Joseph Grammer's Blog, page 5

The Sportswriter

Don't apologize
For staving off black regret
Snow mounds in Detroit.

Dr. Zhivago

Cold! Revolution. Understanding why things happen.

Love and not love, heart trouble, poetry. Candles and scrounging for firewood in the winter. Staying alive while being kidnapped.

The particular moves to the universal, and is swallowed by it.

The Sportswriter

This book should be boring, but it's not (usually). Suburbs, taxes, minutiae of daily life. Blerg blerg.

Lots of meditations on life, some disgustingly cliche, some really nice and clarifying. The action takes place so slowly I'm amazed it had any momentum, but it does. The scene in Detroit is one of my favorites.

Mystery, dealing with the fragile moment and being somewhat hopeful about it, avoiding regret -- these are all part of this American novel, and it feels good because of these ideas.

I saw Richard Ford speak once, and he claims his female characters are as richly drawn as his male, even though he writes from male perspectives. His evidence for this is his strong-willed mother and his appreciation for Eudora Welty, who lived near his house in Mississippi, and his wife, who would "tell him" if he got a woman wrong. What do you think? (He's slightly full of shit.)

Normalcy, being unapologetic for one's life, being alternately grateful for your fate and completely terrified by it.

Sports is a good topic for indirectly bridging connection, or avoiding any completely.

Batter up.

American Psycho

I wanted to say this book was about violence, but that's a little too easy. Going into what makes me uncomfortable about this novel (and there are things that definitely make me uncomfortable), I hit on the point of "centering." Patrick Bateman is looking for a core, for a self, and it is this spectrum he slides along on his gruesome, delusional journey for titillation, which is really just a craving for connection/acknowledgement.

People in Psycho can't understand each other; they misinterpret the other's words, or flat-out ignore people. This allows for some funny bits, but also illustrates how these characters totally "miss" each other's authentic selves. Whether or not they have authentic selves is another question, which isn't important because every fucking human has one, even genetic psychopaths.

I'm going to be honest: I loved this book. It was the first thing I read (by age 22) that I could definitively call "art." Now, of course that's a stupid thought, because I'd read McCarthy and Faulkner by this time, but as a jaded millennial, this book far exceeded any violent fantasies I could possibly have cooked up, and it was this unimaginable extremism that hit me in the guts and literally made me nauseous (at one point I had to turn the book face-down and take a breather). But the reward of this admittedly repetitive and occasionally outright boring book is, strangely, a re-centering process.

If I read it again now, I don't know what I would think. It might be "too much," but at the time, it was the kind of novel I needed to make me really think about limits, and, by association, people's centers.

It's fashionable to trash Bret Easton Ellis as an asshole, and from the little I know of his interviews, I'm sure he is, sometimes, like all of us. I don't really care. His book, essentially, is a long list of brand names interspersed with silly dialogue, drug taking, discourses on popular bands, and vicious, unremorseful murder.

This sounds terrible to a lot of people, and it would to me: but for some reason, once I got 50 or so pages in, I was invested in seeing it through to the end. Ellis walks a tough dance in presenting mostly soulless New Yorkers and expecting us to care about what happens to them (he might not expect this). He also might hope to just straight dazzle us with the vivaciousness of his prose, which works sometimes, but is untenable as a way of doing things long-term (name an Ellis novel from the last 10 years that people care about; even Pynchon wised up enough to start being people-focused).

American Psycho lives on the edge of sanity. That's the point; but by this very design, it is obsessed with souls, with what is meaningful, even as it portrays the gross lack thereof. Outside/inside: nothing new, but presented in such a way that it's literally wrapped in plastic in Australia to make sure young people don't accidentally read it. (No ten-year-old should have their eyes on this, sure. It'd fuck them up crazy.)

Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?

Quotes Stolen from the Paris Review's Interview with Updike

Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.

I have written free from any fear of forfeiting their [his parents'] love.

I feel no obligation to the remembered past; what I create on paper must, and for me does, soar free of whatever the facts were.

