Alexander Chee's Blog, page 4

Hello from Leserland

Hello from Leipzig, Germany, a place that loved books so much it was nicknamed Leserland, or, Country of Readers. I’m writing to you from the apartment given to me by the University of Leipzig while I teach here as the Picador Professor of Literature. It’s located by the gate of Friedenspark, a former cemetery that was destroyed by bombing in WWII, and is now a beautifully quiet, wooded park, and also home to a red fox that lives about 300 feet from my door, who greeted me the weekend I arrived as I stepped out for a walk.

When I arrived the autumn was more advanced than it was in New York, and so it felt as if I’d traveled in time as well. Now it is nearly November. I arrived Oct. 6th, nearly 22 years to the day from my first trip to Germany, when I arrived on the first German Unity Day, Oct. 3rd, 1990. Leipzig was the place the Peaceful Revolution began, the product of a antiviolent protest movement that spread, until the wall came down and that day came, so it’s interesting to return here, as if each time I go to Germany, perhaps I will find some other root to this.

I guess we’ll see.

Leipzig seems to me a city of quiet readers, bookish cyclists, most of them very fit and riding vigorously through the cold as if it were nothing.  I love all the old buildings around, built from every era of the city’s long life, dating back to when it was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, or Saxony. Goethe wrote part of Faust here, something that fills me with joy. It was also where one of my favorite writers from college, Christa Wolf, went to school. It’s a real honor to be here as a guest of the school she graduated from.

In my short time here, it’s also been eye opening to live in a country that is actually concerned about the environment. There’s approximately 9 different cans in the yard here for my garbage, for example, as well as a compost pile. When I bite an organic apple here, I can feel on my tongue the sort of honeyed wild taste of it–a taste I remember from the 70s and 80s, a way apples used to taste when the soil in the US was better.

It isn’t enough to grow something without poisons, in other words.

In honor of my first post from here, a list of some things I am reading or have recently read.

John Cheever, remembered by the amazing Allan Gurganus.
Vanessa Veselka on the serial killer she escaped from as a teenaged hitchhiker.
Peter Mountford on the Russian bookpirate he found pirating his amazing novel.
Jami Attenberg has published a novel everyone, and I mean everyone is talking about, The Middlesteins. It is also the Rumpus Book Club’s pick this month. Here is their roundup of Attenberg links.
One of my favorite novels of this year was Patrick Somerville’s This Bright River. Cannot recommend it enough. A moving, thrillingly inventive novel that incorporates game theory and puzzles into a story of a young man no longer young, trying to pull himself out of his downward spiral, and a young woman hoping to escape the brutal man she once worshipped. You may remember it was the subject of a erroneously written review by a certain Times critic, and Patrick wrote about the mistake, beautifully, here. I don’t want to knock said reviewer, but it strikes me that it is hard to make that mistake reading the novel.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet but I love being an Emily Books subscriber. Emily Books is an online indie bookstore, that only sells books by women. It is also a book club. Each month for one low monthly price I get a book sent via email. Shortly after I joined it was Muriel Sparks’ Loitering With Intent, which made me love Sparks all over again. If you’ve never done something like this, give it a try.
I am also loving Benjamin Anastas’ new memoir, Too Good To Be True. Ben is an old friend, someone I’ve always looked up to like an older brother, which has always been awkward as he’s younger.
Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is another novel I’m loving. It was recently reviewed by a hedgehog, complete with gif. Emma is one of the loveliest people I know, and she’s just written movingly about her struggle with fibroids, for Rookie–as well as her struggle even to admit she was dealing with some extraordinary pain and bleeding. I hope this post gets women who see themselves in her situation to seek the urgent care they may need.
Also! And this is very important. Read this Mike Albo essay, “Lost in Space”. It’s amazing and not just because he quotes me in it. And then if you haven’t gotten it, get his single, The Junket . Also amazing, one of my favorite longreads from 2011.

There’s so much more to add here but it will have to wait until next time. Have fun with these–I know I did.

 

21 Lies Writers Tell Themselves

I have a new essay over at The Awl, 21 Lies Writers Tell Themselves.

