moonlight ambulette

i have a new hobby.

2009-04-03T07:50:00.005-04:00

Hello, dear internet friends and blogging associates. In case you hadn't guessed, posting here at the Ambulette will be intermittent, even more so than usual, if at all.

Because I mean, really.

Look at this.

life lessons

2009-03-21T09:57:00.005-04:00

I've been rereading this lovely old collection of Swedish fairy tales I have (translated by Irma Kaplan in 1953, illustrated by Carol Calder), and you know, there are some valuable lessons to be learned from these stories. I will share some here.

1. Should you happen to meet an ugly old troll in the woods, greet her as "dear mother." She will probably appreciate the kindness and most likely help you out in some way later on when you least expect it. I know, I know -- it seems unlikely. But you'd be surprised.

2. If someone gives you a seemingly baffling gift like a golden apple or a magic dagger, go ahead and hang on to it.

3. If someone says "I will do _____ for you if you just promise to kill the next living thing you see," don't agree. Chances are, the next living thing you see will be your own offspring or spouse. Even if you don't expect it. Trust me.

4. Befriend woodland creatures as often as possible.

5. If you meet a nice-seeming spouse candidate but there is some weird condition like you can't ever look at his face or she appears to be a mouse or something, don't sweat it. They're probably just temporarily enchanted, and you might even be rewarded for your open-mindedness.

the waiting pool

2009-03-13T11:08:00.006-04:00

It's a funny kind of thing, this waiting. I could have a baby tomorrow; it could be in four weeks. And once again I ask myself: What kind of system is this? Like, don't even cows know when they're about to give birth? I hope there is a suggestion box at the end of this whole pregnancy project. I've got some things to say.

When really, I ought to just appreciate this time, that I have this time to be not working (thank you, economy) and instead resting and working on the new novel (as I eke ever closer to having a complete draft!) and swimming and daydreaming. I feel as though I should be both prepared and alert and ready at all times and also that I should keep myself distracted.

Here are some of the week's best distractions, in case anyone else is in need of such a thing.

1) Sara Barron! A dear old friend of mine (Apple Tree Theatre Travelling Troupe, hello!) has had her book come out this week -- a collection of personal essays that is bound to make you laugh out loud. If you want to read bawdy and irreverent stories about dating, celebrities, and being a hilarious person in general, and I think you do, I highly recommend buying her book and/or coming to her book release party on Monday. I kind of wish I hadn't just read the book so I could read it again for the first time and snortingly laugh into my tea.

2) Italo Calvino's "The Daughters of the Moon" from the February 23rd New Yorker. What a weird and great story! The moon is old and busted, and so people decide to throw it away. "The moon seemed lost. Having abandoned the course of its orbit, it no longer knew where to go; it let itself be transported like a dry leaf." Young women disrobe and hitch rides to the trash heap, where the moon is deposited among all the other unwanted detritus of the city. I suddenly remember how much I love reading Calvino.

3) Walt & Skeezix, once again. I happily read one of these great, gorgeous Drawn & Quarterly collections of the old Gasoline Alley strips a while back, only to discover I had 2 (2!) more waiting patiently for me on my bookshelf when I was perusing it a few nights back for something that might capture my skittish interest. (This, after putting down several novels in a row. My mushy brain seems to find many things objectionable these days. It's like all my patience has been diverted to other systems, and when reading there are any number of slight offenses that are suddenly unforgivable. Plus, since this summer I've become a book-abandoner! Before then I never would read 1/3 of a way through a book and then sling it aside. But now, well.) So anyway, the sketchy little drawings and soothingly boring stories of the Gasoline Alley gang, Walt and his foundling baby, and their occasional road trips are right up my, ahem, alley.

4) Cat Dancers! The lovely ladies in the video store we live above recommended this documentary about a trio of performers who train and "dance" with large cats...don't google it or read anything about it, since everything online is blithely pocked with spoilers, but totally rent it! I'm such a sucker for documentaries about weird little subcultures, and this one is, well, pretty satisfyingly weird.

Now, to work on the novel, and then to swim. It really is a dreamy kind of existence, when I remember to think of it that way.

another marvellous thing

2009-03-07T21:04:00.005-05:00

"For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance..."

I came across this story, "Another Marvellous Thing," by a writer named Laurie Colwin, in the anthology of New York stories I've been slowly making my way through. It's a strangely shaped story -- maybe it's an excerpt of something larger? -- but being a pregnancy and birth story of course it captured my attention. Colwin gets so many things so right, in particular the idea of the whole system seeming as ridiculous as it is amazing, and taking over your mind in this extremely persuasive way.

"She had a horror of the sentimental. In secret--for she would rather have died than show it--the thought of her own baby brought her to tears. Her dreams were full of infants. Babies appeared everywhere. The buses abounded with pregnant women. The whole process seemed to her one half miraculous and the other half preposterous. She looked around her on a crowded street and said to herself, 'Every single one of these people was born.'"

The thing that keeps striking me is how pregnancy and birth are such weird, miraculous, unlikely, crazy things, and yet essentially they're so utterly mundane. As this story ends, the new family "walked down the street just like everyone else."

I leave you with a picture of the city animal mobile we made for the visitor we're expecting shortly.

we don't do enough living

2009-02-26T22:15:00.004-05:00

I received an interesting email today in response to my little piece in Poets & Writers about how writers aren't really sloppy drunks anymore. It's funny, I think I thought I was saying in the piece that successful writers aren't drunks and/or eccentrics anymore, but tend to be really hard-working and on top of things. The writer of this engaging email seems to think I was equating being a drunk with being an eccentric, which I didn't really mean. That said, I think this thoughtful stranger makes some really interesting points. And also I just enjoyed getting the email. So I figured I'd share.

Dear Amy:

Reading your piece in the newest issue of Poets and Writers scratched my skin. I was slightly irritated by your delightful piece, and annoyed that you considered substance abuse eccentric. I’ve always considered it the norm. Every Estonian I have ever known drinks to their wits end. I’ve watched to-be elementary educators sniff cocaine off coffee tables out of boredom. And why is it that a person of Aboriginal descent slumming it on a street corner, moonshine in a paper bag, is called a drunk when a writer would otherwise be romanticized? Every man in my family has loved the tang of the brown bottle a little more than family – ah, genetics! And having learned a thing or two from history and how it repeats itself I decided to steer clear of addictions, not because I’m a busy writer employed by a slew of other indignities.

Sadly, your MFA experience is common. Contemporary writers (for the most part) are lost in the dismal glow of their computer screens, listening to the snapping of weak wrists melding with the clang of fingers on food stained keys. But that’s not to say that they are without eccentricities. The paradigm of what is considered ‘eccentric’ needs to shift. When I think of eccentric, I think of the Pierre Berton’s of the world who are out there, experiencing and living life – a message repeated like mantra in self-help books. We don’t do enough living, putting ourselves in unfamiliar places doing unfamiliar things, expanding our comfort zones. And in doing that, the eccentricities follow and the well of writing material deepens, simply by living, not by closet drinking.

Thank you for writing such a thought provoking article. A well-written piece that gets me fired up is always a pleasure.

All Best,
A--- G---

What is "eccentricity" anyway? And what is its value? I tend to like eccentrics who don't even know they are eccentrics, I know that much.

listen

2009-02-24T11:22:00.002-05:00

I keep meaning to post about this interesting story I read over the weekend in my New York City stories book. But today I have a few hours to dedicate to writing (um, real writing) so I think I'd better do that instead. (I suddenly got some freelance work, which is great, but which really interferes with my yoga-write-nap schedule I'd so quickly gotten used to.)

In the meantime, I think you might enjoy listening to Shelley Green sing some songs. We saw her play at Pianos on Sunday and she's excellent. The baby seems to enjoy her too.

revenge of the nerds

2009-02-21T09:50:00.004-05:00

I have a short essay in the current issue of Poets & Writers (that some writer friends/readers of this blog helped me out with -- hello and thanks!!) called "Revenge of the Nerds," about how writers are awfully well-behaved these days. I realize this is a somewhat dubious proposition -- there's always that wild child out there -- and any sweeping generalization is a bit silly of course. But the other writers I talked to seemed to know what I meant -- writers aren't tabloid fodder these days, no one's fist-fighting (unless someone wants to start something??), no one's boozing it up with models at chic hotspots. I mean, it occurs to me that this also has something to do, maybe, with the wide(ning?) gap between successful writers and critically acclaimed writers -- the writers people know about are not neccessarily the best writers (no offense, teenage vampire novel lady). What I mean to say is that I don't feel like there's some cohesive literati that the public cares anything about. This though made sense a second ago and now I'm not so sure. Well, anyway.

Of course I'm probably saying more about myself than anything else in this essay, and that's okay. I can accept that. Nearing the home stretch of this whole baby-making proposition only magnifies my nesty tendencies, but essentially (even in my normal state) the things I like to do -- and have to do, to keep from going bonkers -- involve a lot of quiet reading and writing and time at home with my husband listening to records and making art or whatever. (This has changed since I was child mostly just in the addition of the subtraction of a large gray cat and addition of the husband.)

And then there's the hustling: scrambling for freelance work, searching for teaching jobs. It's time-consuming, and you have to be on your game! I am so worldlessly, mind-numblingly thankful to be a writer, to have a book out in the world, to be working on another, which is all I've ever really wanted. But it's, for people like me anyway, a workmanlike proposition. It is daily work that must be attended to carefully. And I don't think I (a nerd, to be sure) would want it any other way.

smart money

2009-02-18T22:57:00.004-05:00

Isn't it funny when you find yourself reading something that seems a part of a certain dialogue you've just been carrying on in your head? This is I think my favorite thing about reading, when it happens. And thus I found myself on the train this morning -- heading to a little freelance job I have for the next few weeks, having just before getting this thing been lamenting the possibilities of ever making any money as a freelancer and as everyone seems to be these days thinking about money and how it all will ever work out -- reading the Philip Roth story "Smart Money."

It's probably shameful to admit I've never really read any Philip Roth, though I'm of course aware of his general deal. So anyway here I am reading this collection of short stories set in New York City (in preparation for a class I'm meant to teach in the summer about writing the city) and here is this Roth story about Nathan Zuckerman, flush with the sucess of his novel. It reads, at first, to me anyway, like some weird writer's wet dream (or nightmare), almost science-fictiony. Really? A novelist is recognized and gawked at and worshipped and harrassed by casual passersby? Really? He is that famous and known? What different times these must have been. Or maybe a different universe.

The strangers who confront Zuckerman seem on the whole to be far more interested in the money he's made (naturally) than his writing itself, though his novel seems to have been smutty enough that they are interested in the subject matter too. In a great scenelet, an old woman starts chasing him down the street and he is sure she is about to pull a gun from her purse and murder him. "'Don't' -- she was not young, and it was a struggle for her to catch her breath --"'don't let all that money change you, whoever you may be. Money never made anybody happy. Only He can do that.' And from her Luger-sized purse she removed a picture postcard of Jesus and pressed it into his hand." Eek! Even worse! Um, just kidding.

Things get interesting when he encounters a former quiz show champ who is an aspiring writer himself (and a persistent one at that). And... I haven't finished the story yet. Yes, somehow I am unable to finish even a short story in the span of a day. It's amazing.

I admit it's fun for me to be reading these right now and to remember all the good and exciting and mysterious and strange things about this city I sometimes take for granted (or forget exists, outside of my immediate neighborhood, the park, and the Y, sometimes...). Anyway. Any New York City stories or novel excerpts to recommend for my syllabus?

interview with patrick dewitt, author of ablutions: notes for a novel

2009-02-12T11:04:00.005-05:00

Hey, this is a very exciting day: there is something worthwhile on my blog!

A while back I wrote about a strange and excellent little volume called Help Yourself Help Yourself. Recently its author Patrick deWitt sent me a review copy of his dark, funny, heartbreaking new novel, Ablutions: Notes for a Novel. (It comes out next week -- preorder it now, fool!) And then I asked him some questions about it. And then he answered them. And here they are. Wait, but first I should say that this book is both a formal experiment and a compulsively readable story, a boozily intense nightmare and a so-funny-it-hurts redemption song -- which makes it sound simpler than it is. I was perpetually surprised by its crystalline points of humor and revelatory moments. You should pick it up even if it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd usually read -- especially if that's the case -- and be charmed by its copious charms. And then start getting excited, as I am, greedily, for what deWitt comes up with next. So now, without further ado, etc:

How and when did Ablutions start to germinate? When you started it, did you know the entire arc of it immediately, or was it a process of discovery?

It was during my fourth year at the bar I started thinking there might be a book in it, but I put it off for a long time because it wasn’t the freshest subject matter in the world and I was holding out for a less familiar point of entry. But when I found myself casting around for other things to write about, it nagged me. I gave it a shot and dropped right into it. I didn’t know the story line, and didn’t know if it would be a short story or novel, only that I was engaged in a way I’d never been with a piece of writing before. By the time the story wrote itself out, it was book length.

I love the scene where the narrator is washing his hands and hears a ghost’s voice asking him if he isn't through with his ablutions. Did you have this word in mind as the title the whole time you were writing? How did it happen?

I didn’t have it in mind, no, but there was a ghost in the bar and I used to have imaginary conversations with her, to humanize her, and to offset my fear of her. ‘We’ never discussed the word ablutions, though, and I can’t remember what inspired the scene. It’s proved a problematic title, actually - no one knows what it means, and no one can seem to remember it. One of my best friends just called and asked if there was any news about Abolitions. That would be about a dishwasher that frees slaves, maybe.

I almost don't want to ask this because it seems like such a boring question, but your official bio here says you worked as a bartender for six years...how much of the book, if any, was autobiographical? Did the percentage of autobiographicalness make it easier or more difficult to write? Do you really like Jameson? Or was that the "fiction" part?

I don’t know how wise it would be to break down the percentage of fact against fiction, but I’ll say that the protagonist’s general set up is something like mine was when I wrote the book, four or five years ago: I was a dishwasher struggling with my drinking, and was disturbed by the sum total of my life and wanted badly for things to change, but had no clue how to begin making the changes. I never felt an obligation to keep things true to life, though, and there’s a lot in the book that’s pure fiction. That said, I do like Jameson, and still drink it over other whiskies. I keep thinking they should send me a free case or ceremonial shaleighleigh or something. They’ll probably send a summons.

There is some pretty intense imagery in this book, like the scene with all the drugs and prostitutes. Has your mom read it? What did she say? What about your grandmother? My grandmother has trouble seeing so she had my book recorded by some place that records books on tape for the blind and I thought of your grandmother doing something similar and it seemed funny. Do you care what your mom and grandma think of the book? Should anyone care what their moms or grandmas think of their work? That ended up being a lot of questions. Feel free to ignore any or all of them.

My Mom and Dad read it in rough draft and were proud I’d seen it through, but they wouldn’t be very good parents if the book didn’t give them pause. It’s not that they were worried I’d scandalize the neighbors so much as the question of whether or not I was doing all right in my private life. You know, What is motivating our son to make something like this? Ultimately they’re happy I’m doing what I want to do, and compared to a few years ago I’m healthier. But they’ve both admitted it was hard for them to read.

My grandmothers are keen to see the book. I can only hope they never do, but they probably will, and I imagine they’ll be deeply offended and ashamed. What are you going to do, though? I’m sure there are perfectly good reasons for a writer to censor his or her work, but sparing a relative’s feelings can’t be one of them, not if you’re serious about what you’re doing.

What relationship, if any, do you see between this book and your earlier, very funny Help Yourself Help Yourself?

My feeling is that there are more differences than similarities between the two. I wasn’t doing very well when I wrote Ablutions, whereas Help Yourself Help Yourself was written after I’d quit the bar and was living quietly in Washington, and my drinking had tapered, and I was much happier on the whole. (HYHY, though coming out first, was written after Ablutions.) So the mindset and motivations were different, also the way I worked on them. I rewrote and polished Ablutions many times, while HYHY was written loosely, on weekends, with minimal or no rewrites. I guess the link between the two would be the humor, a kind of black-hole reportage. I’ve noticed people aren’t reacting to the humor of Ablutions the way they have with HYHY; it seems the bleakness of the novel is overshadowing the fact that its foundation or partial foundation is comedic. Or maybe it’s just not as funny as I think it is.

