vacillations

project michelle

2009-07-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

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

what i learned from residency...

2009-07-10T09:04:00.001-07:00

...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

2009-06-15T21:00:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

...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

2009-06-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

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.

point of view in 'pale horse, pale rider'

2009-04-27T22:02:00.000-07:00

Katherine Anne Porter's short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the stunning portrayal of a young woman's struggle to survive a war-torn America and the influenza outbreak of 1918. Within this world, protagonist Miranda weighs personal morality and social expectation, love in the face of dire circumstances, the waking versus the unconscious/delirious world, sickness and health, and, ultimately, the differences between life and death.

Throughout the fifty page story, Porter negotiates these dichotomies without ever seeming overly conscious of doing so, and all from the point of view of a woman who is, at various points in the story, asleep, awake, healthy, sick, and nearly dead. One article described Porter's use of “structured stream of consciousness.” Everything is indeed set in close third person point of view, and while reading I felt very much as if I was inside Miranda's head the entire time, experiencing and thinking about everything as she was experiencing and thinking about it.

It begs us to ask the question: why have this story in third person at all? If there is no veil between what she sees and what we see, why not simply tell it in first person? Before I can attempt to answer this question, I want to examine the areas in which there are deviations from the standard point of view. For instance, there are different treatments of Miranda's thoughts. Most of the time we receive her thoughts in close third as “she... decided she was past praying for.” Other times we get her verbatim thoughts as dialogue: “Miranda, desperately silent, had thought, “Suppose I were not a coward”....” Other times her verbatim thoughts are written without quotes: “I can't let Adam see me like this, she told herself.” Still other times Porter actually switches to first person, and it is this striking shift that I want to focus on in this post. The shift occurs as early as the second paragraph of the story, which starts, “Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet.” Both the first and second paragraphs reference Miranda's thoughts, but the first paragraph refers to them only via the pronouns “she” and “her,” which is what makes the second paragraph's POV choice so surprising.

This latter technique of shifting to first person POV occurs rather infrequently, though, after this first usage in which Miranda is narrating her dream (as it is occurring) about the Pale Rider. There are only three other times in which “I” is used outside of quotations and not prefaced by “she thought.” One passage occurs while Miranda is on her way to the cantonment hospital with a group of other women—and in this passage it eventually becomes clear that the "I"'s in question are representative of the dialogue of the women around her, and not Miranda herself. In fact, Miranda breaks this passage with a physical act: the paragraph ends with a dash, as if interrupted, and the next paragraph starts: “Miranda, carrying her basket of flowers, moved in among the young women, who scattered out and rushed upon the ward uttering girlish laughter....” Even though we were inside her head at the beginning of the previous paragraph, and return to her by the beginning of the next, that nebulous space in between is occupied quite directly by the dialogue of others. This example is really fascinating, because their dialogue is not in quotations, and it reads the first time as if it were an interior thought process. While most of the time we are seeing others through Miranda's thoughts and feelings, here we are reading the dialogue of others as Miranda's most intimate (first person) thoughts and feelings. Porter so deftly sets the stage for a depiction of the fragmentation of self, and of Miranda's (and others) “continual effort to bring together and unite firmly the disturbing oppositions in her day-to-day existence, where survival, she could see clearly, had become a series of feats of sleight of hand.” Miranda's existence is invaded by expectations of how she should think about the war, so much so that the women's banal chatter about the soldiers' experiences has wended its way into her interior thoughts.

The third passage of first person not prefaced by “she thought” occurs when Miranda is musing over Chuck's words at the play. She begins to think of how men seem to view the war, especially men who are not allowed to fight, which leads to stream of consciousness: “Bread will win the war. Work will win, sugar will win, peach pits will win the war. Nonsense. Not nonsense, I tell you....” Here, Miranda's consciousness has again been invaded by the rhetoric impressed on her by others, but in this case she actually seems to be answering back. Because here we are not only in first person, but also making reference to second person. Who is the “you” she is speaking to in her mind? Herself? Society? The reader? Perhaps all three. It is not altogether clear.

The opening of the last section signifies the last use of unqualified first person. “Now if real daylight such as I remember having seen in this world would only come again....” Miranda is now the embodiment of the fragmented self, not quite dead but not wholly alive, with “one foot in either world,” as she puts it. This first person narrative demonstrates how Miranda is capable of only tepid twilight living immediately following her recovery. But it can also be understood as that in-between state between so many other things, the smaller moments that can indeed become imbued with as much personal importance as more grandiose things such as life and death. The first instance of first person is in reference to Miranda's dream of death, the second of the social rules of talking about war, the third of the rhetoric of war, the fourth of Miranda's waking up to life again, only to feel its “dead cold light.”

