BRIDGE BOOKS: “Antithesis” by Nat Baldwin
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“Antithesis” by Nat Baldwin
In Antithesis, musician and writer Nat Baldwin presents a polyphonic self-portrait of a creative life across disciplines, blurring the boundaries between language and sound. The collage-like narrative unfolds in a loose chronology of statements of fact about music, books, people, circumstances and myriad other topics of personal significance. Each chapter spirals around distinct affinities, guided by shared questions and concerns. As threads of intertextual activity emerge and overlap, the prose vibrates and hums, allowing a sonic world to link to the unconscious. The careful curation of references and assorted details accumulates into an indirect representation of self akin to an exoskeleton in text. While ghosts of an unspeakable grief also haunt the work, the act of its making reveals a new time being conjured, offering a living archive of the composition process itself and a map to a possible future.
“I never thought writing ‘the story that most spends me’ would be such a joy, but I already miss the process of following the unpredictable paths of these pages. Lucky for them, this collection of memories, actions, and events is no longer subject to my obsessive attention and is now moving on to live new lives through encounters with others, interacting with a network of experiences and conditions through which I am connected but also entirely separate, making meaning far beyond my control. I’m so grateful to anyone taking the time to bring such a life into existence, and to Bridge Books for creating that opportunity.” —Nat Baldwin
Nat Baldwin’s mesmerizing Antithesis is not quite a treatise on music and art and education, not quite a reading log filled with the best books of the last century, not quite an anti-narrative a la the noveau roman scribes Robbe-Grillet and later David Markson, nouveau with upended expectations and erasures and lists and interesting factoids. Rather it is all of that and more. This book is a symphony with dazzling, definitive movements, a collage made of water and blood, and above all a search for beauty and belonging and ultimately an illustration of blazing one’s own path in a world dominated by the routine and mundane.
–Robert Lopez, author of The Best People
Antithesis is a captivating meditation on what it means to make and consume art. While reading I felt the boundaries of genre dissolve into a fluid, effervescent slush of beauty taken in, and beauty dolled out. I saw myself in this book not only because I am, literally, a named character within it, but because I saw the obsessiveness of my own writing and reading life in these pages. It’s a true portrait of what it feels like to be a hopelessly addicted reader. This is a book about how we make ourselves, and how the art we consume lives inside of us. In Antithesis Baldwin’s mind appears as a body encased in permeable mesh where music, basketball and books seep in and out and mix and coalesce.
–Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot
Nat Baldwin is a writer attuned to the resonant, droning field of the page. Herein, the voice splits. Times overlay and hum together. Events become enharmonic tones. The story we read making possible the story taking place below the story, one we can only sense in the sounding, but is simultaneous and synchronized. Part anti-memoir, part shared history of experimental music and experimental literature, Baldwin’s Antithesis resounds. It completely mesmerized me.
–Danielle Vogel, author of A Library of Light
Cover art: In process detail from Michael Workman, Moloch I, 6’ x 9’ oil on canvas, 2019. Volume design by Michael Workman Studio.
