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 First,  this Monday, February 6th, I’m reading from a new short story, just finished, unpublished, not even under submission yet.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.

Ayana Mathis wrote beautifully on joy over at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s new website. I’m now going to just send students with this problem this link.

Suffering and bewilderment are great levelers, shared human experience to which we all are drawn. Isn’t anguish a part of our fascination with Crime and Punishment’sRaskolnikov, or with those beautifully rendered souls in Adam Haslett’s You Are Not A Stranger Here? We want the gory details, we want an apotheosis of pain. In fiction, torment elevates characters to a higher plane; it makes them legitimate as subjects. I’m all for a good dose of literary misery, but I can’t help wonder if there aren’t additional meaningful, and dramatically potent, channels into the heart of the human experience, another way to infuse cells. What about joy?

I am thinking of Dmitri Fyodorovich’s last hours of freedom in The Brothers Karamozov. He gallops off to a country inn in pursuit of his love Grushenka with all of the makings of an orgy in tow: fiddlers, crates of champagne and caviar, dancing gypsy girls dressed in bear suits. During the pandemonium, Dmitri and Grushenka confess their love and both are quietly transformed. I am talking about the kind of joy that mounts sentence by sentence in Stuart Dybek’s story “Pet Milk,” which begins with the narrator’s tender recollection of his grandmother’s evaporated milk swirling into a cup of hot coffee and ends with his ecstatic coupling with an ex-girlfriend in the conductor’s cab of an elevated train speeding over Chicago. “Pet Milk’s” version of joy is a dramatic crescendo, it is nostalgic without being maudlin and it is the engine propelling the story forward.

In his book, Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter calls joy “transfigurative.” Bliss might seem the most uncomplicated of emotions, but joy is complex and made more profound because it is often preceded by pain or, at the very least, by a melancholy against which it flashes like a bolt of lightning across a dark sky.

Last spring at Iowa, Ayana was one of my favorite students there. She was writing the novel she sold to Knopf shortly after we left at the end of the semester, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, due out next year around this time. Keep your eyes peeled for her, she’s amazing.

It seems to me the idea of inspiration is a terrible burden, to many. A cruel one. A myth. I think people are haunted by it, as they are horoscopes that say they’ll meet a lover this week, or that there is a perfect someone out there for everyone, that maybe there is a god, but maybe not, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, Santa Claus. Maybe there is inspiration. Maybe there are just ideas. Maybe it is just the world. Maybe there really is a jolly fat man in a red suit and a beard with a gift just for you.

Maybe just go make whatever it is you are waiting for that man to give you.

I’ve got a guest post up over at Nova Ren Suma’s lovely blog, Distraction No. 99. Nova is one of the first friends I made over the internet, a talented and enthusiastic YA author who is one of the hardest working writers I know. I really admire her. Watching her grow from a popular blogger to a debut author to an experienced writer has been gratifying, and I was happy to write this post for her.

As I say in the post, I’m fairly leery of the whole inspiration thing. I prefer to look for ideas. This may seem like semantics but I feel as if inspiration suggests that what comes doesn’t belong to you and you need it to belong to you in order to do anything real with it. And you need to keep at it. I recently had lunch with the AAWW interns, and one of them asked me, “What do you think, having taught writers for a while, is the thing that makes the big difference? What separates the students who go on to become writers from the students who don’t?”

“Stamina,” I said, very quickly. Persistence is the gift that brings all the others. I know many writers with a great deal of talent who do not write. Art is not fair, it is not democratic, it has no court of appeals. Talent is not equally apportioned, but luckily it also doesn’t matter as much as stamina. There is little science to it all that is reliable except that I have seen persistence carry the day over talent again and again.

And it may be this that inspires me most of all.

Structure is on my mind a great deal of late. Earlier that evening I took a break to go and walk around in the moonlit city with my friend Merrill Feitell, author of the short story collection Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes. We were getting caught up after not seeing each other since AWP in Denver. Merrill has a long-standing interest in the structure of fiction, and so I ran by her some problems I’ve been solving for in my novel, regarding the inclusion of my character’s past, and how the conventional ways of dealing with backstory (I do not like this word) were not helpful.