On Lying to Yourself (and Others) and the Romney Campaign Lie Pattern

For months now we’ve been talking about “post-truth politics” because of the extent of Romney’s lies, and yet it was still uncanny to watch Romney lie on stage last night about his positions on contraception, Pell Grants, immigration–to the extent this is a close election, it isn’t because Romney’s ideas are winning. His lies are winning.

From the beginning of his campaign, when he took a quote of McCain’s as read by Obama and used it to sound as if Obama had said it, and refused to walk it back, defiantly defending it instead, his has been a deliberate misinformation campaign, daring people to accuse him of wrongdoing. He operates with a lot of cover from the press and the public under the ‘hey all politicians lie’ meme, and calling him a flip-flopper is now almost a term of endearment. He shouldn’t get this pass, though, because he’s so far outside the norm on this, it’s terrifying. I’m glad Candy Crowley fact-checked him on Obama’s Libya comments, but it was one lie out of a storm.

Here’s the way the Romney campaign will work with his performance last night, despite his announced loss in the press–and it is the pattern to the creation of Romney’s surge that emerged in the first debate. There’s no reason to think they’ll abandon this now.

Phase 1: Already begun. Romney lies about his positions on stage at the debates to appear more moderate.

Phase 2: The next morning after the debate the press runs fact-checks on a few items—but already the press is referring to Romney’s so-called brand new position on contraception as of last night, saying he reversed his position.  That isn’t true. He called Obama’s statement of Romney’s own stated support for the Blunt amendment a lie. And if you follow that link to the Washington Post, you’ll see it is a clarification from back in February during the primaries, something his own campaign issued after the fact the last time he lied about his support for the Blunt Amendment.

That’s not a position reversal. That’s a fiction, one amid many.

Phase 3: Most likely here’s what will not happen: Romney sitting down with his campaign, saying, “Hey, we really need a new position on contraception, right? So let’s support it.”

Most likely what will happen : ‘“That’s not our position,” a Romney campaign spokesperson said.’

If you Google “Romney Campaign Walks Back”, you’ll see many, many items. So many that it will look as if he is running the first campaign where the candidate and the campaign disagree with each other–it looks at first glance like an inept communications operation, but only if you think it is an operation concerned with getting out the candidate’s actual positions. Because here’s what they want, here’s what comes next.

Phase 4: Last night, perhaps millions of women and men thought, “Oh, Romney isn’t so bad for women’s health issues.” Mind you, this is contraception—birth control! Not abortion. They won’t see the fact-check, they won’t read the “Romney Walks Back” follow-up. They’ll just be left with the memory of what they saw in the debate.

Romney isn’t reversing his positions. He’s really lying–a deliberate feint to the left. He knows it is what people want from him, he also knows he can’t really give it and retain his base support. Thus the bob and weave. Romney’s not a real presidential candidate at this point. He’s a metafiction.

September 3, 2012: Best American Essays 2012, Queen of the Night News, Leipzig and More

I am happy to report back after a long silence with some news.

I’m grateful to my editors at The Morning News for nominating me for the new Best American Essays 2012, edited by David Brooks. My essay “Fanboy” was honored with a Notable Essay nod.
My new novel, The Queen of the Night, is very close to going into production, with an eye toward fall of 2013, and coming out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
And next month, in October, I will be the Picador Professor at the University of Leipzig, visiting for the fall semester there, following in the footsteps of Fiona Maazel and Porochista Khakpour, where I’ll teach the graphic novel and a course on writing both historical novels and speculative fiction, a course I call Imaginary Countries, first taught at Iowa’s MFA in Fiction program in the spring of 2011. Leipzig is a city with a rich literary history, and important to one of my favorite writers, the late Christa Wolf. I’m honored and excited to go.

Before I leave for Germany, in the third week of September, I’ll make three appearances. The first is on Sept. 15th, at the Berkshire Wordfest at the Mount, speaking with Dani Shapiro and Elyssa Shappell on bad behavior in fiction. Sept. 18th, I will appear at Volume I Brooklyn’s Three Minute Stories about Books–this is going to be a lot of fun, and I’ll be appearing with some of my favorite writers–Elissa Schappell, Maris Kreizman, Rachel Fershleiser, and Paula Bomer, who I met as a child actually. Then at Brooklyn Bookfest, I’ll be moderating a panel on writers who debut over the age of 40 with Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Carin Clevidence and my beloved Julia Glass (we shared an adventure in Italy!) on Sept. 23rd.

