inlooking #015: Bad electricity

20231231: books, buildings, heartbeats

My family and I had the great privilege of a trip to Japan earlier this month. It was a refreshing change and a nice way to end the year—not to mention being filled with great food, and… dragons! But that’s all I have to say about that.

1. A review

2. A quick class

3. Books to read

4. An internal organ

5. Burning the bad electricity out

6. On medicine and building and writing and life

Reading…

I’ve been writing fiction lately and doing some developmental editing for clients, but not turning out many essays or much journalism. I’ve gone and done a small book review, though, for Micro-Lit Almanac, on a book called Lessons and Carols. This is John West’s memoir of addiction, adoptive parenthood, and the struggle to create order from lives that often feel too chaotic to cohere into anything like a life at all. It’s a very nicely done book, told as a kind of mosaic of bits that resemble the often fragmentary lives it describes—which means it’s also an example of one of my favorite things: form following function. That is, its design—a kind of impressionistic wander back and forth through time and brief episodes, most no longer than a page—reflects its content—an account of lives that wander in a similar way.

From the review:

"There is no order, save for what we give it," West tells us a little way into the book. "The break of a page. The beat of a cantata. The meter of a poem. Prayer." The phrases make an apt description of the book itself.

Speaking of order, you can order it here.

… and writing

It’s a bit far off, but worth mentioning: I’m teaching a quick class titled “A Beginner’s Guide to Reading and Writing the Personal Essay” at the end of April at the Writers Grotto. It’s listed as an hour, but I think the class is actually 90 minutes long. It’s planned as a kind of whirlwind tour through the history of the personal essay, including a close read of two great essays that will be distributed before the class begins, and a nuts-and-bolts dissection that I hope will give students new tools to bring into their own work. Should be fun.

I also hope to be teaching at least one and maybe two other classes between now and then, but I haven’t quite decided what they’ll be, so stay tuned for details, and/or let me know what you’re interested in.

No lists but a list

As the new year is nearly upon us, it’s been the season of “best of” and other varieties of lists. I’ve never really enjoyed these (neither reading nor writing them), but I realized I do have my own list of books for you, which is just all the books I read in 2023 (regardless of when they were published). There were 40, and while ten of these were books I read to my kids, those count too.

Which were the best? Here’s a list:

• Best contemporary novel: Real Life, by Brandon Taylor

• Best late-20th-century novel: Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, by Denis Johnson. (Runner-up was Fat City, by Leonard Gardner, with honorable mention to White Noise, by Don DeLillo, which is still an amazing book, but feels perhaps less unique and idiosyncratic than it once did, which is both a testament to its influence and a drag on its showing in the year-end book stakes.)

• Best slightly obscure book you want to know about: On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin. Just lovely.

• Best book I read in Japan: The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata

• Best work of author-inflected history: HHhH, by Laurent Binet. This is about the Holocaust, but it’s also a formally inventive book that not only sheds light on a little-known heroic corner of that awful time, but also, by interjecting its writer into the story, gives us a glimpse of how history is written, which is part of how it manages to say something new.

• Best book about books: The Year of Reading Dangerously, by Andy Miller (who co-hosts my favorite books podcast, Backlisted)

• Best series: The Patrick Melrose novels, by Edward St. Aubyn

• Best book I read to my kids: Rooftoppers, by Katherine Rundell

• Best novella: Even Though I Knew the End, by CL Polk (whom, if I may say so, I stan)

• Best old standby: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (I read and teach this book every year)

“Be still my heart”

That quote is from The Odyssey, apparently, but it also applies to my own heart. Attentive readers will recall mention of a debilitating tachycardia I’ve been suffering, which frequently left me hollowed out and unable to function. This was apparently caused by a faulty electrical circuit in my heart, in which the signal that triggers the heartbeat is recycled too quickly, occasionally causing my heart to beat at 150, 180, or upwards of 200 beats per minute, sometimes for hours on end. Some people experience this without even noticing, I’m told. Not me. The condition has put me in the E.R. both here at home and once on a trip to New York. The prescription for it is a heart procedure in which tiny electrodes are threaded through a vein in the thigh and on up into the heart, where they burn out the bad electricity. (Cardiac ablation, it’s called.) I had this done in October and, to my great joy, the condition hasn’t returned since.

It’s done as an outpatient procedure, incredibly, and with no general anesthesia. I was seen by what was apparently a top-notch team, and experienced no discomfort at all during the hours I was on the table. It’s all very intimate, because the electrodes go into your thigh at the groin, so there’s quite a lot of shaving involved (I don’t think so many people have ever seen me naked in one day before). And of course my case couldn’t just be straightforward: In order to find the right spot to cauterize, the cardiac electrophysiologist (what a title!) has to trigger the condition. Once they set off the rapid heartbeat, they know just where to burn. Only, in my case, they couldn’t get my heart to start overclocking. So my doctor decided (with my consent) that he’d just burn the spot he thought might be the right place, and see how everything came out.

At this point, one can but laugh.

Somehow, I am reminded of the playhouse I built for my kids a couple of years ago. (Stay with me here.) In fact, we hired someone else to build it, with me as his assistant so that I could learn something about building little houses and that kind of carpentry in general (and so that we could defray the cost a bit). It’s ten feet wide and eight feet deep and stands on a little redwood deck that’s just a bit larger, and it came out perfectly lovely and—thanks to my wife’s influence—quite a bit nicer than I’d planned. But what was interesting about the process, for me, was getting to see how much a house is really just a pile of sticks and nails, with some plywood, tarpaper, and siding stuck on the outside.

In my head, I conceived of building a house as a process that was far more precisely planned. You ought to be able to measure and cut everything, and then fit it all together, right? But the reality is that things don’t fit together in the world as perfectly as they do on paper. If you don’t adjust for those imperfections at each step along the way, you’ll end up with gaps and angles and lots of other little accommodations that have ripple effects that amplify themselves as you go. Not all the 76” studs you cut for the back wall will be 76” tall, and even if they are, the height that’s spanned by the jack studs and the sill under the window, plus the header over it, will still leave some distance to the top plate that you can’t quite measure exactly, but which you can only fill by cutting a 2x4 on the generous side of your guess and then shaving it down to fit once you find out just how how hard it is to hammer into place.

The old apothegm “measure twice, cut once” has nothing to do with building simple frame houses, it seems to me. A better saying might be, “measure twice, cut (or shim, or fur out) as much as you need to until it fits.” The point here is that you can’t know exactly how long that stud needs to be until you’re actually there in the back yard trying to fit it into the frame. My cardiologist couldn’t know exactly where to burn my heart until he was in there rooting around, and even then he was only guessing.

Much of building is like this, and much of modern medicine is like this, it seems to me. And, of course, much of writing is like this, too. You can ‘t know exactly where your essay is going until you start writing it. This I’ve seen over and over. You can’t know at the outset where things are headed. The only way to get the answer is to start giving it.

Maybe this is why I am not much for New Year’s resolutions. I like the idea of celebrating another of the planet’s revolutions around the sun, but my own life doesn’t seem to admit of such neat seams. It is less a matter of the perfect joinery of the cabinetmaker than of gentle curves, occasional heart procedures and other sharp turns, and (like the lives described in John West’s book) a kind of chaotic but not unordered flow. I push things one way or another, but the result is never really an endpoint, always more of a process, a direction. I measure things out how I think they should be, but I always end up having to make all the unexpected adjustments that are needed to make things fit together. But that’s okay; that’s just what building is like.

The only way to find out what you’re supposed to be writing is to start writing it. The only way to find a path through your life is to start living it. Go on then.

Happy New Year.

Til next time,

Wallace