In many ways, these passages told in the most personal POV, first person, are the least personal. They are simply iterations of death, which is by nature impersonal (i.e. death doesn't discriminate and gets us all in the end). We tend to get much more of Miranda's emotions through the “Miranda thought she...” or “Miranda thought, I...” close third convention (not to conflate the use of she versus I in this convention: the prevalence of both styles of close third in this story warrant their own essay, but I won't be discussing their differences here). To revisit the original question, why have this story in third person? Perhaps Porter wanted to underscore the distance Miranda has had to set up from herself in order to survive all the death that surrounds her. Death, the impersonal, has become the personal, while direct first person narration has lost all of its intimacy. Because thoughts are veiled, actions are monitored and love is futile, life itself in this story has lost its intimacy.

There is one final deviation in point of view worth mentioning. Near the very end of the story, there is a paragraph told from the point of view of Miss Tanner, the nurse that has resurrected Miranda from the dead. We have the entire time been inside Miranda's head, and yet four pages from the end of the story we get this: “(Miss Tanner) had an affection for the salvaged creature before her, the silent ungrateful human being whom she, Cornelia Tanner, a nurse who knew her business, had snatched back from death with her own hands. 'Nursing is nine-tenths, just the same,' Miss Tanner would tell the other nurses; 'keep that in mind.'” Again Porter has subverted our expectations of point of view by suddenly dropping back into a more omniscient role. The veil of life through Miranda's eyes is briefly lifted and a whole other world is revealed. This underscores the concept of narrative and personal distance, of course, but it also highlights another dichotomy. In many ways, Miss Tanner is actually Miranda's foil: while Miranda initially wants nothing to do with the death (though she comes to represent it), Miss Tanner dedicates herself to bringing life back to those patients “past saving.” The placement of this split in POV is also important. Because it occurs just after Miranda has regained consciousness and lost all her desire to live, it serves to contrast how utterly changed Miranda is from all those around her who have not themselves experienced death. By breaking established POV conventions at this moment, Porter is able to show how Miranda's thoughts have now completely isolated her from the women around her who tend to the dying. Like the men coming back from the war, Miranda is now detached from life in a way that those who have not experienced death will never fully understand.

Porter is more fully able to express Miranda's thoughts and feelings to us through these aberrations in POV, these refractions of her perspective. It is almost as if we can only see Miranda's situation clearly through the reflection of a slightly angled mirror, sometimes through her eyes, sometimes through our own, but always a step removed from the actual experience. Even Miranda is aware of this. At times Miranda literally watches herself, as in a dream in which “she saw herself run swiftly down this gangplank to the slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on the rail and waved gaily to herself in bed.” Or in attempting, while delirious, to talk to her doctor, when “to her horror she heard herself babbling nonsense, knowing it was nonsense though she could not hear what she was saying.” There is a way in which Miranda could not tell this story entirely in first person, but a way in which to use only third person would seem ridiculous. The novel becomes much stronger in the close third, with these brief, sparse, powerful first person and omniscient interludes that remind us of the impossibility of remaining completely immersed in the self during immediate and prolonged trauma. Ultimately, Porter's use of this technique creates a haunting reading experience that echoes the dissociation that occurs when our own traumas unfold.

conflict minerals

2009-04-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

The Enough Project is spreading the word about conflict minerals. Not diamonds this time, but tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold... basically the materials that comprise our cellphones, laptops, iPods, etc. The harvesting of these minerals in the eastern Congo is creating the worst (the WORST) sexual violence against women in the world. Learn more here. Or send an email asking the 21 biggest electronic companies to buy their raw materials elsewhere.

"correction"

2009-04-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

Oh, how silly of me. My earlier post about the new Afghan law condoning marital rape was incorrect. It turns out the law does not actually condone rape. Instead it condones starving your wife if she refuses sex. That's much better.

cognitive dissonance in "the swimmer"

2009-04-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

In the New York Times article "In Praise of the American Short Story," film critic A.O. Scott asks readers to rethink their affinity for the Great American Novel. One line, in particular, caught my attention: “no sprawling, anguished epic of marital unhappiness or suburban malaise can match the insight and elegance of, say, 'The Swimmer,' Cheever’s perfect parable of affluent anomie.” After reading the Cheever piece in question, I decided that I didn't agree with Scott's opinion (frankly, I'm not sure why we are always being asked to make a choice between our allegiances to the novel and the short), but “The Swimmer” is indeed a gorgeous and fascinating short story.

