SPRAWL - Softcover

Dutton, Danielle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940696771 ISBN 13: 9781940696775

Verlag: Wave Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“SPRAWL in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection.” ―Bookforum

“Reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia.” ―The Believer

When Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL first broke upon the world in 2010, critics likened it to collage, a poetics of the suburbs, a literal unpacking of et cetera. This updated edition, with a new afterword by Renee Gladman, reopens the space of SPRAWL’s “fierce, careful composition”―as Bookforum wrote―“which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.”

Today I fell asleep in the tall grass near the old train station. It was a complete picture. A fashionable park. Yet the picture had its sordid and selfish aspect. I can’t seem to say what I mean, Mrs. Barbauld, but with some urgency I mean to inform you what a triumph the big city has become. I am a secular individual but even I can feel the shift in the horizon utterly alien to the constitution of things, the habitual. Sincerely, etc. I move in shade on the edge of a parking lot under walnut trees in the early morning around the edge of a curve in an accidental manner. I walk the sidewalk and ripple the surface of it. From this condition I have a view of the world.

Danielle Dutton is the author of Margaret the First, SPRAWL, and Attempts at a Life. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The White Review, Fence, BOMB, and others. She is on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and is co-founder and editor of the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Danielle Dutton is the author of Margaret the First, SPRAWL, and Attempts at a Life. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Harper's, The White Review, Fence, BOMB, and others. She is on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and is co-founder and editor of the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

