Nina Pollari's sadreads, from my email--

 April 22, 7PM, Unnameable Books, Brooklyn, NY: I’ll be reading to help launch my friend Austin Segrest’s new poetry collection Groom at Unnameable Books. The book deals with a complicated, formative relationship that it took Segrest years to see for what it was. In my opinion poetry is the best medium for holding multiple truths in your mind. We’ll read with the formidable Tom Sleigh. Come through if you’re local; I would love to see you.

May 15, 6PM, virtual/inside your computer: I know that I won’t get my act together to send another sadreads in time for the next reading, so just put this on your calendar now if you are so inclined. I have the honor of joining Joy Ladin and Joan Larkin at this event for the Phosphorescence Series at the Emily Dickinson Museum. The event will be remote so you can tune in from home, camera off and wearing your power sweats. Register here and then come hype me up in the chat so I don’t feel like an imposter because I have published the fewest books BY F A R of this lineup.

Zona Motel

I’m thrilled to say that I’m joining the editorial team over at Zona Motel, the new literary site/brotherhood founded by Juliet Escoria and Mesha Maren. It’ll launch next week, and the cast of contributors is very interesting and fun. There’s a manifesto and you can read it! I’m going to be editing reviews, so if you’ve been wanting to write about a book (doesn’t have to be a new book), especially if it’s in my wheelhouse of personal interests (weird/small press/translation/poetry), hit me up and let’s work together.

OK, regular content

It’s been quite a reading season. Most recently I spent a long time with Patricia Evangelista’s fantastic Some People Need Killing, which chronicles the Rodrigo Duterte-era extrajudicial murders in the Philippines. Though I highly recommend it if you like long-form nonfiction about horrible things (like the works of Patrick Radden Keefe, who blurbed this book), this letter won’t be about it, except to say that it struck me just how rhetorically similar some of Duterte’s platform and public statements are/were to those of the current US president. Duterte’s appeal when he ran was that he was supposedly frank, supposedly said things the way they really were, supposedly wasn’t like all the other politicians. It quickly led to a lot of murder! And murder is quick, but writing is slow. As Evangelista puts it, “It takes longer to type a sentence than it does to kill a man.” Government parts, when they are working, are also slow. I am not a political analyst — I’m but a humble dumbass with a very minor platform — but this book activated the pattern-seeking part of my brain when it comes to crimes committed by the state vs engaging the state-sanctioned mechanisms to begin to judge them. The grim, sickening stuff in the book happened so recently, so recently, and then I started to read this right before Duterte’s arrest in Hong Kong and then finished it when he had already been shipped off to The Hague. They say history repeats itself; we can only hope, in some regard.

But what I’d really like to talk about with this letter is Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell). It’s out on Penguin in the US, but I got it through Fitzcarraldo (shoutout to them because they are Amazon-hostile and publish their ebooks in a format viewable on an app called Glassboxx, which easily achieves Kindle parity with highlights, notes, etc). Also, Fitzcarraldo’s minimalist covers really appeal to me.

Zambra is a Chilean writer with ten books under his belt. In Childish Literature, he writes about new fatherhood in several formats: essays, stories, and even a couple of poems. It’s not his first foray into the topic of writing parenthood — for example, his earlier novel Chilean Poet features a protagonist who reunites with a formative love and finds himself a stepparent to a six-year-old. But this book is more autobiographical than some of his others. It’s very funny, and not just about being a dad — there’s a story about the friendship between a couple of kids who write each other letters full of elaborate curses, and another essay in which the character Zambra eats a bunch of edibles as a dubious headache cure and then spends the rest of the story humorously lost in his apartment, texting cryptic things to the loved ones in his phone (an update for his wife: “This trip / is terrible / But im enfiying the ants ”). In other words, he isn’t always Writing About Fatherhood. But in the reality of the book, the writer is also a father, and joyously both.

