Alexander Chee's Blog, page 9

100 Things About a Novel

1. Sometimes music is needed.

2. Sometimes silence.

3. This is probably because a novel is a piece of music, like all written things, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it.

4. Sometimes I have written them on subways, missing stops, like people do when reading.

5. It begins for me usually with the implications of a situation. A person who is like this in a place that is like this, an integer set into the heart of an equation and new values, everywhere.

6. The person and situation arrive together, typically. I am standing somewhere and watch as both appear, move towards each other and transform.

7. If you still don't understand me, think of how you think differently of Clark Kent once you see him run into the phone booth and change into Superman.

8. It is like having imaginary friends that are the length of city blocks. The pages you write are like fingerprinting them, done to prove to strangers they exist.

9. Reading a novel successfully is then the miracle of being shown such a fingerprint and being able to guess the face, the way she walks, the times she fell in love incorrectly or to bad result, etc.

10. The written novel in the hand tries to be the most precise analogy the writer can make as to what was seen in the rooms and trains and skies and summer nights and parties where the novel was written, as the writer walked in moments with the enormous imaginary friend, before returning to the others.

11. Writing a novel is sometimes like going to a party and hearing someone call your name outside the window and when you get there, a dragon floats in the night wind, grinning. How did you know my name, you ask it. But you already know it's yours.

12. Writing novels can make you a bad employee.

13. You do write because you have to write, in the end. You do it because it is easier to do than to not do. After all, a dragon has come all this way and it knows your name. And so families should try not to punish their writers.

14. Coming across a character with your characteristics is like walking into a store and finding a paper doll of yourself.

15. The more so if you wrote the character.

16. For the novelists in your life it is better if you pretend they do something else and that it is always attended to, and doesn't need your attention in the slightest. And then when asked, muster an enormous enthusiasm.

17. Attempts to find out what the novel is about on other uninvited occasions may meet with an enormous resistance.

18. This is because their sense of that meaning changes. My sense of a novel changes in the same way my knowledge of someone changes. And I know you are looking for the sort of answer you can rely on later, when you see the book. But that by then, my answer will have evolved, into the entire book, and so whatever I told you will have almost no relationship to what is there. If I seem cagey it is because I am not a liar and hate being considered one by an accident of craft.

19. Novels are voracious. They move around my rooms stripping half-finished poems of their lines. stealing ideas from unfinished essays, diaries, letters, and, sometimes each other. Sometimes by the time I get to them one has taken an enormous bite from the other.

20. There is usually no saving the poem in these circumstances, or at least, not yet.

21. There is no punishing a novel in these circumstances either, because hunger has its own intelligence, and should be trusted. It is dangerous to be a new novel around another new novel in the years they are each being written, but, they know this.

22. Revision, meanwhile, turns something like laundry into something like Christmas.

23. This is because a first draft is like scaffolding; often it must be torn down to uncover the thing being built underneath. Which is to say, some second drafts, when they emerge, have very little visible relationship to the first.

24. And so another way to think of a first draft is as a chrysalis of guesses.

*     *     *

25. Novels are hard, not like diamonds but like fate. The choice you make that reveals it was never a choice at all.

26. Then it is the novel as jailer. You in a small dark room with no answers to any of your questions and no one seems to hear your pleas, not for for days, months, years. Indifferent the entire time to all requests for visits or freedom. Hard labor too.

27. Or novels can be Champagne Charlies. The limo pulls up, there's cash, a stocked bar and an entourage. A boyfriend/girlfriend you haven't met already mad at you for not calling enough, arms crossed, pretty face steamed.

28. Or it is the Fugitive, arrives at night through an open window. Not quite a dream, it carries a work order signed by the president of your own dream factory. You strain to recognize your handwriting.

29. As the work proceeds, the factory is near the roads leading back and forth to the jails and the Champagne Charlies can be seen headed in and out. Sometimes it is clear that the prisoners and the party are trading places (the entourage fits in the cell). Sometimes not.

