Natural Causes

There's a dead fly on my monitor stand. It's been there for weeks. I think I haven't moved it out of some morbid urge, well-buried in most circumstances, to be aware of dead things, of the brevity of life - particularly for a fly, which lives a few days at best.

Despite this dead fly I can't bring myself to remove, I don't like taxidermied animals. I went in a shop once that was full of desiccated lizards, pinned insects, frozen furred creatures. I don't know how this shop was categorized in the retail world, because the only thing that bound all of its wares was death. A friend came with me. She is an artist and I think that she was not squeamish because she saw so many of the things in there as useful references.

I was squeamish. I saw life, flattened out and lost for butterfly after butterfly. The furs hanging on the wall once quivered above warm flesh. I did not like being in there. Uneasiness hovered like a greasy wad of dark matter in my gut.

We project peace onto our dead, when, most probably, what is there is nothing. Does a fly have a soul to be at peace? It's a husk, there on my stand, a carapace, decaying dryly. A cheap life, I think, but it meets the scientific definition of life. And who's to say that life genuinely lies along a spectrum of value? Flies are better at flying than humans are, even if we're better at thinking. Probably.

Maybe the fly reminds me that my existence is small, too, and I ought to write faster. Maybe I'm vaguely worried that if I try to remove it the fly will disintegrate and bits of it will get caught in the wire mesh of my monitor stand. Then there will be a mess, when at present there is an assembled carapace. (The fly must have died of natural causes, because I did not kill it.)

Or maybe I'm a very lazy housekeeper and I'm coming up with high-minded reasons why my attention drifts to this dead fly when I'm sitting at my desk, writing, and the real reason is that the time is long past for me to slide it onto a piece of paper and drop it into the trash, and it embarrasses me that I haven't done this yet.

I don't know.

by Karl Addison

Out in the world:

I worked extremely hard on a review for LARB of Sjón's three-novel trilogy CoDex 1962. It was not an easy book to review, given the wide differences between the literary tradition I understand and the one Sjón is working from; in addition, there was just...a lot going on with the book. I was profoundly uncomfortable saying even the mildest bad things about it, because it's been so revered across the world. But my editor supported me, and it's important to me to speak as I find, as a critic. If I don't, I oughtn't be a critic.

[Sidebar: this book + Stormwarning has engendered for me a strange little specialty in criticism of Icelandic literature. I have two more Icelandic books on my desk for review, and I've requested one more. A happy, if unexpected, development.]

I reviewed Amy Pence's hybrid poetry collection [It] Incandescent for the Bind, an outlet that's quietly doing terrific and unusual work. The review I wrote is itself a hybrid piece, and I'm very satisfied with it. I liked Pence's work so much that I also interviewed her for Books I Hate.

Bits and pieces of my interview with Alice Hatcher didn't make it into the final version, but I still wanted to get them out there, so I posted them on Medium as "outtakes."

One bit of ego inflation I want to share. Last week I was browsing the internet for information on when the third installment of the Encircling trilogy would finally come out in English, and I discovered that, when you click on the second book's page at Graywolf, my words, from my review, are blasted above the book's summary in huge letters. My heart flipped over when I saw that.

There's good stuff coming in October; I've filed seven reviews in the past couple of weeks, so once those get through editing they'll start rolling out. Also, a piece for the Establishment is coming soon, and it has outtakes I'll probably post here. I'm incredibly excited about that one. I hope you'll like it, too.