Merrill suggested first printing out this troubling past of my character (about 50 pages of it at this point) and using a different color paper from the rest of the manuscript. I laughed, as I had in fact already done this, though by accident, due to a lack of white paper in the house, and the ink was even blue, due to a lack of black ink at the same time.

Next step: Lay it out, she said, and that way you can see with the color change a little better of how the sections interact with each other and where the breaks are.

As I left her, I looked up at the sky to see if I could see the air-craft-carrier-sized asteroid that was supposed to swing by the earth last night, but did not see it. A further irony awaited when I returned to my reading: Asterios Polyp organizes itself in relationship to time with color.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzuchelli, is created out of two stories that eventually become one, or rather, it is one story made out of what I think the main character himself would call a Parallax: we move back and forth in time, though, as if we are viewing the story from a place where all time is visible. A first timeline begins when a lightning bolt strikes the apartment of the main character, an architect named, yes, Asterios Polyp, that sends him running into the subways, into a self-imposed exile from his own life. The second begins with Asterios’ birth, and is narrated by his stillborn twin, Ignazio, and takes us up to the moments just before the lightning strike.

Ignazio appears in the first timeline as a figure in Asterios’ dreams, an uncanny marker for the life that has slipped away from him. He speaks but is invisible in the second timeline.

The present timeline, born out of the lightning, is colored in yellow and purple.

The second, born alongside his birth and narrated by Ignazio (who of course is identical to Asterios) is either blue and red, when Hana, Asterios’ wife, is present, or blue and purple, before she appears.

The story has been described as “interwoven with flashbacks” but it is actually a kind of stereoscopic narrative, but across time, with two narratives, alternating with each other in equal parts and equal importance. In one storyline, we see Ignazio appear in dreams, often as an uncanny changeling, living the life Asterios no longer has–Ignazio the successful architect, and Asterios, the abandoned.

In the other storyline, Ignazio narrates from a knowing, affectionate teasing, bordering on scorn.

The result is a story narrated by a a brother only a brother could tell, but also a story only a ghost could tell. We see stereoscopically, either hearing Ignazio’s thoughts on Asterios, or seeing him, in Asterios’ story, haunting him. Asterios feels guilt at being the survivor, a guilt he doesn’t often describe. Ignazio appears to feel, well, envy, on a low burn. And soon it seems his intentions are not at all benign in telling the story, or being in it, either.

In discussing what makes something literary, I increasingly believe (and teach) that one quality is the protagonist also as antagonist. Ignazio isn’t, for all his anger at the surviving brother, really able to ruin Asterios’ life. He can only make Asterios aware that he himself ruined his own life.

What David Mazzuchelli does is set these up so that the two stories run side by side, each moving toward a climax of their own, and each climax informing the other. First the past story, in red and blue, and then the present time story, in yellow and purple. The climax of the past story is his divorce with Hana, not openly dramatized but witheld instead. The climax of the present is the murder of Ignazio, in a dream, by Asterios. When the third story appears out of the aftermath, with previous unseen colors, and with it, a third climax, we neither see Ignazio nor hear his voice. Asterios seems free in some new way.

In class, when I taught it, we spoke of much of this. We also observed that the two storylines are also reinterpretations of myths–Odysseus, in the story begun with the lightning bolt and Orpheus, in the story with Hana.

This structure, of moving between two stories about the same characters, is something I call a stereoscopic narrative, but conventionally it has been used within a particular present time–it does create a more multidimensional feeling, and I did, for example, use it in my first novel. Here it occurs across time. This has been done in two other novels I’ve read in recent memory–Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital and Lev Grossman’s The Magician King. Margaret Atwood also does this to great effect in her novel Cat’s Eye, but in the first person.

David Mazzuchelli, the author, was previously known better for his work on popular superhero comics: Daredevil and Batman, in particular. And Batman is in fact a classic stereoscopic fiction example, the same story told twice from two or more points of view: the stories usually begin with the reader seeing the crimes that draw Batman in, and conclude with the villain giving his or her side of things.

