Paper Cut Flophouse

"I am like a tight-rope dancer who in the midst of his performances should suddenly discover that he knows nothing about tight-rope dancing"

2008-06-04T14:40:00.001-04:00

“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours, I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. …

I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife. It’s no joking matter. After such crises of despair I doze for hours half conscious that there is that story I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again – and at last go to bed completely done-up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.

I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted, mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can’t write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. I haven’t read for days. You know how bad it is when one feels one’s liver, or lungs. Well I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid – in an evading shape. I can’t get hold of it. It is all there – to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it no more than you can grasp a handful of water. “

Joseph Conrad in a letter to Edward Garnett (husband to Constance).
P424-5 of Joseph Conrad: Three Lives by Frederick Karl, FSG 1979

According to Karl, in the days after his first child had been born, before he started writing "Youth" and The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad struggled to make progress in his novel, The Rescuer, and "began to split into pieces." "One result," Karl writes, "was the emergence of Marlow... Conrad’s route toward the discovery of Marlow is mysterious; we really do not know precisely how or why he came to depend on this figure. Nevertheless, his next three works all used Marlow in varying degrees of dependency."

"O les beaux jours!"

2008-03-28T15:25:00.006-04:00

The first time I saw Beckett’s Happy Days I was sitting in French class in front of a wheeled tv-vcr unit that our high school called a “multimedia cart.” It was the spring of my senior year, after the AP exams; the certainty that high school would soon be behind us had exaggerated our ironic detachment from academics. That day, our French teacher, who had wanted all her life to be an actress instead of a French teacher, played us a video of her performance as Winnie, showing us her life on the stage, buried up to her waist and then to her neck, chattering and smiling frantically.

We snickered, I think, yet it was a traumatic moment: a vision of hell, as a place not of endless light or timelessness, but a place where your finest performance of the person you believe yourself to be ends up passing as comedy for the amusement of people who will forget you.

"Where John Henry Fell Dead"

2008-03-28T14:46:00.003-04:00

John Henry had a little woman,
The dress that she wore was red,
She went down the track and she never came back,
Said she was going where John Henry fell dead.

There was a time in my life when I listened to a lot of old songs, dirt music, folk, blues, shape-note singing, and believed in a strange theory: that the fact that “red” and “dead” rhymed, the fact that that the line “went down the track” demanded that “she never came back,” that “blue” and “you” were inseparable meant that in spite of the utopia we thought we were promised in words, we were doomed by the rhymes and inner harmonies of our common language to live out the same old sad songs.

I know now that there are many authors of our doom, and fates that the finest machinations of language cannot escape.

Famous First Words

2007-12-23T22:00:00.001-05:00

This is a negative way to begin, I know. Let me stress that my main impulse is not to poke fun (the sentence, by the way, is a pastiche […]).

A pair of examples might make my point more obvious. The first is a portion of the opening passage of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady:

Now here is the opening paragraph of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier:

I would like to explore this transition by looking at the opening passage of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift:

Consider the squared-off diction of the opening sentence of Wilson's 1925 review of a work by Mencken:

Pynchon's opening sentence is, it's true, arrestingly declarative:

Breathing Lessons opens as follows:

He announced his new prose in On the Road's first lines:

Boris Pasternak chose to begin his memoir, Safe Conduct, with a curious description of an incident:

With the opening sentence Mr. McFarland not only situates us, but also plants the subliminal conviction that Francis is wrong, that there will be some other metamorphosis and that the 'slow, affable decline' will be anything but.

Here is a fairly random sampling of some opening lines:

I could go on, but the point is made.

(Sven Birkerts)

An Op-Ed for the Chairman

2007-12-16T08:48:00.000-05:00

Guy in government exclaim that no reading which is fun equals not doing good in school on grades. Also fewer money in life after school. Also not "communicating clearly." He say "fact" is number people reading say "I am enjoy books" who are rich. Like dorks with flashlight in bed i.e. unathletic. This guy spend dollars from people pay taxes! For this tax money? Not right. This guy has write books around poems. Maybe he also write poems? I not knowing. But basically what is? Is government poetry. Is such right? No is not right. Thus I contain many questionings. I demand knowing! Why government having poems instead of more extra wars? Why not one more very small war in tiny country for more gas? My gas costing many more dollars. Maybe I pay less taxes to government for more wars not poetry? Hey is this threat? No no threat is simply one idea I am suggest. Is free. So federal poem guy you exclaim reading "fun." Well I am disagree. Also I am make money too which I spend on like excellent big television. Is this not being patriot? Hey I thought dollars were for helping America not for nagging America in re book reports. Whoa the truth "hard"? Easy. I just "call a spade a spade." Perhaps you are from olden times when all had was books. Well excuse me this is now when we are watch athletic television and are make more money than you did in times of old. Hey government poet this is way things are why not "wake up and smell coffee." As they say this is not your grandfather's "fun"! What it all boils down? Welcome to America now get out. Really why not you up to Canada? Canadites all sit inside and read books and get sickly. Canadite government has lots of tax dollars but Communist bad medicine! Not like America! Maybe in olden times there was equation "reading for pleasurable equals later make money." But not modern now. Read your report? I have not. I skim article on Internet. If there one thing I learn while schooling? I am important. I matter. If skim something? Therefore opinionated. And robustly! Then I am voicing democracy. Ergo "hell and damnation" if my dollars going for your poems! Are we back to tax dollars thrown for artists smearing selves with chocolate inside the hot and tangy? I am vote no on chocolate book report! Go back Soviet Union Mister Poems because we are have had it! For you I am "communicating clearly" enough?

Know Nothing

2007-11-30T08:07:00.000-05:00

A full-page ad in The New Yorker. The May 21 issue. A young girl, staring confidently at the camera, smiling. The copy at the top of the page, the copy ostensibly transcribing this girl's voice, reads: "I just saw my first Broadway show. Now I'm writing one, too." I see this, and I just want to punch a wall or something. Is this what it's come to? You only need to experience one of something before you're qualified to create one of those things? The usual comparisons spring to mind, the usual clichés: brain surgery, rocket science. Ah, but yes, of course, the beauty of the arts is that you don't need to have experienced any of them in order to create one of them. You don't actually need to have read a single novel in order to sit down and string a hundred thousand words together. But what is writing supposed to be? Is it just self-expression? Is it just therapeutic? Is it some kind of psychic equivalent of taking a dump? You don't have to be in awe of the pile of shit that humanity has already created in order to add your own small contribution every day. You don't ever need to consider it. You make yours, you get rid of it, you feel better, you feel like you've accomplished something. Is it Weinberger who mentions casually in one of his essays that in Egypt three thousand years ago there was an entire school of poetry devoted to the subject of anxiety that everything had already been said? Everything has already been said, but if you don't read, if you don't go to the theater every night, if you never go to the library, if you never go all the museums you can afford, go to them over and over again, if you don't have any awareness or knowledge of the mountain of everything that's already been created, if all you are is empowered, then you don't have to even know that everything has already been said, you don't have to have anxiety about it, you don't have to be concerned about where your play, opera, poem fits in the magnificent, aggregating, oceanic temple of what has come before, you don't have to even worry about ever having a reader, a viewer, an audience, all you need do is sit down, and let it out, and feel better. (My conscience: Is my worrying here just one miniscule reiteration of the long war between the Classical and the Romantic?) This ad is an ad for an investment firm that funds some sort of theater program in the schools. The girl in the photograph—is she a model, or could she actually be a beneficiary of this program, could these actually be her words?—is (partly?) of African descent; I am (mostly, as far as I know, but who knows?) of European descent. Do I have a right to complain in any way about any amount of money shuffling from Wall Street to (presumably) underfunded arts programs, to kids who benefit from those programs? (From yet another corner of my conscience: What about the irony of complaining about the celebration of empowerment and self-expression on a blog post?) And yet, and yet, there's some great wrong here. Does this have something to do with The Cult of the Amateur? (Why do I have this sinking feeling that the contemporary celebration of the untrained has something to do with a Will Rogers populism mutated by Ronald Reagan economics into a new and subtle way of keeping the citizenry crushed under the heel of its own proud ignorance?) In this same issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes: "In commencement speeches and the like, people say that education is all about opportunity and expanding your horizons. But some part of it is about shrinking people, about teaching them that they are not the measure of everything. […] We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence. Humility is good. There is not enough of it these days." Is this what's missing? Do I want the young girl, rather, to be saying, "I just saw my first Broadway show; I feel humbled and in awe of this dying art, and I'm immediately writing my senators, even though I can't yet vote, to urge increased funding for the arts; and I'm going to get an after-school job in order to pay for my new habit of going to see Broadway shows, because in the next few years I'm going to see a hundred of them, and then, if I'm lucky and I work my ass off, I'm going to go to Tisch, and I'll keep writing all this while, but I'll know, from all my reading and theater-going, that my work will surely be nothing in comparison, because as Jean Rhys said: 'All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.'" But investment firms presumably don't have any interest in funding awe; and I don't want the world to revert to what it was before Free to Be, You and Me, because that was even worse; but maybe my real subject here is this: Shouldn't the teaching of writing really—secretly, ultimately—be the teaching of reading?

"Men and Women in Space" : Notes on a Reading by Don Delillo

2007-10-15T00:35:00.000-04:00

We are waiting for Don Delillo to appear.

As usual for events of this sort, there are multiple introductions. Someone from the 92^nd St Y introduces the writer, Dana Spiota, whose job it is to introduce Delillo himself. The earnest reverence in Spiota's speech is both familiar and embarrassing. She praises his books as "the secret antidote to the depressing consumerist hum we all live with," but it's unclear whether she's suggesting that they stop the hum of consumerism or merely cure us of our depression, and, in either case, the claim sounds false. It might be true if you took out the word, "antidote." And what does she mean by "that particular American longing"? Is that an American quality? Is longing - longing itself, not the object of that longing – specific to a culture? No one asks these questions. There will be a time later for "select" questions, but the questions will be reserved for Delillo. In the ritual of the high literary reading, the introductions are only symbolic gestures; each is an incantation to transport the reader from the profane world at large into the sacred space of literature. The more introductions, one supposes, the deeper we go into the world of the book and the less we actually listen to the meta-language of praise.

The applause begins when she says his name.

Don Delillo is bigger in person, leggier, than what one expects. He's almost athletic as he walks to the podium. In his green buttoned-down shirt and brown pants, the author looks like a middle-aged man who has dressed himself. Maybe his wife tried to stop him – doesn't that look too earthy? – or maybe she's given up on trying to change his mind.

"There's a novel, and there is a reading," he says into the microphone. We are quiet. The audience has been awed by his books into a silence some of us believe is holy.

You think of the opening to Underworld: "He speaks in your voice American and there's a …" but he doesn't speak in your voice. His actual voice is not the voice that you heard in your head – why should it have been, when even your own voice doesn't match that sound? Don Delillo speaks in the voice of an old woman who's been smoking for so long that the years of ash and fumes have ravaged her vocal chords to something mannish, but underneath the velvet and gravel, there remains a fundamental womanliness. At times, you wonder if he has a lisp; there's a cottony thickness around some of his consonants, the word "troop" seems to have more letters, an extra 'h.' You hear it again in the end of the first chapter, which sounds stickier than when you read it by yourself: "Call or fold. Felt or baize."

He sniffles.

There is a novel, and there is a reading. The sentence sounds odd; it would be easier to hear if he'd used plurals. He tells the audience that he has reordered the novel for the reading, choosing two characters, Keith and Lianne, and following their stories chronologically, alternating back and forth.

It's surprising to hear people laughing. You never laugh reading his work. Nothing escapes that dire tone or your awareness of his work as the performance of a writer.

He pauses to drink. The microphone picks up and amplifies the fleshy, gurgling sound of a man swallowing. Smacking his lips. The way he might say "Pafko at the Wall."

He says "police" instead of "priest." He is the high priest of American letters, but he looks like the guy sitting across from you on the subway. He shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet as he fields questions from the moderator, questions written by the people in the audience on blank, white index cards that had been tucked into their pamphlets.

In response to one question, he says that he was not happy about the idea of including a terrorist in the novel. He says, "I felt I had to. I felt it would not be a fully responsible novel if I did not include a terrorist." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by the novel's responsibility, except to say that he had to try to understand the individual inside the structure, the individual "bonding with a group of more or less like-minded men…this blood connection that becomes more important than politics or religion finally." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by "finally."

When the moderator, that same boyish, bearded man from the 92^nd St Y who gave the first introduction, asks him a question about architecture, Delillo says that he thinks that his novels are more three-dimensional than others' are. It's hard to know how to take this, except in a literal sense as a joke, and he isn't joking. "I don't tend to feel as comfortable," he says, "with abstract thoughts as I am with men and women in space." This answer catches some people by surprise because it goes against the mainstream criticism of Delillo as a brilliant, heady writer more interested in cerebral dialogue and aphorism than in the way real people interact with real objects in the real world. A friend turns to you and arches his eyebrow. Of course, what makes Delillo feel comfortable is not necessarily what ends up in his books, and what ends up in his books rarely makes us feel comfortable. His books do not stop "the depressing … hum" of the present, but they make the white noise seem meaningful, and that is all the comfort we can hope for.

