Brooklyn Rail Applauds Szymaszek's Journal of Ugly Sites

Stacy Szymaszek's Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals is a book about the self, Chris Campanioni writes in this Brooklyn Rail web exclusive. The notebook, a rigorous catalog of the ugly, the beautiful, the ordinary, becomes a complex portrait of the narrator. Nothing is unsightly or "too beautiful for the ugly journal," she writes. Campanioni attests to this in his assessment: "Transit generates constant arrivals, and Szymaszek’s astute quips of the quotidian which might have been boring or facile in another context, are instead imbued with the gravitas of drama, heightened by the very fact of their brief mention and fast passing." Moving with the text:

The polarization of highs and lows mirrors our hyperpolarized cultural worldview and meticulously curated lens—which she, of course, includes too, in the form of trending topics on Twitter: ("swallowed by hippo / 3 bodies found on farm / 105 year old bacon woman / gold medalist dead //") or what's playing on the television at the gym ("pelvic mesh recall / Christian Mingle/Obama and the gays //"). She scrolls across the page with careful distance and deliberation, a constancy that remains unbroken, as Szymaszek writes in "Late Spring Journal," "'no news is good news’/as a policy/doesn't work for me." Readers, too, experience the vertiginous sensation of simultaneously reading a historical document and knowing this is happening right now. Documentation is also an integral component of the text, especially its grounding in a New York City that is relentlessly changing. To receive a memento of what it was like in 2013 to be here, amid a HopStopped, cupcake-frenzied Manhattan is to also engrave your name in the sidewalk and claim your experience of witness: what's lost or abandoned, what's already left us—and what stays. Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals, as it follows an arc made tragic by the deaths of two beloved animals, becomes a project of endurance, a project for enduring. Every entry is a fragment that abandons punctuation and embraces the gerund where she is constantly moving, the euphoria and self-surprise of relating one's life in the present tense. Szymaszek's continuous use of the gerund is an especially appropriate grammatical turn because of its linguistic origins, from the Late Latin gerundium, from Latin gerundus, meaning to bear, carry on—and she is doing both, through commentary and investigation.

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