Seventh Draft

The Dark Boquet of Doubt

2008-07-04T16:26:00.009-04:00

Josh,

Gabriel García Marquez was once asked, "Does a blank piece of paper distress you as it does other writers?"

"Yes," he answered, "It's the most distressing thing I know next to claustrophobia."

I agree with García Marquez, although the terms of my distress are distinctive. Garcia Marquez sees a blank page and possibly envisions himself trapped underwater, in an iron box; when I see a blank page I envision myself standing on the minuscule summit of a mountain peak, looking out. I'm standing on my toes, and of course, I'm naked. I have no idea how I got here, no idea how I'll get down. When I look out, I see a voluminous wall of glacial white. When I look down, I see an enormous abyss, looming under my feet.

"When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you," writes Nietzsche.

This is the blank page: the abyss that looks into you.

So I stand there, looking in, being looked in. I consider my options.

I consider leaping over the abyss. (But what if I miss the other side?)

Then I consider building a bridge across the abyss. (But what if the structure of the bridge fails?)

So I peer over the ledge. Every now and then I call out some name, a few nonsense words. The words come back to me, disembodied, like intonations from a distant, unknown twin, peering from the bottom of the abyss, and calling up. Suddenly, I want to meet this man, this alluring dopplegänger. So, finally, I jump.

Of course, if you're a writer, sooner or later you jump--you jump everyday, sometimes numerous times a day. It's scary (What the fuck is down there?) You're utterly full of doubt (What if my parachute fails?!) And you're alone out there (The only echo you hear is yourself.) So it's natural to question this situation, to doubt.

But still, you jump...

It's a long fall, fraught with the silence of swift air. You engage your chute.

You hit land.

Suddenly, you're standing again, high on a dune. There above you is the blue sky, in which two or three clouds, patterned by some crafty god to look like seashells, drift. Intoxicated by the scene, you raise you hands high and exhale deeply. A light breeze amuses your skin.

You survived! The freedom is so fresh you feel utterly overjoyed.

You're so overjoyed, in fact, you fail to see the enormous abyss, looming under your feet.

***

In his biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Andrew Turnbull notes that before beginning The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald re-read Joseph Conrad's preface to Nigger of the Narcissus which states that a work of art should carry its own justification in each line. Then, while writing his novel, Fitzgerald kept his ambition clear: he wanted to create, line by line, a work of art. In doing so, he later wrote, he "tread slowly & carefully at times in considerable distress."

I've been working on a novel and I must admit: I've been experiencing considerable distress. I'd like to think I am making a conscious effort, like Fitzgerald, to produce, line by line, a work of "art." But this is not my ambition. In fact, my ambition seems to oppose Fitzgerald's ambition entirely: I simply want to finish the novel, quickly.

***

Gabriel García Márquez speaks similarly of Fitzgerald's type distress: "At the beginning, when I was learning my craft," he says, "I wrote jubilantly, almost irresponsibly. I remember, in those days, I could easily write four, five, even ten pages of a book after I'd finished work on the newspaper...Once, I wrote a whole short-story at a single sitting…Now I'm lucky if I write a good paragraph in a whole day. With the passage of time the act of writing has become very painful."

So, is writing inherently distressful? Or, is this a burden that comes only with age, with experience? I admit, for me, writing is often quite distressful. I plod, from sentence to sentence, torturing myself over each word. And yet, still, I am doubtful.

Then there are those rare moments, those titanic instances, when I feel inhabited by the muse, utterly overwhelmed and inspired. Then, I literally gush words. I am confident!

***

I'm a whimsical, moody guy. I change, day to day. Carried along by my changing moods, I feel exhilarated one day, mopey the next. For example: I sit down on Friday, start writing a story. I'm full of confidence. I'm certain the story will be published. It's my best yet.

Saturday morning, I wake up, hung-over, and read my story. Suddenly I see the truth: It's actually terrible! It will never be published. I'm full of uncertainty.

What do I do?

I like what Uncle Deano says (in a letter he wrote me when I was 21):

"Allow yourself to be uncertain but don't let your uncertainty turn to despair because it can be wonderful to write when you're sad and full of the dark bouquet of doubt, but misery lends itself to silence and one must get out of bed every morning and prepare for the great celebration of one's own imagination, even if it doesn't happen that day."

So I sit down, full of doubt, and write.

***

I suppose this is just a ridiculously convoluted way to get to this point: You have to just sit down, full of doubt, and write. Everyday.

This is the only thing you can do. You write. You write, with wild ambition; without undue expectation. This is what writers do, obviously.

And each of us is all alone on the edge, looking down, with only one parachute: me, you, Fitzgerald, García Marquez, Uncle Deano.

Everyone feels doubt: everyone.

I think you need to make a distinction, though.

When you're on that ledge, feeling doubtful, the doubt is something, isn't it? It's a beginning. It's a challenge. Maybe you need that doubt. After all, certainty is for the mathematician; the technician. But writers just might need uncertainty in order to work. To me, at least, writing's not fun unless it's something to figure out, a way of figuring out something. I think you'd agree. Nobody wants to write the story already written (except, of course, Pierre Menard.)

To me, doubt is a sort of wonderful, weird fuel. I suspect it's what skydivers call adrenaline. And it's pretty much what makes every single thing in life interesting.

(Will Federer beat Nadal in the Wimbledon final? Will I like Wall-E?)

The distinction you might need to make, then, is between doubt and despair.

Do you want to write? Do you believe in writing, as a life? Do you sense the celebration, looming?
Sky-diving, after all, is fun. It's risky, too. It's not fun, though, if you're sure you're going to die each time you jump. Odds are, that won't happen.

So, if you don't like these odds, why are you standing at the edge, looking over?

Josh Bares Heart, Soul in Response to Seth's Callous Critique

2008-06-29T07:00:00.007-04:00

Seth,

Like a cartoon octopus at a singalong Disney barn raising, your post simultaneously hits a number of nails squarely, and impressively, on the head. Again, I am amazed at how transparent writing is, especially unsuccessful writing. So often I try to hide behind what I'm doing - images, mirrors, devices - but in the end it's all laid out there on the page, waiting for a perceptive passerby to pick it up and be like, "Wait, this isn't a quarter...?"

Nail 1: My inability to have fun while writing. Yes, this is the heart of the debilitation and something that makes me want to run to some reservation where I can sit under a smoke-filled canvas until suffocation forces me to claw my way back into the panther-colored night. The question, then, is how to bring the joy back, and I take your point about the eighty page story seriously because I think it's right on target. For a long time I've been bucking the story form (as I, barely, understand it) in the interests of being original - but by doing this, I realize, I'm forced to rely, as you say, on my talent only. It's like I've got this beautiful, incredibly comfortable sock, but for some reason I spend all my time trying to amputate the foot it should be going on. I'm at sea, in other words, which is one of the reasons, I think, that the language of these pieces feels so disconnected and straining. There's no repose in them, because they don't know what they are and therefore can't settle into themselves. They haven't got a story to fall back on.

(sub-nail 1A: Why can't I write a story? Why do I fear writing stories? Lately, I've come to realize that it has a lot to do with my fear of failure - that is, of "falling" into the normalcy that using a shared form (let alone medium) entails. In other words, instead of solving the problems that everybody's got to solve, I want to find a stretch of beach with no one on it, where I can just fuck around to my heart's content. Which is probably why so much of this shit feels like just that: fucking around. Plus, you've got the idiotic reversal of beginning with the desire to be different, as opposed to beginning with a legitimate difference and then expressing that, via the shared form of the story, in a way so true to your experience that the end construction can't help but be unique.)

Nail 2: Blog/emails vs. "Writing." I think this may be a more mundane, process-type question than it at first appears. In both the blog and emails, I have a goal, an "objective", something I want to communicate. For example, right now, I'm thinking, I want to respond to Seth's comments, and while responding, I want to use the English language as a way to think through what my actual response is (this is, I think, a weirdness of my brain...one you might share, or might not: I literally CANNOT THINK about a story outside of when I'm actually writing it. It's like the story doesn't exist outside of the words in which it's written). The solidity of a goal makes it pretty easy to write - it gives me a poise and balance (between making my point and having fun with the writing itself) that is much difficult for me to achieve in an actual story. In a story, I can never tell what's necessary and what's not. When I try to be shapely, I end up underwriting, and when I try to elaborate, the fabric becomes slack and fetid. You say you spend hours, days on sentences, and I do too - but then the sentences I spend hours and days on inevitably end up feeling stupid and overwrought: like when you're talking to someone about basketball and he suddenly starts referencing the Nichomachian Ethics. I mean, it could very well pertain, but there's a breach of manners - manners here meaning, not just surface courtesy, but the deep fabric of people communicating. Something throws the whole conversation out of whack, and the guy's embarrassed, not necessarily because he tried something different, but because he tried something different and then allowed it to sit there, out of context.

Nail 3: Fear of the mundane. This is very true, and I wonder if, again, I'm not just trying to make prose do something it's not supposed to do: exist as language before it exists dramatically. As D'Ambrosio says, poetry is inspiration, but prose is work. You've got to sweat it out. But I fear sweat as a sign of my own imperfection as a writer and human being. You know what it is? I want to be Mozart. And I'm not Mozart, and I realize that, but even realizing that, I find myself secretly wanting to believe that I'm secretly secretly Mozart, and that all the demands that art makes on me are really just affronts to my genius, and what Writing should really be doing is bowing before me, its lord and master. Immature, right? A sure fire way to never write anything worthwhile. Ever. Unless you're Mozart. Which I'm not. But I could be. No, I couldn't. It's so fucking WASP/Puritan/Calvinist, Seth: I recognize the lineaments of my sick and wasted ancestors in each of my sentences, their faces and anxieties. The desire to be a member of the Elect, which used to mean God's Children, but now means An Artist - proven by faith, though, rather than actual work. Ugh. It's embarrassing, sometimes, how persistently I seem to be trying to destroy myself as a writer.

But, there's always hope... After all, this is what we're all going through, right? One thing that Warren Wilson has convinced me of is that, though we each have our variation, the spectacle of another writer's struggle to become something real is valuable, maybe even heartening. And yes, one thing the Puritans got right is that life really is an allegory. My story (I have the arrogance to believe) is your story in the same way that my fork is your fork, or my car is your car.

Anyway, I wanted to answer your generosity with generosity, and I will. I've been trying to decide how to take on your story. Before I got to that, though, I had to try to communicate all this to you, because I was really pleased and happy that you took the time to read my stuff and give me comments on it. As I've said before I think, I admire and envy your joy. If we're similar in general, we're certainly different species, and it's bracing and important for me to get your point of view on this stuff. I certainly think we should keep swapping stuff.

Anyway, 'nuff said for now. Let me know if any of this hits home, resonates, works for you. Again, for all my obsession with my version, what I really want and need to hear is your version.

And then I took a shit...

Seth Reads Josh's Novel and Responds in Shock

2008-06-28T21:13:00.003-04:00

Josh,

Turns out, I just went through your novel draft in a traditional way, lightly editing in places, leaving comments. I didn't want to mess with the language too much because it's really what I love about your writing. That said, read my comments about precision and superfluity--perhaps they'll resonate. Basically, I think your rich language could be made even richer by excising some of the extras you throw in, here and there. For example, you use "that" a lot, and it doesn't always seem to be needed.

How long do you work on a sentence? In my recent story (not the one I sent you) I'd say I've given each sentence at least an hour's worth of thinking. Some of your sentences seem so carefully wrought; but then, in some places, I feel like you're drifting by on talent. It's obvious to me: you are much, much more talented than me. BUT: I think there is a but! The but is that I enjoy writing, a lot. This is a major plus. From your blog, from our correspondence, I assume writing is more tortuous for you, less fun. Why? Can it be fun? It seems like you have a blast writing Seventh Draft stuff. And e-mails. So what's different about the stories?

Actually, I think I have a sense of why you're complaining of writer's block, having gone through something similar a few years ago. I could be way, way, way off base, but perhaps it's in the work itself, the fact that you're setting up a tremendous, daunting project and that you're worried about sustaining your rigor.

Your "novel" is not really that; it's basically, a series of vignettes, loosely tied together by the presence of the narrator's voice. A few things seem to happen, but there's no sincere connections, yet. I wrote eighty pages of a novel once; something somewhat similar. Near the 80th page I found myself thinking, What the fuck am I doing? I'm not even telling any sort of story at all! Sustaining this tremendous, loose sort of prose-poetry is impossibly hard. It's just daunting. Why don't you figure out a story? Go back, edit, cut whatever you need to--make a story!

My suggestion:

Think about how your sentences work in the piece, how each sentence might deliver a reader into the scene, but also represent what’s going on in the story. Think about how a sentence might also contribute a larger meaning to the story; it should echo previous incidents; it should illuminate. I’ve been thinking about this idea in terms of the mundane: how a writer might offer a very simple, but needed expository sentence, while also contributing something else to a story, something larger. You seem to shy away from the mundane. Your sentences are all relatively spectacular. I can't recall any mundane sentences. Sometimes, to make a story, you need to write "And then I took a shit".

Anyway. Phew! Hope these comments spark something for you...