30. The Fugitive leans at the window, watches, has guessed the limo and the cell are the same.

31. Or it is a Lover. It is impatient, it wants you to know everything. And it won't stop until it's done. Factory, cell, limo, it doesn't matter where you are or with who: the conversation will not stop. It is not endless but is long, it is longer than the writer can contain, and so it gets written down and is born that way.

32. This being because a novel is a thought that is too long to fit in your head all at once until after it is written or read.

33. It is not shorter then. Your hats still fit. But inside you there's more room.

34. Think of a dream with the outer surface of a storm and the inside like the surface of your days as you have sometimes found them. The novel being the only way to lead anyone to the entrance of those days.

35. Or it is a stranger on the street, walking up to you, grabbing you by the lapel and walking away with you quickly, with passports, money. You fall in love as you leave immediately, together.

36. The novel coming not from the mind but the heart, which is why it cannot fit in your head. Why, when you hear it, it seems to be singing from somewhere just out of your sight, always.

37. Meanwhile, or the duration of the novel your heart can believe it is a liberator. You will not deny it this belief as you do at other times in your life because you are distracted by the story. It is why you love novels more than you think you do when you read them.

38. You discover you are in love with the unmet ending—or rather, you long for it. It is the radio station that plays from your radio only when it is in this one corner of the room, which is to say, at the center of your chest.

39. The heart's ruse is nearly over. This entire time, it has convinced the novel it was only following along.

40. This entire time the game it has played with the novel was like the date that begins with love's possibility but ends with the memory of the other, the one you lost or who lost you and who you fooled yourself into thinking was gone from your heart forever, but instead put on a mask, that of the stranger who you kiss against the wall in the street at night.

41. Of course a novel is also a mask.

42. Not for the novelist. Not for the reader. But for something else the novelist brings in from the back of the tent like a lion on a chain.

43. Do not notice the slashes in the novelist's shirt, the welts along the arms and legs. Do not try and decipher them. If the lighting is right you will see them only when you have the chain in your hands and you are ready to let go. You will remember then. The cuts will make you try to imagine what the novelist went through. This is also a fiction but you will not write it down and it will leave on the wake of the next thought you have.

44. Unless of course you are also a novelist and then it is sometimes your next novel. You wake to realize you are in the back of the tent.

*     *     *

45. I think of each of them like a visitor from another planet, the sentences being like the circuits to a vast and beautiful machine that communicates the creature.

46. Or a distant relation I've never met, from another country and with a language barrier between us. He tries on clothes and wigs I give him, he hops on one leg and makes strange animal noises, and soon I have the wig, I am hopping, hopping, hopping.

47. With my other hand I am taking notes.

48. Everyone has a novel in them, people like to say. They smile when they say it, as if the novel is special precisely because everyone has at least one.  Think of a conveyor belt of infant souls passing down from Heaven, rows of tired angels pausing to slip a paperback into their innocent, wordless hearts.

49. If it is like the soul, it is a soul you can share, like the Gnostic one, externalized, with a womb.

50. What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long windy character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?

51. Novelists then like a circus attraction with many limbs, a horse with eight legs or three faces, or two heads.

52. Now we are back in a tent, but another tent altogether, that of a circus.

53. We discover we are the animal made to learn tricks, in order to please something with a whip.

54. Kneeling in the sawdust, juggling plates, we hope the crowd cheers, though we cannot see them past the lights.

55. All the while, we know in some cultures we would be revered as gods. Others, put to death.

56. Of course this almost never happens.

57. And then it does.

58. The novel for which you can be killed is a picture someone is trying to hide of what is inside whoever it is threatening to kill you for writing it.

59. You did not know this was what you were doing, you were only trying to take a picture of the landscape. You thought of yourself as a bystander, you saw something you thought you should try to say this way. In the corner of the photo, something you do not quite recognize, not right away.

60. When you look closely at the picture, in it is a map left behind by a stranger that says This is the way to the treasure, and then this is the way o—

61. The piece that is missing, hidden somewhere but calling, describing itself to you from behind the walls of your days.

62. Would it be beautiful or devastating to write the one novel if it was the only one you had? And what then, to discover that was the one?

