Scan barcode
juliechristinejohnson's review
4.0
I like to think I'm pretty well-read. I mean, I read A LOT and I'm really picky, probably a bit of a snob, as careful about the things I let into my brain as I am the food I put into my body.
But there is a bottomless chasm . . . no, that's not a very nice image . . . An endless horizon? A galaxy of literary stars? All these influential books and writers I've not only never read, I've NEVER HEARD OF. And when I do learn of someone, I'm all WHY has no one mentioned him/her before? Was I just not listening?
Enter one such author: Rikki Ducornet. Of course, I HAVE heard of Rikki. 1974, Steely Dan. The pop culture plea for a young woman not to lose touch with the guy who wants to take her driving along Slow Hand Row. Yep, that Rikki.
This Rikki. She lives not far from me now. Although I've known that girl in the song for forty years, I knew nothing about the woman, the writer, until I read The Deep Zoo, a collection of essays on the nature of aesthetics and the power of art in our writing. Reading more about the writer, I learn she has deliberately walked out of step with contemporary culture, writing novels, essays, short stories and poems and creating works of visual art that weave together themes of fabulism, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, erotica, political protest, and environmental advocacy.
I enjoyed this slim volume of essays, even if I didn't understand much of it. It's full of gorgeous thoughts about playful minds and primal energies, about the importance bringing the ancient world alive in our modern philosophies, about engendering a "thoughtful lightness" (Calvino) in our lives, our art. There are beautiful quotes by Borges, Calvino, Bachelard, Ovid, as well as references to heaps of writers I've never heard of: lots of French surrealists.
I dog-eared so many pages, wanting to dish up her thoughts and savor them like dark chocolate pudding:
"The alchemy of language." I love that. And this revelation of the hidden within the writer—it's precisely what I'm struggling with in my current novel: to give myself the necessary time to explore this process of knowledge.
I KNOW, RIGHT?! I totally want to read that book. I want to write that book. I want to BE that book.
In the elegant essay, Water and Dreams, Ducornet states that her first four novels are informed by the natural elements of Earth, Fire, Water and Air, and then she goes on to explore the element of water in her writing. I am reminded of Lidia Yuknavitch's gobsmackingly powerful memoir, The Chronology of Water in which she talks about the tiny Japanese sculptures known as Netsuke; Rikki Ducornet wrote a novel entitled Netsuke. My first published story, set in Japan, features Netsuke . . . and I feel this connective tissue of literary minds gracing me with courage to continue striving for the ecstatic and the true.
Just as aside, the essay War's Body is everything I've ever wanted to say about 9/11.
There's a lot here that went WHOOSH, right over my head. I made heads, but not tails, of her treatise on William Gass's novel Omensetter's Luck or her examination of the gnostical universes portrayed in the movie Lost Highway, but I loved floating on the river of Ducornet's words.
But there is a bottomless chasm . . . no, that's not a very nice image . . . An endless horizon? A galaxy of literary stars? All these influential books and writers I've not only never read, I've NEVER HEARD OF. And when I do learn of someone, I'm all WHY has no one mentioned him/her before? Was I just not listening?
Enter one such author: Rikki Ducornet. Of course, I HAVE heard of Rikki. 1974, Steely Dan. The pop culture plea for a young woman not to lose touch with the guy who wants to take her driving along Slow Hand Row. Yep, that Rikki.
This Rikki. She lives not far from me now. Although I've known that girl in the song for forty years, I knew nothing about the woman, the writer, until I read The Deep Zoo, a collection of essays on the nature of aesthetics and the power of art in our writing. Reading more about the writer, I learn she has deliberately walked out of step with contemporary culture, writing novels, essays, short stories and poems and creating works of visual art that weave together themes of fabulism, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, erotica, political protest, and environmental advocacy.
I enjoyed this slim volume of essays, even if I didn't understand much of it. It's full of gorgeous thoughts about playful minds and primal energies, about the importance bringing the ancient world alive in our modern philosophies, about engendering a "thoughtful lightness" (Calvino) in our lives, our art. There are beautiful quotes by Borges, Calvino, Bachelard, Ovid, as well as references to heaps of writers I've never heard of: lots of French surrealists.
I dog-eared so many pages, wanting to dish up her thoughts and savor them like dark chocolate pudding:
...it is the work of the writer to move beyond the simple definitions or descriptions of things and to bring a dream to life through the alchemy of language.
The process of writing a book ...reveals to the writer what is hidden within her: writing is a reading of the self and of the world. It is a process of knowledge.
"The alchemy of language." I love that. And this revelation of the hidden within the writer—it's precisely what I'm struggling with in my current novel: to give myself the necessary time to explore this process of knowledge.
Imagine with me a book that, like a seed held in the reader's hands, under her gaze effloresces. A book that contains not only other books, a library, the world's library—a pleasure already ours—but a book that, like a living organism, evolves in unique and unexpected ways. That, like the chrysalis, explodes on the scene in new and dynamic forms with each reading. It is thought that whales sing their world into visibility and so: meaning, stereoptically. Let us acknowledge how their songs extend and enliven our own. Imagine me with a book like that . . . A book that as it surfaces, respires . . .
I KNOW, RIGHT?! I totally want to read that book. I want to write that book. I want to BE that book.
In the elegant essay, Water and Dreams, Ducornet states that her first four novels are informed by the natural elements of Earth, Fire, Water and Air, and then she goes on to explore the element of water in her writing. I am reminded of Lidia Yuknavitch's gobsmackingly powerful memoir, The Chronology of Water in which she talks about the tiny Japanese sculptures known as Netsuke; Rikki Ducornet wrote a novel entitled Netsuke. My first published story, set in Japan, features Netsuke . . . and I feel this connective tissue of literary minds gracing me with courage to continue striving for the ecstatic and the true.
I think of a novel as an unfolding landscape, an entire country waiting to be deciphered. I have always leaned into new places, tugged along by curiosity and an expanding waking dream. How I travel is how I write my books. It is enough to have a dream for a guide, an intuition, an element. Writing is a species of practical magic."
Just as aside, the essay War's Body is everything I've ever wanted to say about 9/11.
There's a lot here that went WHOOSH, right over my head. I made heads, but not tails, of her treatise on William Gass's novel Omensetter's Luck or her examination of the gnostical universes portrayed in the movie Lost Highway, but I loved floating on the river of Ducornet's words.
We are keepers, you and I, of a special gift: if the creative impulse is to remain vital and resurgent, "The book we write tomorrow must be as if there had been none before, new and outrageous as the morning sun," (Ernst Block) Says Borges, "You raise your eyes and look."
More...