Ross gay delight
Air Date: Week of March 8,
Ross Gay’s The Guide of (More) Delights highlights the bliss one can locate in everyday being and in the natural world. (Photo: Courtesy of Ross Gay and Algonquin Books)
Poet and essayist Ross Gay is back with a follow up to his Book of Delights, loaded with moments of fine that sprout amid our troubles. He joins Host Steve Curwood to distribute readings from his new Book of (More) Delights celebrating simple joys such as clothes on a clothesline, garlic sprouting, and dandelion abundance.
Transcript
BELTRAN: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Paloma Beltran.
CURWOOD: And I’m Steve Curwood.
Living on this soil can be a challenge these days. Plenty of crises from the climate to geopolitics can make you experience blue. But poet and essayist Ross Gay keeps creating antidotes to brighten you up. A few years ago he compiled The Book of Delights, loaded with moments of good that sprout amid our troubles. And now after the pandemic he’s back with The Book of (More) Delights with even more scrumptious moments to savor on our complicated planet. H
The Brevity Blog
by Vivian Wagner
One cool, April day, seven years almost to the day after my father’s suicide, I sat outside a coffee shop reading Ross Gay’s The Manual of Delights. As cherry blossom petals fell around me and onto the pages of the novel, I came across this passage in one of its essays, “‘Joy Is Such a Human Madness’”
It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I gain to know—everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything—lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always of everything.
The essay ends with the plan that maybe, by joining our wildernesses of sorrow, we can find something like joy:
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a thoughtful of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?
Not for the first time in reading The Book of Delights, I found myself crying. A
Excerpt
From “Scat”
The first period I saw The Exorcist I was nine years old. My mom, flipping through the TV Guide, saw that it was coming on HBO, and she wanted to spot it because my dad, a very reasonable human, asked her to clutch off when it first came out. She was pregnant with my brother and people watching the movie were having miscarriages and heart attacks in the theater, both of which used to be evidence of a nice movie. In twenty minutes or so, when minuscule Linda Blair disrupts the socialite party by peeing on the rug in her white nightgown, I was very frightened, and I asked my mother if we might see Falcon Crest instead. It’s a rerun, she said. Just go to bed if you don’t desire to watch it.
(Friends, I am here going to leap a boundary I shouldn’t, like some of your childless ex-friends before me, to tell you how to raise your children. My brother’s and my bedroom was, maybe, twenty feet from this television. It was maybe three or four seconds by foot away. But my imagination was immense. By which I express to tell you
The Book of Delights Quotes
“I suppose I could spend occasion theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The signal is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost continual, if subtle, caretaking. Holding unseal doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”
&#; Ross Lgbtq+, The Book of Delights: Essays
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“It didn’t take me distant to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the growth of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
&#; Ross