63. Perhaps sometimes the angels are tired and out of their hands slips not one novel but 5, 12, 100. 1000.

64. They will never come back for them, but when they appear, smile quietly, instead, passing invisibly through the bookstore, remembering.

65. Remembering that in fact no one has only one.

*     *     *

66. The novel and God are always being declared dead. Both are perhaps now indifferent to this, if either really can be said to exist.

67. Imagine for now they pass the time in the Kitchen of Life, telling jokes, each trying to tell if the other's feelings are hurt.

68. God feels confident he is having a come-back. Also the novel. Each is jealous, does not want to say this to the other, not directly.

69. The novel is being sold in vending machines in airports. God points out there are no vending machines for God.

70. Are you sure, though, the novel says. And then adds, I feel like  you could do something about that.

71. Tell me about it, God says. This being one of the things the novel can do.

72. The novel is also now an app. No app yet for God. I think this means I'm ahead, the novel says.

God says nothing to this.

There is something He intends to do about it. And then, He forgets…

73. Sometimes it is the ship, sinking, and you, you are the captain, running around the deck, having decided not to go down with it, but to save it, to head for land all the same.

74. The ship, moved, returns from its fascination with the deep.

75. It would be easy to forget that sometimes the shipwreck saves the ship or the captain. Sometimes one or the other remembers this at the touch of the rock.

76. Think of Nemo, in his submarine, touring the submerged treasures of all of the failed voyages in all of history. A library of unfinished novels could be like this.

77. Or like the buckle of a belt, worn by an islander who found it in a reef, and seen years later, by the original owner's friend when he comes to land. Where did you get this, the explorer asks, and then asks to be taken to the wreck.

78. It is like the language the explorer must learn to even ask the question.

80. What is it you want from me, the novel asks.

81. What is it you want from me, the novel tells you.

82. Everything in here is about you, the novel says.

83. This feels like a trick to keep you reading it or writing it, a lie that is also true.

And this is what a novel is.

84. In the novel the true things often run around like children under sheets, playing at being ghosts. Otherwise we would ignore them. Not now, we would tell them, if they arrived without their sheets.

85. Go to my room, we would say. And wait for me. And then we sob when we get there, to see they are gone.

86. Novels do not take orders well, if at all. They are not soldiers, usually, or waiters. They do badly at housework and will not clean silver.

87. Novels do not wait. They are poor chaffeurs.

88. Novels are good with children but are considered untrustworthy tutors for the young. And yet there we are. As soon as we can crawl, pulling them off the shelves.

89.  Cheever said of the novel that it should have the direct and concise qualities of a letter.   To who and by who, I wonder, as I think of how I feel this is true. I want to argue briefly—It is not a letter from the author to the reader—and then I stop. It is not a letter, just like a letter.

I think of this as the kind of question–to who, from who—that, if you sat with it, could begin a novel.

90. We always hope to find stores full of questions like that, but for most, novels are accidents at their start. Writers lining the streets of the imagination, hoping to get struck and dragged, taken far away.

We crawl from under the car at the destination and sneak away with our prize.

91. This is because the novel begun deliberately is so often terrible, with the worst qualities of a bad lie, or a political speech given during a campaign. The writer turned into something like a senator.

92. In your room after the successful accident, you wake. Something is left in your hand.

93. It is a letter. Or, like a letter.

94. Beside your bed is you, the one that writes a novel, in disguise, funny hat and all. Hoping to understand.

Do not look too closely at the ridiculous mustache. Listen. Surreptitiously, against your hand, write down what is said. In its elaborate disguise it acts out the answers.

95. The novel then a letter from the novel to the reader, and dictated to the writer by the writer.

95. But what is it about, you might ask, and then the novel recoils.

96. I just need to get a drink, I'll be right back, the novel says. Do you want anything?

97. Days later the novel returns. I wasn't with anyone else, the novel says. There's only you, the novel adds, even as the writer fears it has taken up with others.

Imagining pages of itself across the other desks of the neighborhood.

98. There's only you, the novel says again.

99. You are outside, in the street outside the novel's window, you are screaming into the wind. Please, you say finally, finally quiet, uncertain of how to go further.