What interested me here was how in most fiction, the story is a movement between the external and internal events of a character or characters, and a typical flashback is of a short duration, triggered by something in a character’s environment. The author describes it to evoke the psychology and mood of the character. Here, with these competing stories, what emerges is a fuller story of Asterios, one he himself could never tell about himself. This is often the case with stereoscopic narratives, but what was also interesting was the way he (and Adrian, and Grossman and Atwood) has used the stereoscope effect to create something that moves you forward across the present time and the past both, your knowledge of the past of the character becoming another story itself, and more than a subplot. The past is liberated from the character’s memories, which are of course limited, and given to the story, and the reader also. Any epiphanies happen for the reader and not the characters.

I have no idea if this applies to what I’m solving for right now, but I admit, I’m fascinated, and still thinking about all of it. For now, I’m diagramming it and seeing if some further insight emerges from that. “Is it playful with structure,” Merrill asked me, of my own novel, when I brought it up. “I don’t know yet,” I said. And I still don’t, not yet. “I want it to have an articulate complexity,” I said, “where the structure is intricate but the reader’s experience is not.” I have often felt this. Whatever I end up taking from this, in that regard, Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp is one ideal.

For more by me on comics and graphic novels, reflections on a past syllabus, and an essay on comics and the racial unconscious. 

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.

Maud Newton astutely considered the legacy of David Foster Wallace in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. I thought it was an exhilarating read. She begins with a quote from “Tense Present” and  then uses it as a mirror from which to consider him and then the rest of us, as well as the way he lives on now after death. She describes him hidden in our language and syntax, as if he were coded into it like something out of science fiction, a ghost in the machine of the internet, performed by millions:

Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.

Visit some blogs — personal blogs, academic blogs, blogs associated with some of our most esteemed periodicals — to see these tendencies writ large. My own archives, dating back to 2002, are no exception.

Misperformed, then: DFW manqués. 

I remember the first time I came across what seemed to me to be an overly overt Wallace imitator among my students, someone who was imprisoning their own style and chance to be original inside a performance of Wallace’s style. It’s not something peculiar to Wallace–after some time in the trenches of teaching creative writing, I can point out from a mile away the many imitators, of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop. And of more recent vintage, Lydia Davis, for example. Or in the case of one season as a reader for NYFA’s fiction panel, it seemed to me like half of New York State’s applicants had decided to try to be Jonathan Safran Foer.

The student I speak of, he earnestly was doing what he was doing because he felt summoned out of himself by Wallace’s work, called to write himself. But I knew about this mistake. I’d tried to do it myself in college, with Marguerite Duras and Christa Wolf. I wanted to not be myself, to be someone else, because I couldn’t believe I could succeed as me. The sad part was the imitations were where it all fell apart for this student, something else I knew from experience. I worked with him as patiently as I could, because I knew he thought he was honoring a hero, when to really honor the hero, he’d have to depart the hero’s style. But he really fought me, believing the best of his work was his most successful imitation of Wallace, and unable to see his own work’s qualities.

What I told him is, You can’t really imitate someone, something a fellow writer said to me once, and the person who said it is lost in time to me, but it’s true–you can’t, not really. You can try. In the end you end up doing something that belongs to you. The question is, do you understand it? The problem with borrowing too much, with trying too hard to be another writer instead of yourself, comes when you end up like the apes on Planet of the Apes, pounding the glass panels of the spaceship, not knowing how to make it fly because you didn’t make it and so you don’t know what it’s for. The reason any of these much-imitated writers’ works succeed is because they felt the force of what they were doing–and your attempt to copy them, that does not touch that same place, even if you’re sure it does. And I don’t think it can, not intentionally.

I was out to beers with Andrew Altschul and Joshua Furst the other night and the many modernist imitators busy even now trying to defamiliarize the familiar came up. We talked about how out of step they are. It’s not the job of our age anymore. Our age is unfamiliar enough—every day, lately, our world shows us we don’t know what it is. The Modernist imitators, any imitators, run the risk of performing what my Broadway actor friends call “museum theater”, the literary equivalent of the touring company for “Hello Dolly!”, with more in common with hymn singing at church than literary production.