Seth

Doldrums

2008-06-17T19:09:00.004-04:00

Seth,

Travellers in the desert, external or internal, are supposed to return laden with gifts, but I've got nothing. In fact I admit, the past four months have been a period of, not accumulation so much as loss. Not even tangible loss, which might be put to good use, but the slippery loss of footing and focus that you get, for example, from napping too long. Or too late. Imagine a four hour nap, unpremeditated, slipped into gradually and without warning, the cushions deep and cool, the fan on your eyelids, your socks off, everything. Dreamless; but then suddenly you wake up and it's seven-thirty. What the fuck do you do now? You can't go to back to sleep; but at the same time you can't really do anything productive, central. You've wasted both your energy and your exhaustion, and the result is like being a coin trapped on the wrong side of someone's coat lining. You just rattle around in there, not really doing anything.

I'm wondering how you deal with these periods. In the olden days, if Celestial Navigations wasn't lying to me, ships travelling through certain parts of the Pacific Ocean used to carry horses with them onboard. They fed them, rubbed their legs down at night. Treated them like passengers, practically, trying to keep their strength up. Then, when the ship hit a certain particularly-windless spot, they'd tether the horses to the front of the ship and have them literally pull it towards the wind. Cheers! Celebration! After they were out there was no need to keep wasting food and manpower, and the horses were cut.

What is ballast? Your boy Rimbaud liked to talk about seasons - not literal ones, though those work too. Pushkin wrote best in the fall: spring, and then summer after summer he'd spend gambling, flirting, *wasting*; but when fall came teh fetters fell and he worked. Another dream of art: that, by the genius of your good hair-days, your bad hair-days will be transformed into periods of fermentation. You were only "experimenting," only trying out that particular reverse mohawk; meanwhile a masterpiece slept in you like a kidney that you would eventually sell on the black market, and for thousands of dollars.

Sounds good...but then, that's a Writing way to look at it, right? And this right here, thank God, is definitely Not-Writing. It's a machine, with umbrellas sticking off of it and shopping-cart wheels and chicken legs stuck to the bottom - a machine whose purpose, for me at least, is not flight so much as non-flight: a sloth so absolute that it will the reveal the apparently-stationary universe to be moving very, very fast.

It's right there on the masthead after all (maybe we ARE on a ship): writing as a diversion to writing. Or, what to do in the great green doldrum that all of us dilettantes, aspirers, flaneurs, shit-eaters share. This is a constantly-interesting mystery to me. It's where I live right now for all intents and purposes.

(Another possibility of course is that this is the absolute WORST way to think about it, and that writing, creating, really means fessing up to reality and understanding that some things are beyond your control. Reality means being pragmatic, which I like in theory but can never seem to get myself to do when confronted with the page. I fear (and when I say fear, I mean it: I am really terrified by this) that what's really going on here is: the doldrums are finite, but I've refused to bring horses. I lack the necessary cruelty, the "killer instinct." Or, I simply do not want to arrive and find out that where I've been headed for is just as complicated and depressing as where I come from.)

Seth, you are a survivor, a seasoned marksman. You can take down a bear at twelve paces or wait calmly for it to take its shot. You eat cherries out of your hat, toss the pits at its feet. And of course, life can't take that pressure and misses every time. It's a matador-level readiness that I aspire to but frankly am congenitally resistant to. But maybe our weaknesses really are our gifts, and the things we prepare for life on the big stage only larger versions of what we've rehearsed in private all our lives. Wish I knew.

Hit me, Audubon. Let's see what you've bagged over the last four months.

Betrayed

2008-01-31T15:33:00.000-05:00

Josh,

Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary defines jealousy as:

"Suspicion of a wife’s purity, one of the strongest passions (Num. 5:14; Prov. 6:34; Cant. 8:6); also an intense interest for another’s honour or prosperity (Ps. 79:5; 1 Cor. 10:22; Zech. 1:14)."

Incidentally, the same dictionary defines the waters of jealousy as:

"Water which the suspected wife was required to drink, so that the result might prove her guilt or innocence (Num. 5:12-17, 27). We have no record of this form of trial having been actually resorted to."

No record? Of course. Why use water when "the result" could be more quickly obtained with blood. But what, I wonder, was "the result"? Easton's doesn't tell us and I for one am glad. This absence inspires me. I envision levitation, vomiting, cursing.

***

Nowadays I think we have a more reasonable (at least less gender specific, and clearly less misogynist) view of jealously. Wikipedia says simply:

"Jealousy typically refers to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that occur when a person believes a valued relationship is being threatened by a rival."

I prefer this modern, friend-focused version of jealousy and all that it implies: backstabbing, fist-fights, hot tears!

Both definitions, though, have one thing in common: betrayal.

The jealousy you're talking about, I think, really, is a jealousy over yourself. You're jealous of that young kid, back there, full or promise, so happy with the accomplishments of others, so un-disgusted with himself. He's betrayed you. You write:

"Of the many things I wish I could tell my younger self, the danger of jealousy is one of the most difficult to part with. I am sure there was a time when I felt that I was who I was - there must have been a time like that...But now I feel like there's no way out of certain things: self-disgust, for example; also shame, a sense of failed promise. Does this mean that I'm growing up finally?"

Perhaps your younger self, the one who betrayed you, wishes too that he could tell you many things, such as: Is that you there, sitting on the sidelines, scratching your elbows? Are you still doing that? No wonder you're disgusted! I thought growing up means growing out too...

Of course, growing up probably doesn't mean that. From what I know of growing up--which is, admittedly, not much--growing up probably means growing down, growing in--learning, somehow, to feel comfortable in your own skin, your own soul.

***

I had a Korean friend named, let's say J. After high-school we grew distant. Then one day, out of the blue, I wrote him an e-mail:

"I've known you for a long time and have been your friend for a long time, but I have always felt that you were never really "open" with me or anyone about how you were feeling. For example, you always used to seem to downplay the fact that you're Korean; even when we asked you to speak Korean you never did. Back then, and still to this day, I feel like a lot of the time when we speak you try to impress me with certain things, like your salary for example. It seems to me that you were always having a hard time finding your place, especially as the only Korean in the group, and perhaps you did these things to compensate for what you felt you were lacking, which in reality, WAS NOTHING.

You have always been kind, intelligent, and fun to hang out with, and I have always considered you a friend, but NOW, as we grow into adulthood I would like to be friends with you, without the added bullshit. I want to understand every part of you. Hell, I don't even care if I have to learn Korean! I always have wanted to know that part of you. But you never gave it up."

Of course, this e-mail came to J. as a shock. He wrote back a long, intense e-mail (probably the longest thing he had ever written or ever will write) basically laying it out on the line, speaking of an illuminating trip to Korea, and how, back in the states he would go to Korean bars and feel incredibly out of place, how he was now trying, trying, trying, to figure out who he was, but it was hard, so very hard. And he told me he was a bit jealous--jealous of the ease with which I walked through life, my white guy in America-ease, my popular-guy ease.

***

It's strange then, to me, that you write about your jealousy over Asians who were younger, smarter, and better at what you do best. Of course, most of the Asians I've known (in school mostly) have been younger, smarter, and better at what I want to do best. (I remember, specifically, two Korean girls in my ceramics class: there disturbing, exquisite talent created the most beautiful ceramics figures I have ever seen, all the more beautiful when placed near my blobs. Ceramics: one of two classes I've failed. The other one: gym.) But I can't help but think of Asians in America divorced from my impression of J. and his struggles: feeling a bit alienated, unsure of his culture, perhaps even embarrassed.

But who am I to question J. really? Who am I to demand: show yourself!

This is an easy demand, perhaps, when you speak from my viewpoint: White guy in America.

Am I so thickheaded?

***

Is it so easy for me though? Probably, yes. But I'm certainly not dominant. Just because I'm the majority doesn't mean I feel major. Often, I feel very minor, a tiny universe to my own, utterly different, so idiosyncratic, so in need of my strange rules, my necessities: my insulin, my three-square meals, my Noni-juice.

I don't always like to show this odd part of myself, but who am I supposed to be, if not this weirdo?

I think what we share, something that's basic, is how much the sense of betrayal really influences us. We don't feel right when we don't feel like ourselves. We feel like we've betrayed something essential and were jealous for what we could be.

For J. the situation, living in America, divorced from his heritage, only accentuates the struggle: Who the fuck am I?

But the question itself might be ridiculous. How do you answer that question, after all? Probably, you just live. I think this is what I mean by "growing in" instead of out. It seems like it has to be easy, but sometimes it's hard. I think it's hard, maybe, because we spend so much time thinking about growing into something, becoming something--a good husband, an adult. But maybe it's as easy as Not Thinking--instead of becoming, maybe just being.

But what do I know: I flunked ceramics.

No Matter How Good You Are, There Will Always Be an Asian Man Who Is Younger, Smarter, And Better Than You At What You Do Best

2008-01-24T19:44:00.002-05:00

Frequently, that man will be your best friend.

The history of my life is in many ways a history of the Asian friends who have been better than me at what I do best. I'm not sure how far back records go, but beyond the border of my birth-picture I'm pretty sure there's a Japanese boy eating his foot.

"Watch out!" I want to yell at my baby-self. I want to warn him to pay no attention to what is happening one dish over.

There is so much to say in these situations! For example, I want to say, in second grade you will befriend Shunsuki Eno. His house is covered in blue shag; there is a Yamaha organ with an ungodly number of sound presets in one corner of it. The bench is so tall that your feet barely reach the ground - but this is appropriate since Shun himself is at least twice as good a piano player as you. He does not look at his fingers while he plays.

In addition to the organ Shun will have a Nintendo. But it's a strange Nintendo: smaller, with bright, pastel-colored games that cause him to whack disdainfully at the controller. None of its games will work on your console.

At one point you will decide to design your own video game; so you will sit on a wall drawing the slime from Legend of Zelda until your mom comes to pick you up. Shunsuki will let you keep his drawings.

Later, Thomas Aquino will own that rare thing: a Sega Genesis. You will never get to play it. You will never want to play it: you will prefer watching him play, cross-legged on one of his tessellated floor pillows, lunging through Strider, hacking apart Golden Axe, or manipulating the gigantic four-dimensional quilt of Sonic the Hedgehog. You will watch him play these games with your heart in my stomach - you will want him to win so badly! And when he does win, you will feel a warm feeling spreading through your body like pee or the seat-heater on your family's Volvo. Even when you're outside - even when Tom's mother kicks you off the Genesis, and you go outside and tie firecrackers to small lizards, you will continue to feel this.

You will be, according to your sixth grade science teacher, "fiercely competitive." And this will be a terrible and exhilarating feeling at the same time - one that you will savor for years, that makes you more unhappy than any other friend, girl, or even parent. At this point, finally, you will begin to beware your Asian friend.

The Asian friend of your youth will occasionally be Jewish. Don't let this fool you.

He will be an only child; or he will have a sister who he worships.

Tri Vinh Van, location currently unknown. Of all the Asian friends, he will be the most mysterious. A gentle man whose generosity is at times princely, at times merely Canadian. The first one to broach, unabashedly, the Insolubility of White People. The borders of his life will be bizarre, even dangerous-sounding, but he will maintain a clear and untroubled brow. When you drop out of touch with him you will begin to doubt that he ever existed.

Boxers, Hockey Players. They will gravitate to sports and video games, both of which they will beat you at. They will be dogged and quick and above all else hungry for love and attention. They will have pity on you, but this pity will be tainted by your weakness, which will disgust them. Weakness: one of the few things that you will learn without hesitation to call your own.

There will be problem areas. Girls, for example: the time Dewi Dynoot puts paper-clips in your hair. You thought you were just playing around and in doing so proved yourself part of the Insolubility of White People. In this way you will betray, again and again, your Asian friends. They will repay you in kind through their excellence at what you do best, or by stealing girls from you. You will repay them through your excellence at what they do best.

What will it take for you to understand the serious of this? The older you get, the less you will know. Conversely, your Asian friends will get younger, more talented. They will succeed where you failed.

At which point you will have to discover their secret.

You will have to find out how to use this feeling or be destroyed. On the other hand, if you are not destroyed, you will owe one more thing to your Asian Friend.

Of the many things I wish I could tell my younger self, the danger of jealousy is one of the most difficult to part with. I am sure there was a time when I felt that I was who I was - there must have been a time like that. I remember it as if it were this morning, before some long nap I fell into. But now I feel like there's no way out of certain things: self-disgust, for example; also shame, a sense of failed promise. Does this mean that I'm growing up finally? I am convinced it must be, that I'm not alone.

How can I possibly be alone?

On the other hand, I am pretty sure that Shun would never allow himself to be this way.

Anti-Castration Epic

2008-01-17T16:38:00.000-05:00

Seth,

Writing as life seems like one of the main currents of Seventh Draft, and frankly I can't see anything more writerly than putting your all into a MySpace comment. Sure, we're all addicted to the opus - but good is good and the stank of quality rises no matter how small the stain.

I think of it in terms of energy. You've got X amount of energy and you want to make something with it - want to bend the world and feel its kiss or disgusted slap or whatever. You do this because you're inadequate, a Castrato of moon-mash, too awake for an animal but otherwise powerful sleepy. So you doodle in your margins or write notes that no one will ever find. You lavish attention on the world the way you would lavish your hand on the back of a particularly lustrous golden retriever: because hair is soft and your hand can feel it.

The no "good" reason part is why art is heroic. I mean, I'm all for taking your shot at the title, writing a three-thousand page epic on the tobacco industry or rhyming enough couplets to get you into Guinness, but that's not really the point, is it? That's the world's work, and though art is always of the world, it needs to possess multiple dimensions to be real. It needs to have velocity, to be shooting off in all directions - to be shooting especially into those dark spaces and unborn minds that whose existence it can't even begin, at the moment, to imagine. Because it can't imagine them, it has to be as generous.