I really don't think I'm alone among writers in caring about what they experienced in the first eighteen years of their life. Hemingway cherished the Michigan stories out of proportion, I would think, to their merit. Look at Twain. Look at Joyce. Nothing that happens to us after twenty is as free from self-consciousness because by then we have the vocation to write. Writers' lives break into two halves. At the point where you get your writerly vocation you diminish your receptivity to experience. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey—whereas when you're young, you're so impotent you cannot help but strive and observe and feel.

Teaching, the customary alternative, seemed truly depleting and corrupting.

I do it [literary criticism] (a) when some author, like Spark or Borges, excites me and I want to share the good news, (b) when I want to write an essay, as on romantic love, or Barth's theology, (c) when I feel ignorant of something, like modern French fiction, and accepting a review assignment will compel me to read and learn.

I think it good for an author, baffled by obtuse reviews of himself, to discover what a recalcitrant art reviewing is, how hard it is to keep the plot straight in summary, let alone to sort out one's honest responses. But reviewing should not become a habit. It encourages a writer to think of himself as a pundit, of fiction as a collective enterprise and species of expertise, and of the imagination as a cerebral and social activity—all pernicious illusions.

I write every weekday morning. I try to vary what I am doing, and my verse, or poetry, is a help here. Embarked on a long project, I try to stay with it even on dull days. For every novel, however, that I have published, there has been one unfinished or scrapped... In the execution there has to be a “happiness” that can't be willed or foreordained. It has to sing, click, something. I try instantly to set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story or novel to rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.

It's hard to hold a manuscript in your mind, of course. You get down to the desk and discover that the solution you had arrived at while having insomnia doesn't really fit.

Unlike Mailer and Bellow, I don't have much itch to pronounce on great matters, to reform the country, to get elected Mayor of New York, or minister to the world with laughter like the hero of The Last Analysis. My life is, in a sense, trash, my life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

I find it hard to have opinions. Theologically, I favor Karl Barth; politically, I favor the Democrats. But I treasure a remark John Cage made, that not judgingness but openness and curiosity are our proper business. To speak on matters where you're ignorant dulls the voice for speaking on matters where you do know something.

I'm still trying to educate myself. I want to read only what will help me unpack my own bag.

I read Dostoyevsky for a college course and wept.

I love Melville and like James, but I tend to learn more from Europeans because I think they have strengths that reach back past Puritanism, that don't equate truth with intuition—

I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do. American fiction is notoriously thin on women, and I have attempted a number of portraits of women, and we may have reached that point of civilization, or decadence, where we can look at women. I'm not sure Mark Twain was able to.

Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our inner urgent whispers, but—the social fabric collapses murderously. Yes, in The Centaur, to self-sacrifice and duty, but—what of a man's private agony and dwindling? No, in The Poorhouse Fair, to social homogenization and loss of faith, but—listen to the voices, the joy of persistent existence. No, in Couples, to a religious community founded on physical and psychical interpenetration, but—what else shall we do, as God destroys our churches? I cannot greatly care what critics say of my work; if it is good, it will come to the surface in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will sink, having in the meantime provided me with a living, the opportunities of leisure, and a craftsman's intimate satisfactions. I wrote Couples because the rhythm of my life and my oeuvre demanded it, not to placate hallucinatory critical voices.

In other words, a person who has what he wants, a satisfied person, a content person, ceases to be a person. Unfallen Adam is an ape. Yes, I guess I do feel that. I feel that to be a person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situation. A truly adjusted person is not a person at all—just an animal with clothes on or a statistic. So that it's a happy ending, with this “but” at the end.

About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior. There are episodes in Henry Miller that have their human resonance; the sex in Lolita, behind the madman's cuteness, rings true; and I find the sex in D. H. Lawrence done from the woman's point of view convincing enough. In the microcosm of the individual consciousness, sexual events are huge but not all-eclipsing; let's try to give them their size.