What Maud then nails is how a DFW imitation became what I call the “house style of the internet”, something I remember speaking about at a panel I was on with Emily Gould, Marie Mockette and Ed Park, at the New School years ago. We couldn’t put our finger on where it had come from, we all just knew it existed. And that we had all done it. We also all wanted out of it. Maud points out the resemblance between it and DFW’s style:

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread. And! They have sort of mutated since to liberal and often sarcastic use of question marks? And exclamation points! “Oh, hi,” people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.

Blogging is something that bothered me almost immediately once I began doing it, for the way it was both informal and permanent. It was supposed to be casual, because who could spend a ton of time on their blog? But it would also be how you were judged, maybe more than by what you spent your actual time on—your books. The things you published on the internet were there for a very long time when compared to print. Part of why I have published as much as I have on the internet comes from an acknowledgement that a hiring committee for a school is definitely going to Google me–you’re naive if you think otherwise–and read what I’ve written on the internet. They’d never take the time to go through the libraries looking for my journal and magazine publications the same way–those are just too hard to find. I understood I needed solidly written material on the web, and material that wasn’t my blog, even though I also knew this same group would read my blog. I started blogging in 2004 fully aware that my readers who knew my fiction and essays knew me as a writer with an intensely compressed, poetical style from that first novel. I knew that a blog that was too casual would fail them, even though I also knew, the narrators of that first novel are not me. I couldn’t write a blog in that style. And soon, this other, increasingly omnipresent style, crept in. And it was faux-naive, it was a “What, are you here?” sort of tone, because it seemed too egotistical on the one hand to believe anyone would read it, and on the other, too naive to think no one would. So you pitched to the middle, whether you knew it or not. Or, at least, I did, and many others. You tried to be funny, and likable.

To be Wallace, perhaps. I’ll admit this right now–I didn’t reach much of him back in the day. It wasn’t until his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” that I paid attention, and then eventually read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men sometime in 2007. But I didn’t need to read him to be influenced by him. So much of what I read was people reading him and taking on the style.

Blogs came of age at a strange time. Language had become uncertain, even treacherous. It was the time of George W. Bush, of feeling like our president was a weird hologram of his father, snide and leering where the other had been prim and smug, and yet speaking with the same malaprops and syntax, as if the whole family was made to speak in misunderstandings in order to be understood. And it was a time when I saw malaprops spread, as if we all had to use them if we were going to agree that George W. Bush was the president. Faux-naivete was a perfect shield, I think, in a very general way. Our country had become something terrible and strange, or it always had been and now we knew. It seems to me we are still in the process of discovering what our country really is. And Wallace, well, he was a writer whose work gave back a vision of the world that pierced the scrim of the fear we were all feeling. If we imitated him, or imitated each other imitating him, really, I think we did it because of how we all wanted to find our way through. But it became like a game of telephone, but with style, and what had once been able to clarify something soon obscured them.

Maud introduced a beautiful quote from Wallace over at her blog, by way of explaining what she meant by his need to please. Which is to say, he knew of it himself, and worked at removing it–she didn’t just make it up. Wallace here is writing about his fiction:

I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’d be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that both of these problems are traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn’t watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it’s impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to “entertain,” give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison. And sometimes when I look at my own stuff I feel like I absorbed too much of this raison. I’ll catch myself thinking up gags or trying formal stunt-pilotry and see that none of this stuff is really in the service of the story itself; it’s serving the rather darker purpose of communicating to the reader “Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!”

Now, to an extent there’s no way to escape this altogether, because an author needs to demonstrate some sort of skill or merit so that the reader will trust her. There’s some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to fuck-up-on-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it. But there’s an unignorable line between demonstrating skill and charm to gain trust for the story vs. simple showing off. It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art…

Of course, that last line is exactly how I’ve felt about blogging. What I fight every time I do it. More on that soon.

1. Sometimes music is needed.

2. Sometimes silence.

3. This is probably because a novel is a piece of music, like all written things, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it.

4. Sometimes I have written them on subways, missing stops, like people do when reading.

5. It begins for me usually with the implications of a situation. A person who is like this in a place that is like this, an integer set into the heart of an equation and new values, everywhere.

6. The person and situation arrive together, typically. I am standing somewhere and watch as both appear, move towards each other and transform.

