On grief — and dying without finishing your book
August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Just about every time my father-in-law (above) and I talked on the phone, we began by filling each other in on whatever progress we’d made with the books we were writing. I don’t remember exactly when he decided to start working on a study of Macbeth, but I remember his interest developing and his arguments germinating, and I remember clinking glasses with him in many different living rooms as he told Max and me about new developments in his research.
I guess I always believed that Larry and I would finish our projects at about the same time. But in June he died, just a few chapters short of a completed manuscript. At his side were the copy of Memento Mori I’d sent him and Joseph’s most recent essay, which Larry had marked up with question marks and check marks and one “very good.” A teacher to the end.
Like me, Larry was a beginning-obsessed writer. He perfected the start, moved forward incrementally, and backed up again whenever he identified a problem with structure or a hole in his logic. Unlike me, he was remarkably learned and quite conservative. We often disagreed, about literature, about politics, and especially about religion, but I never doubted that he respected me and wanted to hear my opinions. In this regard, and in many others, he differed markedly from my own parents, and I don’t think I realized until his death how much I’d come to think of him as a kind of replacement father. My actual dad and I don’t speak.
When your spouse’s parent dies, grieving is complicated. There is the grief you feel for yourself, for the loss of a person you (if you’re lucky) loved, and there is the grief you feel at seeing the person closest to you dealing with a nearly unfathomable loss. At times the sorrow is literally almost suffocating. These are clichés, but they are also realities, as is the fact that the passing of someone important to you causes you to think about the way you’re spending your own life.
Almost two months after Larry’s death, it’s still very hard to write about him. (Or to think about his book, which Max, Joseph, and I promised him we would finish. We have a lot of reading to do.) And it’s impossible to imagine ever returning to a life in which I treat my writing like a frivolous hobby or prioritize writing about other people’s novels over working on my own.
I’m genuinely sorry for leaving the site dormant without explanation all this time; I honestly haven’t been able to figure out how to say any of this. Things will continue to be relatively quiet here until I’m feeling better and my novel is done. I hope that will be soon, but it won’t be next week or next month, barring some sort of miracle. The good thing about Internet time is that it only seems interminable when it’s happening.
A very Seventies homage to J.M. Barrie
June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
As you can see, I have the best in-laws. That’s Larry on the left, and Jane on the right, and though they divorced years ago — long before I met them — they’re both still this fun and campy.
Right now I’m reading Old Mortality, a gift from Larry. He figured I would appreciate Sir Walter Scott’s meditation on fanaticism, violence, and repression, and I do, very much, even though it’s subtly weighted toward the Tories.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reads for Girls Write Now
June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
On Friday night I’ll be introducing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she opens the last event of Girls Write Now’s Chapters series with a reading from her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. I’ve written about my admiration for her work many times; since then, she’s won a MacArthur Fellowship and earned a place on The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which I once stayed up until 5 a.m. on a work night to finish, centers on a girl about the same age as those Girls Write Now serves. My favorite of her short stories, “Cell One,” appears in the new collection.
At the event we’ll also debut our 2010 anthology, which features an introduction by Nami Mun, whose Chapters reading from Miles from Nowhere earlier this year was astonishingly good. The event will be held at the Center for Fiction, starting at 6 p.m.
Thrilling finale of my Culture Diary
June 15, 2010 | Comments Off
I can’t believe I forgot to link to the second installment of my Paris Review Daily Culture Diary.
It’s not any sexier than the first, I’m afraid, but if you’re craving more usage pedantry, solo drinking tips, or line-editing blow-by-blows, you won’t want to let this one pass you by.
Here’s one of the mouse-over notes:
After reading Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor last year, I internalized her (and Elizabeth Hardwick’s) prohibition against allowing the same word to appear twice on a page, and my prose strains in places as a result. I wonder: did O’Connor read Muriel Spark? If so, confronted with such hilarious and inarguably brilliant repetitions — see, e.g., the sticks* — how could she have continued to adhere to her rule? Also how did Spark reuse words so imaginatively? She built humor through the sameness but somehow made the descriptions fresh every time. I wish she could revise this scene I’m getting ready to work on now, the one with the dogs in the car.
Somewhat relatedly: as predicted, Caitlin Roper’s issue of The Paris Review was waiting in the mailbox on my return from Florida. I turned first to my friend Victor LaValle’s essay, which is just great, and then to the R. Crumb interview, which you won’t want to miss if you’re a fan, and then, fingers quivering with years of accumulated anticipation, I read the Katherine Dunn excerpt, which made me want to read more.