I think books should have secrets, like people do. I think they should be there as a bonus for the sensitive reader or there as a kind of subliminal quavering. I don't think that the duty of the twentieth-century fiction writer is to retell old stories only.

I do know that there is certainly for all of us some attraction in old stories. Mine is a generation not raised on the Bible. The Greek stories seem to be more universal coin, and they certainly have served to finance more modern creations than the Hebrew stories. (Although do read sometime Kierkegaard's splendid retelling of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling.) Freud, for one, named a number of states of mind after them.

I have read old sagas—Beowulf, the Mabinogion—trying to find the story in its most rudimentary form, searching for what a story is—Why did these people enjoy hearing them? Are they a kind of disguised history? Or, more likely I guess, are they ways of relieving anxiety, of transferring it outwards upon an invented tale and purging it through catharsis?

My fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more history in it than history books, just as there is more breathing history in archaeology than in a list of declared wars and changes of government.

I feel a tenderness toward my characters that forbids making violent use of them.

One of the minimal obligations a book has to a reader is to be factually right, as to be typographically pleasant and more or less correctly proofread. Elementary author ethics dictate that you do at least attempt to imagine technical detail as well as emotions and dialogue.

I'm not conscious of any piece of fiction of mine which has even the slightest taint of satirical attempt. You can't be satirical at the expense of fictional characters, because they're your creatures. You must only love them, and I think that once I'd set Conner in motion I did to the best of my ability try to love him and let his mind and heart beat.

On both sides of the footlights, I think the present American theater mainly an excuse for being sociable.

Rabbit, Run was subtitled originally, “A Movie.” The present tense was in part meant to be an equivalent of the cinematic mode of narration. The opening bit of the boys playing basketball was visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits. This doesn't mean, though, that I really wanted to write for the movies. It meant I wanted to make a movie. I could come closer by writing it in my own book than by attempting to get through to Hollywood.

A movie does not really require much work. It pours into us, it fills us like milk being poured into a glass, whereas there is some cerebral effort needed to turn a bunch of mechanical marks on a page into moving living images.

I think that the novel is descended from two sources, historical accounts and letters. The personal letters, the epistolary novel, the novel of Richardson, which is revived now only as a tour de force, does have this cinematic instantaneity; the time is occurring on the page. But this is a minority current in the contemporary novel; we are held captive to the novel as history, as an account of things once done. The account of things done minus the presiding, talkative, confiding, and pedagogic author may be a somewhat dead convention; that is, like anybody who takes any writing courses, I was told how stale and awful it is when authors begin to signal, as Dickens did, over the heads of the characters to the reader. Yet I feel that something has been lost with this authority, with this sense of an author as God, as a speaking God, as a chatty God, filling the universe of the book. Now we have the past tense, a kind of a noncommittal deadness: God paring his fingernails. We may be getting the worst of both worlds.

In Rabbit, Run I liked writing in the present tense. You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense.

But the general question of authorial presence—I find it irksome when an author is there as a celebrity. In Salinger's later works and most of Mailer's work the author appears as somebody who counts, somebody who has an audience of teenagers out there waiting to hear from him. This kind of return to before Chekhov I don't find useful, although authorial invisibility is also a pose. The proper pose may be the Homeric bard's one—he is there, but unimportantly there, there by sufferance of the king.

I learned a lot from Salinger's short stories; he did remove the short narrative from the wise-guy, slice-of-life stories of the thirties and forties. Like most innovative artists, he made new room for shapelessness, for life as it is lived. I'm thinking of a story like “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” not “For Esmé,” which already shows signs of emotional overkill. Nabokov, I admire but would emulate only his high dedication to the business of making books that are not sloppy, that can be reread.

Good works of art direct us back outward to reality again; they illustrate, rather than ask, imitation.

