Louis Bury is an associate professor in the English department at Hostos Community College. He’s also an art critic, writer and poet. His first creative nonfiction book, Exercises in Criticism, was an experiment in applied poetics where he used what are known as constraint-based methods in order to write about constraint-based literature. In this episode we talk about his most recent book, The Way Things Go, (punctum books, 2023). It’s another work of creative nonfiction, also using constraint writing, and is comprised of multiple forms such as numbered lines of prose, poetry, data, dialogue, news headlines, and a couple of specific CUNY documents that will be familiar to many listeners. The book’s title, and to a large degree its subject matter, is inspired by the 1987 Fischli and Weiss film “The Way Things Go.” It is mostly quite personal, and includes intimate philosophical reflections, letters to and from Lou’s sister, Emily, and even an MRI report. At the root of all of it is a meditation on human vulnerability, of the physical, emotional and existential variety, and an overriding theme of climate change. That precarity is reflected in a grappling with daily human existence as well as the larger forces that threaten the survival of the planet. Despite the previous couple of sentences, this conversation is upbeat, and I hope you’ll find it just as inspiring as I did.
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