Tuesday the 19th, join others at the Richard Hugo House for a review of upcoming courses/seminars/sessions, with the instructors themselves giving the orientations and in some cases reading from their own works:

Teacher Reading

Tuesday, January 19, 6:30 p.m.

Unsure what class is right for you? Join winter quarter teachers Kelley Eskridge, Karen Finneyfrock, Carla Norton, Judith Roche, Matthew Simmons, Anastacia Tolbert and Jeanine Walker as they discuss their classes and read some of their own work.

I missed the previous New Works Competition at Hugo House but am still very interested in writing a lot this year – if I can dig up the time and find a way to move this heavy weight off my chest – and the Hugo House is always a great place to start when you’re looking for motivation and/or inspiration.

See you there?

Not a blog for writers, exactly, but a blog by a writer: Writings By Lu, or “the diary of a sand writer.”  It’s a superb find; filled with lovely, sympathetic and tender prose, such as this excerpt about the process of grieving and recovery:

Tread softly, gently. Allow yourself to grieve, but within reason. Don’t be overindulgent. Stand tall, walk proudly, and refuse to let your spirit be broken. Spend time with the people you love, pray every day, and never forget to take care of yourself. Keep busy, move forward, live one day at a time. Today, take baby steps if you need to, but remember. In time, you will travel this road filled with cracks, swiftly, with the grace and beauty of a wild stallion, roaming free in a green open field. So, hold on my friend and be strong.

Or this excerpt from a love letter: doesn’t it just make your heart break and/or gush, depending on where you’re at in your own relationship?

Who said you could wear the only crown in my kingdom ?
Yet it fits perfectly and looks so good on you, I don’t want to take it back. It’s yours if you’ll still wear it.
Why does the thought of you keep me awake at night?
Why do I dream of your soft kisses and sweet smile?
Why do I thank God for helping you find me?
Why do I pray I’ll never do anything so stupid to make you want to leave my side?
You don’t play fair.

Luanne Stevenson, you’ve just made it to my personal blogroll.  Check out writingsbylu.wordpress.com or follow Luanne on Twitter at @writingsByLU.  Enjoy.

I’m journeying in Mexico.

At least in my mind I am.  My body – my real body, physically encumbered – sits in a coffee shop; I’m buzzed on caffeine, idly people-watching and feeling the ebb and flow of the day wash over me.

Why Mexico?  My dreams and nightmares chase me there; a concept for a short-story, half-formed, has been baking in the back of my mind for a few weeks, and so I’ve been imagining it.  This is not the Mexico of tourists and beaches and deferential men in white jackets bringing chilled drinks on white serving-trays.  This is the Mexico of rocks and sand and deep cañons and wide-open azure skies and prickly cacti and adobe walls and silent, black-eyed people with long dark hair who point south, always south, and say “Go!” and then turn and walk away.  Where is my destination?  Who knows.  I have a journey to make, in this story, and it involves an escape, a moving-away-from, an electric impulse, as when a horse shies from a snake and throws its rider.  Emphatic.  It also involves a journey to someplace, a destination, a home, but this direction is more uncertain, foggy, shrouded, unpredictable.  Along the way, I meet people, always friendly but taciturn, weary, jaded but not cynical, who seem wise beyond their experience, as if all of humanity’s lessons can be found in a small village near a dead-end arroyo in the middle of nowhere.

Partway through the journey (in my story) I’m asked to provide escort for a young girl, not much older than my own daughter, who is travelling to a boarding school.  She’s received some stipend, some award, some one-in-a-thousand selection, and has no family that can spare the time for the hundreds of miles it will take, on foot, for the trip.  There are no cars in this story.  Am I in the past?

What’s my task here?  To guide the girl over mountains and through deserts to her destination?  To recognize that in the midst of one’s own journey, others’ needs can and will intrude?  That running-away-from and running-toward are but two sides of the same coin?

Pursuit and withdrawal are both themes in this story, although neither is made manifest in the world.  Rather, it’s me – the authorial me – that is both the subject and object of the pursuit, and the subject and object of the withdrawal.  A mirror-image symmetric perfection.  What one hand puts on one scale, the other hand unwittingly puts on the other scale also.  Balance and cancelling-out.  Breath and exhalation.  One step forward, one step back.

In this Mexico, in this story, perhaps the protagonist finds answers.  Perhaps he manufactures answers.  Perhaps he finds nothing at all.  I’m not sure at this point how the story ends, how it should end, how it should be made right – in a good or bad way – for the journeying man.  Which lessons do I want to teach?  Which lessons can I, as the author, accept?  We are all both parents and offspring of our stories – creating, and created by, that which we put on the page.  What will Mexico be for me?

