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WITTY PARTITION ISSUE 14, AN ASSEMBLY THAT CLICKS.

At the heart of the latest issue of Witty Partition, Issue 14, appear three astonishing pieces. The video Gonna Die by Bill Hayward commemorates the anniversary of the 1965 Bloody Sunday voting rights march in Selma with the words of a woman who was fourteen years old at the time; following that comes Eric Darton’s angry and frightening essay that looks at what’s happened or hasn’t happened since the Attica Prison rebellion; and Teddy Jefferson’s brilliant review of Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Notturno, which was recorded in Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq and Lebanon, about the aftermath in people’s lives under Isis. Plenty of other delicious reads in this issue but these three stand out as extraordinary political and artistic statements.

Gonna Die, a video by Bill Hayward, uses images, movement, and interviews to evoke the 1965 Bloody Sunday voting rights march in Selma. Watching it launched me backwards and forwards at the same time. A woman who was fourteen at the time of the march speaks about getting hit on the back of her head and on her face and said that she was so scared she “I didn’t want any freedom, I didn’t care if anyone voted, I just wanted to go home because I was so scared that I was going to die.” Just wanted to go home. I was bowled over hearing her voice as she became her young self again. Then she talks about a white guy with one leg, on crutches, who told her he’d die trying to protect her. “Okay,” she says, “He eased my fear a little bit,” though she adds that she “never felt fear at this depth.” Once again the courage and bravery of those protesters is astounding.

Drawing by Eric Darton, after a photo by Bob Schultz. Ink on paper.
11 x 14 inches. 1971.

Be Cool, Eric Darton’s essay, begins with a frightening quote from Ernst Bloch. “Of course, humanity always sets itself tasks it can solve, but if the great moment of solution is met by a faint-hearted generation . . .” Filled with emotion, Darton’s essay “Be Cool: Fifty Years Down the Line from Attica.” illustrates the results of that “faint-hearted generation.” Darton writes, “’Attica means fight back,’ a hoarse-voiced slogan if ever there was one – accompanied by D-Yard style clenched fists pumped in the air. But that forest of clenched fists never fought back, or forward. And what was not clearcut by the Man got excised by the Movement itself in its self-excoriating degeneration. After Attica, to paraphrase Lou Reed, came bitter nothing. Nothing at all.” So Darton asks us to read about it, do our research, and get active. Inspiring in spite of its despair.

Teddy Jefferson’s review of Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno follows Eric’s call to action. Jefferson writes that in this documentary: “We are taught that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, yet human behavior suggests the opposite is true. We do what we know. Knowing history is what causes us to repeat it. What does this mean for the representation of atrocity, or a documentary about life in the wake of Isis? Can a work of art provide some inoculation against its reoccurrence? Or is absolution a worthy enough goal: soothing the audience’s guilt at what happened to others with the illusion of having taken some sort of action?”

About the reception to Notturno, Jefferson adds, “It was praised by critics for celebrating the “humanity” of its subjects, though this is precisely what it does not do, which may be why it was bypassed for the top prizes. It refuses any interpretation or sweetening.” Jefferson describes how the film allows the viewers to see in order to feel and his essay does the same, allows us to “see” the film. His descriptions reminded me of Butoh dance and how it conveys meaning through the body. “The shifting of the mode of the scenes from the (seemingly) allegorical to the surreal to the clinical to the quotidian would be considered in a fiction film stylistically incoherent. And yet this anomalous assembly feels seamless and deeply coherent. Though its sequence follows a logic nearly impossible to identify, its build and culmination have extraordinary visceral power.”

So Witty Partition Issue 14, offers an assembly of poems, short stories, essays, and book reviews that feel “seamless and deeply coherent.” Heading up the delicacies, Dana Delibovi’s essay, Found Poetry, looks at Found Poetry, Dada, Blackout Poems, and Tristan Tzara. Setting the tone for rest of the issue, this article examines our debt to the past and the fun and usefulness of unconscious choices. However, the Tzara fragment Delibovi quoted from “Vegetal Swallow” with its “nonsense” images: “rain falls under the scissors of/ the dark hairdresser-furiously/ swimming under the clashing arpeggios.” I had to laugh: these dadaesque random words were an almost literal picture of my husband, a Black hairdresser who listens to jazz as he snips at someone’s hair. Something about Dada both attracts and repels me; this article showed me see the freedom at its center.

