I don’t much like the John Olson who is the subject of the new “Creative Bio-Autobiography” The Nothing That Is. The book details a few days in the life of Olson as he tools around Seattle and travels to Missoula to do a poetry reading at an art gallery. He is a bitter man, privileged and obsessed with how everything used to be better, and his sense of hyperbole has exploded to epidemic proportions. He says, for instance, “Microsoft changed everything. What Katrina did to New Orleans, Microsoft did to Seattle: kicked the soul right out of it.”
Olson loathes his upstairs neighbors for the simple fact that they walk around above his head, and he constructs a list of petty grievances about them that he checks and rechecks with the fastidiousness of a mortally aggrieved party; they, after all, are interrupting John Olson’s Precious Writing Time. Sometimes he hates with the dull ache of the stereotypical self-satisfied Seattle liberal: SUVs, George W. Bush, and conspicuous consumption are on Olson’s shit list, but not for any original or interesting reason.
This is a very different John Olson than the one you’ve read before, the brilliant, occasionally frustrating poet (and Stranger Genius Award winner for literature) who is known and loved by absolutely everyone in Seattle’s diverse (and often soap-operatic) poetry community. On reading The Nothing That Is, the reader is led to wonder: Has Olson been hiding a boorish dolt inside of himself all this time?
And then you realize: The Nothing That Is is a dense journal of those baseline, almost subconscious thoughts that everyone hosts, buzzing, at the lizard-skinned base of their brains as they walk down the street and go about their days. It’s the self that wonders, petulantly, when it will be fed even as it listens to a friend pour her heart out about a recent, traumatic miscarriage. The next meal, the next fuck, the next shit is the most important thing in the universe to this part of the brain.
This is a private self that you never want to reveal to the world, a petty, nasty monster, and Olson allows it to hold court for 157 pages. It’s an act of literary bravery on his part, and a worthwhile one. Olson knows that this slavering beast is the keeper of the fountain of genius, and parts of The Nothing That Is shine with the kind of inspired genius that can only bubble up from somewhere dark. “Words are coins,” he writes in a burst of sudden wisdom. “Loose change. Each coin has an obverse and a reverse side.” Brains are like that, too.
It seems a bit hyperbolic to call the persona projected in John Olson’s THE NOTHING THAT IS “monstrous.” Instead, as the reviewer himself admits, the book offers a “brave” and “worthwhile” self-portrait of a “brilliant” (as the reviewer calls him) poet, in a myriad of moods ranging from bad to mad to appreciative, positive, and hopeful about being alive. If spleen predominates, that is because the book, written in second person, honestly portrays the struggle of a poetic spirit in an anti-poetic society. Here is a passage that captures the tone of the book for me: “The universe is made of morning, you tell yourself. It is always in a state of creation. It is never static. This includes you. Youth is a stuff that does not endure said Mr. William Shakespeare. And that is true. But it is also true that there is a tarantula inside all of us, a wild anarchic spirit, nervous blossoms of mercury, imponderable moments of meaning consummate as trout and tinctured with the candy of gender.”
I agree with Mr. Joron. Constant seems to have missed the literary merit of Mr. Olson’s book. The taking of personae by an artist to address his time is the basis of a vast body of literature. What would Mr. Constant do if faced with the likes of Henri Michaux, Charles Baudelaire, Comte de Lautreamont? I would also like to add that as John Olson’s wife I can assure you that Mr. Olson is in no way “privileged”.
For the reviewer to call John Olson “bitter … and obsessed with how everything used to be better,” is to expose his own narcoleptic complacent dumbing downness amid a storm of gadgetry. As an Olson reader, I feel it more appropriate to praise his courageous and poignant assessments of a culture that is clearly and seriously in decline. Artists are the guardians of the Human, and by attempting to salvage and direct us toward our Humaness, Olson is not being “nasty,” but loving and caring.
I read THE NOTHING THAT IS and found it engaging, brilliant, gorgeous, and a fascinating and gripping read. It absorbed me completely. I actually loved it. I loved the language. I loved the grumpiness, which is humorous and accurate. It’s nicey-nice that is boring me to death at this moment. I loved the wit. I loved the criticism of people who have not a single book in their condo. All of it carried by John Olson’s tremendous ear, his passion for language, his deep and abiding love of words and sounds.
Well. That was an operatic kerfluffle. Glad that’s over with.
@1-4 Once you calm down, you should really read the second half of the review.
“I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value. However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.” –Mark Twain