Day 10: Annie Proulx, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ali Cobby Eckermann
Story: Annie Proulx - Stone City
A short story that feels like a novel with several narratives connecting together to tell the lore behind an overgrown block of land, the kind of place that fills one with "immediate loathing and fear".
The story is very atmospheric with a lot of lush descriptions of a natural world I am mostly unfamiliar with. The dialogue is excellent- I can perfectly picture and hear all the different characters, especially Banger:
"Banger was fifty, a heavy man, all suet and mouth. At first I thought he was that stock character who remembered everybody's first name, shouting "Har ya! How the hell ya doin'?" to people he'd seen only an hour before, giving them a slap on the back or a punch in the arm—swaggering gestures in school, but obnoxious in a middle aged man."
This stock character develops into someone particuarly sensitive and interesting, and by the end of the 22 pages, I was sad to leave Stone City.
Essay: Elizabeth Hardwick - Unknown Faulkner
I love Faulkner quite severely, and think about his books all the time.
Elizabeth Hardwick begins to review a collection of his unpublished stories—stories that were mostly reworked into his finished novels—and then beelines for what she really wants to talk about: his 1931 "potboiler" novel Sanctuary.
I am also fascinated by this short, horrible, evil book. Partially because it dissatifies in its resolution of the crime, never giving the reader a concrete explanation for its villain, Popeye. Rather we get snippets of a strange, basic figure, but not any insights into his psychology.
"Popeye, the creation, is certainly imagined in the fullest degree, but he is not unimaginable as a reality. He is, instead, true to the appetite or knowledge produced by a later speculative journalism. He has the necessary excited flatness of character, a flatness arising from his domination by isolated and singular aspects of the will."
Hardwick also writes tnhis incredible paragraph:
"The forlorn criminal mind, beyond interpretation, this bafflement and destiny, filled with gestures, scraps of eccentricity, outbursts, fornication, drinking bouts, and always, of course, murders—its audience has aggrandized and changed. True Detective gave the facts but did not know how to solicit the aura. The criminal does not stimulate the contemporary appetite for scandal, either. Scandal now feeds on happy people, beautiful and rich, with their divorces and drugs, and inclinations to behave in ways that have an arresting inappropriateness. The miserable criminal is not a scandal; he is too lowly for that. Instead, he seems to engage the sophisticated mind by his overwhelming thereness—that alone—a thereness that is itself a sufficiency."
Poem: Ali Cobby Eckermann - Kulila
This one is by a Yankunytjatjara poet born in Kauma land in South Australia, concerning the hideous centuries of massacres, eugenics and cultural erasure that the Australian government enacted upon indigenous groups.
Written in Aboriginal English dialect, the missing sentence parts make each cluster of words feel charged with symbolic weight.
all around 'em story
every place we been
every place killing place
sit down here real quiet way
you can hear 'em crying
all them massacre mobs
I found this poem in Padraig O Tuauma's anthology Poetry Unbound, a book I initially found too breezily contemporary, but have started to get a lot of value from, especially in his selections and discussions of war, refugee and genocide survivor poems.
The way this history is acknowledged by colonial powers is to erect plaques and monuments or hold ceremonies as attempts to apologise, acknowledge and move. But as O Tuama notes:
She highlights that nobody can put a chronological time limit on how long the loss of culture, language, sovereignty, safety, customs and governance can be mourned. [...] The idea that the annihilation of your people's way of life is a grief that can be moved on from is an imagination of the inheritors of the colonies.
I am one such inheritor, my dad's side being Tasmanian settlers in the 1800s with at least one ancestor being a participant in the horrors. I really don't know what to do about this fact.
My heart, for what its worth, goes out to all the first nations people in mourning for their ancestors and way of life.
This is an evil, evil, evil, evil, evil, evil, evil, evil, evil, evil evil evil world every human finds themselves in.