The story was apparently pared down from over 150 pages of notes to just under 5,000 words. Perhaps it was Cheever's long distillation process that makes the story feel so real and unreal. He uses time and space in a way that I've never quite seen—you cannot read the story entirely literally or figuratively. Neddy Merrill sets off to swim from swimming pool to swimming pool until he reaches his own home eight miles to the south, an adventure that spans the course of one Sunday afternoon in midsummer. It is clear though, by the end, that the seasons have changed. While he walks under “flowering apple trees” near the beginning of the journey, by the end leaves are “falling down around him” and he smells “wood smoke on the wind.” The twilight reflecting off the pool water has “a wintry gleam.”

There is no literal possibility of such drastic weather changes occurring over the course of one midsummer's day. And yet there is certainly a way in which the story is meant to be read as occurring over the space of one day, at least in the mind of Neddy. For instance, in the second to last paragraph Neddy is still intensely affected by the rudeness of his earlier interactions with the bartender and his mistress, as if the conversations with them had indeed occurred that day. Not to mention the fact that he's still barefoot and in his swimming trunks, despite the dark and the chill. This raises some uncertainty as to whether the season has actually changed—whether months or maybe even years have passed, and Neddy is simply thinking of this experience of swimming the county as a figurative “day” in a lifetime of swimming in other people's pools—or whether the season changing is only something Neddy perceives, and that in fact the story is depicting a man who is coming to terms within the space of one day with all the things he's blocked himself off from acknowledging.

Cognitive dissonance is when a person holds two conflicting thoughts in her mind at the same time. What I found really appealing about this story was Cheever's use of setting details and a slowly unraveling narrator to create a cognitive dissonance in the reader's ability to judge a clear sense of time and space, a dissonance that mirrors Neddy's own struggle to do so: it cannot be midsummer when the autumn leaves are falling, it cannot be that Lucinda and the girls are at home when the home is empty, etc.

As we are forced to hold all this in our minds, we become uncomfortable. Supposedly humans are not capable of experiencing cognitive dissonance for very long because it is too difficult to maintain a grip on the world. And it becomes clear by the end that Neddy has lost his grip on reality, in fact hasn't had a grip on it since before he was introduced to us as the protagonist of this story. Because we are forced to experience this state with Neddy, and because we presumably can maintain our grip, we end up doing what most humans do when confronted with the dissonance: we enforce a change in our thinking in order to resolve the dissonance.

For me, in the case of this story, I made the decision that this story does take place over the course of one day, with Neddy forced to confront the mistakes of the past in almost the way a dam begins to crack. Water is a major symbol in the story, and I think it's an apt metaphor: we are witnessing Neddy about to be lost in the deluge of a reality he has tried to block out. But then I think of the seasons again, and I become uncomfortable... again. And I wonder if the story is set over perhaps decades of pool parties and seasons: the long despair of a life where all that matters has been lost. I also have to reevaluate whether or not the people in the story who are supposedly living in "reality" have not also lost their grip, in a manner of speaking.

This to me is the key to the heart of this story's mystery, and Neddy's mystery, and the mysteries of those who live their lives next door to ours. Because there is never a clear answer for the story of anyone's life, even our own, and yet we must always forge a way of seeing the world that allows us (and them) to exist comfortably within it. And while we can't live with cognitive dissonance for very long, reading a story which depicts its traps, especially when the story in question is so beautiful and powerful, makes for thought-provoking reading.

new author find: pam houston

2009-04-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

I went to Writers with Drinks last night and discovered a writer named Pam Houston. She read from sections 80-84 of a novel composed of several small vignettes, and concepts that blur the line between novel and short story tend to appeal to me. I don't think what she read has been published yet, though it might have been from Sight Hound, her latest novel. I just can't find any evidence that Sight Hound is divided into several small, numbered parts. In any case, she was wonderful. Her prose is beautiful and bracing, and drifts along in what feels like a mostly timeless landscape until a character touches on something like the current political mood of the country. Her reading voice matched her written voice, it seemed, pretty well--a rather dry tone tinged with irony, a gruffness that doesn't quite hide the endearing qualities of her characters.

everything ravaged, everything burned

2009-04-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

So, my memory's not the best. When I read a big anthology of short stories, it takes a lot for me to remember individual names. Wells Tower was one that stuck out, though, for a story that ended up in the Pushcart Prize 2003 anthology: "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." The story brilliantly reinterpreted the everyday life of your average Viking, and included one very visceral image that still haunts me.

