One Perfect Page

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Inherent Vice, which Thomas Pynchon released in 2009, and which is only the second Pynchon I've read. Appropriately, it seems to be the second most approachable of his books, because it's only about 370 pages and its journey and characters are reasonably straightforward. Part of the reason I wanted to read it was the approachable thing and the other part was this book trailer, below, which I think I've linked to now three times on this blog, but I can't help it, I've watched this thing like 50 times and I never get tired of it. The voice is Pynchon's, apparently, and he's so private that I just can't get over how cool the existence of this narration is, because why this book trailer (which is a ridiculous concept, IMHO)? Why now, i.e. 2009? Why this book? O, the mystery.

The prose in the trailer does not appear in sequence in the book, to the best of my ability to recognize prose from 2.5 minutes of narration in 370 pages of writing. ("Gum-sandal" and "stewardii" do.) And the book is written in third person, not first, which just adds another layer of quirk.

But I didn't love the book, in truth. It was somewhat hard to follow (surprise!) and it just didn't seem to add up to much.

I loved The Crying of Lot 49 when I first read it because it was completely new to me. I'd never read anything so irreverent, nor anything that ended with what I perceived as a middle finger to the reader, nor anything that skipped along with such a light but powerful touch. I read it again for class a few weeks back and I loved it this time for similar but more sophisticated reasons (which is what comes of nearly a decade of additional reading in between): the lightness coupled with the depth of contemplation that's present in that book, the farce and tragedy inherent in it that's a little like the reverse of the Jacobean text-within-a-text, The Courier's Tragedy, that Pynchon invents. I.e. the tragedy in the play is farcical because the violence is so over-the-top, while the farce in the novel is tragic because it's life-and-death. And I loved the ending, which I no longer think is a middle finger but instead an educational-short-style "What do YOU, the readers at home, think happens next?"

Meanwhile, Inherent Vice didn't really have any depth. (I don't think.) It takes place in 1970 in a beach community in L.A., and I gotta say I suspect Pynchon wrote it in 1970 and just pulled it out of a drawer and fiddled with it a bit in order to publish it in 2009, because I have no idea how anyone on earth could remember such intensive detail about life 40 years ago, unless he didn't live life at all in between, which obviously is not the case. The detail is the thing I liked best about the book - life in 1970 in Los Angeles was sure interesting, and I felt like I had an up-close and personal perspective on it that, despite reading Helter Skelter about 30 times, I've never had before. But to write the book, he melds the hippie life and the noir detective life, and I found that forced, not cool.

That said, there is some amazing stuff in the book. After I read page 98, I read it again, and then I bookmarked it and read it out loud to Matt, and then, when I returned the book to the library, I photocopied it and read it again. Then I typed it up and pasted it here, below. There's nothing before or after this on page 98; it's one perfect page that stands on its own, and it's like sugar-coated crack to me, this lyrical L.A. that appears almost nowhere in literature except in rare moments of Chandler and here, on page 98 of Inherent Vice.

Sunrise was on the way, the bars were just closed or closing, out in front of Wavos everybody was either at the tables along the sidewalk, sleeping with their heads on Health Waffles or in bowls of vegetarian chili, or being sick in the street, causing small-motorcycle traffic to skid in the vomit and so forth. It was late winter in Gordita, though for sure not the usual weather. You heard people muttering to the effect that last summer the beach didn't have summer till August, and now there probably wouldn't be any winter till spring. Santa Anas had been blowing all the smog out of downtown L.A., funneling between the Hollywood and Puente Hills on westward through Gordita Beach and out to sea, and this had been going on for what seemed like weeks now. Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies. The state liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was. Liquor-store owners could be filling those bottles with anything anymore. Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there'd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight. 

Title

For nearly three weeks, I've done posts on Tuesday and Friday. This week I'm still trying to work out what Tuesday's post should have been. I've been reading for others a lot lately, but not writing much, and my synapses are firing in non-bloggable directions.