The moderator, who has been sitting all this time at the edge of the stage in a little chair at a respectful remove from the "talent," thanks the author, and the crowd claps. Some stand in ovation, others gather their things to reach the book signing line first or to catch a cab home. Delillo disappears to the sound of applause, and the holy temple of literature falls apart, but those who leave believe they bear with them its sacred aura like a stone from the ruins.

"Help Me Get Home"

2007-10-07T14:33:00.000-04:00

I sat in Washington Square reading Bolano’s novel, The Savage Detectives, and thinking about the aura of genuineness created by all of those raw, rambling monologues, some of them purposefully inarticulate, others insane or visionary. The book wasn’t what I’d expected from all of the praise – from Susan Sontag, from John Banville, Francisco Goldman, Francine Prose, Der Spiegel, Les Inrockuptibles – it was something wilder, more varied, duller, looser, and funnier. I couldn’t read the book without thinking of what had been written about it, in part, because the book designers at FSG had put out an ugly yellow-and-black hornet of a book, striped with scribbled bands of praise, and, in part, because of the mystifying nature of that praise, in particular the puzzling, almost koan-esque blurb from Ignacio Echevarria that ran in El Pais, in which he heralded the book as “the novel Borges would have written.” You could sit on a mountain for twenty years drinking dew from the moss of your cave and meditate on that mantra; it might lead you to satori; it might leave you insane. Either way, it probably wouldn’t help your writing.

While I was reading, turning from that maddening dust jacket back to the chapter at hand, a blonde-haired boy sat down on the bench across from me, took out his guitar, and laid out a mat that said, “HELP ME GET HOME.” He was wearing a sleeveless concert t-shirt, a pair of blue scrubs, and a straw cowboy hat. He was barefoot.

I read while he sang a song about everything that was wrong in the world. Politicians lied. The military dropped bombs. People had to work too hard in miserable, unrewarding jobs. It wasn’t a very good song, and he wasn’t a very good singer. The chorus was something about waiting for love to set him free.

When he was done singing, no one clapped. In the relative silence of that small part of the park, you could tell that he had been expecting applause. In its absence, he struck up a conversation with a young girl reading, Lady Chatterly’s Lover. She was bored with Lawrence. He was in his gap year. Living on the streets in New York was easy, he said, if you didn’t mind sleeping on a little mat. The girl was impressed with his performance if not his singing. She closed her book. “It’s like camping, but everyone pays for your food and clothes,” he added. There was bravado in the way he smiled then. I looked back again at his bare feet. Love was not going to set him free, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that if he was dedicated enough to his art or to his own artful image of himself, the singing barefoot poet, that one day, when he was good and ravaged, he might write an ode to the stupid heroic self-destructive self-proclaiming sensual poetic bravado of his youth, a sprawling, nostalgic “Non, je ne regrette rien” epilogue to an old manifesto, which someone in their tearful exuberance might call “the novel that Borges would have written.”

Found Short Stories, Volume 3

2007-09-29T23:35:00.000-04:00

(Found in an essay entitled "Political Commitment in the Past Two Decades of Swedish Poetry" written by Gunnar Harding and published in the "Art and Guns" issue of Poetry East)

A boy ran up to me
I ran up to my father
Your son is burning, I said
My son came up to me and said: I'm burning
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My father went up to me and said:
can't you see that the boy is burning?
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My son ran up to me and said:
a boy ran up to me and said:
I ran up to my father and said:
can't you see that your boy is burning?
My son is my father, a boy who is running
I no longer see anyone, I said: it's burning
We've got to put it out: you and I are disappearing

(translated by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will from the Swedish original, "Napalm," written by Bjorn Harkannsson)

Coincidence in the Novel

2007-09-29T12:34:00.000-04:00

From William Logan's wild ride on the tails of Pynchon's Against the Day in the VQR:

The Novel as Juggernaut
A long novel is as difficult to shift from its course as an ocean liner; and Pynchon is no novice captain of the stout tug Coincidence, the favorite of every clumsy novelist since Thomas Hardy, if not long before. (The line of coincidence starts with Oedipus Rex—Shakespeare, Defoe, Charlotte Brontë, and many another have kept it alive.) Novels are famously more conservative in their social physics than in their propriety; random acts offend the reader’s expectation of a moral fate and undermine the Whig view of history on which much modern fiction is based. Novels that embrace the Mode of Perennial Accident—sometimes generated, like the productions of Oulipo, by chance method—often comment upon fiction in a meta-novelistic way. These are gestures of an art fatally uneasy with its means.

The Novel vs. The Short Story #1

2007-09-29T12:26:00.000-04:00

A good portion of Elif Batuman's inflammatory essay in N+1 on the death of the short story seems unfounded, but this paragraph seems worth consideration:

Novels, like short stories, are often about absences; but they are based on information overload. A short story says, “I looked for x, and didn’t find it,” or, “I was not looking anymore, and then I found x.” A novel says, “I looked for x, and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.” The novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself. The novel is a fundamentally ironic form; hence its power of self-regeneration. The short story is a fundamentally unironic form, and for this reason I think it is doomed.

In the Beginning #1:

2007-09-28T19:03:00.000-04:00

From a Review by Richard Gehr of James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand :

This is how Don DeLillo's epic Underworld opens: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."
And this is the way The Cold Six Thousand, the second volume of what James Ellroy has called his "underworld U.S.A." series begins: "They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee."
Note the contrast.

Published in the Village Voice.

So You Want to Be a Writer

2007-09-16T09:17:00.001-04:00

So this early Christian sect, the Syphileans, after life on the outskirts of the late Roman Empire had become completely unbearable, and they simply had to get out, the Syphileans wandered east—not unlike, they thought, the old Israelites in the desert—ending up, many years later, on a small island off the coast of India, a place where life was really, really miserable, in some ways even more miserable than it had been for them back when they'd been living under the thumb of Rome. The irony in all this was that, back in the old country, the Syphileans had been the strictest of any of the early Christians when it came to their religious laws; they stuck to the Bible's injunctions more rigorously than just about anybody. Remember, in that area at that time—I mean, the basic promised-land region—it was full of all sorts of different groups along the Jews-and-Jesus spectrum, who were all asking things like What do we do with this dead Jewish prophet guy? and What do we do now that there's no Temple? And they all had different answers, naturally; but the Syphileans were hard-core, so much so that when British anthropologists discovered the Syphileans a hundred years ago—having missed out on, you know, the Council of Nicea, Luther and his Theses, the Spanish Inquisition, whatnot—they were almost unrecognizable as Christians. They were like some old, beautiful, Middle Eastern fly, or flies, caught and preserved in amber. And one of the ways in which they were stuck in time was how throughly they were still sticking to all the laws about how to punish people who'd messed up. The trouble, though, was that the one copy of the Pentateuch that they'd been able to smuggle out of the old country with them had gotten sopping wet on the trip out to their new island home, and had partly rotted away in places, had completely fallen apart in others, and had had to get gently patched back together, with a little bit of educated guessing going into the patching, such that—and this was partly what was so confusing to the anthropologists—they still had all these strict laws, and they adhered to them strictly, but they'd gotten garbled up a bit. Did a man who sold doves for a living lie with his brother's wife after her monthly seclusion, but before she'd taken her ritual bath? Then they had to stone him to death. Did an angry woman drive her uncle's cattle to market and sell them for an unfair price to the priests? Then they had to mock her in the town square for three days, and then stone her to death. Did a man with a red or green boil on his skin forget to wash his clothes for a week before going to battle? Again—and, to be fair, this was how things usually played out in the original, pre-remix version, too—stoning. The great difficulty for the Syphileans was that, on this tiny little island in the Indian Ocean, there weren't any stones. And they couldn't find any adequate substitute either, like, say, coconuts, or a nice winter squash. Their island was all soft sand and dirt, and the trees were all rubbery, and the fruits and vegetables were all sort of pulpy, like ripe tomatoes. So what were they supposed to do? The priests all met to discuss the problem; after a while, they decided that, following the principle of an eye for an tooth, a tooth for an eye—some parts had just gotten slightly off—their god would accept a punishment that, even if it wasn't quite what was being asked for, was almost exactly as unpleasant. And they still had a knife they'd managed to bring along with them, and so when someone screwed up—carried burning food across running water, fondled his uncle on the Sabbath, and so on—after a brief trial, one of their judges would take the offender, cut open his stomach with the knife, and then gently slip into the incision one or two of the island's tiny, toothy, and highly irritable mongooses. Then the guy would get chased down the beach, around the outside of the island, by his family members—parents, ideally, if they were still around, but if not, siblings or children were okay, too—until, after this miserable, horrendous combination of the worst physical torture, and public humilation, and this high-school gym-class discomfort of exercise on top of all that, he died.

So you see what I mean? That is what writing should feel like. Otherwise, what the hell are you doing? Masturbating with a self-help book? Getting busy with a typewriter? That might be fun for a while with an old manual, like a classic Underwood or something, but definitely not an electric, no, because eventually, you come to the automatic carriage return, and then you'll know for sure you're not writing, because then, zip goes the platen, and, well, you're fucked.

The Diets of the Novelists (A Roman/Pompeston Collaboration)

2007-09-03T10:07:00.000-04:00

We writers are all familiar, from our days of rote memorization back when we were apprentices just starting out in MFA programs, with the list of those legendary novelists who would, and did, consume everything under the sun. The canon of the gourmands starts with Rabelais and moves on down to Cervantes, L'Abbé Prévost, and, not the least among them, Defoe. Who can forget how our writing instructors drilled these giants into our minds? Who doesn't remember their names on the chalkboards, their images raised up before us as icons, beacons of how we, too, should grow up to write everything and eat everything, our words spilling off the page like our fatty soups, our bellies gorgeously bursting the confines of our pants?

For writers, we are taught, excess is second nature. We devour the whole enchilada; we disgorge the kitchen sink; we admire most those novelists who set the bar of superabundance high. But in our private moments, we worry: Can any of us novices ever really be Dos Passos, eating everything and vomiting it all back out again on the page? Why bother aspiring to models like Melville, when it is now not just inadvisable but actually illegal to eat whaling ships in their entirety, from the hard tack to the sea anchor to the first mate to the mizzen? We throw up our hands; we cry out: We will never be Bellow!—consuming great platters spilling over with feasts of blood and offal, fabulously obese widows and skinny young shop girls, juice-soaked copies of The Forward and the Declaration of Independence—and so we hide in our basements, jotting down self-loathing haiku in pencil, weeping softly, nibbling on leftover matzo.

But the truth! The truth liberates. And time reveals all. So many of the models our writing programs hold up for us—these spectacular, all-devouring gods of the world of letters—were, in reality, we discover much later, considerably more human than the myths that have been built up around them. Young writers all know that Joyce's hunger was legendary—but are any of them ever taught that his taste was limited, quite literally, to the scatological? Tanizaki liked vast, seven-course meals prepared for him by gangs of prostitutes, it's true; but as scholars have recently discovered, he only ate the appetizers. Alas, if only more young writers knew that, although Kerouac indeed did swallow all the road kill he could find from New York to San Francisco, he didn't chew, more of them might still be around to tell the tale! Balzac claimed that he ate, drank, smoked, slept with dozens of women, and wrote—all at once—for sixteen hours a day, but almost all of his ninety-seven novels, as recent biographies have pointed out, were outsourced to Bulgarian temp agencies. Are any young writers ever taught that Hemingway, in all his many adventures around the world, only ever ate dry toast? And Dickens—magnificent Dickens!—ate anything he could find lying about in the streets of London, or abandoned in the gutters, or stuck to the insides of his chamber pot—but only if it was thinly spread on a sliced-open half of a muffin.

And what of the less omnivorous novelists? The picky eaters, the allergics in the attic, the vegetarians squirreled away in their garrets? These careers—the lives and diets that do not humble us into inaction—are even less well known. If only our writing programs would make mention of, say, the life of Fielding, who ate a reasonable three square meals a day, or Sterne, whose only dietary sin was a minor addiction to mercury! Then there's Diderot, who abused nothing but oyster shells, or Rousseau, who occasionally ate small parts of himself. Writing teachers! Don't you see that we are all of us particular in our sins, each of us unique in word, deed, and food? Thomas Wolfe smoked banana peels, had a thing for French girls wearing paper bags on their heads, and never did like the taste of anise seed; Wallace Stegner loved turned milk, smoked Gauloises from the age of six, and all his life insisted that his mother cut the edges off his sandwiches. Steinbeck was a lifelong virgin who bit the heads off ducks; Iris Murdoch painted Communist slogans on the flanks of cows as they slept in their fields; Conrad couldn't get enough of his beloved Mexican-jumping-bean-and-French-fry stew. Willa Cather led a double life as a born-again traveling icebox saleswoman with four husbands in three states and a fondness for opium; Flaubert started each day with whiskey on his corn flakes; Edith Wharton repeatedly contracted bad cases of the clap from shared bottles of near beer.