What books and authors and works of art inspire you in general, or inspired this book in particular?

There wasn’t any single person driving the work by force of influence, but after I’d finished I began wondering where the book fit, exactly. I thought of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, and also J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. But these comparisons don’t really stand up to scrutiny, and I’ve come to think of the book as not belonging in any one place, or beside any one author. A reviewer brought up Charles Bukowski, which perhaps is inevitable because of the alcohol angle and the fact that it takes place in L.A., but it strikes me as a pat, lazy comparison. I’m not complaining, exactly - god knows there are worse people to be compared to - I just don’t think it’s a match, stylistically.

In terms of writers I read and admire, there are so many, but a few of them are: Harry Mathews, Knut Hamsun, Robert Walser, Jean Rhys, William Gaddis, Charles Portis, Sheila Heti, Lynne Tillman, Dennis Cooper, Jesse Ball, Donald Barthelme, Malcolm Lowry, Steven Millhauser, Thomas Bernhard, James Schuyler’s novels, all the early John Hawkes stuff. And on and on.

What was the most difficult part of the process of this book from conception to publication—the first draft, the revision, finding an agent, landing a publishing contract? [I stole this from an interview I did about my book but I thought it was a good question.]

The writing itself was kind of a straight shot, but the ten years it took to get to that jumping-off point were pretty horrific. Finding an agent and a home for the book wasn’t easy, but had more to do with luck and hustling, so in comparison with learning to write (and of course I am still learning to write), these other things were something more like successful gambling.

What are you working on now? Also, very important (to me) subquestion -- how does having a small child affect your writing life? Emotionally I guess but mostly I'm interested in the logistics.

I just started this great new book about a dishwasher that frees slaves. No, I’m writing another novel, tentatively titled The Warm Job. It’s about two brothers hired to find and kill an inventor named Hermann Kermit Warm in gold rush-era San Francisco. It’s going to be like Louis L’Amour, only it won’t make sense. There’s a lot of minutia and neurosis and the occult in it. There’s an intermission. I’m going to push for a leather bound first edition, definitely. Also, I’m adapting some of my writing to screenplay for the director Azazel Jacobs.

As far as child-rearing paired with writing: It’s hard at first, and you probably won’t get anything done for several months or even a year, and you should just accept that from the outset and try not to feel frustrated or guilty about it, as much as that’s possible. Speaking personally, I’ve found that once the routine was ingrained and my sleep patterns returned to normal, I’ve written more and I think with marked improvement, in comparison to before my son was born. Time management is the key here. I used to throw away entire days bidding on esoteric eBay bullshit, but now if I’ve got two hours, I really make them count. It’s not easy though, and I can see how it might ruin art or writing for someone who wasn’t all in. My feeling, Amy, is that you’re going to be A-OK.

Aw, thanks, Patrick. And then look, he even made a preview for his book that perfectly captures its graphic-novel-ish sweet-sadness. Damn, he's good.

ABLUTIONS from Patrick deWitt on Vimeo.

a mission for monday

2009-02-09T10:32:00.003-05:00

I think that today's mission should be to think really really hard about something. For me, it will be this: I have a draft of this something, this novel or extended exercise or extremely bloated short story or whatever it is, it needs some hard thinking applied to it. What is it trying to say? What is the heart of it? I know it has this certain theme, but how can I articulate it? I think this will help me in revising. To me this is always the hardest part; I harbor equal amounts of awe and suspicion for those people who are able to say things like, "I'm writing a novel about the displacement of modern man." Getting what I'm actually writing about is usually, for me, the last step.

What about you?

mission accomplished (sort of)

2009-02-07T12:30:00.003-05:00

Well, it worked. I threw on my fur-trimmed robe and got down to brass tacks (what does that even mean?!) (Oh okay, I see. I'm using it totally wrong, looks like.) Back to tinkering with my Martha Gellhorn essay. A certain thoughtful reader pointed out that Gellhorn's letters to my grandmother (the whole subject of the essay, really) reveal so much more about Gellhorn than they do about my grandmother, which I knew on some level but which helped to hear, and now I am digging through again, trying to make some sense of it all. I don't know what will come of this essay or anyone will want to publish it, but for some reason I find it really interesting to work on.

I also finished reading the wonderful Travels With Myself and Another, which I highly recommend -- Gellhorn is funny and opinionated and cruel (Africans smell, Russians are ugly...she's so un-PC that it makes you cringe but then she also writes about herself in such unflattering terms that you almost forgive her) and her "horror journeys" are just the right kind of travel memoir to read when you're planning no travel of your own. She writes a lot (and so vividly) about escaping boredom, which to her is the worst fate imaginable. I feel the same way, maybe, though my cures for boredom are a bit more low-key than hers. More "getting a new book to read" and less "traveling by boat through the Caribbean during hurricane season." But, as she writes in the book's conclusion, like with pain everyone has a different threshold for boredom. Or maybe, as high school teacher of mine used to say, only boring people get bored.

who let the laze out?

2009-02-05T19:35:00.005-05:00

Now, why is this? I seem to recall something like this from grad school -- when I actually have time to be working on writing, I manage to find myself very busy...with other things. The cabinet under the sink HAD to be scrubbed clean yesterday. I mean, really, it did. And then there are yoga classes and lunch dates, and then I am suddenly curious to research cloth diapers (ugh, the curiosity was not long-lived), and then that quiche isn't going to make itself you know, and then obviously I must add some contacts on LinkedIn -- hey that's WORK! -- and then browse Craig's List for "gigs" and then I'm already forgiving myself for not working on any real writing (or, even worse, counting journal-writing, which sorry but does not count) and telling myself I can do it tomorrow. Ugh! It's disgusting. Over the holidays I had 10 days off and was a model of productivity, swimming and then writing every single day. Remember how good I used to be, writing every morning at 5 am before work? I have never had any patience for people who complain about their own unproductivity. And yet...here I am, distracted, pregnancy-brained, whatever it is. Time for another nap. Time for another dog walk.

So, enough! Here is tonight's assignment: finish revisions on a freelance project (before looking for new ones, duh, hello), and then read as much of Gellhorn's Travels With Myself and Another as possible. I am loving this book, but/and somehow feeling like I need to finish it before I go back to the essay I'm writing on her, which is not really true but is an unshakable feeling (excuse) nonetheless. Maybe I can even finish it tonight -- I don't have that much more to go and my husband is at a metal concert tonight. Really. Long story, but really.

Here is tomorrow's assignment: Work on the Martha Gellhorn essay. I have revision ideas from an astute reader, and perhaps I can whip it into good enough shape to send to more readers or something.

Here is next week's assignment: Write for at least 3 hours a day. That number has been plucked from nowhere. I have a draft of the novel that needs serious help. I have story ideas floating around. I have six and a half weeks until my due date and who knows when I will have this much time to myself, honestly, ever again! For the next....20 years or so? So, enough, honestly, with the lollygagging (though I won't have time for that either, so if lollygagging I must at least enjoy it).

Do you like how I am able to be strict with myself even when ordering myself to have more fun? It's bizarre.

Me, tomorrow:

okay okay

2009-02-04T10:12:00.003-05:00

I am posting here not because I particularly have anything to say but because I'm worried certain people will fly through the internet and wallop me if they have to look at that Benjamin Button picture anymore. Here, here's something nicer:

I have no excuse for not posting. I suddenly have nothing but time on my hands, since the magazine where I worked for the past two years folded last week. Oops! I've now been at two different publications for the ominous "everyone in the conference room now" email, the tearful editor making the announcement, the publisher's little speech. Also, this means I lost my job the same week 100,000 other Americans lost theirs. I'm really a part of something!

So, looks like I'm a freelancer now! Hey, anyone got any leads? Any projects they need written or webbed?

In the meantime, I'm about 7 weeks away from my due date, and all full of kicking, squirming baby. I can't say it's so terrible to have some time for prenatal yoga and swimming and napping and oh yeah working on the novel a bit. Maybe I will even finish this Martha Gellhorn travel memoir that yes I'm still reading. Or maybe it will be a lot more of the kind of reading I've been doing lately: childbirth books and the like. You haven't lived until you've read the passage in Ina May's Guide to Childbirth about the pregnant woman laboring in a field and coming across a pregnant horse and hugging it. I imagine my experience will be very similar to that.

(Did you just picture me getting tasered for trying to hug a cop's horse? I did!)

the curious case of the curious case of benjamin button

2009-01-18T12:39:00.005-05:00

Finally, after discussing the story version on Jacket Copy weeks and weeks ago, I've seen this little movie you may have heard of called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I'd been warned about this, but I still was taken aback at what an utterly faithless adaptation it is. All the film has in common with the story is that the main character is named Benjamin Button, and that he ages backwards. I suppose this answers my questions about how such a thin fable of a story could become a three-hour movie. And it's okay. It's like drinking soy milk. As long as you're not thinking it's going to taste like milk, it's pretty good. Just don't think this movie is going to taste anything like the story.

What strikes me most is how the entire tone of the thing has changed. The story is really funny and much more kind of mean-spirited and mocking than the film. Story-BB is born as a full-sized old man, who dresses like a child and tries to play childrens' games to please his father. Funny. Movie-BB is baby-sized, abandoned at birth, and raised in an old folk's home. Bittersweet. Story-BB marries a woman who likes "older men," who accuses him of "trying to be different" as he reverse-ages, and he eventually loses interest in her as she normally ages. Funny. Movie-BB has a star-crossed affair with a woman (played by Cate Blanchett -- is it me, or is she totally annoying? -- meant to be charismatic and irresistable but, ew, a "free-spirited dancer type") who he knows his whole life, meeting when he's an old child and she's a young child, and finally meeting up in the middle only to realize it still can never work...Bittersweet.

Of course the reason why this movie's getting such Oscar buzz is because of its bittersweetness, its melodrama, its big statements about life. Had a more faithful adpatation been made I think it would be a funny, surreal, slightly distant and cruel, Charlie Kaufman-esque affair that would not have made me weep like I admit this did. This Movie-BB is certainly more sympathetic than Story-BB, or maybe I just mean more loveable. The scenes of him as a child, looking like a tiny old man but acting like a 7-yr-old, are pretty darn cute.

I enjoyed the movie, really I did, despite the cheesy "time-markers," which always grate on me whether in a book or on screen (we are now watching The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show! Guess what year it is! Give me a break), and the equally cheesy "telling the story from the death bed" framing device. I think there's something weird about how much our culture (or maybe just our critics?) loves the Sweeping Story that Says Something About Life. Most of the time I think a small story interestingly told is just as satisfying. There's something very male about the worship of the epic, isn't there? Or maybe I read too much into it.

But I am glad I saw it, and I did enjoy weeping into my popcorn, and has someone already written a thesis about birth scenes in film? Because they should. I think.

travels with myself and another

2009-01-09T16:10:00.002-05:00

I'm really enjoying the Martha Gellhorn book I'm reading now -- her travel memoir, Travels With Myself and Another. This book is just the thing one wants to read about exotic travel. It provides a dose of excitement and vivid descriptions of far-flung scenery and people, but at the same time Gellhorn focuses on a few of what she calls "horror journeys." These trips gone horribly awry are unsentimentally recounted in her funny, dry voice, and are somehow just right for cold, dark weeknight reading. She makes fun of her own relentless wanderlust and tendency to get herself into pickles and the result is extremely engaging.

Take for example her 1941 trip to China with Ernest Hemingway: "On this super horror journey I wheedled an Unwilling Companion, hereinafter referred to as U.C., into going where he had no wish to go. He had not spent his formative years mooning on streetcar travels and stuffing his imagination with Fu Manchu and Somerset Maugham. He claimed to have had an uncle who was a medical missionary in China and took out his own appendix on horseback. He was also forced to contribute dimes from his allowance to convert the heathen Chinese. These facts seemed to have turned him against the Orient. I went on wheedling until he sighed gloomily and gave in. That was scandalous selfishness on my part, never repeated...It was all right to plunge oneself neck deep in the soup but not to drag anyone else in too."

The horrors begin on the boat ride over: "Trays crashed off our laps, bottles spilled; the ship proceeded with the motion of a dolphin, lovely in a dolphin and vile in a ship."

She's just really funny is what she is -- sometimes politically incorrect, and probably exaggerating for effect, but really funny. And the horrors recounted here are somehow a lot more enjoyable to read than the books about childbirth I have stacked up on my bedside table...now those are scary.

on reading down

2009-01-02T09:26:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year!

I, for one, rang in 2009 by sitting around and reading -- all. day. long. I figure with a baby on the way these sorts of days are numbered, and it felt very luxurious to be so lazy. Unfortunately I didn't spend the day reading anything even mildly worthwhile, despite my new stack of Martha Gellhorn books which sat on the shelf, fresh from the library. I read this book which I won't name, but which was a huge bestseller when it came out. My excuse was that I thought it might provide some good examples for a writing class I'm going to teach because of its subject matter, which was actually true. And then somehow I got hooked and read the whole thing!

Now here is a mystery to me -- how do you get hooked on a book that's not very good? I mean, this book doesn't have an interesting sentence in it. The author actually uses words like "random" in the very nondescriptive descriptions of things. What I love in fiction is compelling language, rich imagery, interesting characters, inventiveness...none of which were even remotely present. So why was I plowing through it like a zombie?!

Halfway through (taking a dinner break) I thought, well, it's all plot is what it is. Sometimes (and probably, judging by the bestseller list, for many readers) that's enough -- a plot. And there is something to be learned from this. In this book, I mused, there's a purely good heroine, a purely evil villian, the conflict between them. There is a romantic subplot about a a good but boring boyfriend, a handsome temptation. Plot. It's all about plot, and maybe it would serve me well to remember some of this.

Which is true, of course. But even the plot in this book falls flat -- the heroine is never anything but good, the villian is never anything but bad, the romantic subplots both fizzle into the background. No one changes over the course of the story. The heroine doesn't especially grow or develop. I kept waiting for the moment when we learn she has a little evil in her, or that the villian has a little good in her -- nope. Throughout the book characters and ideas are introduced for no particular reason, never to be mentioned again. The conclusion hinges on a side character we know very little and, for this reader anyway, care about less.

I usually operate this blog on a "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all" basis, but this is so contrary to my nature that here and there I guess a little snark must seep through. But really, I don't mean to belittle the author of this book, who has surely accomplished much and has a stellar writing career (which of course I'm jealous of) and needs no encouragement from a humble blogspot operation like this. In the abstract I think that any book that gets tons of people reading is a good thing. What I can't put my finger on is why I devoured this book in a day, cringing the whole time. I guess it was the same pleasure one gets from gossip magazines or those ridiculous countdown shows on VH1 or something -- gorging on too-sugary brain treats. You don't feel good afterwards, but somehow you just can't stop.

the curious case of benjamin button

2008-12-24T19:16:00.004-05:00

Merry Christmas Eve, you beautiful old internet!

Hey so I took part in a discussion of the F. Scott Fitzgerald story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" which is now being posted on the excellent LA Times blog Jacket Copy. Hiding out from the family celebration? Read along, why don't you? Many thanks to the excellent Carolyn for inviting me to take part, and to the other bloggers for posting such thought-provoking things. Now I can't wait to see the movie version, actually. Though it won't be tomorrow -- that's reserved for It's a Wonderful Life at the IFC theatre and then likely some frolicking through Central Park or something else appropriately Christmassy.

point of no return

2008-12-23T07:01:00.000-05:00

Well I just read a cheery little book to warm the heart this Christmas/Hanukkah week...Martha Gellhorn's novel Point of No Return (originally published as The Wine of Astonishment, a title she, rightfully I think, hated). Why did I expect her fiction to be not that great? I thought this book was wonderful. It concerns a Jewish American WWII soldier named Jacob Levy, and how, after visiting Dachau after Germany's surrender, he becomes completely unhinged. I'm sure Gellhorn would have hated the comparison to her loathed ex-husband, but I can't help noticing some Hemingwayish sentences in the unflinching, unsentimental narrative. (And excuse me, but a scene in which a disillusioned colonel "tipped his head back to drink. Here's to nothing, he thought, here's to what we all got, nothing, nothing, nothing." Um.) But I mean this in a good way. I don't know how else one could really write, I suppose, about the horrors of war, if not in a stripped-down and bare language like this. Or maybe I don't mean that but it certainly is effective.

