Pathetic Literature

by Eileen Myles

An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming unpublished writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic”

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their bold and bracing introduction to Pathetic Literature, an exuberant collection of pieces ranging from poetry to drama to prose to something in between, all of which explore those so-called “pathetic” or sensitive feelings around which lives are built and revolutions are incited.

Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their reinvention of “pathetic” formed the bedrock for this anthology, which includes a breathtaking 105 contributors, encompassing titans of global literature like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, queer icons and revolutionaries like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as the invigorating newness and excitement of writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Creative nonfiction by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poetry by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, all joined by prose from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others. The result is a matchless anthology that is as much an ongoing dialogue as an essential compendium of queer, revolutionary, joyful, and always moving literature.

From confrontations with suffering, embarrassment, and disquiet, to the comforts and consolations of finding one’s familiar double in a poem, Pathetic Literature is a swarming taxonomy of ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies, Short Stories, Fiction, Essays, LGBT, Books About Books

672 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2022

About the author

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eileen Myles sets out to reclaim the concept of the “pathetic” presenting a collection of pieces from a wide array of writers whose work stirs the senses, sometimes angry, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal and visceral. These are narratives of fucking and death and loss and love and war. They also share what Myles calls, “…an orientation to crafts, to feeling, to the handmade and diaristic” often queer, frequently transgressive or fiercely political or all three. It’s an eclectic gathering, Myles admits that a lot of their selection process was rooted in what they like or admire. Myles frames their anthology with an introductory essay and an afterword, brimming with their usual outspoken, occasionally controversial, perspectives on life, identity, writing and art.

A number of the entries were already familiar to me: J. R. Ackerley’s eccentric account of live with his dog Tulip; extracts from Brandon Shimoda’s excellent The Grave on the Wall; episodes from Gwendolyn Brooks’s haunting Maud Martha. There are snippets here from the legendary performance artist Bob Flanagan’s pain diary; and Jack Halberstam’s fierce takedown of Knausgård and his arrogant, emphatically white, disturbingly heteronormative, literary persona. Alongside memoir, essay and prose there are a number of poems from Alice Notley to James Schuyler; and activist writings from people like Tongo Eisen-Martin. It’s an anthology, so obviously there were pieces that worked better for me than others, and there were jarring moments sparked by unexpected juxtapositions – a chapter from Tristram Shandy follows the macabre, killing scenes from the opening of Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s Children in Reindeer Woods Kafka and Robert Walser find themselves mingling with Dodie Bellamy, Maggie Nelson, Can Xue and Kevin Killian. It’s a great book to dip in and out of, I think reading it through from cover to cover might be a little too painful or downbeat an experience, and it’s also an excellent source for discovering or revisiting a range of outstanding, thought-provoking work.

Thanks to Edelweiss Plus and publisher Grove Books, New York for an ARC

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve collected whoever’s in here for their dedication to a moment that bends, not in a “gay” way but you know how when you’re walking towards the horizon it seemingly dips. And you feel something. That’s pathetic. It’s an empathetic thing. The light shifts and biologically we turn too. People get different.

Eileen Myles, who compiled the 100+ entries in Pathetic Literature, is an award-winning poet and has taught a graduate seminar on “Pathetic Literature” at UCSD; I humbly and happily acknowledge them as the expert on this topic. Filled with poems, essays, excerpts from novels and other musings, I took my time with this collection — reading a couple here and there in between other books — and I have to admit that that was partly because not everything here worked for me; some entries I found downright tedious; many I found exceptional. I grant that, as the expert on the topic, Myles has collected the works that they have found “frothy”, but I suspect that — if the metric is “writing that makes you feel something” — I might collect something different; this has the feel of a subjective anthology, and it didn’t always work for me personally. I can’t give a four star “I love it” rating (my own subjective opinion), but I am not sorry to having picked this up and been exposed to such a compelling range of thought. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

From the first entry, I felt provoked: This poem by Alice Notley (I believe a mentor of Myles’) is here in its entirety (and is the kind of thing that suggests that I will never truly understand poetry):

All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever wanted,
and still do.