The opening section of the book is comprised of short sections numbered in increasing, erratic intervals — 0, 1, 14, 25, 31, and so forth (please, math people, do NOT tell me this is a pattern, I checked and it’s not pi so everything else is not a pattern as far as I’m concerned. Haha, jk, as if any math people read this newsletter). It soon becomes clear that these correspond with the number of days the child has inhabited the family. Making art about this immediate correlation (as in: the relationship of the very minimal output of an artist during the early days of a child’s existence) isn’t new, but I like whenever I see it depicted, and I like to see especially it from a father. The sections generally trend toward increasing complexity the older the child, but sometimes they’re short again. On day 62, Zambra writes only: “This week you gained the same one hundred grams that I must have lost dancing with you in my arms. The son gains the weight that his father sheds. It’s the perfect diet.” These are the kinds of thoughts that come to you when you’re doing the maintenance work. There’s art in there, but mostly you’re glad that you can still string a sentence together! And the maintenance work time takes so long. We used to have to rock my daughter to sleep to the tune of “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys — some days we measured time in Kokomos. “It took nine Kokomos today,” one of us would solemnly remark to the other after the fussing had finally stopped. We were in the top .01% of Beach Boys listeners that year, according to the algorithm.

On day 101, someone asks Zambra “Doesn’t that kid have a mum?” as a way to, I guess? highlight that he’s doing a lot of work for a dad??? He just mumbles “Asshole, asshole” and then spends the rest of the day trying and failing to come up with “crude, savage, definitive insults” to counter this guy. “I used to be good at comebacks, but I can only come up with that one word. The same insult, twice.” BRO I KNOW THE FEELING. Shoutouts also to having to endure the jab at your masculinity also.

Zambra often brings up the question of books for children — specifically what makes a story childish, for children, vs for adults (“the expression ‘children’s literature’ is condescending and offensive and also strikes me as redundant, because all literature, at its core, is childish”). This is a central concern of the book. But the other thing he keeps asking is whether it’s fair to the children for us to write about them. In another essay, later: “Suddenly, the possibility that someday he will have access […] to the books his mother writes and the ones I write, books that feature him ever more frequently, and even if they don’t, he is still there, lurking in the background - starts to feel unfair, and sometimes I think we should destroy those files to make room for a shiny new forgetting.” This on top of the hundreds, thousands of photos that he has, that each of us have on our camera phones, the archive the kids’ll inherit as they someday start to make sense of their own enormous footprints in our lives. And in contrast to that my own childhood photos, maybe all of ours of a certain generation, certainly of those of us with immigrant parents. The photos are neatly contained in a couple of dusty albums at my mom’s house. There was maybe one home movie of me in existence, and it’s lost to time — in it my father was demonstrating a wood chipper, and the camera panned to me, and I looked uncomfortable.

My own childhood is a myth I get to reinvent because of this scarcity of documentation, and also because I didn’t have writer parents. I take a lot of photos, though I have largely stopped posting my kids’ faces — but like Zambra, I can’t stop writing about them. Even when I’m not doing it, I’m writing from a world in which they exist. I don’t understand when people say things like “I could never write about my children.” Good job for being so good at compartmentalizing. I could never! I don’t understand how! I found Zambra’s fixation with this question to be mesmerizing. But also, this book is light, smart, and funny, and it doesn’t wring its hands guiltily about the topic of Posting Your Children. Zambra finds a perspective I really liked around the responsibility that we have to witness on their behalf, to help them make sense of everything. This certainly includes the state of the world, but it also includes the specificity of their lives in it. So I’ll leave you with this quote:

“[L]ately I feel like I write for him, that I am my son’s correspondent, that I’m writing dispatches to him live and direct from the time he will forget, from the erased years. Perhaps my writing has never been more justified than now, because in a way I’m writing the memories that he will lose. It’s as if I were the secretary or nursery school teacher for some toddlers names Joe Brainard, Georges Perec and Margo Glantz, and I wanted to facilitate the future of their I Remembers.”