Art has no good reason and needs none. It's gratuitous, unnecessary - but if performed sincerely, it manages one of the most amazing inversions of existence and ends up being the most vital and useful thing in our toolbelt. Trusting in its utility doesn't have to be a faith thing, either. Think about how many beds you wouldn't have been able to get out of if it wasn't for Anna's squint. Or how you might not have been able to look yourself in the mirror if it hadn't been for Jens Lekman singing to his hairdresser,

"Your hands are soft.
Your hands are soft, just like silk.
You're a drop of blood.
You're a drop of blood in my glass of milk."

Words like these do more than just suffuse my life with romance - they shape my thoughts, give me a pattern to run myself through. They give off sparks that seem inexhaustible to me, and I know they have real effects in the real world. For one thing, they have made me prick my finger so that I could see exactly what a drop of blood in a glass of milk looks like. I think I know the girl he's talking about.

Art is art, writing is writing, and passion/emotion well-arranged will deliver itself, no matter what. Fuck the consta-poo-poo of masterwork and genre and follow delight, perversity, what ever you want to call it like a bird-dog. Because at this very moment, whether you like it or not, you are writing your life.

Josh

Master of the Myspace Comment Genre

2007-12-17T17:33:00.000-05:00

Our tag reads: I need numerous diversions from writing and I figure the best diversion is probably writing. But what happens when I'm not writing at all? Well, obviously: no writing, no need for diversion.

Which is to say, now that our semester's work is done, I'm feeling a bit listless. Basically, I'm not writing all that much. I had big plans for these days--I was going to work hard on my novella; I was going to edit my ghost story to its natural degree of awesomeness; I was going to write actual letters to my greatest friends, telling them how much I love them (this last one came to me in a fit of unrequited enthusiasm.)

Instead, I'm cooking massive pots of soup. I'm eating glorious dinners. I'm drinking too much wine. I'm hanging out, talking. And, finally, four years after the purchase, I'm reading the instruction manual for my camera.

So, yeah, I'm doing all kinds of Not Writing. But you know what? I'm not really feeling so bad about it. I'm feeling like I've written enough over the past months. I need to take a break.

So why am I here, writing a blog?

Well, for one thing, I'm wildly addicted to writing. When I'm not writing I feel itchy. I actually feel itchy. It's an acute physical sensation.

So, I'm itching my elbows and wondering: Is it even possible to take a break?

I mean today I wrote: two or three meaningful e-mails, one very meaningful Christmas card, two or three meaningful messages on Myspace, and about twenty Myspace comments.

Yeah, it's true: instead of working on my novella, I've been tooling around, posting comments on Myspace. I kind of like this one:

"I think I can accurately say I eat more chicken any man ever seen. Do you agree?"

This is a comment I posted on my wife's Myspace page at approximately 4:49 PM.

Elsewhere, I wrote:

"I am chicken."

~Seth, upon being asked, "Do you do chicken?"

Writing this, weirdly, satisfied me. Reading it, weirdly, also satisfies me.

Remember when I said:

Blogs, letters, e-mails--to me, they're part of it, just as important as the "real" work. Your writing life is just that, your life. When you write a blog, it's not like the blog is not you--it is you. I mean do you really look at your writing as something outside your life? You move from one to the other. You write. You figure things out. Without the blogs, you'd be itching to write elsewhere--you'd be sending mad e-mails; you'd take up letter-writing, you'd deliberately fog your bathroom mirror just so you could finger a few lines on the glass.

I think I'm ready to say, for sure, that writing a Myspace comment often fulfills me as much or more than working on my novella.

***

Recently Janet wrote a review of a book by Marie Phillips called "Gods Behaving Badly" for the NYTimes.

Here's a brief excerpt from the review:

"Ms. Phillips’s premise is that the Greek deities have collectively suffered a whopping reversal of fortune, but that they still endure tenuously in the modern world. They live together in a disintegrating London house with a laurel-wreath knocker (nostalgia counts for a lot here) on the front door. Thus ensconced, with time on their hands, they trade spiteful wisecracks about the glory days."

The book looks ridiculous, but that's besides the point. Janet's not entirely kind in her review. Later, she writes:

"In a story so conventionally constructed that it suggests the help of fiction-writing software (yes, there is some), “Gods Behaving Badly” injects a pair of human lovebirds into the world of its downtrodden deities."

Finally, she writes:

"...although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that."

What the fuck, exactly, is Janet Maslin trying to say?

Basically, she's saying: Of course this novel is a joke, but more than that, the writer is a joke too. At the very least, she's certainly not a serious writer, an Olympian, as she most certainly should aspire to be.

I cringe. What would Janet Maslin have to say about my obsessive Myspace commenting?

Maybe it's just me, but I look at every venue as just another genre. Right now, I'm really working on my Myspace commenting. I'm trying to become a Master of the Genre. I've even met a few Masters. Recently, I discovered a new Master. His Myspace name is boxy and if they ever decide to give a Pulitzer for Myspace comments he will be nominated. From him, I've re-affirmed that the Myspace comment can be: offensive, hilarious, and utterly illuminating.

A few weeks ago, I was deeply immersed in my novella, so deeply that I couldn't even fathom taking a week or two off. Now I'm like novella-shmovela. I have Myspace comments to write!

***

An admission: I've been cooking dinner and writing this blog at the same time.

I would never do that when working on my novella.

But what if I did?

If all writing is the same, as I'm trying to say maybe it is, then why do I always set aside the most special time for my novella? Why do I pace around beforehand, procrastinating?

Perhaps I take it more seriously. Perhaps not. Maybe I'm just psyching myself out.

Whatever. Dinners almost ready.

I have wine to drink, chicken to eat.

Schrodinger's Igloo

2007-12-07T05:23:00.000-05:00

Seth,

A true Winter morning here in Brooklyn: cold, dark, just enough snow on the ground to make me nervous, or more nervous, about riding my bike to work along the slippery Manhattan "bike paths." Winter, Seth....Winter! Just writing the word makes me excited and provokes me into contrasting your Mediterranean, sun-worshipping shark-attackery with my own bearish love of cold, inside, small quarters, snow...

(great how we can do this. Last night in my journal: "A new person is an opportunity to create yourself again." It's strange since I spend so much time alone, but to be totally honest I don't think I'm anybody at all without another person around - even if that other person is only a vaguely-imagined audeince. I'm like Schrodinger's cat: I mean, common sense and experience dictate that I should exist on my own, but then what do you do with the fact that entire constellations of television satellites are kept in flight based primarily on the science of my nonexistence...? Do you just let these things hurtle into Australia...?)

Winter is a natural time for introverts and sleep-artists like myself: a great season for writing but even more so a great time for Not-Writing. I personally have been doing a lot of the latter and not looking back, embracing a mix of Pushkinian laziness and Rimbaudesque mopery, though with much less absinthe, wine and derangement. All that stuff is fun - but for me, the most interesting route to life's strangeness isn't jumping on it (pretending it's a horse, galloping, I don't know, spilling everyone's drinks), but rather crawling under it. I've been calling this the Russian way here and intend to stick to the term despite the fact that pretty much anybody can do it bearded or not.

Even Americans, like Ahab, who wanted to strike through the mask - though in my own personal cosmology I cross him with my grandmother's quilt making and imagine myself a needle pushed - tenderly but firmly - to the other side of the fabric. What a strange place that must be for a first-time needle! A sort of anti-world, colors muted or reversed and the stitching hanging off of everything like wiring after a hurricane, ragged and warm and dream-like, frightening.

Winter, for me, is like a gigantic, three-month-long other side of the quilt: a time of transfiguration and power - the season of advent, which I, being heathen and bearish in my understanding of the term, associate with tiny, pockmarked calendars and the world they represent: a world that isn't a single unliftable piece at all, but a network of little doors and tunnels: people slinking down fireplaces and disappearing into back pockets. A subterranean hearth-lit dreamed and dreaming world; domesticated. Most importantly a place where escape is possible.

(hilarious and revolting how much this post makes me sound like a fat old man eating gumdrops)

Escape...yes...

Freedom/Nonfreedom, or as Victor Shklovsky calls it, "Unfreedom"...Why does this idea obsess me so much?

VS says about his time as a young writer:

"I spent the second factory thinking - or to put this in terms of an object being processed - undergoing the thought of freedom.
What concerns me now are the limits of freedom, the deformations of the material."

And again later, in a letter to Roman Jakobson:

"Roman, I am studying the unfreedom of the writer. I am studying unfreedom as though it were a set of gymnastic equipment."

Freedom presumes that I AM something to begin with - but what if this constant reaching was just a slightly more complex version of the way a plant moves towards sunlight? Then what we've been talking about here isn't freedom at all, but an attempt at a more complicated unfreedom than the one we've got.

An unfreedom we're at home in, like a gigantic living room, with the great living-room strangeness I can remember distinctly from when I was a kid, and even a paper-weight was like a nugget of uranium that had landed in my hands against all sense and decency.

The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the fables the native Brazillians told him as an attempt to turn the world from something strange and frightening to something human - something interesting, rather than terrifying. Igloos, however, are usually abandoned after a night's use, since food moves and anyway snow is everywhere.

The Mope

2007-11-30T15:06:00.000-05:00

Josh,

Funny you should mention Rimbaud, of course. I like to think of him as a sort of emblem of what you might call, following Pushkin, the "lazy man". I like to say "the mope."

It's funny too, though, how mopes always seem to be the ones slamming open hidden doors. That monster Elvis, for example, was a classic lay-about. And have you ever read Truman Capote's New Yorker profile on Marlon Brando? The Duke, it seems, the torrent of American Acting, was really a fat, lazy bum at heart. And that's before he actually became a fat, lazy bum.

I love these guys, but I love them, mostly, for their mopiness. I aspire to Brando in Streetcar--cut, virile, ridiculously handsome--but really I feel more comfortable with Godfather Brando--fat, slow, a bit ugly. The one seems full of energy, but a little empty; the other, full of languor, and yet utterly powerful.

I mean, I always admired a guy like Neruda for his industriousness, but I didn't love him until I read his thoughts on wasting time:

"If poets answered public opinion polls truthfully, they would give the secret away: there is nothing as beautiful as wasting time."

But there's a difference, I think, between being lazy in life and being lazy in ART. For example, that bum Pushkin, you mention, throws grapes at us until we see that we've got to keep slapping ART, keep reminding it to pay attention and not lapse into the laziness of inherited forms.

Which is basically what Rimbaud says: "The invention of the unknown demands new forms". And, really, what poet's life better distills the essence of this quote than Rimbaud?

He wrote this famous line in 1871, at the age of sixteen, in the midst of a sequence of two brash and absurd letters that have come to be known as the Lettres du Voyant or, if you prefer, "The Seer Letters."

The first letter, to his teacher Georges Izambard, announced Rimbaud's intentions to become a poet, a seer, and it included a short poem, which begins with a choice Rimbaud line: "My sad heart slobbers at the poop."

Izambard blasted the letter. It was vicious, detestable he later said—the young poet seemed to want to screw himself up, as much as possible, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

But Izambard missed the point. Yes, Rimbaud was screwing himself up, but he was serving an inviolable master: Poetry.

"Right now, I'm making myself as shitty as I can," he wrote. "Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a Seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. And I've realized I am a poet. It's really not my fault."

This strikes me as one of the most pretentious, ridiculous letters ever written. And I love it. I love it for what it says about the connection between writing poetry and living poetry. The derangement of all the senses is one of Rimbaud's most celebrated phrases. With the support of this bold assertion, Rimbaud transformed the act of writing poetry into an act of living, a voyage into the wild unknown.

"The invention of the unknown demands new forms," Rimbaud wrote in the second of the Lettres du Voyant, sent to Izambard's friend, Paul Demeny, several months later. At this point, the young poet was certain: the new form was meant to be amorphous, as a man's life is, essentially, amorphous. And although Izambard and Demeny both dismissed the letters as utter inanity, practical jokes at best, utter filth at worst, Rimbaud was certainly not joking.

Within a few months he was carousing bohemian Paris, living on little else than absinthe, hashish, and the erotic adulation of Paul Verlaine, and writing his masterpiece, "A Season in Hell."

From poop to poetry—the evolution of Rimbaud was furious.

But still, I must admit, it is this early line that has always haunted me: my sad heart slobbers at the poop.

This line has occupied my thoughts for several years. It comes to me during the most opportune occasions. When, for example, alone and sitting on the toilet, I begin to imagine Rimbaud at sixteen, and I see the portraits of the young poet, the first taken in October, 1871, the second, more famous, taken two months later, in December.

The difference between the two pictures is astounding.

In the first picture Rimbaud, recently arrived in Paris, appears to be no more than a child, a puffy, mopey brat, eminently poised for naughtiness—the type of child who seems capable of writing an entire manifesto on poop.

In the second picture, Rimbaud has aged considerably; his face, chiseled, evocative—Jean Cocteau said, "He looks like an angel"—is the face of a poet, a man.

What possibly could have happened in the span of two short months to bring about this incredible transformation?

Sometimes I linger on the toilet, for up to ten, fifteen minutes, my chin positioned firmly on my fist, thinking about Arthur Rimbaud's life. I can see him, for example, standing on some non-descript corner in the Latin Quarter, kicking a stone, a seventeen year old absorbing the hitherto unfamiliar language of the world that was Paris in 1871: the dung-filled alleyways, the aroma of bodies and smoke, the muggy air. Then, in the evening, when the darkness collapsed upon the city, he would have strolled along the streets until he hit the small alley, the Rue Séguier, where a metal cot awaited him in a studio at number thirteen, the second of four, five, or six addresses in Paris, the filthy rooms where he conceived the lines that won him posthumous worldwide fame.

