A friend wrote “What is this frenzy of activity?” Answer: I made a deal with myself that all posts drafted over 1000 words had to be considered as possible essays and finished as such and sent out to magazines and sites.

This has created something of a backlog in my life, but in any case, that’s what’s happening. It doesn’t feel like a frenzy, though. More like the I Love Lucy episode where the candies keep coming faster but there’s no time, writer’s edition. I think this is just life though. In the meantime, I am reading September 28th at How I Learned To Survive in New York at the Happy Ending, and at Penina Roth’s Franklin Park on October 10th. The Franklin Park event will be fun, and I’ll preview the novel I’m finishing.

2.

Other things you may wonder about: the novel I am finishing, perhaps. In any case, I’m working toward finishing this draft by Oct. 3rd and sending it to her. Some of you who are regulars here leave me great messages of encouragement, asking where it is sometimes. Thank you for this. This is helpful.

Do not lose hope, I will tell you, though, I nearly did, but around the time that I did, it was James Baldwin’s birthday, and I thought of all he wrote while the world was so terrible back then, and I realized it was lazy to use the idea of a terrible world as a reason to stop making things. Thre’s a word for this, accedia, also known as the sin of despair. It would only make the world more terrible to be someone who gives in to it, because, why be one more person who is like that? Why put even one more person on that team?

3.

This is of course also the topic of an essay I’ve been writing off and on for years, and have never finished thus far because each time I think about despair, it is, well, difficult.

Yes, irony.

4.

In the meantime, I direct you to this beautiful trailer for Paul Hornschmeier’s new book, Life with Mr. Dangerous. He is a genius, and you should get this book.

5.

Other things outside of writing: For two weekends this month, I went to weddings. The first in Buffalo, the second in the Catskills. Both left me deeply moved. An essay idea I gave up on came back to me while on one of them, and I thought of a story for a story cycle also on another (now we are back in the I Love Lucy episode). I took notes and moved on back to the other commitments. But more importantly, congratulations to Jeb and Janice, and Keith and Chris, and long may love reign over you, your lives, your loved ones and all of us who know you.

6.

Something I discovered to the side of both weddings: If you wonder what will happen in New York state if a disaster hits, the answer is, terrible things, for now. New York is not remotely prepared. On our drive to Buffalo earlier this month the levee outside Binghamton broke and flooded the town. We were caught in the evacuation traffic. The method of getting road information that was most successful involved standing in convenience marts and listening in while 17 volunteer EMT guys tried to give directions to one attractive young woman. No one else had any information whatsoever. Not on the radio, not on the web. A friend recounted calling the Sheriff’s office and listening as they yelled at each other about roads that were closed.

Worse, the information we got this way turned out to be wrong. Only by second-guessing the volunteer EMTs did we get around the flooded roads on the way back and avoid massive delays that would have come from taking their bad advice. But this, of course, was just part of the Republican fantasia that exists now, it seemed to me, something turning us into a people wandering across a crumbling infrastructure trying to escape dangerous waters released by melting ice caps that are now in the storm cycles, with no public services due to austerity cuts, all while these right wingers make us argue gay marriage as the world burns. This is why, for example, the volunteer EMTs were the one offering directions. There were almost no policemen on the road, and the ones we saw were directing traffic silently, and looked impatient to get away themselves. They said nothing to us as we passed them slowly on the highway.

7.

Other things on the surface of my mind: Troy Davis would be alive if he was a white man. I can only hope his death brings with it real change in our country for the better, because his death happening as it did, with him waiting strapped to a gurney for hours while the Supreme Court met on his emergency appeal, dishonors us all. My heart goes out to his family. Gary Trudeau’s review of the Palin biography is genius. I’ve long known that Homophobia turns all boys against each other, for the way they fear being gay, whether they are or not, but here’s a study proving how this crushes their relationships with each other, friendships they desperately need. If you were thinking meanwhile “How can I get an ebook edition of that study from an indie bookstore?” here is a list of indies that sell Google editions. And if you want to escape the Republican fantasia with me tonight (the debates are on, and they’ll likely applaud the death of Troy Davis like, oh, I don’t know, Orcs?), I’ll be at Pete’s Candy Store, watching Emma Straub read with her idol, Jennifer Egan, who is a hero to me also.

Moore's Watchmen was a response to the Oliver North trials, and to Reagan.

1.