Are you stuck?  Stuck as in stymied, can’t move, can’t move forward, can’t move back, trapped in a web of your own making?  Anneli Rufs gives a sort of pop-psych tour through the landscape of stuckness in her recent book “Stuck: Why We Can’t (Or Won’t) Move On”.

It’s a personal journey for Rufs, who sprinkles anecdotes from her own life throughout the text, as well as examples from friends, family, and people she’s interviewed.  This gives the book a sort of emotional relevance – other people are stuck, too – and keeps it from becoming a dry thesis.

I have to admit I found this book wanting on a couple fronts.  First, there is the amount of time that Rufs spends on trauma and what she calls “trauma narratives” – childhood abuse, PTSD, victimhood, and the like.  Perhaps that’s just not where I am, personally, or perhaps I instinctively cringe when people trot out their long suffering at the hands of others (real or imagined), as excuses for where they are today, but those long sections were not particularly helpful or relevant.

Second, towards the end of the book Rufs flips us around and asks us to consider whether we think we’re stuck when, in fact, we may not be.  Is society telling us we’re stuck when in reality, absent any external measures, we could be happy, fulfilled, and content?  To my way of thinking, this is a sort of authorial double-cross.  It reduces the volume of the wake-up call just as the alarm is about to ring.  It waffles when it should be direct, blunt, and clear-eyed.  Sure, you’re stuck.  We all are, to some extent and about some topics.  Let’s not equivocate and leave the reader wondering if all of this angst – this why am I here, and what do I do next? self-questioning – go wanting in the face of uncertainty about its reality.  If you feel stuck, are you deluding yourself?  Or is it more likely that you ARE stuck?

I suppose in the end, this is not exactly the book I was looking for.  I wanted the book that’s subtitled “How To Get Unstuck.”  Instead, this is an explanatory treatise on why we get stuck in the first place.

So my personal lessons on getting unstuck remain my guide: Make a clear goal.  Commit yourself to it.  Then do it.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful quote I read this morning:

“Only a fool gets what he wants, because only the foolish keep on trying.”

Sometimes when I sit at a coffee shop, writing pages for The Next Great American Novel, I stop.  I think.  It’s not writer’s block – I have logorrhea and could write all day, if prompted, or if promised an audience – I’m just musing about my prose.  Prose quality, to be exact.  Am I good writer,I ask myself.  The page is mute in response to my question.  I don’t know.  I’d like to *think* I write well, but sometimes I find that blogging habits – such as my tendency to hyphenate every side thought (cough) – pass through into my “real” writing.  Also: my tendency to overuse air-quotes.  My tendency to avoid pronouns.  My tendency to jump from one thought to another, cat-like, without giving any one thought its full share of attention.

Journaling is tough too, because when I write in my journal it’s all just stream-of-consciousness writing, fast, loose, no rules, no editing.  I wonder if between the two (blogging and journaling) that I’m not spending enough time honing my capability to create amazing prose passages.  There’s a certain set of effects that I’m searching for when I write, a certain sibilance, one that is original – truly me – and one that is allusive, witty, informed, active, and which reads as if casually unrehearsed. 

Sound is important too – when I read passages in my head, I want them to sound right.  This is difficult, because you have to take into account the need for BOTH consistency and variety.  Too consistent, and your prose sounds boring.  Too much variety, and your prose sounds jarring.  You have to weave together Faye Dunaway’s breathy innocence with Marlene Dietrich’s insistent demands with Mae West’s purring invitations, and get them all to work seamlessly together.  It’s hard, harder than I would think, but of course EVERYTHING is harder than I would think, what with me being the eternal optimist.  I think if I was a pessimist, I wouldn’t write at all.  But I think you, the Generic Reader, care to read what I write.  What hubris!  *cough*

The secret to great writing?  There is no secret.  Hard work, patience, learning the ability to critically analyze one’s own work, being willing to seek out and accept feedback gracefully, having the ability to Ctrl+X passages that are not working.

I’ve been making my way (slowly) through Pynchon’s Against The Day and thought this passage was a riot:

“Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy; your mother’s cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin – all these for the devout Manichaean are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness.”

“But it’s everything that matters,” protested Chick Counterfly.

“And a true follower of this faith had to give it all up.  No sex, not even marriage; no children, no family ties.  These being only tricks of the Darkness, there to distract us from seeking union with the Light.”

“That’s the choice?  Light or pussy? What kind of choice is that?”

“Suckling!”

“Sorry Lindsay, I meant ‘vagina’, of course!”

ROFL

I’m in the middle of reading Against the Day, by Thomas  Pynchon, and I’m enjoying the expansive, wild, diverse set of characters Pynchon has created for his novel.  In particular, being now and forever a sucker for a love story, I lapped up the tale of Merle Rideout and Erlys Snidell.

