project michelle

I have a friend who was friends with a woman named Michelle Maykin. The only reason I know this is because Michelle had leukemia and her family and friends ran a website called Project Michelle to try and get people to register as bone marrow donors, for her and all the others dealing with leukemia. I would periodically visit her site to see how she was doing. I don't know why--I didn't know her. Maybe because I felt connected to her, however distantly. Maybe because my grandmother died of leukemia. Maybe just because of who she was. She seemed like an incredible person. Anyway, Michelle died yesterday. I can't believe how sad it makes me. She lived in the Bay Area. She was only 27.

I guess the best way to help someone live on is to share their stories. You can check out her web site if you want to know more about her.

some new thoughts on metafiction

I am nearing the end of Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. I can't say I'm enthralled, though he does some interesting stuff. But one thing I am realizing is that metafiction is best used judiciously. There are a few times, for instance, where Foer-the-author calls out his own inability to fully express a character motivation or a craft technique. One example is in a paragraph that I just read: a letter from Foer-the-character's guide Alexander, who is reading Foer-the-character's story about the journey they have gone on together.

"I have a further issue to discuss about your writing." (Alexander writes) "Why do women love your grandfather because of his dead arm? Do they love it because it enables them to feel strong over him? Do they love it because they are commiserating it, and we love the things that we commiserate? Do they love it because it is a momentous symbol of death? I ask because I do not know."

Alexander has read Foer-the-character's story and has questions and even qualms. These sorts of passages provided me some initial relief: "aha! Foer-the-author sees exactly what is going on and is consciously choosing either not to expand or is planning to expand in some yet-unknown way." And, as I said, I'm not done with the book so the latter may be true. But there is also a way in which this feels very much like cheating. I remember a teacher once saying something about how if a character has to comment on how cliche something s/he is doing, then it probably is cliche and the author needs to just write it better. This came back to me while reading this passage. Commenting on something not being very deeply written does not excuse the fact that it is not.

I still love the idea of commenting on the process of writing within the writing. But it's interesting to see an example of it being done not so well, too. In this case, I would tend to agree with my old teacher. Calling out faults in the craft of your own writing does not necessarily make for a stronger piece of fiction. Though they may be unconscious signs of where you need to go deeper.

california

I am trying to understand what it is California means to me. Getting back from Vermont always makes me think about this. Getting back from the East Coast in general. I've lived here in Northern California my entire life. I know: foxtails, redwoods, flakiness, a crazy beast of an ocean, dry heat, dust, wine, neuroticism, narcissism, traffic, judgement, produce, psychobabble, probing talk about everything... EVERYTHING... except money (but including real estate). Everything in California is all talk. Did I mention the wine?

I visited my sister when she was in New Jersey a few summers ago. One morning there was a ridiculously huge praying mantis on the front windshield of the rental car window. Bigger than my hand. In the summer, the landscape bleeds chlorophyll. There is grass everywhere, growing the way the yellow-gold weeds do over here. We decided to go to the ocean. I wanted a burrito. There were no burritos. We drove by a little boardwalk and sat down in the sand, which was the wrong color. Then we found a burrito at a little stand and I asked for salsa. The lady gave me the strangest look. "You mean sauce?" "What?" "Sauce?" "...Okay?" She gave me marinara sauce. It was the worst burrito I've ever had.

We kept driving. We came to some part of the shore where people build monstrous houses overlooking the water. The water was more pond-green than blue, the waves kind of listless. Hotels. People. Paddle-boarders. What threw me off was the direction of the sun. In New Jersey, the sun doesn't set over the water.

My earliest memories are of water. My earliest memories are of California. This sounds kind of stupid, but I honestly don't know who I am without California. Maybe because I moved so much, I learned to attach myself to the state rather than an individual city; the landscape rather than people. I took my dog on a long, long walk along the bay the other day. This is what we saw:




I had dinner over the water a few hours later. Outside the sailboats looked like slow, ancient beasts grazing in the sunset. I'm not even trying to be artful. They really looked like that. God, the wine was so good. I walked on the pier until it was too cold and I couldn't feel the ocean anymore. I've seen it all so many times. Sometimes I just wonder what else I would know.

i need to go to this

SF International Poetry Festival
Thursday, July 23rd to Sunday, July 26th
http://www.sfipf.org

what i learned from residency...

...is that you can talk about the ineffable, but you can't use it in writing. It's sort of like saying something is beautiful. So I apologize for using the word ineffable in my last post. Oh, and the word beautiful. Nooo!

happiness

This quote from the movie version of The Hours (for all I know, it may be in the book as well) has stayed with me, and I'm finding it especially meaningful of late:

"I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then."

--Clarissa Vaughan

I had this exact feeling on Friday afternoon, driving down Highway 80 on an absolutely gorgeous day, the kind where the bay glitters with refracted sunlight and the water is blue and clean and unmarred save the bright sails of windsurfers. The wind was in my hair and good music was blasting out of the stereo. I'd done all my errands, I was finally settling into the groove of my new job, I had a break from schoolwork, my personal life was going wonderfully and I had nothing but free time to look forward to that weekend. And I thought: I am HAPPY. Not just my normal (mostly) everyday happy, but deeply, profoundly happy.

