ambition to fail, Brandi Carlile + your daily reminder that all roads lead to Kincaid

 Bots and babes, 

It's possible that I may be under-serving myself, as I am so often wont to do, with the reading task. My ambitious goal of 35 books this year has morphed into a scandalous affair between myself and Netflix and the ginormous world of YouTube. At this point, there is so much on YouTube that one could dedicate their life to being a YouTube scholar. Or you could spend a few minutes with Brandi and the twins' GRAMMYs performance...

Truth is, I'm STILL reading Brandi's memoir, which is excellent by the way, and making my way back through each of her albums. I listened to Tanya Tucker for the first time in my life today and absolutely loved her. I also wondered what makes women like Tanya Tucker and Dolly Parton who have both been in live-long partnerships with various men such epic gay icons, but this is an investigation for another time. And because I doubted for a moment that listening to music and reading a memoir were not literary enough for this esteemed audience of 2 I have amassed, I perused The Paris Review. I'm as embarrassed as you are. But, then again, not really because I found Corpus. 

It’s possible that I no longer live in New York City, a fact that won’t be decided until next year sometime and which I only relay here because the place I currently inhabit has a lot of wildflowers and no bodegas. Inasmuch as flowers exist here, they exist because they come out of the ground randomly, with no rubric or intention or market. First there were lilacs (on bushes!) and then when the lilacs died the peonies bloomed, which began wilting just as the day lilies and trout lilies and tiger lilies sprang open like self-peeling bananas. That was right around when Dame’s Rocket, highlighter purple, was all over the fields and dominating the unmowed grasses along the side of the road. A gigantic mock orange bush exploded into blossoms and made everything smell like, naturally, orange blossoms. Then vervain, then Queen Anne’s Lace like weeds, wild lupines. Right now we are in red clover.

I read this and see Jamaica Kincaid everywhere. Not only in her effortless, blatant, brutal writing finesse but also in her ability to bring nature and bodies together, to use these as mechanisms for revealing and unrevealing a planet of sensations and thoughts. Or, as Kisner puts it, 

...uninterrupted and untended, wholly separate from human timelines and activity, relentlessly.

It's as true now as it ever was that nature writers or writers of nature & other things have this Kincaid-ian tendency to un-sort, un-mingle the lives of plants and people. It's no surprise then that sunsets are romantic, a snake is Satan, seed is colonial sperm, or that as a child I was convinced I could see heaven at the exact moment sun sprouted through stormy clouds. That we take for granted this possibly divine and yet very basic relationship to body and earth is a given, or else such tropes would not exist. It is somehow radical, however, as Camille Dungy notes, to allow "spiritual communion with the environment." The poet Lucille Clifton explained this rather perfectly in "the garden of delight."

and for some
certain only of the syllables
it is the element they
search their lives for

eden

Thus, I introduce my theory: some writers write about nature, some write for nature, some write with nature. And some, a very small number, write nature. By this I mean, there is no binary. They un-sort, un-mingle, and in doing so mingle and sort with fluid categories, all their own, all irrelevant. 

So, as I continue to study this un-sorting through the big wide world of blogs I will vow (once again) to read more. I will confess that some nights I get so tired that I don't read at all, though I always regret that. 

But...it has also come to my attention that it must be the ambition of a writer to fail. Fail miserably, fail gloriously, fail blatantly, fail publicly, fail personally. In fact, I have heard almost every writer posit some version of "failure IS the process." Success is an off-handed exception. "Read voraciously," that's what they all say. They tell you to read so you become a better writer. I, myself, have noticed no correlation between reading and successful acceptance of a journal submission. Although, I often forget the number of rejections is not important. Nabokov pitched Lolita to more than 26 publishers and was rejected by all but one. William Saroyan collected 6,000 rejections before his first short story was published. And while noting that these writers are white men is *entirely* relevant, I'd also note that Saroyan put himself out there a LOT. Too much. Meanwhile, my list of submissions runs about 50 in all my life (90% of these are rejections and just to keep me motivated I put blog posts in the acceptance pile). 

At any rate, I hope you find yourself more willing to fail today and, as always, are kind to your body & soul. 

Eat a sandwich in your spare time, if you want. 

xo BLT