100. The novel is already at the door. Waiting, but just for a little. It is the lover again, impatient again. Wanting again for you to know everything.

This was originally written in 4 parts. I collected them in order to post this in its entirety  here.

100 Things About a Novel, part 4

66. The novel and God are always being declared dead.

Both are now indifferent to this.

67. For now they pass the time in the kitchen of life, telling jokes, each trying to tell if the other's feelings are hurt.

68. God feels confident he is having a come-back. Also the novel. Each does not want to say this to the other, not directly.

69. God and the novel are frenemies.

70. The novel is being sold in vending machines in airports. God points out there are no vending machines for God.

71. Are you sure, though, the novel says. And then adds, I feel like  you could do something about that.

72. Tell me about it, God says. This being one of the things the novel can do.

73. The novel is also now an app. No app yet for God.

I think this means I'm ahead, the novel says. God says nothing to this.

There is something He intends to do about it. And then, He forgets…

74. Sometimes it is the ship, sinking, and you, you are the captain, running around the deck, having decided not to go down with it, but to save it, to head for land all the same.

75. The ship, moved, returns from its fascination with the deep.

76. It would be easy to forget that sometimes the shipwreck saves the ship or the captain. Sometimes one or the other remembers this at the touch of the rock.

78. Think of Nemo, in his submarine, touring the submerged treasures of all of the failed voyages in all of history. A library of unfinished novels could be like this.

79. Or like the buckle of a belt, worn by an islander who found it in a reef, and seen years later, by the original owner's friend when he comes to land. Where did you get this, the explorer asks, and then asks to be taken to the wreck.

80. It is like the language the explorer must learn to even ask the question.

81. What is it you want from me, the novel asks.

82. What is it you want from me, the novel tells you.

83. Everything in here is about you, the novel says.

84. This feels like a trick to keep you reading it or writing it, a lie that is also true.

And this is what a novel is.

85. In the novel the true things often run around inside tricks, like children playing at being ghosts.

86. They do this because otherwise, we would ignore them, just as we ignore children. Not now, we would tell them, if they arrived without their sheets.

87. What could I possibly tell you, the writer thinks, alone at the desk. And then, This!

88.  Cheever said of the novel that it should have the direct and concise qualities of a letter.  He does not, however, say who the letter is from or who it is to.

89. This strikes me as an interesting question. The kind that could accidentally begin a novel.

90. Novels often beginning accidentally. Writers playing in the traffic of the imagination, hoping to get struck, dragged, taken far away.

91. This is because the novel begun deliberately is often terrible, with the worst qualities of a bad lie, or a political speech given during a campaign.

92. The successful accident leaves something in your hand when you wake.  It is the letter Cheever spoke of.

Beside your bed is the part of you that writes a novel, in disguise, funny hats and all.

93. Do not look too closely at the ridiculous mustache. Listen and write down what is said.

94. The novel a letter from the novel to the reader, dictated to the writer by the writer and in disguise as the novel.

95. But what is it about, you might ask, and the novel recoils, leaving the writer alone.

For a moment, a week, a year.

96. I just need to get a drink, I'll be right back, the novel says. Do you want anything?

97. Days later the novel returns. The writer has sulked the entire time. I wasn't with anyone else, the novel says. There's only you, the novel adds, even as the writer fears it has taken up with others. Pages of itself across the other desks of the neighborhood.

98. There's only you, the novel says again.

99. You are in the street outside the novel's window, you are screaming into the wind. Please, you say finally, finally quiet, uncertain of how to go further.

100. The novel is at the door. Waiting. It is the lover again, impatient again. Wanting again for you to know everything.

 

 

***This is the last of a series. For those just arriving, here are links to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Not Too Soon

Hi, how are you? It's late here, very dark. It's the kind of moment that when you blog makes you feel as if no one will ever read it, so you could write anything and it wouldn't matter, but of course this is both true and not true. More people will read it than you think, and less than you want. But this is just true for all writers. For me one great thing about meeting so many writers at this point in my life is discovering that there is no amount of fame and success that will make  you a secure, emotionally whole human being who doesn't need some kind of attention if you don't enter the game like that already.