Anyway, turns out Tower's new collection of same title is out. Here is a review of the book by Michiko Kakutani. Another book I can't wait to read.

stories about marketing

2009-04-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

After reading this article about the iPod nearing its consumer saturation point, I was reminded of two fantastic short stories about marketing. Interestingly enough, they are both about snack cakes:

"The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes" by Haruki Murakami*
"Mr. Squishy" by David Foster Wallace

Ah, marketing. A fascinating field with equally fascinating--if sometimes warped--people populating it. I don't mean to speak of it in terms of clichés. Still, I am so glad to have distanced myself from that world, with all its allure and bizarre logic and desire to turn people into consumer equations.

* I had the pleasure of hearing Murakami read this story aloud last fall in Berkeley. He had some interesting things to say about the relationship between marketing, critique, and academia/the literati.

my new story-making solution: ring-dexes

2009-04-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

I find that, in settling on a short story idea, I generally pull two or three major observations together. I'm a constant note taker, so I might combine a certain character idea with a setting I'd jotted down, and try to work it towards a theme that has been on my mind. Sometimes everything comes together in one awesome bolt of lightning... but sometimes it doesn't. And actually, sometimes pairing two seemingly disparate elements ends up making for a more interesting story. So anyway, I was trying to find a way to put all these random little notes into one place where I could easily access them and pair them in unexpected ways.

I thought up a little device to help myself, and thought I would post for anyone in need of a fleshed-out story idea. I'm not sure if it'll work out yet but it makes sense, at least in theory:

Take a pack of ringed index cards. I found out about these from Dan, who is using them to study Japanese. Ring-dexes are already divided into four sections. I labeled the yellow section "Character," the green "Setting," the red "Plot," and the blue "Theme" but you could use whatever elements/divisions speak to you. Then I copied all my little notes down in the appropriate places. So if I want to write about Pigeon Point lighthouse, that's on a setting card. If I want to write about a weird old woman I saw on BART, that's a character card. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. So once that's done, or once you've amassed enough observational notes, you take them off the ring-dex and try to put a few together in a previously unforeseen way. It seems like it would make for unexpected story ideas, but the cool part is that it's all still things YOU were interested in originally, rather than those writing prompts where you need to write about an old car or something (even if you don't care about cars).

If it works for you, good! If not, at least you now know what an organizational dork I am.

no!

2009-04-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

From an After the MFA interview with Edward P. Jones. This has just about made my day, and it's only 10:30am:

I don’t have much patience — you know, people will say, “Oh, you know I just let the characters take over…” I think that’s so much junk. It comes out of your mind, it’s in your brain, whether or not you’re going to acknowledge it. And sometimes people will say, “Well, do your characters live on after you finish?” No! They don’t do or say anything I don’t tell them to do or say. You know what I mean?

People want to make it seem like there’s some sort of magic. There is no magic. It’s “once upon a time, Jack and Jill went up the hill…” And you don’t need any fancy language, you know?

Read more.

I'm loving some of Jone's fiction, but the way he talks about writing and the literati is sort of unintentionally hilarious.

"worse than the taliban"

2009-04-03T08:32:00.000-07:00

Apparently the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is trying to pass a law that would legalize marital rape, among other things.

The final document has not been published, but the law is believed to contain articles that rule women cannot leave the house without their husbands' permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands' permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex.

Later in the Guardian's article, a western diplomat in Kabul says that "It is going to be tricky to change because it gets us into territory of being accused of not respecting Afghan culture, which is always difficult." I am in shock that someone actually feels this is a valid excuse.

Soraya Sobhrang, the head of women's affairs at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said western silence had been "disastrous for women's rights in Afghanistan".

"What the international community has done is really shameful. If they had got more involved in the process when it was discussed in parliament we could have stopped it. Because of the election I am not sure we can change it now. It's too late for that."

Read more.

the round, unlikeable character

2009-04-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

In ZZ Packer's “The Ant of the Self,” main character Spurgeon, a bright young student, is forced to drive his deadbeat father Ray to DC to assist in his scheme to sell off some exotic birds for cash at the Million Man March in 1995. “The Ant of the Self” refers to the line in the story that a preacher at the March gives: “freedom is only attained when the ant of the self—that small, blind, crumb-seeking part of ourselves—casts of slavery and its legacy, becoming a huge brave ox.”