We could go on—we might mention the secret dinner parties thrown by James, Proust, Mann, and Woolf, where the four greats ate and drank nothing but air; or the cookie recipes swapped back and forth between Nabokov and O'Connor, their ingredient lists limited to ground chickpeas, sand, and the shorn wings of insects. But we'll stop here. Perhaps knowing the truth could give you some comfort; perhaps these examples could offer the young writer shoes that his or her human feet might actually fit? Perhaps this realistic glimpse of mortal, restrained, dietetic lives might provide some of you with solace—as it has done for us.

Dire Warnings #5

2007-08-29T14:17:00.000-04:00

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all of our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. All things swim and glitter.

Emerson, "Experience."

Exempli Gratia (A Blogger Labels, Google Maps, and Mac Stickies Improvisation)

2007-08-13T19:59:00.000-04:00

It was fall, and I was on vacation in Kansas City, riding my scooters around town. I own more than one scooter, and when I go on vacation I like to bring them all. Comparing the relative merits of different conveyances in new places is one of life's great pleasures.

As I buzzed about, I searched my electronic map for a good place to get pizza. The town was new to me; how was I supposed to know where to find a decent pie? Perhaps I could have asked one of the many locals I kept wheeling past, but I prefer computers—the anonymity of a screen, the honesty of cold data—to actual human interaction. This is my way. I like to think that it's the way of the future.

I hadn't had an acceptable slice since my last vacation, when I was in San Francisco, staying in a hotel down on Market Street. There's a fantastic pizzeria there—at 10 Market St., specifically, if you ever happen to be in town, and the place still exists, whenever it might be that you read this. Isn't that one of the funny things about writing, that it can outlive its subject? Just ask any of those Greek and Roman guys, or other historians from other empires that no longer exist that you learned about once, either in school or on the Internet.

Anyway, all I wanted to do was find a business, some business that sold pizza to its customers, but this was proving somewhat difficult as I whizzed up and down the narrow roads and twisting alleys of the fine Midwestern city in which I found myself on this particular vacation, even more difficult than the proverbially onerous task of finding a good hotel near LAX—which is, really, the needle in the haystack of the online generation. I know one—I mean, I know a really, really excellent place to stay near the Los Angeles airport—but I don't hand out free advice to just anyone; I like to play my cards close to the vest.

My trouble in Kansas City was, in part, logistical. I had to keep one hand on the scooter's handlebars, hold in my other hand the digital map device on which I was performing my search, and, on top of all that, keep the widget in my ear from falling out, the widget connected to the telephone I was using to call Lou. Lou is my friend with the answers. He also happens to have the most unmemorable telephone number ever: 555-7361. It's a number I always have to jot down, no matter what. Lou is my answer guy, when the non-human networks fail me. He's the guy I call when I need to connect the dots—like, say, when I want to understand why Seattle and ZIP code 98109 are not perfectly coterminous, and how exactly to get from one to another—if it's even possible to get directions from some place to a place inside it—or when I need to figure out what JFK was doing at 350 5th Ave. in New York City the day before he was assassinated. That sort of thing.

Lou, I said on my portable telephone, what does a modern, digital, scooter-driving fellow like myself need to do to get some repectable pizza on his fall vacation in Kansas City?

You need ingredients—e.g., eggs, maybe milk, Lou said.

And then? I asked.

And then you need to figure it out from there, said Lou. That's as far as I can take you. Or as far as I want to take you, he said.

Eggs and milk, I said. Very helpful examples! You're a good friend, Lou, I said, in so many ways; e.g., your always dependable advice.

No problem, said Lou. Anytime. You know the number.

Eggs, milk—good stuff, I said. I'll write myself a note.

Dire Warnings #4:

2007-07-20T00:58:00.000-04:00

This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because in whatever way we define the concept of civilization it is a certain fact that all things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Ch 2, (p 38 in the 1989 WW Norton Edition, translated by James Strachey)

Dire Warnings #3:

2007-07-20T00:39:00.000-04:00

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Journals, May 24, 1847, written on the eve of Emerson's forty-forth birthday. According to the footnote (Vol XVII, p.277) Emerson considered it one of his best sentences, but had no memory of writing it.

Dire Warnings #2

2007-07-20T00:21:00.001-04:00

For External Use Only.

Dire Warnings #1

2007-07-13T10:24:00.001-04:00

From The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

It's as though I was going steadily downhill when I imagined I was going up.

A Smart Man, A Good Book

2007-07-12T12:47:00.000-04:00

In the grand reading room of the public library, writers and researchers sit beside less experienced students of the English language. Yesterday, in a moment of frustration I found myself reading over the shoulder of the Korean girl beside me. It was a beginner’s English text book, the kind designed to give an unstuffy introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary. “Look!” it announced:

A PEN ....................... A BLUE PEN
A MAN ........................ A SMART MAN
A BOOK ....................... A GOOD BOOK

I was using a black pen, but I wanted very badly for everything else to be true. Only at that moment it didn’t seem to be a very book that I was writing – and had been writing for years now – it seemed like a mediocre book that I was incapable of finishing. Maybe if I were a smart man, I thought. A smart man could write a good book.
Further down the page, there was an even darker omen:

Do you have a bad teacher?
A stupid teacher?
A bad book?
A big apartment?

For once, I took comfort in the fact that I do not have a big apartment. Maybe there was still hope.

The Art of Survival #4: Worker's Comp

2007-06-03T21:33:00.000-04:00

Another entry in the art of survival, this one drawn an old email from a old friend, who is now a businessman:

I had dinner with Aline last night, and she said, “writers don’t die of strokes.” This fine observation came from her real life experience of seeing her boss collapse in the middle of a meeting, and probably in the middle of a sentence earlier that day.

Pathology of the writer: suicide, nervous breakdown, alcohol-related diseases, venereal diseases, boredom, bad luck, TB, dictatorship, drugs.

Pathology of the businessman: stroke, murder, plane crash, drunkenness, exotic holidays, dodgy partners, failure of the heart, failure.

At least there is some choice.

S

The Art of Survival #3: How'd They Do It?

2007-06-02T00:42:00.000-04:00

« Comment les roses de la littérature peuvent-elles naître sur le fumier de l'alcoolisme ? »

Thanks to a coincidence of the Dewey Decimal System and the university library’s idiosyncratic purchasing department, the volumes of Writers at Work published by The Paris Review were placed on the shelf next to a book called,Les Ecrivains et L’Alcool, a book which, according to its author, Michel Convin, began as an attempt to answer the question: comment font-ils pour continuer d’écrire en buvant autant? It’s a question for the ages, and one that the interviewers from the Paris Review failed to ask when they had the chance. Convin does not exhaust the mystery of how so many great writers were able to continue writing so well while drinking so much, and he doesn’t take himself that seriously (His epigraph comes from Blondin: “He had officially quit drinking, allowing himself only a few vermouths under a pseudonym.”). Convin is best, however, when he sounds serious, such as when he informs his idle readers, that “Chez Bukowski, le vomissement n’est pas un motif moral.”

The Art of Survival #2

2007-05-19T11:28:00.000-04:00

The Department of the Army Field Manual FM 21-76 - which "describes and clearly illustrates a vast array of topics and teaches you how to... make polluted water potable... construct a solar water still... capture amphibians and reptiles... make an Ojibwa bird snare... clean a snake... signal to aircraft with your body... AND MUCH MORE!" - provides this warning to the solitary writer:

Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for comfort and a passive outlook...

To overcome the first danger - the desire for comfort - you need to change the way you think of comfort. And the key to changing is reasoning: You compare your present discomfort with the discomfort you will face if captured. Your present discomfort is a temporary problem; as a prisoner your discomfort would probably continue indefinitely and be more intense. Knowing how much discomfort you can take and understanding your demand for comfort will help you carry on. Comfort is not essential!

To overcome the second danger - the passive outlook - you should know what can bring it on.

Some physical conditions contribute to the passive outlook. They include exhaustion due to prolonged exposure to cold, excessive loss of boy fluids (dehydration), excessive fatigue, weakness, and illness. You can avoid these conditions by proper planning and sound decisions.

Lack of will to keep trying can also result in a passive outlook. Lethargy, mental numbness, and indifference creep in slowly, but they can suddenly take over and leave you helpless.

Recognizing the onset of a passive outlook in a companion is important. The first signs are an air of resignation, quietness, lack of communication, loss of appetite, and withdrawal from the group. The best way to deal with such an outlook is to stop or counter the physical and mental stresses that produce it.

Following are the enemies of survival... pain, cold, heat, thirst, hunger, fatigue, boredom, loneliness.

You can increase your self-sufficiency - your ability to function competently on your own - with practice. You have opportunities to do so each day of your life: Make your own decisions and rely on yourself; explore new situations and solve problems. You must learn to accept the reality of a new situation or of an emergency and then take suitable action. This is one of the most important psychological requirements for survival. Do not sit down and worry. Stay busy!

The Art of Survival #1

2007-05-19T11:11:00.000-04:00

When Kapuscinski was still alive, Rushdie asked him how he had survived being condemned to death so many times.

"I make myself unimportant," Kapuscinski said. "I make myself seem unworthy of the assassin's bullet."

12 Students To Watch Out For In Freshman Composition

2007-04-05T21:37:00.000-04:00

The student who, after reading The Odyssey, corners you after class to ask if you also often feel 'like' Odysseus.

The student in your summer section who has a four-leafed clover tattooed on his right calf in green ink.

The student in your summer section who, a week later, also appears with a four-leaf clover tattooed on her right calf in green ink. You notice they start sitting together and, occasionally, giggle.

The student who asks questions that aren’t really questions?

The student who nods her head vigorously as you explicate on the meaning of a text, and then, when you ask her to offer her thoughts on the passage you have just explicated, draws a blank.

The student who was just 'trying to share. '

The student who reminds you on more than one occasion that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.

The student who asks if the brown stain on her assignment is a coffee stain?

The transfer student.

The transfer student from Florida.

The student who, in the beginning of her personal essay, pens the following metaphor: Life is a highway.

The student who reminds you of yourself.

A Mixed Metaphor I Am Too Furious to Fix

2007-03-08T15:58:00.000-05:00

We should think of rage as a 1979 Chevrolet Corvette, painted lung-cancer black, with a T-Top frame, 195 horsepower engine, and alloy wheels, a car someone bequeathed to you without your asking, in whose backseat you have made steamy love, pushed from zero to sixty in quiet suburban roads, shown, proudly, to your meeker friends, and finally, after twenty-eight years of hard driving, come to feel embarrassed of.

In order to dismantle it, you will have to be strategic, especially during the working week. Plead a migraine and beg your wife to leave you with the lights off. You have a tummy ache. Your middle eye has been struck blind. Lie late abed. Enjoy the silence, for it will pass. At noon, or thereabouts, slip out from under the warmth of the covers into the stiff ruggedness of a pair of overalls, blue ideally, so that while dismantling your rage you will at least look the part. In the kitchen, brew a pot of coffee, then forget about the coffee and get out the blender instead. Salt the rim of your glass. Today will be a special day. You are going to tear apart your rage for good.

Work hard all day. Wield your screwdriver and wrench liberally, like a pirate. Or, cast yourself as a hero of some sort, if this will help. Dig deep into the body of the engine, throwing away the carburetor, the valves, the pistons, the connecting rod, and finally attack the body itself, dismantling it piece by piece. (You will need larger tools for this, of course. Sledgehammer, forklift). When your neighbors pass, raise a wrench in hello. There’s Mr. West again, dismantling his rage. Ignore them. You are used to this kind of talk.

When, later, your wife and child return from school hand in hand, perfectly proportioned beside each other, like cardboard cutouts, and stare at the bones of the car in the driveway, and say, but you broke everything, agree with them and begin to apologize profusely. You didn’t know what you were thinking—exclamation point! You are a fool in middle-class clothing—exclamation point! Well, your wife replies, we will have to get another one, won’t we? Or else how will we get from place to place?

Evening will fall. The dogs, rabid and hungry, will begin to bark. Perhaps it will even start to rain, as in the movies you have seen, although the theatre of this moment will offer no comfort to you. Certainly darkness will arrive, the shadows of the streetlamps lengthening into pools, the lamps themselves hissing and bursting into fluorescence, lowering little islands of light down onto the tempestuous seas.

The rain ends. The clouds part. The universe, above you, wheels like a confusing poem. You find it dizzying, nauseating. Yes, it is all coming back, all of it, as you knew it would. So: open your toolbox and remove your screwdriver and wrench. Notice the way they glint, like knives. You are still a hero, my friend. After all, you have done nothing wrong, nothing that has not been done before. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day, and with your tools ready, bending on your hands and knees, begin to put together what you have broken, and work long through the night.

The First Lady (Redux)

2007-02-25T19:41:00.000-05:00

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this reading would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt I was in bed with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aids waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do things that would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we did anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him - it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time, the way that one feels embarrassed for people who are making fools of themselves, no matter how much one dislikes them, though I was also making a fool of myself, since, in my embarrassment, I got into bed with her.