7. If you still don’t understand me, think of how you think differently of Clark Kent once you see him run into the phone booth and change into Superman.

8. It is like having imaginary friends that are the length of city blocks. The pages you write are like fingerprinting them, done to prove to strangers they exist.

9. Reading a novel successfully is then the miracle of being shown such a fingerprint and being able to guess the face, the way she walks, the times she fell in love incorrectly or to bad result, etc.

10. The written novel in the hand tries to be the most precise analogy the writer can make as to what was seen in the rooms and trains and skies and summer nights and parties where the novel was written, as the writer walked in moments with the enormous imaginary friend, before returning to the others.

11. Writing a novel is sometimes like going to a party and hearing someone call your name outside the window and when you get there, a dragon floats in the night wind, grinning. How did you know my name, you ask it. But you already know it’s yours.

12. Writing novels can make you a bad employee.

13. You do write because you have to write, in the end. You do it because it is easier to do than to not do. After all, a dragon has come all this way and it knows your name. And so families should try not to punish their writers.

14. Coming across a character with your characteristics is like walking into a store and finding a paper doll of yourself.

15. The more so if you wrote the character.

16. For the novelists in your life it is better if you pretend they do something else and that it is always attended to, and doesn’t need your attention in the slightest. And then when asked, muster an enormous enthusiasm.

17. Attempts to find out what the novel is about on other uninvited occasions may meet with an enormous resistance.

18. This is because their sense of that meaning changes. My sense of a novel changes in the same way my knowledge of someone changes. And I know you are looking for the sort of answer you can rely on later, when you see the book. But that by then, my answer will have evolved, into the entire book, and so whatever I told you will have almost no relationship to what is there. If I seem cagey it is because I am not a liar and hate being considered one by an accident of craft.

19. Novels are voracious. They move around my rooms stripping half-finished poems of their lines. stealing ideas from unfinished essays, diaries, letters, and, sometimes each other. Sometimes by the time I get to them one has taken an enormous bite from the other.

20. There is usually no saving the poem in these circumstances, or at least, not yet.

21. There is no punishing a novel in these circumstances either, because hunger has its own intelligence, and should be trusted. It is dangerous to be a new novel around another new novel in the years they are each being written, but, they know this.

22. Revision, meanwhile, turns something like laundry into something like Christmas.

23. This is because a first draft is like scaffolding; often it must be torn down to uncover the thing being built underneath. Which is to say, some second drafts, when they emerge, have very little visible relationship to the first.

24. And so another way to think of a first draft is as a chrysalis of guesses.

*     *     *

25. Novels are hard, not like diamonds but like fate. The choice you make that reveals it was never a choice at all.

26. Then it is the novel as jailer. You in a small dark room with no answers to any of your questions and no one seems to hear your pleas, not for for days, months, years. Indifferent the entire time to all requests for visits or freedom. Hard labor too.

27. Or novels can be Champagne Charlies. The limo pulls up, there’s cash, a stocked bar and an entourage. A boyfriend/girlfriend you haven’t met already mad at you for not calling enough, arms crossed, pretty face steamed.

28. Or it is the Fugitive, arrives at night through an open window. Not quite a dream, it carries a work order signed by the president of your own dream factory. You strain to recognize your handwriting.

29. As the work proceeds, the factory is near the roads leading back and forth to the jails and the Champagne Charlies can be seen headed in and out. Sometimes it is clear that the prisoners and the party are trading places (the entourage fits in the cell). Sometimes not.

30. The Fugitive leans at the window, watches, has guessed the limo and the cell are the same.

31. Or it is a Lover. It is impatient, it wants you to know everything. And it won’t stop until it’s done. Factory, cell, limo, it doesn’t matter where you are or with who: the conversation will not stop. It is not endless but is long, it is longer than the writer can contain, and so it gets written down and is born that way.

32. This being because a novel is a thought that is too long to fit in your head all at once until after it is written or read.

33. It is not shorter then. Your hats still fit. But inside you there’s more room.

34. Think of a dream with the outer surface of a storm and the inside like the surface of your days as you have sometimes found them. The novel being the only way to lead anyone to the entrance of those days.