Somebody like Kerouac who writes on teletype paper as rapidly as he can once slightly alarmed me. Now I can look upon this more kindly. There may be some reason to question the whole idea of fineness and care in writing. Maybe something can get into sloppy writing that would elude careful writing. I'm not terribly careful myself, actually. I write fairly rapidly if I get going, and don't change much, and have never been one for making outlines or taking out whole paragraphs or agonizing much. If a thing goes, it goes for me, and if it doesn't go, I eventually stop and get off.

A Romanian once said to me that Americans are always telling stories. I'm not sure this is as true as it once was. Where we once used to spin yarns, now we sit in front of the tv and receive pictures. I'm not sure the younger generation even knows how to gossip. But, as for a writer, if he has something to tell, he should perhaps type it almost as fast as he could talk it. We must look to the organic world, not the inorganic world, for metaphors; and just as the organic world has periods of repose and periods of great speed and exercise, so I think the writer's process should be organically varied. But there's a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you're spinning out the reel.

I wrote “The Sea's Green Sameness” years ago and meant, I believe, that narratives should not be primarily packages for psychological insights, though they can contain them, like raisins in buns. But the substance is the dough, which feeds the storytelling appetite, the appetite for motion, for suspense, for resolution. The author's deepest pride, as I have experienced it, is not in his incidental wisdom but in his ability to keep an organized mass of images moving forward, to feel life engendering itself under his hands. But no doubt, fiction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people do. Insights of all kinds are welcome; but no wisdom will substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, and a perhaps savage wish to hold, through your voice, another soul in thrall.

My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

Updike!

I Like Pizza

Sometimes you can't meet the goals you set out for yourself, but others, like flat Italian cheese circles, are within reach.

I want a buffalo chicken pizza with blue cheese sauce and hot sauce, boiling hot, in a creaky cardboard box emblazoned with chubby letters. Pizza is a national pastime, and as such, I intend to live out my American duty and order at least one meaty disc.

PIZZA.

Horror

I was never one for Nightmare on Elm Street, and stuff like Hostel only grossed me out. But sometimes, when the mood (moon?) is right, I can handle some spooky shit.

The Man from Nowhere seems like a horror movie to me, because it's really dark in subject matter and light use, and it portrays some seriously brutal violence, albeit in the guise of an action movie. The plot goes like this: A pawn shop owner reveals his past as a special forces agent when some organ harvesters kidnap his schoolgirl neighbor. Basically he kills everyone involved, and revenge, taken far enough, seems pretty close to horror in my book. If you don't mind spoilers, check out this as proof.



Likewise, the scene in Saving Private Ryan in which Private Fish is fighting for his life with a huge knife-wielding Nazi is, to me, incredibly horrifying. I always feel sick when I watch it, but for some reason I revisit it every once in a while. Why?

The world seems to break away during scenes like this, and life becomes deeply, irrevocably vulnerable, which I guess is the point of looking at unpleasant images: to feel that all the time I walk on a knife-edge, and could be killed at any second by a mis-swallowed shrimp, a Ford Focus, or a sneaky little blood disease. And I guess it makes me thankful I'm not the one being chased/mutilated/eaten alive.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the matter: "Horror is more related to being shocked or scared (being horrified), while terror is more related to being anxious or fearful. Horror has been defined as a combination of terror and revulsion." It says also terror precedes a negative event, while horror comes after one.

The prolific author Stephen King distinguishes among terror, horror, and revulsion. Terror is "the suspenseful moment in horror before the actual monster is revealed," while horror "is that moment at which one sees the creature/aberration that causes the terror or suspense." Revulsion is a type of gag-reflex gimmick. (All of this is stolen from Wikipedia.)

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

I'm not proud of something, too. When I was maybe three, I saw the movie Alien on TV. It's my second memory, ever (the first is standing on one of those moving walkways in a Florida airport and crying because my dad yelled at me when I asked for a toy, then my mom whispering, "Garland!" -- pretty typical childhood stuff, I love my 'rents, no need to get rowdy and call DYFS).



In Memory 2, I was in a motel, also in Florida, and I was left alone with the TV on. My dad had been the last one to leave, and I remember him turning the channel to something "kids might like." What he put on was Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).

