Possibilities & Absolutes: A Review of Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks
by J. A. Tyler
Evan Lavender-Smith keeps notebooks. Old notebooks. And in these old notebooks he writes snippets: movie plots, story ideas, funny things his wife or children said, potential inventions, et cetera. Evan Lavender-Smith writes these snippets in these old notebooks and, somewhere down the line, decides that he has a dozen or so old notebooks lying around and, instead of just chucking them in a storage box or, worse yet, the garbage bin, he compiles them into a single document, culls and cuts until it is a book-sized endeavor.
There are, within these possibilities, a string of other possibilities.
And like a vulture, as I read, I wait, hoping to pin down a victim, or better yet, gleefully happen upon one’s carcass.
Absolute #1:
This is a review that contains vultures, fortune cookies, and words about Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks.
Possibility #2:
Evan Lavender-Smith keeps notebooks. Old notebooks. And in these old notebooks he writes little things: movie plots, story ideas, funny things his wife or children say, grammarian quotes, et cetera. Evan Lavender-Smith writes these things in these old notebooks and, somewhere down the line, decides that a book could be based on this, could be written as if it was the culled and cut scenes from dozens of these kinds of old notebooks, all pulled together into a book-length endeavor.
Here is a book that is a fortune cookie. We know there is a message inside of our Chinese dinner dessert, and we have a feeling it will be a mostly vague and generic message, something we can easily digest and connect with. But there is a fleeting moment in all of us, when that frame bursts in our fingers, and we think the message might actually be something more than that.
Absolute #2:
Evan Lavender-Smith’s Blazevox title is called From Old Notebooks.
Absolute #3:
Inside of every fortune cookie, there is a note.
Possibility #3:
I am reading Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks and hoping that it is a book of fiction and not a culled and cut-together string of statements made honestly from old notebooks. I want this because Lavender-Smith’s book is, if fictionalized and created, if structured to look genuine but in fact earnestly planned, it is a genius enterprise. There is an arc within the lines, there is a story in each of the related bits: We learn more about his family with each continued moment, we follow the ideas of a writer and how the craft works, we learn something more about being human, about existing.
Consider these excerpts:
“How as a child I once felt that everyone but me was an automaton. –As I sometimes feel still, except for that but me.”
“By waving my hands before my face I affect physical processes of unfathomable complexity. –As I do when thinking of nothing at all.”
“Death is the glue that holds the book together.”
“It can be a terrible feeling to suddenly remember that the sun is a star”
These are just some of the possibilities.
Vultures wait for meat. Sometimes reviewers wait for books as meat. I am typically, as a reviewer, waiting for the taste of goodness, the delicious, rather than simply a hunk of flesh to tear apart in my beak.
Absolute #4: In this metaphor, From Old Notebooks is the meat and I am the vulture.
There is a possibility that I have found a new kind of appetite.
Possibility #4:
I have opened a fortune cookie and what is inside is a message that means the world to me, a message that lights me on fire, a message that tackles me from behind and pushes my face into the earth, waking me up.
Inside some books are hands that reach out and grab us, pulling our eyes to their bodice.
Absolute #5:
Some books are terrible.
Absolute #6:
Some books are tremendous.
Possibility #5:
I have opened a book that is a fortune cookie and what is inside are a chain of simple phrases, ideas, moments of thought, and together they have made me think harder and squint my eyes into the air and furrow my reader’s brow.
Absolute #7:
These are more excerpts from Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks:
“At every moment life suffers the light of innumerable surrounding stars.”
“Not writing my way out of death, writing my death out of my way.”
“In a universe of infinite time, we experience an infinite number of afterlives. In a universe of finite time, we experience none.”
“From Old Notebooks might contain a number of false endings.”
Fortune cookies have messages in them. Books have message in them. We break the sweet shell of both to read their words. We digest both.
Absolute #8:
I truly enjoyed and highly recommend Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks.
Absolute #9:
I do not know how Evan Lavender-Smith wrote From Old Notebooks, though the possibilities are clear.
Possibility #6:
You may buy this book and agree.
Possibility #7:
You may buy this book and disagree.
Possibility #8:
You may not buy this book.
This is not a Chinese dinner, so there is no fortune cookie here. This is no book either – this is a review. And I am no vulture, though sometimes I perch as one, above a desert of pages, seeking blood or monumental tastes. Today I have not found a carcass, but a thriving animal, a beast of a book, one that I must let go, that I must release back into the world, so that it may run where others can watch its hide shimmer in the possibilities.
Absolute #10:
This is the last sentence of this review.
J. A. Tyler is the author six novel(la)s including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (scrambler books, 2009) and the forthcoming A MAN OF GLASS & ALL THE WAYS WE HAVE FAILED (fugue state press, 2011). He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press. To read more, visit: www.mudlusciouspress.com
