The Rarebit Fiend's Year in Review
What I wrote and why
How long have I been writing on the Internet? It all started back in 2003, when Silliman’s Blog and a few other poets’ blogs made writing impromptu essays and musings about matters poetic seem like a good idea. My first book was coming out, and without ever having heard of the concept of a “platform,” I thought that blogging might be a way to support the book and meet my public, tiny as it might be. So I launched the pretentiously named Cahiers de Corey and kept it up through some of the most pivotal years of my life, blogging through my dissertation, marriage, the move to Chicago, fatherhood, several subsequent books of poetry and fiction, and eventually tenure. I loved blogging; I loved the people it put me in contact with, and the opportunity to think out loud about what I was reading, in a manner more casual and spontaneous than the academic writing I was dutifully churning out in those years.
As life got busier, I posted less. By 2014 the blog space had shrunk into seeming irrelevance, drowned out by the bite-sized status updates of the major social media platforms. I left blogspot behind for a blog on my website that I updated less and less frequently. Probably the last time I was able to use a blog expressively in a way that suits the medium was my shelter in place project (now downloadable as a free ebook): one hundred words a day for the first one hundred days of the pandemic. I got into Twitter instead; I liked the compression of the form, even though I recognized it was antithetical to the spirit of inquiry and argument that characterizes blogs. Really it’s antithetical to reading—the thing I love most—and to writing about what one reads.
So now I have this newsletter, which has if possible an even goofier name than my old blog did. The impulse behind it is an old one—the broadcasting of narrow enthusiasms. If this were the 1990s and I wanted to comment extensively on a semi-obscure chunk of culture like the Patrick O’Brian novels, I would have created a zine, which is a nice spirit to try and cultivate. It’s been fun to speculate at length again, and to adopt the hearty project of writing a post about each Aubrey-Maturin novel to give the series something like a spine. Sooner rather than later I’ll get to 21 (the only Aubrey-Maturin book I haven’t read) and then we’ll see what’s next. I might write about another cult author, like Charles Portis; I might write about old movies and TV shows (I have in contemplation an essay about Twin Peaks); hell, I might even start writing about poetry again. I’ve been reading Maureen N. McLane’s selected poems, More Anon, with a lot of appreciation and enjoyment; she’s the love child of Frank O’Hara and Sappho, writing with disarming passionate lightness. Sometimes she can be winsomely discursive, but I like the sharper lyrics like this one:
OK Fern
OK fern
I’m your apprentice
I can now tell youapart from your
darker sister ferns
whose intricate ridgesoverlay your more
regular triangled fans.
Tell me what to dowith my life.
My entire thirties were given over to reading incredibly long and dense modernist poetry; the more abstrusely allusive it was, the more I liked it. Now I’m better enchanted by a poem like this, written in reference to Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” but in an unwinking way; you hardly need to know Rilke’s poem for McLane’s to have its effect. I guess—and this I guess is the theme of this post—I’m more interested in communicating than I have ever been before.
This year I published my second novel—published it in the almost surreptitious way of very small-press publishing. To my knowledge, it has yet to be reviewed, nor has it sold many copies, but I’m glad that it made it out into the world, and a few folks who’ve read it have said very kind things to me about it. The writer M.G. Stephens, who lives here in Evanston (I’ve actually run into him in town with a copy of my novel in his hand!) said this:
Joshua Corey writes an impeccable prose that resonates with echoes from the past, even as these echoes propel his narrative onward in the present and beyond, into the future. But that is not all. This is the Portrait of the Artist as a Jewish American male in the early years of the 21st century. His characters hail from a kind of ideal America where people read books and esteem a good education, which in no way absolves them of the tragic rhythms of action that surround their lives. This is the first contemporary novel that I've read in which I have gone back and re-read a paragraph—because it was so good—and not once but several times.
Not a bad little review! I assume by now that everyone who subscribes to this newsletter has purchased a copy, but if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?
Though the drumbeat of calamity didn’t exactly pause in 2022, it has felt to me a bit more possible to breathe this past year than it has for quite a long time. Like so many people, I lived in a state of more or less continuous dread from election night 2016 to January 20, 2020, and it affected my writing life as well as my life-life. In those years, waking each morning to news of some new crime against human dignity, it felt as if me and everyone I knew had been relegated to the status of minor characters in a Thomas Pynchon novel. I tried to keep sane by working with manic intensity on my as yet unpublished trilogy of science fiction novels; they became the repositories of my unease and offered an escape from the overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The onset of the pandemic shifted things slightly; writing became more directly an expression of the will to keep my eyes open, against the temptation to close them to the globalized trauma. That’s what shelter in place tries to do; it was the last time I really needed poetry to function for me as a kind of instrument or prosthetic that made living, not just surviving, feel possible.
Life feels more possible now. The most significant event this year has to have been Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukraine’s unexpectedly spirited and successful resistance; just as unexpected has been the free world’s staunch support of Ukraine. Is it too optimistic to say that February 24 marked the turning of the tide away from the global turn toward autocracy? Democracy is surviving if not thriving here in the U.S. better than I had hoped; Trump continues to dwindle as a political force and it seems likely now that federal indictments are on the horizon. The specter of global climate instability haunts us all, but we are clever apes; might not some salutary combination of political pragmatism and grass-roots idealism enable our civilization to muddle through, maybe even better itself? If only the grotesque spectacle of the crybaby billionaires would finally make us sicken of oligarchy enough to properly tax the motherfuckers! We could resource the solutions to so many of our problems that way.
Writing feels more possible now. I am still poking about in hopes of securing an agent and publication for my sci-fi novels; maybe I’ll devote some future posts to excerpting them in the hopes of drumming up some interest. I had so much fun writing them; I think they’re fun to read! I’ve been experimenting with a little screenwriting, coming up with my own mock-heroic version of Jack and Stephen for a TV show. And after a long fallow period I’ve resumed work on a novel with the working title The Murder of Jack Ruby, which is really about the life of my distant cousin the boxer Barney Ross, whom I’ve been trying to write about in one way or another for more than twenty years. A few years ago I wrote and published a digital essay about him, Jewish masculinity, and my father’s death; it’s kind of the hinge between How Long Is Now and the new novel; it uses poetry and a little fiction to explore heavy real-life events. If you’re interested in such things, have a peek.
What else am I working on? An academic book review of Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Tissues, Fibers, Clouds by Ada Smailbegović; it feels a little like a monograph I might have written myself if I hadn’t been seduced by fiction. Every now and then I jot down a few lines of poetry in one of my notebooks, but I don’t feel especially compelled to type them up, let alone submit them to journals. That said, I am sitting on a couple poetry collections that I may revisit to see what’s truly essential in them, what might actually be worth trying to publish. If I am more committed to communicative prose than I once was, I’m also curious about the refuge that writing poems used to be for me—a kind of coded communication or fan dance that I did with the reader, an expression of the desire to connect that by its nature holds most readers at a distance. I want to understand that impulse better. There is something a little bit autistic about me, maybe even a tiny bit schizophrenic—I refer to my tendency to become distracted by the twitches of my own consciousness, which can cut me off from participation in the world. I’ve done a lot of work, personally, to overcome that tendency in my personal life; as a result I have more happiness and satisfaction in my family, my friendships, and my teaching than I ever expected to have. Now when I look at my poems, I see them as artifacts of a mongrel yearning for revelation, but on my own terms. Something I must explore, if not overcome, if winning readers is my goal.
Chag Sameach, y’all. Here’s to another year of reading and writing to come!