Still, I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I’m a teacher: that’s the sort of stupid thing I might say. I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she might have been in her underwear, she might just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, she might have kept on her socks, I have no visual memory of this, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two perfectly opposite interpretations. As does this dream, since I can’t figure it out if it was treasonous or dangerously patriotic.

That was the last thing I remember clearly. I think we came out of the bedroom into the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could say a word. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. The next morning I was still humming “Maniac” when I read the president’s declaration that “our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen.”

The Art of the Novel #4:

2007-02-21T15:07:00.000-05:00

ANOTHER AMUSING ANECDOTE IN WHICH I PRESAGE MY OWN DEATH BUT DISPLACE THE BURDEN ONTO A LITERARY CHARACTER TO AVOID MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY CALLING ME WITH FEIGNED CONCERN

Whoever said that nothing human is alien to him never lived in upstate New York. I bought a boat last weekend, a big boat. I offer this information to illustrate just how very far a man can fall. When I visit the boat on Saturday at noon with my family, I wink, and, shining in the sun, the boat winks back. We are in a great and secret communion, the boat and I—the deep blue sea, the message in a bottle, boys to men, these are metaphors which are false. I was once quite deep within the problems and question of metaphors. When I lived in Manhattan, for example, its own misleading metaphor, a city I also grew to distrust and dislike, like a sentence that cannot just come out and say what it means, I intended to write a novel, and I knew shit about boats. I said that word often, novel, and it became imbued with a sense of deep suffering whenever I mentioned it, as if, every time I went to work on my novel, I was secretly going to chemotherapy. My son, Butch, (yes, I know), often asks me about this, usually when we are boating. When are you going to finish the novel, dad, he asks me. Just as soon as I have sucked back these beers, son, I reply. It is a great joke between us, the kind of joke that makes you sick to your stomach, like when Butch pours bad milk into my cereal on April Fool’s day, or my wife forgets to look at her watch on Friday night when she is out with the girls, or when my neighbor snickers and guffaws over rising gas prices. Look, buddy, I never meant for this to happen. I wasn’t the kind of person who said buddy. I was the kind of person who said “my friend.” I am, I want to be honest here, terrified at the prospect that I no longer know myself. Alternatively, I am terrified by the prospect that I know myself all to well, and this is who I am, a man who boats, and so I have grown up and into myself, like a hand into a baseball mitt. I would rather, at the end of the day, remain mysterious to myself, for it was another wise man who said the day was darkest before the dawn, whereas in own my case I have found the day is darkest at noon, when the prow of my boat is beating and pulsing across the waves, and the beers are finished, and my wife and youngest daughter are waiting for me on the shore, waving wildly, holding up juice bottles or mock pirate flags to signal me home, and I want to do something reckless, very, very badly, but there they are, my wife and child, cheering at me, happy on this fine summer day, wanting Daddy to be brave.

Sent in from the Field by Luke West

We Thank You (A 21-Note Bricolage)

2007-02-18T10:32:00.000-05:00

(1) Many thanks for thinking of [our literary journal] for your work. We aren't able to use this piece for the magazine, but we appreciate the opportunity to consider it. All of us at [our literary journal]. [sic] Thank you again. (2) Thank you for allowing us to consider your work. Though we find we are unable to use it, we consider it a privilege that you thought of us and regret that the volume of submissions precludes a more personal reply. (3) Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. We regret that we are unable to use it at this time. We wish you the best of luck placing your manuscript elsewhere. (4) Thank you for letting us consider your manuscript. We regret that it does not suit our present needs. (5) Thank you for sending us your work, but I'm afraid we can't use it in [our literary journal] at present. (6) Thank you for sending your manuscript to [our literary journal]. We will not be able to accept it for publication, but we appreciate your interest in the magazine. (7) Thank you for submitting your manuscript. We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in [our literary journal]. (8) Thank you for submitting your work to [our literary journal]. Though it doesn't meet our current needs we appreciate the opportunity to consider it for publication. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere. We are doing everything we can to reply to manuscripts in a timely way, and hope that we haven't been too slow in considering this one. Keep up the good work! (9) Thank you for submitting your work to [our literary journal]. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept it for publication at this time. We wish you the best with your writing and thank you for your interest in [our literary journal]. (10) Thank you for the opportunity to consider your manuscript. We've read it with care but have decided not to accept it for publication. Best of luck placing it elsewhere. (11) Thank you for the opportunity to consider your work. The editors have read your submission and regret that it does not meet our present needs. We wish you the best of luck placing your manuscript elsewhere. (12) Thank you for the opportunity to read your work. We regret to inform you that we will not be able to publish it. Because we understand the time and effort that goes into writing a story, we're sorry for the brevity of this reply. (13) Thank you for your recent submission. We have given careful consideration to the material but we regret that your manuscript is not suited to the current needs of the magazine. We thank you for giving us the opportunity of reading it. (14) Thank you for your submission to [our literary journal]. Unfortunately, we must pass at this time. Best of luck placing your work elsewhere. (15) Thanks for sharing your fine work with us. We receive a large number of submissions but can publish only one in a hundred. Since our space is limited, we must often turn down well-crafted writing. We wish you the best of luck in placing your work. (16) Though your work has been declined by our editors, we thank you for allowing us to consider it. (17) We have read your submission carefully and found that it does not fit our current editorial needs. However, we do appreciate your interest in our magazine. Thank you for sending your work to [our literary journal]. (18) We regret that the manuscript you submitted does not fit our current editorial needs. Thank you very much for sending us your work. (19) We regret that we are not able to place your work in our magazine. We're sorry to disappoint you, and we thank you for submitting to [our literary journal]. (20) We thank you for having given us the opportunity to read your manuscript, but regret that it does not meet our particular needs at this time. (21) We thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript. Unfortunately, your work does not meet our needs at this time. Because we know how much effort went into this submission, we regret the use of this form. But the volume of manuscripts we receive makes a personal reply impossible.

Found Short Stories, Volume 2

2007-02-02T17:55:00.000-05:00

(Found in the Wikipedia entry for Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, imprisoned after the Nuremburg trials)

Later, Speer took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work. Heretofore the garden was divided up into small personal plots for each prisoner with the produce of the garden being used in the prison kitchen. When regulations began to slacken in this regard, Speer was allowed to build an ambitious garden, complete with a meandering path, rock garden, and a wide variety of flowers. The garden was even, humorously, centered around a "north-south axis", which was to be the core design element of Speer and Hitler's new Berlin. Speer then took up a "walking tour of the world" by ordering geography and travel books from the local library and walking laps in the prison garden visualizing his journey. Meticulously calculating every metre traveled, he began in northern Germany, went through the Balkans, Persia, India, and Siberia, then crossed the Bering Strait and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence in central Mexico.

The First Lady

2007-01-20T20:05:00.000-05:00

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this note would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt of having a sexual relationship with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aid waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do what would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we didn’t anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him, and it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time. Yet I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she may have been in her underwear, she may just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, I don’t remember, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, an act I have no visual memory for, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two opposite interpretations. That was the last thing I remember clearly from the dream. I think we came out of the bedroom in the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could actually acknowledge it. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. I must have been left in the log cabin alone then, though I have no memory of this.

Howling

2007-01-11T12:15:00.001-05:00

A Japanese television crew travelled to Utah in search of a lone wolf. They carried with them a special device called a Bowlingual which was designed to translate the sounds of barking dogs into recognizable words. When the television crew finally found the lone wolf and recorded its cry, the translation the Bowlingual offered was surprising: the Wolf was not howling to mark its territory or to call down the moon, it was asking, "What should I do now?" I have been asking myself that question for the past month. Like the wolf, I am getting used to the world's silent response.

The Perfumed Garden

2007-01-09T18:21:00.000-05:00

A library, no matter how apparently sterile or stolidly institutional, is a dangerous place to go to escape distraction. Consider The Perfumed Garden of Cheikh Nefzaoui found on the shelf in a university library, a text originally translated into French in 1850 by a French soldier based in Algeria, and then translated into English by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Plucked off a shelf of Hindu philosophy, The Perfumed Garden warns its unsuspecting readers that "the coitus of old women is a venomous meal." Anyone looking for light reading will find no shortage of a metaphor ingenuity. Especially in Chapter XIII:

Know, O Vizir (to whom God be good!) that man’s member has different names, such as:

El dekeur, the virile member;

El kamera, the penis;

El air, the member for generation;

El hamama, the pigeon;

El teunnana, the tinkler;

El heurmak, the indomitable;

El ahlil, the liberator;

El zeub, the verge;

El hammache, the exciter;

El zodamme, the crowbar;

El khiade, the tailor;

Mochefi el relil, the extinguisher of passion;

El khorrate, the turnabout;

El denkhak, the striker;

El aouame, the swimmer;

El dekhal, the housebreaker;

El aour, the one-eyed;

El fortass, the bald;

Abou aine, the one with an eye;

El atsor, the pusher;

El dommor, the strong-headed;

Abou rokba, the one with a neck;

Abou quetaia, the hairy one;

El besiss, the impudent one;

El mostahi, the shame-faced one;

El bekkai, the weeping one;

El hezzaz, the rummager;

El lezzaz, the unionist;

Abou laaba, the expectorant;

El tattache, the searcher;

El hakkak, the rubber;

El mourekhi, the flabby one;

El mokcheuf, the discoverer.

Found Short Stories, Volume 1

2006-12-24T10:47:00.000-05:00

(Found in Biological Science: A Molecular Approach, ed. by Hugh P. McCarthy.)

The simplest kind of maze is the T-maze, where only one choice is involved. Flatworms and earthworms can learn to make the "correct" choice of turns in this maze. Earthworms, for instance, are given the choice of entering a dark, moist chamber or of receiving an electric shock. The earthworms in an experiment took about 220 trials in the maze to learn to make the correct turn.

Press the A Button to Continue: Playing the Greatest Story Ever Told

2006-12-14T13:26:00.000-05:00

One hears a lot these days about the confluence of video games and movies: there are scenes in the Matrix and the Spiderman franchise films, for example, which one feels at a loss watching without a joystick in hand. And then there are the Tomb Raider films in which Angelina Jolie played (or plays? - Are they done yet?) a video game character. We seem to have moved beyond making films about video games (Tron, War Games) in the 80s to making films of video games. But in all this talk about the videogamification of movies and the cinematization of video games, we often miss what is happening to the lowly book.

Hyper-text fiction aside, the most videogame-like books may well have been the "Choose-Your-Own Adventure" series that came out during the rise of the video game, culminating, perhaps inevitably, in the creation of a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" video game. For other books, the transformation of the text into a video game is more difficult. What would the video game of The Great Gatsby be? The Man Without Qualities? We may never know, but we can now play The Bible Game, which was published last year by a company called Crave Entertainment. I have not yet played the game (and believed until recently that it was a something out of a dream, since I discovered the game manual on Halloween night in a strange apartment in the East Village while listening to a reggae song by the Olsen Twins called "Broccoli and Chocolate") but the reviews on Amazon on mixed.

The Bible Game shows us the dangers of a distorted reading of "The Greatest Story Ever Told" : you (or your children or someone else's children) end up on the David & Goliath level, where according to the manual your mission is to "hurl stones at Philistine targets!!!" Later in the game, you compete to smash the most stories to destroy the Tower of Babel, presumably to humble mankind on behalf of an angry God. The best part of the game may be its novel definition of the grace of God as a game show bonus round, a round, which by definition none of us can truly deserve:

The final round is played after time has run out during the previous round. It is a completely unique round that gives everyone a fighting chance for first place - if they are willing to risk it all.

It's not clear from the manual what you may be risking (your score? your money? your soul?) but the game is clear about who you're up against:

The game is rated E, for "Everyone."

Famous Last Words #1

2006-12-05T14:33:00.000-05:00

"Yes, I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Or so I thought.

Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple. Or so he thought.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Or so he thought.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. Or so she thought.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past—or so we think.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. Or so I think I think.

His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs. Runs?