But eventually my thoughts always turn to his life after Paris, his years of wandering, and his death in Marseilles. The biographies tell us that in 1874, though possibly later—the life of Rimbaud has always remained splendidly ambiguous—he quit writing, irrevocably.

Rimbaud—the seer-poet—was nineteen years old.

He spent the next seventeen years wandering around Europe and Africa. This period of his life is sketchily documented, often vague, and mysterious. His letters, written during the time, reveal a sullen, mopey man. "I am bored all the time," he wrote to his family in 1888.

By the time he died, in 1891, in Marseille, after years of wandering, his poetry had resurfaced in France, but Rimbaud had vanished so completely that many people did not believe the news of his death: they assumed he was already dead. Rimbaud—the wanderer, the mope—was thirty-seven years old.

Rimbaud's life—the early, resounding poetry; the sudden, unreasonable renunciation of poetry; and the inscrutable years of wandering that follow—has fascinated and perplexed me for some time. And this is why I have chosen to evoke him now—as a resounding testament to the intrigue of mopey behavior. And yet, when I am on the toilet, thinking, and even now as I write, I am confounded by what seems to be the inscrutable enigma of Rimbaud.

After all, what is one to make of this enigmatic character?

How am I to evoke the unreasonable Rimbaud?

Was he a seer? Or a mope?

Whatever the case, it's obvious there was a lot of Not-Writing that led to Rimbaud's writing: a lot of getting ready. Does it really matter what you do to get ready, though? Probably. I tend to think boring lives inspire boring writing. But then, of course, there's the Emily Dickinson factor. She basically sat around her place a lot, but she sure wrote a lot of kick-ass poems.

Did she even do drugs? I don't think so.

I suppose the connection between Not-Writing and writing might be too subjective to qualify at all. We all get ready in different ways, of course. Writing, though, the act of sitting down and doing the work--that's easier to define. You sit down, do it. I know you might find that attitude naive, a bit ridiculous, but that's how I've always gone about it.

I live, get drunk, wake up hung-over, and sit down and write. If I don't make this commitment to sitting down, each day, I'll never write. When I'm Not-Writing I don't think about it. I try, instead, to give my attention to what really matters, at least to me: my wife, my friends, my family, food. Funny thing though, this attention, this look away from writing, is me writing too.

Basically, I'm always preparing, but not always thinking about the preparation. That puts an awful lot of stress on your life. Deliberately going out to derange your senses in the service of writing? That's childish. I'll just go out and derange my senses.

Hemingway was a dick-head, for sure, and part of this might have been his need to live experiences for writing. That strikes me as extremely artificial and very bullshit.

Perhaps that's why I prefer the mopes, the ones who love wasting time, which really has nothing and everything to do with the time they spent writing--which, of course, was not wasted time at all...

pushkin47

2007-11-20T07:34:00.000-05:00

Polis,

Russian Futurist…French Surrealist…? Are you serious?

Putting the inherent ridiculousness of these two ideas on the sideboard for a second, let’s have a closer look at them. My can-opener in this discussion, as usual, is going to be the Russian serial-amorist Alexander Pushkin, who Russians worship but who nobody else pays any attention to and rightfully so: he sounds stupid in any language other than his own, really beyond shitty.

I think he'd like this – I mean, if anyone spent less mental energy on writing and being a writer it was Pushkin, who founded Russian literature in a few brilliant strokes and then walked into a Frenchman’s bullet because his wife was a flirt. Live by the sword die by the sword; so he’s become a real hero of mine, not just for what he wrote, but for the way he wrote it. Reclined, generous, with swiftness and vigor and complete immersion.

Pushkin was a “lazy man,” by which I mean the usual pose of artistic industry didn’t appeal to him. Easy for us to forget in professionalized America, but art used to be, not so much a matter of when you clocked in and out, but rather how you positioned yourself so as to let the energies of the world flow down your pen-hand most efficiently. As beard-wearer/Soviet-escapee Abram Tertz wrote:

“If Pushkin (let’s assume!) was only pretending to loaf, it means that he needed that pretense to free his tongue, that it suited him as the plot motivation for the unfolding of his destiny, and without it he couldn’t have written anything good.”

I love this quote because it gets to the heart of what is a real writing problem for me. I mean, isn’t that what a long and intense part of what we do is about: not the writing itself but the getting ready to write, the Not Writing that leads to writing: organizing oneself like a circuit, the perfect combination of tradition and re-invention?

For Pushkin this meant giving yourself up, letting Fate (Pushkin loves F-f-fate) make you the greatest writer who ever lived one minute and a ridiculous cuckold the next. Your destiny is someone else’s business, which frees you up to look around and describe everything you see so beautifully and memorably that you end up, strangely enough, outwitting fate completely: escaping it, disappearing Houdini-style through a trap door no one else can see, because they're too busy doing what they do.

Another important fact about Pushkin, who was murdered by a Frenchman: he loved France. All Russians did – most of the upper class at that point spoke French from birth and had to have Russian letters translated to them, sniff sniff. But, attracted as he was to its masterpieces, P. knew he couldn’t compete, for example, with Victor Hugo. And he didn’t have to. He was a Russian. The whole thing was hilarious to him: the wigs and powders (which he loved), the balls (adored), the pretenses and high-blown speeches (made a few in his time). High-falutin’, fascinating but, at the end of the day, kind of beside the point. Now, a Russian horse shaking snow off its back – that was life! That was a moment that deserved to make its way into literature!

So Pushkin becomes one of the first flaneurs – the first walkers, to translate the term stupidly: one of the first guys to try to put everything and especially the underbelly of life back into art. Art is great, but art is also very, very stupid, Pushkin held. We’ve got to keep slapping it, keep reminding it to pay attention and not lapse into the laziness of inherited forms. Keep looking, Pushkin shouts at us – or not shouts, since he’s not really a shouter. He throws grapes at us and threatens to not invite us to his next party.

Empires, cultural or otherwise, develop underbellies, which the provinces explore vigorously; then if they’re smart the empires themselves learn from their subjects and begin dissecting themselves. So genius France develops in the 19th century a generation’s-worth of little Pushkins, which it now officially calls flaneurs: walkers, starers, examiners of underbellies. Rimbaud, for example (sound familiar?). Baudelaire. Alfred Jarry, and all the other people who piled out of that particularly roomy clown car. As archer/vegetarian Roger Shattuck says:

“The intellectual activity that Diderot refers to as libertinage (free-thinking, debauchery) in the opening sentences of Rameau’s Nephew rests squarely on this response to the fragment as ambiguous – both isolated and implicated. Baudelaire developed Diderot’s attitude into the endemic activity of the dandy: flaner (to stroll about, to saunter). The Surrealists in their prose narratives of city promenades refined flanerie into fine art…”

[fragments here – argumentative etiquette suggests I hold my tongue, but come on: there it all is, the 7th Draft aesthetic in a nutshell! Shattuck’s prose is as clear and strained as a man asking a passerby to kindly help him remove the badger from his Balzac, but you can hear the point trembling under there, compact and dangerous as the hum of an electron cloud…]

Pushkin showed France how to strut…but how does this fit up with us, who are anyway just Americans plain and simple, putting on these masks and codpieces as they suit our moments, whims, deficiencies and advantages? Well, to their surprise, the mob of flaneury has discovered in the centuries 20th+ that when a prone position transforms the entire world into a work of art, everybody becomes an actor. As the Shatt-man explaineth, once again:

“What is no longer given – station of self – must be created. It may take a lifetime. To that end most of us own a little property, have some adventures high or low, and revert at intervals to the mutterings of our innermost feelings. It all helps. At the same time I wonder how far the histrionic sensibility, the fourth path [!!!] to a place in the world, has also made actors, and perhaps lunatics, of us all.”

With the curtain closing, then, enter poor belated blogging, this fucking ridiculous enterprise comprised, as has been noted before mon frere, MOY DROOG, of equal parts tragic and absurd, or just plain stupid, and which runs on a frottage and aspires to smitage, the wholesale eyeball-peeling of the sun settling like a grapefruit on some distant dirty rooftop. “IT ALL HELPS” – I hear the famous Be Someone On Which Nothing Is Lost dictum in this, not to mention the dream of miscellaneists/bloggers/diarists, which at the end of the day seems to be nothing more than to catch all the little fragments of life and rub them together until they spark and the world (or, more often, an immediate circle) catches fire and burns.

Pushkin…proto-blogger? Dumber things have been claimed for him, I guess. The way I see it, the dream haunting literature is anti-literature and the nightmare of the Book therefore the Anti-Book, which, solidified, gets busy throwing its own shadow. Pushkin left behind a handful of fragments, which he didn’t think was anything to take seriously.

Communism Works: An Open Letter to Michael Silverblatt

2007-11-15T13:32:00.001-05:00

Impossible to say exactly why, but the lumpen is rising, people. For example last night I listened to the voice of Michael Silverblatt and wanted to cry. I wanted to cry, Michael Silverblatt. For one thing is certain: we cannot go on like this…

I’ve been thinking about the world for a while now Michael – thinking of it not as a network of true or false propositions but as the inside of a gigantic whale tunnelling through time and darkness. Etymologically, as you know, whales and architecture come from the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum – but there is architecture in the whale as surely as there are whale pods migrating through downtown Los Angeles. Just because things aren’t brightly lit, doesn’t make them invisible, Michael.

Michael Silverblatt, to be honest I thirst for your tears as voraciously as a car whose little orange gas-icon has been lit up for the last thirty miles. I feel like we could get there, Michael. I really do. You interview authors on the radio and I am an author not on the radio, and together we are travelling through a series of interlocking whales that make up existence. One whale is America, another is Earth, then others that are God, Los Angeles, etc.

You remember the grade-school exercise that asked us to write our exact location on an undelivered envelope? Well, I think it’s time you opened that envelope and delivered the message that America has been promising the world for years. We’re ready for it – we’ve waited long enough, anyway, and the message is burning through the thin blue sheath like a coal. Messages, messages: we’ve been promised these for centuries, Michael. But your country’s hesitancy has made the rest of the world suspect her.

Michael, I believe I have made progress along these lines, and though I may not be the first person to say this to you, I want you to listen very closely: the thing that will make you cry is brotherhood.

“Brotherhood?” says Michael Silverblatt. “Just last night I talked to Junot Diaz. Jonathan Williams sat on that exact stool – you’re speaking into the microphone that once touched the lips of Seamus Heaney!”

What, exactly, is Michael’s point here? An older guard might pull out the over-rich consistency of the bourgeois worldview – but I like Michael, and more importantly I am like Michael, specifically in my reverence for the sacred and the high. I believe that we are all in the same whale and therefore hope to answer him, not with the scorn of the working class, or the kiss of the whip, but with a vision as pure and simple as a rose in winter. A ROSE IN WINTER MICHAEL! Am I speaking loud enough yet? Lower this partition, take off your headphones and I will show you how passion can make a rose blossom from your forehead and vines drip from your nose like shoelaces; thorns pierce your eyelids. I will show you the world you’ve been longing for.

Should Michael trust me on this one? Should he put down his collected works and chop wood with the rest of the sun-bronzed demi-gods? More importantly will the whale ever dock and the message dribble off its lips to collapse exhausted on the ivory sand?

Alright, I admit it Michael, you are making me cry now, which is not exactly what I was aiming for, but which I like anyway. Delicious tears of the people, or the person! Rosewater on my upper lip! I feel that we are halfway there – Communism works, Michael Silverblatt! Say it with me, and by saying throw off the fetters of your life and ambition and find yourself in the real utopia that we’ve been planning for generations, whose groundwork we laid before you were born and whose spires will continue their putsch long after you yourself have disintegrated. You may die, but the world you bequeath to your children will live on into the night.

Are you crying yet, Michael Silverblatt? Because listen, people, if Michael isn’t crying we haven’t done our job. Rend your clothes and don hairshirt after hairshirt, for an unmoved Michael is the surest indication that everything we have worked for is lost. The winter is upon us. The vast Russian winter. Take refuge in your rabbit holes. Because from now on the only things that you will experience in common are death and sleep and maybe not even the second of these, because the world we have made respects nothing and lurches gradually towards the twenty-four hour work week. The man on which nothing is lost looses everything, and this is the secret Michael. This is the switch you must flip to extricate yourself from this madness of industry, nightmare of endless books…

I know you can do it Michael. I have faith in you, I hear a spark travelling through your vast and deeply-sonorous naval cavities, making its way towards the light, moving as it not-moves, like Jonah in his whale. Longtime listener, first time caller, Michael. Take me into your heart and I won’t disappoint.

Sermon on Industry

2007-11-11T09:10:00.000-05:00

Seth,

I’m sitting here picking my nose and trying to think of how to start this letter – which, of course, is always the problem. How to start. The inertia of life is so powerful and the vice-grip of routine so ever-present that I find myself constantly plotting, scheming, and devising what my girlfriend likes to call “spiritual pyramid schemes” for how to get up. A particularly pertinent problem for a writer, since most creative work is self-structured and therefore lacks the easy motivation of, say, a gallon of water shot up your nostrils.

In general, I’m a naturally lazy and even indolent person – indolent, which when used in a medicinal context (about an ulcer, for example), means persistent: slow to develop, progress or heal. So, in order not to stay in bed all day I’ve had to organize my life into a series of intricate routines, the point of which seems to be to turn a normally shapeless existence into something structured, purposeful.