So, while that left me scratching my head over what I was in store for, I was delightfully dipped and swerved by the second entry: the short work we’re the only colored people here by Gwendolyn Brooks, in which a Black couple chooses to attend a typically whites-only movie theatre in 1945 despite what the others might think of them, “She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.” I was completely empathetically engaged in that story, as well as, later, shaken up by If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes:

As long as I knew I was going to kill him, nothing could bother me. They could beat my head to a bloody pulp and kick my guts through my spine. But they couldn’t hurt me, no matter what they did. I had a peckerwood’s life in the palm of my hand and that made all the difference.

I was upset by Joe Proulx in An Obituary (wherein a man is trying to seduce another man while telling stories from his time as an American soldier in Iraq):

The children drowned to death in boiling water, their silhouettes frozen on the walls from the heat of the initial impact, their flesh and eyeballs stuck to the cement forever. My colleagues and I toured what were once some of the world’s leading hospitals, hospitals which had been transformed into hovels of hospice — not on accident, by collateral damage, or due to lack of national export, but by calculated efforts on the part of the Clinton administration, whose bombs were targeting public hospitals, sewage treatment plants, and water filtration systems — policy meant, in the words of Clinton’s secretary of Defense, to accelerate the effect of sanctions.

And I was absolutely delighted by Jack Halberstam’s hilarious takedown of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle:

Thank god I am a white man, I thought, and I don’t have to engage in the tiresome jockeying for position that marks the work of homosexuals and women. No, a white man can just sit down and write and he writes his way into the whole world! The fact that this “world” also comprises mostly other white men in no way invalidates the labor, the art, the craft, the sublimity of what we write. In fact, by building on each other and on the work that came before us, we can bypass the petty squabbles of the others and just dig into the important stuff — like whether to eat cornflakes or museli for breakfast, how best to appreciate pornography and what to do about the crazy women who pursue us.

I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be unsettled by The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan (and although I hadn’t heard of him before, what I eventually learned about his life and art certainly caused a dip in my horizon):

4/ 25/ 95 Letterman. Couch. Drugs. How we do drag on. Getting hard to breathe again. Thought I was doing much better. It never lasts. My mood has been better, though. And I’ve got a renewed interest in sex, mostly fantasizing about this alligator clip thing, and trying it out a little bit with a couple of clips here and there, those jagged little teeth biting into my tender spots as I grab hold of something like the bed rail and squeeze until the pain floats off a little, turns sweet almost, and then it’s time for another. It’s almost like eating hot chili peppers, except these taste buds are in my balls.

There were entries from well-known figures — from Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; entries from Borges, Kafka, Victor Hugo, and this poem from Rumi which did stir me:

Yesterday I went to him full of dismay.
He sat silently, not asking what was wrong.

I looked at him, waiting for him to ask,
“How were you yesterday without my luminous face?”

My friend instead was looking at the ground.
Meaning to say, Be like the ground, humble
and wordless.

I bowed and kissed the ground.
Meaning to say, I am like the ground, drunk
and amazed.

It’s hard to give a flavour of this collection overall — passages quoted are mostly things I liked, while some things I didn’t like went on for mind numbing pages and pages — but again, this is Myles’ project and presumably conforms to Myles’ tastes and I’m glad it exists.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

It’s taken me a month or more to get through this anthology of more than 100 works, which runs to 600+ pages. It works better as a ‘dip into it when the mood takes you’ rather than attempting to read it in its entirety at once.

It’s a plaintive collection containing diverse works by lesser-known, up-and-coming authors, and literary evergreens. Much of the compendium focuses on (gay) sex, and some pieces of poetry and prose are impenetrable and defy any attempt at interpretation. Laden with emotion and sentiment, the protagonists are often pitiable (unsurprising when one considers the title). I found it confronting, raw and abrasive at times, and at other times, poignant and heart-warming. More than anything, this collection embodies the diversity of life.

My thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Chaserrrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

A shaggy treasure trove overflowing w/bravery, fragility, nerve and vulnerability. Pathos on parade. Salivating for future volumes.

