Genius writer Katherine Dunn talks about her new book on boxing (which she has reported on for decades) in this recent interview. Her honesty is, of course, startling, raw, and refreshing. She’s brilliant. She makes the rest of the goddamn world just seem so insufferably POLITE. Well, the rest of the world can have their little social interactions that keeps everyone safe and secure, they can have their little acceptable lies they tell one another – about the world and about themselves. Count me out.
I love her thoughts on … well, everything.
I love that she acknowledges brokenness as not just part of the human condition, but its very essence. Brokenness is not the end. Brokenness is just the way things are. Like Auden wrote, “You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.”
That’s all we can do. Yearning for straightness and wholeness (after a certain point, I mean) is a weakness. It is the desire for utopia, which is a delusion.
Geek Love has, in its title, its message. It is love, pure and simple. Crooked bodies and crooked hearts and what it means to love. For the most part, love given will not be received. At least not received in full by the one it is given to. It will be rejected, or brushed off, or ignored, or laughed at. Or, worst of all, not understood to be as deep and true as it is. But love should be given anyway. And that’s what makes a wreckage of life, and yet that is also what makes it most worth living. But please. Let’s not just skip over that whole “wreckage” part and try to pretend that these are two equal halves. They are not. Katherine Dunn understands that. She understands that heartwrenching struggle. It is that which breaks us. Geek Love was all about that, but what I find really interesting is her perspective on boxing, and how many of us need that hard tough persona. It is undervalued today, especially in certain sectors. But it has its uses. It is one of the most important survival skills we can practice. Yes, the risk is that the hardness of the outer shell will go deep into the core. Oh well. There are risks in everything.
Wishing that we were not “geeks” (ie: broken) is a waste of time.
I love her for getting that. And putting it into words like nobody else.
Here are my thoughts on Geek Love: A Novel
Her new book is called One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing
Wow. Amazing interview. Everything she says is just so crisp. And her thoughts on the usefulness of violence — brilliant.
Also waiting breathlessly for her next book.
There’s a chapter from Geek Love I’ve been trying to write about for weeks now. It was the exchange between Olympia and Miranda in Miranda’s apartment where they were talking about their deformities. Olympia spent her whole life in a world where she was seen as inferior to her siblings because she wasn’t strange enough. She always wished that she was MORE different, weirder than what was ultimately a Binewski family “disappointment.” Then there’s Miranda, who always hated her tail and how it made her different, having grown up in that convent environment where she was told it was God’s punishment for her mother’s sins. The contrast is amazing, one woman always wishing she was stranger than she was, the other wishing she was just like everybody else. But both of their attitudes were entirely “normal” for their circumstances. I love the way Dunn has a knack for making you question definitions of words like “beauty” and “normal” within an individual context without hitting you over the head with some kind of condescending lecture. She just says here they are. Take them or leave them. They don’t care either way.
I love where Dunn says:
“That if you mess with them, it will not be cost-free.”
A huge survival skill. Not that you have to be able to win, just that you will not let it be cost free. That backs off an awful lot of would be thugs in life. I think that’s come up previously here.
“Yes, the risk is that the hardness of the outer shell will go deep into the core.”
I think that’s true, but there’s another risk also: That by keeping too much out, one day you wake up and find you’re somewhat hollow.
Interesting. I started to write an essay today about hollowness.
That is the choice. Hardening up or hollowing out.
A lot of this happens organically, against your will – whatever, you have charge of a little of it, but not all of it.
I don’t care, hard or hollow, as long as I can still write. I mean, I do care, but it doesn’t seem to matter – one way or the other.
I also love how she crucifies, in my opinion, the morons who believe everything is WORSE today than it was back in the glory days of … uhm, when would that be? When was man not violent? When was he not a predator?
Please, enlighten me.
Idiots.
I also love this exchange:
Guernica: Whoâs the greatest fighter?
Katherine Dunn: (long pause) In my personal opinion, Jack Johnson is the greatest boxer of all time. He changed the sport. He revolutionized the sport.
Guernica: In what ways?
Katherine Dunn: He moved. He moved. He got up on his toes, he brought fluidity and movement to a sport that had been flat-footed, forward-backward movement. Everything that came after him was affected by it. I donât think thereâs any way that can be overestimated.
Guernica: Who wins in a fight between Jack Johnson and a pissed off kangaroo wearing boxing gloves?
Katherine Dunn: Oh, Jack Johnson. No problem.
Guernica: What if Jack Johnson happened to be drunk?
Katherine Dunn: I have no reason to think that Jack Johnson was sober for any of his fights. And I still pick Jack Johnson.
I love that story she told about her fellow boxing fan of a husband asking her about a match he’d missed while at work. She’s got this pages-long blow-by-blow of the whole thing and he’s like “um…I just want to know who won.”
The passion that she writes and speaks about boxing with is just inspiring. I love it when somebody can take a subject I have little or no interest in and just ENGAGE me enough to care, even if it’s only for the moment.
Emily – I loved that too. She, like, randomly found her calling.
“That is the choice. Hardening up or hollowing out.”
Maybe, but I don’t know. I still think it’s possible to find a good place that is between those two. Finding that has turned out to be hard though, and I know there’s no guarantee that it will last if I ever get there.
Yeah, balance is the goal, I suppose. But to me it feels (and has felt) like a stark choice. I’m leaning towards hollowing out. Hardness does not suit me and ends up being more self-destructive. Hollowing out feels like – well, it’s gonna happen whether I choose it or not. It’s the gentler of options although it has its ruthlessness too.
All of this is subjective, of course. This is just my experience of life. Your mileage may vary and I hope it does!!
Yes, very subjective. My take, through my experience, is that totally hard is where you hurt the ones you love directly, totally hollow is where you hurt them through what you do to yourself. Just my perspective and why I don’t want to be in either place. I don’t presume to give you advice, but I hope you don’t go hollow, Sheila. It’s a bad place.
I’ve been there. I know both sides. I’m 41 years old. My experience is that Hollow will happen to you whether you want to go there or not. Hardness is more of a CHOICE. You decide: “I’m going to be mad at the world starting NOW.”
The hollow/hard thing is what I was writing about today. Obviously the Dunn piece struck a chord.
The year I’ve been thru has been ruthless. It has left me with no reserves, everything stripped away – and it’s all just taken a turn for the worse.
That’s where I’m writing from right now. Much of this has to do with the “operating from scarcity” theme I’ve been working on. I don’t expect to be understood – still working on the ideas, they aren’t fully formed yet. But operating from a position of scarcity makes you see the world a certain way.
again, not fully formed ideas yet. The Dunn piece helped get me going.
But dave – thanks. Your kind words are very nice.
It struck a chord with me, obviously. I could go on about it, but enough. Thanks for bringing it up, it’s a good subject to think about once in a while.