My Own Devices

Posted on by Josh Nudell

My usual way of being could probably be summed up as chronically un-hip. I usually read books, list to music and see movies well after that phase has passed. When culture swings back around to where I am, such as with the Song of Ice and Fire (which I started reading in about 2000 when I was in early high school), the hipness doesn’t quite stick. I generally have pretty good taste, in my obviously biased opinion, so this un-hipness doesn’t bother me. It just is.

This is all preamble to talking about a book that, in reading it less than a month after its publication, might possibly be the hippest thing I have ever done in my life. That book, published less than a month before I read it, is My Own Devices, a memoir by the Minneapolis hip-hop artist Dessa.

The essays in this collection consist of stories from and about Dessa’s early career as a touring artist that put friends, family, and challenges front and center. Each essay could stand on its own (and several were previously published), but the through line is her side of an extended, intermittent romantic relationship. Heartbreak became an addiction that defeated “time, distance, and whiskey”—what Dessa calls “over-the-counter remedies” that included moving to New York so that she wouldn’t be in the same town. The collection reaches its climax in the essay “Call off your Ghost,” which recounts her self-crafted experiments with fMRI-scanning and neurofeedback conditioning break this addiction.

Dessa writers beautifully, which is one of the reasons I like her music so much, and in fact there is a passage early on about her ex’ sage advice to rap more like she writes. Pulling back the curtain on these parts of her life put the songs into greater context, particularly for the early releases that aren’t quite as fully developed as in the more recent albums. But that would make this collection only of interest to fans of her music, when this is so much more. What I found particularly effective here is the self-portrait of a bright young woman who is simultaneously curious about the world, wrapped up in her neuroses, and ambitious to the point of grating against her lack of accomplishment.

I can’t do My Own Devices justice here. It is thoughtful meditation family, friends, and art, with a little less science than I was anticipating form the subtitle. (Science shows up in a couple of essays, generally as an adjunct to family or heartbreak.) Dessa is refreshingly blunt, acknowledging her imperfections even while telling her story in a sympathetic light. In short, I loved My Own Devices, going so far as to complain online that I started it at a time when I knew I would have to put it down, and am adding it to my list of Dessa’s work that I recommend to just about everyone I meet.

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I am now reading Kevin Kruse’ One Nation Under God, which argues that the public performance of religious piety in American life was invented in the 1930s by an alliance of corporate executives and religious leaders who opposed the New Deal and came to fruition during a 1950s post-war religious revival.

The Man Who Spoke Snakish

Posted on by Josh Nudell

It really is ridiculous how persistently everything in my life has gone awry. It reminds me of a bird that builds itself a nest high in a tree, but at the same time as it sits down to hatch, the tree falls down. The bird flies to another tree, tries again, lays new eggs, broods on them, but the same day that the chicks hatch, a storm comes up and that tree, too, is cloven in two.

The end is at hand, and there’s no point in holding back on the good stuff. So what are you going to offer your guests?

Where to begin? Leemet, the narrator and protagonist is the last man who knows snakish, an ancient language that marks an ancient bond between humans and snakes and gives people control over most animals. Deer offer themselves to be eaten and wolves are tamed for milk and as steeds in time of war. Bears are more of a problem, though usually more because they are the lotharios of the forest more so than for their furiosity. The speakers of snakish live in the forest, in harmony with nature.

In previous generations they lost a war against the iron men who came from over the sea. Now the old ways are dying. People give up the forest to live in the village, show their butts to the sun while harvesting grain, and eat bread, which causes their tongues to become too clumsy to speak snakish. Leemet himself was born in town before his parents moved back to the forest before returning to claim his family inheritance. They are the exception and only a few traditionalists, including the last remaining Primates, remain. Among those are Tambet and his family. Tambet never forgave Leemet for having gone to the village and clings with ever greater desperation to what he sees as the old ways, but his daughter Hiie becomes one of Leemet’s playmates whenever she can escape her father’s wrath. Life in the forest is good for Leemet, but the days when speakers of snakish had venomous fangs, let alone the ability to summon the Frog of the North to repulse the iron men, are gone.

The Man Who Spoke Snakish spins the story of this vanishing world from after an inflection point has been passed. Leemet grows up in a world that is effectively dead. The result is a narrative that is at once a delightful coming of age story and a poignant examination of the nostalgia for lost tradition. The latter particularly emerges through through a number of characters who organize their lives around increasingly bizarre traditions. They claim that these traditions are ancient, whether brought from a far off land or simply how people used to live in Estonia, but what they are doing now is utterly unrecognizable from and usually unrelated to whatever seed they might have sprung from—something Leemet learns when he finally meets his grandfather…who lost his legs after a battle with the iron men and is now collecting bones from men he kills in order to construct a pair of wings.

I came to The Man Who Spoke Snakish purely because I wanted to read a book from a language I hadn’t before. I had never heard of Andrus Kivirähk, let alone read anything by him when I purchased this and a Slovenian novel after doing a bit of online research into “best novel” lists on the internet. I was not disappointed.

In a word, this book is spectacular. Much like a Miyazaki film, its whimsical prose belies that Kivirähk also captures something fundamental about the invention and destruction of tradition. The fact that the story is told as a folktale among a lower strata of society that is straining beneath the rule of the church and the knights is handled so deftly that it is almost invisible. Frequently these choices muted the impact of individual deaths, as though to show that it wasn’t the loss of the individual, but of the collective that is the real tragedy. The Man Who Spoke Snakish has its flaws, including that most of the characters are fun, but flat, but I found myself spirited away and loving every page.

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I recently finished Lorrie Moore’s collection Bark, which was well-crafted, but left me once again trying to figure out what it is about short stories that usually make them fall flat for me. I’m now reading Dessa’s fabulous new book My Own Devices.

Narratives Matter

Posted on by Josh Nudell

An excerpt of a new book appearedin Salon this week, provocatively titled “Why Most Narrative History is Wrong. The book is similarly provocative, alleging in the subtitle to reveal “the neuroscience of our addiction to stories.” Naturally this caused a series of knee-jerk reactions that spawned long Twitter threads. I had a similarly impulsive response to the chapter, but also wanted to response to it in good faith before returning to a point the author and I actually agree on, that narratives—the stories we tell ourselves—are fundamental to human societies, because my distaste with this piece emerges from the consequences of this point.

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