A lot of the trick to being a writer is being able to survive what your ego thinks ought to be happening for you. And remembering to write as if no will ever read it and so you could say anything. Because it will matter, both more and less than you want it to, and the only protection you have is to engage with it as a free person.

I've been listening to this song about ten times tonight. I remember I used to listen to the album—The Throwing Muses' Real Ramona—when I lived in San Francisco. It was my personal soundtrack. I was just out of college, working at a bookstore in the Castro, I had a motorcycle I rode when I wasn't walking everywhere. I wanted to be a writer but I didn't know how else to do it except to go to cafes and write in my notebooks. I wanted to do something daring and profane and beautiful. It felt like the end of the world. We were at war. George Bush the senior, the one we'd come to think of as "the first" was president and it felt like the world was going to end, so, why not do something truly beautiful and sacrilegious? It was impossible to imagine then it would be worse. That he would have a son who would look like him but sound like a less educated, less intelligent, less compassionate version of him, as alike him as a donkey is to a mule. The son a bad dream about the father that went on for 8 years.

Sometimes I think about being in a yoga class in the late 90s, and the teacher saying "Yoga is meant to help us endure the Kaliyuga, the worst of times, the era we are entering." If, after getting up after that class, you'd said to me, "You'll remember that remark for at least a decade", I would have laughed.

I made the joke recently that the above video was my screen memory for the 80s. It almost is. Watching the video I can feel the 80s somewhere, but in fact the album dates to 1991.

I have a theory about apocalypses. That they are negative fantasies. That we think about them, imagine them, because it relieves us of responsibility. It appeals to the part of us that relishes horror, that luxuriates in paralysis. Back then I was reading Galeano's Memory of Fire and it was blowing my mind. Here is another thought I've had for decades: the story in that book, of the town waiting for the end of the world and then it didn't happen. And there's a line I remember, about how the end of the century often brought with it the idea that the world would end.

So we are approaching an announced apocalypse again, this time 2012 per the Mayan Calendar, and at the same time we have the lovely fundamentalist Christians who are trying to rush the end times, to make the predictions come true—and who scoff at the idea that we even need to take care of the planet, because after the return of the Lord, those who are taken won't be here anymore and they are the ones that matter, per their beliefs.

And I'm no preacher, but I think, if Jesus is real, if he really is the Messiah and the Christ… do you really think you can get him to hurry back?

I think if you think you know God, you don't know God.

Eileen Myles at the Awl on the VIDA Stats

The chart from VIDA on the rate at which women are reviewed and published versus men is an eye-opener. Eileen Myles' reaction is one of the most personally felt and vigorous to date. Honestly, I could quote the whole thing, but, here's the opener:

When I think about being female I think about being loved. What I mean by that: I have a little exercise I do when I present my work or speak publicly or even write (like this). In order to build up my courage I try to imagine myself deeply loved. Because there are men whose lives I've avidly followed—out of admiration for their work or their "way." Paolo Pasolini always comes to mind. I love his work, his films, his poetry, his writings on film and literature, his life, all of it, even his death. How did he do it—make such amazing work and stand up so boldly as a queer and a Marxist in a Catholic country in the face of so much (as his violent death proved) hate. I have one clear answer. He was loved. Pasolini's mother was wild about him. We joke about this syndrome—Oh she was an Italian mother, but she could just have well been a Jewish mother, an Irish mother, an African-American one. A mother loves her son. And so does a country. And that is much to count on. So I try to conjure that for myself particularly when I'm writing or saying something that seems both vulnerable and important so I don't have to be defending myself so hard. I try and act like its mine. The culture. That I'm its beloved son. It's not an impossible conceit. But it's hard. Because a woman, reflexively, often feels unloved. When I saw the recent Vida pie charts that showed how low the numbers are of female writers getting reviewed in the mainstream press I just wasn't surprised at all though I did cringe. When you see your oldest fears reflected back at you in the hard bright light of day it doesn't feel good. Because a woman is someone who grew up observing that a whole lot more was being imagined by everyone for her brother and the boys around her in school. If she's a talented artist she's told that she could probably teach art to children when she grows up and then she hears the boy who's good in art get told by the same teacher that one day he could grow up to be a commercial artist. The adult doing the talking in these kinds of exchanges is most often female. And the woman who is still a child begins to wonder if her childhood is already gone because she has been already replaced in the future by a woman who will be teaching children like herself.