The book weaves in and out of the perspectives of its many characters, often resting with Levy but also dipping into the minds of the other men in his regiment and the women they encounter and sometimes a passing stranger. This refracted POV is one I like anyway (as you know if you've read my book) but it seems especially apt for the story at hand -- this world in which everyone involved has retreated into fantasy worlds in order to survive, fantasy worlds which are never shared with even the people who closest to them. In the end it's about remembering how to hope which I know sounds hopelessly cheesy, but after the journey the book takes you on, you need a little something like this or you'd go as crazy as the poor soldiers and prisoners do. Some of the characters lapse into wartime cliche but I think this is an easy sin to forgive in this case. I recommend it, if you're feeling hearty.

This is the book she'd most recently published when she and my grandmother had their little correspondence. Gellhorn had been covering the war, and had seen Dachau like Jacob Levy does, and you can understand her lack of patience for invented drama on the homefront (which is the gist of her letters) -- how she may have felt, like the soliders in the book, that no one at home could ever understand the things they hadn't seen, much less appreciate all that had been done to protect their cozy little lives.

I'm becoming a little obsessed with Gellhorn now, I realize. But, as someone said to me recently, she hasn't really had her moment of resurgence yet and maybe it's coming.

eternal dream

2008-12-22T19:41:00.000-05:00

I actually read the New Yorker this week (well, last week's, anyway), and was fascinated yet again by the idea of Japanese cell phone novels. In the article, one of these young cell-phone novelists explains why she writes under a pen name and never lets her photograph be seen: "I don't want to bring unwanted attention on my family. And it's not just me--there's my husband's family to think of, given the things I'm writing. I don't want to inconvenience anyone. Revealing anything, whether it's fiction or truth, is embarrassing, don't you think?" Okay, I get that the content of these cell-phone novels is sort of racy (they sound intriguing and completely unreadable, from the article's descriptions), and that culturally things are very different there. Still, part of me wants to scream, "Writers and artists should inconvenience people! It's their job!" But I think I mean that in an abstract, thought-provoking way. Who knows how I would feel were my writing more autobiographical. And at the same time, she has a point -- revealing anything as a writer can be embarrassing, whether you realize what you're revealing or not.

Meanwhile, on the same page was nestled the only New Yorker cartoon that's ever made me chuckle out loud. Oh man. Good stuff.

Sigh.

blood effusion

2008-12-21T19:27:00.004-05:00

I finished The Age of Innocence last week and shew, what a book. I've totally had Wharton fever lately! Not to give anything away, but man are her endings gorgeously bleak. They just destroy me. And it occurs to me (again and again) how odd it is, the way the relatively simple story of a handful of people can overtake your mind and have you racing through a book, as if their story were your story, were the most important story in the world.

Of course it's not just that; of course she's saying Something, Something which she even sums up neatly towards the end, in case you had missed it...

"It was the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood': the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them."

I'm sad that the book is over, and have been considering watching the movie version of it in order to further bask in all that ill-fated glory. Will I just be annoyed and disappointed though? Hmm.

kentucky cave fish

2008-12-12T12:42:00.003-05:00

First day really devoted to getting back to the novel, after months of distractions (most recently, half-assed attempts at revising the first part of my draft, which is really sometimes just a form of procrastination, and then of course the Martha Gellhorn piece and assorted freelance projects), and it is not easy! Which explains why I've broken one of my cardinal rules and here I am, on the internet.

So, quickly: a wonderful thing from Age of Innocence, which I've been plowing through lately: "It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman's eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the woman who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What it, when he had bidden May Weeland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?"

Eh, marry her anyway. I'm sure it will all work out for the best.

!!!

Okay, enough of this. Back to work, me.

the writer's life (such that it is)

2008-12-08T18:45:00.001-05:00

So I recently read (and returned to the library just in the nick of time, phew) this biography of Martha Gellhorn, and was struck by how she made her life her art, in a way. I mean, the early years in Paris...the covering D Day by sneaking onto a hospital ship...the wild nights drinking with Hemingway and the locals in Cuba...living alone in Mexico and Africa and varied locales in between...etc, etc. There were lots of torrid love affairs (often with married men, a detail which seems to have bothered her not at all), many exciting travels, moments of real danger, and the writing of lots of journalism and novels fit somewhere in between all that. It makes for terrific reading.

Now I’ve started to read one of her novels. The Wine of Astonishment, later republished as Point of No Return, is the one she had just written when she was corresponding with my grandmother, which is the time of her life I’m writing about for this little essay thing I’ve been mulling over. It’s very Hemingway-esque in language and tough-guy-ness (sorry, Martha) but then it is about WWII soldiers so what else would it be, I suppose.

I’m one of those fiction writers whose interest is in imagining things, in putting myself in situations I’ve never encountered and exploring characters whose lives are unlike my own. So it was interesting to me that Gellhorn’s biographer pointed out how her fiction never strayed terribly far from her own experiences. Not that she’d been a solider in WWII of course, but she had covered the war quite closely — and the main character is, like, her, a half-Jew from St Louis. Luckily she had such a depth of fascinating experiences that this not-so-fictional-fiction-mode worked for her. This is how this works — either you have a really dramatic life you can write about, or you write quiet domestic stories about a life similar to your own. I don’t think it matters, either way. I’ve always found that as a reader I care most for fine and interesting language and insights and characters — subjects matter very little to me, really.

In a somehow related side note, this essay (what’s with me and essays lately!) I wrote last summer was just finally accepted for publication. It’s about “the writer’s life,” such that it is. My general thesis was that writers don’t seem to be such characters as they once were — drinking and carousing and raising hell in very public ways. Instead of the bar, we go to the gym. We tend to be more practical and career-oriented than, oh, say, Hemingway. Or Gellhorn, I suppose. Which maybe means that either fiction’s subjects are generally more domestic, or that more people are researching and imagining and really creating from scratch. (My reading habits are too strange and varied for me to be able to really generalize on the world of contemporary fiction.) I don’t think this is either a good thing or a bad thing, it just sort of is. I’m such a homebody that this new “writer’s life” suits me well — at home quietly reading — but in the end it does reveal something sort of sad about how little people care about writers. Anyway, the editor of my piece added an extremely terrific line about how the literary biographers of tomorrow, if there are any, will have exceedingly boring jobs. Which, thinking back to the excitements of the Gellhorn book, I realized was really, really true.

personal daze

2008-12-06T23:13:00.002-05:00

"Laars said that so far, this winter wasn't as bad as the winter before. It took a few seconds for them to realize he was talking about the temperature. They all agree, but it was based on the haziest of communal memories and a degree of tacit peer pressure. How many people really remembered what last winter was like? Winter was winter. Some days were colder than others. Some days were wet. Every winter had at least one blast of traffic-stopping snow, followed by a miserable stretch of slush and countless afternoons when you said I can't believe this wind. Inside the office it didn't make too much difference..."

This book, Personal Days, totally nails the particular weirdnesses of working in an office, how days blend into days, years blend into years. That weatherless timelessness. What a curious book to be reading this week, too, as the news is all so very dire -- recession, the publishing industry, joblessness, blah blah. Just like the people in the book, you can hate your job and still be so thankful for it.

I'm teaching a class in a few months about writing fiction about work, so I'm going to have to come up some better way to articulate this, but this book really really nails it, whatever the it I mean is. And it does, I think, what good fiction should -- gets reality down exactly, and then throws it for some subtly surreal loops. You're laughing and then all of the sudden you wonder if you should have been laughing.

"Winter really kicked in a few days later, snow up to here, thuggish winds. Laars said, This is like two winters ago. Winter, two winters, two years. Where does the time go? Where does the life go?"

a pregnant pause

2008-12-03T19:05:00.004-05:00

1) When I wrote my first novel, which is about, among other things, a surrogate mother, I had never been pregnant. But I always knew I wanted to be someday, and as I wrote I know I was if at times subconsciously considering what it means to be a mother, to make a family. To vastly simplify things, the surrogate, Susannah, learns that being able to be pregnant does not a mother make. The biological mother whose child Susannah carries, Kit, is brittle and defensive about having had her body fail her in this way, and tries to “feel expectant” even though she’s not. I thought of Kit as someone who’s been very successful (and in control) in all aspects of her life, only to reach this biological roadblock.

In writing about these characters, I would sometimes wonder in the back of my head if I too would have fertility struggles (maybe in some weird cosmic punishment!) and whether or not I would ever consider a surrogate. My instinct is that I would not, though I think that the urge to procreate is so strong that people don’t quite know how they will deal with this until it happens to them. That said, I was happy and relieved when I became pregnant without any trouble (uh, knock on wood -- so far that is -- gosh but I'm superstitious) -- I’d always known I wanted to have children.

2) A few months ago I visited a friend’s bookclub to talk to them about my book. There was a funny tangential conversation in which one of them admitted that she was afraid she would find herself unable to become pregnant when the time comes (these ladies were all in their twenties or early thirties) -- and another immediately chimed in, adding that she sometimes wished she would accidentally get pregnant since she didn’t see herself finding a suitable mate anytime soon.

Then someone asked an interesting question, the gist of which was: “In your novel, women are defined by their relationship with motherhood — whether or not they are able to procreate (Susannah and Kit) or how they relate to the children in their lives (Char and Dicey). What about other definitions of womanhood?”

It surprised me, as this was not how I’d ever thought of the book. (It's not exactly how I read or think about fiction either, I might add.) Part of it is that there aren’t all that many characters, and that only a very zoomed-in portion of their lives is being seen. I never set out to make any statements on modern womanhood or anything like that. And I think the men in the book find themselves defined in a similar way. I don’t think this is how I define people by any means, but the fact that the question came up seemed interesting.

3) Surrogacy pops up in the news again — in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine there was this story about one woman’s experience with surrogacy. As these stories go it’s not a particularly unusual one, but I did find it intriguing that the author (and biological mother), Alex Kuczynski, is also the author of the book Beauty Junkies: In Search of the Thinnest Thighs, Perkiest Breasts, Smoothest Faces, Whitest Teeth and Skinniest, Most Perfect Toes in America, and a self-confessed (former) "cosmetic surgery addict."

In conceiving (ha!) my book I was thinking of surrogacy as another one of those weird, mysterious, science-fiction-y things the human body is capable of, and cosmetic surgery seems like yet another strange application of biology, an odd testament to the elasticity of our bodies. Say what you will about Kuczynski, this is a woman whose physical being has benefited (or something?) from some of science’s weirder applications. In this New Yorker article Rebecca Mead writes, “Like certain strains of Christian mysticism, cosmetic surgery is founded on a notion of human perfectibility.” Maybe the idea of surrogacy — you can have your baby, even if your body says no -- comes from something similar? At any rate, Kuczynski’s article has over 400 comments on the NY Times website, some pretty vitriolic. People have many opinions on the matter.

personal days

2008-11-30T18:01:00.002-05:00

So now that I remembered how to read I've been picking up all the many half-read books littering my apartment, and have happily re-delved into Personal Days, Ed Park's very funny novel about a group of people who work in an office at a time of economic upheaval and rampant layoffs. It just goes to show you what a difference it makes to be reading the right book at the right time -- even just a few weeks ago I'm sure the employees' skittishness about layoffs wouldn't have struck so chillingly close to home, but now layoffs (and rumored magazine shut-downs) are sort of the theme of the day at the media company where I work.

And then the most amazing thing happened. One day I read this paragraph: "Week after week, you form these intense bonds without quite realizing it. All that time together adds up: muttering at the fax machine, making coffee runs. The elevator rides. The bitching about the speed of the elevator. The endlessly reprised joke, as it hits every floor: Making local stops." Funny, I thought, and so true about the unexpected bonds. But no one makes that elevator joke where I work, bub! I mean, no one really makes small talk or even looks each other in the elevators in my building.

And guess what happened the next day at work. Two security guards in the elevator, going up, with practically every floor's button illuminated. One turned to the other and before he even said it I knew what he was going to say. Making local stops.

This book must be magic!

tiger cocoon

2008-11-26T08:04:00.002-05:00

Oh here's that quote I was thinking of, from Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life:

"Martha was also now worrying that she was writing badly, haunted by a suspicion that younger writers, Americans like John Updike and Saul Bellow and William Styron, were producing better work than she was, and that they could remember things, like smells and noises, in a way that she could not. She said that she suspected that they understood about evil, while she did not, and she resented how prolific they were, the writing apparently flowing like lava. Her writing, she said, was pedestrian, unadventurous, while they, who led soft little lives, brought forth tigers out of their cocoons."

the homebody's adventure

2008-11-25T18:34:00.000-05:00

Finished the Gellhorn biography in a big greedy rush on Sunday. Around 8 pm, my husband wryly commented that I’d been sitting in the same position in my chair by the window reading for about 10 hours straight. (Not true, by the way — we totally walked the dog once in there, and I’m sure I went to the bathroom.) It’s a funny kind of reading. I didn’t find the book to be particularly well-written — and even less so as I retyped some passages I wanted to remember for later. I love retyping passages of wonderful writing. It always seems like a good way to get the feel of the words in your fingertips, to study the sentence in a little more depth. But these sentences are often clunky; at their best, they’re serviceable. Which I guess is all they need to be, really. It’s about the facts, ma’am. Which, I think, is why I never read these books! And yet — it was an excellent primer on some world history I’m a bit dusty on, and full of juicy gossip about Hemingway (guess what! He was a jerk!), and just interesting to read about a writer whose life and sensibilities were so vastly different from my own.

In her letters and journals, Gellhorn was constantly writing about her thirst for change, for movement, for experience. She got restless in one place or with one person for too long. She did amazing thing — covering battlefronts in WWII, living in Africa and Mexico and all sorts of wild places, having affairs with soldiers and writers, and churning out a whole lot of books and articles along the way. Of course it makes me think of the Ward Six post from a few weeks back about life experience and writing. There’s a telling passage in the biography where, as an older woman, Gellhorn is reading the fiction of Saul Bellow and other such novelists and is annoyed to find that their writing is good though, to her mind, they haven’t really done much outside of write. I love reading about the things she did with her life. But I haven’t read her fiction yet, and maybe that’s the next step. In her case, did an interesting life lead to interesting writing?

In a letter to my grandmother, she wrote something like (I don’t have it right in front of me) , “This is a kind of life. But to my mind, a husband and sons are a better way.” Maybe she was just being kind to my restless, would-be-writer grandmother. Could she really have meant it? Nothing in her life indicates that she did. Or maybe she did mean it, a little — in that way that other people’s lives always seem rosier.

For me, I’m glad that people like her spent their lives racing around the globe so that people like me, who are ecstatic to spend a Sunday reading and immobile in a chair, can read about it. And then write about. From the comfort of our cozy little apartments, as the winter evening comes on and the dog circles around on the couch and the tea starts to boil.

spoken, not stirred

2008-11-21T12:37:00.003-05:00

Last night I, Cheeverishly enough, rode the Metro-North train out to Harrison, NY, rubbing pin-striped elbows with beer-sipping commuters, to give a reading as part of the rather remarkable Spoken Interludes series. It's this amazing thing where people pay money for dinner and four readings, and there are lots of them there, and they are totally attentive and engaged and wonderful, and I read with these writers much more accomplished than myself. (If you happened to follow the link above, don't get excited about Christopher Plummer, because he didn't show!)

Anyway, while riding the train back to Grand Central with one of the (very nice) other authors, who must be about 10 years older than me, I had a conversation that I've had several times while reading with or encountering slightly older writers. It goes a little something like this:

Older and More Accomplished Writer: "Yeah, the apartment/house/year in Europe -- that was from my first book." and/or, "Oh, that cross-country tour when the publishers put me up in swank hotels -- that was from my first book."

Me: "Golly! For real?"

OAMAW: "Well, things were different then. [sigh] The party's over."

