Episode 605: Caryl Pagel - Out Of Nowhere Into Nothing
b'Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional; the ghosts\\u2014literal and figurative\\u2014that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel\\u2019s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Pagel\\u2019s essays explores each enigma or encounter (a football coach\\u2019s faked death, the faces of women walking, historical accounts of hallucinations, a city\\u2019s public celebration gone wrong) as an intellectual detective ascending a labyrinthine tower of clues in pursuit of a solution to an unreachable problem: always curious, and with a sense of profound wonder.
Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a sprawling, highly associative consideration of the ways in which the observed material world recalls us to larger narrative and aesthetic truths. Interspersed with documentary-style photographs, Pagel\\u2019s first collection of prose is a radiant, obsessive investigation into the mysteries at the center of our seemingly mundane lives.'