I read The Hunger Games. So this is how America has chosen to process the power grab by the country’s richest 2%, I think, as I finish the novel. I buy it after I read that the author was inspired by seeing only reality shows and war coverage on her television.

That strikes me as honorable inspiration for a best-seller.

In case you somehow missed it (there’s over a million copies in print), in this novel a young woman named Katniss lives in a post-American state called Panem, in a poor coal-mining district. Each year each of the 12 districts has to send two of their children, a boy and a girl, to fight to the death in a broadcast reality show. She volunteers to replace her sister when her sister is chosen.

It’s a well-written and fun read, and there’s two more novels, a trilogy.

2.

Reading it I think of how this last year was the year of the so-called Health Care Reform debate, which was people telling the truth vs. people lying about it. This was also the year that I wasasked, every few months, to contribute to fundraisers for the healthcare of others, with cancer, usually. I participate. Because what else is there to do? Unlike my government, I believe a citizen deserves to live whether or not they can afford their care.

3.

I am still not really sure how I ended up living in a country I’d never agree to move to.

We have snow days, which gives me two days of cancelled class. I stay in and read and write. I read Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever and want to quote every line of it. I consider putting it up on Twitter but that seems like a defacement, something she’d loathe (I studied with her). Also, for a class I’m teaching, I’ve been reading Orlando, Never Let Me Go. I’ll blog some responses to these in the coming weeks. Everything feels like it’s about the amnesiac rich, wealthy people who have no idea as to the human cost of their existence.

And then over that weekend, the Reagan centenary arrives.

4.

I remember Reagan as a senescent right wing apparition, evil with a grin. The smiley face button covered in blood on the cover of Moore’s The Watchmen. When I saw that cover I thought, Oh, Reagan. He was the grinning killer sending death squads into Latin America, funding the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, ignoring AIDS while it became a full-fledged pandemic, lowering the poverty level and then declaring poverty diminished. “Trickle-Down Economics” is a rich person spilling something while he eats, and everyone else fighting over it on the floor underneath him. Good riddance. The day he was born is blackened forever. If he’d never been president, we might not have a novel like The Hunger Games. We might not have healthcare fundraisers for people who can’t afford to survive cancer. He is dead and we are all still trying to survive his presidency.

I have a conversation with my partner Dustin’s Uncle Jack about how he fell on his good hip and, while painful, it reset his hips. The pain he’s been suffering from the former bad hip is gone.

I wish that would happen to me, and then, a day later, on the plane home, it does, with a bag falling on my bad knee.

I’ll be making some more wishes.

2.

I spend the month of November at a writer’s colony, Ledig House, in upstate New York. I can’t work without very good coffee, and so I investigate, and find some of the very best coffee I’ve ever had. This is consoling. Strongtree Coffee is an organic roaster local to Hudson, NY, located right by the train station.

The owner describes changing her business recently, due to climate change. Coffee business owners are not climate change skeptics. Instead, they are preparing to fight each other for the increasingly scarce beans.

I am already on board for saving the planet, but had not prepared, all the same, for a shortage of good coffee.

3.

There’s a Turkish writer at the colony who describes living under the threat of constant arrest, due to several charges leveled against her by the Turkish government. After this conversation we watch an episode of Glee. I can’t tell if she’d be happier in America, where the government doesn’t care enough about writers to threaten them.

When she decides to leave early to return, I see the answer is no.

A few weeks later, as the election happens, I try to explain the US to the international writers, who watch, incredulous. The one who seems to understand best is an Israeli writer, who says, insightfully, that Far Right American governments are typically more favorable to Israel. No one is rooting for Obama in Israel, he says. It makes me wonder if he saw this.

4.

I reflect on the irony of trying to finish my novel during #Nanowrimo. Daily.

5.

On breaks, I read essays by people still trying to discredit the MFA, responses to them, responses to the responses. I wouldn’t mind something written that was critical of the MFA in ways that were honest as to what is taught there, but this parade of paper tigers doesn’t resemble the world.

In the meantime, it’s a new business, created by the MFA: the industry of attacking the MFA.

6.