Really, I keep hearing that, word for word -- the party's over.

I tend to pooh-pooh reports that the publishing industry is in decline and we're all screwed, not because I doubt their veracity, but because they don't seem helpful to stew over. I am so incredibly thankful every day that someone wanted to publish my book at all, and I'm still, frankly, surprised that they wanted to actually give me money for it. It's amazing! And of course it's all about having it out there, which is its own reward. And of course, I get that books don't make that much money so it doesn't made sense to pay writers a lot for them. Unless of course they do make that much money. It's fair. I get it. But every now and then, I admit, I hear something about how advances used to be, or about how even low-profile first-time novelists used to be able to immediately quit their day jobs, and I think, damn. The party's over.

Eh, oh well. I'm not much of one for parties anyway.

writing

2008-11-19T08:27:00.002-05:00

From Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life:

"'I see perfection as a complete aliveness,' she would write. 'Being alert and eager, wanting all things to mean growth and intensity...' Martha was still not quite twenty-five and had published very little; but she was already absolutely certain that, for her writing to amount to something, it would have to come from some deep feeling of neccesity, a need to write so powerful that not to do so would be too painful to bear."

bio shock

2008-11-18T18:50:00.006-05:00

The book I’m happily tearing through this week is a strange choice for me: an autobiography.

I don’t know why, but I never read autobiographies. I associate them mostly with shelving them at the public library where I worked when I was in high school — the shelf was alongside the windows which looked out into the ravine, and alongside the windows were the noisy heaters, so that in the winter it was both sweaty-hot and freezing all at once. The biography shelves were always a huge mess, which we blamed on old people, because for some reason old people love biographies. Why? I am open to your theories.

But anyway, right, so I never read them. I did read Quentin Bell’s autobiography of Virginia Woolf, and that really may have been the only one. Wait, that’s a lie. I know I did a kick-ass report on Sir Francis Drake in fifth grade that must have involved some illustrated biographies. And now that I think of it, I seem to recall reading a salacious autobiography of some anorexic ballet dancer when I was in junior high. Some of my friends had read it too and we enjoyed seeing that being a beautiful and thin ballerina wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, as if that somehow made being not-thin and awkward any better. Oh my god, look, this is totally it. Can you believe it? Look at that cover! "The fairy-tale romance that became a living nightmare"!! I loved it.

Anyway. Of course I’ve read memoirs -- Speak, Memory is rather unoriginally my favorite -- but those don’t seem the same at all. Why not? Again, I am open to your theories.

Anyway. I was recently talking to my mother about my bookish late grandmother, who was famous for locking herself in the bathroom for a soak in the tub with a peanut butter sandwich and a mystery novel. I was asking what books my grandmother had loved, and my mother couldn’t remember any in particular, but noted that she’d loved biographies. Biographies! Goes with my old theory, except that I think she read them before she was old, so maybe not.

Actually, it’s because of my grandmother that I’m reading this autobiography. When my grandmother passed away several years ago, my mother and uncles were cleaning out her things and found some letters written to her by Martha Gellhorn. You know, the rather famous journalist and novelist (yeah, she was married to Ernest Hemingway), who by the way I hear they’re (they! Those people who do these things) going to make a movie about. My grandmother knew Gellhorn’s mother through the St Louis League of Women Voters, which is how their paths crossed. The letters are these remarkable, clear-eyed, tactless, ferociously honest assessments of my grandmother’s life -- my grandmother, who Gellhorn could tell was meant to be a novelist, but who instead was a housewife trying to keep things interesting for herself, if only in her mind. I keep trying to write something about these letters and everything they imply, and this week I’ve started trying in earnest, but after a few days I’m still casting about.

I realized part of my problem was that I knew almost nothing about Gellhorn. So, you guessed it, I’m reading her autobiography, aptly titled — wait for it -- Gellhorn. I’m totally surprised by how engrossing it is! I guess that’s the thing about biographies. Some people have really interesting lives, and it’s simply interesting to read about them. I mean, duh. But still. A novel can be fascinating no matter whether anything interesting happens or not, I think, and so can a memoir, really (maybe there's the difference!) but this here biography, well, it's all action.

the good thief

2008-11-16T09:40:00.005-05:00

Yesterday was the first day in a long time when both schedule and attention-span allowed me to just sit and read all afternoon, and wow, was it nice. I tore my way through the rest of The Good Thief, which is a real page-turner. One of the blurbs compares reading this novel to being totally engrossed in an adventure story as a kid, and I couldn't agree more. In fact, the hero himself, a 12-year-old, one-handed orphan named Ren, has a similar experience reading The Deerslayer:

"At times Ren felt like he was reading fragments of his own dreams, reassembled into words that pulled at his heart, as if there a string tied somewhere inside his chest that ran down into the book and attached itself to the character, drawing him through the pages. The boy read and read and read, until his eyes burned and the candle went out, and even then, in the darkness, he could still see the Deerslayer, pushing his way through the thick leaves, sighting his mark, raising his long thin rifle to his shoulder and firing."

There is much adventure to be had, and an interesting cast of characters to be met, and the result is utterly transporting. Ren is adopted by a couple of scoundrelly thieves and, well, mishaps ensue. (I was reading one particularly vivid grave-robbing scene when my husband walked into the room and said, "Um, is something sad happening in your book?" I guess I was making some tellingly horrifed faces.) In the end it's deeply satisfying, and most of all I feel thankful towards this book for being the first thing I could really sink my teeth into and read all the way through in months. It is a sad state, for the ambulette, to not be reading, and it feels good to be back! Now maybe I can dive back into the, um, four books left unfinished from the scattered summer. It's just so unlike me that I feel a little ashamed, and I go to sleep trying not to hear the books reproach me from my bedside table. And I better act fast, right, since my days of uninterrupted reading might well be nearing a baby-induced hiatus in, oh, about 18 weeks or so.

words to mouth

2008-11-14T16:26:00.003-05:00

1. Well, a podcast of an interview I did a while ago is up at Words to Mouth and I didn't say "like" as much as I was worried I had, so I'm posting a link.

To me, the highlights are when I describe a project I'm working on as "embyonic" (I was in my first trimester then and hadn't told anyone about my pregnancy!) and towards the end, when I blurt out, rather hysterically, "Please! Readers! Email me!"

Anyway, many thanks to Carrie at Words to Mouth for her interest in the novel!

2. In other news, it is 4:30 and getting dark out. Oh right, this time of year. And: I made a solemn vow today to go on a book-buying freeze. I have about 30 books tucked tetris-ly into my bedside table, waiting to be read, and looking through them I realized I really do want to read each of them! My reading goal is now to work my way through them before acquiring anything more. This vow was made a few hours before I realized it is imperative that I read a biography of Martha Gellhorn. (She once briefly corresponded with my grandmother, a fact that suddenly has attracted my somewhat-divided attention.) So an addendum to the solemn vow is that I am allowed to get this book from the library, as it is research-related.

blogger summit

2008-11-09T19:38:00.002-05:00

Wow, the folks at Ward Six sure are the best. Not only did they help me arrange a reading in beautiful Ithaca this weekend and make sure people came, they were incredibly hospitable and charming and even sent me home with farm-fresh eggs laid by chickens named for first ladies. AND they posted to their blog today, so that I can just link there.

Best weekend ever! Even though now I am jealous of their sweet writery existence, advanced brains, amazing home and children, and lovely hometown. It's a good jealous. Which is something like a dry heat.

Oh AND I got to walk by the house where Nabokov almost burned Lolita. It's student apartments now! What a world.

hope, orphans.

2008-11-06T06:43:00.003-05:00

First of all, it feels weird to not note: HOLY CRAP! OBAMA! SO HAPPY AND EXCITED!

This feels like an exciting time. At least, I am able to feel that way this morning, being well-rested -- last night I think everyone in the city had a political hangover from waiting in epic lines to vote at New York's awesome old-timey mechanical voting booths and then being out too late at election day parties and weeping at Obama's acceptance speech and all, and by evening the left-over elation had dulled (at least in my case) to exhaustion and F-train fury. (My feelings on the out-dated machinery of this city: voting booths, charming. Broke-down subway system, not so much.) But! Doesn't it seem like in the country and in art and everywhere there is this undercurrent of hope?

But that's not what I meant to write here. I meant to write about Hannah Tinti's exciting novel The Good Thief. I read with Hannah at the Brooklyn Book Festival in September, and was so engrossed in the passage she read that I was reluctant to switch gears and read from my own book. Then I saw her last weekend at the wonderful Sunday at Sunny's reading series (if you've never been, it's well worth it. A sleepy Sunday afternoon in Red Hook. The sunset on the water. Coffee and pastries. Oh right, and writers reading from their work at the charmingest bar in Brooklyn). Sunny's was the perfect place for this book, too, with its nautical themes and slightly bygone-times feel. Anyway, at both readings I had the thought that I would really like to start TGT right now, but was interrupted by guilt over the FOUR books I am weirdly in the middle of. This time, I started reading it anyway.

Let me tell you this: it's about an orphan with a missing hand who steals things, and who is adopted by a mysterious con-man stranger who claims to be his brother. Question: why does all the good stuff happen to orphans? I was obsessed with orphans as a kid, which must have been disconcerting to my parents.

Anyway, just as you'd suspect, this reads like an adventure story, and has been the only thing that could capture my scattered interest lately. Something about the prose feels, appropriately enough, like colonial New England architecture -- sturdy and clean-lined and lovely. It reminds me of what's exciting about reading fiction -- being transported to another time and place. Isn't it wonderful to find the book, after casting around for a while, that you don't want to put down even for a second? As in, oh yeah, what a pleasure it all is! It makes me want to read and write and read and write. Nice to feel that way again.

tip tip tap

2008-10-31T17:37:00.003-04:00

Um, hello?

Is anybody out there?

What happens if you unceremoniously disappear from your blog and then just as unceremoniously reappear? Anything? Nothing? And which would be the better option?

Last week my husband and I took a road trip. We drove first to Chicago to see family, and then Iowa City, where I fulfilled my (incredibly nerdy? Incredibly cool?) lifelong (or at least, since-I-was-in-college-long) dream of doing Live from Prairie Lights, and where I also fulfilled my constant dream of eating the best sandwich in the world. From there, onto Minneapolis, where I delivered a lecture (!) on setting in fiction, to the undergraduate writing class I was a TA for in graduate school, and then gave a reading at the university bookstore, where, by the way, Goldie the Gopher was handing out balloons. The balloons were for some sort of sale, not for my reading, but I pretended not to know that. From thence it was on to the literary mecca of Des Moines to visit more family and to do a “book signing,” or what could be more accurately called “the world’s loneliest book signing" but which, all things considered, was pretty fun. We all need those book-promoting war stories, don't we?

It was a lovely trip, and fun to play author for a week. It was a strictly DIY sort of mini-tour, and also valuable to me personally in an “in summary” sort of way — visiting old haunts and such. This was excellent timing, too, as it happens that I am now, let’s see, four-and-half-months pregnant. Book, baby. Baby, book. I am glad that the tiny baby has gotten to come to so many of my readings for the book. All of them, in fact! I hope the tiny baby is not super sick of the passages I pick to read. Though he/she probably is. At another reading last night, at the excellent Pete's Candy reading series in Brooklyn where I read with the exceedingly talented and also very super nice Salvatore Scibona, I could feel the little buddy squirming all around as I read. From my book about a pregnant lady. An interesting experience, that.

All of which is to say, on the drive back (we once again made the epic 14-hr drive from Chicago in NYC in one day, because we are impossibly heroic, or maybe I mean insane), I was musing aloud (we’d discussed every other possible topic in the world by that point, from politics to baby names to, well, really those ARE all the possible topics in the world right now, aren't they?) about this blog, and whether I should just abandon it altogether, or regroup somehow. I am wondering the same things about the novel or whatever that I’m trying to write right now, but that’s neither here nor there, unless maybe it is related in someway which come to think of it, it might be. Anyway, my husband said that I should keep it up. He reminded me of how excited I get to share books I love, or making new blog friends and learning about new books from them. And he also reminded me of how awesome blog-friends have been to me since my book’s come out.

In summary, I am going to clear the hormonal silt from my brains and read some books and write about them here.

So there.

Happy Halloween, also.

talking talking talking

2008-09-16T18:44:00.004-04:00

Somehow exhaustion and distractions have turned this blog into a chronicle of self-promoting links. Meanwhile, I am reading a book, I swear -- Honore de Balzac's Cousin Bette -- which is terrific. Lately I can't seem to read anything but overwrought historic dramas. Post-House of Mirth, I'm looking to read more Wharton, too. I just want a book to make me weep uncontrollably, is that too much to ask?

But in the meantime... please enjoy this interview with me at authormagazine.org, filmed from an unflattering angle. I do not believe my face is quite that white and puffy in real life, but perhaps my vanity deceives me. Anyway! In the background, stacks of Nabokov books make it seem like someone smart lives in my apartment. Speaking of which, once my husband and I decided to read all of Nabokov, and when we were done to celebrate with a pizza party. I really like pizza. And Nabokov. So what became of that plan, I wonder?

In the meaner meantime, we will now buckle down and make the Frankie-story chapbooks for the winners of the best worst motel contest, because they won after all, and winners deserve chapbooks.

sad

2008-09-15T19:28:00.003-04:00

Edward Champion's compiled a really wonderful assortment of writers' remembrances of David Foster Wallace over yonder. Check it out. Then go read or reread "Girl With Curious Hair." It's so funny and so sad.

check me out!

2008-09-12T14:25:00.002-04:00

I really love the blog Largehearted Boy, so I'm super excited to be featured on it today, talking about music and my book!

Also, please to see the very cool Page 99 test. Cool idea for a blog, eh?

People make good things. I like that.

I'm going to try to go make something good now.

checking in to the thunder lodge

2008-09-06T20:02:00.002-04:00

By the way, do check in with our new sister blog, The Guestbook of the Thunder Lodge.

It encompasses all matters of motel stories, both real and imagined, that readers of my book How Far Is the Ocean from Here sent in as part of a contest I held on my site. These winning winners will each receive a handmade chapbook containing an extra story about one of the characters from the book. As soon as the good people at Fortress America Productions (er, my husband and I) get around to making those books, that is.

Anyway. These motel stories are truly amazing -- some horrifying, some hilarious -- and I think you'll enjoy reading them. A new story will be posted every day. And what with gas prices going through the fricking roof, it's cheaper than actually visiting a real motel.

your hypothetical penpal

2008-09-03T21:52:00.004-04:00

I am so full of blog shame right now. First, I joyously finished House of Mirth last weekend, and, not to give anything away, but as many people warned me, as I read the end I wept and wept and wept. But did I type out any of the wonderful lines here? Did I write about how great this book is and why? Nah. I just...didn't. And then, now, I find an interview I did a while ago which is just now up at the University of Minnesota website, in which I talk about, what else? -- blogging!

Oh well. I leave you, invisible friends, to go wallow in my continuing shame, while doing, let's be honest, little to assuage it.

In other news, the RNC is making me so furious, I really wonder why I'm watching it. Seriously! Why? Gah.

corner store wars

2008-09-01T21:44:00.002-04:00

It is a sad/happy fact of my life that I live on a block with three corner stores. While awesome, this also encourages my laziness and poor meal planning (and makes me twitch nervously when I think of how unprepared I would be for life in the country, where people must be self-sufficient and capable). It also commonly induces guilt when caught by one corner store guy going to the other corner store. Anyway, so I wrote about this pressing issue over at The Nervous Breakdown.

a visit to the fortress

2008-08-27T20:23:00.000-04:00

I have been a bad, bad blogger lately.

But you know who hasn't been? My husband! He recently revamped his blog and right now features on it an excellent interview with LA-based artist Jesse Spears. In my humble, totally unbiased opinion, the blog looks great and the interview is totally interesting and inspirational.

Interviews of artists of all sorts will be appearing over at Fortress America from now on, so be sure to check it out!

giving mirth

2008-08-20T20:07:00.000-04:00

I think I forgot how to blog!

