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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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