The semester is kind of screeching hell-bent into its conclusion, throwing off a lot of sparks and steam. I'm doing okay, but spring break's late placement made the whole thing lopsided, and I have a lot of anxiety about whether I'll finish okay.

I don't know. I'm kind of casting about. Here's some nice sentimental stuff about libraries and books from E.B. White, every word of it true. (Click to embiggen.)

Write the Shit Out of It

I have the best pen pals in the world. They are scattered from New York to San Francisco, from Indiana to England. Some of them I met through my prior, anonymous blog; some I met through random internet activity (like, for example, commenting too enthusiastically on the blog of a British independent publisher); some I met at writers' events, and have grown closer to them over e-mail than I did during the week or whatever I had in-person access to them.

We have great conversations, my pen pals and me. It's the kind of conversation that makes me mad that teleporters don't exist. I write absurdly long and opinionated e-mails, and in reply I get e-mails that are exponentially more interesting than what I have to say and make me want to write even more opinionated crap, and if I'm very lucky, we keep this up for longer than a few days.

Recently, one of these beloveds was struggling with uncertainty about a manuscript. I had read something for her and given her feedback, and a couple of weeks later I offered to read whatever else she was working on. What she sent was more of the same manuscript, but she'd added on to what she'd already written by several thousand words.

The e-mail I sent her in reply was well out of character for me when giving feedback - a little voice in my head was shrieking "who do you think you are?" as I typed it - but her reply was incredibly positive. She later read what I'd written out loud to a teen critique group she runs, and their response, too, was really positive. So I felt like it might be worth sharing here.


--I read the new section closely once, and then skimmed it as a second look. I owe you an apology for not reading it closely a second time - which is *always* my practice when I'm reading for friends - but I had a good reason. It's because this is what I think and feel from reading it: stop analyzing and write. Stop thinking so hard and write. Stop sending me fragments and write the whole. Write this entire manuscript, as Stephen King advises, with the door closed, and then go back and look at it and revise it and fret over it and send it to me. What I smell from your draft and from your e-mails is you getting so wrapped around whether this project is worthwhile and/or going somewhere that you're keeping yourself from getting through a first draft, which is the single most important part of writing anything at all.

You gotta write it first and worry about it later. You'll never finish this thing if you painstake it (I just made up that verb, but it applies on multiple levels) one chapter at a time. When you're done, I'll be privileged to look at it, but not until you're done. Even if it's 250,000 words, I'll read it and I'll tell you everything I think in enormous detail - but not until you're done.

If it ultimately sucks, you'll write something else, and it will be better. In the meantime, you have to write this first. And you have to finish it. No matter what happens, it will not be a waste of time. It will NOT be a waste of time.

If my instincts are wrong about all this, and you're not planning on it being a big long project, I owe you another apology, a much bigger one, and I'll go back and read it carefully again and give you line edits and comments and etc. But I'm assuming that this is the same project you mentioned in the prior e-mail. If that's right, [Penpal], baby, darlin', you just gotta write it. Put your head down, don't show anyone what you're doing, and WRITE THE SHIT OUT OF IT.

Lots of love. And also this.

I Mean...You Know What I Mean?

I'm not completely sure I know how to write this post. I've never taken a literary theory course, so my grasp of the concepts herein - especially hermeneutics - is based on clumsy research and hasty in-class explanations from professors. Despite these dangers, the topic has hounded me to create a blog post about itself over the last few weeks, so here we go.

A month ago, in my experimental lit class, our professor introduced the concept of "ostension." My notes say it this way:

the writer (& reader?) is hurled outside of language into a pre-hermeneutic state - the place where you know what something refers to w/o translating it into language (DFW?)

I needed more. I Googled ostension, and found only two results that actually helped instead of muddying things further: the book of the guy, Paul H. Fry, who applied the word to literary theory, and a book called (Re)Writing Craft by Tim Mayers. Much of the latter is available online from Google Books, and this is the relevant passage:

...there still exists a phenomenon called "ostension" in which the act of writing occasionally hurls the writer (and by extension the reader) into an ontologically prehermeneutic realm - a "place" where there is no meaning, only existence.