* Mouse-over note from the first installment: “By now there are passages I could almost quote from memory — especially the post-funeral scenes involving the writer with rheumatoid arthritis slouched over ‘two sticks,’ making his way among the funeral flowers as the other elderly characters goggle at him. The novelty of the Scottishism (’sticks’ rather than ‘canes’) tickles me, of course, but it’s the perfect, deadly repetition of the word — all the glimpses of the ‘clever little man doubled over his sticks’ — that makes this section so funny.”
Tags: brad gooch > elizabeth hardwick > everyday drinking > flannery oconnor > kingsley amis > muriel spark > paris review diary > usage pedantry
My Kingsley Amis obsession continues at The Paris Review Daily — and in Central Florida
June 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The first part of my Culture Diary — chronicling things I read, watched, and did the week before last — is up at The Paris Review Daily. Featured: Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis, Sam Lipsyte, Damages, Jenny Diski, Jimmy Buffett, Rebecca West, Panir Sabzee, Jonathan Franzen, alcoholic beverages…
The silence around here may continue for a little while. I’m unexpectedly in Florida with Max and A.; we’re visiting my father-in-law, who’s in poor health. Here he is (pictured), reading aloud the entry on “alright” (“all wrong”) from my copy of Kingsley Amis’ The King’s English. Not long after this usage bonding moment, he presented me with his pristine abridged copy of Fowler’s 1908 book of the same name.
The next issue of The Paris Review, edited by Caitlin Roper and probably waiting in my mailbox back in Brooklyn, features an interview with R. Crumb, an essay by Victor LaValle, and long-awaited new fiction from Geek Love author Katherine Dunn.
My ode to an enchanted hotel, in Oxford American
June 2, 2010 | Comments Off
Oxford American’s fifth annual Best of the South issue includes my ode to Miami’s Biltmore Hotel, which I grew up thinking was haunted. Here’s an excerpt:
By day, the hotel was a dingy institutional white, its roof stained with age and half its windows blocked up, but when I first saw it lit against the night sky, barred minaret gleaming from within, I half-expected the whole thing to vanish. It looked, to my six-year-old eyes, like an apparition, an enchanted castle with a single turret. My mother walked me to our crumbling slab of a dock for a better view.We’d moved into a house along the Coral Gables Waterway, a limestone channel dug during the ’20s land boom. The air smelled of muck and salty reeds with subtle notes of motor oil. Young peacock bass — quicksilver in the dim light — leapt out of the water and dropped almost soundlessly back. At the canal’s head, a half-mile away, rose the vacant hotel. In a land of strip malls, the mouldering Jazz Age relic was the most beautiful building I’d ever seen.
You’ll have to track down the rest to read the part about gangsters, ghosts, and thwarted attraction.
Obviously that’s the hotel, above, and here’s another old South Florida postcard showing a view of the canal. My childhood wasn’t all long afternoons of slow-flowing water and grand limestone sea-walls, but despite everything, I’ll always miss that house.
Fingers crossed, my copy of the magazine will be waiting when I get home tonight, and not just because I have a piece in it. I look forward to this issue every year. My personal favorite best-of essay so far is Sean Rowe’s 2008 “Insider’s Guide to Jailhouse Cuisine.” I’m also partial to Karen Russell’s, on a field trip to the Coral Castle.
The 2010 contributors listed on the magazine’s website are great, but they’re only part of the picture. Facebook tells me that something by Josh Weil was also included, and I know from experience that work from other writers I like will have been, too. Once I have the full table of contents in front of me, I’ll do a giveaway.
Librarians do Gaga, organize read-ins
June 1, 2010 | Comments Off
On June 12, Save NYC Libraries is hosting a We Will Not Be Shushed read-in to support restoration of funding to our local library systems. To get everyone in the spirit, here are some librarians adapting Lady Gaga. (Link swiped from Alison Bechdel.)
If you haven’t sent in your postcard yet, now’s the time.
Tags: brooklyn library > librarians > nypl > queens library > read-in > urban librarians unite
2005 wants its cultural debate back
May 26, 2010 | Comments Off
I doubt I would have been so ticked off at Garrison Keillor’s death-of-publishing op-ed this morning if a friend hadn’t called yesterday to tell me how insulted she was by similar comments he made at a recent Authors Guild gala, but seeing newspapers endorse this sort of twaddle does get tiresome.
