A, A, A, A, eh

FROM June 20, 2006

I'm kicking back w/ la ladies in an hour for my job, and selfishly, what I really want to know is this: how can I perfect my snap? That's the point, of course, but it's also a vestige of taking dance classes four days a week: songs become inextricable from my body moving itself. I can no longer hear Chamillionaire's "Ridin Dirty," for instance, without thinking of crunches. We crunch up halfway whilst "driving" with alternating arms, targeting both our obliques and our ability to look cool. That's what my teacher always says, he of the old school b-boy and the house warm-ups: "You got the step. Now make it look cool." Backhanded encouragement.

Louise Erdrich's Painted Drum, which I am just now reading, is exquisite and excruciating. Her devices are fiction 101, i suppose -- person, dilemma, mysterious object, quest, discovery, denouement -- the DNA of all stories but somehow hers are more transparent -- but they are also tried and true, and no object, scene or character is extraneous. The paragraphs are snap together, fitted. Some people call this economy: deliberate, which takes craft. But it's hard to read, 'cause the the detail of grief, death, debt and rebirth, though, and abuse, abandonment, neglect; and how anger, compulsion and fear keep life from living, they're nigh too palpable. She describes a scene in which a grieving father does not like tree stumps, because they look too much like people. People suspended in time. It's all so immediate, the backstory echoing through the pages. For instance: the man who believes he's Ojibwe but cannot find the evidence, and thus practices a caricatured, white-man version of Native American living. (Interestingly, that character repulses Faye, the first person narrator.)

And nearly a decade later, it's still difficult to imagine her writing without Michael Dorris, her ex-husband and writing partner, his voice still present. It is not at all like how Joan Didion's book without/about John Gregory Dunne felt hollowed out, a chilly absence. But then voices lingering long after they've gone is what the Painted Drum is about. And it was probably always Erdrich's voice, anyway. Her economy and rhythm. Persia Andromeda, Pallas Antigone, Aza Marion: the names of their children together, the children she bore.