I have been reading some wonderful books and I just...don't have anything to say about them. It's very strange. Maybe I'm over-tired -- a lot has been happening! -- or maybe I'm just under-thoughtful. I'm even in the middle of 3 or 4 books, which is a strange state of affairs for me. But what's grabbing me most right now is, old-fashionedly-enough, Edith Wharton's House of Mirth.

I gave a little workshop on plot in fiction last week, and in it I talked a bit about the whole marriage plot idea. It's so simple, and of course reductive and sociologically upsetting, but it's also so unavoidably gripping, maybe because it's so simple. Will she get married? Will she DIE? It's really as simple as that. Will Lily Bart marry for money, marry for love, or not marry at all? And it's enough to keep me reading furiously, propelling me through sleepiness and distraction and everything else. Funny, I used to hate to even think about the idea of plot -- it seemed so ordinary and dull. And yet, it seems so clear now, how it's the engine of the whole thing, no matter how small and subtle it may be.

Also, from the very beginning of H of M, how excellent is this line: "He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her."

Yipes!

ernest borgnine is stalking me

2008-08-15T08:35:00.002-04:00

You know how sometimes you hear of a word or person or concept for the first time, only to have it come up in conversation a thousand times in a row? Well, this has been happening with me and Ernest Borgnine lately, and it's really getting weird. A while ago a coworker mentioned partying at a bar (congo line and all) with Ernest Borgnine's wife. "Who's Ernest Borgnine?" I inquired. She answered, "Who's Ernest Borgnine?! Are you crazy? He's a really famous movie star, everyone knows who he is." And this turns out to be true. Since then, people have mentioned him left and right. My dad's talking about McHale's Navy, a movie I see concerns a man obsessed with Borgnine in Marty, etc. Then, two nights ago, I was at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble to teach a one-hour fiction writing workshop. I walk into the store and start laughing, because of course there are huge posters everywhere advertising the upcoming appearance of Ernest Borgnine, reading from his memoir. I wish I'd taken a picture of our little store posters next to each other. It was really a magical moment.

So what is my 91-yr-old soulmate up to these days, anyway? Masturbating a lot, apparently. Ernest!

Anyway. I've rented Marty and as soon as I get the ancient VCR hooked up, I will be communing with my inner Borgnine. Not in THAT way, ew.

also blogging elsewhere

2008-08-10T18:06:00.001-04:00

A thing about where I work, where I used to work, and public urination during lunch breaks, at the awesome Nervous Breakdown blog.

roosevelt island

2008-08-10T16:48:00.003-04:00

Sometimes you just need to get away, even if only for a few hours. Roosevelt Island seemed very idyllic yesterday. We took the terrifying tramway up in the sky and into this serene little neighborhood.

A farmer's market, lots of swimming pools, mysterious power plants and a strangely high ratio of basketball courts and baseball diamonds. A secret old smallpox hospital, fenced away in a wild field. Former lunatic asylums galore. What could be better?

There are so many hidden nooks of this city.

books and books

2008-08-04T20:10:00.000-04:00

This whole having a book out thing has been very interesting. I have given readings to friends and strangers and answered questions I didn't think I knew the answers to. I have tried to answer questions about the book, when asked, that wouldn't ruin the questions other people have, because I think having questions is what makes a book interesting. I've gotten some very nice reviews. I've gotten some very nice write-ups on blogs. I have gotten very nice emails from strangers -- plus one angry one from an individual very upset that my publishing company publishes Ann Coulter's books. Make of that what you will, I guess.

I wish I could say something intelligent about how it makes me a different kind of reader (which of course is always what I'm coming back to here), but I don't know that it does, or maybe it's just that it hasn't yet, or maybe it never will. I think I've always read as a writer. Anyway, these last few days I've been obsessed with reading. It's hot, and I'm tired, and there is nothing better in the world than the couch and a book. I'm reading at least 2 great novels right now, and maybe I will write about them soon. But for now it feels like enough just to be reading, and to remember why it was I ever wanted to write a book in the first place.

another

2008-08-01T12:17:00.001-04:00

story here at sub-lit.

chicagoland

2008-07-29T09:25:00.005-04:00

Had another great and terrifically fun reading last night, this time at the Borders in Highland Park, IL, the suburb where I grew up. The staff couldn't have been nicer, the crowd couldn't have been kinder, and some of my TEACHERS FROM HIGH SCHOOL showed up which made me nearly pass out with surprise and joy. Whoa. Seriously.

There is another suburban reading tonight at 7 at BookStall in Winnetka (if you're in town, come! My grandma will be there!) and then on Wednesday I take part in the inimitable Claire Zulkey's Funny HaHa reading series at the Hideout in Chicago (visually stimulating poster above). Somehow I've weaseled my way into this awesome series (and better come up with something funny) -- reading with people like Wendy McClure, whose wonderful memoir I read and once wrote about here, and Mimi Smartypants, the famous blogger! Anyway.

This is fun.

more queasy self-promotion

2008-07-28T16:51:00.000-04:00

A story called The Kidnapped on awesome brink magazine.

book's first day of school

2008-07-24T22:49:00.008-04:00

So, the book's out. Let's see, I started writing it in May of 2005. It sold in February of 2007. Then came editing and revising and editing and revising some more and then came a long quiet period during which I got used to the idea that, okay, maybe it had all been a complex practical joke, and then all of the sudden it appears to be out in stores. Let me say that it is very surreal to have people knowing these characters that used to only live in my head. Let me also say that it's all very, very exciting. Strangers have emailed me saying nice things about the book, and this is enough to make me feel light-headed. After all, that's what this writing thing is about, isn't it? Communicating, as if by magic, with perfect strangers?

Last night was the book party/reading at the excellent BookCourt in Brooklyn. First my husband and I sat on a bench outside, getting used to the idea that no one was coming and once again we'd fallen for complex practical joke. Then all the sudden people came! People from all different corners of my life: work, old work, grad school, Gotham, junior high, the neighborhood, the internet, and even a few people I didn't recognize who appeared not to have been coeerced by me into attending. It was so much fun. I think we should all do this every night. See?

Having been to approximately ten million readings, it was fun/surreal to be on the other side of the podium, as it were. (Here I am, delivering what I'm sure was a ridiculous answer to an insightful question.)

Look how many people came! Aw. And, as I think I even mentioned in my flush of realization -- man, I know good-looking people. They don't even look that angry with me! Or wait, this could be their angry-faces.

And then there was a line of people waiting to buy the book and have it signed! A line! I am pretty sure I wrote squiggly lines of nonsense in each book. I'm hoping people will assume I just have dreadful handwriting but that it says something terribly witty. And the bookstore sold out of the book, even. So how do you like that.

Today was incredibly glamorous as I...went to work. But there is something to said for being able to think "I am a novelist!" -- even if it feels like a complex practical joke you've played on the world.

This weekend I head to Chicago for some hometown readings. Hope to see you there, Chicagoans.

Oh PS -- a lovely write-up of the evening can be found on mediabistro!

book. party.

2008-07-16T23:10:00.003-04:00

Hey, New York people! Just a reminder that my book party/first reading is next Wednesday at 7:00 at BookCourt in Brooklyn. Please come if you can! Look, they even made a pretty invitation for it.

I have some readings in Chicago, too, on July 28th, 29th, and 30th. Check out my website or stay tuned here for more information.

It's really happening. Gulp.

photos, and a graphic novel, and a box of books

2008-07-12T01:21:00.006-04:00

Gifts from the internet abound today. As in: A friendly stranger sent me this gorgeous New Mexico Flickr set (her photo here is used totally without permission), after reading my article here.

In the meantime, I've been totally scattered and over-committed and therefore have neglected to write about things here, like about how, hello, the week before last we were in Canada for the first time, and now I want to move to Montreal, where I imagine I would have a totally different life/personality; I would be laid-back and Frenchy and ride around on a bicycle with a basket and so forth. Between being greeted by friendly locals and managing to drive directly into every enormous street-closing festival the country has, I picked up this incredibly charming graphic novel in a shop in Quebec City. It's called "Hello My Pretty," by Line Gamanche, and is drawn in this nutty, vaguely Lynda Barry-ish style, and is about a family whose youngest child is born with mental disabilities and a whole lot of unique, playful charm. So good.

Another thing I've been meaning to write about is the package (or should I say packages) that greeted us upon our return from vacation. Yes, the real, actual hard cover copies of my book have arrived, and holding one in my hands was extremely surreal. The books themselves are lovely, if I do say so myself -- thanks to my publisher's good old-fashioned respect for things like endpapers, notes on type, thoughtful cover design. Of course I'm jumping out of my skin at the thought of the book actually being published, but what struck me most was this: what a beautiful object this is, and how lucky I am for that.

What a scattered post this is. But anyone, if you're still reading this, hello, and if you live in New York, come to my book party the week after next! July 23rd, 7pm, at BookCourt in Brooklyn. Plus I have upcoming readings in Chicago, and in the fall, Iowa and Minnesota. Stay tuned.

Passing

2008-07-08T19:50:00.000-04:00

Hey, guess what. Shana Youngdahl's amazing new chapbook, "Donner: A Passing," is just out from Finishing Line Press. It's the second book I've gotten from them and I just ordered another -- the very talented Karen Rigby's "Savage Machinery." (I don't know if there's a Minnesota connection to the press, but all three books I've bought from them are people I knew from school! Weird!) I really like this little press and the compact poetry pamphlets that they produce. I think it clears the mind a bit to consume at least a dose of poetry now and then, though I don't read nearly as much as I'd like to.

ANYway, Shana (a grad school pal!) has created something really magical in this long poem. It's about the Donner party -- you know, the ones who famously chomped on each other while making the difficult passage to California in the 184os. I feel like I read this chapbook with my ears perked up and my face very hot, like how you feel when you realize you've done something humiliating or made a terrible mistake. You know? I mean that in a good way. I felt implicated, and guilty, and starved. Again, in a good way.

What I'm trying to say is, Shana has such a graceful hand with language and line. I always feel that I am a bit of a dunce when it comes to reading poetry, but I kept noticing the quality of the line here -- how at the beginning, when the party is gathering to leave and all is full of hope, the lines are coherent and tidy; and as things start to fall apart, so to does the line. In such few, minimal strokes, she's able to recreate entirely the terror of the people involved. This is magic, really. I feel like as a writer I tend towards the intricately wordy, which is probably why poetry's hard for me to write. Anyway, here there are lines like this:

"They didn't know hunger
could bloom full around necks
a chain of poison flowers that gives snow
more than water,
more than feet or hands"

And this:

"Onward: until it is written
in the trees"

And this:

"A woman watches the heart
of her brother on the fire."

In summary, everyone should order this book. Oh my god, wait till you get to the last page. It's a heartbreaker.

nice girls finish last

2008-06-27T10:51:00.003-04:00

Oh yeah, an update re: The Literary Death Match. I didn't win! But a nice fellow named John Williams did, and posted a good summation (which includes flattering of me, which I always enjoy in a blog post) of the event on his blog, which is awesomely named A Special Way of Being Afraid. He read a great and funny story about feuding literary giants. My favorite part was when one of them had a sky-writer write the worst parts of his nemesis's recent bad review in the sky. Ha! Anyway, big props to runner-up Debbie Kuan, whose blog looks suspiciously similar to John Williams's. She lost the physical challenge but was perhaps unfairly hampered by her attire. But for the skirt and flats, Debbie. But for the skirt and flats.

The reading was set up between some basketball courts and a playground (the kids seemed to like the high percentage of masturbation references in the stories that were read), and further down in the park some famous athletes were playing soccer. There were millions of sporty people milling about. And then, tucked in the center, a little oasis of bespectacled people sitting quietly and listening to words. The readers were worthy, the judges hilarious, the sporty folk confused. A good way to spend an evening.

reading up, reading out

2008-06-24T07:24:00.002-04:00

1. In the comments here a few posts back, brilliant Torontonian Amanda pointed out that when reading while writing it helps to "read up." She wrote, "I only read things that are leagues beyond my own calibre of writing, like Nobel winners and so on." This seemed like sound thinking, and so I picked my fat collection of Flannery O'Connor stories back up. O'Connor's delicate, detailed, dark stories are just the thing for this summer, I think.

What struck me most about the story I read most recently was the faces, maybe because of the great essay on faces in Baxter's Subtext book -- ""When we look at a person's face, do we think that we are seeing that person's character?" I would say so, certainly in fiction anyway, but perhaps I am old-fashioned. At any rate, look at these faces from O'Connor's "The Displaced Person": "Mr Shortley raised a sharply rutted face containing a washout under each cheek and two long crevices eaten down both sides of his blistered mouth." And -- "Monster! she said to herself and looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. His forehead and skull were white where they had been protected by his cap but the rest of his face was red and bristled with short yellow hairs. His eyes were like two bright nails behind his gold-rimmed spectacles that had been mended over the nose with haywire. His whole face looked as if it might have been patched together from out of several others." Beautifully ugly, these faces, and both, in the realm of the story, reveals something about both the character it's attached to and the character doing the observing. This is my assignment now, to think about faces.

2. And oh yeah, New York people: Come see me read tomorrow (Wednesday) in a Literary Death Match! Yipes! Sara D. Roosevelt Park at 6:30.

contest!

2008-06-16T20:52:00.001-04:00

I was just complaining about how no one AT ALL had entered my awesome contest on my new site.

Then Carrie TryHarder was like, dude, did you mention it on your blog yet? And I was like, dude, no I did not.

So here it is, a little announcement just stuffed with google-friendly keywords.

Hey! There is a contest on my site! You can win stuff! Cool stuff! You can win a limited-edition, handmade chapbook! Don't you want to win cool stuff like a limited-edition, handmade chapbook? What are you, insane? No, you're not. Therefore, of course you want to enter a contest where you could win cool stuff like a limited-edition, handmade chapbook!

You have to do something, it's true. You have to write a teensy little email to me about your favorite bad stay at a motel. It can be real or imagined. This is topical to my book. See? Get it? So then you email it to me, and then I do a drawing of all the copious and awesome entries, and then in September (a long time from now, I know. But it's good, because you will have forgotten all about it and then you will be so excited to get this weird crazy awesome prize) maybe you will win a a limited-edition, handmade chapbook! So maybe enter it! If you feel like it.

subtext

2008-06-15T14:53:00.002-04:00

This weekend I happily devoured my brilliant former professor Charles Baxter's slim book of essays The Art of Subtext. I became aware of this new "Art of" series from Graywolf Press at AWP this winter, and had been eagerly awaiting just the right moment to dive into this volume, which of course begins, "Books sometimes fall into your hands in the oddest ways. Meeting up with a particular work of literature may have an eeriness of occasion that resembles an accident that is not really accidental." So it follows that at a sticky, weird point in this new thing I'm working on, I find myself finally picking up this book, full of witty and wise essays that seem to illuminate exactly just what it is I need to do in revising some of the scenes I'm finding lackluster. I can't recommend this book highly enough to any writer or would-be-writer. As in :

"Much of the time you can say whatever you wish to say about what you want. But you can't always say aloud what you really crave or desire because for some reason it's unmentionable. You want the wrong thing, or too much of it. These discrepancies are at the core of many great stories, and myths. Think of Oedipus, famous forever for wanting the wrong thing, and getting it."

He makes it look easy, doesn't he?

And, later, in another essay but in some ways it seems to me a continuation of the same thought: "we create a scene when we forcibly illustrate our need to be visible to others, often in the service of a wish or a demand that we seek to impose. Creating a scene is thus the staging of a desire."

Important and helpful things to keep in mind. It's funny -- most of the time I'm not much interested in texts on writing, and then this week I can't get enough of them -- Zadie Smith's great essay in the Believer on writing novels, this book. I wonder.

crafty

2008-06-09T20:39:00.002-04:00

This Zadie Smith essay in The Beliver is absolutely perfect. I guess the whole thing isn't online, which is too bad -- but the way she talks about lovingly hating your book, about feeling that another person altogether has written it, and the ways she categorizes the different kinds of novelists (oh, and that time of magical thinking when everything seems to have to do with your book! I've never heard anyone talk about this but it is so true and weird and great and terrible!) -- great.

