into Nina as her husband hurt her, as madness, as she hurt her daughter and herself. We say: we have the music, she had that, martyr-song, young gifted and. My baby just cares for. Still.

100 Words: TODTNAUBERG (2006), by John Banville

An inspector calls: intrepid eyebright Paul Celan stalks Herr Doktor Heidegger to his Hütte on the mountain named for death, where gnomically they rehash their lives. Celan presses the question, Heidegger evades him, falling back into steamy memories of Hannah Arendt and her green dress. All the actors are English and have English accents save Heidegger, played by the great Joss Ackland, man of White Mischief, who rolls his South African growl into the jocular menace of a German master. The play captures little or nothing of the poet’s anguish or his poetry, but consider the possibilities: Paul Celan, P.I.

100 Words: The 47th Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900

Stagger the line between loneliness and sociability—back in Louisville, Ali’s town, prince of the Southern Rust Belt, for my turn in the bourbon barrel, hunched in streets or stretched between the interstate and the partial-brick purgatory of the Humanities building. In cinderblock classrooms casual brilliance on display, nearly spontaneous Festschriften in which the author is present, head bowed, smiling; or else dead, enigmatic, rescued (Jack Sharpless thy lovely lines). Snug with poets on hotel couches or encircling a table at that goddamn Persian place, hovering over the groaning board of dear Alan Golding’s, reading out poems and each other.

100 Words: Ghosted by a friend (2015-present)

How did I fail you, how didn’t I fail you? Life accelerates and pulls away, redshifting friendship, car taillights burning out of sight. Fell into fatherhood then my own father fell. Entangled in webs of illness and loneliness, the call every half-year became too much or not enough. Unanswered texts, emails, my calls unreturned. There used to be more of you—still you move in the world. Others read you, speak of you, as the intimate thread stretches and slims without ever entirely snapping. Unfriended hollowed-out shape in my chest—you, the wound, so lovely a man—I hope, unhealed.

100 Words: “The Dead” (1907-1914), by James Joyce

Is our journey westward back or forth? Swoon, Gabriel, swoon in tragic misapprehension of your wife’s nether regions, planting a pliant face there, while her heart and eyes fill with sentiment for the young man that’s dead. Screwed together upon the scaffold erected for us by the Misses Morkan whose name means in Danish darkness and in Welsh the sea. Chastened foolish Gabriel Conroy dreams his way to dissolution like us all—be it death or regeneration or a bit may be of both. “The Lass of Aughrim” grims its way through Gretta’s dreaming mind, tenor-born. That man could sing.

100 Words: THE BROS. K COFFEEHOUSE (February 2019), Evanston, IL

Ten degrees whirls eddies of shivery air over the black-and-white tile floor, curling around everybody’s ankles, mirroring the steam curling from the tops of lattes. A dozen years gone and the same green painting of the old man smiling down at us, same bearded barista serving up banter, same Brian, same John. Under the old man old men gather at their usual table with biographies and newspapers, talking through the times. The giveaway shelf: thrillers, Twilight, Arthur C. Clarke, Retire Rich! and Pamuk’s Snow. Heat climbs down the ceramic mug of my coffee-for-here. Voices fly to the ceiling. Stay warm.

100 Words: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES (2017), by Carmen Maria Machado

Parties are what elude us, what join and separate the many bodies of Machado’s title, the procedural bodies, the queer bodies, the mother-bodies, all the violent and violated women stalked by Law & Order’s silver hammer, talking back now as they love and vanish and erupt in mysterious blemishes and fall, photographed as if dead, never more or less than alive. Strike through the mask of first-person, convulse into the scarred beauty of these sentences, lean into these pregnant words: pops, grapefruit, bottle, blades. Sick and scared with eros, entranced into dalliance, making love in the world they never made.

100 Words: THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT (2018), by Ken Krimstein

It’s the dialogical spirit of pluralism as embodied by a green-skirted Arendt versus the unitary monoculture of Being as represented by the Magus of Messkirch, from whom Hannah makes the most equivocal of her escapes. A slangy, nearly sexy Walter Benjamin steals the show with his life and death, while Krimstein’s pencil wavers between cartoony verisimilitude and something blankly visionary, as asterisked references pile up the wreckage of proper names for the benefit of readers insensible of their loss. No one’s fool, Heidegger’s femme fatale slips out of Dichtung into history with the key to all ideologies in her pocket.