I won’t make another appearance in the US until the following Spring, when I’ll read at the AWP Conference with Elliott Holt, Jennine Capo Crucet and Reese Okyong Kwon. I will however be making some appearances in Germany this fall, and details on those are forthcoming.

What I Did This Summer – A Very Partial Report

Two essays appeared this summer, at The Morning News and The LA Review of Books. Both began as blog posts here and had to, per the rules of this blog (any post extending over 800 words must be considered as an essay first), get sent off.

The Morning News essay, “Go Away”, is an account of my experiences at three arts residencies–the VCCA, MacDowell and Civitella Ranieri–and a look at the entire reason you’d go away to one at all.

Fiction writers are often portrayed as fussy prima donnas, and I won’t say we aren’t, but to explain, when we write fiction, we are, all in one head, the actor improvising a scene, the director, the writer writing down the results, and also all the other actors, as well, improvising all the other parts, plus camera, set decorator, grips, etc. When we’re home, we’re also often our own catering and makeup crews, and then we must also be the person we agreed to be to everyone we know.

Colonies provide the time and space to work unbothered. If you interrupt us at work, a complex piecework of notions falls apart. I don’t know if I could have put it that way back in 1998, but I felt it, desperately.

The second, at The LA Review of Books, “Parvenucracy”, was an experiment in metacritical TV writing–an account of the writing that appeared around the BBC/PBS hit Downton Abbey last year, with an eye toward understanding the sensation, the backlash, and the thing itself.

LAST YEAR WE WERE a people in a country with roads that would take out your axle, watching a show about people learning to use cars for the first time. All over the country, we were learning that you could pronounce the “t” at the end of “valet.”

We were said to be watching it because we were stupid Americans or we were watching it because we were nostalgic for being ruled over or because we loved Jane Austen or country houses or Upstairs Downstairs or (the first) Brideshead Revisited. Or for more reasons than this, or for fewer reasons. But we were watching it, we were watching it, watching it, watching it, watching it.

More work is on the way–a short appreciation on the writer Julian May in a forthcoming issue of Tin House is up next. And of course the novel, but news on that in the very next update.

From Lydia Davis’ “The Architecture of Thought”

Sometimes, after he’d been awake a few hours, though still in bed, Proust would decide on impulse to go out and see a friend. At ten or eleven at night in a dark bedroom, the only light comes from the lamp by his bed, and the fire in the fireplace if it’s winter. The dark room is crowded with furniture, including two large bookcases, a wardrobe, a grand piano, an armchair for visitors, and various little tables. Proust leaves his bed, crosses the short hallway, and gets dressed. His suit is made to measure and his patent leather boots were bought at the Old England Shop. He does not tend to wear out his shoes. He is transported by taxi and walks on carpet and parquet floors.

He arrives at his friend’s house, waking him up, and begins talking. His friend, perhaps exaggerating, later reports that Proust speaks in one long sentence that does not come to an end until the middle of the night. This sentence is full of asides, parenthetical remarks, parentheses, dashes, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes. The sentence, in other words, attempts to be exhaustive, to capture every nuance of a piece of reality, and yet to be correct–to reflect Proust’s entire thought. To be exhaustive and correct is of course an infinite task. More can always be inserted, more event and more nuance, more commentary on the event, and more nuance within the commentary. Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Swann’s Way appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections; there were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. “I can’t read it,” said one old father to his son. “You read it aloud to me.” The sentences did not seem as long when they were spoken as when they were read on the page. The voice punctuated. On the page, the punctuation is eccentric. Certain sentences are remarkable for their absence of commas, and others for having suddenly so many more commas than you would expect. The punctuation obeys some other law. Is this style conversational or not? Well, it seems to want to give the illusion of the conversational. Sentences begin with “and so,” “but,” “in fact,” “actually,” “and yet,” “of course,” “yes,” “no,” “wasn’t it true,” “really.” But what a strange conversation, long and one-sided, composed in darkness and silence. And sentences so elaborately constructed with towering architectures of subordinate phrases that you have to stop and think, and then go back over them, just to figure them out.

From Lydia Davis’ terrific talk on Proust at PEN’s salute to him. Full text of her remarks is here.