I’m tired of these attempts at totalizing views on this topic, though, and tired of this argument, if that is what it is, which is not the same as being critical of the MFA and asking it to reform—it is about delegitimizing it.  This I think of as a mask—it only reproduces arguments elsewhere in the culture, arguments that are all really about money, and that are in themselves a mask for the same thing: access to a “safe place”, aesthetically and morally, that doesn’t exist. If anything is dangerous, it’s said totalizing view: the attempt to delegitimize the degree altogether, to portray the hard work of the people involved in an entirely negative light—and it is hard work. Worse, the anti-MFA crowd portrays itself as populist, when in fact the MFA is, despite portrayals to the opposite, a largely democratic force in American literature—a fellowship won by a student entering a grad program allows one to write a novel or stories when one lacks, say, a trust fund or a huge advance.

I can understand being bitter if you spent 80k on your degree that you don’t have, but I wouldn’t do it, and I always tell students faced with that not to go. You could make the money back in a lifetime of teaching, but it’s better to have a fellowship.

When I went for mine, those two years were the first two years of my life where I was paid to only write and and study writing. I made much less than the fancy New York magazine editing job I gave up and I didn’t care. I was tired of editing articles about Versace skirts.

I understand the critiques then partly through the lens of who I was before I went—from the time when I applied skeptically, afraid of what I imagined was a program that would try to wipe any individuality off of me.  I was a queer punk bookseller from San Francisco who’d lucked into a NYC magazine job and felt too cool to get a MFA but also too cool for magazines, too—too cool for anything.  I was young and ridiculous with misconceptions, and getting into Iowa with a magical realist queer sexually explicit story about a Korean adoptee was the last thing I imagined was possible, but, I applied to prove I was right, and then I was wrong. When I got in, with fellowship money, the myth, the idea that the program only wanted young Carvers or people to turn into young Carvers, began to shatter. When I say most of what I read about the MFA (or Iowa for that matter) is wrong, what I mean is, I used to believe that too.

7.

I find How to Write Like a Victorian, by Paul Collins, on the first book of writing instruction, a much-needed bit of comic relief. Which is to say, the attacks on the MFA begin perhaps here, and much as now, much of the complaint seems to be about the democratization of writing:

The whole discipline had been gestating for a decade, beginning with novelist Walter Besant musing in 1884 over the notion of “Professors of Fiction”—something then as fantastical as a steam-powered robot. It was a vision that at least one critic found “Appalling. As if there were not enough novels already. … [Now] we are to have our young maidens trained to the business, and let loose upon the world, in batches, every year to pursue their devastating calling, as if they were dentists or pharmaceutical chemists.”

I will now imagine myself as a steam-powered robot professor and writer. Also: consider the much better The Writing of Fiction, by one such maiden, Edith Wharton.

8.

What worries me more is the celebrity, or the economy that struggles to exist around celebrity. In the same way that most people in the Hudson area now owe their livelihood to the needs of weekenders, publishing too often caters to celebrity. “Most of the people I see promoting their book on tv are already famous,” my partner’s sister observes a few days ago. She says this as she is asking me how the average writer can publicize their book.

“This is a big question,” I say. I remember my idea for a tv show, born several years ago, out of the desire to have a show where my book would be the product placement, carried by the stars everywhere. I’m not entirely convinced it is a bad, cynical idea.

9.

I leave Ledig House, and go on to Philadelphia, making a short stop to read at Temple University and meet with students in their MFA program. I get a ride from a Tunisian cab driver who, it turns out, is a writer. He left Tunisia because of his political writing, unable to stay, but he doesn’t speak English well enough to write and publish here. I encourage him, because he is entertaining, to try to write more in English.

I think of the Turkish writer.

In the US, I say, you would never have to leave because of your political writings. Writing itself has been discredited, which is something of a time-saver for the fascists. (This is still true for now, despite the best efforts, say, of the MFA and #Nanowrimo.)

You’re right, he says, with a short laugh. And then drops me off.

I saw Heathers again last Friday night. I remembered how I went to it twice the first night it appeared in theaters. My friend Libby and I drove out to it in her ancient and enormous Cadillac DeVille, and as we left the theater, looked at each other in amazement and said, “Again.” And then after a cigarette, went back in.

Watching it, hearing the familiar phrases my friends and I had quoted so intensely over the years, as the characters said them, it was weird. It was like they were copying me and my friends, who had, of course, been copying them.