And then I got a call a few hours later that someone very, very close to me has cancer. It's quite a treatable cancer, and I know that it will be fine. It's not that I'm suddenly unhappy. If anything, I'm more grateful than ever; more aware of what this person means to me. It's more the idea that you can't expect to hold on to full-on, blissed-out happiness. Your mind tries to close around it like little hands reaching for a butterfly, but it cannot because happiness is ineffable, intractable; it is only truly possible within the eternity of the moment. I suppose that is what makes those moments so mind-blowingly beautiful when they do occur.

apparently i'm not completely slow-witted

...because I finished Don Lee's latest novel, Wrack and Ruin, in a day. That says more about his ability to hold a reader's interest than anything else, but I'll pretend it proves something about me, too. Oh, how nice this little month-long break from school is! I'm still reading Baudelaire and Robert Walser for this July's lyric prose/poetry workshop but I also get to catch up on some of the stuff I've been itching to read for ages. Lee's latest is laugh-out-loud funny and the prose just comes alive. And his Rosarita Bay (a fictionalized Half Moon Bay) is so dead-on Northern Californian, I still can't understand how he didn't grow up here.

Next up, I want to read Lee's Country of Origin to complete the triumvirate of his published book-length works in anticipation of his appearance at VCFA this summer, and then hopefully I can get through Sue William Silverman's Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You... and Under the Volcano... and David Jauss's new craft book Alone With All That Could Happen. It's looking at least possible. I haven't been Facebooking, watching bad TV or obsessively checking Perez Hilton nearly as much now that there are no looming packet deadlines. I've become Susie Homemaker in the kitchen. And I have learned that I am obviously someone who reads a bit more productively when I'm calm and happy. Let's hope some of this productivity can carry me through my third semester critical thesis....

jim shepard on writing, reading and research

I read Jim Shepard's Like You'd Understand, Anyway more than a year ago. It's a collection of shorts rooted in worlds as bizarre and rich (and varied!) as the nuclear plant on the night of the Chernobyl disaster, France during the end of the era of public beheadings, the Roman Empire, etc. I've been thinking a lot about various writers' approach to research, and he'd always struck me as a writer who must be doing a lot of it. I looked up an old interview he gave and what he had to say really resonated:

In a lot of cases my stories wouldn’t have come to be without some of those books and articles. I read a huge amount, initially just because something fascinates me, and as I’m reading, I’m trying to read receptively; that is, I’m trying to be alert to small but significant stirrings of affect, or some kind of quiet charge inside me: whatever it is in the material that might make it more than usually compelling, and affecting, to me. I don’t need, initially, to be able to articulate to myself fully what that is; I just need to have registered it on some level. Once I think I’ve identified something like that (and it hardly happens all the time; often I’ll do a huge amount of reading on one subject, and nothing will come of it, other than my own pleasure) my reading changes, and I start approaching the material as though researching a subject: i.e., with some notion of the sorts of gaps I’d need to fill in if I were going to attempt to recreate the illusion of a world like the one about which I’m reading. I certainly, in other words, end up writing stories because of things I’ve read. But those things are almost always moments in which human beings have found themselves in extraordinarily difficult, and memorable, positions. In other words, zeppelins themselves don’t get me going; it’s the position in which a zeppelin can place somebody that generates the initial impulse for a story.

Read the whole interview here.

the trouble with summarizing trauma

José Saramago's Blindness is a portrait of humanity's devolution following an epidemic of “white blindness” in which everyone's vision is lost to “a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colours, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible.” The only person who continues to see is the doctor's wife, and the story is largely about her and the small group of characters she oversees through the ensuing chaos. It is an engrossing book laid out in an unusual style: there are very few paragraph breaks, sentences are long and dialogue is enveloped not in quotations but by commas. In one sentence we might get an entire conversation between three people.

What most struck me about this book, though, was its handling of trauma during one of the most traumatic scenes of the entire novel: the mass rape scene, in which the doctor's wife and the women of her quarantine ward are forced to submit to a group of men in order to eat and provide the men of their ward (in some cases, their husbands) with food. Saramago closely chronicles the events with sickening detail up until the doctor's wife becomes directly involved (when she is forced to perform fellatio on the leader of the group). The paragraph ends with the following sentence: “She moved her head forward, opened her mouth, closed it, closed her eyes in order not to see and began sucking.” The next paragraph then begins with day breaking and the women being allowed to go. “For hours they had passed from one man to another, from humiliation to humiliation. From outrage to outrage, exposed to everything that can be done to a woman while leaving her still alive.” In effect, a veil has been dropped over this night for the reader, as it is for the men waiting for the women to return to them. The women never talk about the details of that night.

I found myself getting angry about this. Of course it is relieving, as a reader, to not have to bear close witness to such a horrific scene. But on the other hand I couldn't imagine the doctor's wife skimming over what amounts to the worst night of her life. We the readers do not know what happened, the men who loved them were not there, but the women had to endure this prolonged rape that was apparently so bad that if the rapists had done anything more, they would have killed the women. In fact the assault does kill one of the women.