After the Dada poems, comes poems by two writers. Teddy Norris “English Teacher’s Recurring Post-retirement Dream” reminded me of my English teacher dad whose article about teaching fiction appeared in Issue 7, https://the-wall-archive-issue-7.weebly.com/the-short-story.html. And Carmen Firan poems about time and nothingness flowed with the same blood of the rest of the issue:

raised on a heap of nothing
the truth sits at a table with the lie
the scale tips from nothing
stars are annihilated
and put themselves back together again

what is unyielding plays with us;
nobody believes in nothing anymore

Broken Kismet is an excerpt from a novel by Hardy Griffin. Following her mother, the narrator leads us through the streets of Istanbul, the day before the narrator is to leave for college in the United States. We go to a strange place to meet a strange woman to partake in an ancient Turkish custom of spilling lead. The chapter ends with:

“Mom, do you really believe in that stuff?”

She opens her palm and I see she still has the hunks of lead in it.

“You know the old Turkish saying, ‘Don’t believe in fortunes, but don’t go without one.’ Think about it Eser, it’s a ritual that’s been around for more than three thousand years. Must be a reason, right?”

Hearing Eser and her mother’s fortunes read made me want to go on whatever path writer Griffin leads us towards his characters’ futures.

Then comes three chapters of the memoir Becoming by Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno, These chapters are so filmic in their attention to detail they reminded me of Teddy Jefferson’s review of Notturno: “The minds of the viewers are given more -and trusted more. They are neither told nor led. Each scene is set before them, intact, complete, uninterpreted, without music, comment, or indication. The goal is not to transform or wow or fool or move; the goal is to make us see, not feel. Seeing must come before feeling, as well.”  In Chapter 24 “I Become a Resident of Piedras Negras, ” Sawyer-Lauçanno writes about his initial difficulties as a seventh graders struggling with new language in a new place, “I saw the store front to which he had directed me. I walked in expecting to wander as inconspicuously as possible down the aisles until I found the coffee, then pay for it at the cash register. But there were no aisles. Instead a large counter filled the front of the store. Behind it an array of bins, boxes and canned goods stretched nearly to the ceiling. I divined, probably by observing the customers in front of me who were placing their orders and receiving goods, that the same procedure was also expected of me.”

Then we’re treated to Basil King six non-representative paintings from “The Black Opal Series.” They offer a meditative experience, somewhat akin to the desert area Chris passes through on his way to the mine in his memoir chapter. His images are followed by Diggin’ the Scene,  a meandering essay by me of my meandering thoughts on meandering through the books around me, an ode to superabundance and the discreet charm of gorging on books.

In Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno writes about the Tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti heldon March 24, 2021, “what would have been his 103rd birthday.” Sawyer-Lauçanno recalls protesting against Kenneth Rexroth’s forced retirement from UCSB in 1970. He helped organize a protest with poets. “I wrote Lawrence. Within a few days I heard back. ‘Yes,’ he wrote. ‘I’ll come and I’ll bring a few pals.’ A week later I heard from Allen Ginsberg who said he was coming, too. So was Gary Snyder and Diane DiPrima.” A link to the video of the tribute is available with this article.

In Ed Foster, Dana Delibovi writes: “So it’s no surprise that Edward Foster’s new collection, A Looking Glass for Traytors, warmed me like hot cider in a drafty old Colonial manse. Of course, to be warmed in New England is to feel a heady mix of grief, loneliness, and more than a touch of rancor; to pull on austerity like a well-worn flannel slipper. But it is also to bask in the freedom to be authentic, or more precisely, eccentric.”