Merle Rideout is a photographer, a perpetrator (and victim) of a crime that he can’t remember, ostracized from the community, facing

deputies with court orders way before breakfast, patent lawyers, vigilantes with shotguns, and worst of all those town lades, herds o’ locusts, no end to ‘em.  Torchlight rallies waving signs on sticks, ‘Beast without Shame’.. so forth.

[…] It was exactly in this blessed lull in the daily discombobulation that Merle met Erlys Mills Snidell, and found himself unexpectedly miles up some unfamiliar road, as if in the dark he had encountered an unmapped fork. […] “The Aether might have been an open question,” he told Dally, years later, “but there was never no doubt about that Erlys.”

Later, Merle’s daughter Dahlia (Dally) asks about her mother:

“And, so, what first attracted you to her?”

“Didn’t run away screaming when I told her how I felt.”

“Love at first sight, something like that?”

“Figured there was no point in trying to hide it.  Minute and a half longer, she’d have figured it out anyway.”

After a few years facing the hardships of the day with Merle, Erlys takes off with a traveling magician, Luca Zomboni, the “evil interloper”, leaving Merle with their baby daughter Dahlia.

Merle waited in East Fullmoon as long as he could, waited for mail, a telegram, a rider, a carrier pigeon circling in from the winter skies, and in the meantime learned how straightforward it would all he, taking care or this baby here, long as he didn’t fret about the time or any need he might’ve thought he had to get on with some larger plan-with Erl gone, anything like that was out the window and down the turnpike anyway — and that long as he just kept breathing smoothly in and out, just staying within the contour of the chore of the moment, life with young Dahlia would provide precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or otherwise.

Doesn’t it just break your heart?

Many years later, Merle comes across a magazine article featuring Luca Zomboni, and there are pictures of Zomboni with Erlys.

Erlys, who had always been beautiful, was way beyond all that now. Years of bitterness about how little she had loved him sloughed away and Merle understood, miles down the line, the simple truth that Erlys had no more been ‘his’ than the unfortunate Bert Snidell’s, and that to persist in that belief anymore was to approach the gates of the laughing academy.

I love two things about the story of Merle and Erlys: first, the purity of Merle’s love for her, from the very first time he set eyes on her.  Second, the arc of the emotional response that Merle has – from rose-colored-glasses love at first sight, to day-to-day living and loving, to pain and anguish when she leaves, to bitterness, to a final acceptance about their relationship.  Has Merle come full circle?  Perhaps.  I’m only a quarter of the way through the novel, so there could be more to the story, but Pynchon has so many characters thrown in to the mix that I’m not even sure Erlys will make a second appearance, let alone try to predict how it might turn out for good old Merle.

Americana

Don DeLillo

1971

Americana is a tough book to review.  I finished it a few days ago and have been mulling it over and over in my mind.  I’m not sure that there is a single theme that one can pull out of the novel around which to frame a review – but let’s try.

The novel revolves around a period in the life of early-middle-age David Bell in which he embarks on a road trip.  He’s a network executive, brilliantly positioned, but filled with confusion and more than a bit of self-loathing.  He’s divorced, but good-looking and eligible, and has several relationships underway at the same time in that early-70’s sort of swinger way.  Yet he’s unhappy, unfulfilled, stifled perhaps.   I’ve read other reviews that talk about the narrator’s alienation – and that rings true.  He’s in the system, of the system (his father is an ad man), and yet he finds himself outside the system.  He dwells on the origin and meaning of anonymous, semi-subversive memos that are circulated around the office.  He’s obsessed with who’s in and who’s out.  He’s concerned with his own place in the system, and analyzes all the subtle office-political cues for signs of his in-ness or out-ness.

So, a third of the way through the book, he sets out on a road trip, ostensibly to film the Navajo in Arizona, but his plans go (unintentionally?) awry.  He and his friends stop in a small town called Fort Curtis and Bell becomes obsessed with making a personal film, a subversive film, a work of art that is intended to defy all convention, using local townspeople as his actors.

DeLillo writes, in Bell’s voice:

The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning.  I like to touch the film.  I like to watch it move through the projector.  This is my success.

He tarries too long in making this film and eventually supposes that the network has fired him; which brings us to the last section of the book, the conclusion of his road trip with a new wildcat businessman named Clevenger.  They double to Arizona, where Clevenger operates a test track, and he offers Bell a job.  Then comes one of the strangest scenes in fiction, where the test track crew, including Clevenger and Bell, get drunk and have a surreal orgy with some local women that stop by the garage.  Bell is pulled in several directions – he attempts to fight the humiliation forced on the women, while simultaneously fighting his own urges.  The better half of his nature wins out, and the end of the book sees him setting out on a return trip to New York.