By "pre-hermeneutic," I think these people are referring to a place where there is no interpretation of language, nor any of the fuzziness and human baggage that interpretation brings to meaning. Instead, there is just an it - an ineffable whatever that really fine writing communicates directly to the reader's brain.

Have I bugged you to read "Good Old Neon" recently?* It's likely my favorite short story, perhaps my second favorite piece of writing altogether, and I think it succeeds at ostension by the time it reaches its conclusion, giving the reader thoughts and feelings that would be too confusing to explain easily in words but that are nevertheless pure and clear. (Although it might just be all the paradoxes piled on each other that create this impression.) Initially, though, the story labors in an obvious way toward clarity, to explication rather than intimation.

Despite my note in class, I think Wallace's goal is not generally ostension, but that his task is using excessive language to make meaning utterly clear to any reader [who owns a dictionary]. I think one of his central concerns is trying, through maximalism, to mitigate the hermeneutics problem - the problem of all those brains, all those varying worldviews, set to the same hunk of language.** So these are kind of two approaches to the same problem: ostension, which creates pre-hermeneutic meaning through weird linguistic/architectural techniques; and maximalism, lurching toward meaning through pages and pages of skilled and seductive overexplanation.

The book we were talking about in class when this ostension thing came up was This Is Not a Novel, an experimental work by David Markson, about whom Wallace himself was quite effusive in the late 1980s. The book creates ostension through parataxis - another term I learned that day which I still haven't quite learned - placing hundreds of factual sentences next to each other in order to create a certain effect. I loved the book, finding that it made me think and feel unique things about death, the human lifespan, coincidence, art, the act of creation, etc. (It was not well-received by everyone in class.) Few of these themes were brought out specifically in the text, but all the unadorned, uninterpreted facts in juxtaposition for 190 pages meant that my mind leapt to these places nonetheless.

Incidentally, you'll get some weird shit if you Google ostension, because it
means completely different things to philosophers and folklorists. 

I recognized something like this feeling from reading Faulkner. I told Matt while we were reading As I Lay Dying in my other class that I found Faulkner maddeningly vague and yet repetitious. He doesn't give you anything like the full picture, but he repeats certain details over and over in varying ways so that you feel like you have a good grip on the situation. Is that ostension? Or is that just...what Faulkner does?

Of course, being that I can hardly recognize ostension as a reader, I doubt I'm capable of bringing it into my work as a writer. It's a high bar. Communicating right to the reader's brain is the whole point, and doing so with technique and language rather than with less expensive tricks, like a cipher protagonist or exotic backdrops, is a nice goal to have in mind for my work. By the year 2026, maybe.


*If you can't make it through "Good Old Neon," here's an article about it that communicates the essentials. I disagree with some of the author's opinions, but it's still really helpful. I feel it necessary to note that the story's continuous waltz with the theme of suicide is probably irrelevant to David Foster Wallace's actual ending of his own life. His illness was well-controlled at the time he wrote the story.

**Although not in all his works. I don't claim to know what he was up to in Infinite Jest, but I think if it was this, it was not a consistent goal for the whole text. Certainly in his nonfiction, though, and later short stories, I recognized this endeavor.


***Do not use me as a source. If you know more about this than I do, please, please, please leave comments correcting me.***

L'histoire de Pain

Yesterday I did some revisions on the bread story...did I ever name it as such in the blog? It's the story I wrote for my experimental class, which I thought turned out well and which was fairly well-received in workshop. I revised it somewhat to my professor's suggestions, and I am much less certain about it now than I was before revision.

Here's how it goes: Two people meet, fall in love, and break up, but that story is told three times in three different ways. The two people are the same, although their ages and other details differ, and essentially I put them through three versions of their doomed relationship over about 4,300 words. But that's not all! I also included text in boxes that sit physically to the side of the narrative, acting as a sort of Pop-Up Video for the story, with stuff about what I was thinking when I wrote it and also random facts about baking bread (which is a threaded metaphor for their failing, failing, failing relationship).