Sex and Punishment

Saturday night, Dustin and I watched a movie we’ve been wanting to see for some time—I Am Love. It was a beautifully made film, with impeccable performances, and Tilda Swinton is a pleasure as a Russian emigre, “Emma”, who appears to have adapted entirely to her new life as the wife of a wealthy Italian industrialist, and the mother to his three beautiful children.

I couldn’t help but feel it was entirely destroyed by the plot twist (yes, spoiler) that comes when,after beginning a love affair with her oldest son’s best friend, Emma is punished for this by inadvertently causing the death of this son. He confronts her at a dinner party, sensing the truth, and as he tries to shrug her off, he falls, hits his head on the edge of a reflecting pool and dies.

The sex punishment plot twist, as this is known, is essentially a traditional mode for the punishment of the cheating spouse. After an affair that reveals some truth to the main character, their child dies, or they do. It’s no doubt an infantile psychological response to the real thing–i.e., perhaps the writer or the director has this wish to punish the mother.

And I say that because it makes no sense otherwise. There’s no reason to do it within the story, and it takes the story out of the realm of the subtle–what would it be like, to be her, and to fall deeply in love with a boy her own son appears to be infatuated with?–and into the melodramatic. And all of the threads from before, the storylines running through, are cut off, to flounder against this immovable death.

Yes, death is real. It cuts lives short unexpectedly. There’s no reason to exile it from fiction. But there’s also every reason to see this as a lazy choice in fiction writing, especially as it engages in a sort of moral theater of the basest kind. Of course the mother becomes a bad mother, and then she leaves, and runs off to a cave with her paramour, where they sit in a flickering light. Anything you might have learned about human existence, female desire, fidelity, etc., is all lost in that flickering light, which is only an empty aesthetic gesture after the rest.

Seeking some kind of solace, I then put on the first episode of Brideshead Revisted, the TV play based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. It holds up, though it too is a kind of sex punishment plot. But it is wrung out across decades, and the structure is elegant enough that, well, I won’t say you don’t mind, but at least it can’t be said to not teach something about humanity. The young Jeremy Irons is impeccable as Charles Ryder at both ages–as an aging officer in the British Army, and as a young man at Oxford, falling desperately in love with first Sebastian Flyte and then his sister, Julia.

The structure is quite elegant, and is essentially kept for the TV Play: Charles Ryder is setting up an HQ in the English countryside at an estate he doesn’t recognize at first, and the first 30 minutes (and pages, in the novel) lead you to think you are in one kind of book entirely, a war memoir of a kind. But then he looks out at the estate and remembers, the beautiful line “I knew all about it.” He goes first to his memory of the first time he saw the estate, and from there, the first time he met Sebastian, until, after finally seeming to find his footing in the past, the narrative pushes forward, to his first meeting with Julia and the glimpse he has of their future when he lights her a cigarette and hands it to her as she drives.

The book is set up like a mirror, with Sebastian in foreground for the first half and Julia in front for the second, bookended by Charles’ time in the army. There’s even Sebastian through the looking glass, in a wheelchair with a wounded foot during the first half, needing Charles to look after him, and then with him looking after a lover with a wounded foot in the second half, when Sebastian is in an opium-induced descent. What he feared, that his family would take Charles from him, appears to have come true with Charles’ love for Julia. But in the end despite their passion and rightness for each other, their affair ends with Julia retreating.

No ones gets anything they want, not really. But by then, whatever happiness Sebastian, Julia and Charles are robbed of feels only like life. Each character has been, to the end, entirely themselves, character as destiny. We’ve seen Julia’s marriage unwind, Charles’ as well, we are hoping for their mutual escape from the misery of mutual isolation, and then it cannot quite appear. What melodrama there is here is confined to our fantasies for them, and by this I mean any of them.

I thought of this when a friend told me about her breakup today. I liked her ex, and was sad to hear of it. “Is he sorry now,” I asked her, of his inability to commit to her. “Yes,” she said. “But not sorry enough.” We laughed.

“There’s sorry, as in, ‘I will change for you’, and then there’s just ‘really sorry’,” she added by way of explanation. “Where they’re just not going to change. Lots of people, I think, are sorry that way,” she said. I knew what she meant.