One example is my morning, which I developed the year after I left college and have stuck to rigorously ever since. The keystone is a ridiculously-early wake-up: 4:15 am, on the dot. My alarm goes off on the waist-high bookshelf in our living room; I walk the six or so steps to turn it off (very important, an alarm next to my bed being easy to snooze). Then I go into my bathroom and turn on the light to pee. While peeing, I keep one eye tightly shut, which is a little disorienting, but which makes it easier for me to walk through the pitch-black apartment after I’ve finished peeing, since my closed eye remains dilated and can therefore see better in the dark. Out in the living room, I turn on the lamp and prepare to make coffee.

I am not lying when I say that I’ve done this exact same thing every morning (barring travel, disaster, and acts of God), for the last three years. The process as it now stands is effective, both streamlined and possessing a few little kinks (the one-eye thing, my alarm in the other room) that I’m proud of, because they work, and because they’ve evolved like monkey-sticks from the frustrating encounter with reality that is everyone’s day, really, from start to finish.

Now, one of the things that forces me to my knees and makes me regularly weep or at least scrunch my face up in a simulacrum of weeping is the human mind. I carry mine around with me in a silver dish and exercise it with the same delight I get from putting on a pair of fresh-from-the-box sneakers – a feeling of power, yes, but more importantly of rightness, the feeling a fork probably gets as it’s spearing asparagus. I stand in awe of its redundant beauty – redundant because why should we have these things? Why shouldn’t we just be worming around in the warm earth, bumping into roots and eating our children?

There’s so much posturing in writing and art that it’s easy to forget how beautiful and pleasurable a mind can be – but as usual, going back to the primary sources makes things a little more complicated. Virginia Woolf, who suffered from her mind as much as she delighted in it, thinks in her diary about the magic word “Health”

“Returning Health

This is shown by the power to make images; the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extent which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-stockish and fish-blooded. And I have it compared with poor Mrs. Bartholomew almost to the extent that Shakespeare has it compared to me.”

Again and again, I try to pin down why passages like this one, and the books they come from, are so important to me. Books are cities; books are cathedrals. Books are machines that can channel indolence to awe and awe back into indolence with Rumpelstiltskin-like efficiency. And the best books can (I really believe this), graft themselves onto you in a way that causes your original organism to react. They can turn sicknesses (depression, exile, prison, or just life) into the precise conditions in which joy can happen.

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m obviously feeling sermonly; but I don’t see any real reason why I should feels so charged, so excited. The room is freezing, the heater spasmodic at best, and there’s a bright yellow vacuum cleaner standing about two inches from my left arm – but god, how I love Sunday mornings! I remember being five years old and laying in my bed, listening to my parents sleep, the house creak around me, the wind like a gigantic dog chasing the trees and the leaves and all the other stuff around the yard. It was like the world was lying preserved in jello: inactive, but therefore couched and peaceful. People in general (especially writers) like to use upward-looking words to describe their happiness, but for me, happiness is about ankle-level. It’s that real life that we barely register, the world of drawers and closets and back seats and roots. Right now, for example, my socks on the floor look pretty happy.

I don’t know, I’m sure things need to exist in a balance – but for me, there’s something indescribably satisfying about making coffee in the morning. It’s as if the process – which I’ve cut into my life mysteriously over the years and now can only marvel at, as if it were some kind of crop circle that had appeared there beyond my strength to assimilate or change – it’s as if this form releases, rather than blocks my energy. I mean come on, about ten sentences ago I was practically peeing in my pants! But then at the beginning of the post, honestly, I was just sitting here picking my nose and thinking about how bizarre it is to be writing like this, for no particular reason (for no essential reason, at least).

These days I think about writing and life more and more as a sort of stone-soup production. You bring the pot and life brings the garden. Some books display the process that another person has taken to adapt to their circumstances. It is particularly heartbreaking when, inevitably, this person fails – and maybe this is the biggest difference between The Great Gatsby, for example, and Virginia Woolf’s diaries. One has architecture, design; the other is shifting and incomplete, partial, and imperfect. Or maybe just not interested in perfection.

Ask Her If She Likes Baloney

2007-11-05T14:36:00.000-05:00

Hard to talk about Bruce without getting emotional; maybe there's no need to, anyway. Argument is calm and rational, but some things plunge beyond argument into the substrata of health and disease, meaning they organize your soul. Bruce is one of these things for me.

Like many romances, ours begins with a drought: specifically, the chunk of eight or so years that I lived between the ages of six and fourteen, when my family moved from Brattleboro, Vermont to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea to Lusaka, Zambia. The capital letters are just distracting: the most important part about where we were was that it was Not America. So, as the law of supply-and-demand dictates, we were raised under the banner of what I still flatter myself was a very peculiar Not Americanism.

Flash forward to my junior year of high school, when the walls of the schizo-edenic East Coast boarding school I had been languishing in since my parents moved to Egypt exploded, literally exploded, or rather inverted, figuratively inverted, to a sort of Deep Space Opera I later learned to call Bruce. This was Born To Run, the album that he called "My Shot at the Title." I decided immediately that I would like it.

(I don't know about you guys but for me, this is how liking things has pretty much gone my entire life. I decide for whatever reason that I like something, and then I make myself like it until I really do like it. Eventually, I'm so caught up in whatever it is that the delight can be described as "spontaneous." Will feeds delight feeds will feeds delight, back and forth like a Miranda July Poop Vortex.)

These days I'm on the downward spiral of my Bruce obsession - but I still think that he has important things to teach us. For example, I could ask you what you know about your own disease - the real disease I mean - and you probably wouldn't be able to tell me anything. But one way to know your disease is to see it reflected in another man so persuasively and completely that you feel a sort of intuitive sympathy for him. You think "I want to get away from this person," and at the same time "Maybe this guy will know what I'm talking about." You're fascinated, in other words, or repulsed, or whatever.

Bruce is rotting: grandly, operatically, and right before our eyes. If a Dylan withers and a McCartney ferments, then a Bruce rots, because he's an American and has spent his entire life running in two directions: mythical past and mythical future. Like all good Americans, he is a prophet of Not America, meaning he's never found rest and never will, and this is what makes the rot so disgustingly visible, like a bad sunburn, or male pattern baldness.

Apocryphal, but true, story: I once saw Bruce Springsteen's penis or at least a shadow of it, while weight lifting in downtown Boston. I'd gone to his concert the night before and was wearing my newly bought "Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band" hat, and it was early enough on a Sunday morning that there were only three other guys in the whole place: the owner, a trainer, and a guy who looked a lot like like Bruce Springsteen. Actually, this guy looked so much like Bruce Springsteen that, after he'd finished his workout, I followed him to the bathroom, Sharpie in hand, and prepared to take my chances.

The bathroom was cool and white, and filled (I immediately noticed) with a sound like a waterfall gushing over rocks. It was a mighty sound, a sound so intense and vigorous that at first I thought someone had turned all the faucets in the bathroom on at once, as a sort of paean to Bruce. As I cleared the corridor, however, I saw that this noise was being made, not in honor of Bruce, but by him! Bruce Springsteen, peeing (I include this for Seth)! And not any pee, but one filled with anguish and a low lament - the kind of pee that makes you glance over from your own place and consider, seriously consider, asking the stranger next to you if he's okay! A pee of terror and loneliness, the likes of which I had never heard before, and hopefully never will again...the pee of Job in the wilderness, or Jonah in his whale. A wild, hortatory pee.

When I closed the door Bruce re-sheathed himself and zipped up. "Excuse me," he said, shouldering his way past me. For a few long minutes, I seriously considered tearing the urinal off the wall and enshrining it in my bedroom.

Of course he was pretty cooked by "Tunnel of Love" - and that was the late '80s, before I'd even hit double digits. Now he makes albums called "Magic," and asks us to "Rise up" - a song that, more than any of his others, I like to play while running, writing, or taking a particularly difficult shit.

Anyway, after Bruce had left, the owner of the weight-room and I watched him walk away through the second-story window. I'd gotten my autograph, but I still wasn't satisfied.

"I saw The Edge once, in a pool hall," the owner said.

For some reason, I felt very jealous about this.

One Who Dissects Living Rats

2007-11-02T16:08:00.001-04:00

Alex Tilney is an exciting man living in exciting times. Like the rest of us, he has battened his head for too long and now emerges seeking original response. He writes "for myself, strangers, and the elderly." He joins the Seventh Draft discussion in full regalia.

Hey Seth, Josh, and now Tommy (yesssss),

First of all, I wish my name were Attila Jozsef.

I had a beer with Josh last week and he infected me with the plague that produced this blog (another name for the blog could have been 'The Bubo.') Generally, I'm having some trouble lately buying the conceit of naturalistic fiction: 'you will experience the following writing as a mimesis* of lived experience, and the dream of the story will illuminate people and the world for you.' When I look back over my last full semester of creative work (I wrote the essay this semester), I had a couple stories I was proud of, but the things that have the most live-wire energy are the letters I wrote to my advisor. There it's just me talking and trying to connect with Victor LaValle, and that's where it seems like the effort to communicate a state of mind finds the most success. And as I'm approaching a lot of my story ideas now, the parts that feel least compelling are the "and then she got out of bed and went to the door to listen…" i.e., the show don't tell parts.

We all decided to spend so much time and energy on fiction writing because novels and stories have been kicking our asses since forever, but for the last 6+ months, I just haven't wanted to read any more fiction. I thought it was because I'm lazy; or because I had been writing stories with the aim of having them be 'finished stories' instead of recreations of lived experience, and so I needed to clear out all the built-up writerly residue in my brain; or because I get so many stories already from TV, movies, journalism, etc. Maybe all of these reasons are true, but I think, Seth and Josh, you have a point that fiction just doesn't seem to be quite the right tool or toy these days.

Like you two (or three), a lot of the ideas I've been having lately are much more marginalia-type stuff, and when I try to turn them into finished stories, I wince. My grandmother's 80th birthday party was last month, and the dinner was just overflowing with stuff I wanted to write about, but the idea of making a fictionalization out of X or Y situation just seemed like this huge exhausting detour. So along comes this blog for these other things I want to do, and I'm thankful and excited.

Anyway, so, this first post is a little more throat-clearing intro than my posts will be from now on, and more about Jesus and Transformers soon.

Before then, though: Josh, you mention that you can't think of a novel that you can open on any page and really like and get drawn into the way you can with Seinfeld. I agree to the rafters, but Infinite Jest jumped into my mind as a huge exception. I can open that book to almost any page and get sucked in, delighted, pissed-off, etc., etc. I know I'm going to get hated on because of Infinite Jest's reputation and because I insist on talking about it even though Josh, who has read seventeen times as many novels as I have, hasn't read this one. Oh, well--when I am doubting fiction, that book still has so much verve and all the people still exist even when they're off-stage, and so it keeps me hopeful.

Also, Bruce is cheesy.

Yours in grabbing hard young breasts,

Alex

*(I looked up 'mimesis' again because it's one of those literary terms I'm always a bit hazy on, and another of its meanings that I didn't know is: "the occurrence of a disease's symptoms in somebody who does not have the disease, often psychosomatically caused.' So maybe the bubo under my literary armpit is a fake. Oh, well.)

Consta-Poo-Poo

2007-11-01T17:28:00.000-04:00

While I steam and gather my strength after Seth's vicious and irresponsible Bruce-bash, the late, great Tommy Kim (pictured below) has volunteered to take - nay, to righteously demolish the Seventh Draft stage.

As a man he cannot possibly top five ten, but as a writer, modern dancer and hockey player he literally towers over his peers. By which I mean, I have one of these "sorrow" posters hanging over my writing desk. Without further ado...

Josh and Seth,

Someone you know (rhymes with gnarls) once said that you should have a story on why you’re writing your story. Not necessarily autobiographical material, but literally a story like “Mr. Misadventure” that will keep you centered, focused, a story that will at least help you get outside of yourself and make you engage, in some way, with something beyond your own process. Sounds like writerly hoo-doo, but I dunno, I was willing to try it.

When I was playing hockey in high school I was one of the first to use those breath-right strips on my nose to increase the nasal velocity of the air entering my lungs. Anything to enhance my anaerobic ATP-CP energy process. So what story am I holding onto these days to help evacuate the backed up cloaca? Well, I can’t really reveal that. I feel it would diminish whatever elaborate mechanism I’ve constructed to delude myself into thinking I can control my writing.

In other words, I’m fucking weird, I have superstitions. I believe in lucky charms, in taping the left shin pad first before the right, etc. I believe in rituals and the power of correlation, which explains why I stuffed my mouth with foil Upper Deck baseball card packaging after getting a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie in my first pack. I've stuffed my mouth with the foil packaging ever since, no matter how dusty the package, and when the metal paper touched my fillings, this sour-tasting saliva would burst from the corners of my mouth. This is, I think, talking about something else completely.

Wait, let me add this one: when I played video games I would yank my t-shirt at the shoulder, revealing parts of my back, and I would somehow think this odd ritual had some effect on the outcome of the game.

Sometimes when I have writer’s consta-poo-poo (this is a term my mother made up, mostly because she has difficulty pronouncing "pay-shun") I read writers I admire, but be careful there, because that strategy can overwhelm you and remind you of how you will never get your work to that level.

