Matt Briggs
When I was a baby in the early seventies, my father used to rock me for hours in his rocking chair. Once, while drinking his second forty ounces of malt liquor he puked on me, and I jumped down from the chair and ran into the kitchen. “Mom, Dad spilt on me.” I don’t remember […]
An essay in eight parts. My Father and the Genre of Silence Isaac Babel the Master of the Genre of Silence My Father What is Silence? What is Genre? Quick Rhetoric of Photographs Barthes The Woods
Part 1 of The Genre of Silence, an essay. My father died in 2011 and left behind him a rebuilt red Chevy Super Impala convertible 1968, a couple of houses, and about a half dozen shoeboxes full of several thousand photographs of the Central Cascade mountains. I hadn’t spoken with my father for five years […]
Part 2 of The Genre of Silence, an essay. Isaac Babel, a Jewish and Russian short story writer, was one of the greatest naturalists who ever lived. His book The Red Cavalry and Other Stories along with James Joyce’s Dubliners–two early 20th century short story collections–are definitive statements of the naturalistic short story that has […]
Part 3 of The Genre of Silence, an essay. My father drove a bus. Growing up he had been a night cook at the place where Westlake Mall now stands called the Copper Kitchen. It was a Seattle dinner with the theme of copper implements. My dad wore a white double breasted chef’s coat and […]
Part 4 of The Genre of Silence, an essay. It is understood that you are not to make noise in the library. The movies tell us to silence our cell phones and not to talk. Silence is not nothing; silence is the absence of communication. Silence is the number zero of genres. To understand a […]
Part 5 of The Genre of Silence, an essay. A genre is a set of conventions. A convention is, by its nature, subjective and something that is agreed upon. What we consider genres are patterns that have been calibrated. We know that a poem does certain things. A poem is poetic. But is prose poetic? […]
Part 7 of The Genre of Silence, an essay. Roland Barthes wrote one of the essential books on the significance of photographs: The Camera Lucida, which provides some simple and yet useful concepts for understanding not just how a photograph talks to us, but how we hear this communication, and finally the trickier relationship of […]
Part 8 of The Genre of Silence, an essay. If the creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us . . . we would never doubt that we were in another world. — John Muir No one was able to capture the moment when my father pin-wheeled and died. That instance was […]
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