My professor didn't like the boxes aesthetically, and pointed out that the couple's narrative isn't really the main narrative but the stuff in the boxes is, and said by way of complimenting me that my writing is too clever by half. I disagreed with her on the aesthetic thing, but decided to try a revision with no boxes anyway. Instead, I made the text go sideways and at one point wrap all the way around the main narrative, and I included more stuff about truth, which is a central concern for me but which snuck its way unexpectedly into the story.

I already hate what I wrote anew, but Matt read it anyway and said that he thought I was closer to making meaning out of the story instead of it being mere fun. I'm going to rewrite again - maybe using a different method than the haphazard way I went about the job yesterday - and hopefully I'll hate it less and bring even more meaning into the story. I admitted to Matt that I liked the story the way it was, when it was just for fun, but I want it publishable, not merely fun, so I've got to do better.

I didn't revise any of the too-clever-by-half aspects, because that's stylistic, and there really isn't much I can do about that. Here's a sample sentence:

The day was so crisp it could have been bagged and sold by Frito-Lay, and the sky was a jewel.

See, the first metaphor is amusing and allusive and slightly odd and risky, but the second one is pretty cliched and ordinary. That's the tension that I'm trying to keep taut throughout the whole word count. If a reader thinks the story's smarmy instead of delightful, I suspect that's kind of her problem, not mine.

I was going to try one other type of revision, where the narrative occurs in a regular paragraph and the other text is shaped in a sideways bell curve

in the margins, so it looks like my own identity as author is swelling out of the story. I don't know if that would have worked. I like the way I did it with the text running sideways and upside down - it reminds me of a cross-written letter, when people wrote over their own text to save postage

(found here, click to embiggen)

- but, after all, I'm not writing a concrete poem here; what it looks like interests me a good deal less than whether that look works for the reader.

In other news, I have some new writing to do, on a story I haven't started yet because its embarrassment of options has stumped me, but most of what's on my plate right now is revision. Yay, revision. Yaaaaay. I recently read this quote from Matt Fraction:

I can rewrite anything. WRITING remains a motherfucker I must be tricked into doing at all costs and at all times.

to which I said (to my computer), great, how about I write and you revise? Forever? Because that is the exact photo negative of me. Writing may be revising, but I nevertheless find revising unbearable.

KerouaCobain, or A Note on Freshness

Kurt Cobain's suicide turned 20 last week. He's an important figure, but I find it slightly ghoulish the way articles and commentary on Cobain pop up like clockwork on every anniversary of Nevermind; of In Utero; of his final act, alone with a gun.

This article at the Washington Post caught my eye, because it seemed like that rarest of creatures: a new angle. But it dances around the problem of the final mix of Nevermind of which Cobain disapproved, and I'm afraid that its reading of Cobain's pre-death importance may soar far beyond reality. (I was there, and Nirvana was way famous - acting as a sort of pushbroom to the dreadful pop of the early 90s as well as glam rock and G&R-type hair metal and all else that came before - but I don't think they were famous beyond anyone's imagination, as the article has it. Probably not beyond David Geffen's.) Still, kinda sweet to think about a few generations of kids plucking out the first notes of "Come As You Are", which happens to be the only riff I ever learned to play on the guitar. I wonder very much what "Smells Like Teen Spirit" means to people born around the time it was a hit on the radio, as opposed to what it meant to me or to the Xers.

Anyway, over the weekend I listened to Nevermind for the 11,867th time, and it reminded me strongly of the last book we finished in my American Novels class: On the Road. Not because the two works resemble each other artistically (although I suppose you could argue that they do, each a yawp from its respective generation), but because each, despite its grounding in a particular time and place, offers utter freshness.

