NICK FLYNN

Scituate native returns with a bomb

By RACHAEL E. KATZ

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Whether The Ticking is the Bomb is the ticking or the bomb, it's the bomb; but I guess it is the ticking as well, which makes it the bomb, and vice versa, via the transitive property.

I first encountered Nick Flynn's work with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City a couple of years ago when I was taking a writing workshop and we were given an assignment based on it. We were told to make a collage poem in which we took phrases out of Flynn's book and rearranged them to make our own piece. During that time, I couldn't get his voice out of my head. Now, his new memoir brings that feeling back. I carry it around the house with me.

The book has extreme momentum. "It doesn't feel like a chronological narrative," Flynn said when he spoke to me, "it feels more like a ball of energy." Everything is building toward this: His daughter is about to be born. He is preparing himself to show her what this world is, but he's haunted by what it actually looks like right now. Understandably, he is driven by the hope of bringing her into a world free of episodic terror and indignity. And so he has made a scrapbook of all of these moments in his memory, both private and shared. Nick Flynn has a crystal ball, and the guy can see everything. The Ticking is the Bomb is about the power of sight, after all.

Written as a series of living snapshots, it is also inspired by images. He writes as if stepping into the photographs of the detainees at Abu Ghraib, his baby's ultrasound, picture books, impish dreams, volcanoes and his mother. Flynn roots out hypocrisy and ugliness by acknowledging them gently, cathartically. This way, he unlocks the world by way of self-discovery. It seems he is determined to do that very important parenting thing, which is really a very important human thing: exemplify his own values. Chief among them, I imagine, is clarity of perception.

I asked Flynn how he felt about writing a memoir. "It has this inherent tension to it," he said, "that something happened, and it's an imaginative act to try and wrestle with that, but you're wrestling with something real." He said he knew journalist colleagues who were writing about the same things he was, but he had to pay tribute in his own way. With not so much whimsy as visionary anxiety, Flynn binds himself to quotidian loss around the world.

In the end, what we are left with in The Ticking is the Bomb is a man behind a camera, constantly adjusting its aperture, its shutter speed ravenous for scenery, compulsively digesting truth.

NICK FLYNN
READS FROM
THE TICKING IS THE BOMB
WITH MUSIC FROM ERIC MARTIN
AND DREW O'DOHERTY (7PM)
AND BILL JANOVITZ, CHRIS COLBOURN
AND FRANC GRAHAM (9:30PM)
CAFE 939
939 BOYLSTON ST.,
BACK BAY
BOSTON
617.747.8600
7PM & 9:30PM/ALL AGES/$5
CAFE939.COM
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