précis

[publication date Nov 23, 2007]

[436 pages]

• A book?

• A long poem? -- written in a car on the highways between Normal IL and Providence RI

• An anti-pastoral response to Ashbery's quietistic _Vermont Notebook_?

• A Sisyphean meditation on American unsettledness, its collective agitation, on roads, the ugliness and emptiness of the American roadscape?. See esp. pp 87-91

• Post-nature writing?

• The only book that I know of written entirely inside a moving car

• An account of a family falling apart

• A chronicle of affect. A narrator's movement from negative mindstates toward an awareness of those states and the resolution to overcome them

• An at times lyrical (and sometimes turgid) account of the road, the weather, etc

• A simultaneous history: the personal (the driver's separation from his daughter) and the national (a chronicle of the rise of jingoism and the invasion of Iraq)

• A gift for the driver’s daughter when she is much much older

• A personal history, a chronicle intended at one level entirely for the driver’s daughter, Clio. She is 5 at book’s opening

• An exorcism. An exorcism of violence, historical and personal

• A meditation on America and American violence/aggression. Much about Iraq, passim, &
- Genocide against Lakota, driver raised in Lakota country: pp 264-285
[Entire “Appendix” concerns genocide of the Lakota, the importance of standing up to brutal, violent, remorseless people, looking into fear and sorrow]
- Teddy Roosevelt: 135 - 144
- Violent parody of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: 114-118

• A novelized notebook literally written in a car using sketchpad and pen between Sept 2002 and Dec 2004

• An attempt at a meditation in the spirit of the great renegade sociologist C. Wright Mills who suggested seeing connections between “personal troubles and public issues”

• A story of one's man's friendship with the Shenango River: 113,128, 141, 155, 208, 218, 227, 247, 260, 273, 288, 308, 310, 325, 338, 341, 352, 353, 361, 386, 419, 434


Narrative Arc: (the driver's favorite sections in bold):

Basic narrative arc and concern of book are laid out in prologue.

Book opens w/ driver in Normal, Illinois and partner and daughter and step-daughter in Providence, Rhode Island.

- Discussion of katabasis (8-14); setting of katabatic theme of notebook: narrative arc of notebook as in one sense a journey into and out of a hell, the rising out of a self-made, or a self-permitted, hell as the notebook progresses
- Meeting Herodotus in hell (8-13)
- Essay on Whitman’s comprehensive empathy and its relation to death and the comic (8-11)
- 22-36: lengthy beating and torture of American bald eagle that eventually morphs into J Robert Oppenheimer

63-64 Essay on literary narcissism (in Aufgabe)

71- A marriage occurs in attempt to save a relationship. 71-72 theory about cockroaches proffered

87-91 Catalog of road signs from Ohio to Illinois.

96-108: Essay on dung

75-77: Violent parody of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

136-146, 161, 217: Violent attack on Nancy Reagan

110-118, 167-171, 172-180: Violent attack on Bush family

180: A divorce is decided on 4 months later (3.16.03), the very day the US invades Iraq.

194-212: Driver meets M...., a kind person; driver not used to such a kind, calm person

213–230: Driver travels to Providence to give poetry reading, negative mindstates generated by exposure to long-standing interpersonal trauma and then deflected toward southerners, also extension of a violent verbal world constructed around Nancy Reagan, in which I think she turns into an eagle again; also talk of killing a deer with a thumbtack (p. 225); further various unfocused negativities, etc

231– 253: Optative mood. Drive to collect Clio and bring her to IL for summer. 238-241: Hymn of gratitude for Clio (not in galley version)

253–267: Driver returns to Illinois with Clio. Very happy. Simple writing. Driver's favorite section.

268-276: A meditation abt personal failure, reactivity, Late Capitalism and its entraining of emotional reactivity

281–293: Immersion in a divorce hearing at Family Court in Providence. 187-88, missing home and Minnesota, remembering divorce of parents (version in New American Writing)

293–302: Description of the divorce hearing witnessed. Drive back after hearing.

303- : Travel to spend Xmas holiday with Clio in motel. Have flu. Thérèse of Liseaux (305), Nietzsche (306-307), Matthew Arnold’s misprision of reality (303-304): Driver resolves to start meditating, to get positive (304-307). Huge snowstorm (310-314).

320 - : Clio very ill. Driver travels to see her. War in Iraq, Halliburton, Thomas Paine, the radio

335-339: landscapes in CT and southern NY, & PA

347-357 : Drive for Clio’s birthday. Slaughters in Fallujah: Ramadhi, Baghdad, Basra; on Philip Wylie’s “multi-momism” and its relation to state aggression (vis. a fight between bunnies, babies, and moms) ; physical abuse of a mom toward bunnies (353-355). Large, physically abusive mom attacks bunnies. Various sorrows. (357)

239 – 264: Driver determines to embrace a strict wash of meditative practice as a means of coming out of habitual modes of perception and action. On the logically-grounded and scientific efficacy of certain aspects of Buddhistic psychology – and the resolution to begin developing lovingkindness – and how to do that

- On Isaac Bashevis Singer, flaw, hamartia and the comic: (367-370) (as found, eventually, in Jacket Magazine, #33, “The Dangerfield Conundrum: A Roundtable on Humor in Poetry”)
- On a method of mental cultivation known as Metta Bhavana (the cultivation of lovingkindness) (371-376, 387-389)
- Last trip: advice for Clio (somewhat Polonius-like, pp 396-401);
End of main part: bottom 263-264
406-436: Appendix. Meditation on facing pain, Sitting Bull, genocidal foundations of current affective habits inherent to America, Lakota especially, the Buffalo, etc etc & the serious anger and denial subtending this landscape & its inhabitants

------------------------------------------------------------

Poetry, wrote Diderot

at the beginnings of what would come to be “our time,”
must have something in it that is barbaric, vast, & wild.
It is some such wildness & vastness (multiplied several times over) that marks Gabriel Gudding’s unexpurgated & ever-more-inclusive Notebook. In writing or recording it, he creates an ultimate on-the-road poem, ranging between the personal & political, the familial (familiar) & the transcendent (transformal), while never stopping to apologize or to correct. Seen in that light & its attendant darkness, Rhode Island Notebook is a modern/postmodern epic as a poem-including-everything. An incredibly human/humane book at bottom, it is also Gudding’s road of excess, as Blake once had it, leading him (& us) to the palace of wisdom.

-- Jerome Rothenberg

This is a remarkably vulnerable book, a dapple-drawn vortex sutra, a contemporary odyssey, an anti-Baudrillardic-bardic remapping of America. It is a meditation on loss and fecundity, an amazing read, a necessary read, by an amazing poet. It documents travel-stubble and it brings America home like nothing else I've read. Literally written on the road, everything skitters and opens to an elsewhere. What might have been an experiment in conceptual writing has emerged into an exhilaration that makes me glad I'm still alive, in the midst of critique and highways. This is the first 21st-century classic.

- Alan Sondheim