I was back in Amherst for the weekend, to drop some things off in storage that hadn’t fit into the apartment I share with my partner in New York (I prefer calling him my boyfriend as partner still sounds like maybe we just go home and look over contracts together). Fitting things into our apartment was a sort of miracle. Dustin, my boyfriend, was filming a short horror film in Concord, not too far away, and at the end of the weekend I would join him for the closing dinner and drive home the next day. He’s very talented, especially with the things of this world, and he can look at them and see ways of resolving their conflicts that are just not apparent to me or many others. Anyway, these things I was taking to storage were simply outside the realm of his considerable abilities but also mine. There was nothing to do with them except put them here.

There are things, as I said to friends at lunch today, that you both cannot have around you and cannot throw away. “Do you imagine a future where you bring them back into your life,” asked one of these friends. “Sort of,” I said. “If we get a house, sure.” My questioner was almost twenty years younger than me, and I know he thought I was some sort of hoarder. “Get rid of them?” he asked.

I shrugged. It’s no use explaining some things to people in their twenties, when time  and the world will team-teach it to them all the same.

People kept asking me if I was enjoying the fall weather. Sort of, was the answer. The spectacle of the changing leaves was lost on me for most of the weekend, as if it was just too much to bother with, to enjoy it. I was busy. I was seeing friends, meeting babies for the first time, I even raked a friend’s yard out of some sort of mix of the desire to just do something physical and outdoors and repetitive and the pleasure of cleaning something.

As I left that friend’s yard, I drove down her dirt road toward the paved one that would take me back to town and stopped, as a wild turkey delicately stepped into the road and gave me the long eye. It was followed by approximately thirty others. It was hardly the first time I’ve seen one, but I felt a visceral pleasure at the sight of them. They wandered into the road, and I waited patiently as they crossed, one of them even pausing to give me what could only have been the wild turkey version of a flipped bird. And as they hauled into the woods, glossy and dark and headed who knows where in their huge numbers, I drove off, and as if they’d pulled a veil off my eyes, the fall and the sun setting and the light in the trees were all beautiful to me, and I became excited, even. I bought my boyfriend a pumpkin and some apples, drove to the storage place and realized, as I pulled in, that I had not remembered the number of the locker, having been there just the one time back when I was moving and leaving town.

The storage place is behind a motel there, and the clerks run both. The motel easily dated to the era of Heathers, and standing there, I felt like I was a character somewhere out of the sight of the main characters. If the filming had required extras to play things never filmed, in some insane theater of method acting that required, say, the world outside the film set to also be in on it, that was where I was. The desk clerk there had no power, he told me, to go into the manager’s files to find out what my number was. “It’s no problem,” I said, which was my way of not saying, That sounds super sketchy. The image of all of my rental fees going to the manager where he could skim them filled my head. “I’ll just try my key and I’m sure the lock it opens will be the one,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, as I stood looking at someone’s stuff that wasn’t mine, lit up by the headlights of my car, I understood that Masterlock keys will open locks that are not yours. I think they have just counted on the idea that no one would ever try to open someone else’s lock with their key. The sight of their Rubbermaid containers filled me with sadness, that I could even accidentally see them.

I went back to my clerk. He called his manager, and while he’d been very friendly to me, and acted as if of course everyone did this, he was instantly dismissive of me in the third person to his manager in tone. “Yeah, uh, there’s this guy here who forgot his locker number…” I said nothing because of course there was no way he was paid enough for the amount of acting he had to do with me and his manager. I couldn’t mind seeing behind the curtain.

As I went to lock my own locker up, I wondered if I minded, that someone else could just open this locker up. They would of course have to know the secret I had just discovered. It was just incredibly heavy and sturdy modern furniture you couldn’t steal without a rental truck, boxes of literary magazines, old notebooks. My key hadn’t opened all of the Masterlocks I’d put it into, just one besides mine. It would take someone else a series of tries with several different keys. It wasn’t exactly like it being safe, but it was good enough for now. I stopped in at the clerk one more time. “Tell people not to use Masterlocks,” I said, as I told him my story. His eyes went wide in a horror I didn’t feel, as if I’d told him all the lockers were just sort of…open. I saw him about to ask me which locker I’d opened. He didn’t. I didn’t offer it. It seemed like an invitation of a kind to tell him, that the people whose locker I’d opened would probably just accuse me of stealing something, when I’d just put the lock back on, and he seemed to realize this also as he stopped himself. And so I just waved goodnight, enjoying our mutual recognition of the way people are, and drove off to bring my boyfriend home.

*When I drafted this post, without a title, it came up with the randomly assigned post number “1989″, the year Heathers came out. Make of it what you will.

