It’s a busy time. First,  this Monday, February 6th, I’m reading from a new short story, just finished, unpublished, not even under submission yet. The occasion is the BOMB Magazine I <3 BOMB party, at the Powerhouse Arena bookstore in DUMBO, Monday, February 6th. I’ll be reading with Myla Goldberg, Robin Elizabeth Schaer and Tina Chang. We’re celebrating Valentine’s Day but also sending off the BOMB Magazine party master/web master, the excellent Paul Morris, who is joining the staff at PEN, the organization for writers.

I have a review of Daniel Clowes’ The Death Ray in the above winter issue, and as previously mentioned, an interview with Daniel at BOMB‘s site.

6 days after this, I will be speaking on a panel for Emily Books.

February 12th to be precise. The Like a Boss panel is at the Uncanny Valley on Long Island City as a part of the Emily Book Club event for Sigrid Nunez’s brilliant memoir of Susan Sontag, Sempre Susan, the book club choice for February. I’ll appear with Heidi Julavits, Will Schwalbe and Doree Shafrir. Hope to see you at either or both. If you don’t know about Emily Books, by the way, it is an online independent bookstore and book club both, by subscription. Check it out.

And, let me also announce that the paperback of the anthology Mentors, Muses and Monsters is out. If you haven’t read my memoir of studying with Annie Dillard, it’s in there, and also still here at the Morning News. Sigrid’s book about Sontag came from her essay for this anthology. I myself wrote an essay twice as large as the one that’s been published–we cut the second half, or what what I’d call the sequel to it, to make it fit for publication, for if I’d left it in, it would have been twice the size of the next largest essay. It’s not good to be that guy, but also, it seemed perhaps more esoteric. That section is about life after my study with Annie, when I struggled to make sense of what I’d learned, and put it all into practice. Reading Sigrid’s book has me thinking about it again, though. This may be something I’ll revise and send out later this year, or, it may be, well, not really interesting enough–it all takes place in my head, after all. And on the page.

Anyway, I’ll have more news soon–a lot is happening this month. In the meantime, I hope to see you out at either of these events.

Full Stop: 2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Does literature have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval?

Alexander Chee: Probably. Just not in the way any of us would expect. I think if it has any responsibility at all it is to defy the expectations of the current moment, to understand us in a way more deeply than is perhaps available to us now. But perhaps this question is about something else together, points to something that is more about writers and contemporary American fiction and the way it is both created and consumed?

I remember reading Mavis Gallant as a writing student to understand how to include the political lives and histories of my characters, because she did it so gracefully. I did it because I was being told writing about politics was to make something unwelcome, or unpleasant, and yet it was something I wanted to do. I had noticed her stories always included the politics of her characters just as a way to make them whole. It was a small but important moment in my life, both the realization of what was needed, and the lesson, but I do think it speaks to this thing we can almost see about contemporary American fiction as a whole.

Full Stop has updated the Partisan Review’s Questionnaire for American Writers from 1939, the Situation in American Writing questionnaire, and sent it to writers such as Marilynne Robinson, George Saunders, Porochista Khakpour, Darin Strauss, Roxane Gay, myself and many others. My response is here.

I’ve got a review of Daniel Clowes’ newly-reissued The Death Ray in the new issue of BOMB Magazine, and over on their site, an extensive, wide-ranging interview with him.

Clowes is, without question, one of the masters we have now, as a comics artist and graphic novelist. In discussing the new seriousness with which comics are treated, we have to begin with the seriousness artists like Clowes and Chris Ware and Los Bros Hernandez brought to comics starting back in the 80s and 90s and have kept alive until now, when they are enjoying a level of readership and respect I think most fanboys and fangirls never dreamed of back even 10 years ago.

Clowes and I spoke of everything from the origin of The Death Ray to his early days hanging out with Chris Ware to the idea of his comics as horror comics starring the self. The Death Ray is part of a trio of works from him to appear in the last year and a half, and completes his sense of his current body of work, he says in the interview–it was initially published as a comic in his Eightball series, and he is reissuing it to have it back in print, and as a bound book available to his new readership. These works, Mr. Wonderful, Wilson, and The Death Ray, together, give off a patchwork sense of a world in which all of them exist together, an alternate universe with an emotional realism that puts much of contemporary fiction to shame by contrast.

For more on Clowes, Tavi at Rookiemag has an interview with him that appeared yesterday. And for more on the contemporary comics scene, check out the excellent interview with Adrian Tomine, another favorite creator of mine, at The Rumpus.

Mark Armstrong of Longreads invited me to submit my top Longreads for the year. If you haven’t found Longreads yet, I like it a lot. It’s a great way to locate longform narrative nonfiction, journalism and short fiction online. I did both a Fiction and Nonfiction list.

Ok, I remember thinking. I guess we’re off.

