New Work
SWALLOW: Foreign Bodies, their Ingestion, Aspiration and Extraction in the Age of Chevalier Jackson
Forthcoming from The New Press
This nonfiction book, part psychobiography, part cultural history, part philosophical meditation, emerges out of a collection of “foreign bodies” currently housed in Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum: nearly 2000 swallowed or aspirated “things” that pioneering laryngologist Chevalier Jackson extracted nonsurgically from the air and foodways of people in the early 20th century and that he also saved and framed. A contribution to histories of the marvelous and the curious, Swallow will bring Jackson’s incomparable contributions to the history of medicine to light while simultaneously restoring the narratives, lives, and longings that haunt Jackson’s collection.
‘Rituals in Transfigured Time’: A Breast Cancer anti-Chronicle
Drawing from Maya Deren’s film of the same title, and in conversation with Proust’s Swann’s Way, a lyrical prose meditation oriented around the conventional phases of breast cancer treatment (from diagnosis through surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and “cure”), but that seeks for each phase an uncommon language and conceptual center as point of entry: the nature of the new and of “news,” of reading practices and measuring devices, of the difference between being “brushed” and “penetrated,” on eyes opened or closed, on temporality (life lived as a series of “eves”), on narrative connection and essential solitude, on love and eroticism. A book imagined as a companion piece to Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Rose’s Love’s Work, and Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.
Posthumous Postures: A Taxidermy Dossier
In the spirit of Joseph Cornell’s "dossiers"—infinitely expandable fileboxes of items focused on a single burning issue—a short book oriented around numerous broad themes that I call: scared states (our fear of animals), wild states, and skin states; taxidermic practice-as a form of freeing, animating, relaxing (a taxidermic term), handling/mounting, silencing, reversing (of a process toward death); the aesthetics of taxidermy, and taxidermy as an aesthetic (still life painting will come in here, in particular Raphaelle Peale's trompe l'oeil "Covered Painting"); personal tales (that I've been collecting from people); popular cultural investments; aesthetic and [pseudo]scientific offshoots like BodyWorlds, and the work of artists like Damien Hirst, Duane Hanson, et al; ornithology (with recourse to the writing of Thoreau, and of Maine-er, Cordelia Stanwood, in particular); Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (Norman Bates is a taxidermist and offers a disquisition on the art); taxidermy as newly fashionable in a newly decadent age.
All of this backdropped by the pretext for the meditation in the first place: bourgeois city types who are dwelling in a cabin in the woods and forced into proximity with the "wild."
The Book of Moods
I’m struck by the elasticity of the term (“mood”): it can describe a place, a time, a nation, a person. It is something that can be “enhanced,” “improved,” and “broken.” Something one can be “in” or “out of.” That mood means “mode.” That it describes a grammatical entity as well as an atmosphere. That drugs are now available that claim to stabilize it, that there is such a thing as mood music, and who can forget the fad of mood rings? What in part compels me about mood is that it is altogether elastic in its range of possible referents; strangely indefinable; and everywhere pervasive and therefore, one would think, palpable. But it’s not. I want The Book of Moods to give mood a sound form and a palpability—which isn’t to say I want to pin it down, but take it on and discover the ways in which it resists and yields unexpected significance.
There’s a lot of writing out there on “feeling,” and its newly imbued cousin, “affect,” but mood remains untapped. [If I could, I’d insert a footnote here about “feeling” to say that so much has been thought about feeling and yet could any of us explain if pressed what is implied by the fact that we ask “How are you feeling?” to address a person’s physiology, “What are you feeling?” to address a person’s psychological state, and we use the phrase, “You hurt my feelings” to suggest something altogether different and strange. Is hurting someone’s feelings the same as hurting their selves? And what are the feelings when understood as entities that can be independently hurt over and against feelings as something one can have?) At this initial stage, I have a hunch that moods are more ethereal than feelings and follow a different set of rules than feelings. Again, our own language’s treatment of mood is rich: e.g., a mood is said to “lift”; one is entreated to “capture” a mood; moods are related to a set of things called “sorts” (which one can also be said to be “out of”).