In contrast, there is another horrific scene in which the doctor's wife kills a man, the leader of the group that has just raped her. “The scissors dug deep into the blind man's throat, turning on themselves they struggled with the cartilage and the mebraneous tissue, then furiously went deeper until the came up against the cervical vertebrae.” The height of the act, the killing itself, is given the most visceral description possible. It is followed by a complete chronicling of what happens immediately following the death, the flurry of women fleeing, the aftermath, and beyond. Later in the novel, when the characters all feel the pressing need to relieve themselves, Saramago writes that “however reluctant we might be to admit it, these distasteful realities of life also have to be considered, when the bowels function normally, anyone can have ideas, debate, for example,” … “but when we are in great distress and plagued by pain and anguish that is when the animal side of our nature becomes most apparent.” Saramago is certainly not one to shy away from the rank physicality of violence, a description of baser needs, or any other 'unsavory' subject. In fact, this latter sentence is key to understanding the novel, because what Saramago is investigating so brilliantly is humanity itself: what it depends on to exist, or whether or not it exists at all. He must show his characters in all stages of debasement in order to explore where humanity breaks down, and where it continues to strive.

So why did Saramago make this choice to drop back, when for the rest of the novel he stays in the scene so intensely in order to make his points? Didn't the doctor's wife have thoughts running through her mind as she was being raped and tortured? What reserve of strength did she rely on? How was she able to endure the pain? Saramago seems to expect us to imagine the horror, and in fact touches on this later in the novel. In a passage near the end of the novel, a blind writer (likely a foil for Saramago himself) briefly makes an appearance and asks the doctor's wife about all that she has seen. He remarks “how horrible” when she intimates, without going into any detail, just how awful it has been to bear witness to all the things no one else can see. “You are a writer,” she replies, “therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible”.... And indeed Saramago keeps adjectives to a minimum throughout the novel, allowing us to feel the despair and horror for ourselves. Yet in the rape scene we can't imagine the horror in the same way because we are never given the full journalistic description of the events. They are summarized, which feels dismissive to me; as if we as readers are "let off the hook" from having to experience this direct trauma as we do with all their other direct traumas.

It seems for every writer and every reader there is a limit to what can and/or should be described. For instance, I couldn't finish A Clockwork Orange—I was too disgusted. And maybe for most readers the depiction of the rape would have been too much. Maybe for Saramago himself it was too much. Or perhaps, as the doctor's wife says to her husband after the rape, “we are no longer the same women as when we left here, the words they would have spoken we can no longer speak.” In other words, perhaps Saramago felt there simply weren't words to describe what they endured. Because he so ably depicts all the other traumas it seems clear he made a conscious choice not to depict the details of the rape scene. And perhaps it is more truthful to not try to describe the devastation in words. But it is the one point in the book where we as readers are shut out—the only point—and I'm not sure it works, especially considering the style and viscerality of the book as a whole. As chilling, as brilliant as this book is, the rape scene is the one place in which I felt truly blind.

out of kindling

So at the beginning of May my husband "surprised" me with the Kindle 2 I had been dropping hints about for weeks. Not really hints. More like extensive marketing pitches. I was so excited to see the box in the mail. Pulling off each successive layer of fancy packaging was like unwrapping a delicious snack.

And there it was! Time to download one of the books on my reading list.... Michael Ondaatje's Coming Into Slaughter? ...Nope. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano? Try again. Finally I was somehow able to find a free (and ONLY a free) version of José Saramago's Blindness.

Finally! I could begin the test drive. I could change the text size! Highlight sections and store them all in one place! Look up any unknown words on the spot while I read! Glorious!!!!

There was the slight problem of highlighting on an "unsupported" document. I had to call Amazon's support because the highlighting feature wouldn't always work, and at least once actually crashed the device entirely. Apparently if you read anything not bought directly on Amazon's site, they won't support it. Even if it is something as seemingly innocuous as a .txt document. If disappointing, it makes sense--why try to fix problems when you can't isolate all of the parameters?

But it turned out there was a bigger problem. The reading experience. I'd kept telling anyone who would listen how Kindle would revolutionize the publishing industry, how much easier it would be to read on a Kindle than via a hardback format, etc. But now that I was actually reading a book on it, I wasn't so sure. Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning novel was highly recommended by a good friend and fellow VCFA'er. But it just wasn't doing anything for me. Which seemed strange, because I liked the premise and I'd been highlighting a lot of great insights.

Finally after being stalled on the highlighting function for maybe the twentieth time, I decided to buy a paperback version of the book. And what amazed me was how it suddenly came alive!!! I actually thought the novel was better, MUCH better, once I was able to read it in paperback format. I'm still at a loss for words as to why. It's an ineffable and highly personal observation. But it's the truth.

I also realized how stressed out reading on the Kindle had been. I didn't want to be thinking about crashing or loading or any of the other technological issues that can arise. I wanted and still do want to feel like I can read when my plane lifts off, or in the bathtub, or at any moment. Paperbacks will never, ever, ever freeze up on you.

So, for now, so much for saving trees and promoting a more egalitarian publishing industry. I said goodbye to my electronic friend and am settling back into the joy that is a good paperback.