you too can stand on solid ground

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos – John Berger

andie’s been into John Berger for years – I remember her watching his old videos as she experimented with oil painting years ago. Back then she lived with three other people in a small gut-renovated apartment that was painted with a shade of bright so white that it dulled your head a little. She lived there in a small room with three windows. I’ve always been partial to tiny rooms with too many windows, and I loved how the mornings felt with the light flooding in from all sides in that room, so much light we could have drowned in it. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never left that room, or as if that room is recreated in miniature somewhere inside me, with a little me and a little andie, 25ish, still living in it.

I never really sat down to watch a video of John Berger speaking about art history, though some of the videos I watched over andie’s shoulder stuck with me, with his gentle forthrightness, his honesty. So this was my first time really engaging with his work. I expected it to be more focused than it was. He has little concern for linear narrative; I enjoyed the jumps, even if sometimes they felt abrupt. 

The title here got me, like all overly dramatic titles do. Brief as photos? Brief as photos. Photos are brief, I suppose, though they also seem long, like the moment that the photo depicts has been extended outward in time from the point at which the photo was taken, onward and onward like a column you can’t see the end of. Until the photo is lost or destroyed forever. And our faces, my heart. Love. This is a book about love, and around love. There aren’t that many people who know anything about love, much less those who can write about it. There were some breathtaking passages about love in this book. 

Really, John spends most of the book flitting around wherever he wants, and it’s pleasant to follow that flightiness. This was a book that came in and out of my life like a painting does after you linger in front of it, forcing your attention into it, letting it become your world for a little bit before moving on. I’m changed, and I’m also gone.

An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth – Anna Moschovakis

My expectations were not high for this book – I picked it up at a bookstore in DC with a bunch of other books, doing that thing that sometimes you do when you travel where you spend a little more money a little more recklessly than you otherwise would. This one surprised me, though. It was fun and funny and sad and didn’t make any sense. I’m liking things that don’t make too much sense right now (suddenly the name of the Talking Heads film, “Stop Making Sense”, jumps into my head, even though I’ve never liked the Talking Heads, never really got them). The narrator of the book is pathetic, with a sense of self that never fully stabilizes, and that lack of internal stability seems to externalize to the ground she stands on, like every time she doubts herself the earth shakes beneath her. It sounds a little cheesy but it makes for a desolate, stunning work of fiction. This narrator is a pathetic narrator that you’re not just feeling bad for but also rooting for, and every time the earth calms beneath her a little bit you feel that sense of calm too, like you’re glad that, for once, you too can stand on solid ground.

The acknowledgements immediately shed some light on the book’s contents; that this is a debut novel by a poet, and that the novel came out of years of research about the self-help industry and its intersection with method acting. Both the years of research and the poetry background were evident in how brilliantly the world was created and exposed, how delicately some of the details were revealed. I think this book will sit with me for some time.