And so a story that I thought would attract a lot of attention on, say, social media, at least, was a non-starter: a lamp discovered with a shade made from human skin, alleged to be one of the famous lamps the Nazis made. It didn’t make any sense inside of any of these narratives, but also, it was just too horrific, I think, to take in. The cover of NY, with its image of a lamp, ostensibly the lamp, and the quote from the article, offering the lamp for 35.00, felt, when I saw it, like a voice from a dream . And the story itself was then easy for me to forget, except for every time I walked by it. All of which is to say, I was blocking it out, too. I think we were all blocking it out.

Observing this in myself made me turn my thoughts to my loose approximation of Freud’s idea of the self: that we are all what we agree to be, and that there is more to us out to the edges, rejected and ostensibly annihilated by that, except, it waits for those moments when we say “I don’t feel like myself right now”, or, “I don’t know why I did that.” This felt like part of that but perhaps also for the larger national mind. As I thought about it, though, it was easy to touch on something else: a weariness, I think, of being trapped in this story of how we think of our country and our culture and it is breaking down. One place you can see the rest of the story, as it were, is in fiction, and I thought of it reading Sigrid Nunez’s self-interview over at The Nervous Breakdown, where she said, of her new book, that while it has elements from dystopian novels, it is more about “a near apocalypse” and a temporary dystopia. I feel we live in a world of near apocalypses, adrift in temporary dystopias that seem never to end at the same time. Or as Fareed Zakharia recently asked, regarding our country, “when do the emergency powers end?” More importantly, when does the emergency end?

I thought saw the rest of the story also as I read my friend Porochista Khakpour’s op-ed this weekend, a thoughtful, searching response to the Islamophobia the Right has stoked since Obama was the nominee for president, and then Maureen Dowd’s latest, most hopeless column ever. I don’t know why she has her spot in the Times, and it continues to make me think less of the paper that they carry her little fictions. Never is she more incensed than when someone is performing their gender or race incorrectly—Hillary is mannish, and “Barry” (her condescending name for our president) is effete, also “colorless”, and is allegedly being abandoned by “Obamicans”, in this case represented by her transparently fictive Peggy, the character she tells us is telling her all of these things about our president, and who… has no voice from Dowd’s that sets her apart. While I do think it is the disease of our age, to just believe something because we feel it is true, despite evidence, I read it and thought of how much I wished Porochista had her spot instead. Not just because of her being my friend, but because her op-ed described life as I know it to be, as lived by me and the people I know. Dowd’s op-ed is, to my mind, what I’d call in a workshop “overdetermined”, i.e., it is a narrative trying to sell you something and is too neatly organized to do so to be drawn directly from life. For all she claims to understand the troubles of “regular people”, Dowd is very much from “the narrative”, the one elite members of the press write in advance of the news and then fits the news into, such as the alleged anti-incumbent fervor before most of the summer’s primaries, which then led to…just seven incumbents losing their spots out of 324 elections. This narrative is the same one that led also to the war in Iraq. Dowd, who made her name really by mocking the Clintons, now writes columns that have more in common with the Tea Party’s conservative white angst of “wanting their country back” than with the troubles of the average American, because the identity of that “Average American” has moved on, which is the whole reason we see the Tea Party agita at all. And Dowd is then part of a kind of Exquisite Corpse, written collectively by a punditocracy that struggles to be as inflammatory as the average sign at a Tea Party rally.

Porochista’s traffic on her op-ed did climb into the top ten of their most-emailed and most-read last night—here’s hoping the Times editors are as fed up with Dowd as the commenters on Dowd’s column, who, hilariously, one by one, took the time to take her to task.

Note: this has been updated, 5/17/2010.

Lately I kept thinking of what I thought was a quote of Susan Sontag’s from a posthumous essay, and wrote a post about it. Here is the actual quote, supplied by Joshua Benton over at the Harvard Nieman Journalism Labs blog, who read the original post I put up.

Hearing the shattering news of the great earthquake that leveled Lisbon on November 1, 1755, and (if historians are to be believed) took with it a whole society’s optimism (but obviously, I don’t believe that any society has only one basic attitude), the great Voltaire was struck by the inability to take in what happened elsewhere. “Lisbon lies in ruins,” Voltaire wrote, “and here in Paris we dance.”

