inlooking #017: Right of seeing
20240505: secret, Glamorama, reference
Things have been busy lately, but I’m not writing about any of that here.
sidetracked
on detention
in community
creature photography
“someone named Susan Sontag”
vocational, avocational, or otherwise
House of D
When I was doing my MFA at Bennington College in the last years of pre-pandemic America (I graduated in January 2020), I got to know queer historian Hugh Ryan when he was writing his first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer. Hugh had gone through the Bennington MFA program some years before me (no less than ten years, in fact), and was back as a graduate fellow, acting as an assistant workshop leader in one of the most amazing rooms I’ve ever sat in, with a group of talented and hard-working students led by two stunning writers, Brian Blanchfield and Melissa Febos. I don’t know if I learned more in those ten days than I learned in any other class I’ve ever sat through, but that semester of working with Brian, corresponding once or twice a month and trading long letters about writing and art and life, was absolutely one of the richest experiences I’ve ever had, and taught me as much about art as I’ve learned in any other period of my life, including the brief period in which I studied composition with the great American composer Andrew Imbrie when I was 20? 21? 22? I had already dropped out of two or three colleges, but I was holding fast to my ambition to write music. I don’t know how I came to understand that Imbrie taught at U.C. Berkeley (the first school I dropped out of), but I got it in my head that I had to study with him, and so I did something I have rarely done since, I wrote and asked for what I wanted. I included an untidy stack of compositions, and an earnest letter, and figured that was that. But, amazingly, he agreed to take me on, despite the fact that he usually only taught graduate students, and so each week I’d drive to his lovely airy house in the North Berkeley hills, awkwardly accept the offer of tea and cookies from his kind and gracious wife, and, once the previous student had left and Imbrie had done whatever he needed to do to clear the air of one music so that he could receive the next, I would enter his music room, this modest but stately, polished and wood-shelved sanctum with its bright windows letting the leaf-dappled sun fall on Imbrie’s long, veiny hands, and I would play for him — or, more often, he would play my pieces — and we would talk about the ways in which they were not yet answering for themselves, the ways in which they were not yet sound (in the structural sense), not yet honoring the ideas they contained. We would talk, too, about what was good about them, but what I needed to hear, what I craved, was his perspective on their faults. At that time, it was only by coming to understand what was wrong with my music that I could focus my efforts on making it better. That isn’t always the case, but at that time it was, and so I loved to go to that room and listen to him dismantle my work. Then we would put it back together again, together, and I would come away, each time, with that much more understanding of what I was trying to do. Which is the great gift of a good teacher, the ability to help students become more of the artist they are trying to be, not more of the artist the teacher may think they should become. I am teaching a writing workshop at the moment, and whenever I do, it is that lesson that I keep in mind.
But this is not what I came here to write about. Pardon me.
House of D
I mention Hugh because I recently had a chance to co-host and choose an interview subject for the Writer’s Grotto’s podcast, the Grottopod, and Hugh was the subject I chose. T.K. Rex and I had a fun time chatting with Hugh (who is, after all, a fun guy), about all kinds of things, including, not least, his latest book, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. That’s the House of D pictured in the foreground at the top of this missive. Whenever I think of it (it was torn down in 1974), I picture my father, who used to tell stories of shouting up to girlfriends, or of women shouting down at him (the stories varied, or my memory of them does), when he was an original-issue beatnik in the 1950s and 60s, just before I came along. The older, brick building on the right, by the way, is the Jefferson Market Library, where I have spent a considerable amount of time, over the years, not always inside, but always pausing to admire it from the street.
I do miss New York.
Communitarian
The nice thing about the conversation with Hugh, I think, is that it’s mostly about building community as a writer. This was part of the brief; the podcast is meant to be about craft and community; I leaned toward the community part, for this one. So we got to talk about what community means to a writer, about how and where to build your writing community, about the notion of community in general, and who one writes for, the importance of knowing your audience and of committing to your audience, of writing for that audience in particular, and the liberating value of not writing for everyone. In fact, we didn’t talk about all of this. We talked about the way Hugh’s books, while very readable by anyone, are written by and for the queer community, but we didn’t talk about how liberating it can be to commit to an audience like that, that’s just something that was implied in our conversation or which I saw there and which I’m talking about now. Perhaps, if you listen, you’d like to tell me what you heard.
That’s mostly all I came here to say, that I did a podcast and interviewed Hugh and that there’s a lot of great stuff in it and the conversation was fun. Have a listen.
Now then, speaking of pictures again, I found the snippet below in a draft of an earlier edition of this newsletter, a snippet that never found its place, it seems, but which I offer here, under the rubric “In any case,” which is how the original snippet seems to have begun.
In any case
I tend not to take as many picture as I probably should when I travel. I read Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of the Creature” very many years ago, and it had an impact. Basically, I don’t want to waive my right of seeing.
Seeing the [Grand Canyon] is made even more difficult by what the sightseer does when the moment arrives, when sovereign knower confronts the thing to be known. Instead of looking at it, he photographs it. There is no confrontation at all. At the end of forty years of preformulation and with the Grand Canyon yawning at his feet, what does he do? He waives his right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years. For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future.
(Susan Sontag, of course, treads nearby territory in her essay “On Photography.”)
It occurs to me that Binx Bolling, the narrator and main character of Walker Percy’s quite amazing first novel, The Moviegoer (for many, many years my favorite novel), is also treading nearby territory, refusing to waive his right of seeing, when he tells us (as I remember it, anyway), “Not for five minutes will I let myself be distracted from the wonder.”
Nearby territory, but not the same.
Right to be seen
I had been writing fiction lately, but I seem to have put that aside for the moment in favor of a book proposal. This is something more familiar to me, this kind of nonfiction, narrative work. I still describe myself as a “still-aspiring novelist,” but journalism and narrative nonfiction is what I have spent more time doing than almost anything else — vocational, avocational, or otherwise — and, having hit on an idea that I and my agent think might actually sell, I am excited to be working in this grooved, familiar mode, for now. The book (which I won’t describe, for the moment) is on a slightly curious subject, but it also has to do not with the right of seeing, more with a right to be seen, and one particular way in which we work that out. That itself is perhaps a curious way to describe the project (and I apologize for any mystery here), but that’s what comes to mind.
I’ll stop now. I’m trying to keep these shorter, but it’s not really working, is it? This one’s a bit misshapen. But maybe I like them that way. One thing I learned in that room with Andrew Imbrie and in that other room with Brian Blanchfield is to let the work be what it’s supposed to be, not whatever your preconceived notions might want to make it. That is, I learned the value of letting the work teach you how to compose it, the value of letting it teach you where it’s supposed to go. But it’s taken me many more years to learn how to put that into practice. I suspect one never really stops learning that.
This is fine by me.
Til next time,
Wallace