35. Or it is a stranger on the street, walking up to you, grabbing you by the lapel and walking away with you quickly, with passports, money. You fall in love as you leave immediately, together.

36. The novel coming not from the mind but the heart, which is why it cannot fit in your head. Why, when you hear it, it seems to be singing from somewhere just out of your sight, always.

37. Meanwhile, or the duration of the novel your heart can believe it is a liberator. You will not deny it this belief as you do at other times in your life because you are distracted by the story. It is why you love novels more than you think you do when you read them.

38. You discover you are in love with the unmet ending—or rather, you long for it. It is the radio station that plays from your radio only when it is in this one corner of the room, which is to say, at the center of your chest.

39. The heart’s ruse is nearly over. This entire time, it has convinced the novel it was only following along.

40. This entire time the game it has played with the novel was like the date that begins with love’s possibility but ends with the memory of the other, the one you lost or who lost you and who you fooled yourself into thinking was gone from your heart forever, but instead put on a mask, that of the stranger who you kiss against the wall in the street at night.

41. Of course a novel is also a mask.

42. Not for the novelist. Not for the reader. But for something else the novelist brings in from the back of the tent like a lion on a chain.

43. Do not notice the slashes in the novelist’s shirt, the welts along the arms and legs. Do not try and decipher them. If the lighting is right you will see them only when you have the chain in your hands and you are ready to let go. You will remember then. The cuts will make you try to imagine what the novelist went through. This is also a fiction but you will not write it down and it will leave on the wake of the next thought you have.

44. Unless of course you are also a novelist and then it is sometimes your next novel. You wake to realize you are in the back of the tent.

*     *     *

45. I think of each of them like a visitor from another planet, the sentences being like the circuits to a vast and beautiful machine that communicates the creature.

46. Or a distant relation I’ve never met, from another country and with a language barrier between us. He tries on clothes and wigs I give him, he hops on one leg and makes strange animal noises, and soon I have the wig, I am hopping, hopping, hopping.

47. With my other hand I am taking notes.

48. Everyone has a novel in them, people like to say. They smile when they say it, as if the novel is special precisely because everyone has at least one.  Think of a conveyor belt of infant souls passing down from Heaven, rows of tired angels pausing to slip a paperback into their innocent, wordless hearts.

49. If it is like the soul, it is a soul you can share, like the Gnostic one, externalized, with a womb.

50. What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long windy character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?

51. Novelists then like a circus attraction with many limbs, a horse with eight legs or three faces, or two heads.

52. Now we are back in a tent, but another tent altogether, that of a circus.

53. We discover we are the animal made to learn tricks, in order to please something with a whip.

54. Kneeling in the sawdust, juggling plates, we hope the crowd cheers, though we cannot see them past the lights.

55. All the while, we know in some cultures we would be revered as gods. Others, put to death.

56. Of course this almost never happens.

57. And then it does.

58. The novel for which you can be killed is a picture someone is trying to hide of what is inside whoever it is threatening to kill you for writing it.

59. You did not know this was what you were doing, you were only trying to take a picture of the landscape. You thought of yourself as a bystander, you saw something you thought you should try to say this way. In the corner of the photo, something you do not quite recognize, not right away.

60. When you look closely at the picture, in it is a map left behind by a stranger that says This is the way to the treasure, and then this is the way o—

61. The piece that is missing, hidden somewhere but calling, describing itself to you from behind the walls of your days.

62. Would it be beautiful or devastating to write the one novel if it was the only one you had? And what then, to discover that was the one?

63. Perhaps sometimes the angels are tired and out of their hands slips not one novel but 5, 12, 100. 1000.

64. They will never come back for them, but when they appear, smile quietly, instead, passing invisibly through the bookstore, remembering.

65. Remembering that in fact no one has only one.

*     *     *

66. The novel and God are always being declared dead. Both are perhaps now indifferent to this, if either really can be said to exist.

67. Imagine for now they pass the time in the Kitchen of Life, telling jokes, each trying to tell if the other’s feelings are hurt.

68. God feels confident he is having a come-back. Also the novel. Each is jealous, does not want to say this to the other, not directly.