I would like to say more, too -- about how, yes, it is so important and nourishing to have bits of great writing to gobble up while you're writing -- I can never go in for the "not reading while writing" deal. And about how, yes, like Smith I think I am a "micro-manager," completing as I go in a way, and about how articulating that makes it sound somehow okay and not just obsessive and neurotic and--

But it is too hot and I can barely think. Sorry if this post seems melty. I feel rather melty in the brains.

it's the end of the world as we know it.

2008-06-08T19:43:00.005-04:00

Finished Last Last Chance -- what a delight this book is! I feel tingly all over. Or maybe that is just sunburn from a day at the beach. Or maybe just my body absorbing urban sewage, as the beach was Coney Island.

But, the book! First of all, it involves paragraphs like a so: "The seat of the couch was so deep it broke well beyond the knee if you sat back. This made everyone look a little like Alice in Wonderland. In particular, it made Alfred look like a dwarf. Also, he lacked for hair on the pate, whch left what coverage he had horsehoeing around the sides." Just an example, there are so many wonderful lines. Maazel's language is compact and zingy and stylish, her descriptions crystalline. Also: in viewing a potential world-wiping-out super plague through the eyes of an admittedly self-absorbed drug addict, this book manages to make interesting and important-feeling points about how, well, all of us really deal with the terrible things that happen in the world; how our own little tragedies feel so much more real to us. And this book has that quality I really love in a novel -- a feeling of depth, a sense of layers, evidence of an energetic and creative and lively mind -- a gorgeous meditation on listening to opera, the antic voice of a reincarnated Viking, a diorama of a chapter set at born-again-Christian camp, etc. Read it already! It's really wonderful.

Also. It is a curious experience to read a first novel just as mine is about to crown its gooey little head. I think I am more impressed than ever at all the things that people do well, at peoples' brilliant imaginations (this one! Sharp Teeth! Etc!), all the things I wish I did, doubts, of course, all of it. But also, I am reminded of what a joy it is just to be a reader, and how to me, writing is so much about reading. I'm teaching an online writing tutorial with a woman who wrote to me the most brilliant thing: that she doesn't like to know the whole story of something she is writing at the start, so that the process of writing is more like that of reading. Exactly. When writing is as pleasurable as reading, I know I'm on to something.

And sometimes I think, well no matter what happens with my book, if one stranger reads it and has as involved a relationship with it as I do with the books I read, then it will be enough. (Oh, that and glowing reviews and through-the-roof sales.) (Just kidding.) (Mostly.) (Sort of.)

this song's really got a hold on me

2008-06-03T19:35:00.000-04:00

do you think it was my soul or a swimming pool?

2008-06-02T21:37:00.003-04:00

not reading, then reading

2008-06-02T07:31:00.003-04:00

I have a strange, almost-allergic sort of reaction to not reading. I'm always impressed when people say they don't read fiction while they're writing something so as to keep their voice and vision pure but I don't think this would ever work for me, since I'm always writing something, which would mean no reading fiction and I honestly can't even imagine such a misery. There is something about being in the middle of a book that is like having an open window in a room -- there is more space, more light, more noise, more something. I can't articulate it very well except to say that if I haven't been reading I start to feel a little penned-in and antsy, a bit too involved in my own thoughts. There is something about the vistas of fiction, about the act of imagining, that feels nutritious.

And I hadn't really had a lot of time to read lately, by which of course I mean I hadn't been making time for it which is all anyone means when they say they don't have time for something anyway -- but between work and teaching and writing the New Thing and then actually socializing with human beings now and then, not to mention the awesome new top secret project we have brewing here at home (ok, fine, I'll tell you -- we found a keyboard in the trash, and it works, boy does it work, and it has been inspiring the heights of musical excellence), oh boo-hoo, everyone's busy I know -- well, it happens.

Then this weekend I started reading a wonderful book I bought a couple of weeks ago: Last Last Chance, by Fiona Maazel. As is apparently my way lately, it involves apocalyptic whisperings and a superplague. Sort of Oryx and Crake-y but from the other end -- it's all just beginning -- and funny. There's a cast of awesomely strange characters, there's danger, there's humor, there are sentences so stylish the rhythms invade your head -- and believe me when I say even though it's about drug addiction, death, and superplague, it's really fun to read. And also just: wow, it feels good to be reading. How do people live without fiction? I know they do, and most of them, but it just seems impossible to me.

I know they've been saying much smarter things on the topic of not reading over at Ward Six, by the way, if you're interested.

workshop to go

2008-05-28T07:55:00.000-04:00

I am reading a book that I would like to recommend to you. I can't put it down! It's funny and sad, bittersweet and hopeful. The characters feel immediately like old friends. And there are tons of funny, witty, Lorrie Moore-ish moments.

But no one can read it! No one but me, ha!

Because...it hasn't been published yet.

I hadn't realized how much I'd missed this -- having a friend's manuscript to tote around and read and offer notes and ideas on. It's a unique kind of reading -- more interactive than usual I guess, since you could possibly have some insights that affect its development. More tiring too. The responsibility! Still, I love the exchange, and the unique quality of stories in their nascent drafts.

Writer friends, let's trade stories more, eh? I know we're all busy, but please. It's so refreshing to have that little dose of grad school on a crowded F train reeking of hobo pee, even when your eyes are all squinty from too much computer-glow. Yes?

little lost robots

2008-05-24T00:10:00.003-04:00

I finished reading I, Robot the other day on the train and almost immediately forgot all about it! It’s one of those books, I think – fun to read and ultimately insubstantial. Oh, I suppose it has some messages about the mechanization of society and all but nothing more thought-provoking than, like, Ironman. Or maybe it’s that the messages would have seemed more surprising and ominous a few decades ago, when the book came out. Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading these stories while I was reading them – the quippy exchanges, the neat little pieces.

I think maybe part of the empty feeling I get from this book has to do with the characters. Even though we see the same characters throughout, I never felt that I got close to them. I don’t think of myself as a very character-oriented reader when it comes down to it, but there it is. Everything here is told at a distance, very 50’s radio play in tone. The exception is a great story about a mind-reading robot -- only when he digs around in the scientists’ brains does the reader get to. Oh, and the one about the political campaign in which nasty rumors spread that one of the candidates is a robot. I bet it's only a matter of time before that one hits in real life.

Most of all, I'm struck by how oddly this book is structured. I really can’t imagine a book like this being published nowadays, unless the author was already rather famous, and maybe Asimov was at the time. I don’t really know enough about him to say. But what I mean is that it’s essentially a collection of stories, many of which involve the same cast of characters, tied very very loosely together by the rather lame conceit of one of the scientists “remembering” all these stories and telling them to a young reporter. It’s sort of Martian Chronicles meets In Our Time. And, in the end, exactly what it needed to be – a good train book.

from chinatown to the catskills and points in between

2008-05-21T21:22:00.001-04:00

Belatedly, some photographs.

second site

2008-05-20T19:42:00.000-04:00

Drum roll, please.

The new site.

Thanks to awesome Alex Marvar, who was able to create this from my request to "ummmm do something pretty...but not too pretty...and motel-y?" Should you need a website or any high-quality photography or even just good music recommendations, may I recommend Ms. Marvar.

Anyway! Tell me you like it!

(No, I didn't accidentally leave out the "if." I meant what I wrote.)

hopped up on carrot juice and ready to go

2008-05-15T06:30:00.001-04:00

1) Here's a question for you. What is the best thing ever in the whole world?

A)Pirates
B)Rock operas
C)Puppets
D)Accordians
E)ALL OF THE ABOVE

If you answered D and you live in New York, please go see Jolly Ship the Whizbang at Ars Nova because it is 100% awesome.

Not as good as the pirate band that played at my wedding, but pretty good. Better than the puppet Hamlet, even, due to the rock music and hilarity. Why do puppets WORK? Why is it so pleasing to see something in miniature, the inanimate animated, carved little faces singing fucking pirate rock songs? These are questions for the ages.

2) Oh and it seems a long time ago but over the weekend we went to the Whitney Biennial, which, as usual, was, you know, spotty. But I loved Javier Téllez's film, "Blind, for the Use of Those Who See," about blind people touching an elephant and talking about how it feels. It's strangely moving, and understated, and thought-provoking, and beautiful. Beautiful! So much of what was there was not. I wonder. Why is so much of contemporary art, or that which ends up being represented in the biennial anyway, so aggressively ugly? What's with that arte povera-type shoddiness that seems so in vogue? It's like the art is daring you to enjoy it. I realize that sounds unsophisticated, but there it is.

3) Finally, the book of the week: I, Robot. Would you believe I have never Asimov? Well, I have not. But I picked up this slender little paperback with an awesomely 70s cover from a box of stoop-sale-afterbirth somewhere and it makes for perfect train reading. Very X Minus 1, these clever little stories. The robots go haywire. The wisecracking scientists fix them. Repeat. Also, Asimov's writing is sometimes completely hilarious. As in:

"At the end of two hours, Powell was copiously besweated. Donovan had enjoyed a none-too-nutritious diet of fingernail and the robot said, "How does it look, boss?"

Copiously besweated! Diet of fingernail! These two are the best, Powell and Donovan. They're always getting into jams and then saying things to each other like, "All right, and skip the sarcasm. We'll save it for Earth, and preserve in jars for future long, cold winters." A comeback I plan to have at my disposal from now on.

Clearly I am on a real nerd-power kick. The talking dolls in bizarre Hell, the werewolves of the wonderful Sharp Teeth. The pirates of last night's play. Basically...I am a six year old boy I think. Next thing you know I'll be really into trucks.

4) Oh and things are afoot. Book things. Website things. Just wait!

howl

2008-05-12T19:28:00.001-04:00

It was a very Sharp Teeth weekend here in the Ambulette! Not only did I go see Toby Barlow give a charming reading at BookCourt in Brooklyn on Friday, but then I spent most of Sunday reading, yes, the whole freaking book. Couldn't stop. It is one of those books that lulls you into its world completely, and what a world it is: violent and gnashing and sexy and scary and wolfy. Though it's in free verse, I'd say its language and rhythms have a sight more to do with hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir than with most poetry -- the lines are compact and clipped. And, as with any good novel, the form is undivorceable from the the function -- the form is a strange hybrid, in its own category rhythmically and otherwise, just as the characters are strange hybrids, wolves and women, dogs and men. There's a fascinating plot in there too, satisfying twists and all. An intensely fun read, this book. Often books I love make me want to run off and write, write, write, but this book had the strange effect of making me want to run off and charge through the mountains and howl at the moon and whatnots.

little dog came from you

2008-05-09T15:41:00.003-04:00

I did start Sharp Teeth and it is great.

As in (as the dogcatcher remembers his childhood pet):

"But in all these tales the dog is the innocent shooting star
we all wish upon
until it burns up, aging fast and disappearing
behind our jagged horizons.
Each dog marks a section of our lives, and
in the end, we feed them to the dark,
burying them there while we carry on."

Ack! Let us all hug our animals.

werewolves of l.a

2008-05-08T19:06:00.004-04:00

The next book I am super excited to, oh god forgive me, sink my teeth into is theter Sharp Teeth. No, not a White Teeth sequel, nor the memoir of an erstwhile dentist, but a novel in verse (yes!) about werewolves (double yes!). Just listened to a great Bat Segundo interview with the author, Toby Barlow, and loved some things that were said. As in: a discussion of so-called "innovators of the new weird," wherein Barlow gives props to one of my favorite books of all times, Anne Carson's (novel in verse, about a monster-boy) Autobiography of Red. He calls her Rachel Carson but it's okay, we totally know what you mean, TB. He also talks about the desert as weirdly fertile place, and idea which obviously (obviously, if you've read my book, which you haven't, because it's not out yet) speaks to me. And then about how the theme of the book (of any book, I'd say) is: "This has all already happened before; this is all completely new." Also, yes. Also, he explains his decision to not have his lycanthropes moon-based by saying he can't imagine a creature being taken over by animal forces once a month. To that I say HA HA HA. Clearly, you are male. But, again, I forgive him. Because I am so excited that a novel in verse has been published, first of all -- by a major publishing house, no less! Everytime that happens I think we should all have a pizza party, even if the book is terrible. And also: werewolves. Transformations. L.A. The desert. Homer. Burritos. So here I go, I'm going to start it tonight.

hell yes

2008-05-06T22:19:00.002-04:00

“Something is wrong in the house.”

Finished reading Katherine Davis's mystifying, gorgeous, creepy and inexplicable Hell on a bizarrely crowded train this evening, though somehow I feel like I still haven’t even started it yet. It’s a strange book, deliciously strange, and it concerns itself with three distinct storylines which connect (like the impersonators and the nuns in Mister Lonely!) only obliquely – parallel layers more than braided strands. There are three households in the book: a home in 1950s Philadelphia, a dollhouse within this home, and the cottage of a nineteenth-century domestic management expert. Yes, one of the storylines is about a dollhouse, and it’s amazing. I love that Davis can do things that sound so crazy -- setting part of a novel in a dollhouse, or including a talking mouse -- and make them work so completely. (Again, I'm reminded of Mister Lonely! Watch it and then tell me that the wistfully singing painted eggs don't make you well up a little.)

“Sooner or later the house will get the best of you. It will defy your attempts at narrative because it’s opposed to content; it only honors form.”

I also love the way Davis plays with the same themes and images and ideas in each different setting, the way certain things accumulate throughout the book. In each story there is a sickly daughter, a cold mother, a distant father, a charismatic outsider – there is a an interest in food, including a dread of burning and a hallucinatory, transcendent Molly Bloom-ish stream of consciousness rant about blancmange that is truly amazing. In some ways it feels like some of the pieces of Labrador and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, gone completely wild, unfettered by anything so pedestrian as, say, plot. Anyway, it’s an odd book but a beautiful one. And it leaves me with three Kathryn Davis books left to read, which is exciting.

“Better far to be a ghost outside a house looking in, especially at night when the lights are on and you catch glimpses of the people you loved when you were alive going about their business.”

Which to read next? Or should I make myself wait. Hm.

don't stop till you get enough

2008-05-04T20:20:00.004-04:00

This weekend we saw Mister Lonely, a movie so sweet and strange and sad that we can't stop talking about it (or singing "Mister Lonely"). It's Harmony Korine's newest movie (I realize I've never any of his other movies! Somehow I thought I had but no, no I had not. I gather this is quite a departure) and he was there to answer questions afterwards. Let me first say that this movie was beautiful, just gorgeous frame by frame, and deeply, awesomely weird and funny. It's about a Michael Jackson impersonator who goes to live at a kind of impersonators commune in the Scottish Highlands. (I know, it sounds like it could have gone very, very wrong, and it could have, but it didn't. ) What an ongoing and hilarious joy to see a wistful Marilyn Monroe, an antic Buckwheat, a foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln, and others, tromping around in yellow Wellies and doing their farm chores. Part of what's so wonderful is that they do very little performing as impersonators -- they just live as impersonators. And then there is a seemingly disconnected subplot involving flying nuns. I know.

If I were going to flatten out the delicious mystery of it and try to put the thing into words, I would say it's about taking a leap of faith to discover who you are. But that makes it sound corny and simplistic, and I would never do something like that. Anyway, afterwards people asked some very good questions and some very silly questions which Mr. Korine answered with a sly, nervous grin. Someone asked about the connection between the two story lines, which of course was what everyone wanted to know but also utterly unanswerable. Satisfyingly enough, the response was a shrug and something like, "Well, you know, I've always wanted to write the great American novel but with, like, pages missing... kind of like that."

too many have lived

2008-04-30T06:47:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was a day with two curious incidences. First of all, I think I shrunk. This is distressing if true. But I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that I was wearing shoes I wear all the time and that have always fit just fine; then, halfway through the day, they became too big. They would barely stay on my feet! So after work I was clomping through the Diamond District, towards the Mercantile Library, feeling like a kid playing dress-up in her mother's pumps. What in the world? Therefore, I suppose I must be shrinking?