I didn't love On the Road. I found it rambling, self-centered, pointlessly repetitious, and reeking of privilege of various types. But I was nevertheless seduced by its sincerity, which is a rare quality when uncoupled from sentimentality. The voice is completely convincing, head-over-heels committed. And it feels...fresh. There's just no other word for it. It feels novel and new and unique, 60 years after its birth, after it's been made a bible by numberless masses.

Nevermind feels the same way. All the reasons in the world exist to make me bored with the record: I've listened to it 11,867 times, I heard "Teen Spirit" played and referenced and analyzed to death in my adolescence, I wore out CDs of other grunge that practically photocopied Nirvana. (This listen, I realized that Stone Temple Pilots' Core is basically a 12-track meditation on "In Bloom" with a little Metallica flavor.) Nevertheless, it's a thoroughly fresh record. It makes you sit up straighter and turn up the volume and pay attention.

Both Nevermind and On the Road have the capacity to revolutionize a young life, no matter the year. Their age seems not to have denuded their power. They're both still genuinely exciting, and they both stand quite apart from the hordes of imitative works that they spawned. It's a shame that (arguably) neither Cobain nor Kerouac was able to top himself after that one great artistic expulsion.

How does "fresh" happen? Why are there so few albums and books and films that succeed at staying fresh generations after birth? How do you quantify it? Is it inevitably linked with voice-of-a-generation works, or even just voice-of-an-artistic-movement stuff? Is it one of those qualities, like pornography, that depends on knowing it when you see it? If anyone knows, please tell me, because I'd like to be able to create fresh work. (Wouldn't we all?)

Mine and Not-Mine

Oh, journalist story. I just don't know about you.

I drafted the journalist story in late February and early March. It got just under a month to ferment before the first real revision, because after writing it I went over it again and then again across several days. Then I couldn't stop thinking about it, which meant it was not becoming a foreign object ready for (somewhat) objective study. So I knew it needed more time than usual for a revision to be decent at all.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours revising it at last. It has given me distinctly divided feelings. I know there's something there thematically, and I think there's something there character-wise. In places, the writing feels like it's singing. But on the whole, the story feels like it's just not coming off, and that feeling might be springing from a variety of weird places.

Maybe it feels strange because it's actually good. Unfamiliar because it's unintuitive: not the kind of story-of-my-heart that I can't seem to place in magazines, but a story-of-my-hands that's a piece of craft, instead. (Or because it's actually not good - it seems like it's not coming off because it's not coming off.) Maybe it's because it's part of the blended thing I talked about in that fermentation post -

meld[ing] a methodical sort of writing that I've been developing in my exercises and in the hot springs story with the disturbing, sex-and-violence-focused work that produced the stories I love that keep getting rejected

- which is not how I've written up to now, but is perhaps a better way for me to write moving forward. Or maybe it feels strange, just practically, because there's an awful lot of cursing (even the C-word), but I'm also writing about tender and difficult places in these characters' lives.

Or maybe it isn't working and I need to rewrite it.

I dunno. The piece is exciting for me to work on, but it's also quite confusing, because it doesn't feel like one thing or another. Mine and not-mine, good and not-good, subtle and obvious.

This probably isn't very interesting. It's just the only thing writing-related that's really happened lately. Spring break is next week - which, incidentally, divides the semester into a ten-week block and a four-week block, which really? That's poor planning, to me - and I made a list of all the things I want to do. Revise one story, start another, read the next book for 478 (Leviathan, which itself is an interesting prospect because I didn't like the one Auster book I've read (Moon Palace, which felt static and overly New Yorky and just...boring) but this book has one of the best first lines I've ever read ("Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.")) and get to work on my final paper for the same class, etc etc. It's a wildly unrealistic list. This weekend, though, I've got to get the journalist story into shape enough to give it to a non-Matt reader or two, to find out what the hell it is I have here.

Want the first line? I'm really happy with the first line. It's not good the way the Auster line is, but its sensations are exactly right.

A torn-up lotto scratcher blew about the brick walkway leading up to Charlotte’s house.