69. The novel is being sold in vending machines in airports. God points out there are no vending machines for God.

70. Are you sure, though, the novel says. And then adds, I feel like  you could do something about that.

71. Tell me about it, God says. This being one of the things the novel can do.

72. The novel is also now an app. No app yet for God. I think this means I’m ahead, the novel says.

God says nothing to this.

There is something He intends to do about it. And then, He forgets…

73. Sometimes it is the ship, sinking, and you, you are the captain, running around the deck, having decided not to go down with it, but to save it, to head for land all the same.

74. The ship, moved, returns from its fascination with the deep.

75. It would be easy to forget that sometimes the shipwreck saves the ship or the captain. Sometimes one or the other remembers this at the touch of the rock.

76. Think of Nemo, in his submarine, touring the submerged treasures of all of the failed voyages in all of history. A library of unfinished novels could be like this.

77. Or like the buckle of a belt, worn by an islander who found it in a reef, and seen years later, by the original owner’s friend when he comes to land. Where did you get this, the explorer asks, and then asks to be taken to the wreck.

78. It is like the language the explorer must learn to even ask the question.

80. What is it you want from me, the novel asks.

81. What is it you want from me, the novel tells you.

82. Everything in here is about you, the novel says.

83. This feels like a trick to keep you reading it or writing it, a lie that is also true.

And this is what a novel is.

84. In the novel the true things often run around like children under sheets, playing at being ghosts. Otherwise we would ignore them. Not now, we would tell them, if they arrived without their sheets.

85. Go to my room, we would say. And wait for me. And then we sob when we get there, to see they are gone.

86. Novels do not take orders well, if at all. They are not soldiers, usually, or waiters. They do badly at housework and will not clean silver.

87. Novels do not wait. They are poor chaffeurs.

88. Novels are good with children but are considered untrustworthy tutors for the young. And yet there we are. As soon as we can crawl, pulling them off the shelves.

89.  Cheever said of the novel that it should have the direct and concise qualities of a letter.   To who and by who, I wonder, as I think of how I feel this is true. I want to argue briefly—It is not a letter from the author to the reader—and then I stop. It is not a letter, just like a letter.

I think of this as the kind of question–to who, from who—that, if you sat with it, could begin a novel.

90. We always hope to find stores full of questions like that, but for most, novels are accidents at their start. Writers lining the streets of the imagination, hoping to get struck and dragged, taken far away.

We crawl from under the car at the destination and sneak away with our prize.

91. This is because the novel begun deliberately is so often terrible, with the worst qualities of a bad lie, or a political speech given during a campaign. The writer turned into something like a senator.

92. In your room after the successful accident, you wake. Something is left in your hand.

93. It is a letter. Or, like a letter.

94. Beside your bed is you, the one that writes a novel, in disguise, funny hat and all. Hoping to understand.

Do not look too closely at the ridiculous mustache. Listen. Surreptitiously, against your hand, write down what is said. In its elaborate disguise it acts out the answers.

95. The novel then a letter from the novel to the reader, and dictated to the writer by the writer.

95. But what is it about, you might ask, and then the novel recoils.

96. I just need to get a drink, I’ll be right back, the novel says. Do you want anything?

97. Days later the novel returns. I wasn’t with anyone else, the novel says. There’s only you, the novel adds, even as the writer fears it has taken up with others.

Imagining pages of itself across the other desks of the neighborhood.

98. There’s only you, the novel says again.

99. You are outside, in the street outside the novel’s window, you are screaming into the wind. Please, you say finally, finally quiet, uncertain of how to go further.

100. The novel is already at the door. Waiting, but just for a little. It is the lover again, impatient again. Wanting again for you to know everything.

This was originally written in 4 parts. I collected them in order to post this in its entirety  here.

In this part of Florida, every house around us is for sale or for auction, which would appear to be worse. At the supermarket, as we ask questions about the are stores, the people working there speak to us, telling us how they were laid off from better jobs or work at least three. The food is all corporate food, heavily processed and packaged, very little of it organic, though sometimes labeled “natural”. Increasingly, though, I think of nonorganic food as “poisoned”. I find it difficult to eat, as if we have gone from being merely surrounded by euphemism to eating it also, with everything in these grocery stores just a euphemism for food.