Anyway. Next up was the reason why I had to clomp over there at all: a live recording of a Dashiell Hammet story "Too Many Have Lived" for the (new?) "audio magazine" The Black Mask. Carrie Tryharder met me there, so she can confirm that yes, if you listen to the program (it doesn't appear to be online yet), that horrible thud you hear towards the start would be me dropping my bag onto the floor. But hey, it's hard to get used to my new smaller self! Anyway. The story was complete with sound effects and a musical number, and made me want to read Hammet which I really have never done. There should be more opportunities to see (and possibly ruin) live radio recordings, I think. It's fun.

a good book is hard to find

2008-04-23T07:01:00.002-04:00

I was traveling over the weekend and toting around the Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor is someone I've always thought I'd read a lot of. Now I realize that, really, I've just read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" over and over. (And of course Wise Blood, which I read last year on a tip from a blog reader and adored.) Almost all of these stories are completely new to me. Have you read them? Have you read them recently? They are breathtaking!

The first six stories in the collection are O'Connor's MFA thesis, and the collection proceeds chronologically from there. It's interesting to see how her writing changed and developed -- how the stories thickened, developed texture, got more and more complex. I'm making them sound like sauces or something and maybe they are. But those first stories, while identifiably O'Connor-y, seem to have fewer layers, and slightly different themes -- I was surprised by how many of them are about racism, about small town southerners confronting their own racism or the different race relations underlying life in the city or even just "nowadays." Of course this continues in some way in the later stories, but alongside more religious zealots and weird plot twists. Enoch Emery's obsession with the gorilla, little Bevel's ill-fated fascination with a religious sect, Tom Shiftlet's abandonment of Lucynell -- the stories are packed with unforgettable imagery, that twisted dark humor, and a very particular kind of energy -- characters humming with unsettling attentions and obsessions. These stories are just so good!

Also: I had terrible delays at the airport and switched to a different flight (which of course was then itself delayed!) and sat down on my new plane and opened my book and the next story was, of course, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." And of course, in this story, a detour while traveling leads to a family's doom. So I was convinced that my new plane was doomed, and read the story with great feeling, all the way up to that plucky little grandmother's bitter end. Miraculously enough, the story didn't make the plane crash, but so vivid is O'Connor's prose that I wouldn't doubt it had such power.

honeycomb

2008-04-14T07:44:00.004-04:00

"A long letter to Eve... If only she could make Eve see what a book was... a dance by the author, a song, a prayer, an important sermon, a message. Books were not stories printed on paper, they were people; the real people;...'I prefer books to people'...'I know now why I prefer books to people.'"

I've finished reading Honeycomb, the third volume in Dorothy Richardson's hypnotic Pilgrimage. Hypnotic really is the right word for it -- it's sometimes rather boring, though not unpleasantly so, and it's so much about the rhythm of Miriam's quiet observations. In this volume she goes to be a live-in governess with a country family, and despite her high hopes at the start, finds it just as unsatisfying and vaguely depressing as her previous employment at a London girls' school. Again, there is the crushing sense of being trapped, a woman without money of her own who isn't especially interested in marrying but has few options. Of course, two of her sisters have to go and get married, so in the last third of the book she's gone home to attend their joint wedding, watching them transform into women who suddenly don't have to worry anymore about money, money, money. So much of this book is informed by the family's economic downturn -- they once had money and the girls all went to school and were led to believe, likely, that a different kind of life awaited them -- and then their father lost all his money. Their mother, to top it all off, is sick -- she suffers that peculiar old book illness of "hysteria" -- and eventually Miriam quits her job and comes home to care for her.

I'm amazed by this book's utter indifference to plot, first of all, and its conviction that Miriam's observations of the world are enough. And often they are. It strikes me that maybe this is the main difference between P. and the in-many-ways-similar Remembrance of Things Past -- it's this book's immediacy, versus RoTP's distance. There you have the narrator remembering (duh), reflecting, shifting things into place, jumping back and forth in time, sifting it all into more of a semblance of shape. Here, you are relentlessly close to Miriam in each moment. This affords some great pleasures -- her gorgeous attention to moods and the way moods shift in a room full of people, her observations of the subtle power plays between men and women in everyday conversation, her detailed descriptions of light -- but it also can be a little claustrophobic and even confusing.

Well, only nine more volumes to go!

what art is

2008-04-10T07:48:00.002-04:00

I have been meaning to post about this for days, but at brunch on Sunday this actress I know said a brilliant thing I wanted to share. She was talking about why she took a break from acting for a few years, explaining that it came down to an epiphany of sorts she'd had about acting really was. She likened it to being a shy little girl and pulling your skirt over your head to hide, only to one day realize that not only can people still see you, they can see your underwear. And you have no idea what you look like, or what exactly you're revealing. As real live humans in the world start reading my book, I think, dear god, that's what writing is like, too! You only think you're hiding behind a narrator, that you the person is completely absent from the fiction, that you're only the vessel, but really, probably, people can see your underwear.

Good, right?

new yorker stories

2008-04-06T01:54:00.001-04:00

Here's my idea of big excitement: lying on the couch, listening to records, and reading the short stories from the New Yorkers that have been accumulating, mostly unread, in an ungainly stack on the coffee table. No kidding -- it really was dreamy. Here were my findings.

1. "The Bell Ringer," John Burnside (March 17). This quiet, melancholy tale of a woman in a lonely marriage features some bone-chilling imagery, some -- yes -- bell-ringing, and -- wait for it -- a neat little twist at the end.

Great Line: "Harley was always polite with her, in the way that Americans are: doggedly courteous and, at the same time, utterly remote, like the landing party in an old episode of 'Star Trek': curious and well-meaning and occasionally bewildered, but sworn not to interfere in the everyday life of their hosts."

Bonus Vocab Word: viridian -- durable bluish-green pigment.

2. "The Region of Unlikeness," Rivka Galchen (March 24). A thrilling, gorgeous, and mystifying tale that calls to mind Steven Millhauser, Kevin Brockmeier, Italo Calvino -- interesting, thinky, mind-bendy, with a vaguely Eastern European-feeling detachment. Also: funny in parts, and also sad. See also: time travel (as in The Invention of Everything Else!)

Great Line: "Early Saturday morning, I found myself knocking on Jacob's half-open door; this was when my world began to grow strange to me--strange, and yet also familiar, as if my destiny had once been known to me and I had forgotten it incompletely."

Another Great Line: "My face flushed, and my heart fluttered, and I felt as if a morning-glory vine were snaking through all my body's cavities."

3. "Great Experiment," Jeffrey Eugenides (March 31). Every once in a while a story feels so plainly, entirely real that it is as unsettling as an unbidden confession from a sister-in-law (that was a reference to story #1, you know!). I believed every inch of this story about a disillusioned former poet, tired of just scraping by in middle-class squalor, who takes a page from the book of corrupt businessmen. Do you think it will end well? Well, do you?

Great Opening: "'If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?' It was the city that wanted to know. Chicago, refulgent in early-evening, late-capitalist light. Kendall was in a penthouse apartment (not his) of an all-cash building on Lake Shore Drive. The view straight ahead was of water, eighteen floors below. But if you pressed your face to the glass, as Kendall was doing, you could see the biscuit-colored beach running down to Navy Pier, where they were just now lighting the Ferris wheel."

Bonus Vocab Word: denuded -- 1. To divest of covering; make bare. 2. Geology To expose (rock strata) by erosion [used to describe a pillow!]

4. "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry," Ha Jin (April 7). An almost pathologically laconic narrator tells of renting a room in a the smallest little whorehouse in Flushing, and helping one of the prostitutes imagine more for herself. But not as Pretty Woman-ish as I've made it sound there. The preoccupations with money and living without health insurance (as illegal immigrants) are telling.

Great line: "Insects were chirring timidly, as if short of breath."

Interesting thought: "I used to believe that all johns were bad and loose men, but now I could see that some of them where nothing but wrecks with serious personal problems that they didn't know how to handle. They came here, hoping that a prostitute might help."

in the place of

2008-04-05T10:24:00.002-04:00

On the heels of a New York Times article about "outsourcing" pregnancy, using Indian surrogates, comes this Newsweek story called "The Curious Life of Surrogates." (I love the dek here: "Thousands of largely invisible American women have given birth to other people's babies." Largely invisible! But not ALL invisible, so presumably you can see their hands and feet or some such.) Anyway, it was a really interesting article on a topic that has fascinated me so much I, you know, wrote a book about a surrogate mother. (Of course, that's not all it's about, but she is the central character.) I think this is one of those things that many of us just don't get -- no but really, why would someone want to be a surrogate? -- and is also still so relatively new and unusual that the weird, futuristic biology of it is rather stunning. The things the human body can do! As the article says, "what kind of woman would carry a child to term, only to hand him over moments after birth? Surrogates challenge our most basic ideas about motherhood, and call into question what we've always thought of as an unbreakable bond between mother and child."

The article also discusses how many surrogate mothers are military wives -- which makes sense, I guess, when you think about it -- and the mixed reactions surrogates have to life after their pregnancies. It's really fascinating how in some cases it's looked at as a purely financial agreement, while in others, the families really want to have a close relationship with their surrogates; some of the surrogates say it's easy to say goodbye to the baby and others admit to finding it deeply upsetting.

The surrogate in my book was, from the start, a bad choice -- she's not quite the stable, competant woman you want carrying your child -- and the novel is about her running away weeks before her due date. As I start to think about actual humans actually reading this book, I sometimes worry about real surrogate mothers -- who I'm sure are, for the most part, incredible people -- being annoyed at the portrayal. But the thing is, if Susannah were a good and responsible and balanced surrogate and everything had gone very well, there would be no story. It's all about trouble when you're writing fiction.

Oh, and then there's this upcoming movie about a surrogate mother! A comedy! Starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Jeesh. Guess we all thought it was an interesting idea, huh. Well, here's to very selfishly hoping people aren't sick of surrogates by July.

wonder

2008-04-01T18:50:00.002-04:00

This is so weird and wonderful, but here, now, today, just as I was preparing to write a gushing post about how much I loved The Invention of Everything Else, how it transformed the city for me, how the writing's lyricism wound its way into my skull, how I miss the characters already, I found out that Samantha Hunt wrote a blurb for my book. I love this author (as you know if you've been reading this blog since I first read The Seas), and it's an understatement to say I'm thrilled (and surprised and psyched) that she was generous enough to read my book and say such very nice things (keep in mind I don't know even know her). Phew. So now I feel weird writing about her book but rest assured it's great.

This book business is so strange -- I find myself wowed again and again by the generosity of strangers, of writers willing to take me, in one way or another, under their wings. So far, when I think about, the book has been read almost exclusively by strangers. And that feels like magic, like it's taken off without me, which, for writing and children alike, I suppose is the ultimate goal.

I need a drink. A bookish drink.

internets

2008-03-31T06:40:00.001-04:00

Some poems! And look how cool this site is. I love the way it looks, and its manifesto is rather revolutionary, really, as lit mags go. Good poems in there, too.

Oh yeah, and, on a more embarrassing note...I finally joined Facebook. Why? I don't know! Are you on Facebook? Friend me or whatever!

working for the weekend

2008-03-30T14:23:00.004-04:00

It occurs to me that when I was reading the very funny Then We Came to the End a while back part of what I liked so much about it was that it was about work, and the selves that we are at work versus the selves we are the rest of the time, and now I come to the end of Dorothy Richardon's Backwater and realize that in a way, despite being a very different book, it's about the pretty much the same thing. Miriam's life is defined by the ways in which she can make money, and so far each volume of the novel relates to a different job. And Miriam's predicament is even more claustrophobic than just an ordinary old plodding un-love for work, though, since she literally lives at work, boarding at the school with the other, rough-edged girls from North London."She was holding back from the gnawing of the despair that had made her sick with pain when she heard once more the jingle-jingle, plock-plock of the North London trams...'If you can't have what you like you must like what you have,' said Miriam over and over to herself as she went with heavy feet up the four flights of stairs." Rough.

This book deals so frankly with the disappointments of work and the difficulties of being a single woman without any money at the turn of the century, in a way that reminds me a little bit of Henry James's In the Cage. And I love what a hater Miriam is. Listen to her riding the Hato Bus here: "But I hate everybody...What foolish nonsense. You musn't think such things. You will make yourself unpopular...She must keep her secret to herself. This Brighton life crushed it back more than anything there had been in Germany or at Banbury Park...It lurked just beyond the poplars in the park, at the end of the little empty garden at twilight, amongst the books in the tightly packed bookcase. It was here, too, in and out of the sunlit days."

I've just started the third volume, Honeycomb, and things aren't looking much better for Miriam. The volume starts with her getting off a train in the woods, feeling stimulated and energetic and full of hope for this new post as a governess in a private home. Everything's looking up! It's spring! New beginnings, etc! But of course, she steps foot in the house and realizes, with a sinking sensation, oh wait. This will just be annoying in a new set of ways...

time is on my side

2008-03-26T07:48:00.001-04:00

1) from Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else:

"What was it to suddenly come awake? To suddenly fall asleep? Particularly while Freddie was standing there just beside him? What would she think of him if her were to stretch out underneath one of the pine massifs that are not really pine massifs but street lamps? To take off his shoes and dip his feet into a brook that might have trickled across the island of Manhattan two hundred years before but had since been staunched and subverted by culverts, bubbling up as a filthy puddle, a sparrow's oily bathtub? What was it to suddenly come awake? It was terrifying. Yes, he thought. I am terrified, but I don't want it to end. If time is so porous that a full-grown man can slip inside it while holding fast to the hand of his wife, what then can he rely on? The solidity of a hand? He doubted it."

2) from Jay Griffiths' A Sideways Look at Time:

"When it comes to defining time, only the oceanic need apply...Now is 'the instant,' etymologically 'standing on' the shoreline of time, one toe in the tidal present, one toe in the ocean's deep--and full--forever, the poise of pure potential. Here, with the child on the shore, at the brinkful rim of events--where the Moment is not the opposite of the Eternal but its only possible realization--is where time happens and every watch which thinks it tells the time should be taken off, flung into the sea, into the ocean, in to the waters of time itself."

have you ever wondered how buttons are made?

2008-03-26T07:44:00.000-04:00

well, here you go.

lutz lust

2008-03-25T07:16:00.000-04:00

The possibility of reading Gary Lutz for the first time is one of those reading experiences I am actually jealous of – his prose is so singular it always (and especially that first time!) seems to crank my brain a few degrees to the left. Or maybe to the right. At any rate, his newest book which is really more like chapbook which is really more like a pamphlet is called Partial List of People to Bleach, from this cool small press called Future Tense Publishing. Lutz is what people call a "prose stylist," which seems to mean "person who writes in interesting ways" but which always strikes me as a weird term because, really, aren't all writers prose stylists in one way or another? Anyway, what I love about his writing are his descriptions of things that manage to be surprising, strange, surreal, funny, frightening, and totally accurate all at the same time. He has the most muscular verbs!

Like: "First, my apartment, which was just mounds of dirtied clothes, newspapers, index cards, depilatories, razors, and paper plates forming a ragged little semicircle around wherever I happened to be sitting on the floor when I was home. (I owned no furniture; I was afraid of heights."

Or: "I got my revenge by ladling out all A's--even an A for the kid who slept through my entire last term, because I was jealous of his frictionless, rubber-limbed sleep."

forms, functions

2008-03-23T11:06:00.001-04:00

There are, now on view in Chelsea, two different exhibits of sculptures by two of my favorite artists, Amy Cutler and Marcel Dzama, both of whom usually make paintings and illustrations. Hm!! The film--with live piano accompaniment!--at the Dzama show is well worth a visit.

Also, a secret gallery!:

And of course, the end of the world:

Art makes me hungry for diner french fries. Or should I say, space fries:

Later. Construction site art straight from the:

And in Carroll Gardens, a new store, full of wonderful art books and art things:

Everyone's making something.

wonderland

2008-03-21T11:21:00.003-04:00

"'I was frightened at first, but then, the longer I stood, my hand held within my mother's palm, the mystery of the moon and the idea that there was something unknowable in our world had my heart racing. The possibility for wonder, for marvel and stupefaction, felt, perhaps, like the greatest freedom I had known so far in my life.'"

