Two Books I Read and Loved: American Gymnopedies and When All Our Days Are Numbered, etc.

July 13, 2010

I’m not a reviewer, but I just wanted to gush about two wonderful, wonderful books I recently read and enjoyed the hell out of.

American Gymnopedies by Scott Garson

Scott is awesome, first of all. As someone who’s just (barely) dipped her big toe into the cold scary waters of editing for a publication, I am always in awe of writers who find the time to run killer lit magazines AND write killer stuff. (Scott, for those of you who don’t know, runs Wigleaf, one of the single most fabulous flash fiction magazines out there, web or print. Period. ) I’ve been reading excerpts from Gymnopedies (and I’m sorry but I’m too lazy to put the accent over the “e”) and enjoying every single one of them, so I very much anticipated the release of this book. And I’m not disappointed at all. In fact, I’m the opposite of disappointed. Elated? Appointed? Whatever it is–I’m very much that thing.

That’s because Gymnopedies is this amazing sort of travelogue, this sad, weird, lovely, rough guide to backyards across America; it’s a travel guide to the places no one really wants to travel to–but you end up in just the same. Useful, no?  As we travel the map, we travel the mind, seeing and unseeing and hacking up memories and allusions and collecting the pilings-up of the past. These are not lovely piling-ups–they spill out of the pages like spare auto parts and broken pawn shop stock–but they become lovely, sometimes, through the spare language, and sometimes cracked,  often loving lens that Garson views them through.

Anyone who grew up not-wealthy here will recognize these pieces and the people who live in them. The boy at the Walgreens counter in Omaha. The depressed worker in the call center in Buffalo. The single mother in Seattle. The homeless man in Albuquerque. These people aren’t rich, and don’t have much or much of anything at all, maybe, but they have the rich portraits that Garson’s of them–and the idea that everyone, even the plain girl in L.A., has some kind of good, human thing inside of them. Something good for one story, at least.

when all our days are numbered, marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds by Sasha Fletcher

This is one of those books that makes me happy and sad at the same time: happy because it’s so good I want to eat it and digest it and make it part of my cells, sad because I know I will never be able to write anything like it. It’s a fable and a story and a meditation on love and dependence and the fear that goes along with both. It’s an exaggeration of the fear of death and of joy and a warning label on the bottle of Taking Thing Too Seriously.  “Don’t get carried away” is a warning throughout the book, both metaphorical and, as it turns out, literal.

Fletcher gives us this huge, beautiful language, this carefully-constructed-but-then-recklessly-torn-apart world which seems more impressive than real, more dream than sleep. It’s filled with policemen who build beaches and turn into birds, with whales that fall from the sky, with builders and building and destroyers and destroying. But this is a hopeful book, a romantic and beautiful book, in so many ways. It’s a sad tale, but also a tale, in the end, of love and possibility and endless renewal:

I was up all night drawing pictures of plants on pieces of paper. I cut them out & glued them onto some cardboard. I glued the cardboard to some paint stirrers & planted them in the yard. I tried to make sure there were some pretty good plants out there.

I am building you a garden the best that I can. I built you a steamboat. I built you a window. I built you a river.

I built the river out of what rivers have always been built of.

I believed in tradition as much as I could for all the ways it could help me & all the ways that it would.

Fletcher lets us know that he is the one doing the building, and that anything is possible while we can still build worlds out of what’s true and real, for ourselves and for the people we love.  These worlds may be shifting, changeable, and made of paint stirrers and glue, but we can tear them down and build them again and again and again. And that’s beautiful.