Travel. Read. Linger. Is that the right word? Regardless. We were travel and now we are not. We were bed and beach and read and now we are riff, and muse, and verbiage. We are also collections, nonfiction essays with Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell and poetry with Letters From Robots by Diana Salier. It is coincidental that we fell into these books at the same time, but we are not surprised to see that these two have recently read together because of what the work has in common - being young and searching, and all that goes with it, drinking, drugging, sex, pop culture, friendship, heartache, wandering, confusion, and the hunger to consume everything in front of you because it's in front of you and it's new and it must be experienced, tortuously deconstructed, left behind and found again.
There are differences though as well. Salier appears to be saying, these experiences are coming to you as observations, no emotion, no distraction, lived-in and sparse maybe, but happening from a remove. Because that's how robots, and artists, many, most, not all, relate, from a distant place, diligently distilling what they know down to words and images. Caldwell, however, has chosen to eschew anything that looks or presents itself as removing her words from anywhere or any emotion she may have ever experienced, and just how it was experienced, the sex, the drugs, the dumpy apartments, fucked-up dudes, and isolation. It's all there, right there, in front of you, for you to consume with her if you can stand not to turn away. Ultimately, if Salier is writing precise unvarnished letters from somewhere removed from a moment, Caldwell is taking pictures of each and every moment and refusing to airbrush them for our comfort.
Whereas the Joseph Riipi talks Legs Get Led Astray with Chloe Caldwell at The Lit Pub.
JR: One of my favorite moments in the book is in “That Was Called Love,”
a kind of love letter to New York City from Seattle, when you write:
“Last night I described New York to a rock climber in Seattle. ‘It
sounds like, New York is for you, what the mountains are for me.’” Since
then you’ve moved back to New York (but now just outside the city).
Have you found for yourself a permanent mountain?
CC: No. I think “mountains” or “homes” are
specific to what you need at that time in your life. For a long time, I
truly did think you could count on a place to make you happy. Like, when
I moved to New York City, I was young and so affected by it that I
thought it was alive. Now I see that just like people — there is not one
person or place that you can get everything you want from. It’s all
about compromise. If I could mix my mother’s backyard, Brooklyn, and
Portland together, that would be a pretty sweet home. When I left the
city to move to Washington, I thought that Seattle would be as new and
exciting. But it was far from it and for a while, that was hard for me
to cope with and accept. It’s like this quote by Fran Lebowitz: “When
you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the
world is. Clean is not enough.”