“I had the idea of having a ring engraved with the name of my destroyer, and wearing it on my big toe.”

From the memoirs of Cora Pearl, one of the most famous courtesans of 2nd Empire France. Her memoirs are more interesting than most of what you can read about her.

She was also, it should be said, an inveterate hater of men. The destroyer she speaks of is a man who got her drunk at 15 and had his way with her while she was passed out. She woke up in a room he’d taken for his purpose and never went home. She simply vanished once she’d been raped. She instead got a room with what her destroyer paid her, and began a lifetime of taking money for men’s favors, hating them all the while.

She is in my new novel. I do love her, and I’ve tried to do her justice, and make her at least as interesting as the above quote. Below, a few more quotes from the episode.

She was the inspiration for Zola’s Nana, which is a terrific novel if you can stomach Zola’s misogyny (the effect is mostly like eating food you like with MSG–much of it is delicious but parts of it make your blood boil). Nana’s character has about as much to do with the real Cora Pearl as one of her shoes did, I think, but I love them both.

Zola’s novel chronicles a time in Cora Pearl’s life when she was the toast of Paris. His Nana is wonderfully frank, funny woman, vain, naive. Cora at the same time Zola satirized her (let’s call it that?) was a clear-eyed and wealthy businesswoman as regards the sale of her favors, and while she did die in poverty, decades later, in the 1860s she maintained a sumptuous lifestyle and several homes. She was an elegant horsewoman, also, with a stable of 60 horses, and her livery and coachmen were the envy of people who thought they were her betters. I’ve found her name on the listing of horses bred and sold at the time.

She reminds me a little of the myth of the Mongolian princess who vowed never to marry a man who was a poorer rider than she was, and won every race. One of her nicknames was La Centauresse.

In Which Blogging Teaches Me Something About Writing Novels

The other night I described this method to my friend Mike Albo and he said, “You jerk! Why didn’t you tell me about this ten years ago?”* So, I’m telling you now.

I keep a journal of my novel that is just about the novel–any ideas, questions, thoughts, lines, even just entries like “page 77 is still a problem!” or “return to page 13!” I make the entry, even if it’s just a few lines, every day of work on it as I close the day’s work, and I also put scraps in there, deleted sections and lines I want to save. If I’m working on an edit like I am now with a master copy, I include the page number from the master.

When I return to work the next day, I reread that entry first and I return to where I was and what I was thinking about the more quickly. This is in addition to the writing notes I keep on my phone.

The journal I call a “workjournal” and it is a MSWord doc, and each new entry is entered at the top of the first page, a method I learned from blogging actually, so that the most recent entry is visible immediately when I open the doc–the oldest entry is at the end. This is because a MSWord doc opens right to page 1 always, and this way I am not scrolling past old entries to get to the one I need to remind me of where I left off.

I also keep any outlines or structural thoughts here, I keep lists of themes, etc. It’s all in there. The one for The Queen of the Night is very long right now, almost the same length as the novel. Please, try it out. Tell me how it works for you.

*This is how Mike expresses affection.

Me and the Great Pulitzer Do-Over, at NYTMag

The New York Times Magazine asked me and several other writers and critics–Maud Newton, Laila Lalami, Sam Anderson, Macy Halsford, John Williams, Garth Risk Hallberg–who we would have picked for the Pulitzer this year, given the vacancy. I chose Tayari Jones’ novel Silver Sparrow:

“Silver Sparrow” is the story of a bigamist, his two wives, their daughters and his mother, narrated from the perspectives of the daughters, Chaurisse and Dana. The structure is deceptively simple — first telling one girl’s complete story, then the other’s — but the movement of time is complexly rendered, and the result is a stereoscope trained on America of the 1980s, specifically Atlanta’s black middle class, with roots in Marietta, Ga., in the 1950s. Those communities, and their values, are put in conversation, until what appears is not a simple she-said/she-said story of the grievances of girls forced to share a father but the story of a 14-year-old black girl’s pregnancy in 1958, the forced marriage that resulted and the three generations of shame and heartbreak that followed. Jones offers us a vision of how the problems of her characters belong to us all, in a way that is as much about the sisters as it is about America: who we are as a country and who we want to be.

“The Great Pulitzer Do-Over”, at the New York Times Magazine.