Bronwyn Mills reviews Ngugi wa Thiong’o epic The Perfect Nine, a book originally written in Gikuyu, the language native to central Kenya that explores epics, myths and written vs oral story-telling. Mills sums it up: “I remember Ngugi saying that another argument for the use of Gikuyu, of one’s mother tongue, was the simple fact that if a language is not used creatively, as a means of invention, to tell stories, for literature, the language becomes impoverished. That won’t happen on Ngugi’s watch, that is for certain.”

So go for it. Check out Issue 14 of Witty Partition, its stories, essays, poems and videos are like a salve after watching and listening to the terrifying news these days. And I’m not just saying this because Witty Partition’s editors recently bestowed upon me the title of “Consulting Prose Editor.” I’m saying this because I’m moved by the writing to want to tell you about it, to let you see and feel it. But if you go to only one thing, go to Gonna Die, the video by Bill Hayward about the march in Selma.

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Brandon Taylor’s debut novel “Real Life”

I read Brandon Taylor’s debut novel “Real Life,” a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, right after I reread Camus’ “The Stranger” whose famous first line “Mother died today,” resonates with Taylor’s book. I wouldn’t have put these two together, other than that I’d read them one after the other, but they do have a lot in common.  In Taylor’s novel, Wallace’s father has died and he’s living a similar anxiety, alienation, and streak of rage as Camus’ Meursault, whose mother has died. Yet, the time and place and situation between the novels have little in common. Meursault is French Algerian in Northern Africa in the 1940s and Wallace is Black, gay, and a biochem grad student at an unnamed Midwestern University with only white friends, in the present.

With exquisite detail Taylor trains his literary microscope on Wallace as he finds his nematode experiment ruined, then he trains this same tight focus on Wallace’s life in the Midwest, his friends, his memories of traumas, and sex, present and past. Simple things increase his alienation, such as Wallace bringing a homemade meat dish to his friends’ dinner party to find it left untouched, his new friends all vegetarians. At the center of the book, is a dinner party where Taylor, for the first time, has his white characters directly voice the racism previously implicit and directly “unvoice” the other white friends who say nothing. Throughout this lengthy night, Taylor is able to keep these eight characters distinct and clear in my mind, while he delivers a devastating account of the evening with Wallace’s analysis of complicated relationships, kindness, racism, silence, love and hate. A tour de force that primes the reader to hear Wallace’s back story.

Taylor’s ability to evoke deep emotions and then analyze them is one of the reasons, I assume, that it’s been so well received. Reviews often quote from a paragraph about white cruelty, but his examination of cruelty is all-encompassing: “Cruelty, Wallace thinks, is really just the conduit of pain. It conveys pain from one place to another—from the place of highest concentration to the place of lowest concentration, in the same way heat flows. It is a delivery system, as in the way that certain viruses convey illness, disease, irreparable harm. They’re all infected with pain, hurting each other.”

As I read about his world in a non-diverse university science department, I was saddened, though not surprised, to find this still happening. When I started UW Madison in 1968, it was a wild time—anti-war protests, the blowing up the Army Math Research Center, and the Black Student Strike, which got the National Guard unleashed. Among the demands was that at least 500 Black students be admitted to UW by September 1969. A modest number when you consider at the time the student population numbered around 33,000. Terrifying to see how little things have changed.

In the last chapter of Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life,” Wallace journeys back in time to his first day meeting these friends and we feel the circularity of life. Brandon Taylor’s dexterity with language has the ability to make me feel as though Wallace’s pain and ambiguity and alienation were mine. And it made me feel the unrelenting whiteness of the Midwest. As I read, I kept longing for some Black characters, some Black jokes, some Blackness. Though I love the Midwest and my white family there, though this may not have been Brandon Taylor’s intent, I sure was damn happy to walk out my door and find myself in New York City, where I was immediately met by a swarming cross-section of humanity—where our dinners include rabid bacon defenders, fervent pork-eschewers, vegetarians, vegans, and the lactose or gluten intolerant—with everyone fighting the universal sugar urge.