This place is as large as any other town. Each new day there is the coming through of sunlight between the oaks. Things fall and because of this there is a kind of discontinuous innovation. What influences the Richardsons? What influences the Saintsburys? The two questions go hand in hand. How do we cope with the privacy of various domestic characters? The letter, of course, the familiar letter, we employ it. Dear Mrs. Barbauld, It is primarily for the sake of your re-orientation to our town that I write to you today. There are more interesting letters, of course. There are no doubt letters with unreserved emotions, just as there are many ways of communicating that are, especially in retrospect, alien to one's own individual experience. It's difficult enough to take in the results, all the sordid aspects. Only gauge what's arisen during old Mr. Anderson's lifetime! The changes have imposed themselves on our features. What does it signify? Flowers, birds, churches, planes, resorts, malls, green places. Industrial clusters and country houses. Today I fell asleep in the tall grass near the old train station. It was a complete picture. A fashionable park. Yet the picture had its sordid and selfish aspect. I can't seem to say what I mean, Mrs. Barbauld, but with some urgency I mean to inform you what a triumph the big city has become. I am a secular individual but even I can feel the shift in the horizon utterly alien to the constitution of things, the habitual. Sincerely, etc. I move in shade on the edge of a parking lot under walnut trees in the early morning around the edge of a curve in an accidental manner. I walk the sidewalk and ripple the surface of it. From this condition I have a view of the world. Magazines provide images of half-cooked food products. Glazed and slick they seduce us like any raw material. Books offer helpful suggestions about how to lead our lives (let the kitchen sparkle, become fully insured, do not approach the sidelines). On the evening news the periphery is always in decline, but we are able to project our own great men into its material present as if extending ourselves into other cultures—an archipelago somewhere west of Hawaii (and pineapple rings on grilled hot dogs make "Hilo Franks"). After this we return to normative-centralizing activities, such as the time we made a replica of our town out of sugar cubes, or when we gathered to string garland around every phone booth on Main Street. But Haywood defends himself against my moral intrusions. He stands in the kitchen holding a knife and a mushroom. He says, "Clothe your instructions in less abstract examples." He is angry because he was raised to be a substantial Protestant, with stories of utility to tell the women, and relevance. Without it he gets cranky. I prevail. I appear to be free from design or discretion. It is an easy discovery of the "feminine." I walk through the doorway wearing my aggressively orange hat. I do it over and over. I do it as a kind of series and then I do it in reverse. I do it as an indicator of a particular lifestyle, to redefine myself and exclude others. First I do it in a red pantsuit and then I do it in the nude. I do it and I say, "I doubt it." I twirl a little when I do it. I do it and am striking when I do it because I do it in a frilly dress like meringue. Afterwards, we eat bread, corn, cupcakes, cheese, and two chickens, and then we argue about it. We ingest liquids and a bunch of different fruits. Together we forget where we parked the car. We go into houses to witness the presentations. Domestic life appeals to us as well rounded. When we lick each other we do it without any sense of "before" or "nowhere," so you can see we do it as suggested. Also, we worry for money and are employed worrying about things. While it's been proposed that we are more interesting than characters on television, one day soon we will be characters on television. The story is well told. The water tower can be taken up as a challenge to the mist. It invokes a center relative only to the imperceptible pattern I leave with my footsteps, mostly at night. Feeling like a mist, I look at things, trees. The water tower takes on sonnet form. In my dreams I embellish it with tacky Christmas decorations. I sit at the kitchen counter with the cat by my feet and watch the lights of the city in the distance and a skyscraper. Helicopters and planes revolve around it in peculiar orbit. Meanwhile, the book in my hands says we should try to hone our "sensation of of, if, the, and some as well as tree, smoke, shed, and road." I put the book on the counter and go into the yard. I do a little dance somewhere near the fence. I raise my arms above my head and swing my hips. I lower my arms and tap my feet on the grass. I do this for a while, and then I sit on cold lawn furniture, and then I finish cooking dinner. In this place, we eat chicken and peas at least once a week. Once a month we organize three weeks' worth of leftovers and once upon a time Mrs. Richardson introduced a new trend that was spatially interesting; it was intended to embellish our looks like poodle skirts or microwaves. We smoked clove cigarettes and stood in the Millers' backyard. I refer to these as "the early times." And other trends: we wrote poems. I wrote them with Lisle. I wrote her poems and she wrote mine. The subject matter was Egypt. We followed each other around town without looking, like tribal migrations. This was one whole epoch of my life. Later it seemed incomprehensible. Today Haywood uses language to articulate a room and I'm supposed to move inside it. I bump my hips against edges of tabletops, but I'm surprised to find each detail intact and some dramatically more effective than what preceded (two eggs on a white linen tablecloth). It's a kind of new Industrial Age and all our information is encoded or reproduced. I take three or four showers a day, but this would never make it into a biography of the town. What we want is a "true celebrity," an automatic pop star who can supervise the details of our lives. What we lack in inspiration we make up for in public charity, like the time we bought cowboy hats for the nameless kids who wander the town, or the time we all fainted at the murder of Sara Patterson. It's a whole universe of suggestion. There are all sorts of trends in the hedges (pornography, garbage, toxins, booze) and all over the countryside (atomized families, robots, childrearing, etc.). Mrs. Agnew is vilified for her intake of candy, the unfortunate part she plays in American culture, her redheaded remoteness. I stare at her front yard and try not to be there at all. So I close my eyes and become lightened and shadowed by clouds in the background and the foreground. There are dirty dishes in the sink and blooming roses on the countertop. On the table is a white tablecloth, a honeydew melon, two peaches, a paper napkin, two plates, two spoons, a lollipop. Also there is a ripeness, some strange flavor, erect and curious in my mouth. So I start on foot. For a while I pass nothing but the usual ribbon of lawn, then after a while I pass something else and a dog. Soon I pass Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Aubrey. I say, "This is a really nice lip balm." Then I say, "Set the table," then "Gems!" then "Nope." Later, I ignore myself on purpose, which takes practice. The book in my hands offers an analysis and sometimes a celebration; it says there is an "ascendancy of private, individualized transport." It's true we have ample parking and this is almost impossible to reverse. In the middle of the street are several small household appliances and a round yellow cake, which must have crossed into my path like a glass plate broken in a fit, or a healthy lawn, or a jar of grape jelly at the supermarket. All these things overlap and line up at the same time. I write letters on the white...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wave Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1940696771
• ISBN 13: 9781940696775
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland