[Aaron Kunin, Grace Period: Notebooks 1998-2007 (Letter Machine Editions, 2013)]
A concern that I have been, of late, overusing the word aphoristic has left me reluctant to cleanly describe this book. But I do not similarly find that I have been overusing the word resentment, and so I feel free to state here that the primary mood of this book is one of resentment. Grace Period is a smart, squat, unloving book styled as a sequential compilation of notebooks, with each notebook, in turn, styled as a sequential compilation of numbered thoughts or half-thoughts. Many of these thoughts and half-thoughts are appealingly wild, generative, and entirely depopulated; when people do appear, the I and then the you, the you has often assumed an intemperate posture: “To pretend not to know something that I’ve told you is an insult. / It is an insult to go on ignoring it after I’ve given you permission not to ignore it.”
I paid particular attention to the movement of people across the pages as I read Grace Period, having recently heard a novelist recounting the story of his book’s title, which involved him proposing a title that prioritized the interaction of objects, and his publisher responding that he needed to change the title so that it referred instead to human relationships. So that it would sell. He and I were standing on a ramp at the time of this conversation; I was in the low spot.
Resentment may be professional as well as personal. A fair amount of Grace Period is dedicated to weird snapshots of undesirable moments in academic life (and please here don’t say ha ha are there any other kind): “Being smart is only a job for them; they don’t take it home,” or “The profession pretends to value both originality and conformity, both of which it calls professional,” or “She asked if I had gone gay, and I was too embarrassed to explain my belief that academics should be celibate.” Is this imagined dialogue for some future piece of fiction? Imagined dialogue for some present peace of mind? Kunin writes, “He often picked up the phone and spoke a tentative greeting into it, as though he suspected that it was trying to ring. Or suppressing a ring—someone was trying to reach him.” I have heard that the exercise of describing oneself in the third person is popular in self-help communities as a means to spiritual fulfillment, or, failing that, to momentary calm. Another such suggested exercise is to ask oneself: where in your body are you?
Really, I sometimes can’t feel myself inside of time. Because this journaling project covers the year 2001, I had the thought that it might reveal Aaron Kunin’s reaction to 9/11, but then I thought, of course there is no 9/11 in this book that is divorced from the time in which it is written. But actually there is, in the 2001 section, this litany of possible reactions: “Now they’re all going to forget about me,” and “No one’s going to buy my book,” and “Rotten luck,” and “Too bad his book had to come out immediately before a terrorist attack,” and “This is really going to hurt sales of my book.” All these are followed, a page later, by the standalone sentiment, “So sad, but not nearly as sad as everything else.” 9/11? Or?
In the end, the book is largely funny: “An allergic reaction to people in cat costumes,” and “It was not a long-distance relationship; it was just a distance relationship,” and mostly “I hope everything that happens to you happens for a reason. (curse).” The book is also forlorn: “Something lacking in his saliva—it did not activate the glue on a stamp.” The point of maximum emotion is statement #62 in the May-August 2003 section: “I don’t want to see any movie in which this, or this, or this happens to a woman” (quote marks in original). If you would like to imagine a world in which the primary form of identification for bureaucratic purposes is not a driver’s license, but a library card, it is too late for that—Aaron Kunin has already gotten there.