4.

I love waking up, sliding out of bed, making coffee and heading to my side of our house, divided by a door. Knocking before entering his side, the two of us working all day. I work on my novel’s edits, and Dustin on a screenplay we’re collaborating on, an adaptation of a biography (more on that soon). We have an entire cottage. We take meal breaks together where we talk about the screenplay and the novel. I’ve been plagued for a while with a sense that something was wrong in the structure of my novel, but I couldn’t quite figure it out.

I was thinking of how I’d just written to a student of mine at Iowa about how you basically hit your target, so you have to be careful of where you direct your attention. He’d written me about his own anxieties about being a gay writer–he didn’t want to be this one kind of writer, but another, and so on, and did I ever feel like this? I had felt exactly like that. History, for that matter, is full of stories of people who became what they feared. I decided I had a great deal of control over what I became, and that’s what I told him–not to be a writer who’d deny what or who he is, but to just write things that were interesting to you and to others, and to let that work shape your career—and not to have a career that shaped your work.

Afterward,  I was thinking about it because it was sticking in my brain—it is often the case that whatever I end up telling students is also what I myself needed to relearn. Without seeming too mystical, in all of those cases, it seems to be a karmic thing.

Later, Dustin and I go for a walk. We haven’t found any shark’s teeth in ten days of being there. Dustin starts chanting “Shark’s teeth, shark’s teeth, shark’s teeth.” I’d been told the way to find them was to rearrange your vision, to set your eyes to finding them. This had only angered me previously—of course I was looking for them! But then Dustin jumps down and brings one up triumphantly.

Soon he has a dozen. As I stand there, somewhat sad about still not finding one, I look down and my rearranged vision sees one.

On the walk back, I rearrange my vision of my novel, and that night find at last what had been plaguing me about my novel all this time. I’d been trying to change the beginning to change the ending, but the real problem was the novel’s climax. The climactic chapters of a novel rearrange the story not just for the reader but also for the writer, as you write it. That’s when it becomes what it is supposed to be, and afterward, the way to edit it becomes very clear. I didn’t didn’t quite believe the climax, though, and yet somehow also didn’t quite know this consciously. The sign that I didn’t like it was in my search for a “right” beginning.  But as the climax reinvents the entire novel draft, including the beginning, this problem with the beginning was my way of telling myself the climax hadn’t done it’s job.

5.

I reinvent the climax.

6.

At home in New York now, over a week later, the teeth sit on Dustin’s desk, waiting to become presents for our nieces and nephews–we’ve discovered the teeth are black because they’re ancient, the fossilized teeth of mackerel sharks, each about 5 million to 35 million years old and dating to the Pliocene or Oligocene. We feel pretty sure handing these out will make us two of America’s best gay uncles. But before I give them away, one will become a tattoo, for after I turn the edits in. So that I never, ever, ever forget this.

Have a happy holiday, whatever you believe in.

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.

He’s the one here on the right, with the glint of triumph in his eyes.

Ok maybe that is arguable about the New Yorker but really they could have more coverage of the jewels. And to be fair, it’s been a year.

Why am I saying any of this? Well, this Saturday, Das Racist uses its powers for good and joins Fred Ho, Tao Lin, Richard Price, Lorraine Adams, Karan Mahajan and Koreanish favorite Nami Mun for the Pageturner Sexy Nerd party at Chambers Fine Arts in New York City, located at 522 West 19th St. Admission is $40, $60 for two and free if you wear your sexy nerd glasses.  Come out and support the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Pageturner festival**, and have fun at the same time. I of course am, like Victor Hugo was once, with my party clothes locked away until I finish my residency here at Ledig House.***  But you go.  I insist.

I seriously do.

*Also, for publishers looking for a celebrity novel with some underground cred and some very real literary qualities, Victor is an astonishing talent.

**For bonus points, ask Ken Chen about the t-shirt ideas we came up with after Brooklyn Bookfest.

***Yes, Victor Hugo was never at Ledig House. But he did ask his wife to put chains on his party clothes, so he would not go out and instead write.