Tillie Olsen: Yonnondio

The book itself is a fragment and named for a short poem of the same name in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge,

Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,

To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;

Yonnondio—I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine,
with plains and mountains dark,

I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,

As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the
twilight,

(Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls!

No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)

Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn'd they disappear;

To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms, factories fade;

A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the
air for a moment,

Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

But if anything, Tillie Olsen is a far more powerful writer than Whitman. her language is artful, even impressionistic at times. Apropos of recent news in the U.S.; She describes a meat processing floor on a hot summer day in the 1930s.

"The stench is vomit-making as never before. the fat and plucks, the bladders and kidneys and bungs and guts gone soft and spongy in the heat, perversely resist being trimmed, separated, deslimed; demand closer concentration than ever, extra speed. A hysterical , helpless laughter starts up. Indeed they are in hell; indeed they are the damned."

It's a similar setting described by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, or The Disinherited by Jack Conroy... but better than both. It's a shame that she has a lower profile these other working-class writers.Instead she's often cast as a Jewish writer, or a Feminist writer and of course she can be all three, but her bibliography is slim. Her first book Tell Me A Riddle published in 1961 was a collection of short stories, and Yonnondio was published in 1974 from a manuscript started in 1932. Her membership in the Communist party may have impeded her career. Her next book Silences wasn't until 1978.

Russell Working: Terrain

I don't often quote literary magazines but this was a nice chunk of word craft. In the Spring 2018 issue of Crazyhorse, a publication of the College of Charleston, is an article by Russell Working titled "Terrain." Like the best essays it's about multiple things, but Working uses his own deafness as a device to discuss a few topics: Hemingway, Insomnia, WWI injuries, Beethoven, Evelyn Waugh, and Slovenian tourism to name a few. It included a few very vivid descriptions of tinnitus. 

"It is a misconception that the deaf and hard-of-hearing dwell in Trappist silences. Day and night I hear the rumble and scram of tinnitus. The phantom sounds are caused by damaged nerves in the inner ear: a devil's philharmonic of buzzes, hums, brays, shrills, cicada chirrs, television static, leaf-blower roars, and shrieks like a factory full of motorized grindstones sharpening knives."

Mr. Working of course actually suffers from tinnitus, insomnia, Slovenian tourism and news writing. Only someone with that particular array of afflictions could possibly have written something so visceral. It makes me interested to read some of his short fiction.