Read the rest here.

Hunger Games

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Moore's Watchmen was a response to the Oliver North trials, and to Reagan.

1.

I read The Hunger Games. So this is how America has chosen to process the power grab by the country's richest 2%, I think, as I finish the novel. I buy it after I read that the author was inspired by seeing only reality shows and war coverage on her television.

That strikes me as honorable inspiration for a best-seller.

In case you somehow missed it (there's over a million copies in print), in this novel a young woman named Katniss lives in a post-American state called Panem, in a poor coal-mining district. Each year each of the 12 districts has to send two of their children, a boy and a girl, to fight to the death in a broadcast reality show. She volunteers to replace her sister when her sister is chosen.

It's a well-written and fun read, and there's two more novels, a trilogy.

2.

Reading it I think of how this last year was the year of the so-called Health Care Reform debate, which was people telling the truth vs. people lying about it. This was also the year that I wasasked, every few months, to contribute to fundraisers for the healthcare of others, with cancer, usually. I participate. Because what else is there to do? Unlike my government, I believe a citizen deserves to live whether or not they can afford their care.

3.

I am still not really sure how I ended up living in a country I'd never agree to move to.

We have snow days, which gives me two days of cancelled class. I stay in and read and write. I read Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever and want to quote every line of it. I consider putting it up on Twitter but that seems like a defacement, something she'd loathe (I studied with her). Also, for a class I'm teaching, I've been reading Orlando, Never Let Me Go. I'll blog some responses to these in the coming weeks. Everything feels like it's about the amnesiac rich, wealthy people who have no idea as to the human cost of their existence.

And then over that weekend, the Reagan centenary arrives.

4.

I remember Reagan as a senescent right wing apparition, evil with a grin. The smiley face button covered in blood on the cover of Moore's The Watchmen. When I saw that cover I thought, Oh, Reagan. He was the grinning killer sending death squads into Latin America, funding the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, ignoring AIDS while it became a full-fledged pandemic, lowering the poverty level and then declaring poverty diminished. "Trickle-Down Economics" is a rich person spilling something while he eats, and everyone else fighting over it on the floor underneath him. Good riddance. The day he was born is blackened forever. If he'd never been president, we might not have a novel like The Hunger Games. We might not have healthcare fundraisers for people who can't afford to survive cancer. He is dead and we are all still trying to survive his presidency.

UMF Reading Notice

Google alerts has been providing me with notices appearing in several papers in Maine that I am giving a reading this coming February at the University of Maine, Farmington. This is a publicity mistake: the correct date is March 24th.

My Next Move

One winter, I moved to Brooklyn to figure myself out. I was escaping a situation I didn't understand, by which I mean a job and a lover and an apartment that when they were all together left no place for me. As I had made my life into something that I couldn't fit inside of but was for me, this meant I didn't know what I was, not even close, and this seemed like a problem literally the size of my whole life. I wanted to go somewhere I couldn't hurt anyone while I fixed this, so I took a small apartment with a single window on the very last street in Park Slope, where the neighborhood literally was less gentrified by the middle of the block. I got a job waiting tables, work that wouldn't bother me at home or call me or email me with last-minute changes. And I picked as my bar a small gay bar almost no one knew, not too far from the apartment or the restaurant, with dark wood and old-fashioned mirrors and a crappy pool table out back usually surrounded by plain-spoken lesbians playing for keeps. I never played pool, so this was fine. I left my phone off for the first month, as I didn't know what I would say to anyone who would call me, and eventually was afraid to turn it on. But this also seemed fine as the only person I really needed to speak to was me.

