Rachel Newcombe
Harry Dodge’s Meteorite Whacked Me in the Head: Or Why I Love Dodge’s New Book
Disclaimer: Not even a smidgen of objectivity in this review.
A notice from the Seattle Public Library shows up in my Gmail. I am instructed to go to my online holds. Finally, my turn to download the audio version of My Meteorite: Or Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing. Harry Dodge’s new memoir or as Wayne Koestenbaum describes it, “. . . a brilliant autobiographical manifesto that takes the accidents of death and birth and remixes them into a whirlwind unlike any book I can remember reading.”
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I listen to Dodge read his book which means I get to have him in my ears. Fastest way to stir my unconscious. Seems fitting given he is a multidisciplinary artist who speaks of voices real and artificial, experiences carnal and poetically unknowable.
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Sheltering in place on an island in the Pacific Northwest, unable to travel to Seattle or New York City I feel both contained yet free with Harry Dodge. He speaks of our need to create patterns and to look for order in chaos. How and why simultaneity unfolds within randomness are themes running throughout My Meteorite. Dodge’s stories are an invitation to the reader to consider these themes too.
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Harry Dodge weaves tales. Twenty-one chapters threaded with different colors and textures held together in non-chronological order. The order of Dodge’s psyche. The reader becomes a participant not a voyeur. Dodge braids theorists and artists, sexualities and parenthood, adoption, and uncertainty. Spending time with the author feels intimate, his voice commanding and sensual bringing us into his ponderings. We encounter Dodge’s world that includes Roland Barthes, George Bataille, R. D. Laing, Amy Sillman, Carrie Brownstein, Lynn Tillman, Eve Sedgwick, and Wayne Koestenbaum. Just to name a few. We meet his children Lenny and Iggy and his wife Maggie Nelson. We also meet his birth mom, his father and a niece named Reality. In every story told there are people to meet, museums to visit, and events that feel like they are unfolding in the present.
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Chapter 19 is my favorite. Not only does Dodge wonder, “Are human bodies simply soft machines running algorithms?” He also describes a cosmic sexual encounter, language luxuriating with a primal cadence, “We were drubbed by lust (miasmic seemed to be aromatic, honeyed); this in waves which comingled our subjectivities, bested us.”
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The experience of reading or listening to My Meteorite is one of giving yourself over to Harry Dodge’s artistic world, his unconscious process. Searching for an arbitrary ending right now, all I can think about is the expansiveness of desire. I want to enter the book again. Randomly.
MY METEORITE
Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing
By Harry Dodge
321 pp. Penguin Books. Paper, $18.