Event Recap: Nick Flynn Reads from The Ticking is the Bomb

Nick Flynn packed Powell’s last night for a reading from his new book, The Ticking is the Bomb, a memoir about becoming a father for the first time while immersed in the stories of Abu Ghraib detainees.

Flynn traveled to Istanbul in 2007 to hear the testimony of Iraqi prisoners who were tortured by American military personnel in the Baghdad prison.  This book, like his last one, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, is written in brief sections that hang together like poems, koans, or songs.  (Flynn called his selection of pieces a “playlist,” and laughed that he’s been following Patti Smith’s reading tour for weeks.   “She’s playing for free.  How do you compete for that?  Patti Smith playing for free at a reading?”)

Flynn read widely, touching on his worries about parenthood; his fears about love, intimacy, and death; and his attempts to grapple with the testimonies of the tortured men.  In retrospect he realizes he expected the detainees to be defined by their trauma, made two-dimensional by their experiences.  Instead he found them to be by turns funny, angry, sober, and thoughtful — essentially, individuals who have weathered the storm in individual ways.  He shared conversations, meals, cigarettes with the men.  In one section he talks with Amir, a detainee who asks if Flynn has children.  When Flynn says his daughter will be born in a few months, Amir looks at him with a new expression, “as if I’ve just come into focus.”

The photos from Abu Ghraib hit the American media just as Flynn reached the age his mother had been when she committed suicide.  There was a particular feeling of import, he says, to reaching that year — the one past which there was no parental model, only “white space” on the map. At the same time, he was attending infant CPR classes, learning how to perform two-finger chest compressions should the worst occur.  A student of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Thanh (“I’m not a Buddhist, but I like Buddhists,”) Flynn strips emotion and commentary from his spare paragraphs, but allows a few themes to surface and resurface.  He reveals the fragility of the human body, its susceptibility to damage, the sheer brink of disaster on which we all perch and somehow — miraculously — mostly — avoid.

On the Bush administration’s official statement that the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees was not torture, and not in violation of the Geneva Convention — that it was, essentially, legal — Flynn had this to say:  “I used to drive drunk a lot.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  I had to get home from the bar, you know?  And it’s like if we were to say, ‘We drive drunk a lot, so let’s make it legal.’  It’s like we took our darkest impulses and made them legal.”

Last night was the last date on Flynn’s three-week reading tour, but you can find the book at local bookstores.  Flynn’s fans should keep an eye out for a movie of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which is rumored to be scheduled soon.