Other times I will do something intensely solitary, something odd, something Jill would call “fucking weird”. I’ll go to my favorite coffee shop in K-town and use the toilet. To dispense toilet paper, this café bathroom uses a thick boba straw as an axle, a sort of pin to keep the toilet paper spinning smoothly. I don’t know what happened to the original metal pin. I’ll write that detail in my moleskin (yeah, I’m a poser, I use those.)

Sometimes I’ll go to the Korean market and pretend I’m examining the pork bellies on display. Assi Market stores the sliced pork bellies in those wheeled, portable ice cream freezers street peddlers cart around, and I’ll nose through with the giant community tongs. I’ll dig through the clattering slices of frozen meat and fat while perking my ears and listening to conversations around me. Snooping around, being invisible yet infiltrating other people’s lives, that sort of thing. It keeps me aware of this very odd world around us.

I’m not sure if this adds anything to anything.

Fuck Writer's Block

2007-11-01T09:07:00.000-04:00

Josh,

I should be working on something else but I feel compelled to post a blog, mainly so I can push Bruce down, get him out of my face. With each word, he goes down.

Yeah, you like that Bruce. Don't you?

I have to disagree with your assessment of blog-writing. Actually, I don't even really understand the whole real writing vs. everything else battle. What makes blog writing un-real?

Of course, you might feel blog-writing is un-real because you don't edit blogs as you do your more serious work. Editing, most writers will say, is real writing. And editing, after all, was the notion that launched this blog--the seventh draft. I remember reading a letter from my uncle Deano:

"You should be glad Neal didn't hear you say 'I felt the need to go back and re-write the novel I am working on.' Right now she is finishing hers which means working through a SEVENTH substantial re-write, some parts re-written more than that. It's not my field but doesn't just writing a novel from beginning to end seem a bit naive? Writing IS revision. Do the work."

Do the work.

I understand this and live this, not just because my uncle, my mentor, told it to me. I understand it because I feel it--I feel this desperate need to go back, to re-work. I'm not sure whether this just isn't something in my psyche trying to show itself to me or whether it's just a weird manic behavior. Perhaps I indulge my urge to re-write because I can't figure out any other way to spend my time. But more likely, I own weird constellations, urging expression.

Whatever, it makes sense. When I re-write, I roll up my sleeves, get into the nitty-gritty, and I start figuring things out. Working on a sentence, to me, is like working on a specific weirdo meme in my body--when it's figured out, the meme is actualized and I move on to the next weirdo meme. This is everything to me. This is why I quite literally need to write.

To me though, it's all work, good life-giving work. The writing, the re-writing.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour re-working a paragraph and then, suddenly, I'll realize I've just recovered from my parent's divorce.

Sometimes I'll write a sentence out of the blue and realize I've just pardoned myself for bad behavior.

Sometimes nothing.

And, of course, you work through the nothing to get to something. The problem is, you can't sustain inspiration, you can only court it. And here's the thing: it happens WHILE you work, it's not something you wait around for.

Blogs, letters, e-mails--to me, they're part of it, just as important as the "real" work. Your writing life is just that, your life. When you write a blog, it's not like the blog is not you--it is you. I mean do you really look at your writing as something outside your life? You move from one to the other. You write. You figure things out. Without the blogs, you'd be itching to write elsewhere--you'd be sending mad e-mails; you'd take up letter-writing, you'd deliberately fog your bathroom mirror just so you could finger a few lines on the glass.

Remember my "Season of Triumph" blog? Well, I'm currently writing a short-story called "Season of Triumph." The blog led to the story and now I'm blogging about the story. My last blog, that piece of fiction, that goes into my next packet for school. The other recent blog, the Miranda July blog, well that blog was basically a direct quote of my latest annotation for school.

Writer's block is a bullshit dictum created by THE MAN to hold us down. Fuck writer's block.

Blogs are important. But now I have to go, because I really should be working on something else--my real work.

You Yourself Must Be the Seventh

2007-10-31T07:21:00.000-04:00

Seth,

Absolute writer’s block this morning: I pull up stories, start picking through them, removing commas and ampersands with the thoroughness of a chimpanzee removing lice from its neighbor’s pelt. But two minutes later I decide that the same paragraph looked better with the original punctuation. At which point I realize that writers’ block, literary constipation, whatever you want to call it has officially set in.

One of the interesting things about writing stuff on this blog has been, for me at least, the way that it relieves these moments, or at least makes me feel like I’m experiencing relief. For example, right now I have moved from my traditional “serious writing” armchair, to the more relaxed “unserious writing” couch. I am semi-reclined; I begin thinking about the posture of writing, and the way that certain writers prefer certain physical positions while they write. Pushkin, my hero, wrote best lying down, in what I imagine was a gigantic four-poster with grapes and naked women strewn all over it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, wrote while walking. He composed one sentence at a time, in his head, and then wrote the whole article or poem or whatever down as soon as he got home. Edward Said wrote standing up, prowling among a study's worth of podiums.

So already I’m writing again….but is this a good or a bad thing? Shouldn't I really be sitting there bent double, agonizing my way towards mastery? Shouldn't I be suffering for my art?

Real writing vs. everything else: this mental/spiritual battle royal has occupied me for years, not least of all because I am a puritan through and through and therefore addicted to fairly narrow ideas of work and productivity. Real writing: the work that produces a finished product, something whole and tight and perfect as a microwave - a “machine made out of words” or, failing that, a poem made out of things. Real writing, I assume, would be recognizable the moment I produced it and would fill my life with joy and self-gratification. I would stand back carpenter-style and observe it. “Ahhh!” I would say....putting my hand on my son's shoulder in a sort of Kleenex moment.

That blog entries are not real writing, however, is a fact I have become convinced of lately: one that has confused and shocked me and made me rethink the whole dynamic. It has led me, as I'm sure you’re tired of hearing, even deeper into the thickets of marginalia. But what is this kind of writing, and what does it do to me? Should I, for example, be combing my posts over and removing unnecessary punctuation? Should I be turning my sentences not twice but once, with my hand on the key? Or, is there something powerful in this speed (swiftness) and movement (intuition) that makes the adoration of mastery and perfection seem like the wrong move? “Anyone who looks for perfection in a painting knows nothing about art,” Ruskin said. I ask because I’m curious, I don't know.

On this topic: I’ve been reading a book by the Spanish writer/scholar/adumbrator Enrique Vila-Matas, called “Bartleby & Co.”, whose narrator devotes himself to tracking down all the writers who have ever decided to just put down their pens and not write. These Bartlebys – these "Artists of the No" – devote themselves, at a certain point in their careers, to the abandonment literature and the advancement of non-literature. Some of them go to great, even heroic lengths: they write books, tomes, encyclopedias, articles, describing in detail the "real books" they are never going to write. Long philosophical treatises on notwriting. Catalogues of footnotes to invisible texts. All in an attempt as the Bartleby Joseph Joubert says, to create something that would “replace ordinary reading, where it is necessary to go from one part to another, with the spectacle of a simultaneous word, in which everything would be said at once without confusion, in a glow that is…total, peaceable, intimate and uniform at last.”

Talk like this has the stupidness of true poetry to me: it makes no sense on a rational level but bites my intuitive line. There’s something in it that I feel I can use…something that pertains to what we’ve been talking about over the last couple of months maybe, that touches my obsessions. Early in the book, Matas’s footnoteist notes something incredible about the author Robert Walser:

“Walser’s entire work, including his ambiguous silence of twenty-eight years, is a commentary on the vanity of all initiative, the vanity of life itself. Perhaps that is why he only wanted to be a walking nobody. Someone has compared Walser to a long-distance runner who is on the verge of reaching the longed-for finishing line and stops in surprise, looks around at masters and fellow disciples, and abandons the race, that is to say remains in what is familiar, in an aesthetics of bewilderment.”

Aesthetics of bewilderment.

Bewilderment…say it seven times and it begins to sound like a gum flavor. An artistic command hidden inside like an iron-on tattoo. I think of a huge stag lifting its head up for some reason. Moss is dripping down its jaws and neck.

What happens when the writing of non-writing (this is getting silly) begins to be more interesting than the writing of writing? When the things you do to relieve writers’ block end up feeling better than the story itself?

Found a poem last night that explains to me why this blog is called what it’s called. By the Hungarian hunter/gatherer Attila Jozsef:

The Seventh

If you set out in this world,
better be born seven times.
once, in a house on fire,
once, in a freezing flood,
once, in a wild madhouse,
once, in a field of ripe wheat,
once, in an empty cloister,
and once among pigs in a sty.
Six babes crying, not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

When you must fight to survive,
let your enemy see seven.
One, away from work on Sunday,
one, starting his work on Monday,
one, who teaches without payment,
one, who learned to swim by drowning,
one, who is the seed of a forest,
and one, whom wild forefathers protect,
but all their tricks are not enough:
you yourself must be the seventh.

If you want to find a woman,
let seven men go for her.
One, who gives his heart for words,
one, who takes care of himself,
one, who claims to be a dreamer,
one, who through her skirt can feel her,
one, who knows the hooks and snaps,
one, who steps upon her scarf:
let them buss like flies around her.
You yourself must be the seventh.

If you write and can afford it,
let seven men write your poem.
One, who builds a marble village,
one, who was born in his sleep,
one, who charts the sky and knows it,
one, whom words call by his name,
one, who perfected his soul,
one, who dissects living rats.
Two are brave and four are wise;
you yourself must be the seventh.

And if all went as was written,
you will die for seven men.
One, who is rocked and suckled,
one, who grabs a hard young breast,
one, who throws down empty dishes,
one, who helps the poor to win,
one, who works till he goes to pieces,
one, who just stares at the moon.
The world will be your tombstone:
you yourself must be the seventh.

Candy, Anger and Sleep

2007-10-29T17:50:00.000-04:00

Candy

Candy is a marginal food group, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much. Also it is delicious. Also - and I truly, truly love this - you don't buy candy to improve your life. You don't spend an entire off-season rebuilding your candy empire while keeping your eyes securely fixed on an eventual title run. Candy is for the now and is therefore what makes us human, our Achilles heel. It is a strategy for remaining off-balance and develops inevitably into the second two terms of life, Anger and Sleep. It both relieves and itches. In this way, it is a rough equivalent of such narrative starters as: Your Wife, Paper Clip Girl, or the Way My Upstairs Neighbor Has Been Polishing His Floors.

Anger

The second part of a life of energy, and in some ways the most important.

For example: for a long time now, I've been looking for ways to keep myself off balance. I do this because my life is, for the most part, pretty routine. I find myself unable to read the novels I once loved - why read novels, I ask myself? The sensation is like being shot out of one of those old-style catapults, with plot as the cata- and me as the -pult. What is the purpose of a novel? (ask yourself this with complete honesty - as in, "Why do I pick up this or that novel?) The answer is: to finish it. Same with a story. I mean, I can watch ten minutes of a Seinfeld episode even if I've seen it a thousand times before, and be filled with delight, scorn, love of fellow man. But try opening even your favorite novel to page six hundred and seven, and reading a line, and convincing yourself that this is something you like.

This makes me angry - not the real, out-of-body angry you get when someone cuts you off in the check-out line, but "angry," the force that like Mephistopheles "wills only evil, but does only good." In this way it is the flipside to my joy and maybe only a half-step more honest.

Sleep

Sleep is what happens after candy and anger, after I have fed my body something it doesn't need and then whipped myself into a state that leads nowhere, leads to nothing. As an American, I am an ecstatic and therefore both terrified of and addicted to waste. I aspire to be one on which "nothing is lost." This is the miraculous dream, right? This is when the stars stand up and start singing out your name like Mouseketeers?

Nap sleep is not like night sleep and this is important to me, since about half my sleep these days comes from naps. Nap sleep is marginal sleep: brief, deep, utterly more pleasurable than the food-pyramid sleep you get at night. Some people want to write a book like a dream, but I want to write a book like a nap.

Of course, one problem with napping is that it can erase borders and make you forget things: your name, for example, or just how long you've been napping. It can want to drag you down like a turbine, closer and closer, you're nothing but sleep, you live to sleep.

Could I live to sleep? Do you live to sleep? And how many people out there are sleeping right now, in their beds or on couches, subways, haybales, laps? How many people are sleeping RIGHT AT YOU as we speak?

Endless sleep is terrifying, it is death or maybe worse than death and at this point it is important to remember that there is always candy.

Short Fiction: What's Cool

2007-10-28T10:29:00.001-04:00

For Josh's uncle...

I used to pee a lot. Now I do a lot of cocaine. The two are not exclusive. They go together. What happened was this: I spend a lot of time dining out. I drink too much wine. I have to pee.

And, well, the walk from the table to the bathroom is embarrassing.

I mean, have you really ever walked through a crowded restaurant, to go pee, five or six times? Maybe you did it once, not five times. And I know you didn't do it six times because that's the record. Trust me, I contacted the people who keep the records and everything.

They told me: Six times, yeah, that's the record.

This is terribly uncool. All this peeing. But you know what is cool?

Cocaine!

Cocaine's just about the coolest thing ever. It's right up there with the girl who wears paperclips on her shoes. I love when she finds paperclips laying on the street. I mean she's full of magic or something because she finds the most boring thing in the world laying on the street and she transforms it, magically, into an emblem of coolness.

My emblem of coolness is my rampant cocaine habit.

One night, at my favorite place Table, I was peeing. I was embarrassed. It was like the seventh time, a new record. I was thinking of how uncool it was. Then I was hit with an epiphany or something.

I thought: What's cool is cocaine.

Now when I get up to pee everyone knows I'm really getting up to do more cocaine. Trust me, I can see the looks on the people's faces.