I both loved and hated what I came up with, and it made no sense to me. And yet it haunted me and so I put it away. When Dave wrote to me, I thought of it immediately. I pulled it out, looked it over, made some changes to what was then the first chapter, and emailed it off to him, to publish in the Hartford Courant’s Sunday magazine, a special issue, in January of 2004.

Last Saturday, I’m happy to say, I finished the most recent draft and sent it to my publisher. I’m very happy with it, and while there’ll be some changes to make, the book is very close to being scheduled. I look forward to updating you soon with that news.

Also, I’ve turned in the first half of my novel, the second goes out tomorrow. More news on The Queen of the Night soon.

Next week, meanwhile, please join us at ABC No Rio in New York for the launch of Finite and Flammable, the zine about zines. I’m a contributor, with a short memoir of zine-making in my 20s that has me wanting to do one of my old zine ideas again. If I am going to do it, I’ll announce it that night, Wed. Dec. 7th. From 7-9.

Meanwhile, back to your regularly scheduled Koreanish programming, with me writing some more posts here on graphic novels I’m reading with my class at Columbia this fall. Also keep an eye out for my interview with the legendary Daniel Clowes for Bomb, coming soon.

I feel as if I grew up in New York. Or perhaps more specifically, Brooklyn–Fort Greene, Williamsburgh, South Park Slope. The East Village, the West Village. Harlem. The Upper West Side. In the first few years I lived in New York, I moved between sublets. I’m writing about it now a little as well. But it’s also the case that the unpacking of my boxes after all this moving around has me uncovering file after file of unfinished work, some of which I abandoned, some of which I set aside to return to later, all of which is calling me, a little choir with songs about my future. I created a filing cabinet in my desk at home, with projects in a row for me to work on, and as I’m ready, I put them in my bag and take them to my writing office.

For now, though, I am still finishing this novel.

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I often take the trains now from our apartment to my writing office, sometimes my bike, and the journey feels too short, which is how I know I wish I still lived in Brooklyn. Or wish the apartment I had with Dustin was in Brooklyn, or something of the kind. We talk about Brooklyn, specifically Bushwick or Williamsburg, but sometimes other neighborhoods too. The other day, we were nearly ready to move to Sunset Park.

Perhaps I will begin to take long trips on the subway to read, with no particular destination.

It’s interesting to me that part of what drove me to distraction on my travels was the noises I heard from other artists inside of the various residencies I was in, and yet I think part of that was the cleanse I was on, which can make you feel, well, sensitive. But cleanse or no cleanse, I can get on a New York subway train and descend into a level of concentration I rarely find anywhere else. It’s almost cruel, or it would be, if it were something you could argue with or understand.

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When I get out of the train, I am in the FIT neighborhood. The office is 2 blocks east of the C/E trains. Think whimsically dressed kids with plans on being the next big thing in fashion. One more block and I am in the flower district, another, Koreatown, still another, Chelsea.

By my office, then, outside on the street, I am surrounded by baby fashionistas, flowers, Koreans and gay men. This seems exactly right. Also a short stretch of bike messengers who smoke what seems to be a bale of weed on the sidewalk every day around 6PM.

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I am also writing a science fiction novel, a young woman says to me last night, interested in possibly studying with me. She shrugs, as if she has admitted something embarrassing. Oh, I have plans for one, I tell her. We laugh. Me in part because of the long row of things in my filing cabinet at home.

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“You’re writing a piano sonata,” Joshua Furst observed to me last night at Franklin Park. I’d just given a short preview reading to the audience out there in Prospect Heights, a part of a group of readers on the theme of Nocturnes. Joshua did me the great favor of coming to both this reading and another, the week before, an invitation only private salon in Williamsburg, and so he and had a long view of a kind on what I was up to with the novel, as I read distinct excerpts. Today I looked the reference up—he was speaking, I assumed, of Beethoven, but in any case, I found this, in a simple check of Wikipedia, and experienced something between an idea and a moment of recognition. Sonatas of the classical period and after are typically considered to have four movements:

1. An allegro, which by this point was in what is called sonata form, complete with exposition, development, and recapitulation.
2. A slow movement, an Andante, Adagio or Largo.
3. A dance movement, frequently Minuet and trio or – especially later in the classical period – a Scherzo and trio.
4. A finale in faster tempo, often in a sonata–rondo form.

What has been hardest in writing this is understanding the structure I wanted to use for it. It may be this is it.

To those who mock writers house visits, I can only say, how nice for you, to live a life where you don’t need heroes. How nice that what you wanted to be always came with some sort of imprimatur of approval from somewhere above you so that you could seek it uncomplicatedly, and not feel like a class traitor, or a gender traitor, or a sexual one. Hurrah for you. After all, there’s just so many ways writers are honored in America after their deaths, it really does get hard to choose. It’s not like the French, who really love literature appropriately, went and made Victor Hugo’s house into a museum or anything.

Anyway.