I told myself I was only here until I figured out my next move, and the bar was where I figured it out, or thought I did, after my shifts at the restaurant, though I think I drank more than came to any particular decision. I didn't know it yet, but I hadn't changed anything about myself, just my location. I'd thought that if I could just get away from everything that was in the way of what I really wanted, who I was would appear like an old friend long missing, and we'd leave together for whatever was next.

From a new short story of mine, "My Next Move", the weekend fiction feature over at The Good Men Project Magazine. It's about intersecting love triangles, and how when you say you need to go find yourself, you usually just don't like the answer you already have.

Fear of the World

If I have a religion, it is probably bibliomancy, the practice of flipping books open at random and reading from the quote I find.

Just now:

Fear of the world produces crystals in writing. One seeks the faultless, crystallized phrases, perfection, the hard polish of the gems, and then finds that people prefer the sloppy writers, the inchoate, the untidy, the unfocused ones because it is more human. To jewels, they prefer human imperfections, moisture of perspiration, bad smells, stutterings, and all the time I keep this for the diary and give the world only jewels.

That's from the journals of Anaïs Nin, Volume II, page 52, at the end of July 1935.

I have lately seen a lot of praise for not being perfect. I like this above quote because it encourages the writer to just be alive. I've written some about this disjunct, how readers prefer story over style, in my post on Ender's Game, and back then I was only amazed at the seemingly childish attack on style Card makes in the new preface to the current edition.  But it has been on my mind lately, the idea that style doesn't matter, the uselessness to a writer in being a master of style. Master of story, yes. I will always love style, to be clear—I am now taking a break in writing, for example, from a revision that involves retyping the manuscript of the second novel, which I am doing because it is the best way to pay attention to the whole story—a very old-school way to proceed, yes, but that's because it works. Retyping allows you to edit it in an intuitive way that cut and paste can't reach. And yes, it also helps the writer revise to tone, something I've always loved. Oh well. Me and my useless love of style.

The woman pictured here is the Comtesse de Castilgione, a character in my new novel and a real figure from history. She was one of the legendary beauties of 19th Century Paris and the milieu surrounding the court of the Second Empire, the ambassador to France from Italy. She was something of a Second Empire Cindy Sherman. She hid herself from society as she aged, afraid of allowing people to see her beauty in decline, but before that happened, photographed herself relentlessly in her favorite costumes to commemorate scenes from her life. The Met organized a beautiful show and catalogue around these portraits.

I know I haven't updated in a while, and if you're wondering, "what is he up to?" The answer is, thinking about her. I am delivering edits on the manuscript before I begin teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for the spring semester, and there's not much time for anything else. I am trying to live up to being put on The Millions Most Anticipated List, basically. Anyway, we return to regular updates soon.

Shark's Teeth

1.

The 2010 'Best of' lists appear, like little angels of death. Little cuts on my will to get to the end of the year.

Not now, I say, each time one appears. Not yet. I need to make use of every minute of this year.

2.

In Florida, at the Hermitage for a residency with Dustin, we find we have the first of two weeks to ourselves. Our cabin sits on the Gulf. The other artists coming had to cancel for various reasons.  Dustin thanks the director and she says, "This is your reward for a life dedicated to art." We laugh about it until the office empties and having the equivalent of a seaside estate to ourselves sinks in.

Go team, we say later. And then go to the store for provisions.

3.

In this part of Florida, every house around us is for sale or for auction, which would appear to be worse. At the supermarket, as we ask questions about the are stores, the people working there speak to us, telling us how they were laid off from better jobs or work at least three. The food is all corporate food, heavily processed and packaged, very little of it organic, though sometimes labeled "natural". Increasingly, though, I think of nonorganic food as "poisoned". I find it difficult to eat, as if we have gone from being merely surrounded by euphemism to eating it also, with everything in these grocery stores just a euphemism for food.

4.

I love waking up, sliding out of bed, making coffee and heading to my side of our house, divided by a door. Knocking before entering his side, the two of us working all day. I work on my novel's edits, and Dustin on a screenplay we're collaborating on, an adaptation of a biography (more on that soon). We have an entire cottage. We take meal breaks together where we talk about the screenplay and the novel. I've been plagued for a while with a sense that something was wrong in the structure of my novel, but I couldn't quite figure it out.

