Happy and proud to announce my essay “I, Reader” was selected for the Notable Essays list in this year’s Best American Essays.
Life With Mr. Dangerous and Other Stories
1.
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.
The Sarah Orne Jewett House Adventures, Pt. 1
Over at Writers’ Houses I have an essay up about my visit to Sarah Orne Jewett’s house. It includes a short defense of writers’ houses, which have come under attack in recent times, because, I don’t know, why not just make fun of everything? Anyway.
To those who mock writers house visits, I can only say, how nice for you, to live a life where you don’t need heroes. How nice that what you wanted to be always came with some sort of imprimatur of approval from somewhere above you so that you could seek it uncomplicatedly, and not feel like a class traitor, or a gender traitor, or a sexual one. Hurrah for you. After all, there’s just so many ways writers are honored in America after their deaths, it really does get hard to choose. It’s not like the French, who really love literature appropriately, went and made Victor Hugo’s house into a museum or anything.
Anyway.
What I have yet to get into in writing about this visit is that it continued past the Jewett House. In my Writers House post I mention a relative Jewett speaks of in her essay “The Old Town of Berwick” that led me to make the visit. Growing up, my mother knew of Hetty Goodwin, an ancestor of hers from the 17th Century, but all she knew was that Hetty had been kidnapped by Native Americans there, with her husband. Hetty is Mehetable Goodwin, and Jewett describes her kidnapping in that essay in greater detail than we knew of, including how she was sold to a French settler and then reunited eventually with her husband.
Filed under author's own
On the Pleasures of Watching Battlestar Galactica Again
Lately Dustin and I have been watching Battlestar Galactica, him for the first time. By lately I mean “as of a week ago”, courtesy of a BBC marathon broadcast of the show. Some of my friends have questioned whether it holds up, whether it is “still good”, as it were, as much of the show’s initial suspense on a first watch-through is driven by the question of who the Cylons are, which of the cast are synthetic humans and which are not, and whether humanity will survive. On re-watching the show, a conventional take would be that the suspense is removed and the show would be dull.
What I discovered, though, was a different pleasure in the show. Spoilers to follow, so if you haven’t watched once through the first time, consider stopping here. Continue reading
Filed under television
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Filed under author's own
On Maud Newton On David Foster Wallace
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. Continue reading
In My Book Bag This Week – August 12
- Mike Albo’s hilarious tell-all roman-a-clef of life as a freelance writer, The Junket. Get it.
- For weeks now I’ve had a galley for The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst. I love it. Don’t you want me to review it? Yes you do.
- My novel. Still editing.
- Drew Magary’s The Postmortal. So funny and smart.
- Just arrived: Krys Lee’s Drifting House, coming out from Viking. Short stories by a Korean American author on the rise. Comes out in February of 2012.
Filed under author's own, books, fiction, Korean American, novels
My Hedge Witch Chronicles
This week I published a review for Lev Grossman’s The Magician King over at NPR, and then followed up with an essay at the Morning News of me, well, wanting to be a Magician King, though I think, on reading Grossman’s novel, I had more in common with his Julia character, the hedge witch—the girl who learns her magic by herself, with no help from any special school for wizards.
I was a hedge witch, then.
This essay is called “The Querent”, and is about my relationship to the Tarot, magic and fortunetelling.
I love the stunner of an illustration with it (above), commissioned for it from the amazing Lauren Nassef. Lauren, if you read this, you should consider doing a whole deck. It would be a big success, I think.
And now, back to revising my novel.
Filed under author's own, essay
Savage Beauty
It felt like a cross between a movie premiere, a post office line and a funeral for a head of state. The lying in state of the body of work.
Friday my partner Dustin and I went to see Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beauty with our friend Eric McNatt. We stood in line for the show for two hours, a line that wound through the Met starting in the Asian Arts, going past the atrium on the 2nd floor and into the Assyrian angels through to the Greeks and Romans and the 19th Century gallery, until we ended in the gallery for the show. It had the feeling of going past the eons of influences that went into the McQueen show–as if the show was some sumptuous culmination of it all.
During life, McQueen’s work was hidden by the cost and exclusivity of his work. Who can and can’t be at the show, buy the dress, see the image, and so on, the vagaries of fashion’s ecosystem. Now we have the show, composed entirely of donated items from private collections, giving the public a view not even McQueen had of McQueen. When the show is over, the collected items will perhaps disband and return to their separate corners, but not before a finale—this week, the Met is open until midnight.
