Neck Deep and Other Predicaments

This is an Uber-Cool collection of essays! Ander knows it, I know it, now you should find out what you're missing, too! This book makes me fall in love with my home state- I'm an already obsessed Michigan native... god, what a great state this is! and now it is summer, whoohoo!- and makes me wanna crow from the top of a mountain... or the roof of my car while in motion and I'm surfing on it. Ander knows what a strange place Michigan is to live, in particularly the Upper Peninsula. You'll hear all he has to say on the subject. You'll find out what a circuitry-crook he is, too. He's toodling with unseen and unspoken things here. Day to day experiences, as seen in this book, are often metaphors for life and countless other things. He's aware of what a big state, country, planet, universe this is. I dig that. It blows my mind like the stage lights at the Phish shows I used to go to. I'm a particular fan of these essays: "Outline towards a theory of mine versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline", "Cranbrook Schools" and "Subject to Wave Action". As a writer myself, this book has made me realize that there are no limitations in form, that the obnoxiously white page can be a vehicle for design. Maybe someday when I am a better writer I can dismiss my naive ideas of traditional form and create something spectacular, but till that day... Good stuff. Peace.

When I read the first two essays I was very confused. But the Cranbrook essay was great. I coudn't put it down. I suggest this book to people who aren't afraid of something different.

First, a disclaimer: I think that it would be almost impossible for me to dislike Ander Monson. The author of last year's excellent Other Electricities and Vacationland, Monson's only a few years older than me, he's from my home state of Michigan, and he has the uncanny ability to render literary many of the places of my youth (especially those I lived in when visiting my mother's family in the Upper Penninsula). He also shares a variety of obsessions with me, from his fear of dentists and tooth decay, his appreciation for technology, and even his more scholarly musings about form, a subject I've only just begun to explore in my own work but am beginning to find limitless in it's possibilities. That said, it's also hard not to like a guy who uses the Questions page on the Neck Deep website to put forth the self-deprecating question, "Monson kind of seems like a douchebag, don't you think?" Luckily, I didn't have to worry too hard about going into Neck Deep and Other Predicaments biased, because after reading the book I know I would have liked it either way. The winner of Graywolf Press's 2006 Nonfiction Prize, Neck Deep contains twelve essays about subjects as wide-ranging as disc golf, mining in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, car washes, snow, juvenile criminal activity, the end of telegram service, and classic video games. At the same time, each of the essays is also about form, an idea reflected both in the varied forms the text is written in and during explicit discussion of it in several of the essays. Monson frames his topics and writings in terms of topology, which he defines as "about electricity or water or anything that flows equally throughout a form, that moves through channels." It is with the creation of forms and channels that he controls his subjects, giving him an angle to consider them from while at the same time changing them slightly. Applying the Harvard outline to an essay about mining in the Upper Peninsula and his family's involvement in the industry (in "Outline Toward a Theory of the Mine Versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline") might seem gimmicky at first, but actually allows Monson to organize and rank the information he's providing. Digressions slip to the right of the page, indented into the essay, while main points and emotional stand outs anchor the left side of the page, gathering the smaller details beneath them. It also provides an interesting way to read the essay, taking in as little or as much information as possible: Try reading only the main ideas (I, II, etc.), then read it again adding in the concrete details, then the smaller subsections. Reading this way lets the essay grow and shrink in a way that illuminates Monson's thoughts and thought process in a way a traditional essay might not. Other essays use form to illuminate their subjects, or to obscure them. In "I Have Been Thinking About Snow," the page is filled with rows of periods which both simulate the essay's snow and also serves to o