Spurgeon has enough trouble trying to cast off his father. What I was curious about, in reading this story the second time around, was how Packer was able to create a believable relationship between a son and such a meritless father. It is so difficult to depict a truly unlikeable character (like a deadbeat dad) without that character seeming flat. I was looking for the sentence, the snippet of dialogue, the intimation that underneath it all Ray had some good in him.

But that never happens. Ray is self-serving, manipulative, and often openly nasty throughout the course of the story. There is no moment of remembrance on the part of Spurgeon of when his dad did something nice for him (only a memory of his dad calling him a pussy for not fighting another boy), no moment of true remorse on the part of the father. The closest Ray comes is, when drunk, asking his son whether or not Spurgeon believes in him and, later, whether he understands him (certainly not the other way around).

Still, Ray is somehow still a larger than life character that seems believable. He does not feel static, and yet he does not seem to change of his own accord. What instead inhabits his character with life is the lens of the way his son views him. “He's so stupid, he's brilliant....” Spurgeon thinks. Later it is he that feels bad about getting angry at his father, though he seems to have said nothing that his father didn't deserve to hear. He even apologizes. Later, when the drunk Ray asks to be understood, Spurgeon really does try to, going so far as to ask his father how to understand him. Later, when Spurgeon says something even more devastating, it is he who tries to pull his own father back to him, “begging in the only way you can beg without words.” Always Spurgeon is yearning for his father's love and approval. And through this technique, Ray's character seems deeper than it otherwise would. Instead of Packer depicting Ray as a flawed but likable character (a more classically round character) that the son simply doesn't want to understand, she makes him an unlikeable character that becomes interesting because the son does wish to understand him. Our sympathies lie with the son, but in doing so we are roped into the son's desire to be liked by his father. Ray's character becomes a fuller character because of his son's perception of him.

And unlike a typical static or flat character, Ray does change. However, in this case it is also the son's actions and words that bring on that change—it is not an internal change or reflection, at least not yet. Toward the end Spurgeon says the one thing that “will kill (his) father.” He accuses his father of being a pussy himself by not going to Vietnam. Spurgeon then reflects, “I had turned him into something ugly, and of all the millions of words I've ever spoken to him in all my life, this is the one that blows him to pieces.” Though we never see Ray's reaction (other than to flee), we understand that Spurgeon has finally broken his father in some fundamental way.

Finally, Ray's plight seems more sympathetic because of the way the men at the March, who have never even met him, view him. “'You got to cut your father a little slack for caring for your sorry self!'” one man says. Another says, “'You have to take responsibility and reach out to him.'” Though on the one hand we can read this as just the misguided advice of men who assume Ray is a good father rather than one of the worst, the dialogue does call into question the maturity and compassion of Spurgeon's point of view (he is, after all, an angry high school kid who still tends to want to see things in black and white).

What I like about this technique (reflecting perceptions through the eyes of more round characters to show depth) is that it opens up an avenue for depicting a character that really has few to no redeeming qualities. To pretend that such people do not exist in the world is to avoid reality just as surely as to pretend that all cliches are always true. And yet, like cliches that are sometimes true, wholly unlikeable people still sometimes need to be written about. Especially in how they reveal the weaknesses, flaws and desires of more likable characters to which they are tied.

"the cab ride i'll never forget"

2009-04-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

My sister sent me this blog post about a cab driver's most memorable charge. The writing is a bit too sentimental at times, but this woman really moved me.

sacrificing the story to the idea

2009-04-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

Shamefully, I've not read much Chekhov. Actually, other than a barely-remembered story from a short fiction class from undergrad, I've read none at all. Why is this shameful? Because, of course, Anton Chekhov is widely considered to be the father of the modern short story. (You can't write short stories and tell people that you haven't read Chekhov.)

What may be more shameful than not having read much Chekhov, is to actually read one of his collections and realize that you are bored. (You probably shouldn't write short stories and tell people that you don't like Chekhov.) Alas, such was the case for me after reading Ward Number Six and Other Stories.

[Spoiler Alert... from 1892] The title piece depicts a relationship between a doctor and patient in a mental ward. Protagonist Dr. Andrew Yefimovich Ragin despairs of ever finding anyone who can hold an intelligent conversation with him—until he meets mental patient Ivan Gromov. He finds himself drawn to the ward again and again to talk with Gromov, philosophizing about the nature of pain and suffering, until people begin to take notice. Eventually Ragin's association with Gromov brands him as something of a lunatic himself.

