Alexander Chee's Blog, page 6

Advice for Young People and the Office-Bound (basically everyone)

After the Mentors panel Sunday, a friend who was there was sorry she hadn't gotten a chance to ask her question. She wrote to ask of my opinion on Choire Sicha's recent advice post for young people over at the Awl. She had wanted to ask the whole panel, though, and now it appears she is writing to everyone involved and will publish the answers. I'll put that link up when it comes in.

Here's her question about the post, and my response. She is, it should be said, young and ambitious, and incredibly nice.

"What do you think of it? Are soulless careerists a thing? Is essentializing people like that even a good idea? What is your advice for office-bound young people?"

Choire knows of what he speaks.

Is it divisive? I don't think I'd say divisive,  and I think it's sweet that you are asking me if they even exist—you're so young! It's adorable and terrifying. Anyway YES, they are definitely there. I call them people who fail upward. They mysteriously ruin the magazine/film/show/company and get hired at a better place for more money later. They miss their deadlines, their targets, then get the promotion you were hoping was going to come to you if you were just good and did your job from your corner, because surely everyone notices quiet quality, and then they get that promotion because they are not in the corner and actually no one notices quiet quality unless it is underlined for them.

And that's where they can actually help. The thing is, the drama he speaks of is also a kind of PR, sadly—and a lot of people get sucked in, including bosses. But you can learn from them and let that be the first lesson—don't be the insanely proficient office doormat hoping people notice you. Learn to take compliments gracefully and from your place in the corner doing all the work, watch how they fearlessly buttonhole people. And then make that part of the work, just a little. Don't do it in the sad way—find your own way of doing it.

The big problem in those set-ups is always that if you're doing your job and doing it well, it's usually invisible. People would notice if you didn't do it, because everything would go wrong, but then you'd only be blamed. The key is to find moments when your successes can be out in the open. Make your points in meetings, come prepared, smile but not too much, and be relaxed without being inappropriate. Never let anyone take credit for your ideas unless you agreed on it beforehand and even then, try not to agree to those things.

Here's a different example of why I say this that may be illustrative: I often get much better students in my Fiction 1 class than in Fiction 2—the advanced class ends up too often being a siren call for people with only attitude who think they're too good for Fiction 1, and Fiction 1 is full of super talented students who may think of themselves as beginners their whole lives. I don't think of these soulless careerists as soulless careerists, I think of them as talentless and with no self-doubt, people who never hold themselves back. They used to frustrate me a lot, and they still do, but increasingly it is because they are never the one up at night worrying their manuscript is horrible. They get 7 hours and turn their crap in with a smile. Way too many young people are convinced talent is what they need to succeed, and it isn't. Stamina is. And relentless self-belief can function in place of stamina, it is much like it.

A friend of mine and I, years ago, observing this, resolved to be at least as forward because if it worked for them and they were a mess, chances are it could work for us. And since then I've noticed I know many talented unsuccessful people, many more than the untalented successful, and so the formula I use is to get my work done and then tell myself to have at least half the will to get my work and myself out there where people can find me as the least talented successful person I know.

As for telling people about the soulless careerist? Well… here's the thing. I take Choire's point, but trashing them even if it is the truth makes you end up looking a lot like them–the way these people talk shit about others is part of their game. It makes them seem like they have game, to talk other people down. Instead, try a wince, a raised eyebrow, where you wait for the other person to fill it in, this can be much better and is also unquotable and even deniable, especially when you're under 30 and need as few enemies as possible. This way you and whoever can laugh together conspiratorially and the knowledge is shared in eye conversations, which are unquotable, and cannot be forwarded years later in an email with a "FYI" to the person in question. It would be nice if we could raise some sort of cordon and keep them out, but that underestimates the power of their lack of self-doubt and how much people fear them and do their bidding. Some day you'll need something from them, and you won't get it if what you said got back to them.

If you do trash them, be sure of the embargoes, and that the person you speak to is completely trustworthy. The only time I ever speak the truth about these people openly is when it may affect what I'm doing. And never put it in email. Don't create something that might come find you when you don't want it. Mostly just take a lesson from them on the power of what looks like self-esteem and go, and keep your eyes open.

I Love BOMB Reading + Like A Boss with Emily Books + Mentors in Paperback

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 , 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.

[image error]

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.

The Situation in American Writing

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.

Me and Daniel Clowes and BOMB

 

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.

My Top Longreads for 2011

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.

We're Off

It was around this time in 2003 when a young editor by the name of Dave Daley (now at Five Chapters) emailed me to ask if I had any work that had been sitting in a drawer. I did. I had approximately 30 pages of a novel I'd begun one morning in 2000, when the voice started speaking to me in my head as I lay half-asleep in my Brooklyn apartment. I remember I stood up, flipped open my laptop and started the coffee.

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.

Some Current Events That Belong To Me

I am happy to report receiving two Pushcart Prize nominations this year, in fiction and nonfiction respectively. The Good Men Project wrote to say they had nominated my short story "My Next Move", and The Morning News has nominated my essay "Fanboy".

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 On Joy

I often worry at how often my writing students seem focused on misery and pain. As if literature were a Victorian curio cabinet of suffering and the point of writing was to find the most interesting pain.

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.

I Just Feel Like It Is Going In A Really Random Direction

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.

On Asteroids, Stereoscopic Novels and Time

Tuesday night, as an asteroid was coming very close to striking Earth, I was re-reading a graphic novel I was teaching,  Asterios Polyp, that concludes with an asteroid hurtling at the main character, who is, yes, on Earth. I thought about the irony of it, partly because it is the kind of irony the book thrives on–mirrored worlds–and through that, I began thinking about the structure of it.

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 Brian 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 Brian 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.

Brian 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.