Nada Gordon on Dana Ward's The Squeakquel

Nada Gordon writes admiringly of Dana Ward's Song Cave chap duo The Squeakquel on her blog this week, and in relation to her recent traveling:

... I have been wanting for weeks to write about: Dana Ward's twin chapbooks, The Squeakquel, pts. 1 and 2, recently out from The Song Cave. He writes in part 1 that

...I never had much of a feeling for 'things'. On Easter Sunday last year I was visiting New York & David & Sara were there from San Francisco. After lunch we got onto the subjct of the object (haha), & I admitted to David I never spent a whole lot of time on the topic, & how, with respect to Walter Benjamin (& Proust) this often made me feel insufficiently bathed in melancholia & thus somewhat detached from the haunted modernity I loved as emotional color & theory but never appreciated as viscera. David, a curl of mild shock in his voice, said, "You don't think of our lives as it's lived amid things?!."

Two points. No... three points, really:

1) David and Sara's apartment is filled with things. Books, mainly. Hundreds of books in piles. I don't remember a whole lot of other things, but the books are there with a kind of radiant, possibly sinister, seductive energy, because that is what books are: radiant and sinister and seductive.

2) Dana goes on in these chapbooks to sort of disprove this statement and notice mindfully that in fact he is as intertwined with objects as anyone, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding: "I was so happy to get the scarf back I can barely tell you how happy I was! It provided me not only with a feeling of narrative completeness but also it perpetuated the seditious upending of my own bland coolness toward objects..." (pt. 2) Plus I remember the time before last when I saw him he was wearing these amazing blue suede boots; no one who was truly indifferent toward objects could choose and wear such footwear.

3) I'm in love with his "prose style." "A curl of mild shock in his voice" is just the right amount of mannered and inventive, and it's just exactly right.

Ward's book is sold out, but surely borrowable.