I can't really express the feeling I had as a toddler first seeing a monster burst out of John Hurt's body. I remember freezing in place, seated on the flower-patterned bed, as slime and blood and other fluids sprayed about and a living fucking thing emerged from a human being. For probably a few years after I thought, if you ate the wrong kind of food, that could happen to me, too.

The feeling was so strong that, ten years later, I was watching TV with some close friends when a commercial for an Alien replay came on. I immediately turned away, and my buddy's Uncle Pete laughed, asking, "What's a matter Joe, are you afraid or something?" I blushed pink, mumbled, "No," but I still felt frightened inside, not to mention embarrassed as a bona fide wuss.

I still haven't watched the movie again (wuss), but if I break the scene down, I can tell that I did feel terror (what's going to happen next?) and revulsion (holy God, look at that hole in the British dude's chest). Does this combine into horror? Or is horror a separate business?

King says I would have felt horror upon first sight of the alien, and probably revulsion to the gore. Perhaps the terror in that instant should have been relieved, because the alien was visible, but I say with full confidence that my anxiety and suspense didn't diminish; if anything, it went up.



I have not read Danse Macabre, the book King talks about all this in, but from the quotes I can find, there's no reason to assume terror should vanish as horror starts up. They can coexist. Whether or not one is a prerequisite for the other, I'm not sure, but since my patience with these abstract nouns is starting to wane, I'll just friggin' move on. However, I will say revulsion is probably optional if it's not the point -- so thanks, Ridley, for freaking me out when you didn't have to.

Awkward flashbacks aside, there's the matter of tragedy and horror. One can have elements of the other, I'm sure. From Wikipedia again, tragedy is "a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing." That reaction to the Alien scene was not pleasurable, I'll tell you that.

Can tragedy be horror? In Antigone, more or less everyone dies, and a nauseating air of darkness hangs around the play, but it seems different to me from the feeling of horror. Maybe if Sophocles had rubbed my face in the blood and guts more, I'd feel it?

By Wikipedia's logic, Antigone does not count as a horror story, because I'm neither terrified nor revolted. Mostly, I'm just saddened by the avoidable loss of so many people. Same goes for Hamlet, even if the emo prince wears black the whole time, and there's a ghost. Mr. King might say Shakespeare engages on the level of "terror," and in this he might be right: I feel anxiety about what will happen next, coupled with a premonition that shit will go drastically south for everyone involved. But I'd also say anxiety and terror are different. One is "extreme fear" and the other is "a feeling of nervousness or unease."

Does terror always precede horror? What tragedy-horrors do you know of? (The movie version of Stephen King's The Mist, maybe?) How do you feel about using revulsion (e.g., no more Saw movies please, although the first one was more horrifying than revolting, so I suppose that's cool)? Let me know. If you think I'm wrong about Antigone or Hamlet, let me know, too.

Also, in case you made it this far, here's this. Plus in case you were wondering, that Florida story has a nice ending, because I eventually got an Alien action figure -- I think it was the android. Technically it might have been a few years later, but whatever. Have a horror-free day! Unless, you know, you choose to watch some real freaky flix.

A Diary Isn't About You, Dweeb

Roberto Bolaño once stood in a crowd and yelled his own poem at Octavio Paz, then Mexico’s most recognized wordsmith and a future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Bolaño was not, it seems, hesitant to tell people what he thought of them, a skill I wish I practiced every day. I can barely tell a Jehovah's Witness at my doorstep that I don't believe in God, and that even if I did, I wouldn't expect Her to oppose blood transfusions for dying infants.

While I don't understand why the Almighty acts like a Ba'athist tyrant, let's lay off supreme deities temporarily and head back to the 1970s, when the wandering Bolaño founded a small artistic group called the infrarrealistas, who accomplished such noble deeds as crashing other poets' lectures in Mexico City and yelling abuse at them. Bolaño hated Octavio Paz, hence the interruption, which brings up a good tangent: protests by their nature are disruptive, so before you complain about the audacity of the Black Lives Matter movement (e.g., at the Bernie Sanders rally), kindly remind yourself of your enclavish whiteness and criticize your own jacked-up community first. Issues with rubios notwithstanding, the spirit of a young, radical "fuck-you" imbues Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, a twisty fictionalization of his itinerant past.