The Common Reader: A Confession

2006-10-20T19:25:00.000-04:00

When it happened I was standing in a bookstore reading. I had stopped at Three Lives on the way home ostensibly looking for a particular book, even though I knew that the store is so small, so demurely civilized that it almost never has the book I am looking for (not even when I was looking for Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays which features - on the cover! - a photo of a woman standing in Three Lives reading), and there was little chance that it would have George Steiner's book, The Uncommon Reader. The real reason that I was there was that stopping by a bookstore on the way home seemed like a special privilege, a way of turning the inevitable commute into a late afternoon stroll. As it turned out, Three Lives did not have the book I was looking for, or even the other book I was looking for, or even the new reissue of Eichmann in Jerusalem that I'd considered buying when I saw it there only a few weeks ago laid out neatly next to the other attractively packaged volumes in the Penguin “Great Ideas” series. I thought about buying a book by Orhan Pamuk and then felt embarrassed about being a part of the Nobel Prize-winner's "bump" in sales. I ended up reading E.L. Doctorow's new book, The Creationists – his short essay on Dos Passos. I was thinking about the opening of U.S.A. when I heard a man yelling. What was he saying? The word I heard was that unprintable, unmentionable word that one seems to hear all the time, on the street, on the radio, in movies, apparently stripped of its earlier violence. He shouted it again. The doors of the tiny bookstore had been left wide open to the street, inviting in passersby. As the man walked past the open door, I saw his face clearly, though all I remember now was that he was old and white, and did not look especially insane. He was dressed in a puffy winter coat and was carrying what looked like a laundry bag. I looked around. The woman who had told me a few minutes earlier that the store could “special order” the Steiner book was standing nearby, nervously facing the same direction. I tried to go back to reading the essay, back to Dos Passos, back to my admiration not only for his work, but for the life of the author, his ambition and productivity and commitment to putting himself in the center of the action, but then I heard the man's voice again, and I could not read another word. What would Dos Passos do? I had just been reading about the Spanish Civil War, about Hemingway and Dos Passos splitting over the murder of José Robles. I thought that I should walk over and punch the man in the face. This seemed like the brave act of principle until I reminded myself how little courage it would take to hit an old man. I could not tell if he was talking to anyone in particular. Whose defense would I come to? "You filthy, no good n-----." I couldn’t see the old man any more but I could still feel his presence. I listened for a response, waiting for some evidence of a victim, some sign to tell me how to act. Was reading cowardice? A young, pretty mother walked past the open doors holding her daughter's hand. The girl said something I couldn't hear, and then the mother who was like so many mothers in the neighborhood – finely dressed, composed, and well-married – said to her daughter, "Well, I don't like that word either." The wind picked up, colder than anyone had expected it to be. I couldn’t hear the man’s voice any longer. The store clerk went back to the cash register. I looked back down at the book that was still in my hands, unable to think of any surer response than this.

Reading Report #2

2006-09-27T17:54:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn climbs itself like an autodidact, like a vine using its own stalk as a trellis, like a bridge being built out across a river with no supports. The streets work the graveyard shift for the squeaky wheels dreaming self-improvement dreams, but the days thwart ambition with an inventory of niggling details: "Beer bottles and beer cans, liquor bottles, candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs, caved-in boxes that had held detergents, rags, newspapers, curlers, string, plastic bottles, a shoe here and there, dog feces." Or, rather, human feces? This is a civilized, late twentieth-century Brooklyn, but a Brooklyn in which men urinate out into the void from the windows of the upper floors of brownstones. A protagonist reminisces about a childhood hobby of shitting as a group pastime, an outdoor activity. Do the citizens of the borough, bum and burgher alike, take delight in shitting in the gutters, on subway rails, in the parks, on stoops, in the rivers, on sidewalks? Do we all stand and point and howl with the joy of our own unaided manufacture? Who was it who said that this is the only city in the world where the dogs can step in human shit? Brooklyn is a wise child, innocent and depraved, wild-eyed and sleepless, its Brooklynness impossible to box, wrap, or bottle. Brooklyn is a nation of immigrants and exhibitionists, escapees and cartographers, pirate lepidopterists and amateur gang leaders, petty thieves on sabbatical and nice guys who got stuck halfway; in short, life is not entirely wonderful here, and on that point, children and adults can agree, but they always get stuck squabbling over the particulars. Every curve of this marvelous place, a once and future garbage dump; each corner harbors ghosts; every crook vibrates with the history of the culture. (For example, did you know that part of The Warriors was filmed on one of the dead platforms of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop?) I love New York.

Positively 4th Street

2006-09-19T10:01:00.000-04:00

I've forgotten the party, but I remember the bum, the one in Washington Square, stumbling around singing "New York, New York" to all the tourists and the students and the dogwalkers and dealers, really belting it out; he had a hell of a voice this guy, a boozy, old time Bowery voice, a real charming hounddog crooner, but he only had one note, a sustained shout he threw in anywhere he wanted to: at the end of "New York, New Yo--------k," or in the middle of some other jumbled line. He sang,

If you can make it there
You'll make it anywhere
It's up to you - 8 fucking million
You---------------------

He wore a wool Yankees cap and jean jacket and carried around a jug of chocolate milk he drank from in between songs. He was drunk, but I wasn't sure it was permanent or temporary. For all I knew this guy had a house with a backyard in Queens; he had work boots on; he could have been a contractor or the owner of a trucking company or a lost beat poet, the one in Tangier, sitting slumped in the corner of the room, ignoring the others, picking away at his guitar, mumbling to himself, "If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier." What I know for sure, what we all remember, is that this man was compelled to sing and he was making it up as he went along.

Summer and Smoke; or, the Muppets of Tangier

2006-09-17T23:56:00.000-04:00

Remember that party back at the beginning of the summer, or maybe it was the end of the spring, the party where at one point I was talking about how I misremember facts, get details fogged and discombobulated, maybe especially when it comes to the biographies or writers, like how I remember the story of Carson McCullers out on Nantucket in the summer of 1946 with Tennessee Williams and his companion, Pancho Rodriguez, and the two writers would sit every morning, all summer long, on opposite sides of the dining-room table, kitty-corner to one another, Tom with his typewriter and Carson with hers and a bottle of whiskey between them, during which stay she wrote The Member of the Wedding and he wrote The Glass Menagerie—except, reading McCullers's biography I realize I've got it wrong, that summer she wrote a play based on her third novel, and he, rather, was working on Summer and Smoke (in a year when Menagerie was still running on Broadway); except, come to think of it, I might not have mentioned that story at all at that party (and I might actually be accurately remembering an old, pickled creative writing teacher's inaccurate recounting of the story), but I think I did talk about my memory of Allen Ginsburg showing up at William S. Burroughs's house in Tangier, finding Bill anesthetized and inconsolable, sprawled on his bed like a lovesick nihilist with a monkey on his back, pages upon loose pages, stained and trampled typescript, strewn about the apartment, which Allen picked up and started to read, and maybe Jack Kerouac was there too, and somehow, in the retelling, Jack and Allen took on the voices of Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear, if I'm remembering right, and Bill had the voice of Sam the Eagle, and Kermit and Fozzie thought some of Sam's pages were pretty good, maybe they could put them together in some kind of order, like a novel, and Sam said no, no, it wasn't worth it, life was misery and romance was a crock and boys were fickle and besides, there was no more decent hash to be had in all of Morocco, but Kermit and Fozzie gathered all the pages together and put them in an order that made sense and took them to a publisher in Paris, and that became Naked Lunch (although maybe I didn't mention that story at the party either, maybe it came up that afternoon back at the beginning of the summer when we were talking on West 4th Street, not far from the library, while a bum sang variations on the old jingle our city used to use to advertise itself to the world, "I Love New York," at us)? Anyway, that was a fun party.

The Last Gatsby

2006-09-03T11:24:00.000-04:00

One of the bittersweet pleasures of the end of summer is the nostalgia one feels for the promising days only a few months earlier, back at the beginning of the season before the deep heat had settled in, back when the dogwoods and pear trees were still in bloom, and people asked each other about their plans, and all of life seemed projected forward towards the prospect of those three golden months. On a breezy day in May, drunk on my own utopian schemes for the summer, I walked into the library looking for Gatsby. I wanted a summery book, something alluring and corruptible, and apparently I was not alone. The only copy of the book left on the shelf had been thoroughly annotated. The corners of the book’s green hardcover had been thumbed down and some of the pages were missing corners. The body of the text itself was a palimpsest of misreading, layers of ill-conceived attempts at exegesis composed for years of last-minute assignments. Each reader had left signs of his or her ownership of the text: underlinings, coffee rings, phone numbers, questions in the margin – (Symbolism? Sexism!), a haphazard to-do list. One generous scholar had taken the time to provide his fellow readers with Chinese translations of the tricky words: vista (境界), buoyed (纽约), murmur (私语), divan (烟)… I reread Fitzgerald against his readers, pausing occasionally to look out the window at the people strolling through the park below. What struck me this time was the way that Fitzgerald introduces Daisy and Gatsby, the line for line beauty of the descriptions, the forward momentum, especially in this passage:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragiley bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of the picture against the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out in the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

According to his notes, the Chinese scholar read this brief introduction to Daisy, which contains in miniature the action of the entire book, as an example of foreshadowing color symbolism. Rose, he wrote in the margin, is not a real color. Rose = red+ white. Prepain [?] and bleeding. Red = anger. Represent blood. White = weak. It seems appropriate that this novel on the tragic results of willfully misreading each other – projecting our own desires onto that green light on the horizon – should be so variously and consistently misread. Without disputing whether rose is a color or whether red really equals anger, we can agree that prepain seems a strange and apt term, both for the moment when Tom Buchanan first slams the window shut and for these early days of September when we feel the sobering postpain of the summer and the prepain of what’s to come.

The Belly of the Beast

2006-08-29T23:44:00.000-04:00

The new Poets & Writers. Page 125. (This is way back in the "recent winners" listings; past the eternally optimistic "deadlines," heading in the direction of the slightly tawdry "contests," the suspect "personals" and "rentals," the downright unsavory "services.") The bottom half of the page is an advertisement for a graduate program in creative writing; no great surprise there, the pages of this magazine are filled with them, and it's not that the ads shock me with their quantity, I'm well aware that this country is multitudinous with writing programs, it's just that seeing all their disciplines, all their addresses, all their distinguished faculty and recent distinguished guests, it's like putting a face to a name, names to a number. This one, the ad I'm looking at on page 125, has a quote from Flaubert: "Writing is a dog's life, but it's the only one worth living." This is not surprising either; many of these ads are appended with quotes that seem to attempt to summarize a theory, a sensibility, a philosophy; NYU's ad, for example, has E.L. Doctorow, "A book begins as a private excitement of the mind" (an onanistic approach to writing if ever there was one!). But this, the Flaubert's dog one, this one features a photograph of a dog, or, rather, either the right half of a photograph of a dog, or a complete photograph of only the hindquarters of a dog that is lying on some sort of white sheet, as if it's participating in a tasteful erotica shoot, a languid dog, all stretchy leg and lazy tail, perhaps reminiscent of the ubiquitous anonymous women's bodies, all skirts and boots, that have been haunting the jackets of every work of fiction by a young woman about the travails of young women since flying earflap girl ran away from us on the cover of Melissa Bank. And someone—the photographer springs to mind first, or perhaps the dog's owner (Whose dog is this? Is this stock photography, or was this shot especially for the James A. Michener Center for Writers?)—has tossed the manuscript of a novel onto the animal's left side. The words on the manuscript pages are difficult to read in the photograph, but, squinting, the title page appears to read A Blessing on the Moon, by Joseph Skibell, who graduated from Austin in 1996 (so it was not stock?). The printed sheets have fallen apart loosely, some limning the dog's belly, some pushing down toward the darkness between its legs; the top right corner of what looks like it might be page 11 has gotten itself tucked inside the dog's left knee, seeking fur, and warmth, and crotch. A pencil has been placed on the manuscript's cover page, so we are certain that this is a static shot, not one of action, but still, I wonder, is this what Updike was talking about? Must we lie down with the books we want to write like this, like a love between animals and objects, the tasteful pornography of the domesticated and the inanimate, dogs and pages quietly searching out comfort from each other amid the cold air, the bright lights, the ice cubes, the satin sheets?

The Art of the Novel #3 / The Art of Love #1

2006-08-25T16:28:00.000-04:00

It's been weeks and I still haven't gotten over the little sentence tucked away in the middle of Updike's essay in the New Yorker on the late works of great authors. I include it here with the preceding two sentences as context:

Hawthorne's inability to carry forward and complete, "The Ancestral Footprint" was, in Adorno's term, a "catastrophe" for him personally. His struggles to find the key—the handle—demonstrate what a precarious feat it is to write a novel, organizing a host of inventions and polished details into a single movement toward resolution. Like sex, it is either easy or impossible...

Does this simile hold up? Am I screwing the wrong book?

So It Begins

2006-08-20T15:43:00.000-04:00

At a coffee shop not far from my house, to the right of the cash register, a small clipping from, I believe, The New York Post has been taped to the back of the espresso machine. It's not an original article, but rather a wire service feed from Reuters; the headline reads: "KILLER CHIMPS ATTACK TOURISTS." Someone—the coffee shop employee who must have originally cut out and taped up the article, perhaps, or a coffee shop customer?—has scrawled on the clipping with what appears to have been a ballpoint pen, to the left of the headline, the following words—which, like the headline, are all in capital letters:

SO
IT
BEGINS

On the bottom edge of the clipping, also in all caps, and in what appears to be a different hand, someone has also written these words, all forced together as if it might be a domain name rather than the title of a film:

BATTLEFORTHEPLANETOFTHEAPES

Further complicating the understanding of this marginalia, this palimpsest, is the matter of punctuation. To the left of the letter "B" there are symbols that look like two exclamation marks, bending to the right in the wind, with two additional symmetrical vertical lines shooting down from the double periods, a mirror of the lines above them, twin masts reflected in a lake; to the right of the letter "S" are similar figures, except these look like two bars leaning to the left off the tops of two right-angled exclamation marks, or like two bangs, twice the usual length, that have been cleanly shot by an invisible bullet right through their middles. Perhaps these glyphs are meant to indicate exploding French quotation marks? Maybe they're intended to be a fusion of Spanish and English and French, indicating exclamation, quotation, and bracketing all at once? I don't know the answer to this, nor can I fully explain why the former graffito is so funny, but the latter is so completely not, other than to wonder if perhaps it is a matter of becoming something, rather than just pointing at something, which seems to be a more interesting variation of the old writing-workshop saw to show and not tell, a useless piece of advice if ever there was one; and it also might have to do with voice, perhaps specifically the commonplace of the ominous Lord of the Rings or Star Wars voice, intersecting culturally here with another Hollywood cliché, the random smattering of strange and foreboding isolated incidents seen occurring all over the world that always opens those wonderful movies about the apolcalypse; but even more than these, maybe that great little three-word tag wins because of punctuation, or lack thereof, because it could have so easily been followed by an ellipsis—such an abused mark!—one that ought to be reserved for a trailing off, a "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther" trailing off, or an actual elision, but all too often seems to be an incompetent conveyor of sense, of seriousness, or an inadequate stand-in for a full stop?