Judy Berman invited me to elaborate on my Twitter comments, and you can read my and others’ responses to Keillor’s article over at Flavorwire.
See also Douglas Adams’ 1999 essay “How to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet” (“anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really”).
Tags: beginning of the end of intelligent life as we know it > death of publishing > douglas adams > garrison keillor > internet
Organizational feat, or technological boondoggle?
May 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Organization, as you may recall, is not a virtue I possess in excess. And it depresses me when plans are drawn up and fail. So I hadn’t attempted to outline my novel draft in a couple of years. Now that the project has changed so fundamentally, though, I decided to spend a couple hours this weekend mapping out the story on my iPad.
The easiest thing would’ve been to type it all up in Pages, or to forgo technology altogether and plot everything out in my notebook (for some reason, I take comfort in keeping provisional things handwritten). Instead, I downloaded a new app and spent a little time teaching myself to draw letters with my index finger. (See practice effort, above.) Then I put together an outline. At the time this seemed, if not sensible, like a reasonable way to spend the morning. Later, less so.
But now I have the whole scheme in a handwritten PDF that, after many more hours’ work on the book, I’ve updated twice, once from home and once from my office. Maybe the effort wasn’t a complete boondoggle, after all.
See also Kitty Burns Florey’s Script and Scribble, on the death of cursive.
Tags: handwriting > ipad > note taker hd > technological boondoggles > tgbiw
Kingsley Amis on whiskey, marvel of the Wild West
May 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Further thoughts on everyday drinking, from Sir Kingsley Amis, who settles the question of regional whiskey spellings and marvels at the fortitude of the gunslingers of yore:
Whiskey in the USA has a long, colourful history. (Note that it is indeed spelt with an “e,” along with Irish whiskey — the Scotch and Canadian varieties are both plain whisky.)One of the most illustrious early American distillers was George Washington, who manufactured the stuff commercially at his place near Mount Vernon in Virginia [Ed. note: reconstructed distillery above], and was very proud of the high reputation of his merchandise. I’m sure it was great for its time, but then and for long afterwards the general run of whiskey must have been pretty rough. I’ve often thought that the really amazing achievement of the Western hero wasn’t his ability to shoot a pip out of a playing card at fifty paces, nor even his knack of dropping crotch first into his saddle from an upstairs window, but the way he could stride into the saloon, call for whiskey, knock it back neat and warm in one and not so much as blink, let alone burst into paroxysms of uncontrollable coughing.
All that, of course, is changed now. American whiskeys are second to none in smoothness, blandness, everything that goes to make a fine spirit…
George Washington’s distillery has been resurrected, and I’ve been meaning to try the stuff.
Further reading: The spirits of 1776; archaeologists’ notes on the excavation of the Mount Vernon distillery; Hangover reading with Kingsley Amis; Charles Dickens’ eggnog (according to Eudora Welty); The Newtons, blood, and bank-robbing cousins. Cheers!
Tags: brown liquor > distillery > everyday drinking > george washington > kingsley amis > whiskey
Prepare ye the way, etc.
May 21, 2010 | Comments Off
According to the nice man handing out tracts in the subway station below my workplace, the world is going to end on my birthday next year. (Details.)
As someone prone to equal parts self-loathing and self-absorption, and raised in a constant state of Rapture-readiness, I can’t say I’d be surprised.
Either way, and I hope you’ll indulge me in this drama-queen moment: I hereby declare the next twelve months my shit-or-get-off-the-pot year. When May 21 rolls around again, I will have completed a full draft of this (first) godforsaken book I’m writing, or I’ll do something else with my life.
There’s been a lot of brouhaha lately about the impossibility of writing books in the Internet era, so, to be clear: I attribute my slowness not to the supposedly-ADD-inducing properties of the online world but to my own limitations and lack of discipline (and day job).
Colson Whitehead said it best back in February: “Sure am glad Shakespeare found that wifi-less cafe! Or no Hamlet!” He went on: “I dig the need to kickstart things every once in a while, but don’t blame the internet for your crappy work habits.” One of these days I’m going to turn those tweets into a needlepoint wall hanging. One of these days after I finish the draft, that is.
Marie Mockett reads at Chapters
May 18, 2010 | Comments Off
I’ll be introducing Marie Mockett when she reads this Friday, May 21, along with the young writers of Girls Write Now, as part of our Chapters series at the Center for Fiction. Her novel, Picking Bones From Ash, was recently shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize and is concerned with the unique power and difficulties of talented girls.