The book's first and third parts are presented as the diary of a teenage poet, which might also be titled "Graphic Analog Sexts." (It was the 70s.) The larger, middle chunk, which I boldly and unoriginally christen "The Point," conducts a series of interviews about--not "with"--two adult unorthodox poets, who are basically professional drifters. This split format invites the reader into a parade of heterogeneous brains, which was confusing and even off-putting at first, but eventually convinced me to care for the humans, even if I didn't always enjoy their lurid escapades.

Throughout the center bit Bolaño switches back and forth among interviewees, weaving through countries, human psyches, and a handful of weird-ass decades. Like any mother, I chose my favorite characters and started to wonder, while reading some story I didn't care about at all, "When are we getting back to Amillo? I want to know if he finds another bottle of mezcal with those two rascals in 1976." I didn't really say the word "rascal"; I just realized later it kind of rhymes with "mezcal."

One section about a lawyer had its positive moments, but the frequent Latin and overall size turned me off, not unlike a certain ponderous church--by the way, when are you going to accept female priests? The longer you wait, the more likely we'll all see you as a pedophile exchange program with beautiful hats, even if young people love you now. Also, let male priests marry.


Why can't I smoke forty-five cigarettes at once?

So in the book, more than one section did nothing but list the names of obscure poets, some real and others arbitrarily fake. While I get the design behind "realism," this kind of inventory prose is soul-killing, which is a mortal sin when you are not also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. As a rule of thumb, killing more trees than you need for self-indulgence is a stupid idea. Here's looking at you, Kissinger...

...that's an Agent Orange joke.

As a whole, though, The Savage Detectives impressed me with a plucky, heartfelt vitality, which sounds like professional jacket copy but feels true to say. At least in the English translation, Bolaño writes without pyrotechnics, preferring what I call "chill uncle bluntness" (I hate the word "avuncular") in the vein of Murakami, except Bolaño's lack of restraint opens more breathing room for the long, propulsive sentence that can make me relive the memory of falling in love for the first time, as well as the subsequent understanding that an orgasm on a couch and the pledging of your life to another human are two very different forms of meaning, which only overlap a few times a week, or fewer, if there's hormone stuff going on.

Roberto Bolaño was born in Chile in 1953 and moved to Mexico City when he was young. At some point, he returned to his birthplace to deliver messages for the resistance against General Pinochet, who was both the focus of his book By Night in Chile and a murderous, chronic human rights violator installed by the US government in place of an elected president. During this time, Roberto was held in a prison where people were brutally tortured, and the sole reason he escaped was because two of his guards had gone to high school with him. Luck such as this makes me relieved to have been the weird, harmless chameleon who kept friends in every clique, or as relieved as my deep-seeded conformity can make me.

Meanwhile, shit goes down in Mexico City while rich and poor poets fuck, fight, laugh, love, drink, and write poetry, hardly a line of which we ever get to see (we see the fucking, though). It seems certainly a challenge to be happy when money troubles, romantic pitfalls, and the overall craziness of 1970s Mexico combine in one location, but some of these artists manage to do it, even if they realize the pursuit of happiness is secondary, since joy is fleeting, to the pursuit of meaning, which is the only thing that probably matters. Props to Dr. Frankl.

The two focal poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, spend their time searching for Cesarea Tinajero, a very elusive poet from the 1920s who started what was called the "visceral realist" movement (no relation to infrarrealismo). Most of the "plot" revolves around this goal of discovery, as the dope-dealing poets talk to everyone they can about Tinajero's life. What's strange, though, is Cesarea has only one recorded poem to her name, which begs the question: is she even a writer? Belano and Lima seem sure, but I find it tough to trust their judgment when they're impulsive and intoxicated all the time, which admittedly sounds like bullshit from a man who recreationally abused horse tranquilizers.