I was thinking of how I'd just written to a student of mine at Iowa about how you basically hit your target, so you have to be careful of where you direct your attention. He'd written me about his own anxieties about being a gay writer–he didn't want to be this one kind of writer, but another, and so on, and did I ever feel like this? I had felt exactly like that. History, for that matter, is full of stories of people who became what they feared. I decided I had a great deal of control over what I became, and that's what I told him–not to be a writer who'd deny what or who he is, but to just write things that were interesting to you and to others, and to let that work shape your career—and not to have a career that shaped your work.

Afterward,  I was thinking about it because it was sticking in my brain—it is often the case that whatever I end up telling students is also what I myself needed to relearn. Without seeming too mystical, in all of those cases, it seems to be a karmic thing.

Later, Dustin and I go for a walk. We haven't found any shark's teeth in ten days of being there. Dustin starts chanting "Shark's teeth, shark's teeth, shark's teeth." I'd been told the way to find them was to rearrange your vision, to set your eyes to finding them. This had only angered me previously—of course I was looking for them! But then Dustin jumps down and brings one up triumphantly.

Soon he has a dozen. As I stand there, somewhat sad about still not finding one, I look down and my rearranged vision sees one.

On the walk back, I rearrange my vision of my novel, and that night find at last what had been plaguing me about my novel all this time. I'd been trying to change the beginning to change the ending, but the real problem was the novel's climax. The climactic chapters of a novel rearrange the story not just for the reader but also for the writer, as you write it. That's when it becomes what it is supposed to be, and afterward, the way to edit it becomes very clear. I didn't didn't quite believe the climax, though, and yet somehow also didn't quite know this consciously. The sign that I didn't like it was in my search for a "right" beginning.  But as the climax reinvents the entire novel draft, including the beginning, this problem with the beginning was my way of telling myself the climax hadn't done it's job.

5.

I reinvent the climax.

6.

At home in New York now, over a week later, the teeth sit on Dustin's desk, waiting to become presents for our nieces and nephews–we've discovered the teeth are black because they're ancient, the fossilized teeth of mackerel sharks, each about 5 million to 35 million years old and dating to the Pliocene or Oligocene. We feel pretty sure handing these out will make us two of America's best gay uncles. But before I give them away, one will become a tattoo, for after I turn the edits in. So that I never, ever, ever forget this.

Have a happy holiday, whatever you believe in.

The Reading Cure

One of the bookshelves Dustin built for me, described over at The Morning News.

A few years ago I checked myself into a hotel with a book. It was 2006, and I was on my way back from my first year teaching at Amherst College and headed to a Christmas celebration with my family. I misjudged the timing of my trains and planes and instead of making an uncomfortable connection, I decided to get an inexpensive hotel room in Boston. When I arrived, my plan was that I would just go into the hotel and read, alone.

I'd read Michael Cunningham's The Hours, if you're wondering. When she checked into the hotel with a book I felt only an intense wish to do the same. Here I was finally, making a deep pause in between what I'd been doing all semester and what I was about to do.  The hotel I chose was the Hotel 140,  which felt like a secret hotel, located on several floors upstairs inside 140 Clarendon Streeet—in the lobby it had the appearance of a normal office building.  I set my bags down, opened the window shades. It was almost sunset, late afternoon.  My grades were in. I pulled the book out, Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, opened it and began.

I read through the night into the next morning, taking myself out to a dinner. I recently found my menu from that night, at Petit Robert Bistro, nearby, which I wrote down in a diary as it was a perfect meal.

Moules Mariniere

Duck confit with grilled sausage

Glass of Vouvray

Glass of Bordeaux Superieure

Glass of Cognac, Pierre Ferrand, Selection des Anges

In a new essay up over at The Morning News, I talk about some of my reading habits and ways I tried to address a decline in my pleasure reading, or, as I like to put it, how the internet remapped my brain, and an e-book re-remapped it—and brought me back to books in general.