Essays

How We Tell the Story Together

Notes on the Story of the Golden Country
~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Rebecca Solnit writes comfortably in multiple veins as geographer, historian, environmentalist, memoirist, feminist, humanist, journalist, activist, even novelist. It’s pretty clear to me that she is one of our finest writers. In particular, her consistent artistic and poetic approach to essays and long-form narrarative is always surprisingly insightful and enlightening. And the way she writes, melding deeply personal perspective with a constant drive to pull back the curtain on the special ironies and contortions of American life, is the rarist form of reporting and commentary I know of – especially here in the 21st century (which, may I remind you, is now 25% in the can and still foaming).

Lately, Solnit’s been up on the battlements pushing hard to turn the tide in this current attempted

Continue reading →

The Psychology of Sound

Brain on music
~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

I’ve spent my entire life astounded by the magic of music, appreciating everything from opera and Gregorian chant to bluegrass and every kind of jazz there is. But what exactly is being touched in us and inspired when we listen to our favorite songs? What is this creation of new and complex emotion, the stimulation of sensuality, bittersweet memory, at times even, that awareness of sublime connection to the universe? How full and rich our lives are because of the beauty and profundity of sound waves organized into melody, rhythm, timber, and harmonic tones! Friedrich Nietzsche said it best: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Continue reading →

Why There Are No Final Drafts

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

I completed the first draft of a story called “Millie Floating” in the fall of 2004. In those days, my goal was to edit a project until I had a final draft, at which time I could send it out to publications until someone accepted it. That was naive and wrong.

Fast forward nearly two decades. “Millie Floating,” a weird little story about a guy who wonders if his wife has murdered the family dog, was published in the Toho Literary print collection, The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia 2021. It would never have been published if I’d stuck with that final draft theory.

Continue reading →

Maybe Everything Depends on the Wedding

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

The traditional happy ending has the young lovers heading off together into the sunset. What the writer leaves out is the fact that not only do the lovers travel into the sun (such a beautiful and straightforward metaphor for the future) but the rest of the world rides off with them as well.

I worry some that all this negativity towards what we know to be Truth and the Good in Life may mean that certain people out there honestly don’t understand the idea of happy endings. Denial of things like the importance of public health and rational environmental investments carry an obvious dark and cynical set of presumptions.

Continue reading →

Those Who Wake Up in Love

~ David Biddle ~ 2 Comments

Love seems to be growing rarer and rarer in this world, doesn’t matter which kind I’m talking about. There’s vitriol and hostility everywhere — on all sides. I get it, I suppose. Love in every form requires vulnerability and courage. These days everyone on so many levels is tired of feeling vulnerable. It’s all too obvious as well that courage and personal strength and the ability to take care of other people are expended resources.

So, in the words of the world’s greatest living romantic nihilistic cynic, Tony Johnson (Ricky Gervais) in the wonderful TV show After Life:

“… (long sigh …) Ah, fuck me!”

Tony Johnson (Ricky Gervais)

And yet, somehow, I’m pretty sure a good many people on this good green earth continue to wake up in love every morning. They can’t help it. I’m thinking of those still romantically connected to their partners; those with unshakable friendships; and whole families in general, no matter how distant and separated by coronavirus.

Continue reading →

No Translation Possible: On Reading Roberto Bolaño

~ davidbiddle ~ 1 Comment
“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
– Roberto Bolaño, “The Savage Detectives” 
Patti Smith with a Roberto Bolaño portrait
Patti Smith with a Roberto Bolaño portrait

I have discovered the work of Chilean poet/novelist/essayist, Roberto Bolaño, in the past year. For years I stayed away from this dude because it seemed like he was probably one of those difficult writers who made a reader’s journey very time consuming and dicey. Boy, was I wrong!

I want to admit here first that I’m mesmerized by what Bolaño produced in his all too short career. I can’t say I’m an addict, but I do love reading pretty much anything he’s ever written. The experience is uncanny. He tends not to overload sentences. Tends not to get too lyrical or philosophical. Most certainly he does not take himself or whatever work he’s doing too seriously (not too seriously does not mean he writes frivolously).

Continue reading →

“Natural Symbols”: On the Brutality of Popular Opinion and Why You Think You’re Always Right

~ davidbiddle ~ 3 Comments

Mary Douglas, Anthropologist
Mary Douglas, Anthropologist

Anthropologist Mary Douglas published a book called Natural Symbols 45 years ago. It’s a gateway into thinking about how individuals encode their perceptions of reality through the complex cosmology of cultural symbols they live in — bodily or “natural” symbols in particular. The idea of the book was to develop a way of talking about how well the individual is integrated into society.  Social integration is the idea of “order” that each of us carries with us everyday. In a nutshell, she was at play with the ideas of taboo and purity. These are at the root of everything. Either you love and embrace things or you hate and reject them. And you tend to learn these from society at large.

Ya’ think that’s some boring shit? Well, maybe, except when you actually try to understand what the hell is going on in the world today.

What we just went through last fall, standing in little pockets around the country in judgment of police in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island was an extreme case of how “natural symbols” work in real life. There was a huge amount of emotion attached to these two Continue reading →

Not the Marriage Plot: On Men Reading Novels in the 21st Century

~ davidbiddle ~ 5 Comments

Here’s what I think about at some point of every day:

What is going on in this world that would lead so many men far, far away from reading modern literary novels?

I’ve written here at this blog and in other places around the Internet about my overall concern for literary fiction. A helluva lot of intelligent people want nothing to do with it anymore. Before the Internet took hold (about 18 years ago), I thought that somehow it was just the little world I lived in here in Continue reading →

Here’s what I think about at some point of every day:

What is going on in this world that would lead so many men far, far away from reading modern literary novels?

I’ve written here at this blog and in other places around the Internet about my overall concern for literary fiction. A helluva lot of intelligent people want nothing to do with it anymore. Before the Internet took hold (about 18 years ago), I thought that somehow it was just the little world I lived in here in Continue reading →