My memory of the show is composed partly of the throngs moving slowly and uncoordinatedly, as people began in a sort of initial incurious blankness and moved into a dull frenzy. Some were texting, as if to say “I’m at McQueen”, as if that had been the entire point of the line, to get inside. Others were filming or taking photos despite prohibitions otherwise. If security had simply removed everyone taking photos illegally it would have drastically cut down on the lines. The spectacle reminded me a little of when a deceased courtesan’s clothes and jewels would be put up for auction back in 19th Century France. Or of the ladies of the court who would try to sneak in and view a famous courtesan’s apartments. Though if anyone understood the vagaries of the Parisian courtesans’ legacy of success de scandale, if anyone was their male heir and modern protector, as it were, it was him. Among the most moving of the exhibits was his hologram of Kate Moss, a finale to a show appearing at a time when Kate had been caught up in a tabloid scandal [Usually they did not affect her]. As the audio tour pointed out, her appearance in the show, as a dazzling holographic muse dancing in the air, was a bravura stroke that also restored her.
I remembered at the time how soon after that scandal she was bigger than before. I marveled at it, but in the room with the crowd hunched over the glass where it was exhibited, some too impatient to wait even for it to start, I felt I understood it.
Filed under art, current events, fashion
Home
I am back in my apartment, home, my things a little unfamiliar to me. I don’t know where the colander is, the cutting boards, this book or that one. I go into the kitchen with purpose, look around blankly, waiting.
I am still making coffee in a Bialetti I used only occasionally before, if it happens that the other kind of coffee I preferred even two months ago somehow fails me. A little over a month ago I found this coffee disagreeable and missed the kind I now look at warily. How have I done this, how did it happen?
I have been away. I was in Iowa, teaching, then in Italy, writing, then on vacation in Spain, but that makes it seem orderly, as if I did not write in Iowa, or did not teach somehow in Italy, or left all of it behind by the time I was in Spain. Instead it all spilled around me, it made noise. I grew used to not knowing where things were in a kitchen, until it was time to feel that way in my own, and now I work against it. I go to the corners of our kitchen, I study what’s there so the feeling of unfamiliarity goes away.
The borders, of course, the apartment itself, is deeply familiar, the red bedroom covered in paintings, photos, books, the ancient white wardrobe we consider replacing but haven’t, not yet, the old wood floors, my lucky chandelier in said kitchen, which has followed me through several homes, but has not been hung until this last year. The apartment is much like, I think, this blog, which became a little strange to me also, as I’ve worked to complete my novel and do all of these other things. And yet here I am, back inside its walls much like the apartment, thinking, “Did I leave that there? Where does this go? Is that really where I want that?”
There are times when I pass through the world and one place speaks to me such that I imagine living there, and Dustin and I even had one of those, with a tiny Medieval village on the coast of Spain. I stand in the courtyard, I look up at the stones, I imagine sitting down and staying.
Tonight I go to see my friend Tayari Jones speak with Sara Nelson of O Magazine, and it is a warm, inspiring conversation at the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York. Part of what I love about my friend Tayari is her generous spirit, and today is a day the world gave a lot back to her: a great review in the LA Times, a mention from Jennifer Weiner on the Today Show as a top pick, the Diane Rehm show. I go home afterward, to my bookshelf here ,and I flip a book open. It is Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House. I do this when I want to be ambushed by an insight. Here is the first quote I find, from his chapter The Donald Barthelme Blues:
The price one pays for being loyal to certain kinds of anomalies is typically melancholy or acedia. Barthelme’s fiction asserts that one of the first loyalties serious people give up in the theater of adulthood is a claim upon what they actually want. Of course, other desires are available, and can be acquired, but they are curious grafts, what other people want you to want—not desires so much as temptations, desires-of-convenience. Barthelme’s stories are obviously and constantly about such temptations, which might itself be called the temptation to become unconscious and let others program your yearnings.
The places I’ve been, all my life, seem, in this light, like grafts themselves, as if I’m a tree made entirely of them. I read on.
The Barthelmean character is tempted not by ordinary sins but by the ordinary itself. Does God care about adultery? Sins generally? “You think about this staggering concept, the mind of God, and then you think He’s sitting around worrying about this guy and this woman at the Beechnut Travelodge? I think not.” (Paradise).
It wasn’t activities like adultery that caught Barthelme’s attention, but the inclination to disown one’s wishes and to give in to the omnipresence of the Universal Banal.
Well, yes. And then Baxter quotes a beautiful passage from a catalogue copy Barthelme wrote, for a Sherrie Levine exhibit:
Where does desire go? Always a traveling salesperson, desire goes hounding off into the trees, frequently without direction from its putative master or mistress. This is tragic and comic at the same time. I should, in a well-ordered world, marry the intellectual hero my wicked uncle has selected for me. Instead I run off with William of Ockham or Daffy Duck.
I can think of no better metaphor for the experience of a fiction writer than this one. But also, a beautiful idea, the idea of sin being unfaithful to your wishes, to the person who would do the wanting. In any case, I have been homesick, was homesick for New York, for Dustin, for here. I wanted to be home and I am home.
Filed under letters to you