In the University Library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended

2006-08-11T15:25:00.000-04:00

In the library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended, you try to find an isolated table, but cannot escape the diversity of life that the library shelters in all seasons. The woman with red pants hidden behind a carrel twenty feet away cannot stop herself from burping over and over again. Occasionally, she murmurs, “excuse me” to the otherwise silent wing of the library. A wild-haired man with headphones zips past on his way to the bathroom, never to emerge.

You close your eyes in concentration. You can feel the weight of the pen in your hand. You are listening for the burping woman in the red pants – what could she have eaten? balloons? – when you hear a sudden disembodied voice declare, “Holy shitfucking fuck.”

You whirl around looking for a man in distress. The voice came from somewhere in the aisles of German literature, but you hear no footsteps, no creaking chairs, no other sign of human existence. You think of the story of the PhD student whose laptop – with the only copy of the thesis he’d been working on for four years – was stolen while he was in the hallway, talking on the phone. He put up posters pleading with the thief to email him the files. “Keep the computer,” he wrote in one desperate message, “but, for the love of God, give me back my thesis.” You don’t know if he ever got it back, or if he started over again or if he dropped out of school. You wonder how he felt leaving the library that night after all the fraught and pointless conversations with the staff and security, walking away from everything he’d written into the night.

The worst part of you envies him.

In the library, the ghostly voice does not come back. Life on the 9th floor returns to normal. You shift in your seat uncomfortably, holding tightly to your pen. The woman in the red pants burps.

Burrito-Town is Loserville

2006-07-31T14:41:00.000-04:00

This is not your best night. You're on your own, hungry, stuck somewhere in the middle of an unending project you never wanted to do. After 9 o'clock, you leave your apartment to wander the streets in search of something to eat. Did you even eat lunch? You can no longer remember. All around you, the streets are crowded with people determined to have a good time. You, on the other hand, end up in Burrito-town, population 13. The menu board shows off the Burrito-town chain's sense of humor. Pains have been taken to give each Burrito-town burrito a funny name. There are burrito's called, "Mr. Bean," "No, Woman, No Cry," "Pulpo Fiction," "CBGB (Corn, Beans, Garbanzo Beans)," "Old Yeller," "Holy Mole!," and "Dude, where's my chorizo?" Each of these burrito's come in multiple sizes, ranging from "Gi-normous" to "Webster."

You have a profound need for sustenance.

While you eat you watch the tv screwed into the wall above the cashier. There are a few scenes of people keep getting in and out of cars, followed by a lunch at a country club cut short by an angry outburst. Because of the bad reception and inaudible volume, whatever story the images are trying to tell is impossible to follow. Instead, you enjoy one of the many mixed pleasures of living in this city. You listen to a stranger describe his novel. There are two guys in the booth beside you. One of them is eating a "Holy Mole!," the other is just eating chips. The guy with the chips is almost finished his first draft.

"It's about this guy," he says. "He's a regular guy, he's got a job, an apt, whatever, but one day - and I'm really sure yet exactly how this happens, but I think it involves getting into a car accident with the Devil - the guy ends up with this amazing power. Everything he wants to happen, happens. He can, like, control everybody with his mind. He goes to the office and he gets a raise. Just because he wants it."

The other guy with the burrito interrupts him, "What does he do with this power? Does he become President? Does he figure things out in the Middle East?"

"Whooah, that's way out my league. This is my first novel." He dribbles some green salsa on his chips. "What the guy really wants is to get a girlfriend."

"Shouldn't be too hard."

"It isn't. But that's the problem. I mean he can get any girl he wants. There's no challenge anymore. The moral of the book is, kind of, be careful what you wish for - and there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. After a while the guy gets fed up with the mind control. I mean, he realizes that the girls don't really want him. It's not real. He ends up getting really depressed. He just sits in his apartment and watches tv all day. Pretty much what he was doing before he got the special power, only now his apartment is a lot nicer, because he makes, like, mad bank."

The "Holy Mole!" guy nods. "If I had more money, I'd buy one of those hd plasma flat screens."

"Yeah, totally. And get digital cable."

You've eaten half of the burrito and you're full, but you stay to hear the guy with the chips explain how the book ends.

"Well, one day the dude meets a girl he can't control, and the whole question is like, 'is she the devil or is she the love of his life?"

"That's some profound shit. Which one is she?"

"Both."

"Wow."

"Yeah, originally it was a screenplay. But I got a lot of feedback on my blog about how the plot was hard to follow. So I figured I would make it into a novel."

"Cool."

It's time to go home and write.

The Neuroscience of the Dead

2006-06-28T16:20:00.000-04:00

There's an advertisement in the back of the current issue of Poets & Writers (on page 97, to be precise) for a new book called Against Workshopping Manuscripts. The ad is, to be generous, homemade-looking. The copy, in part, reads as follows: "Shall we admit that workshopping stymies the imagination? —Resulting in leathery thought and actual harm."

The passive-aggressive quality of the first question makes me want to hurl the magazine across the room (Shall we admit that your copy jumps to conclusions about our opinions on the matter, and has the gall to presume that we are simply hiding them from the world, cowering in fear of conventional wisdom?); that odd and amateurish em dash makes me feel—how shall I put this?—more charitable, say; but the marvelously appealing image of thought being leathery (I want my thinking to be tough and waterproof, like tanned animal flesh!), and the idea that writing—poor, neglected writing!—could ever actually cause harm, in this bright and glaring universe of amphibious space tanks and night-vision sonar guns and street-legal off-road military transport vehicles and the kids, the kids, they're killing each other every day with their poisoned school uniforms and samizdat mobile phones—and yet, looking at the website of this two-lady publishing operation, and seeing that this book (with its strangely generic ocean waves on the cover!) purports to challenge the hegemony of the workshop with "upper cortical re-entry" and "plucking wounded young people from the herd," well, I am as charmed as I was when I first heard about the book People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting bystanders and what to do about it. Whether their conclusions involve wearing a tinfoil hat or not, I look forward to the neuroscience of us all becoming better writers, and getting this damn dead person off my back.

Searching for a Fax Machine in the Air Conditioner Factory

2006-06-22T15:47:00.000-04:00

I wanted to find out if a particular phrase a friend made use of the other day had actually originated with a particular artist or not. The following is a loose sampling of the results Google returned to me:

Sometimes I'm reminded of a postcard I saw long ago. It was a sort of Lichtenstein, pop-comic-book style card. There was a woman talking on the phone, and she was saying, "Oh my God, I forgot to have children." When I was twenty, a friend gave me a T-shirt bearing a comic strip frame of a glamorous woman weeping dramatically, over the caption "I can't believe I forgot to have children." You know that illustration with a stylish woman talking on the phone, saying, "Oh my God, I forgot to have children"? There is a funny cartoon of a middle-aged woman, hand to head, exclaiming, "Oops, I forgot to have children." It was one of those 1950s cartoons of a glamorous brunette, with a speech bubble saying: "I can't believe I forgot to have children." It is kind of like the Roy Lichtenstein cartoon-style painting, which is of a woman on a bus, and she says in a balloon over her head: "Oh no, I forgot to have children!" And one day I suddenly realized that T-shirt where the woman says "Oh my God, I forgot to have children" was me. Headlines like "Hey, I forgot to have children!" cause some of our listeners to hyperventilate. Others have seen the cartoon of the woman exclaiming, "Oops, I forgot to have children," and decided it wasn't such a joke. The cartoon of a crying woman saying "Oh my God, I forgot to have children" is more applicable than ever. Charlotte: But we're 38! These are the years. Carrie: Yes, I know, I've heard. I'm running out of time. I don't even have time to eat this cookie. Charlotte: How is it? Carrie: It's so good I forgot to have children.

And I have realized that the Web is only as reliable as our own memories, only as smart as our own minds, only as good as our own senses of responsibility and codes of ethics; and therefore, I have concluded that we are all doomed to hell.

The Art of the Novel #2 / The Art of the Podcast #1

2006-06-13T18:17:00.000-04:00

Is Christopher Lydon the thinking man's Charlie Rose? While he may not have the pull of his older colleague, he's definitely sharper and more web-savvy. Lydon's mp3 interviews played a major role in popularizing the podcast. His new project, Open Source, is a radio show, podcast, and a blog. In the past month, Lydon has interviewed Philip Roth, the critic James Wood and Mark Greif of N+1 on the NY Times Book Review's Great American Novel Survey.

Philip Roth discussed the Art of the Novel, the elemental joys of the Jersey Shore, and how his father picked up a woman using the line, "Hey, You're in Dr. Horowitz's spot!" In their conversation on the Times Survey, Lydon prompted Wood, Greif, and Moby Lives / Melville House publisher, blogger, podcaster, Dennis Loy Johnson to speculate on what the next Great American Novel will look like. Yesterday, Lydon talked with John Updike about sex, god, and New Jersey.

The Art of the Profile # 1

2006-06-13T17:57:00.000-04:00

The celebrity profile is not an ancient art. The formula for the integration of the interview with a survey of the celebrity's life was devised by a German mathematician sometime after Einstein's annae mirabilis, 1905. Not much has changed since then, aside from the flourishes "New Journalism" added during the 60s. Mostly, the profile falls into the tried-and-true magazine model of the bait-and-switch. The magazine cover announces an in-depth interview with the celebrity subject, but aside from a provocative close-up photo or two, we see little more than the obvious. There are notable exceptions of course - occasions when the writer's talent and commitment overcome the conventions of the genre. Mostly this happens when the subject sexually propositions the journalist, as in the case of the stupendous profile of Principal Stanley Bosworth in New York Magazine and the Guardian's profile of Michel Houellebecq, in which the celebrated controversialist poses the question, "Would you like to be in my erotic film?"

(See Also: the self-hating, self-portraits on Houellebecq's web journal).

Same as It Ever Was (Look Where My Hand Was)

2006-06-10T18:06:00.000-04:00

The blogging revolution is the desktop publishing revolution is the photocopier revolution is the mimeo revolution is the typewriter-and-carbons is letterpress is surely some other democratizing technology of reproduction not lodged in my all-too-short historical memory (is the telephone? is the telegraph? is the Gutenberg?):

I've never liked mimeo. Sure, it's fast and it's cheap but it doesn't look like a book. If you can do it yourself, why bother? […] Somebody once described mimeo publication as "punk publishing" and that made it work for me for a while. But not really. […] I like these shiny books: they look commercial, real, they look American. If only the stupid publishers and the brilliant poets could get together. Mimeo skirts all that so the publisher is the poet's best friend or even the poet and that's that. Your family won't believe it's a book but so what. They also are unable to read your poems. So I have only set my hand once to mimeo publishing but it was an act of revenge in my heart—we did an anthology of poems ourselves in response to another slicker inferior one. Mimeo was effective in this case—fast & cheap. It wasn't like killing someone, it was like throwing a beer in their face.

—Eileen Myles, in The Poetry Project Newsletter, March 1982; from A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960 - 1980: A Sourcebook of Information, Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips.

Get off the Internet; I'll Meet You in the Street

2006-06-08T10:56:00.000-04:00

From "The Wide, Wide World of Chapbooks," by Tim Kindseth, in American Book Review, March/April 2005 (Volume 26, Issue 3):

Reading Bob Dylan's new memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), I was struck by Dylan's obsessive curiosity as a young man, one that did not allow him to stop with the reading of tattered paperback copies of Balzac and Chekhov—and bound books in general—that were easily at his and anyone else's disposal. Rather, he had an insatiable appetite for arcane knowledge that took him to the far corners of the New York Public Library, where in his early twenties he was scouring newspaper articles written during the Civil War and available on microfiche for song ideas and personal satisfaction. Had he been content with digesting what everybody else was busy poring over, I'm not so sure his songs would have bloomed.

Granted, most of what you'll find in chapbooks written today probably won't be as stimulating to the imagination as first-hand accounts of the battle for Lovejoy Station written with slang long-gone. But there's always a needle in every haystack, and that's reason enough to try to get your hands on any chapbook you can, whether you find it at some local reading, at some ruined pawn shop on the wrong side of the tracks, or through some focused browsing on the World Wide Web.