[Oliver Jarvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. This book changed me. I haven't wanted to finish it and have drawn out reading it for so long, like one of its stories on reading Moby Dick a page a day suggests, but, after a couple of years, I finished, allowing time to savour all the little gems in this treasure chest. I love Myles and their style of writing and I can see a lot of works in this anthology that speak in similar tongues to them (Myles). Myles summarises the book best themself in the PostScript:

"It's a dictionary really. I've been assembling this dictionary all my life I mean. I think everyone should be able to pick a word that moves them, and occupy it. Time does that over scores or hundreds of years, and many voices pour over it like the ocean, like something in so many hands that's how a word shifts. Can you build a word, collectively, assemble a word, like a small bird singing, its chest pushing in and out, flaunting its breath like a deity before it flies away. It's almost a poem”

In short, it's a wonderful collection of works with some kind of connection to the idea of "pathetic" and the words root in "pathos" -- to look for an emotional response in another. Isn't everything pathetic? Maybe not facism, as Myles said in an interview on the Apologies podcast, but isn't everything some kind of attempt to garner an emotional response in another? All my favourite things are pathetic, as Myles said, in the same interview. What's it like to live within a word, occupy space and breathe within it, expanding the cavity of definition? Read this book and find out. I loved it!

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles, is an extremely satisfying anthology both for the works included and for the thought-provoking introduction.

I can't say for sure that what I take to be pathetic literature is the same as what Myles expresses, even if it is their introduction that got me to think about it. My take (and don't hold any gross conceptual errors against them, any errors are all mine) is that we are going back to the root of pathetic, think pathos here. Appealing to emotions and stirring feelings as one source states it. But I think inclusion in the category goes beyond simply that. It is from these emotions and feelings that meaning comes. Rather than a purely rational expression (which isn't to say these are irrational) we are led to experience conflict, pain (physical, emotional, and spiritual), discomfort, and other feelings but through someone else's perspective, their eyes, their hearts, their fears, and their reality. Then we can hopefully make some meaning from it all.

Even setting aside trying to fully understand the definition of pathetic literature, this is a wonderful anthology, period. No, you likely won't be equally moved by every work, such is the nature of any collection. But you will read works from familiar writers and some you aren't likely aware of. You'll read excerpts from longer works, some you probably know, which, taken separately, can alter how they speak to you. And hopefully, through feeling and emotional connection, you will arrive at some new and/or modified meaning of the world around you.

In recommending this book I would include those who want to read it straight through as well as those who will use it as reading for when you have little time. I went through it rather quickly so I could share my thoughts, but it is the kind of book I would prefer to work through over several weeks or a couple of months. Read an entry or two, think about it, feel it, maybe look up things it might make me think about. Then either reread or move on to the next entry. Even any piece you don't care for, ask yourself why. Was it the voice? Was it truly an authorial voice or the racial/ethnic/gendered/etc voice that turned you off? And again, why? Discomfort? Dislike? Lack of knowledge? Feelings and emotions don't have to be separate, use them with your so-called rational mind to look closer at the work, our society, and yourself.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this whole tome. Eileen Myles I love you forever. Have been thinking about chapters from this anthology for days and days since. Best bday present ever

[Mark Dickey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really great, and I’ve never read an anthology before so it was a cool experience! Eileen Myles has great taste, I wish I have a better grasp of conceptualizing their effort to tie all these pieces together as “pathetic literature”. The introduction explaining the category is a bit vague, so when I finished some pieces I didn’t have an answer when I asked myself how exactly is this pathetic under Myles description. To learn more I listened to Eileen Myles on the podcast “Apology”, but the more they talked about “the pathetic” the more vague and abstracted it seems to me, adding further confusion. So anyways,,, but this was a really good challenging read and I look forward to pursing more authors because this book has provided a strong introduction to them.

[Brianna Kline-Costa-Chavez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Six hundred twenty two pages with a hundred different pieces from Borges to Kafka to Gwendolyn Brooks. An anthology is such a tricky thing to read cover to cover but I loved making myself totally reset and reorient every few pages entering a new piece. At least a third of the pieces I hated completely but I thought the way the whole thing was arranged was genius

[baruch]

cool stuff in here but myles does a poor job in their intro or afterword giving a sense of what defines pathetic literature and coheres the disparate pieces

[Gabe Steller · Rating 4 out of 5]

600 Pages (whew!) but i was convinced to read by the intro and Myles’ really cool attempt to re-claim the word Pathetic as not so negative but a more humanistic, existential state of finding yourself at the mercy of something. Of being overwhelmed by a feeling, of being compelled to do something when it has no hope of success, of something intruding, or slipping out, where it “it wasn’t supposed to be”... and then applying that concept to 1000 years of literature!
(If this idea intrigues you I also wrote about it a bit more on my substack https://substack.com/home/post/p-1783...)

