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A review by safetypinned
A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt
5.0
Billy-Ray Belcourt.......you did it again. WOW> This is A Stand-Out, I-Would-Rec-This-To-Anybody Book !!!!
Belcourt's concept is SO compelling ... to attempt to write in the "we/us" and the "I" -- to write a "minor chorus of voices." And the execution is absolutely fucking stellar. He lays out a series of conversations that feel both fragile and certain. All of this is placed lovingly in the parentheses of his deeply intimate writing style.
Also tbh, I love the meta-writing-a-novel-about-writing-a-novel. Lots of stuff on writing as craft in here. (esp @Alex and any other people who have complicated love affairs with writing and / or academia ....Read This Book.)
### my many many favorites below ###
"What I wanted from sex I wanted from writing: to be more fully inside my body without encumbrance, to experience embodiment as something other than a catch-22. My body felt so thoroughly overdetermined by forces outside of me, yet it was the source of my livability, it literally coursed with life even as life was something I was being deprived of. Love, art, these were small portals, they allowed for transcendence" (20)
- "It was late and I was lonely and I was in rehearsal for another kind of life, so I drew the blinds and unbuttoned his jeans" (21)
- "I decided to reread James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to try to relive the awe I felt when I first read it; I'd written for hours after putting the book down. This time I was struck anew by Giovanni's assertion that homesickness is captivating only insofar as 'home' is out of reach. The distance allows it to be imbued with inflated nostalgia. To return is to risk watching it explode" (23)
-"I decided that if I were a word it would be 'grieve,' and it would be sprawled across by forehead, as both a demand and a self-description" (26)
-"This is what you want, isn't it, he said, his voice denser than I had heard it all night, citing, for the first time, a history of cruel speech...I squirmed out of his hold...I ran ahead of my body, into bodilessness, without shoes on. Since then I had always thought that if I were to write a book I would write this down, So, here, have it."
- "(on his interviewees) it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn't time or space to account for or to how with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one's life, to assert one's enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where do it pile up?" (31)
-"Maybe this was why I wanted to write a novel: to be reminded that not even my puny life with its puny preoccupations and miseries was mine alone to shoulder. I want to be reckless, which is to say unsentimental, with my suffering." (34)
- "It made me think of color, of the color blue; the language of her looking was deep blue." (37-38)
- "I grabbed Jack's shoulder and said his name...We'd already drifted apart, were no longer childhood coconspirators, so I had no idea how he'd respond to the gesture, whether it would be too strange to allow. He did allow it, though; he fell onto my chest, and it was so unexpected I almost stepped backward." (50)
- "(re AIDS era). "To be gay was to be dead or dying. Worse, to harbor the ability to kill" (60)
-"(better) "for Michael to clock in and out of his body than to confront the heaviness of his desires...At some point, - he convinced himself he was a stray bullet that silence had clenched between its teeth...Michael's story reminded me of Judith Butler's observation that we sometimes choose to stay attached to what injures us rather than gamble with what it might feel like to be in the world without the attachment" (61)
- "Michael walked me to the elevator and then to the front entrance...At the edge of the parking lot, I turned back to get one last look at him. Because it was five o'clock and the sun gave him a new face, or because I was twenty-four and lonely in a country that made me feel like a shipwreck, I wanted to kiss him, Instead, I said goodbye for a second time. Back in my hotel room, it was as if I could still hear desire clamoring inside Michael. It was like a bird's wings rattling against a cage -- a beautiful and terrible melody I suspected he would eventually die to." (64)
"Suppose a body were trapped between two parentheses, I thought, made out to be an aside, a distraction, a trace of another narrative possibility. Would you set it free, set it loose into the world?" (64)
- "Mostly I wasn't taught to say no, mostly my body was a question for which any man could be an answer, a solution, dead air to float inside of. Something inside me dilated like a pupil at the sight of a shame-drenched man. Unlike a sentence, my body didn't end: I was an elastic form inside which men actualized their inner consciousnesses. When you think of me, picture a glistening wreck, something of a piece with the subliminal. The thing about the sublime is that at some point you have to look away" (67)
- "(of pillowtalk w a hookup) "His grip was tight but unmeaning, which is to say it was questionless...." (72)
- "At the very least, it could do what sex did for me, give access to what Lispector called 'whatever is not word,' what I believe to be another way of saying 'the opposite of the present.' ...I felt an urge to text River. I reached for my phone...and wrote: Inside my body it was loud like a body or a city street. To which they responded: O, desire!'... So what if the present was an empty bathroom inside which I shivered, at least I had something to write about" (80)
- (On Toni Morrison's death) "When I first caught wind of the news I cried outside in the rain. For once, I wanted to be vivid, like a metaphor, like weather" (90)
- "Take my friendship with River as an example; I became the person I am in their company. Who I am is tied to who they are. In this way, we have a kind of collective self, and we tend to it as one does a garden. That, to me, is the mark of the material function.