For me, though, this picture of the young Mr. Zimmerman exploring ignored arcana makes me want to turn off the World Wide Web altogether. Granted, this haystack we've all made is a marvelous thing, like a new layer of brain we've all evolved (ah, if only we could adapt at will, consciously evolve, the things I would do with my extra set of hands!), but I need to go do some browsing at that ruined pawnshop, see what bits and scraps have been left behind. Anyone care to join?

(Direct link to PDF of essay, here.)

The Art of the Novel

2006-06-05T21:12:00.000-04:00

“The Amazonian boy is first provided with a breech-cloth when he is five years old. His earliest lesson is in its manufacture, for every Indian fashions his own clothing, is his own tailor and cloth manufacturer. He goes to the bush and selects a tree, on which he makes a space 6 feet long by 9 inches in width, and strips from it both outer and inner barks. He separates the two layers, and cuts the strip of inner bark in two, and carries the pieces to the river where the material is thoroughly soaked. Afterwards this is beaten with a small wooden mallet until it forms a yard length of bark-cloth 9 inches in width. Nothing further is needed, for this makes the breech-cloth and it is sufficient to pass between the legs and tuck securely over the waistband in front and behind. There is no variation from the type or method of manufacture, and this simplest form of clothing is common to all tribes inhabiting the wide stretch of country between the rivers Issa and Japura.

The breech-cloth is never discarded by the male Indian, nor, in sight of a man or a woman, would he ever remove it. When bathing he wades in a sufficient depth before he interferes with its adjustment. Even when a man dies his breech-cloth is buried with him.”
--- From The Northwest Indians: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes, by Thomas Whitten, F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I. Captain HP (14th Hussars). NY: Duffield and Company, 1915

Emerson on Immigration

2006-06-03T18:25:00.000-04:00

"Native Americans. I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party. It is the dog in the manger. It is precisely opposite to all the dictates of love and magnanimity: and therefore, of course, opposite to true wisdom… Man is the most composite of all creatures… Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any called the Corinthian brass was formed; so in this continent, – asylum of all nations, – the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, – of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements. "

- 1845 Journals.

Babel in the East Village

2006-05-31T23:32:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, I stopped by the St. Mark’s Bookshop to look through the Collected Stories of Isaac Babel on my way to buy groceries for dinner. I found the book in the back of the bookstore, on a shelf below Paul Auster and above Italo Calvino. I knelt down and read about how Babel had been killed by the NKVD, after he was arrested, forced to confess, and shuttled to a prison camp in Siberia.

To my left, beyond the table of discounted books, an agitated man with white-hair and a short, neat beard was talking politics with the woman behind the desk. When he mentioned Rumsfeld, he swung his arm above his head to make a point. When I looked over to him I noticed that I was crouching next to a rack of postcards with photos of the president and his administration. Their faces had been doctored, certain features were elongated, others erased. Rumsfeld was a monster with tiny eyes and a sharp pointed head.

“The people I know who have been shot,” man with the white hair declared, “were shot because they were thoroughly understood.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said the woman. “It’s better to be misunderstood.”

“I totally disagree,” he said. “I want them to understand me. That’s what’s important.”

“But then they’ll shoot you.”

“Great.” He threw both hands above his head.

“But you’ll die.”

“At least then they’ll understand who they were messing with.”

The Slush Pile and the World

2006-05-25T23:30:00.000-04:00

I recommend Sven Birkerts's introductory essay, "Finding Traction," in the new issue of AGNI, issue #63. He starts with the daily tackling of submissions to the magazine:

When I sit down with a huge stack of envelopes, each one containing some hard-won, deliberated expression, I am not the tabula rasa—the fantasied clean slate—that I perhaps ought to be. No, I am a man of my time, a besieged reader, creating a specific occasion within what is, day in and day out, for me as for most everyone, a near-constant agitation of stimuli, an enfolding environment of aggressively competing signs and meanings. And my attitude, when I remove a clump of print-covered pages from their envelope, is not "Send me more and more new information" but "Reach me, convince me that this news is different, that this is the news I need."

And he somehow works his way from there, from the speed with which he's able to make his way through the slush pile each morning, to a consideration of the enormous changes that have taken place in the culture in the past ten years, in which, if I understand him correctly, we have all become robots. Or maybe it's that we're all still human, but our flesh and blood has been mold-injected into the invisible husks of robots. No wait, it's like we all now have little tiny microscopic robots that squat in our frontal lobes, dug in like a first assault, like a world-wide brain tissue Oklahoma land rush. Or maybe it's just that AGNI refuses to publish stories and poems written by robots, even though robots pretending to be humans are submitting to the journal all the time, but they give themselves away, because robots always use Tyvek envelopes, and their manuscripts are covered in little metal shavings, the residue of their tears.

The Paper Cut

2006-05-20T17:50:00.000-04:00

After alcoholism, heart-disease, near-sightedness, divorce, bankruptcy, and depression, the paper cut is the most serious occupational hazard of the writer. Its menace passes largely unnoticed, and we are all its silent victims.

All paper cuts are not created equal, but each is nasty in its own way. The truly painful paper cut seems to hurt more than it has any right to. We understand the justice of bruises, burns, and scrapes - the pain we feel seems proportional to the evidence of the injury, but the case of the paper cut confounds us. A little epidermal slice, a spot of blood, are all we have to show for our affliction. Any calls for sympathy are in vain. The paper cut infantilizes the writer. We suck our fingers in disgrace.

Moreover, the paper cut is the painful reminder of the physical nature of the book. As much as we may wish to believe that in the beginning was the Word, we know that things were here first, and that they will remain long after the last remnants of language have disintegrated.

Kafka Was the Rage

2006-05-15T10:28:00.000-04:00

"The competition was friendly, laced with admiration and respect, but it was as fierce as only a match between close friends can be, and it brought out the best in them [...] It was, in fact, competition as much as collaboration that linked Ashbery and O'Hara and Schuyler and Koch so tightly that they acquired a group identity with a collective force. 'Collaboration, a direct extension of O'Hara's mode of living, is a good metaphor for the manner of his relationships--an intimate competition in which each participant goads the other toward being at his best,' the poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl perceptively noted. Or as Koch advised the young poets who came to him for instruction at Columbia, 'Have some friends who are so good it scares you.'"

--from David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, p. 71 (in chapter two, "Band of Rivals")

Note also, in the author interviews on the One Story site, Andrew Foster Altschul's answer to the question on writing advice and the importance of having friends who are also writers, as well as Kelly Link's answer to the same question, about the importance of having friends who are not writers (or rather, friends whose lives are melodramatic; I'm jumping to the conclusion that writing and melodrama are mutually exclusive, which was certainly not the case with the New York School).

He Also Did The Crossword (in Pen)

2006-05-15T09:32:00.000-04:00

The latest piece of evidence submitted in the case against I. Lewis Libby Jr. includes articles from the Times, the Post, and the Chicago Sun Times, as well as an image scanned from Cheney's copy of the Joseph Wilson Op-Ed piece, "What I didn't find in Africa." Written above the title are a few jotted down notes in what Fitzgerald believes is the VP's neat, confident handwriting, including the question: "Did his wife send him on a junket?" The image was printed in Sunday's Times, and is available online (together with the rest of the evidence) as a pdf.

Interview: A Retrospective

2006-05-12T09:56:00.000-04:00

In light of my recent EWP interview, I've been reflecting on past job interviews. Here are some of the highlights:

Smith-Craine Finance, San Francisco, 1999: Receptionist

Ed Craine: The job requires a lot of Xeroxing. How do you feel about that?

J: I feel good about it. (pause). Great. (pause). I actually find the sound of the Xerox relaxing. The smell of toner is not at all offensive to me.

Interaction Associates, San Francisco, 1996: Assistant to Office Manager

Inspired Office Manager: Interaction Associates wants to inspire. Our job is to inspire. Your job is to keep the candy tray full.

J: Yes, I see.

Inspired Office Manager: Any questions?

J: Do I need to fill the candy in an inspiring way?

Alta Vista Car Wash, San Diego, 1994: Guy who stands in the middle of the car wash while wearing a rain slicker and scrubbing the cars

Racist Jock: I usually hire Mexicans. They're good workers.

J: I'm a good worker.

Racist Jock: But you're not a Mexican.

J: I used to work at Taco Time.

Taco Time, San Diego, 1994: Cook

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: You have to wear this stupid visor.

J: That's okay. I like it.

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: And this stupid t-shirt.

J: Lovely.

Girl with a face like a day-old enchilada: Do you have a girlfriend?

J: I just want to make tacos.

Edwards Cinema, San Diego, 1994: Guy who rips tickets

Sad 46-year old: You get free movies.

J: Great.

Sad 46-year old: Yeah, and free popcorn.

J: Even better.

Sad 46-year old: It's really not so bad. I've seen True Lies 23 times. Do you maybe want to see it later?

J: Is this an interview?

(I was later fired from my position and replaced by a retarded person).

The Great American Novel *

2006-05-11T11:37:00.000-04:00

* - As determined by a plurality of votes from the hundred or so judges chosen by the NYTBR, a number of whom (according to A.O. Scott) "declined to answer, some silently, others with testy eloquence."

From the Times website:
"Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'"

Their list of "literary sages" includes everyone from Harold Bloom to Aimee Bender.

The results are posted here.

A.O. Scott's effort to make sense of the results is worth reading.

An Oral History of Our Time

2006-05-10T17:26:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Joseph Mitchell's book everybody knows Joe Gould's secret. The great project he told everyone he was working on, the oral history of our time that would encompass the chitchat at artists parties in the Village, the political speeches at rallies at Union Square and the talk in the hallways of flophouses on Bowery, that grand work that would make him the equal of Gibbon, was never realized. The dime-store composition books he left behind contain only a spotty diary account of his own habits:

June 7, 1946: I saw Bele De Triefant. He said he had a pair of shoes for me. I had an ale at the Minetta.
June 8: De Triefant had not brought the shoes. I had a drink at the Minetta.
June 11: I saw De Triefant. He had shoes for me. I took them. I went to the Minetta. I drank.
June 12: I went to Goody's. I had some beers. I lost my shoe. I went to the Minetta.
(from Charles Hutchinson & Peter Miller's article in the Voice)

The books are now housed on the 3rd Floor of Bobst.

There a few brave souls today who seem to have taken up his project. Like Gould, they believe that "what people say is history." One of these brave souls, of course, is the guy behind OverheardinNewYork. Another is whoever put up this story from a rapper named Saigon:

"I was at 23rd and 9th Street, that’s where everybody goes after the club," Saigon told HipHopGame.com. "I’m out there with me and my man. My man is 135 lbs. soaking wet. I have an $18,000 chain on. I guess someone thought I was food. They were probably scheming the whole time. I didn’t even realize it. One of them asked my man if he sold weed. My man was like, “Nah.” We were with these girls. One of the kids walked up to me. I thought he was a fan. He snatched the chain right off my neck. I took it right back from him and my man knocked him out. My man dropped him. We’re stomping this nigga out thinking he’s crazy that he’s going to come and snatch my chain.

We didn’t know he was with somebody else. His homeboy came behind me and stabbed me in my temple. I lost a lot of blood. When he stabbed me, I started fighting the nigga but I was losing a lot of blood. I faked a jack like I had a ratchet on me. I didn’t have no burner. I was like, “Hit the nigga, hit the nigga.” They started running. Me and my nigga were standing there and they ran.I had my chain and both of their cell phones. They dropped their cell phones when they started running. I’m out there like, “Yeah nigga!” but at the same time I’m losing a lot of blood..." [More]

Saturday Night Minutiae

2006-05-09T12:26:00.000-04:00

When I finished reading the last sentence of my story, I took my two pages, which I'd folded over two or three times to fit in my back pocket, and I smacked the lectern with the vertical crease, as if to indicate "the end," or "I am done reading now." I smacked on impulse, not thinking about it. It felt appropriate, although the gesture might have been so small as to not even be noticeable to the audience. I don't know.

Immediately after, as I squatted next to the bar, my hands still shaking, I thought about Will Ferrell's line from Old School: "That's the way you do it! That's the way you debate!" Maybe some variant on that, I thought, would be the best way to end a reading.

It could certainly be beneficial to writers facing the conundrum of having brought their serious material to a almost entirely humorous event.

Or it could turn the whole proceedings into something not unlike kabuki?

Which, in the world of readings, would not necessarily be a bad thing.

Reading Report

2006-05-03T12:08:00.000-04:00

The old man got up to the podium. He said a few words before he read his two poems by the dead poet, the poet whose memory this reading was honoring. He said the dead poet would have been great without the disease. The disease that was the poet's subject, a subject that spanned three books. He said he'd made this comment before to the poet's companion, who was there, sitting in the front row. But where did this comment's emphasis lie? I wanted to give this old man the benefit of the doubt, I wanted to believe he meant the emphasis to land on the "without" (I'm paraphrasing here, I think he might have actually said "hadn't had"), meaning that the greatness existed regardless of the subject matter, rather than what it sounded like he was saying, what I feared he was saying, which was that the poet's work had been hamstrung by the singularity of the subject. When he sat down, the air of the room shook with the sound of the old man's sheaf of poems, which he struggled to cram back into his inside suit coat pocket, his hand shaking uncontrollably, a Parkinson's tremor, his face locked in the expression of an old man's revulsion at his own crippled body.