We got Gwendolyn Brooks, Kafka, a Japanese handmaiden in the 900’s, Violette Leduc, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Rumi, Samuel Delaney, Chris Kraus on and on!

I found so many amazing amazing writers…and also a lot of so so ones (especially the poetry much as I would’ve liked to be able to hang with that stuff)

I love the idealism(if thats the right word) of anthologies , but they are ultimately always flawed, and somehow less forgivabley flawed than a novel haha (even though thats unfair!) Wish I’d given myself a bit more permission to skip stuff that wasn’t interesting to me since i really started to slow down at page 400 or so but c’est la vie

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

At nearly 700 pages and multitudes of authors, the inimitable Eileen Myles has curated a volume of what they call 'Pathetic Literature'. I admit that, despite their lengthy and engrossing forward, I'm not certain what is pathetic about the essays, novel and memoir excerpts, short stories, and poems include in this volume. Most of the authors are queer and much of the writing is definitive of the New York School of poetry. Story after poem, each piece presents its writer's own mastery.

There is something for everyone, and it would be impossible to single out every exceptional piece. This is a book to be savored, authors to discover, favorite authors who present unpublished work, and authors whose work is translated from other languages.

[Matilda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to pace myself with this one a lil more than I did. but I really couldn't help myself and even while reflecting on one piece I was already engrossed and connecting it and disconnecting it to the next. eileen myles has done such an intriguing job of raising the "pathetic." I kept going back to the lengthy introduction when I wasn't sure how something quite fit. was so excited to see how some poems and pieces I've read before sit in this anthology and how their order made me re-evaluate the feelings they evoked for me. even that Rumi piece that I've found myself going back to and going back to. been really loving the queer lit this year and this does such a good job of weaving it into to the queer-ish non-queer. loved it and might just have to buy.

[Pop Bop · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying collection. A few of the selections had some nicely crafted lines, a few well-conceived set pieces, a fair share of perceptive and insightful observations, and some lean dialogue. That said, many pieces could neither arouse nor hold my curiosity or attention. As a consequence, it doesn't seem fair to write much more of a review, apart from encouraging inquisitive readers to give the book a try.

[Kelsey Weekman]

Oh no. I'm sorry. This is too long. Way too long. I am fascinated in this concept and I enjoyed a good portion of it but I'm gonna have to keep putting it down and picking it up for all of eternity because it's not really a book you rush through. It's a book you read one story from every few months when you remember you have it. And hey, I didn't dislike it. I'm just not super compelled to finish it. DNF.

[KYE Intimates]

If des pair books was religious its God would be Eileen Myles and its bible, Pathetic Literature. Through their writing about sorrow, love, loss, and hope, the 106 contributors in Myles' anthology perfectly capture what it means to be alive, and it's pathetic.

Shared by Addison Richey, founder at des pair books for 'Table Talk', KYE Intimates.

[Yanna Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this on the side, over the course of a few months. It definitely was comforting to me- and I love the idea and reinvention of pathetic-ness. I can really appreciate this piece of work, and love Eileen Myles forever!

[Thomas Rasmussen · Rating 2 out of 5]

An extremely difficult book to finish.

I mean, I love Eileen Myles. And I love pathetic literature. But the collection reads like 200 pieces from as many jigsaw puzzles.

It’s not that everything has to fit like a streamlined toaster… but pure whimsy is just confusing.

[Mic Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will be reading this at least once a year, my pathetic contribution. Absolutely adore this anthology.

[Rachel Rava · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dictionary for the heart. Just, wow.

[Hetian bias · Rating 5 out of 5]

bestie

[Saffron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just excellent.

[Shruthika]

gonna be real i did not like most of these but i appreciate it nonetheless for the gems i did find and a little window into everything else

[Jonas Hirt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judy Grahn is simply masterful! An amazing anthology 🍀

[Jerry Muzsik · Rating 5 out of 5]

READ THIS BOOK SLOWLY BUT SURELY

[Natalie · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNFd may return in time