Ensemble.
Last week I went to a literary gala and I may be still processing it. The lovely folks at Other Press extended an invitation to their table for the PEN Gala, the annual fundraiser for PEN America's vital work in freedom of speech for writers worldwide -- though I admit when I saw the invite I was thinking anxiously less about authorial freedom and more about the words "BLACK TIE". Luckily I had a ten-year-old dress I love in the back of the closet (small designer, punkish fabric pieces, long train at the back) so I put myself together as best I could and went to the American Museum of Natural History on a Tuesday night.
Arriving, I found that Other Press had also extended an invitation to several fellow booksellers, including two of my own Greenlight colleagues, who were a delight to encounter in a sea of suited-and-gowned strangers. We talked a kind of shop, about the challenges of curation vs. the demands of free speech over cocktails around the giant skeletons in the lobby. I even got to run into and chat with an editor and a poet / novelist I know, before we were all called to descend, through the (slightly, charmingly eerie at night) halls of biodiversity, to the glamorously lit room under the beautiful, famous whale. The MC was Awkwafina (!!), who joked about coming on field trips to the museum as a kid from Queens and hearing tales of fancy parties that happened here at night -- and look, here we are!
The speakers were luminary and the award recipients highly deserving; I took notes on the speeches though I can't quite decipher them now. (And a bookseller friend I admire inhabited the spirit of free speech by silently holding up a sign saying "DISNEY PAY YOUR WRITERS" during the entirety of Bob Iger's award acceptance speech -- what a badass.) But the real thrill of it was just the sensation of hundreds of us in a room together, humans with their passions and ideas and principles and beautiful clothes, feeling a part of human culture, in the midst of all that animal life, in the middle of the city, once again.
Amy Leach is part of my secret Head Canon, in the section with Ross Gay and Rebecca Solnit of "Essayists Who Write Like Poets And Somehow Convince You Of The Joy Of Living While Engaging With Complex And Sometimes Dark Realities." Her previous book Things That Are is dog-eared and marked by numerous rereadings, at least of the essays whose metaphors haunt me so I need to go back and remember the details.
Like many authors I seem to have been reading lately, she is obsessed with the non-human living things of the world, but in a way that translates into a kind of giddy delight and play and an embrace of wildness that is also enormously humane; there's a raised eyebrow at humanity but Leach is too full of joy at the quirky wonders of her (mostly animal) subjects to spend much time on condemnation.
This is science writing at its most surreal. The title essay imagines a choral gathering of literally all living things, which is very messy but very interesting. Another essay examines the prevalence of wild animals in the book of Job, and what the undomesticated nonsequiturs in that Biblical text suggest about pious and logical answers to our questions about God. There are essays about Robert the Bruce and walruses, single-cell evolution and the absurd trials of baby birds on rocky islands, exercises for cultivating humility and why weirdo Earth feels inferior to its simple and elegant fellow planets. There are more facts than you can shake a stick at, but the real treat is the language, which is tightly witty, endlessly playful, wistful, and so full of puns and wordplay that I recommend not reading this book in one go, as there's just too much to absorb all at once. I frequently snorted while reading in bed, and interrupted my partner reading his own book to read particularly irresistible bits out loud. There's really no way to describe it that compares to itself, so here's a bit from the first essay:
"So all twenty quintillion of you, just go ahead and arrange yourselves however you want! As soon as there's more than one of you, you can be homogenous or heterogeneous. You might sort yourselves by smelliness, sneeziness, spazziness, speckliness -- speckled chachalacas can sort themselves from plain chachalacas, Holsteins from Jerseys. You can sort yourselves by biases and then again by sub-biases; there can be a reflective section and section for those who are all reflex. Ther can be a section for the surreptitious -- we're not sure who you are, but we noticed you arriving, obscured by the leafy branches, pampas grass, and toadstools you were carrying in front of you.
There can be an emergency section for the two- and three-year-old humans, who are forever losing their marbles, who act like the stars are sparkling them to death. We will use the emergency singers quite a bit in our program tonight, since most music could use a little emergency. With the toddler contingent, there will be no pathetic, droopy music, no songs of resignation. They may be joined by some emergency singers at the other end of life too, the ones jonesing for time. Along with the emergency singers, there can be a section for emerging singers, like owlets, as well as submerging singers, like crocodiles."
The near-infinite variety of life forms; the delight of names and sounds; the sense of unwilling mortality, alongside plain old puns -- I feel buffeted by this language, in the best way, like being drunk at a cocktail party with your smartest and weirdest friends. This is a book made to be read aloud, if only in the theater of one's own mind, and returned to, as I intend to, for a taste of what is wild and good.
Comments