What’s to love?  The prose – tight, descriptive, fluid.  The characters – all of whom have a fully-fleshed out third dimension; their own secrets, worries, cares, enthusiasms.

When I first got done with this book, I thought of two other books: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, which I just got done reading a couple months ago.  It’s obvious that DFW was influenced by Americana, especially the idea of “The Entertainment”.  The second book that came to mind was Falconer, by John Cheever.  The style of the prose reminds me of Cheever, and DeLillo’s weary-but-affectionate handling of his main characters, warts and all, is very similar.

I’m tempted to re-read Americana again, soon, because some important part of me believes that I really didn’t “get it”.  Some books are like that – you read them once, and come away with a furrowed brow; you read it again, and the puzzle pieces start to fall into place.   Sometimes a third reading is in order.  It’s certainly well-written enough to make a second read an enjoyable experience; and I really want to get past that feeling that I Just Don’t Know Everything DeLillo Intended To Express.

Of course, that general feeling – that I’m just not seeing things correctly – could be more properly attributed to my general personal sense of ennui, the sense that I’m not in the place I want to be, that there are things out in the world that I should be doing and people that I should be spending time with.  Given that context, maybe it makes sense that I’m struggling a bit interpreting a novel about a disaffected young professional.

Last part of the review – this book has whetted my appetite for the two other DeLillo novels I’ve just recently purchased – White Noise and Underworld.  I’ve heard spectacular things about both.

I’m curious – if you’ve read the book, what did you make of it?  Love it?  Hate it? Other?

Just finished David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System.  This read followed hard on the heels of Wallace’s magnificent Infinite Jest, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Broom suffered in comparison; it’s also true, however, that I thoroughly enjoyed Broom.  It was an entirely different type of work.  Lots of talking; a good chunk of the book’s exposition is given in dialogue form.  Lots of focus on male-female relationships, ambiguously defined and maintained.  A similar investigation of family dynamics that one saw in Infinite Jest. The plot, or pseudo-plot, revolves around a missing great-grandmother and a cohort of her nursing-home acquaintances, but then everything kind of goes off from there in several different directions, and nothing really gets resolved.  In fact, and the book is famous for this, the narration ends in mid-sentence, unfinished.

What was memorable?  The contrast between the nervous, desexualized Rick Vigorous, and his newly met Amherst pal Wang-Dang Lang was priceless.  You can imagine from his nickname on what Andrew Lang’s reputation hangs.  Or is hung. (ba da boom!).  The sex-talking parrot, the industrialist who wants to eat the world, the drug-addict college kid who talks philosophy to his prosthetic leg – all are very well done sketches.  Wallace’s description of the office scenes at Frequent and Vigorous publishing are subtle, coy, and funny.  As a cohesive work, it can be faulted, for sure, but I really enjoyed the sensibility, the language, the imagery, even the imagination behind conceits like the Great Ohio Desert (aka GOD).

What would I have liked more of?  More Wittgenstein – Lenore’s great-grandmother (also named Lenore) was a student, and her philosophy as such got very little airing.

Overall: Excellent work.  If you liked (a) Infinite Jest, (b) Pynchon’s V, or (c) DeLillo’s Americana (which I’m reading now, and from which Broom quite obviously borrows), you’ll enjoy The Broom of the System.

Have you read it?  What did you think?  Leave a comment!

So as part of my next personal 30-day challenge, I’m going to attempt to whip a piece of writing into shape for publication.  Day 30, rain or shine, shit or shinola, I’m going to submit at least a short story to a publisher.  Said publisher, upon hefting the submission once or twice, will immediately recognize it as Proof Positive of the Second Coming of Yann Martel.  Or something.  Maybe they’ll roundfile it, or send me a form letter saying “Your work shows promise, but is not what we’re looking for at the present time.”  Either way, it’s in their hands, and out of mine.

In all seriousness, I just want to put some OOMPH behind my goals and make myself accountable to others for producing in areas of my life that have been, um, underserved.  Exercise is one area; tomorrow I finish Day 30 of my initial commitment there.  Writing is another area; so I’ll join a writing group and force myself to crank out publishable pages in between meetings.  There are other areas that I’m thinking about as well.

The process of finding a suitable group is always a little overwhelming – social dynamics are always play a huge role in whether or not you find a writing group helpful or not.  After a brief search, I found a few meetups that might be interesting:

Seattle Writers Group – Daylight Hours

Seattle Writers Meetup–Book-Length Fiction & Non-fiction

Seattle Writers’ Study Hall

Which to choose?  I may attend one or two meetings of each and get a feel for the people and the vibe.  Any writing groups you know about that are must-attends?