They're not saying: Look at that fucking dork, peeing again.

They're saying: Look at that Mythical God of Love, doing more cocaine. Isn't he cool? He probably doesn't ever even need to pee.

At least that's what Paperclip Girl says. I'm her Mythical God of Love.

Once, after dining, I drove Paperclip Girl to an abandoned parking lot and fucked her in the backseat of my car.

She was like, That's good.

But that doesn't include the sounds she was making, or the volume. That's just the words.

That's good. That's good. That's good.

A bunch of times, just like that, with a lot more Os, and real loud.

Afterwards we just sat there, not having to pee or anything. It was cool. She was fiddling with a paperclip which I had lovingly clipped on her nipple.

We laughed and laughed.

I said: Why is it that sex ends in laughter?

She said: When it ends in crying that means you fucked up somewhere along the line.

But anyway, I like it best when I get up, I go pee, I do more cocaine, and when I come back Paperclip Girl is there waiting, the food has been served, and everyone in the whole place knows, really knows, that I only got up because I wanted to do more cocaine before eating.

Only thing, I'm never hungry when I dine out anymore. I don't get it. I just keep thinking about "after dining", about, you know, making love, which I previously called fucking, but now realize is probably just loving.

Overbabylonia

2007-10-28T09:37:00.000-04:00

Seth,

Before getting back to our Zeno’s paradox-type enrichment/demolishing of daily life, I wanted to pause for a second, lift my head up, shake, and take a minute to savor the great wet dog smell of other people. One of the strange things about writing online being, amazingly enough, that both strangers and loved ones can read your shit and then have an opinion of it, and that there’s nothing you can do about it. Bizarre, right? The desk drawer where I used to stash my aborted masterpieces is getting so lonely that I can hear it mewing at night like a lamb at pasture…

The Fascination of the Fucked Up and Brilliant Uncle is a known quantity in the world, despite its mysteriousness. But why the uncle? Why not (and wouldn’t this be about a hundred times more cosmically fair) the father? Why not Barak Obama, who seems to me like he’s probably a fun enough uncle but a lousy father? Tolstoy? Steven Spielberg?

My own uncle has become more and more important to me as I've gotten older, and especially so since his sister died two and a half years ago. As a kid I remember him as kind of a shit…a lovable shit, but a shit nonetheless. He and my mom argued whenever they met, there was tension, I mean they had a whole childhood’s worth of issues that I have no idea about and never will probably.

One afternoon we ate lunch together at Red Lobster; at a certain point I asked to go to the bathroom, where I peed, washed my hands, and then stared calmly at my face in the mirror. My face, which at that point I decided looked nothing like either my mom’s or my uncle's, and which therefore was completely innocent, spotless, uncconected with their problems. I had been sent to this planet to observe and record and would be whisked back up to my home planet upon my eighteenth birthday. So I spent the rest of the meal watching the shrimp scampy fly from behind the dumb waiter.

(Actually, that last part never happened and never would happen: my family is Scotch-Irish and would literally walk the Red Lobster plank before they’d let even a single slice of lemon garnish go to waste.)

Fifteen years later the mothership still hasn't circled, and I've become at least partially convinced that there are things you can’t escape. To be honest, I've become fascinated with the things you can’t escape. Family being one of the big ones. My soul is a battlefield where my father, mother, and whatever other ancestors might want to show up fight for supremacy, and there are unfortunately no dumb waiters to hide behind.

This preamble is getting kind of ridiculous, so I’ll speed it up. My uncle, who visits me every once in a while but whose permanent whereabouts have been unknown to us for some time (some say Indian reservation, some Hawaii, or prison, but I have insider information that points to Shanghai and a small but lucrative expatriate video rental business) has begun sending me emails about this blog. Interesting emails. To say that his angle of access is unique is understating it – I mean this is the guy who, I am not kidding, used to read my brother and I a page of Finnegan’s Wake while we were taking our nightly bath. Given that both of us kids had to fit in a single bathtub for that arrangement to work out, I’d say that our combined ages at that point were probably not even in the double digits.

Anyway, here’s Screwtape on your last entry, blogging, and the State of the Soul:

“i dug seth's recent gristlogue on 7thdraft and kept mulling what we were in disco about on the pierrepont street couch: writing for an 'audience' v. the interior madness & conflict we keep to ourselves, & only capture 'diaretically' in an effort to explain said incongruities TO ourselves (a losing proposition, mostly)

for instance in the 'journal' version he woulda done that poor girl in the office. right in the ass, bent over the copier, her moans barely stifled as a stack of corporate balance sheets are spit out to the rythym of his thrusts... [sorry, but we all know this is closer to the psychic truth than any 'reality' could be!]

it woulda been : "how could i do this to my wife whom i love??" -kinda schtick, ---the counterintuitive acting against our own best interests we all know & love so well its become the practical fabric of our existence; part of every story, every film...

then it occurred to me, you - you & this particular associate, par example - may simply be too good-hearted as people to pull this off. you may simply lack the type of mean-spirited, selfish, & abusive instincts required to entertain an audience riddled with covert pathologies & obsessions

for instance i would never tell ANYONE but my diary something like: "women should be routinely cornholed until they drop", etc. - a horrible, rotten thought indeedy - and yet one proffered only 1/2 in jest, since its amazing to me how many times i find myself drifting down that burnt brown dirt road...

its the core misanthropy you're missing, lad...

and then the killer: "WHY IS EVERYONE SO FUCKED UP AND WOUNDED?"

wow, now THAT, that is at the very heart of the matter, isnt it. when you get right down to it & stop lying & running....it stunned me right off the side of my chair. wowwowwow....oww-wow. brilliant.

actually once on the screen porch in Berkley several years ago i broached this very subject with a friend, and she told me almost exactly the same thing. shocked the shit outta me then & it still does. my point? you knew i was dragging you along towards one?

well i laid the groundwerk with you & el last time at clark's, non?? did you see it rearing its ugly head then? or did my overbabylonia only cloud it up?

OK>>lets reverse engineer this pudding for a moment. in other words, the psychic landscape may not be a function of unintended 'bad' consequences, as if we didnt want to be so detached from & hostile towards one another deep down but QUITE TO THE CONTRARY - what if its....

-----------------------> TRAUMATOPHILIA???"

The Cause or Result of My Daffiness?

2007-10-25T13:26:00.000-04:00

Oct. 24,

5:00 am

My wife’s cell-phone wakes me up. I have the urge to pee. So I pee for the third or fourth time since falling asleep, five hours earlier.

My wife, crazily, gets ready for work.

I wonder: What kind of person wakes up so early? What kind of person cares so little about sleep? What kind of person is this person, my wife?

I get back in bed and happily doze. The wind from the open window smells nothing like steam from the subway. It smells like aged green, like wet leaves and smoke. I fall asleep wondering if my wife might be the type of person who would say: Tootle-loo…

6:55 am

I wake up, again. I find, to my surprise, that I feel refreshed. I walk into the kitchen, test my blood sugar: 138. What the fuck? Why is my blood sugar so high? I make about five, six calculations. Finally I understand: The chicken. I ate too much chicken last night.

I accept it. I drink Noni. I jab a needle into my abdomen, inject three units of insulin.

Then, my first thought of the day as a writer: Can a writer possibly write about blood sugar hassles with coolness?

A few years ago, just after I was diagnosed, I considered my coolness quotient irreparably wounded.

This morning, I take my insulin, I eat my toast, I jump down on the floor, do fifty push-ups. Then I leave the house wielding my weird little blood-tester as if it’s some sort of badge of triumph.

Fuck it. That’s what I say when I leave the house. Fuck it.

In this way, I convince myself: Coolness is possible. And levity, probably, is mandatory.

8:00 am

I drive to work. It’s raining so hard I have to pee. Why do I always have to pee? Is it possible to write a story exclusively about one guy’s never-ending urge to pee?

That story would be about me.

8:15 am

I get to work, pee.

9:00 am

I pee. I test my blood sugar: 145. OK fine.

9:01 am

I look in the mirror. I’m so in thrall of my face it’s obscene. I think: when I was a kid, looking at the gorgeous faces in my brother’s magazines, this is exactly what I wanted to look like. Exactly! I’m so excited!

Maybe, I think, I’ve always looked like this. Or maybe it just happened recently. Or maybe I always looked like this, but I only recently learned to see it. Likely, I’m utterly narcissist. I’m doomed. There’s a small chance though, that the obscenity of loving one’s own face is actually quite fruitful.

And maybe, I think, I just need to say this to my wife: You’ve always been as beautiful as you are today. Always. So buck up. What’s done is done. You can’t help if you’re born this way. You can’t ever be any less beautiful than you were last night, in that goofy green shirt. It’s not obscene. It just is. And I think it’s cool.

10:05 am

I pee.

I walk out of the bathroom and there’s this woman I work with, making herself a cup of coffee. She tells me a secret. We’re standing by the coffee urns and she tells me a whopper. We just stand there, looking at each other. She’s trembling. She probably needs a hug more than any person needs a hug right now.

I say: come here.

We embrace, warmly. She cries. I rub her shoulder blade.

I tell her, in terms of work: I’m here, so don’t worry. I’m here. I’ll take care of everything.

Walking away, I ask myself, When did I become the guy who says: I’ll take care of everything?

Then I think: Why am I so fucked-upped and wounded?

Why is everyone is fucked-upped and wounded?

10:12 am

I sneak away, read Shalom Auslander for five minutes.

I answer my question re: Why is everyone so fucked-upped and wounded?

Just because.

11:43 am

I’m sick of everyone asking about the new girl working with me. I’m sick of telling everyone that she’s my best friend’s sister. Yes, I know, she’s gorgeous. But back off.

So I change tactics.

This guy walks up, asks: Whose the new chick?

(He smiles, weirdly.)

I say: My sister, why?

He says: Oh.

11:44 am

I tell the new girl some people might think she’s my sister. I pee.

11:57 pm

How goofy and horrible is life?

12:00 pm

Fucking conference call. Do people actually enjoy conference calls? Perhaps that’s why they ask so many questions, consequently prolonging the conference call. I hate conference calls. The conference call might just be the thing most opposite writing.

Why am I here, doing the thing most opposite writing?

When I should be writing?

How did I get to be 31 without figuring this problem out yet?

I start to blame my blood tester. I start to blame my blood. Bad blood, always fucking me up. Can’t you just start raging with me and not against me?

I decide for the one millionth time: I will never, ever waste another moment again.

Calls over.

I pee. I jab a needle into my stomach, inject three units of insulin. I pee.

Lunch is sandwich and soup, the same lunch I’ve had for about three years. The exact same lunch. I read the New Yorker while I eat.

The New Yorker will save me.

1-3:47 pm

Weirdly, I forget to test my blood sugar. This never happens.

3:47 pm

I’m home from work, on the couch, reading Shalom Auslander. I get up, pee. I doze. I get up, pee. I doze.

4:49 pm

My wife calls, wakes me up, asks for a ride. I test my blood sugar: 120. Not bad.

We get into a bit of a scrape. I eat an apple and some pumpkin seeds. She’s shocked I can eat and apple and pumpkin seeds so nonchalantly.

Not because of my condition. Because of her’s.

She flops into bed. I go there, delay my trip to the gym by nearly thirty minutes.

Afterwards, I jab a needle into my thigh, inject 11 units of long-acting insulin.

6:00 pm

At the Y, on the treadmill. Vogue.

Strike a pose
Strike a pose
Vogue, vogue, vogue
Vogue, vogue, vogue.

Why does Madonna say Rita Hayworth gave good face?

What the hell does that mean? Do I give good face?

If the music's pumping it will give you new life
You're a superstar, yes, that's what you are, you know it.

8:00 pm

Roast Chicken and Epic Sweeta Potato Mash for dinner. Wine too. I jab a needle into my abdomen, inject two units insulin. I pee. I eat a ridiculous amount of chicken.

The World Series begins and I feel celebratory! I drink three glasses of wine!

The life-giving air of baseball.

I tell my wife I’m a spiritual man when it comes to baseball and that her brother is a religious man when it comes to football.

That’s the difference, I say.

Get over yourself, she says.

8:40 pm

I pee.

I sit down to write. I’m thinking about how everyone’s so fucked-upped and wounded, especially me.

Henry calls. He’s on day three of his Master Cleanse. I chide him for chewing gum. He desperately wants to eat a cheeseburger.

Knowing he’s insanely afraid of death, I say, That might kill you.

He promises not to eat a cheeseburger.

I get back to my work.

Just because is not a suitable answer. Just because is lazy.

The only other thing I can think of is that fucked-upped woundedness is probably pretty funny. I think of Daffy Duck.

8:43 pm

“Well?” I shout.

9:07 pm

I love you Miranda July. I love when you say:

"People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side).’ But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe."

I test my blood sugar: 142

I jab a needle into my abdomen, inject one more unit insulin.

10:00 pm

On the couch, with my wife, watching the Red Sox destroy the Rockies. My wife. Her skin, ridiculously soft. Ridiculous! Her coolness quotient, sky-high. Sky high!

She probably doesn’t even think about this kind of stuff.

We grew up together but we grew different in our goofiness.

I wonder: Why does she still like me so much?

Why do I need her so much?

I like her ass. That's one thing.

10:03 pm

I pee. I pee. I pee.

11:02 pm

Awful things have happened to Daffy Duck.
Was that the cause or the result of his daffiness?
His bill blasted to the back of his head.
His eyes bounced around.
Deep inside his meal feathered brain
is the need to fuck or fuck-up
everything beautiful even the Parthenon.
Yet he returns again and again from what
would kill and make inedible
an ordinary duck.
Is this too a power of daffiness?

