Maggie Nelson’s Follow-Up to ‘Bluets’ and ‘The Argonauts’
Author of The Argonauts and Bluets, Maggie Nelson brings her latest book, Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth, to Powell’s this week.
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It’s not entirely true, but one reason Maggie Nelson gives for writing Bluets—that she kept telling everyone she was writing a book about the color blue, and eventually had to deliver something—is my favorite book-writing alibi. Nelson is known equally for her sharp, academically leaning literary and art criticism and for her bruised, fleshy prose poems, as seen in Bluets and The Argonauts. Somehow, wonderfully, the latter—these small, weird books of hers—get the most attention. Friday, she’ll chat with Portland author Leni Zumas and read from her latest, Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth, at Powell’s (7pm, May 2).
If you like, you could call the form autotheory, a writing mode that blends memoir and critical theory, sharpening the two against each other. In Nelson’s case, the practice often comes out as poems. It’s quite the formulation: Dense academic theory + poems = funny, touching, rueful, and notably approachable samplings of deeply human experiences. And yet. “Nelson’s pen is fast enough to catch…,” B. K. Fischer writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Go read Fischer if you want to know what, but the speed and acuity are what’s important to me. Nelson’s trick is to generously force her life upon you, dear reader.
Equally a pain, dream, and pandemic diary, Pathemata follows—if that’s the word—Nelson on a hapless search during COVID for a doctor, dentist, orthodontist, or shaman to cure her relentless mouth pain. As a writer, the threat to her speech is mortal. Still, more or less, the book is made up of all the things you might write to heal yourself and shove in a drawer: The title derives from the Greek proverb pathemata mathemata, which translates loosely to learning through suffering. And to pretty much anyone else, I would say, No thanks, I don’t want to hear about your dental exams and nightmares, even if they sometimes feature Slim Goodbody and The Brady Bunch. But Nelson is concise and vivid with her oneiric tales. She “wields a facility for radical distillation,” Fischer writes, “paring down the yearslong struggle to 62 pages that read as a single essay—the tip of the pain iceberg.” What’s more, you could say, not entirely dishonestly, that she wrote this book in her sleep.
More Things to Do This Week
MAGAZINES Chess Club at Frances May
6–9PM THU, MAY 1 | FRANCES MAY, FREE
Through May and June, the newish international art magazine shop Chess Club is taking over the mezzanine level at Frances May. Since moving into its latest, multilevel storefront on SW 10th Ave, the boutique has offered up its third floor as a residency space for other local artists and businesses. Chess Club feels like a perfect fit, mimicking the curated shelves of magazines and photography monographs at Dover Street Market’s shop-within-shop, IDEA.
VISUAL ART Morgan Buck
2–4PM SAT, MAY 3; THRU JUN 21 | ILY2, FREE
Buck’s paintings draw on “pop cyberculture” and the “digital glut”: memes and internet ephemera, in lay terms. The tension in these AI-looking digital collages, which usually bear overlaid text styled like subtitles, comes from their being painted by hand, with an airbrush, and often on large-scale canvases. Glossy mannequins in front of a monster truck, titled Mud Slut, after the windshield decal; a Beanie Baby, tag on its ear, with an evil grin; a goth holding a small dog wearing a flowy pompadour in a rainbow of pastel hues (It’s colorful, and not everything’s like just black). Buck, who lives in Portland, renders these shitposts in a distinctly screen-like, photorealistic blur. Love, Light and the Thrill of Imminent Distraction, his first solo show with ILY2, continues an ongoing taxonomy of everything gross, funny, and profound online.
MOVIES Thank You Very Much
7PM SUN, MAY 4 | TOMORROW THEATER, $15
Though it is a biographical documentary, director Alex Braverman’s portrait of Andy Kaufman is interested in understanding the late comedian’s appeal—we’re talking about a guy who died over 40 years ago—instead of merely lining up the major events of his life. More absurdist performance artist than stand-up, Kaufman was ahead of his time, to put it lightly. Today, his beguiling, crass, and often straightforwardly offensive act would be apiece with Tim Robinson, Sarah “Squirm” Sherman, and Eric André. Yet Kaufman found mainstream success as a professional upsetter in the ’70s by making sure no one knew exactly what he was up to. “[H]e was always playing a character,” Alissa Wilkinson writes in The New York Times, “even if that character was a guy named Andy Kaufman.”
Elsewhere…
- This year’s Oregon Book Awards winners. (Literary Arts)
- Threats to National Endowment for the Arts funding, and what they may mean for Portland. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
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