One might suppose that in the 20th century, in the age of genocide, people would not find it either paradoxical or surprising that one can be so indifferent to what is happening simultaneously, elsewhere. Is it not part of the fundamental structure of experience that “now” refers to both “here” and “there”? And yet, I venture to assert, we are just as capable of being surprised — and frustrated by the inadequacy of our response — by the simultaneity of wildly contrasting human fates as was Voltaire two and a half centuries ago. Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events — by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That here we are here, now prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening…while elsewhere in the world, right now…in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio…

You can also say that it’s not “natural” to keep remembering that the world is so…extended. That while this is happening, that is also happening.

True.

But that, I would respond, is why we need fiction: to stretch our world.

Novelists, then, perform their necessary ethical task based on their right to a stipulated shrinking of the world as it really is — both in space and in time.

Characters in a novel act within a time that is already complete, where everything worth saving has been preserved — “washed free,” as Henry James puts it in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, “of awkward accretion” and aimless succession. All real stories are stories of someone’s fate. Characters in a novel have intensely legible fates.

–Sontag from “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”

At the time I found this, I agreed with her.  My thinking about it turned this into what I thought the quote was: the novel as the antidote to the modern problem of knowing too much about what is happening elsewhere.

I am thinking about this idea of the novel again because I wonder if it is useful to shrink the world if it is no longer how anyone lives.  If a certain kind of novel represents a naive, even pre-modern state of being. And so if this is so, if this is no longer how anyone lives, then doesn’t the novel has to represent this new condition, with the clarity and intensity we can only get from prose fiction?

I think I’ve been thinking about this as this last semester I entered into this very quiet place in the middle of myself, finding myself with nothing to say whenever I signed into my blog.  Around me, things had reached a dizzying and even frantic pace, what with applying for grants, residencies, interviewing for jobs, finishing a novel and finishing my time at Amherst as their Visiting Writer—there were reasons I could have found the task of writing this blog confounding.  I’d found it strange before, or had felt ambivalence about it, but I’d never found myself feeling mute while sitting here trying to write it. I was thinking about the idea of the novel as antidote, in other words, because within the making of the novel, I had a great deal to say.  Most people experience catharsis while reading novels, but it seems to me catharsis is a possibility for the writer while writing it also.

I didn’t lack for ideas for blogging–My files are full of many unfinished drafts–and some were posts that simply became too long or that were better as possible magazine pieces, and those are some of the reasons as to the stalling, but there is something underneath it all that I can barely feel, like something your foot finds at the bottom of the lake as you get near the shore that is sharp but is just out of sight. Now that a revision of my novel is with my editor and the school year has ended, I am reaching down to see what is there. And I know it begins and perhaps ends with the news.

When I was first in New York after college, I loved nothing more than to wake up, get a cup of coffee from the corner deli and hit the newstand, where I’d buy three papers–a New York Times, a Daily News and a New York Post.  I was living in Fort Greene, between Fulton and DeKalb, and brought the three papers back to my kitchen, where I read them until I felt the click in my head, when I closed them and began to write on a typewriter I’d had since high school.

Reading this way, I felt I saw things in a stereoscope–and the Times was better at the news of the country and the world, the Post and the Daily News had the local crime and politics, and Media Ink, the column in the Post on the magazine business, that was a must read for any aspiring magazine kid in the early 90s.  The Post’s politics were offensive, sure, even then, but I also felt it was an obligation of mine, to know how the other side thought–this is being a gift I suppose from growing up in Maine.

When the news went online, this began to fall apart. But worse, it became clear that by 2004, the news no longer generated that lovely click in my head. Instead, there was an urgency I read with, of someone watching for a sign the ship was not going to strike the iceberg.  But of course there is always a new iceberg we “may” hit.  For example, the much blogged about takeover of the House this fall is already fait accompli, despite being 5 months off.

There’s any number of ways to criticize the news today, and deciding on the story before it is written certainly is one, but it seems to me the chief way it is driven increasingly is by speculation–by fiction, essentially.  And I do object to that.  Online news, full of headlines that are questions, and articles that are mostly speculation, the whole thing read together is a long speculative fiction novel in installments, populated by real people who become famous because they fit the narrative.   Just today, a friend mentioned how she felt Gordon Brown hadn’t been able to “escape the narrative”, and I hadn’t mentioned this idea of mine at all–I think we can all feel it.  And so it is interesting to see that at the same time betting on futures has gotten the banking industry in trouble, it is the central product of the news industry for now.  Yes, there’s been any number of discussions devoted to conflict-driven news–we all know about this now–the habit of bringing that famous “two sides” to the table to argue on live Cable news–but 24-hour online news now creates a 24-hour cycle of being at this side of the table or the other. Conflict news, as we can now simply call it, is a speculative fiction written to get someone to click and read and be angry, so they will click and read more. Its job is to produce fear that your side of the table will lose, as fear is the mother of anger, which means a click of this other kind.