“There must be something deeply unsettling to us about [them],” she wrote, in a guest essay for this site. “They often don’t fare well in fiction.”
Girls Write Now’s mission is to bolster talented, underserved high school girls, by pairing them with professional writer mentors who encourage them to express themselves. We received the Coming Up Taller Award from Michelle Obama earlier this year and recently celebrated our 10th anniversary.
The young artist Olivia Morgan (7), an audience member, captured the spirit of our last reading in the drawing above. If you’re free this Friday, please join us. There’ll be plenty of time to swing by the One Story Ball afterward.
Tags: chapters > girlswritenow > mariemockett > pickingbonesfromash
Jamaica Kincaid on when to be arrogant
May 13, 2010 | Comments Off
Here, in an MIT lecture, Jamaica Kincaid reads and discusses some of her early contributions to The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” She recalls being astounded when her work started to appear in the magazine, because at the time she was reacting against the way everyone else there was writing. One of her pieces, about a book reception for the economist Milton Friedman,
consists entirely of an inventory of the costs of the event to her and other participants (all rigorously fact-checked, Kincaid notes). She felt hostile to Friedman, because he was in those days an advisor “to a cruel government in Chile,” and Kincaid wanted to express this but “didn’t want to just say it.” When “Mr. Shawn published it, it was amazing to me.”
Reading this old work reminds her, she says, how to be daring. “Be arrogant and vain when you’re young,” she advises her audience. “That’s the only time it looks appealing — and it’s also the only time it’s forgivable.”
During this hour-and-a-half lecture, Kincaid also reads her “Biography of a Dress.” She often writes from life, but once she includes a memory in her writing, “I’ve dispensed with it and it is no longer of any literary interest to me.” And she “rule[s] out the memoir… The minute you start thinking of things as memoir, it caramelizes and beautifies things. Implied in memoir is forgiveness that I don’t feel. I never forgive and I never forget, and I’m never cathartic.” See also Kincaid’s The Estrangement.
Talking with Sarah Waters uptown next month
May 12, 2010 | Comments Off
On June 17, I’ll be talking with Sarah Waters at the Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle about her postwar haunted house story, The Little Stranger, possibly my favorite of her novels yet. It’ll be tricky (but fun) to discuss the book without giving anything away. For the uninitiated: my appreciation appeared at NPR last summer.
For a writer so gifted at conjuring up worlds in which unspoken longings seem to manifest themselves as otherworldly phenomena, British novelist Sarah Waters is surprisingly dismissive of her own superstitions, which she sees as symptomatic of her lower-middle-class origins. Her grandparents worked as servants, her parents were the first in the family to attend grammar school, and the Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith author learned early on to touch wood, cherish the Catholic saints, and worry that it would be bad luck to try to move too far beyond the station to which she was born.Class anxiety is the animating force behind Waters’ fifth book, The Little Stranger, a suspenseful and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II, when the fading gentry collided with the emerging professional class that would once have been the help…
The photo above is of Alison Bechdel reading The Little Stranger in the wee hours. You might enjoy Bechdel’s back-and-forth with her friend, Queer Theory Professor. Also, the lengthy Sarah Waters FAQ. Join us June 17, at 7:30 p.m.
Hangover reading with Kingsley Amis
May 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Excerpting Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking at length in any discussion thereof is both crucial and inadequate: crucial because nothing anyone could say about it would be as entertaining as the text itself, and inadequate because the only way to convey how consistently funny it is would be to reproduce the book verbatim.
In their persistent humor and charm and their seeming effortlessness, these essays remind me of the best of Mark Twain’s.
You may have come across a condensed version of Amis’ hangover recovery advice in the Daily Mail a couple years ago. I enjoyed it at the time, but now, having read that section of the book in full, I’m aghast that so much was lost in the cutting. Couldn’t the editors have omitted some of the day’s news instead?
Amis advocates a two-pronged approach to hangover recovery: the physical, and the metaphysical. The third step in his treatment of the metaphysical hangover (M.H.) — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” — entails embarking on either the M.H. Literature Course or the M.H. Music Course, or, if necessary, both in succession. “The structure of both Courses … rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.”
Amis’ Rx for hangover reading:
Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lose, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick someone less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A.E. Housman and/or R.S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.
Tags: cocktails > everyday drinking > inadequacy of excerpt > kingsley amis > salty dog