We only ever learn obliquely what Lima and Bolano are like. The general consensus is that they're weird, and, like Tinajero, it's not even 100% certain they're really poets (the ratio of odd jobs and marijuana sales to actual lyrical output seems rather lopsided). Honestly, they both seemed like one composite character to me as I was reading, which could have been annoying but somehow I just didn't care. They're both lonely, pretend-mysterious men who love poetry and act apathetic about everything else, except maybe sex. Both follow a logic that baffles their companions at times, transforming them into a strange, slightly spooky urban legend of Mexico City.

The interviewees, who all spoke in the first person, were by far the realest characters, and this seems like the point: through these artists (most of them are), we get sketches of two men who are chasing the sketch of a possibly dead woman. In that sense it bears resemblance to a detective story, but only if you drink a few fingers of mezcal and squint between the lines of your favorite poem.

Bolaño might dissect his rowdy times, but not with the narcissism Bret Easton Ellis prefers. On the contrary, Roberto jumps willingly into the skulls of many others for unexpected angles into a history he's left behind (what history isn't?). Like Ellis, he is willing to write about horrible things--a story about a gangster brutally choking a woman with his dick, in the middle of a crowded bar, no less, and to applause, was particularly unsettling--but not only from a sense of insecure weariness.

Pretending to be cool, by the way, is entirely normal, but you start to grievously wound people if you keep it up much longer than your teenage years. Actually being cool requires a bunch of stuff I fail all the time at, like being authentic and pursuing what you're actually interested in. (Animals, writing, Spongebob Squarepants memes.)

What I gather Bolaño believed, writing as he was in his middle age, is that his diary was unconcerned with him. Sure, every novel bears something incredibly personal to the author--and Ms. Morrison's exhortation to "write the book you want to read" is always true--so this author wanted to read about his friends, who they were, how strangely they might have seen him, and, of course, an unavoidable bit about how terrifying/exciting it was to write his first poems and lose his virginity. That Bolaño at the time of writing had detoxed from a heroin addiction and begun a family only drives the point home harder that he cared more for other people than his own limited mind, even if he did want to see himself as a kooky teen.

Rather than standing up and screaming at Octavio Paz, the fictional poet Arturo Bolano, when he sees the actual famous future laureate in a park, only respects his space, and at some point later has a friendly conversation with him. This is the mature, maybe more defeated but also more honest writer, no longer motivated by hatred of an "other," which is more than a lot of us can say. Just mouth the word "Muslim" in a crowd and watch people in our "post"-racial country cringe.

I admit I enjoyed the ending, in part because it ran counter to my expectation that the book would just taper off into random entries of carnal love, cheap hotels, exchanges of poems without showing them. The denouement feels like a disc between the book's vertebrae, to risk a medical simile, and avoids being a tacked-on attempt to wring excitement out of the pages. This is a challenge in a book that, on purpose, screws with the idea of plot, and is so hostile to your run-of-the-mill narrative arc.

While the biggest drawback of The Savage Detectives is baggage, I forgive most of it. Whenever I'd feel myself trudging into a slump, Bolaño would shake things up with some jarring action out of nowhere, and I'd sign up for the next section. This means his pacing is pretty odd, but I don't come away from the novel wishing he had more fights and car crashes. It's the quiet parts I remember most: San Epifanio's vacant smile while he recovers from surgery, the old man pouring mezcal for Lima and Belano, Belano crying on a friend's couch in Israel (a married friend whom he's in love with), Lima struggling to fish on a commercial boat, "the mother of all poets" hiding in a toilet stall for days while the Mexican Army storms the university where she works.

Maybe that last one isn't 100% tranquil, but I savored the lulls in The Savage Detectives. The gaps where poetry might skulk around and show itself, though it almost never does. In effect, this is a book about poets, not the lines they produce, and by grounding himself in the humans behind the creative process, Bolaño lets his novel breathe.