It probably isn’t hard to guess: these antics void the spell for writing I hope for when I went to the newstand over a decade ago, and it disappoints the sense of mission I felt as a kid, that reading the news was the job of the responsible citizen.  Instead I just feel weak with a rage hangover–at the lies, lack of reporting, the bullying that passes for discussion and the way each news item, no matter what it is about, to me is always about the death of critical thinking in the American public and the inability of a majority of people to reason their way through what is presented to them–something I believe is directly related to the destruction of public education.  All each of these news items tells me is that the country is still drunk on the faith-based world, whether they are redstate or blue, still content to think that because they believe it is so, it is so.

For years now I’ve instituted blogging as a kind of place to make sense of my world after reading the news I read to put me in the mood to write, like a place to spit out the venom I took in, but even that doesn’t seem like an answer anymore.  It just seems like a way to allow the actions of 1% of the American public to dominate my mental space.  Which is what they want. I mentioned all of this to my boyfriend Dustin recently, and he reminded me that I worry about my mother, who sits watching MSNBC and CNN with my stepfather until she goes to bed, furious, nearly every night. How I worry that she will have a shorter life for her regimen of evenings full of rage.  Maybe you get it from her, he said.

I might. He theorized that her way of raising me, to be prepared for disaster, to be ready to swim to shore when the ship goes down, that this is why she does this and is also why I do this online version of shouting at the news in my living room.

It is time for me to adapt again. Just as I don’t want that for my mother, I don’t want it for me, either.  And in much the same way I learned to write on computers by writing down the page number of my draft when I stopped writing, so as to avoid beginning to revise page 1 again when the document opened (typewriters never made this problem for you), I have to reinvent my pre-writing ritual and my sense of my duties as a citizen, and move on. I think I was thinking of Sontag’s quote primarily because I think she meant reading novels was the antidote to this problem, and as near as I can tell, it may be that writing them is also the antidote.  Perhaps the impulse to either read or write a novel is at some very basic level the urge to get the poison out, and in that light, National Novel Writing Month’s steady growth annually looks like something very different.

In our age now, we exist in an environment that oscillates between euphemism and slander, anonymous cool and rage.  Whatever it is I know about the world away from me, whatever my experience of that is, I write and read novels, then, because the truth a novel can evoke, drawn into place by the essential falsehood a fiction is, in turn reveals something from within all the mix of lies and truth delivered from the world.  A lie that uncovers what is under the lies, then, being what a novel is or can do, whether or not it does. Not a moral imperative but a moral possibility.  And so this is why I’m still interested in writing them.

** A mentioned, an earlier version of this post appeared without the Sontag quote–I went looking for it where I found it, at the Guardian, where it had been taken down, and what’s more, I misremembered it as a result. Thank you to Nieman Labs blog for pointing the way to the right quote, and I’ve updated this post to reflect the results.

A truly slavish adaptation would have been better, if 4 or 5 hours long—and would have included the Black Freighter story, released as a kind of special feature the week the film went out, and which had no intrinsic value on its own. “Am I supposed to bring it into the film and watch it on my hand-held at the appropriate moments,” I remember complaining to a friend who understood, and shook his head at the idea also. The film that came out was anything but a slavish adaptation—it was a hammy, unironic imitation of what the book meant to critique. The Watchmen wasn’t supposed to be a spectacle on the scale of last year’s Iron Man, and so I knew there was a problem when it was billed to us as if it would be. The original comic pulls the very idea of Iron Man apart critically, even as it reaches towards a very earnest ending.

To be clear, the Black Freighter storyline, in the comic, functioned as a narrative intervention that also enlivened the narrative at the same time. In the comments section of various reviews, people arguing about this have complained that The Black Freighter takes them out of the story but…it’s supposed to, as a way to make the story about something larger. The Watchmen as a comic is a fragmented narrative, and the purpose of fragmenting a narrative is to break the it into pieces so it can fit around something much larger than what a facile whole narrative can contain. It implies more than it describes as a result, and the reader, when this is successful, feels the touch of something greater than the story can provide otherwise.

