A better, truer record

Dahlias, anemones, reading in public, etc.

Peekaboo! it’s summer Gilbert

Stuff

• The Fixed Stars is five years old this month! Though somehow August of 2020 feels more like fifty years ago? Thank you to all who have bought the book or borrowed it from your local library; to all who showed up on the Zooms that, during that bleak summer, we called a “book tour”; and to all who have said, in person or in writing, that the book spoke to you. I needed to write it; what a relief and a joy that you needed to read it.

• There are spots available in my October 27-31 workshop at historic Asilomar, on the California coast. If you find it difficult to get any writing done in the summer (yoo hooooo), this’ll be a great way to get back to it. And you’ll be surrounded by like-minded people, because in addition to my workshop, there will be two other writing workshops going on there that same week — basically, adult summer fall camp.

For a moment this morning, I thought I’d misplaced the notebook where I write down passages I want to remember from the books I read. Of course I’d left it on top of my dresser, a reasonable enough place, where it was then hidden by a stack of clean laundry I could have put away yesterday as I was folding it, but didn’t. I wanted to look at the notebook’s most recent entries, from Ongoingness, by Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is a book about a diary, a meticulous diary that Manguso kept for twenty-five years. The book is her attempt to understand why she did it, sort of. But really it’s about the relentlessness of time and the slipperiness of memory, and about how one writer, one memoirist — Manguso — grapples with it all. It’s a small book, spare, a little sneaky in how it moves. It showed up in my library holds last week, and I read in a single go on Wednesday afternoon, sitting in the corner of a salon while June was getting their hair cut. I liked it, though I won’t say I loved it. I wrote down a half-dozen paragraphs from it in my notebook.

Here’s a passage from page 26. Manguso explains that, in her diary, she takes pains to record anything that has changed since the previous day. But, she also wonders, how would “the record” — her diary, her memory, her experience of time — be different if she focused on the inverse:

What if I recorded only what hadn’t changed? Weather still fair. Cat still sweet. Cook oats in same pot. Continue reading same book. Make bed in some way, put on same blue jeans, water garden in same order… Would that be a better, truer record?

In general, I don’t think too hard about why I choose a passage to copy into my notebook. It’s just a sense I get while reading, that I might want to revisit something later. Like now.