~Uncle Deano

11:54 pm

In bed, with my wife. I put my hand on her ass. Why do some people call it rump? Rump is a terrible word. Ass isn't much better.

This is the assumed posture of our marriage.

Sleep like a duck in the middle of an explosion.

My wife's ass. That's funny, put the word "wife's" in front of "ass" and the word blossoms...

Self Portrait as Miranda July

2007-10-23T20:27:00.000-04:00

Oct. 23rd,

4:15 am

Wake up early and am confused. What is it that makes me do this? My girlfriend is asleep, my apartment is asleep. The wind from the open window smells like subway steam. I seem to have found myself on the dark side of the world, not the sinister dark side, but the unseen side, the “tail” part of a two-headed coin.

Coffee, thick, which I make by hand. I find, to my surprise, that I have no idea how to make coffee. I put too many beans into the grinder and then too little water in the French press: the result is a sludge that I could only be drinking for the caffeine. So why am I making it?

I stare at the coffee-grinder; I imagine that it is not a coffee grinder at all, but one of those centrifugal amusement park rides. Exiting, the grounds feel both more and less themselves.

5:30 am

Still no one up, except for the ginkgo trees. Luckily I am Miranda July.

6:15 am

I come across a quote in a book that I pull randomly off of the bookshelf. Books! Why do I have so many…The underlining is so heavy that you can feel it, like braille, on the other side of the page.

“ ‘I trust people who get up early,’ admits a young woman.

There are poets who do not concern themselves with the material of sleep. There are those who are concerned with it, but they are fighters against sleep, sleep-fighters.”

Earlier in this same book, another, equally-interesting idea has gone un-underlined:

“He has nothing to do with sleep. As another poet put it, he knows only a ‘great insomnia.’”

7:30 am

Staring at the ceiling, that last undiscovered country. I think one of the experiences I want to create in my work is the one you get when you stick your head in the corner of an old sofa. I would advise you to do this too, but I know you already have.

Everything in there is amazing, like being on the moon.

It’s like, I’m in life, but I’m not in life. I’m waiting to be born.

Being Miranda July, I allow myself to observe that, though we will be dead forever (there is forever in front of us), we were not born forever too (the forever behind us). I greet the dawn by covering two of my three windows with peach-colored post-it notes, and the third one with yellow ones. I feel like I am in the belly of an enormous tropical fish, whose scales are soft as feathers and flutter in patches when my rotary fan passes over them. October: however, it is for some reason still 80 degrees outside, with the sun just coming up.

9:30 am

A sea of Chinese people: “Good morning teacher!” they say. Appreciating this, I love them as Miranda July. But they do not love me back as Miranda July.

During the break, I get in a long discussion about the difference between a whiteboard and a blackboard. How is this difficult to understand? I tell a middle-aged woman in a purple track suit that, if it is helpful, she can think of our whiteboard as the long-lost cousin of a blackboard that is out there, in the world, tramping from town to town and cameo to celebrity cameo, like Big Bird in “Follow That Bird.” I remind her of the horrifying “blue bird” sequence. “Each blackboard searches for its whiteboard,” I say. “Blame Zeus.”

She nods, of course: my students, apparently are always nodding. But her eyes look at me as if I have a sunflower growing out of my forehead.

12:00 pm

Class gets out. I sit for a few minutes in the empty classroom. Actually, it is a conference room hidden deep within the bowels of a YMCA.

12:15 pm

I walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge. The naval yards like a prehistoric swamp.
Take a minute, oh my people, to imagine what it would be like to actually see a dinosaur. I honestly think very few people are capable of imagining this more than once, or at most twice in their life, myself included.

1:00 pm

Home. Have you seen my eyes? I look at them in the mirror. Seriously, I could be Bette Davis over here.

2:00 pm

Where is lunch? My refrigerator is empty but I still open it and stand staring. I am a big starer – at lease I assume with eyes like these I spend a lot of time staring.

5:00 pm

More quotes from the sleep book (maybe this is my favorite book? Maybe it is one I am planning to throw out? Give away?):

“And so the truth of poetry gradually disappears from public places – it retreats into the separate lives of separate individuals.

The reader changes – now he is not occupied with faceless ‘common affairs,’ now he experiences his life in the light of the problematic phenomenon of Existence. This must not be thought of as his own selfish ‘affair’ – his experience of existence can be exemplary, can show the way – a model of human life. The reader needs a poet who speaks only for him, only with him. The poet in such a case is the only companion he can trust.

The ‘shape’ of the connection between poet and reader is changing. Now it is not from stage to auditorium, to the ear, but from paper (often not even from print) to person, to the eye. The reader is led, not summoned; he is conversed with as an equal.”

7:00 pm

Quiche for dinner. I used to hate it. But now I can’t get enough of the stuff.
How could this have happened? My five-year old self would be horrified. He would not even recognize me.

8:12 pm

Halloween coming soon according to this month’s calendar.

9:18 pm

“Well?” I shout.

10:00 pm

Beds, which like many people I have always imagined as plummeting through an endless sky. Interesting that the term “escape velocity” has come to mean something moving very fast. Escape, for me, moves as slowly as a moon rock. It stares and stares, until finally its heartbeat stops.

I’ll tell you what. You try it.

Sleep like a door in the middle of a river.

The Joy Quotient

2007-10-22T09:05:00.000-04:00

Josh,

It's funny, I've been thinking of what you wrote here, actually not thinking, but more likely gestating without responding, and today, out of the blue, I wrote an annotation on the very topic you write about below, re: strangeness and familiarity. To me, it's a matter of scale and, well, Miranda July.

Yes, you went away to Mexico, I went away a few times to New York, and now we re-convene and I'm still talking about Miranda July.

My wife says: Miranda July this, Miranda July that! Why don't we just find Miranda July and fuck her, me and you together?

Actually, my wife doesn't say that at all, but isn't it pretty to think so? (Do Hemingway quotes pop into your head at inappropriate times too? Bastard, he's seeped into me--too much early training in canon, not enough marginalia.)

Anyway, in an interview for bookslut.com Miranda July was asked what her collection of short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You might have to say about “our human existence, our minor existence, on this big planet.”

She answered: “I guess…there’s something always interesting to me about scale and how you can get to the universe through sort of the tiniest things and vice versa.”

July’s response puts me in mind of her narrator from the story “Making Love in 2003”. She—the narrator—is a goofy, sentimental young woman who makes love, first, as high-school student, with a dark shape, and later, as a special needs assistant, with one of her students. Love, and making love, for her, is the universe. She longs for, and lives for, a love connection and her need is displayed in the most idiosyncratic, goofy ways: She sits around other people’s houses; she drives around, without purpose; she confiscates other people’s hand-written notes. The whole time she thinks about love.

And this is what I love about Miranda July: she writes about the great universal theme, love, via the utterly mundane, and in doing so she reminds us that the mundane is precisely the scene of the extraordinary.

Early in “Making Love in 2003” July’s narrator is sitting around a woman’s house waiting for the woman’s husband to come home. The woman’s husband once told her she had “promise” as a writer, so the narrator wrote every day for a year with his business card attached to her computer. Now she is finished and she is sitting in the husband’s living room with his wife waiting to present the book to him. She scoffs at the wife and she wonders what the husband will do with her: “Will he kiss me?”

The narrator is mystified by a collection of needlepoint pillows. One says: MAKING LOVE IN 2003. Another says: MAKING LOVE IN 1997. The pillows seem weird and creepy to the narrator. Then she learns that the woman is actually Madeleine L’Engle, the famous author. This bit of knowledge hits the narrator with a bout of cosmic consciousness. Suddenly, where she once saw creepiness, she now sees the extraordinary love between Madeleine L’Engle and her husband:

"I looked around the living room. This was Madeleine L’Engle’s living room. MAKING LOVE IN 2002. MAKING LOVE IN 1997. I looked at her tailored brown pants and realized he was probably making love to her right this second. When you reach a certain saturation point, lovemaking becomes one endless vibration. He was running late, and this was his way of making love to her, and she wanted to write but had to entertain me instead, and this was her way of making love to him. I was just a part of the love-making between Madeleine L’Engle and her husband. A tiny part of MAKING LOVE IN 2003."

This quote jumps from the mundane to the cosmic back to the mundane in a matter of three lines, from brown pants, to an endless vibration, to a man running late. July’s sense of scale here is enormous, and yet she seems to be saying: do not be fooled by scale, it has nothing to do with size. The grand endless vibration of love does not need a grand image to match: it can be seen easily in a collection of needlepoint pillows. The needlepoint pillows, in fact, purposefully temper July’s grand, vibrating gesture; by conflating her cosmic image with a mundane image, July gives the reader something to chew on, something familiar to taste and in doing so she not only illuminates love in a new way, but pillows too.

I think this is what you call the "squishy ridiculousness of life." I call it The How Goofy and Horrible is Life Quotient. Yes, it is both: goofy and horrible.

Another quotient I've been thinking about: The Joy Quotient. What if we're given an endless amount of joy to spend each day, like a wallet with an endless supply of twenties? If we don't use it we waste it. But it's there and the supply is endless.

So I'm starting to think like Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions.

I mean after all, there's pillows and stuff like that. So much.

What the hell do I have to lose?

Third Way 2: Why Transformers Is the Most Important Movie of Our Generation

2007-10-08T07:29:00.000-04:00

Seth,

In hopes of serving as an aesthetic bird-dog, I'd like to send out a few more brief but hopefully potent salvos about writing and the difficulty of writing, now, when the technology of literature is at its peak and a tangible sameness has settled over storytelling, the story, and American writing in general. Of course, to say that I'm under qualified to talk about these things definitively is, well, pretty much stating the obvious.

As I see it, great art should posses two qualities: strangeness, and familiarity. Less than great art errs most often by forgetting too much about one or the other side of this equation.

Strangeness.

The world is filmed with art and with ways of looking at things. You can barely touch a soda bottle without getting your hands sticky with story, let alone a person. And because all this art is known to us, the world gets dull, gets boring. We forget it exists.

Claude Levi-Strauss talks about culture along the Amazon: sometimes form stops being a way of perceiving and starts being a way of remembering.

But the amazing thing to me is, the world is still there! I can still go outside to get some coffee and see a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, calmly walking down the other side of the street with her hand on her crotch. I still have to park my car every Tuesday.

"Keep the ground, feel the roots, domesticate yourself." - Emerson's Journal

"There are, however, corridors around these mountains." - Davenport on Joyce, Mann, Proust.

"All is garden."

Familiarity.

On the other side of things, experiment that leaves the human universe is less interesting, to me at least. Gertrude Stein is a force of nature in Three Lives or The Making of Americans, but I don't see the point of Tender Buttons. Language, unlike music, is referential: it can never be completely abstract.

A true investigation of daily life reveals quickly how bizarre the world is. Also, how packed with humor, life, death, joy, pain.

"A few nights ago I was the topic of discussion, and we all decided I was an ignoramus." - Anne Frank.

"Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, as it were, in a dream." - Osip Mandelstam.

"In this vacuum of our thoughtlessness, in the pile of blase, feuilleton nothingness, our eternal lyric Poem has plopped itself down and howls like a soaked dog." - Gombrowicz.

To recap and tie some of these undeveloped strands together: about four months ago I saw the movie "Transformers" in a North Carolina movie theater. There, for the first time I think, the fatal flaw of digital special effects was brought home to me. I mean, the gigantic robots looked "real" - they were given weight and dimension and color, they turned shiny in the light and darker in the shade - but there was no reality to them. An entire industry, state, country's worth of resources had been put into making these creatures life like, but they weren't: they were deader than dead.

Think about how amazing it is that we are not impressed by the spectacle of gigantic robots fighting with one another! Why not? What is missing?

Now try looking at this short clip of the Russian animator Yuri Norstein's "Winter's Tale," as an antidote.

For me, the difference between the two types of "animation" - Transformers/Hollywood style special effects and Multfilm collage - is incredible, illuminating. Norstein's movies (and if you haven't checked them out, you should: very Miranda-July-worthy) are made out of pieces of paper; what makes them appealing is not that they're realistic - that they "fool" us, or pass for live action - but that they're so clearly artistic. The technique is at the forefront, and because the technique is so visible, we take pleasure in its mimesis (the Blogger spell-check says that I should spell this word "mimosas"!). We get the feeling of a mind observing, and translating its observations into a resistant medium: this gives delight. We also get the feeling that there is an observed, human world under there.

How does this apply to writing? Without making too many grand claims, I wonder if the traditional short story and novel forms - the types, Seth, that we are working our asses off to write every day - haven't become a sort of high-tech production themselves. Ways of remembering, rather than ways of perceiving. How many stories/novels do you read in which the point of the whole thing, from page one, seems to get to the end? Even very good works frequently feel like that for me, and I wonder if it isn't because the form itself has become a sort of ritual that I indulge in, like drinking warm milk before bed or something.

One of the reasons why "Miscellaneous" literature - and by here I mean the great, gigantic Nile delta of diaries, letters, fragments, experiments, failures that runs around, beneath and through the main channels of literature - has been so fascinating to me lately is because of its "low-tech" feel. Something about the way a diary, for example, admits its form from the very beginning seems to give it an unbelievable freedom to me. So I wonder about different ways to break things up, put art in the forefront, transform things back into perceptions.

As Pushkin, the king of marginal literature, says: "Poetry has to be a little bit stupid."