Right of First Refusal + Rejection Note = Refusal Note

2006-04-30T13:50:00.000-04:00

(an attempted reconstruction of a collective effort)

Dear Sir/Madam:

A pox upon you for submitting your work to our journal. We receive a large number of submissions every month, and none of them compare to the contemptibleness of yours. We have read your pages with disgust and horror. No, no, a thousand times no, we shall not consider publishing such garbage. Our current need is that we might forget the stain your words have left on our retinas. If we could cause this self-addressed, stamped envelope--the one enclosure with any sense in your most objectionable mailing--to projectile vomit onto your shirtfront right now, believe us, we would indeed. We do not merely pass on your work; rather, we kick you, and your work, dead on in the nut sack with our steel-toed editorial boots. Your pages are not fit to wipe with, and yet we have, because we felt we must, and thus our bottoms are riddled with inky little paper cuts, but we are glad of this, because it is nothing compared to the torn and bleeding flesh you have wrought upon our minds. We do not wish you luck placing your work elsewhere; rather, we earnestly pray that you never write another word again, burn every page that has regretfully dropped from your wretched bunghole to date, and do penance for the harm you have caused us, and literature, preferably involving violently painful flagellation, from this day to the one on which your corpse is blessedly lowered into the ground.

Regards,
The Editors

Eleventh Street in the Times

2006-04-30T11:49:00.000-04:00

Eleventh Street is all over today's Times, from Jane Jacobs's barstool at the Whitehorse, where she argued that the city of the future should look a lot like the West Village of the 60s (as opposed to the West Village of the present where, according to the paper of record, the red benches of the White Horse are filled by "graduate students from nearby New York University and would-be writers"), to the 11th Street Bar, where Chuck Klosterman mulls over his latest humiliation.

The Strange Story of Our Earth

2006-04-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

The library here, in this creaky old hunter's cabin by the side of the road, is a weird mix of books about machines, nature, and Christianity--with titles such as Bear!, Fix Your Chevrolet, Cowpokes Ride Again, Old Gun Catalogs, Best Ways to Catch More Fish in Fresh and Salt Water, Is the Bible REALLY the Word of God?, and Father Smith Instructs Jackson, a instructional manual for Catholicism written entirely in Socratic dialogue form.

But my favorite so far is The Strange Story of Our Earth, a science book for kids, published in 1952. It reads like science written by Nabokov's Kinbote; in other words, you might hope that a book about something "strange" would answer questions, but instead it leaves them dangling and convoluted, the author preferring to pick fights with unnamed enemies. I can't imagine a kid reading this and not wanting to run the hell away from science, screaming.

This is the book's final paragraph:

If the ancient inhabitants of America domesticated the Megatherium why shouldn't they have domesticated other creatures including the horses? At all events even if some scientists will not admit that the first Americans originated in America they must admit that the Americans were the first men to domesticate large animals, for as far as known, dogs were the only animals domesticated by the men of the Old World at the time.

Why should they not have indeed? replies the 10-year-old in the early fifties, making a mental note to give the humanities a closer look.

Gross Anatomy: The View from the 9th Floor of the Library

2006-04-22T16:41:00.000-04:00

The view from the 9th floor of the library extends downtown over the rooftops of Soho all the way to Wall Street. If you stare hard to the Southwest you can make out the blue hills of New Jersey. I often bring my work to the 9th floor, which houses the university science library, and sit by the window. The view offers just the right amount of distraction for me to work. One gray day like today when the city seemed particularly ugly (and New Jersey had disappeared into the mist), I distracted myself reading the mysterious titles of medical books on the shelf in front of me. Wound Care and The Acute Hand sounded like titles of poetry chapbooks. An Atlas of Vulval Diseases…Iowa Head and Neck Protocols… The ambiguous Principles and Practice of Nurse Anesthesia… I put away my work and took Obstetric and Gynecological Milestones ILLUSTRATED off the shelf. Chapter 26 was titled “Thomas Wharton and the Jelly of the Umbilical Chord.” Another chapter was a reproduction of William Hunter’s illustrated Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi from 1751, a work of art whose terrifying images of dissection show the body to be both beautiful and monstrous. They make Damien Hirst's Virgin Mother look like a third grade diorama.

Links to Historical Anatomies on the website of the National Institutes of Health.

James Wood on Flaubert

2006-04-20T00:17:00.000-04:00

There is a good James Wood and a bad James Wood. The good one sings when he writes about Bellow, the bad one just sulks eloquently. The bad James Wood published a poisonous condemnation of the "New York" novel and its practitioners McInerney, Ellis, and recently Rushdie, in The Guardian on Oct 6, 2001. The headline was "How does it feel?" The good James Wood has just given us a thorough and insightful essay on Flaubert's legacy in the guise of a review of the "magnificent" new biography of the writer.

Wood offers a fine reading of Flaubert's "superb and magnificently isolate" details in this passage from The Sentimental Education:

At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses' workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller's stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.

Flaubert, he argues, "is the greatest exponent of a technique that is essential to realist narrative: the confusing of the habitual with the dynamic... [his] details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously."

Tonight's Featured Act

2006-04-15T10:10:00.000-04:00

She was talking about going to hear Dawn Raffel read, but the words formed in my head as Don Raffle. Maybe the former is pronounced the same as the latter? Neither of us were sure. I started imagining what a writer like Don Raffle would be like. A Borscht Belt comedian of a writer. The Fozzie Bear of fiction. "How's everybody doing tonight?" he hollers, stumbling out on stage in his tawdry suit and hat. He's got a martini in one hand, microphone in the other, pages up his sleeve. Is his voice Fozzie's, or Krusty the Clown's? There's feedback from the PA. "Are you ready for some short stories?" The last word drawn out like taffy. Oh yes. It's late, the audience is drunk, it's a long drive home, the audience wants to be entertained. Maybe literary fiction should be more like bawdy jokes about farmers' daughters and popes walking into bars, priests and hookers and presidents on lifeboats. I think I want to be Don Raffle.

More on the Q&A

2006-04-13T14:20:00.000-04:00

What I remember: The conundrum of the bumblebee. Cueing fetishes, talismanic pages. Not knowing how to solve the problem of the project until you're inside it. Ideas agglomerate. Roth: job is to make a book smarter than its author. Maugham, Mann: Waiting to write the bildungsroman. "I'm a great believer in bohemian life." The value of the intimate and useless. Trillin on Babel via Wachtel: The human fact within the vale of circumstance. I heard the lyric as "monster eyes." I was so happy the kangaroo was named Shelf.

EL Doctorow on the Research in the Novel (An interview by Ron Carlson)

2006-04-10T22:51:00.000-04:00

(This interview with the writer Ron Carlson was done for the show Books & Co on KAET TV in Arizona. I'm posting it here because it seems to have been dropped from its home web server. I found it in Google's cache.)

Ron Carlson: What obligation do you have to your research? Because you've done a lot of research. You've written a lot about different places.

E.L. Doctorow: I don't know if what I do can be called research. It's so idiosyncratic and subjective. I've known too many writers who have researched things so thoroughly that they're stopped in their tracks.

Ron Carlson: That's what I'm asking.

E.L. Doctorow: And I believe when I'm asked this question "How much have you researched," I say, "Just enough." You start writing, and if you are writing well, I think really you create kind of a magnet force field around you. Whatever you need will come to hand. You'll see something in the street or run into -- I'll give you an example. In "Ragtime," I wrote a scene in which this -- the old silhouette artist Tateh and his little girl take streetcars from New York up to Lowell, Massachusetts, on the interurban street lines, which I knew were very widespread in those days, in the 1910s era, but I felt, well, this is really a stretch, and I’d better find out if it was possible to do this. But I didn't know how to go about researching it. So I was wandering around in the New York Public Library in the mid-Manhattan branch through the stacks, and my knee banged into a shelf of oversized books that were protruding from the shelf, and there was one with a big orange cover that was very prominent. So I just picked it up and looked at it, and it was a history of trolley car companies in America. And I’d found out, yes, you could go to Lowell, Massachusetts, from New York paying nickels with each new line. In fact, you could go from New York to Chicago by streetcar in those days, and it was a great system, and it was destroyed probably -- J.P. Morgan bought up some lines that he felt were competing with the new haven railroad. He destroyed them. Then the general motors corporation went around to cities saying buses are much cleaner and better, which was not true. And so trolley cars, streetcar transportation folded. Too bad.

Ron Carlson: But you found that book by accident.

E.L. Doctorow:By accident.

Ron Carlson: So it's a little different now with the internet. Everyone researches everything on the internet. It's all I hear about. People are "Googling" and finding out this stuff. You don't have a research staff? You just do your own research, correct?

E.L. Doctorow: I don't use a research -- one book I hired a guy to get some old magazines for me. I guess that was for "World's Fair." but, you know, a lot of what you make up is simply applying yourself logically to the situation, and there's really not that much trouble. I never corrected the problem in "Welcome To Hard Times." I left it. You know the Hawthorne story, the birthmark, where this man's married to this beautiful woman and she's absolutely perfect, and he loves her, but she has a little birth mark on her cheek in the shape of a tiny hand, and he's a natural scientist, so he concocts a potion and says, "Drink this and the birthmark will disappear and you'll be perfect." Because she loves him, she drinks it and the birthmark disappears and at that moment she dies. So that's why I've left Jenks out eating the roast haunch of prairie dogs.

Ron Carlson: Leave your beautiful flaws.

E.L. Doctorow: You want flaws.

Ron Carlson:Sure, I understand. Talking about research, so many times the question becomes your responsibility to be exact but, I mean, what you're saying is very much more kindred to what I've experienced, that is to say, as you focus on the work, that what you're writing becomes its own research, that you create and find the information you need.

E.L. Doctorow: I think so. You do look things up, but basically you have to trust the act of writing to guide you.

Notes from the Reading by Darin Strauss and Jonathan Lethem:

2006-04-10T22:25:00.000-04:00

Washington Square, March 30, 2006.

During the Q+A, Darin Strauss confessed he watched The Godfather 2 twenty times over the course of writing his first novel, Chang and Eng, to study the double-narrative structure. People these days, he argued, are paranoid about plagiarism. A writer should read widely taking what he can. On the other hand, one should be cautious about research. Strauss said that it was only when he was writing his first novel that he discovered the real truth behind the funny response Doctorow once gave to the question: how much research do you do for a novel? - As little as possible, he said.

Jonathan Lethem warned aspiring novelists that “an idea for a novel is not enough for a novel.” He said that his general reaction to reading “apprentice fiction” is “Do more. Do this and something else or 10 other things, but not just this one thing. Do more.”
After the Q+A, Strauss read briskly from his novel-in-progress about an adman in Long Island. As listeners, we sometimes felt forced to run to catch up to him, chasing one biting description after another. In the office scenes, the description was often aphoristic (“Small talk abhors a vacuum;” “The dotcom bubble’s contribution to the world of business was a residue of counterfeit wackiness.”) His metaphors and similes created a strange beauty from the dreary world of office supplies: “The overhead light jiggled. Everyone held still as if they were being photocopied.”

Lethem read from the beginning of a new novel about the breakup of a couple who are in the same band together. He’s the guitarist. She’s the bassist. Both of them have day jobs that take up most of their time. He works at the zoo, cleaning up after kangaroos. Though Lethem read with flair, the first section felt a bit flip – a satire with an easy target: sorta-hipsters stewing in their unrealized ambitions. The audience laughed along in sympathy. Especially the poets. In the scene, the band writes a song together, improvising the lyrics. Lethem sang the refrain, “Keep away from my monster gaze!” It was a real performance. He sounded a little like David Berman from the Silver Jews. The lyrics needed to be improvised because the band’s songwriter was “having a problem with language.”

“What do you mean?” the guitarist asks.

“You know, the place where it comes from.”

The MFA poets in the room laughed until tears came to their eyes.

The later scenes from the book involved an awkward conversation at the grocery store and a kidnapped kangaroo in a bathtub.

A brief reception followed. Refreshments were served.

One-Word Poem

2006-04-10T20:10:00.000-04:00

Big Al: So, Eric, you teach writing. I’m a terrible writer. The worst. When I was in grade school, our teacher told me we had to write a one-word poem.
Mike: What the hell’s a one-word poem?
Big Al: Exactly. It’s stupid. I said I’m not gonna do this shit. So she calls up my mother and says your kid’s an asshole he won’t write his poem. My mom says, if he don’t wanna do it, don’t make him do it.
Mike: How about “Fuck”? That’s a good one-word poem.
Big Al: Nah, she said it was like “Love.”
Me: That sounds like an awful poem.
Mike: Yeah, “Fuck” is way better.