So says a character in Samantha Hunt's dreamy and beautiful The Invention of Everything Else. I read this passage, serendipitously enough, right after listening to the great interview with Hunt on the Bat Segundo show, where she talks about that sense of wonder, and how the book is both a salute to the imaginative spirit and an excuse for both author and readers to exist for a little while in a time when mad scientists still invented important things on their own, and lived in hotels and talked to pigeons. Well, that's my paraphrasing anyway. I really do love those Bat Segundo interviews -- awkward moments, um's, background noise and all. I love how long they are, and how, I guess, unfettered. Unslick. It's like Fresh Air in shirtsleeves. Anyway. I really recommend listening to Hunt's -- she has such an interesting mind.

It's true that this book is full of wonder. Nikola Tesla's wonder at the possibilities, Louisa's wonder at him. It's delightful to disappear into this New York City of the past, too. In a way it reminds me of Ticknor -- another daring act of ventriloquism, another poetic exploration of a fascinating mind and the texture of its unconventional thoughts. I find these books delicious and appealing in the same way an antique diver's suit is, or a bathysphere, or the journals of Ernest Shackleton. Something about the appeal of that antique sense of adventure, a belief in the possibilities, a certain something that now seems not innocent exactly but... well, full of wonder, I guess.

I'm at a dangerous part of TIOEE, though -- a little more than halfway through, and so involved that my brain says, Pssst, just drop everything and read the rest! You could finish it in along sitting! And I have to be like, No, brain. Come on. You know I have stuff to do. But still, it's tempting.

it's always 4 a.m. at han bat

2008-03-19T07:13:00.003-04:00

Recently I was asked why I keep this blog, and I am in the process of formulating a satisfying (hopefully!) answer to this question. Truthfully, a lot of the time I don't know why, and think maybe it's silly and pointless. Then, a few days later, I'll read or see something and think, ooh I want to post about that, and perhaps there is the real answer. It's similar to why I write, I think. I can paste on any number of explanations about wanting to be in conversation with books I've loved --well, I guess that's true -- and wanting to make something for this imaginary reader who is basically me at 14 -- that's true, I think, too -- but probably mostly it is because if I don't write I feel weird, and I miss it, and I keep thinking of things I want to write about. Maybe this is an unromantic way of thinking about it. Rereading that, I realize I make it sound like an addiction! Yeesh. At least it's safer than smoking.

Or is it.

Anyway, I was mulling over this question last night while getting Korean food with Carrie TryHarder. We've talked about this question before, and it's always a little silly -- the foregone conclusion is that the point of blogging is exactly what I just said: that I got Korean food with Carrie TryHarder, who I met through our blogs. It's about finding other booky people who want to talk about books, and finding out about authors and books and events and artists you would never have known about before, and giving shout-outs to underappreciated things you bossily want other people to know about. It's also, sometimes, about hashing out thoughts I imagine will end up in some other format one day, maybe -- like with Backwater, I keep thinking some essay about the experience of reading this whole epic might be in order, in a hundred years when I finish it, and this is sort of a place to keep notes and think things through along the way. I think maybe I started this blog because I loved Unprintable Version so much. I don't know.

But then I'll get a comment from someone who is not my mom (or who is! hi ma!) or who I never even knew read this blog, and it warms the cockles of my ice-cold heart. It's a curious kind of connecter, sometimes, this internet of ours.

rare dolphin

2008-03-13T07:29:00.002-04:00

If you've been watching/reading/listening to way too much news lately, as I know I have, you will likely especially appreciate this brilliant new blog my friend started: raredolphin.blogspot.com. There's a quiz everyday with three headlines -- you have to guess which one is fake (the other two are from cnn.com) -- it's surprisingly hard and incredibly hilarious!

backwater

2008-03-11T06:26:00.001-04:00

I'm almost finished with Backwater, the second volume of Dorothy Richardson's quiet epic Pilgrimage, and I suddenly realized I haven't written much about it. I think this is because the book's effect is cumulative in what feels like a singular way. What really strikes me about this book is Miriam's deep-seated angst -- the sheer, claustrophobic dearth of choices she sees for her life. It's really so sad! In Pointed Roofs, she is in Germany, seeing a whole new array of ways to think and act; she experiences some sort of spiritual breakthroughs with her music in particular. But now she's back in London, working at a similar girl's school, not nearly as enchanted and in fact feeling as though the world is closing in on her. (Ugh, to be an intelligent woman without any money at the turn of the century. No thanks.) And the only escape she has, the only window into both the world and her true self at once, is reading.

In fact, she experiences this epiphany of sorts while reading an article called "The Royal Commission of Education" -- sounds fascinating, right? -- "As she read the room grew still. The memory of the talking and clinking supper-table faded, and presently even the ticking of the clock was no longer there. She raised her head at last. No wonder people read newspapers. You could read about what was going on in the country, actually what the Government was doing at that very moment. Of course; men seemed to know such a lot because they read the newspapers and talking about what was in them... Here was the free press that Milton had gone to prison for. Certainly it made a great difference. The room was quite changed. There was hardly any pain in the silent cane-seated chairs. There were really people making the world better. Now. At last." (Guess she wasn't reading today's NY Times! Hey-oh!)

But really, I think this is why any of us reads anything, isn't it -- but what a small world she lives in, that she has to sneak away to secretively read the newspaper, and that it seems to open everything up -- just the smallest little article. And then -- I don't mean to shock anyone, I mean, this is a family blog and everything -- she moves on to novels. "Almost every night she read until two o'clock. She felt at once that she was going wrong; that the secret novel-reading was a thing she could not confess...It was a sin. She had read somewhere that sin promises a satisfaction that it is unable to fulfil. But she found when the house was still and the trams had ceased jingling up and down outside that she grew steady and cool and that she rediscovered the self she had known at home, where the refuge of silence and books was always open...And the discovery that it was not quite dead...brought her warm moments of reassurance."

Reading is such a mystery, really. I think I know exactly what she means -- I think without reading one feels so trapped, like the world is so small and ordinary. I love that reading allows her to connect with her true self. And that it can be so pleasurable to read about reading.

botched experiments

2008-03-09T13:41:00.004-04:00

Another unforgettable description from Oryx and Crake: "He gets to his feet, stretches, scratches around the old scabs on his back -- they feel like misplaced toenails..." That phrase really makes me want to scream. And here, a line that tells you everything you ever need to know about Jimmy/Snowman, the totally normal guy who somehow ends up as the last man standing after disease decimates the earth: "So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him." Really, there is something magical about that kind of line. It makes sense at the time, for the situation he finds himself in then, and it makes even more sense once you've read the entire book -- you realize what an important clue it was, a keyhole into his inner self.

What I like best about this book is the unbelievably vivid, scary, post-climate-change, post-genetic-engineering-running-amok world that's imagined. The people that mad genius Crake has created not only small of citrus and mate like baboons, but they purr, and heal themselves with these ultrasound-like vibrations. Get this: "There'd been quite a few botched experiments, as Snowman recalled. One of the trial batch of kids had manifested a tendency to sprout long whiskers and scramble up the curtains; a couple of the others had vocal-expression impediments; one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring." I want one of those cat-kids!

File this book with Maureen McHugh and Kevin Brockmeier: amazing, imaginative, brainy sci-fi, minus genre tropes and easy answers. What a fun/terrifying thing to read! Thank god for book swaps.

after words

2008-03-05T20:44:00.001-05:00

Oryx and Crake is turning out to be a tremendously satisfying read. It is the curious kind of story that is told after all the action is over. (Well, I guess that's any post-apocalyptic tale, really, huh.) The ruined world Snowman stumbles through in his bedsheet-toga is one of interminable aftermath. Something terrible has happened, but since Snowman doesn't want to think about it, the narration skirts around the details, offering only (really fascinating) glimpses of this world in which environmental contaminants and genetic testing have gone insanely awry. (There's nothing like sitting on the subway and reading about infestations of snats--rats with snake tails! Why?!) Most of the actual action happens in lengthy flashbacks in which Snowman remembers his life as Jimmy, when other humans were alive and civilization was intact, if coming unhinged.

Early in the novel, Snowman considers how he could be keeping some sort of diary or ledger, "But even a castaway assumes a future reader, someone who'll come along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate. Snowman can make no such assumptions: he'll have no future readers, because the Crakers can't read. Any reader he can possibly imagine is in the past."

This strikes me as a gutsy way to construct a novel, a structure warned against in writing classes. But I guess if you're Margaret Atwood you're like, Bitch please, I'll structure my novel however I like. And it feels right; it feels inseperable from the story itself; of course the book has to be structured that way, to capture the nostalgia and bone-crushing loneliness of this world. So we have Snowman wandering around rather aimlessly looking for food, with no real plot to speak of, and the whole story, the whole forward momentum, is in the novel's past. Even Snowman is aware of it, that anyone he could tell his story to is in the past, his entire world is in the past.

Maybe I should read that there Handmaid's Tale...

amusements

2008-03-02T21:48:00.000-05:00

be kind, make stuff

2008-03-01T09:06:00.003-05:00

We saw Be Kind Rewind last night and predictably enough, I found it utterly charming. How odd and interesting, to see a movie that views bootlegging and DIY user-generated content as an expression of creativity, energy, and a particular kind of magic -- and not as a threat, an onslaught of what one reviewer called "the mass proliferation of the mediocre." I love the wacked-out world Michel Gondry creates, and the way his movies are often about creativity in ordinary lives. This movie seemed to be about art being accessible, bringing people together, adding an extra dimension to an ordinary person's life, and making people want to create more art of their own, and to me this seems important. It draws a certain connection between the world of YouTube and that of garage bands, to anyone who creates art not knowing or caring what will come of it. It also felt like a stand against crotchety protests to the democratization of art, a porthole to the sincere, exuberant joy of making something for no real reason other than to make it, and maybe to show it to a friend. I'm reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's great writing rule: "Write to please just one person. If you open the window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will catch pneumonia." Making something to amuse your friends is no small feat, and loads less lofty than trying to Communicate with the Canon. I don't know. There are so many ways to get discouraged, and I'm all for protecting against that, for making room and time in life for creativity.

Of course, all of this seems a bit too analytical a response to something that is, after all, about sheer antic craziness and fun. I'm into that, too.

art therapy

2008-02-28T21:52:00.000-05:00

In response to some unassociated, vague floating sense of boredom and discontent in the air (in my air, anyway), I've been cramming my head full of art. Even if I'm not feeling particularly inspired, at least others are, I guess, is the point. I loved Barbara Bloom's witty collections at ICP, and, in their archives exhibit, one beautiful, sad, hypnotic video called "Overture" by an artist named Stan Douglas, where antique footage of winding mountainside train tracks were combined with a reading of the opening passages of Swann's Way.

Then at the New Museum, there's a whole exhibit devoted to collage in its various forms. From their blurbage, "Historically collage tends to appear in times of trauma and social change. The artists in 'The Unmonumental Picture' exploit the power of found images to communicate the unease, displacement, and anger peculiar to our times." Isn't that interesting? Is that why I've been so interested in collage lately? Or is it just that I'm too lazy to draw? Hmm. Oh and course, then there was an arcing, gravity-defying tidal wave of chairs. You know I loved that.

Is this a weird response to feeling the late-winter blahs? I'm also reading like a thousand books at a time. I feel wildly under-stimulated, maybe that's it, and thus this books-and-art benders. I know, it's very dangerous. I should probably just drink more beers. Also, I think watching Obama speeches over and over again actually helps. Really, it does!

What do you do?

2 things about Oryx and Crake

2008-02-26T20:28:00.002-05:00

1. Isn't it funny how blogging affects your reading? I started two (TWO!) books yesterday (you know, one train book, one home book) because of bloggery: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which I picked up at Carrie TryHarder's book swap, and which my pal Siobhan told me to read (via the comments here!), and Hell, which I've had forever, due to my ongoing Kathryn Davis obsession, but had been warned against, and which JRL blogged about not too long ago over at Ward Six. Oryx and Crake is all crazy post-apocalyptic spookiness, and Hell is, um, I don't even really know. Spookiness, yes, but/and also: a dollhouse. But they make nice complementary readings (I think?), along with Dorothy Richardson's Backwater, and actually, some other things. I am a slutty reader right now.

Anyway, in Oryx and Crake this morning I encountered a truly great description. It involves the main character's mother "smiling her increasingly weird smile, as if someone had yelled Smile! And goosed her with a fork." It is so rare and so wonderful to come across a truly great description. To be truly great, for me, a description has to be both totally surprising and startlingly accurate. Dorothy Parker's "She looked as new as a peeled egg" is on my list, as is a line from Mary Gaitskill's Veronica that I wrote about here a long time ago: "He moves like he's being yelled at by invisible people whom he hates but whom he basically agrees with. He smooths his hair like somebody just yelled, 'And look at that hair!'"

2. Also from Oryx and Crake (I could say that all day, couldn't you? Oryx and Crake. Oryx and Crake):

At the bonfire Jimmy was anxious about the animals, because they were being burned and surely that would hurt them. No, his father told him. The animals were dead. They were like steaks and sausages, only the still had their skins on.

And their heads, thought Jimmy. Steaks didn't have heads. The heads made a difference: he thought he could see the animals looking at him reproachfully out of their burning eyes. In some way all of this -- the bonfire, the charred smell, but most of all the lit-up, suffering animals -- was his fault, because he'd done nothing to rescue them. At the same time he found the bonfire a beautiful sight -- luminous, like a Christmas tree, but a Christmas tree on fire. He hoped there might be an explosion, as on television.

I read this right after seeing the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit and maybe that's why it reminded me so much of his quiet, suffering animals. This passage has a similar feel to the artwork, somehow -- a quiet observation of something both horrible and beautiful, horrible because it is beautiful, beautiful because it is horrible. Also, explosions. And being both excited and melancholy about them, which is how Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder paintings seemed to me.

i want to believe

2008-02-25T21:20:00.001-05:00

This was pretty cool. I loved the Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim, and in particular, his amazing and eerie creatures: life-size arrow-quilled tigers suspended in space; a flying parade of wolves colliding into a clear wall; live snakes and canaries (not together!). What struck me most was how uncanny they seemed, how about to pounce. Motion captured in space; tableaus both kinetic and imposingly static. The Guggenheim is always a really weird place to see anything, though. For me, extreme vertigo is part of any experience there, and so whatever I see seems more terrifying and precarious than it would anywhere else. I'm pretty sure I hate it, actually.

But then we saw Chuck Close! And I felt faint with star-struckedness.

a wild and threatening confusion

2008-02-21T21:18:00.004-05:00

Lately I've been listening to a recording of South! Ernest Shackleton's awesomely-named account of his last Antarctic mission, thanks to the wonderful LibriVox site. (The texts are read by volunteers, so it can be a mixed bag. But I love the totally Jersey way my current reader says "sled dawgs" -- it's strangely perfect.) There is nothing like the journal of a doomed, ice-bound explorer to make winter seem like no big deal. (At one point he describes the weather as pleasantly warm -- 37 degrees! And this, before polar fleece.) His descriptions of pack ice and readings of the different kinds of ice they encounter and what they mean are especially beautiful. He also has a terrific sense of humor, especially when describing the dogs' antics (um, this is before they have to kill and eat them!), or describing how gathering penguins reacted to one crewman's Scottish music with dismay.

When we lived in Minneapolis we saw the film South! screened at the awesome and weird little Bell Museum, with live musical accompaniment. The imagery was incredibly stark and beautiful -- particularly once the ship gets stuck in the ice, and the men are forced to wait and wonder what will happen, living out there on floating continents of ice, lunching on seal meat, playing football, and training and racing their dogs to stay occupied.

Meanwhile, with his ship and crew stuck in the pack ice, Shackleton writes: "A faint twilight around noon of each day reminded us of the sun...the movement of the floes was beyond all human control, and there was nothing to be gained by allowing one's mind to struggle with the problems of the future, though it was hard to avoid anxiety at times."

Good advice, that!

the burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places

2008-02-20T06:16:00.000-05:00

Then, out of nowhere, the city offers another reason to love it: semicolons on subway signs.

even the dirty ones

2008-02-18T17:34:00.000-05:00

Awesome!
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