The final night of the tour, before a modest crowd, I sat in a folding chair at Ravenna Third Place books in Seattle. One of my closest friends, Chris Robinson, had just returned to the Northwest from Ireland, and I had asked him to introduce me. I knew he would get carried away writing his introduction, and that he would treat the delivery of it like the performance of a fiction. Like me, Chris refuses to separate theory from story, criticism from narrative; it’s all part of the show. And the summation of my work that he presented a week and a half ago serves, in my opinion, as the perfect conclusion to my journey — a journey which I feel some nights as if I imagined. Though I intend to write at length about my experience, I’d like to leave all of you who’ve followed the Zero Emission Book Tour with this:
“Hominem nihil scire, nihil sine doctrina, non fari, no ingredi, no vesci, breviterque non aliud naturae sponte quam flere!”
So Pliny the Elder writes in his Naturalis Historiae: “Man alone knows nothing save by education — neither how to speak, nor how to walk, nor what to eat; in short, the only thing he can do by natural instinct is to weep!”
This idea reaches its logical absurdity in Beckett, where we learn not to expect characters to know how to speak, walk, or what to eat, where even the most innocuous circumstance can rightfully engender weeping. Est queadam fiere voluptas.
Of course, Beckett is a great influence on Kaelan, though his inheritance is not so easy to discern; it is a purloined letter, hiding in plain sight. I speak of his penchant for the theoretical beginning and his tenacity to follow a theory to its conclusion, no matter how crazy or painful it becomes.
In fact, the lot of you are about to bear witness to the conclusion of one such audacious, brilliant, and idiotic idea (the Zero Emission Book Tour). I say that as a good friend, which, in theory, we are. I say in theory because our relationship has always been theoretical. We used to play racquetball every Saturday morning in Boston, and on our twenty-minute walks to and from the gym, we would discuss literature inchoate: I would tell James about an epic poem I was scaffolding, and he would explain the philosophical underpinnings of a new story: a group of kids leave the city and abandon technology. Regress vs. Progress. Language as technology. That sounds retarded and luminous. I’d say, write it. And he would. Of course, we never read each other’s work. That would’ve collapsed the theoretical relationship into something real.
It was thus with trepidation that I began reading Kaelan’s new book. I already knew the ideas behind many of the stories, and they were solid, in theory. But what if they sucked in execution? Could we still be friends? What the hell would I say at this introduction? Fortunately, though he has a penchant for the theoretical, he is a master at devolving. He thinks his way into feeling. “I find that I’ve grown tired of thinking,” he says near the end of We’re Getting On, and so reaches a place of honest sentiment. That is a real achievement, for all too often such idea-driven literature fails to properly defibrillate the heart.
None of this comes easy. Kaelan is one of the hardest working writers I know. Not only that but he is ludicrously original, both in his writing and in his approach to 21st century publishing. And in that he lives up to Beckett who would certainly call his book a failure, but an astonishing failure. And Kaelan will only continue to fail better. In fact, the only failure worth condemning would be your failure to buy this book.
Sunday, August 8th, 4pm @ Powell’s Books in Portland (
They still have a bit of a stretch to get to Portland and are trying to fill their down-time with tomfoolery.
More soon. Thanks for staying tuned in!