The Book of Moods will be oriented around (seemingly) conventional qualifiers that attach to mood with one wild card thrown in: angry, sad, happy, and dangerous moods. And I want to interlard these sections with meditations on materials: namely, water, metal, cloth, and glass. At the center of the book will be an inquiry into the relationship between mood and sound since mood is often conflated with tone and other concepts relative to sound. I am interested in water, metal, cloth and glass as producers, conductors, insulators, or mediums of sound (and therefore of mood), and I am especially interested in writing about sound and the body (following Sound Artist Bernard Leitner whose work convinces us that we do not “hear” only with our ears but with our entire bodies and that sound both has the capacity to “enter” the body and to define space.) No doubt I will want to meditate on technologies that regulate sound since we live in an era pervaded by mood disorders so-called, thus suggesting that some people fail properly to regulate their moods and that moods indeed can be regulated (indeed, I believe they are often regulated, but for us rather than by us).
I’ll expect to think about Alcott’s first novel, Moods, Emerson understood as a “philosopher of moods” (that’s Cavell’s phrase), the holy, ecstatic, the quiet, rapturous mood created by a story like Jewett’s “A White Heron.” If there’s a kinship between this book and Awkward: A Detour, it’s in their both pursuing wholly pervasive aspects of our lives that remain under-thought, under-theorized, or that need to be talked about in new ways.
In the process of composing the book, I’ll carry out experiential experiments relative to sound and mood—e.g., to return to childhood sites, mostly in Pennsylvania, and record the sounds that I “hear” in them in the present—but also to Sicily and the town that my paternal Sicilian grandfather dreamt, on his deathbed, that he was traveling to, Siracusa, on the outskirts of which I want to experience and write about the acoustical phenomenon there known as the “Ear of Dionysus.”
How is mood different from feeling, affect, emotion? What does it mean to say that a piece of literature or a nation has a mood? How is mood acoustically produced? These are the questions at the heart of the book.
“Reading your book [Night Bloom] has been an incredibly rich experience. Did you happen to visit the Martorana, in Palermo, while you were in Sicily? If not, it's a Moorish building with a Byzantine interior, covered with frescos. During services, which are long, the choir sings at the same time that the priest prays and the parish responds. All the while, incense is filling the air. I keep coming up with this image when I think of the sensory and evocative layers in your writing. Please put me on your mailing list! –Pat Benny
Palimpsests: A Collection
I am currently composing a collection of experimental prose pieces on the subjects of parapraxis (slips of the tongue), orphaned meanings, and linguistic inheritance; taxidermy; Craigslist (especially the buy and sell feature); a condition I term the “frugal imagination;” dimples, dents, wrinkles and seams in the work of Emily Dickinson; and mood.
Readers often ask how reading plays into the writing process. I read a great deal before I begin and in order to prepare to write. So, toward thinking about and composing my essay on taxidermy, “Posthumous Postures,” I read Joanna Scott’s novel, Manikin, psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s book, The Skin Ego, Susan Orlean’s essay on taxidermy, numerous taxidermy manuals, a biography of Charles Willson Peale (one of the earliest American natural historians), a study of the work of his son, still life painter, Raphaelle Peale by Alexander Nemerov, Thoreau On Birds, just to name a few, and I have studied, anew, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (Norman Bates is a taxidermist).
The formal inventiveness of the book is one of its most exciting challenges, for me, and I hope for a reader. To read a sample—the best demonstration of my ideas about form in this book— “Heir to Ambiguity.” This particular piece is in conversation with the work of Gertrude Stein and Lydia Davis.
Some of the temptations that incite the form of the pieces in this book might look like this: why not tempt an aesthetic of the essay that relies on inclusivity rather than exclusivity; why not compose an essay that moves less like a narrative and more like a poem; why not an essay that resembles a piece of music because it works by way of resonance and echo; why not, instead of an essay that sets out to prove its origin, an essay that sends your subject sailing down the street like a candy apple (which, instead of eating, you have tossed)—instead of investigating your subject like a scientist, then, you propel it into a domain and let things stick to it. The result is hardly an “essay” after all, but a collage that is one part speed, one part magnetism and one part sugar.
The pieces in Palimpsests are essays within essays, and they are written with the spirit of Sigmund Freud’s “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad” near at hand.
(Images: Marsden-Hartley, “Summer Sea-Window #1”; Raphaelle Peale, “Still Life” (top); The Ear of Dionyus in Sicily (bottom)