About halfway through the story I realized where this was headed: Ragin is eventually tricked into becoming a patient himself. Knowing what was coming next made reading the latter half somewhat laborious. But even more laborious was suffering through what I felt I was being hit over the head with: the idea that there isn't much difference between those who are deemed crazy and those who are regarded as sane.

I am always wary of stories in which philosophies are espoused by the characters via long dialogue passages. Within this dialogue, there is an inordinate amount of text related to the vagueness of the label “insane.” For instance:

“'So why are we shut up? Why not you? Where's the logic of it?'” (p. 42)

“'There is no morality or logic about my being a doctor and you being a mental patient, it's sheer blind chance.'” (p. 43)

“'Which of us two is the lunatic? (…) Is it I, who try not to annoy other passengers? Or this megalomaniac who thinks he is cleverer and more interesting than everyone else, and so won't leave anyone alone?'” (p. 55)

And while I don't disagree that the idea of what is 'normal' and what is not is tenuous at best, I did not need a 46-page story to tell me so. And yet, this is Chekhov. And so I, meager student with nary a publishing credit to my name, decided it might behoove me to re-read.

I found that on a second read, the story was definitely more engaging. I was less distracted by idea and more focused on the plot structure. And I began to think that the fact that a reader can predict Ragin's fate is not necessarily unplanned—that his inevitable fate is indeed one of Chekhov's main points. That, as Ragin says, “the more you try to get away (from being labeled insane) the more you are enmeshed in the toils.” As readers we are forced to watch as Ragin roots himself in deeper and deeper, knowing all the while where he will end up. We more directly experience his helplessness because we, as readers, are helpless to do anything about the knowledge of his fate that we are given.

And still... the story feels manipulative. Ragin's main credo is that “man finds peace and contentment within him, not in the world outside.” This credo is disputed by Gromov, eventually tested and debunked by Ragin after he is forced to experience the true misery of a mental ward. So beyond this philosophical idea of whether or not the label of insanity is an arbitrary one (the question that troubles Ragin) we begin to see the deeper problem that troubles Chekhov—that of the people who believe their social systems are terribly flawed and yet do nothing but philosophize. It seems in this story that the fate of such people is to be slowly driven insane.

And, indeed, Chekhov slowly drives Ragin insane, or at least causes him to suffer mental anguish to the point that he doesn't care if he is labeled insane. But everywhere I felt that authorial hand. For instance, Ragin is described as “let(ting) things slide,” and yet for some reason he decides to follow one of the mental patients into Ward Number Six, which precipitates his meeting Gromov (which allows for the author's desired philosophical exchange). “'This is quite wrong,' he thought, looking at the bare feet and thin red ankles. 'And in this damp weather too!'” Nowhere is Ragin described, prior to this, as a person who would be moved to action by the plight of this shoeless man. Later, Ragin is duped by an idiotic trick into being committed. As apathetic as he might have grown by that point in the story, it doesn't feel like the ploy should have worked on him.

There is a certain parallel between the author's awkwardly deliberate plot devices in this story and the awkward idealism of Ragin's beliefs, and perhaps this is also intended. The unfolding of the plot in all the other stories of this collection feels much more fluid—obviously Chekhov is capable of unraveling an effortless story arc. Still, it makes for strange and not entirely satisfying reading.

research along the 1

2009-03-29T09:55:00.001-07:00

It is so weird to finally see a place that you have only written about. After viewing pictures and reading blogs, tourist blurbs, and diving accounts, Pigeon Point (about 30 miles north of Santa Cruz) was completely unfamiliar and yet absolutely correct. The bluffs, the rocks and the abundance of sea life (at least as visible from shore) were all exactly as they should be--which was surreal. Like sleeping through someone else's dream. One thing I wasn't prepared for was the ferocity of the offshore waves, even after all the reading. I can't believe people actually dive out there. But people do.

bourdain in san francisco!

2009-03-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is true. The pork lover who waxes poetic over distant climes and second-tier U.S. cities is FINALLY REVIEWING SAN FRANCISCO! Many thanks to Luckylettuce for alerting me to his whereabouts. The list of haunts is unexpected and not exactly exhaustive, which seems to be how he rolls. It's not the way a local would draw up the list, but maybe that's sort of the point with his show--that you can't possibly pay dues to all the great restaurants in an hour, so why not just try things from a different angle? Food is so personal anyway. I have really been wanting to try Sebo though. And House of Prime Rib. Hopefully it'll be a good show. Man. I'm really hungry now.