A bristly avant-garde poet in his youth, Bolaño settled down eventually and started a family in Spain, where he began writing books to make real money—real, of course, relative to writing poetry, which makes the business of fiction look like credit default swaps in 2005. For a man who claimed his chief desires in life were "writing and making love," he lived pretty much according to his principles (married people statistically have more sex) and got some solid art out of it. That he shared his diary with the world by splitting it into a hundred mini-versions, he showed that one's vulnerable thoughts are hardly selfish--they're pretty much charity, as long as you realize you're a lame organism like everyone else. In other words, Bolaño=Octavio Paz. With a viewpoint like that, there's really only room for care and understanding.

When the Jehovah's Witness next rings my doorbell (at my parent's place, since I live in a third-floor apartment now), I know I might feel like disparaging their beliefs in favor of my own, like some less eloquent Christopher Hitchens, straining to prove to them that their system creates misunderstanding and pain while my own is more rational, more inclusive, and allows for a greater capacity to be kind to others. However, maybe I'll just think of Bolaño's winter years (relative: he died of liver failure in 2003, in his fifties) and take the honest route, neither offering polite banalities, nor directing the plucky inquirer to a hell of her own choosing, but saying only this: "I don't believe in God. Hopefully it's rewarding that you do, and I expect you to respect my lack of religion, so let's both get on with our days and do some good in the world. Thanks for stopping by."

And then I'd skip church and blaspheme with my pups in the backyard. ¡Felicitaciones!

Pitching My Novel Until I'm Physically Sick of It

So I'm pitching my book to three agents on Friday, and I've been drinking lots of coffee and scrambling to make a workable, concise summary of my book. I'm doing this over and over until my brain malfunctions.

I want my story to be unorthodox, to promote mental health, to be community-oriented, to be a little bit funny, and to be hopeful. We'll see if that comes across in my pitch (I don't see any humor in it, now that I'm reading it over again).

Here goes:

"Keystone Trigger, a 100,000-word literary thriller, follows a group of people so stuck in their troubled pasts that they lose control of the present. It's set on Okinawa, which is known for the longest-living people in the world, and for a history of US-Japanese military oppression, which rips apart the local community. So, in my story, a decorated ex-Marine rapes an Okinawan girl and sets off a chain reaction of violence that escalates when a typhoon hits the island.

A suicidal activist in her nineties, a ridiculously impulsive hitman, and a tough but grief-stricken psychologist all fight to gain power over their surroundings, even though the only way they can truly feel strong is to make peace."

Just for clarity's sake, here are my main characters and their goals/flaws:

Hidari
Goal: to create a free Okinawa.
Flaw: she isolates herself because of her past.

Glen
Goal: to feel like a Marine again.
Flaw: he is consumed by the need to feel powerful.

Yoshio
Goal: to be a good man like his foster parents wanted.
Flaw: he is incredibly impulsive.

Dana
Goal: to keep her family stable and intact.
Flaw: she doesn’t communicate her grief to those around her.

Also, here's a video tour of Okinawa, thanks to the Washington Post.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to tear apart my pitch if you want.

Feeling Like An Author

So I'm heading to the local writers' fair at Cascades Library at 10am (21030 Whitfield Place, Potomac Falls, VA 20165 cough cough...) and my goal is to feel like an author. This doesn't involve repeating "you're an author" over and over until I externally validate myself into a state of euphoria, although that might be fun if I did bath salts while wearing a cable-knit sweater.

Instead, I worked with my girlfriend Anna to brand all the stuff I'm going to show and do, which means she did all the work--an incredible amount of it. Seriously, she's the reason I look even halfway professional. I, meanwhile, ate bread and shuffled around in my house slippers, trying to explain why I named a particular story "Coffee Spiders." (Spoiler: it has coffee spiders in it.)

Major props to Anna and her brand-oriented brain. Now come see me at a table with my face on it!

Time for bed.