Still, I loved my mother with the fortitude of a line break. She was a quaking 'I' about to leap, like a doe that's suddenly no longer a symbol, into the future" (93)
Belcourt's concept is SO compelling ... to attempt to write in the "we/us" and the "I" -- to write a "minor chorus of voices." And the execution is absolutely fucking stellar. He lays out a series of conversations that feel both fragile and certain. All of this is placed lovingly in the parentheses of his deeply intimate writing style.
Also tbh, I love the meta-writing-a-novel-about-writing-a-novel. Lots of stuff on writing as craft in here. (esp @Alex and any other people who have complicated love affairs with writing and / or academia ....Read This Book.)
### my many many favorites below ###
"What I wanted from sex I wanted from writing: to be more fully inside my body without encumbrance, to experience embodiment as something other than a catch-22. My body felt so thoroughly overdetermined by forces outside of me, yet it was the source of my livability, it literally coursed with life even as life was something I was being deprived of. Love, art, these were small portals, they allowed for transcendence" (20)
- "It was late and I was lonely and I was in rehearsal for another kind of life, so I drew the blinds and unbuttoned his jeans" (21)
- "I decided to reread James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to try to relive the awe I felt when I first read it; I'd written for hours after putting the book down. This time I was struck anew by Giovanni's assertion that homesickness is captivating only insofar as 'home' is out of reach. The distance allows it to be imbued with inflated nostalgia. To return is to risk watching it explode" (23)
-"I decided that if I were a word it would be 'grieve,' and it would be sprawled across by forehead, as both a demand and a self-description" (26)
-"This is what you want, isn't it, he said, his voice denser than I had heard it all night, citing, for the first time, a history of cruel speech...I squirmed out of his hold...I ran ahead of my body, into bodilessness, without shoes on. Since then I had always thought that if I were to write a book I would write this down, So, here, have it."
- "(on his interviewees) it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn't time or space to account for or to how with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one's life, to assert one's enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where do it pile up?" (31)
-"Maybe this was why I wanted to write a novel: to be reminded that not even my puny life with its puny preoccupations and miseries was mine alone to shoulder. I want to be reckless, which is to say unsentimental, with my suffering." (34)
- "It made me think of color, of the color blue; the language of her looking was deep blue." (37-38)
- "I grabbed Jack's shoulder and said his name...We'd already drifted apart, were no longer childhood coconspirators, so I had no idea how he'd respond to the gesture, whether it would be too strange to allow. He did allow it, though; he fell onto my chest, and it was so unexpected I almost stepped backward." (50)
- "(re AIDS era). "To be gay was to be dead or dying. Worse, to harbor the ability to kill" (60)
-"(better) "for Michael to clock in and out of his body than to confront the heaviness of his desires...At some point, - he convinced himself he was a stray bullet that silence had clenched between its teeth...Michael's story reminded me of Judith Butler's observation that we sometimes choose to stay attached to what injures us rather than gamble with what it might feel like to be in the world without the attachment" (61)
- "Michael walked me to the elevator and then to the front entrance...At the edge of the parking lot, I turned back to get one last look at him. Because it was five o'clock and the sun gave him a new face, or because I was twenty-four and lonely in a country that made me feel like a shipwreck, I wanted to kiss him, Instead, I said goodbye for a second time. Back in my hotel room, it was as if I could still hear desire clamoring inside Michael. It was like a bird's wings rattling against a cage -- a beautiful and terrible melody I suspected he would eventually die to." (64)
"Suppose a body were trapped between two parentheses, I thought, made out to be an aside, a distraction, a trace of another narrative possibility. Would you set it free, set it loose into the world?" (64)
- "Mostly I wasn't taught to say no, mostly my body was a question for which any man could be an answer, a solution, dead air to float inside of. Something inside me dilated like a pupil at the sight of a shame-drenched man. Unlike a sentence, my body didn't end: I was an elastic form inside which men actualized their inner consciousnesses. When you think of me, picture a glistening wreck, something of a piece with the subliminal. The thing about the sublime is that at some point you have to look away" (67)
- "(of pillowtalk w a hookup) "His grip was tight but unmeaning, which is to say it was questionless...." (72)
- "At the very least, it could do what sex did for me, give access to what Lispector called 'whatever is not word,' what I believe to be another way of saying 'the opposite of the present.' ...I felt an urge to text River. I reached for my phone...and wrote: Inside my body it was loud like a body or a city street. To which they responded: O, desire!'... So what if the present was an empty bathroom inside which I shivered, at least I had something to write about" (80)
- (On Toni Morrison's death) "When I first caught wind of the news I cried outside in the rain. For once, I wanted to be vivid, like a metaphor, like weather" (90)
- "Take my friendship with River as an example; I became the person I am in their company. Who I am is tied to who they are. In this way, we have a kind of collective self, and we tend to it as one does a garden. That, to me, is the mark of the material function.
Still, I loved my mother with the fortitude of a line break. She was a quaking 'I' about to leap, like a doe that's suddenly no longer a symbol, into the future" (93)