Alexander Chee's Blog, page 7

Sonata

After a year of residencies and travel, I find I do not want to leave New York, not right now. Sometimes I do not even leave my apartment. It was all I could do to agree to see my family over Thanksgiving, and I love them, dearly. But there is some deep-seated thought process that does not want to be interrupted. Being in New York is part of it, with Dustin, being home, in a place both new to me—our apartment of the last year and a half—and the city in which I've spent the majority of my life. I can say I grew up in Maine, but it seems to me I didn't leave childhood behind until I came to New York.

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 decades of 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. 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.

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:

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

"I, Reader" Chosen for Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2011

Happy and proud to announce my essay "I, Reader" was selected for the Notable Essays list in this year's Best American Essays.

I, Reader Chosen for Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2011

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.

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.

The original drama was about humanity suffering from a genocide, at the hands of a machine-made humanity, a silica-based life-form made to resemble humans, but with abilities that surpass them physically and mentally, the limits of being human–what are they, and at what point are you human, at what point, not? Can you come at being human from the other side, in other words—can you start out somewhere inhuman and make yourself human? This is more centrally the topic of the show once you know who the Cylons are, and what emerges is a different cadence to the dramatic irony. Boomer's relationship with Chief, for example, Tigh and his wife Ellen's reunion, these become more poignant rather than less, for how these are relationships between Cylons who both do and do not know who each other is, in ways conscious and unconscious, and the show's original need to be conventionally suspenseful vanishes, replaced by another story, animated by the new dramatic irony of knowing what the rest of the crew does not. We are then watching the Cylons as characters variously lost within this human world they sought to enter, and finding each other again at the edge of catastrophe. A new plot emerges—will these new creatures, who sought to be human and then more than human, survive themselves? Can they find what it is they sought, or have they simply recreated the worst of what they hated about humanity inside themselves? The Cylon civil war, the idea that there are elders who are so lost in their dream of humanity that they've forgotten themselves, the robot who drinks to forget himself—if anything, the literary qualities of the show's story increase on a second watching. I can't wait to see how it changes the end.

The above image is from a fine recap of an episode from the original series that uses the former Expo 67 site, complete with excellent photos.

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Private Instruction

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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. The reason any of these much-imitated writers' works succeed is because they felt the force of what they were doing–and your attempt to copy them, that does not touch that same place, even if you're sure it does. And I don't think it can, not intentionally.

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

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

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

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

To be Wallace.

Why? Well, I think of it happening as a result of a time when language became uncertain, even treacherous. It was the time of Bush 42, of feeling like our president was a weird hologram of his father, snide and leering where the other had been prim and smug, and yet speaking with the same malaprops and syntax, as if the whole family was made to speak in misunderstandings in order to be understood. And it was a time when I saw malaprops spread, as if we all had to use them if we were going to agree that Bush 42 was the president. Faux-naivete was a perfect shield, I think, in a very general way. Our country had become something terrible and strange, or it always had been and now we knew. It seems to me we are still in the process of discovering what our country really is. And Wallace, well, he was a writer whose work gave back a vision of the world that pierced the scrim of the fear we were all feeling. If we imitated him, I think we did it because of how we all wanted to find our way through.

I am thinking of something a life coach said to a friend: "We imitate our parents because it makes us feel closer to them." This, it seems to me, is behind all literary imitation as well. We want not just to touch the hem of a hero, but to borrow the robe, too.

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

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

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

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