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Baseball, Books, and Me

Emily Nemens novel “The Cactus League” was released in February to great reviews and, since then, she’s been doing readings all around town. Earlier, I finished reading Henry Dunow’s memoir from 2001, “The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime.” Both of these books, one by editor of Paris Review Emily Nemens and the other by literary agent Henry Dunow revealed baseball’s transcendent, actual, and metaphoric significance, something I had no clue about. Or thought I hadn’t. So whether you’re quarantined or not and looking to read something, try these out.

Nemens’ “The Cactus League” uses the structure of baseball—without employing the often-used literary device of an actual game, think Casey at the Bat—to temper, for the reader, the nightmare struggles of the person at the core of the story, Jason Goodyear. As he descends into a hell of gambling addiction, we see him from perspective of people on the periphery of his life. Divided into nine chapters/innings, Nemens gives us an entertaining crew to guide us through the baseball domain: batting coach, groupie, agent, Black co-owner, pitcher struggling after elbow surgery, organist, seven-year old kid hanging with his homeless mom who works the concession stand, the organist, and finally Jason who shares the final chapter with his wife. Nemens passionate treatment of how baseball, geology, architecture, and music mirror each other slows the narrative, yet somehow intensifies the drama. That these disparate elements hang together and construct a compelling novel is a testament to her writing and her characters who are surviving love, terror, and miracles.

Early on in “The Cactus League” I came across this paragraph that brought me back to fifth grade, a time when I experienced a baseball miracle—and, since we girls didn’t do sports in the fifties, it was a once and only once in a life-time event. “There’s something cathartic about swinging a piece of wood at a hurtling knot of leather and yarn. The sting that happens in your palms when you connect, the ball bending ever so slightly at the collision. The reverberations of that rubber center that run up your arms, plugging into your shoulders with a little zing. The sound of it.” Of course when I once felt this —and only once—it wasn’t a hard ball traveling at 90 miles an hour, it was a big old softball traveling at the speed of a paper airplane, but nevertheless, when I swung and hit it, the feeling of being in concert, in the zone, in my body, thrilled me. Nemens closely observed moment brought this memory viscerally back to me.

Through vivid, loving characterizations and musings about life and time—from the glacial geological tectonic plates’ progress to the slow-motion action of baseball, to the timing and rhythm of music—Nemens evokes a realm in which “enough” exists—in relationships, sports, the arts, and the natural world—in the face of the “never-enough” world of addiction.

Henry Dunow’s memoir, The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime, uses his experiences in non-professional baseball as a method for finding connection. His humorous, biting, charming prose and his generosity of spirit and understanding hooked me immediately in this story of family life in New York City. Dunow describes his attempts to connect with his son through baseball, as his own father hadn’t been able to do with him. This lively paragraph depicts his young son and his wife’s worry: “It’s a little scary. He’s a walking 24-hour all-talk sports radio station, an IBM mainframe saturated with sports statistics and trivia, stores of arcane knowledge growing like some diabolical virus in a cheesy sci-fi movie. Wendy worries that there will be no room in that little brain for anything else, and I try to assure her that sports knowledge is like a useless vestigial organ—it can expand endlessly and accommodate vast stores of data without cramping rest of the brain. There’s no real damage.”

When Dunow begins coaching six-year olds—hilariously—and comparing himself to another cocky assertive father/Little League coach, memories of his own father, a powerful and stubborn Polish Jewish immigrant, emerge. Dunow writes with great intensity of his son, his father, other children, and baseball. Of his father, he writes: “After years of terror and running halfway across the world to save his life while everyone and everything he knew perished, it had come to this: in the hands-and-knees search for jagged pieces of glass on the kitchen floor, in the harried nagging to get us to clean our rooms, was his need to banish the chaos of his past, the horror of what had happened to his family—his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters—and his world. His constant preoccupation with household order obscured a whole constellation of feelings and thoughts kept separate from us. A piece of him was missing, not available.” This anguish went through me like a switchblade