100 Words: SUPER BOWL LIII (2019)

What’s duller than two teams you don’t care about punting their way ingloriously for three hours while we put away nachos and Buffalo wings? Duller than a boy band past its sell-by date, duller than the edge of Outkast’s less interesting half puffed up in your great-aunt’s piss-yellow furs? At least we’ll always have Jørgen Leth’s Andy Warhol choking down a burger in blank silence, wondering why no one thought to provide him something to drink; we’ll always have ads for spectacle, ads for advertising, ads for no particular product but consumerism itself. Rally the team scorelessly. Go to bed.

100 Words: A HAIRCUT (2019)

Two corporate options on one block, the dreary mall snip-shop and the annoying hipster hotspot. The latter gets me a nervous noseringed woman for whom this is the first day on the job. She handles the clippers all right but takes forever with the scissors, sending her hands fluttering up behind my head like little chirping birds. A tattooed manager gripes about the radio: “I’m not having this remix.” My barber gets help for the beard from a bearded colleague and the two of them stare down the problem, looking at me but not at me. Half-price hair looks: okay.

100 Words: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1934), by Agatha Christie

I read it over my mother’s shoulder, or she mine—year upon year watching her read Christies in black hardcover with a little silver skull on the spine, curled into herself, cozy in this case with Poirot and his preposterous traveling den of vipers and coincidences, trapped between snowdrifts in the mountains of Eastern Europe, a vessel for dubious nostalgias—for Europe itself, for colonialism, for violence refined on this paperback’s cover to the degree of lamp, menu, lilies, plate, and knife. The solution matters less than our readerly sadism in the name of a justice that strips everyone bare.

100 Words: IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME (1913-1927), by Marcel Proust

For a long time I used to read without finishing the labyrinthine chain of labyrinthine sentences spiraling in and around and through Marcel’s innumerable false starts through aristocracy and eroticism and art—sinuous syntax the ontology of which imposes a simultaneity of selves each jostling for the prize of the present moment which eludes them every time; meantime we are all of us getting older and less recognizable to ourselves and the thirty-six chambers of childhood are receding ever further and farther yet liable until the very last page to be revived in the flesh, giving us back the world.

100 Words: THE POLAR VORTEX (2019)

Fat flabby tongue of arctic air comes drooping down from the overheated north, displaced onto big shoulders putting my neighborhood on lockdown. Sirens throughout the day. Elegant frost patinas crawl up and down storm windows. Radiators knocking everybody’s home. Go for a walk to the lakeshore with a scarf over my face and too-thin jeans in prismatic sunshine, wind pushing me backwards, down to where a million snakes of smoke curl up from the simmering black broth of Lake Michigan giving up its stored heat a little at a time. Pretend it’s winter normal, hike home with legs on fire.

100 Words: SHELL GAME (2018), by Jordan Davis

Can poetry compete with the Internet? Why try, drones Davis: “Click here to watch / a video of otters / floating, holding hands.” But he who once lived by flarf need not die by flarf, as the poems’ self-undermining snark gets inflected by a belated compassion traveling in the wake of ideologically poisoned heteroglossia (vis-à-vis “New Words 1939-1945”), on brightest display in plainspoken translations from the Turkish in “My Orhan Veli”: “When the sea tears / who do they get to sew it up? / Yours truly.” My twin the moral mosaic poet wears his Baudelairean borscht-belt halo with flair.

100 Words: THE LESSER BOHEMIANS (2016), by Eimear McBride

Doesn’t seem quite fair: the gloriously naïve narration in particles and sentence fragments mimicking the overlap of thought and speech of an 18-year-old Irishwoman and would-be actress come to early-90s London, who doesn’t just fall for an older man but yields up every last ounce of power to him—not the affectingly rendered power of sheer youth or the convincing presentation of the sexual act on both sides of the skin, but to a tired abuse narrative wielded by a narcissist with a bad mommy, healed however by the love of a good woman in prose unbegrudging and utterly uncliched.

100 Words: MILKMAN (2018), by Anna Burns

Middle sister has a problem named Milkman: an IRA terrorist accosts her where she walks reading nineteenth-century novels on the street, striking a dark chord on the web of implication that entangles every member of her violently hyperpoliticized community lacking proper names. She’s passive every which way except for the strings of syntax that she unfolds into an enraging and beguiling narrative of which paranoia proves to be the best available interpreter. If this novel were a woman, and it is, it would tell its reader: this is what it’s like to be objectified and sustained by abjection’s dark laughter.