When I have a new book out I find myself compelled to continuously re-read it because just being aware that others are reading it changes it for me and I need to try to account for that. Then before too long I get sick of the book and can only see what’s wrong with it and that drives me to write another one to compensate. (Which is convenient, because a person needs to have something to do.)
So I’d been doing that, absorbing my book What Just Happened (2023). First, it contains about 70 pages of poems from pandemic lockdown, then there are another 70 pages, divided about in half between an essay from 2019 called “Falling Asleep” and a 33-page section of 88 numbered entries from recent years’ notebooks. The essay contends that the operation of reality most resembles the state between wakefulness and sleeping, like a communicating coma, dead man walking, which could also describe the condition of the entire human race, most inescapably in our apocalyptic time.
One of the books I was also reading as I kept obsessively returning to my own was Joy Williams’s novel Harrow (2021). Its setting is post-apocalyptic—climate change, pollution, death of species, collapse of societies—and it is quite grim, if also funny and intimate and super alive. In it, towards the end (ahem), there are running references to the five-page Kafka tale or incident or parable, “The Hunter Gracchus” (and its briefer companion, “The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment”). After coming across a third or fourth reference to the story in her book, I went looking and found the text.
