the green notebook

, Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro, reading Jay Owens + all the places where dust gets in,

Further to the Alice Munro revelations, The New Yorker publishes a story by Rachel Aviv, “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” two days before Christmas. Aviv writes of Munro circa 2014, as Alzheimer’s drained her ability to write, and her second daughter Jenny, attended the dailyness of her mother’s banking to leaving “pens and spiral-bound notebooks beside her chair,” an entire narrative within the shadow of Gerry’s abuse, and Munro’s own egregious response. “For years,” Aviv writes, “Jenny had been trying to talk with her mother about something that had been put through the machine repeatedly: the sexual abuse of Alice’s youngest daughter, Andrea, by Gerry, and Alice’s refusal to see the harm that it had done. ‘She loves and protects the most destructive person of my life,’ Andrea had written years earlier.” Aviv recounts, through Jenny, Munro’s illness shuttered her ability to write, while simultaneously eroding her emotional reserve, as well as her resistance. Aviv recounts the story as revealed by Andrea, and Jenny recording their mother’s admissions of guilt, all too little, too late.

There’s a part of me sad at the idea that the conversations around one of Canada’s most celebrated writers, a Nobel Laureate, has shifted away from her work into this. And yet, this situation that Munro might not have created or caused, but compounded, and in the worst possible way.

Already the articles, the comments, have begun to emerge: those that are still reading or re-reading Munro’s work, aware of a far different sensibility. Of all that can be dismissed, or hidden away.

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I’m enjoying the language of Jay Owens’ dust: the modern world in a trillion particles (2023). I’m barely a page or two in, listening to her 2015 descriptions of California wildfires, not far from where she’s set up camp with a pair of further adventurers: “Meanwhile the North Fork blaze stained the sky yellow, the sun red. Fear licked gently across my collarbones: one road in meant one road out. But oh, the smell: sun-warmed pine-sap; the hot dry earth, tar, woodsmoke and burning. Each breath drew it deeper into my lungs.” I’m only on page three, eager to quote her at length, although I probably shouldn’t. “The three of us shared a fascination with places as layered, their history continuously overwritten but never quite rubbed out. If you looked at somewhere slantwise, tired and liminal, in the pale light of a new morning, there might be a way of seeing otherwise, of catching a glimpse of a place’s past and its future, just there, imminent, lying in waiting.”

Every year for Christmas, Christine gifts me a book that I might otherwise have never picked up for myself. Last year, it was British poet Jack Underwood’s Not Even This: Poetry, Parenthood & Living Uncertainly (2021), a curious blend of poetry, parenting and uncertainty, offering the fear, curiosity, delight and bafflement of becoming a parent for the first time, circling out from his central thesis through a lens of writing, poetry and the structures of thought poetry allows. The year prior, it was actor Stanley Tucci’s delightful and evocative Taste: My Life Through Food (2021). I’d been repeatedly devouring episodes of Searching for Italy (2021-2), his documentary food-travelogue that CNN cancelled, a decision on their part that leans into the criminal. A few years prior to that, it was Brian Jay Jones’ joyfully-rich Jim Henson: The Biography (2016), one of the finer biographies I’ve read, second only to the heft of the 852 pages of William Hjortsberg’s thoroughly detailed and devastating Jubilee Hitchhiker: the life and times of Richard Brautigan (2012). I tend to spend the bulk of my Christmas Day reading such volumes, falling into a sequence of unexpected moments and movements.

There’s so much lyric and attentive language through Owen’s conversation around dust, bringing an attention through natural and man-made particles, a thoroughly-researched array of particulates across a wide spectrum, all of which enters and accumulates into our breathing and bodies, in this “collision of scales – the microscopic and the planetary,” and attempting to meet somewhere in-between, at a size roughly human. “The accumulation of dust was like the accumulation of the past,” Owens writes, “which must at some point become suffocating to the present – housework the only thing preventing the transformation of the home into a nightmarish haunted house.”

Our young ladies, who came in to wake us at 6am, but I resisted for more than an hour, until I could resist no longer. The chaos, the calm and the clean-up, everyone back in their corners by 9:30am. I am here with my book, sitting.

Later in the afternoon, through Owen’s own social media feed, I find someone else who compares the onslaught of AI to dust: it gets into everything.