With this fragmentation removed from the story, the satirical aspects collapse and fall away, and the faux-naive story it became comes forward. And thus, all was quite literally lost.

Also, in all the noise from critics about how being so slavish to the book the film was destroyed–a conversation that tried to pin what was bad about the film on fanboys instead of on the people who actually made the film–what went missing was that the film was actually another case where Zack Snyder evacuated the book’s content and inserted a narrative that is about his love of the male figure and his anxiety about openly gay men.

Coming up next, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World promises to be one of the best comic-to-film adaptations yet. Directed by Edgar Wright, the director of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, two of my favorite films ever, the story is in basically the most perfect hands it could have found. The Scott Pilgrim comics are a meatloaf of everything you could think of in pop culture: indie music, kung fu films, video games and D&D. Scott runs into “save points” at various times throughout the book, has to fight and defeat his love interest’s 8 evil exes in order to date her, and when he wins these battles receives mysterious piles of spare change, much like how in a video game you receive points you can spend as money after vanquishing a foe. At one point, a bonus is a Mithril Skateboard, which vanishes when Scott lacks the skills to use it. The Scott Pilgrim story is also drawn like a Manga comic, and yet features such real-life crises as room-mate drama, and what to do when you don’t have enough money for the bus. Or how to handle it when  your evil ex-girlfriend becomes a huge star.

Scott Pilgrim also does what The Watchmen did–uses superheroes to comment on the human condition–but it does so with humor, not moralizing, and the result is that amid what seem like colossally vapid stories, some hilarious and yet breathtaking truths about life emerge. When I teach The Watchmen, I teach it to my students as a forerunner, something that at the time was a pioneer, and that in retrospect seems a little leaden. And part of the problem with how posterity treats such things is that you can’t imagine what life was like before this or that book altered our consciousness forever. The terrible irony of the Watchmen film now is that something made during the Iran-Contra era and meant to comment on it–especially the idea that millions of human lives could be the “cost of doing business”, or that national security programs often leave us less safe rather than more so–comes out at a time when it is both most needed and least wanted as a vision of how we live now. And so the glossy toothless apparition is dismissed, and the message of it, lost to the audiences who only ever will see the film. But it is also true, I think, that the Scott Pilgrim comics are the wacky great-grandchildren of The Watchmen.

Next up for Wright is… Ant-Man.

• Ben Stein of Ben Stein’s Money (and, who normally drives me crazy) points out that in the Elliot Spitzer case, a few Federal officials with new surveillance powers have subverted the electoral will of the people of New York. He predicts a terrifying new trend.
• Bob Novak simultaneously says Yes, Ben Stein, you are right. Fingers anti-Clinton GOP operative who predicted Spitzer’s fall three months ago.
• Bear Stearns implodes. Arrogant money men who began last week laughing at Elliott Spitzer’s fall fall themselves due to corruption Spitzer was unable to contain.
• Bear Stearns chief played bridge while company tumbled.
• War In Iraq Over …as a news story. Until, of course, our ability as a country to borrow more money to wage it falls apart as foriegn countries consider us a bad investment bet.
• Foriegn Investors Veto US Fed Housing Bailout. What I’ve long said on this and other blogs, that borrowing money from abroad meant that soon we’d be unable to set our domestic and international agendas, has come true. So, whereas earlier this year I said “The Dollar Is The New Peso”, I’m revising that to “America Is The New Venezuela”. Get ready to riot at your bank for your money.
• Newspapers now vaguely aware that they are becoming giant blogs with reporters; may need to rehire fired editors and reporters as web producers, as bloggers rarely do their own reporting.

Okay. Well, I’ll see you guys at the water riots.

Me: We lost power last night because of the storm. But it wasn’t for very long.

Mover: You’re lucky. We still don’t have power back in my neighborhood.

Me: It’s not luck, exactly. The neighbor next door here is the president’s adviser on the Mideast. So, they work pretty quick in neighborhoods like this.

Mover: What’s the Mideast?

Me: (Tries to hide fear of her question) Uh, you know, Iran, Iraq.

Mover: I don’t know what that is.

Me: They’re…we’re at war with Iraq?

Mover: [Shrugs].

Follow the link to today’s NY Times article, Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile To Knowledge?: