[Autofocus; 2025]
Comprised of hundreds of different artistic/literary quotations, quotes and allusions, along with a disjunct narrative involving “Protagonist” and “Reader,” Readers Block is the first of three books in David Markson’s The Notecard Quartet. This quartet is masterful. Via the wavy narrative and endless accretion of allusive note, fact, and detail, Markson offers his take on… everything. Death, ego, spirituality, antisemitism, morality, artistic relevance, artistic obscurity, historical precedence, the glories of humanity, the follies of humanity, all of it. Although Markson does, semi-cryptically, give the reader clues to his own failing health, The Notecard Quartet works implicitly and exclusionarily. By telling us so much about the plights of others, their own predilections and flaws, the way they lived their lives and the way they exited them, we get a deep interior view of Markson himself as his life nears its conclusion.
The front cover of my copy of Reader’s Block has a blurb that has always intrigued and mystified me. Taken from a Publishers Weekly review of the text, it reads: “A book often dreamed about by the avant-garde but never seen…utterly fascinating.” This anonymous reviewer tacitly posits that the avant-garde is some type of formed group, with distinct members, an office space, monthly Zoom meetings, yearly dues. That the avant-garde, maybe like the Oulipo group, works in tandem with one another, identifying new minable areas of artistic innovation, then forming a collective task force and putting the group’s best members to work. New and heretofore unknown artistic masterpieces on the factory line, arriving fully formed and always on time.
It’s not a thing and not really possible. By its very nature the avant garde is unknowable; it involves different people in different cities working in different artistic milieus to different ends. Fifty years later we look back and say that someone was a member of the avant-garde, that they were working within a new form or forms, one that hadn’t been seen before. And although possibly known to us, even well-known, the present members of the avant-garde are not card-carrying or dues-paying. Many would no doubt push back against an “avant-garde” classification. (Too generalized, ill-fitting, non-remunerative, etc.) Might just be me, but if someone were to walk up tomorrow and introduce themselves as a member of the “avant-garde,” I would be deeply suspicious.
After finishing Naomi Washer’s great new book Marginalia, this Markson Publishers Weekly blurb bubbled up for me almost immediately. In its own way, the conceit of Washer’s text is something the avant-garde, if it were an organized thing, might have dreamed up, putting its best folx on the job posthaste.
Marginalia is a short book-length essay comprised of marginalia that the author wrote in a medley of texts by authors such as William Hazlitt, Anne Carson, and Robert Walser. As Washer notes in a brief afterword, these works were read—and the book was thus written— “in Vermont, then Chicago, then California, then Vermont again, then Chicago again, then Manhattan, and finally Brooklyn…” The volume is suitably disjointed, although it also displays an associative logic, small jump to big. The logic that makes the kind of sense that, after reading the book Japanese Poetic Diaries (selected and edited by Earl Miner), one might next read Walking by Henry David Thoreau, and, although it’s impossible to directly articulate, the books seem designed to be read one after the other. The reader can’t tell you why and the author herself doesn’t really know—but they fit, two odd oblong puzzle pieces that yet snap together.
Although not an example of textbook surrealism by any means—there are few otherworldly, discordant images and few right=left digressions—a certain dream logic pervades the text. From book to book we’re subversively swimming and it’s impossible to tell which text Washer read while writing Marginalia, what prompted any specific linguistic outburst. Anti-didactic, this is part of the book’s mystery and appeal. There is no direct mention of longing or blue from the marginalia in the author’s copy of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets; in her marginalia from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes we aren’t sure what rendering of love (or misappropriation of love) is being offered. We aren’t even sure if the sentences written in what I would guess is A Lover’s Discourse—“Years ago, having dinner with an ex, who wasn’t an ex then but present tense, I forgot the French word essayer. We were eating pizza and he asked me how to say to try in French. I paused. My mind did not exist…”—were actually written in A Lover’s Discourse. Although composed of marginalia written in Washer’s books, Marginalia is also completely itself, its own entity, and refuses to overly cater to amateur, “I know what she was reading there!” sleuthing. If, like me, you regularly write your own marginalia, barely discernible scribbled line by barely discernible scribbled line, then the text makes you ponder: What would one’s own version of this book consist of? Would it hold to the standard that Washer has created, or be mere linguistic detritus, barely significant even to its writer?
Ultimately, Marginalia is a volume about growing up in books, with a narrator who positions her source material as sword and shield. This isn’t Washer’s first book—that would be her 2021 novel Subjects We Left Out—but it has an appealingly wide-eyed view of things. Throughout there’s a playfulness, a buoyancy. The author is learning as she goes, with the texts conduits to that end. Early in the volume, Washer writes:
How does anyone become a nonfiction writer?
Not knowing is what draws me in.
I don’t want everyone to know what I’m doing all the time.
I feel this impatient, rushing sense of time
…
I’m searching for something unexpected to reveal itself to me.
By the end of the book, Washer is essentially in the same place, in the way that every writer is “searching for something unexpected to reveal itself.” The attunement to that unexpectedness is what makes a writer. And through the thoughts and notes jotted down in other writers’ books, Washer has created such a space for herself. Writing is a tenuous, halting endeavor, but if one cares enough about language, it is nourishing and enduring all the same. It activates a life previously unknown to oneself. “Writing begins from the middle of the confusion” reads one of the final sentences of Marginalia. It’s true. And Marginalia makes clear that such confusion provides the writer, in this case Naomi Washer, with the loveliest of beginnings. The avant garde waits for what’s next.
The co-publisher of the small non-profit press Fonograf Editions, Jeff Alessandrelli is most recently the author of And Yet: a novel about sex and shyness and society. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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