Resolute, 2017 Edition

Every year, I post last year's New Year's resolutions with a short analysis of how well I think I succeeded at them, and then I post this year's. So, here are last year's (in greater detail here):

1. Stay calm. A draw, I think. My equanimity grows with each passing year, and I perceive this as a less-passionate and totally preferable way to live. But I lost my cool a couple of times this year, and I lost my temper in private. I will say that the emotional aspects of my PMS worsened really badly in 2017 (like, from 2 out of 10 to 8 out of 10), and I wish I could figure out how to mitigate that.

2. Get off Facebook. No, really, I mean it. Fail. I'm going to stop making this resolution. Every time I really step away from Facebook, my emotional health improves measurably, but I miss important events in my friends' lives and my self-promotion falters. The friends and the promotion matter too much to me right now to make that trade.

3. Stay a healthy distance from smug. Success. Visibly walking the middle politically proved impossible this year, so I tried instead to keep my mouth shut to avoid hurting others. This isn't everyone's best solution, but it is mine.

4. Go toward the crazy, weird, awesome, instinctual. Big success. All of my happiest results personally and professionally came from this choice.

I've already meditated on what 2017 was like for me as a writer. 2018 will mark my seventh year keeping this blog. I don't know how that happened. I look back and all those little bits have added up to something.

I think that's the shape of a life, too.

For the last couple of years, I've had a difficult time coming up with resolutions, but man, this year's were easy.

1. Hustle. Keep up the momentum I've built as a writer in 2017. Working a little bit all the time will be better for me, better for making things happen continuously on the long line between words on the page and publication. I've begun rolling down the hill and I don't want to swerve off into one of those runaway truck ramps and come to a halt in a flurry of sand and ignominy. (Even though I've always wanted to, less metaphorically, swerve off into one of those runaway truck ramps in my car, just to see what would happen.)

2. Keep to my own rhythms. After we got back from the UK I took on the habit for a week or so of two sleeps. I went to bed at a laughable hour, like 7:30, and then woke up in the wee hours and read or wrote for a few hours, and then went back to sleep until 7 or 8. It was great. I felt well-rested, the line between sleeping and waking wasn't as intimidating as it usually is, and I got a lot done. But once the jet lag wore off, and I had to get up for work at 6 again, it wasn't feasible anymore.

I sleep a lot on the weekends, especially during the day. I used to find this pathetic, lazy, and generally an excuse to beat myself up. But now I realize that I function better (I'm more creative, friendly, relaxed, focused) when I nap at some point during the day. I am just one of those people who needs more sleep. Instead of fighting this or insisting that it makes me a sucky person, how nice if I could accept it, and use it to run my life better. There's all kinds of stuff in my life like this, rhythms of my own preference that make me better when I keep to them.

3. Fight fear. I've gotten pretty good at courage in the face of anxiety over the last few years, especially since the first Ojai workshop. I don't find myself victim to fear too often, but I do still feel it in my body on a regular basis, and that is something I can battle against. There's no reason to be afraid of asking for what I want or need, whether it's publication or more ice in my tea.

4. Plan better on a small scale. Planning down to the minute doesn't work for me. Even planning down to the hour is too granular. I get resentful and self-sabotage and nothing whatsoever gets done. But leaving things wide open (so I feel free, instead of feeling trapped) overwhelms me and makes me waste the whole day. It's a fiddly balance to strike and I think, through trial and error, I've finally gotten the process down:

1. Decide what to do in the morning and what to do in the afternoon [on non-work days]. General goals for four-hour blocks seem right. E.g. "read particular book" in the morning and "write x, y, and z pitches" in the afternoon. 
2. Keep the goals small, even underwhelming. 
3. If you feel good/productive, keep going, and accomplish something unexpected (e.g. "do laundry") (because there's always laundry). 
4. If you fail, do not do not do not yell at self. 

The last step is the most important, because yelling at myself wrecks the entire thing. I get so caught up in how much I suck that I can't keep my plans for the next block of time and I just play solitaire and eat cheese. Which makes me feel like I suck. Which takes me into the next block of time.

I'm recording this not just because I hope it helps you, but also because I need to see this strategy put down in detail in a place I can refer to all year to make myself stick to it.

5. Give myself credit for hard work. These resolutions are much nicer to myself than in past years. It's almost as if I'm learning not to be so hard on myself. Almost as if that had been the primary focus of my therapy since around 2015. Hm.

Anyway, this resolution has to do with not chalking my successes entirely up to luck, or circumstances outside my control. Luck is an integral part of success, as is privilege and talent and other things not determined by one's own will or mettle. But I believe hard work is more than half of success, and possibly a much greater proportion of greater successes. People have said about Marilyn Monroe and Tom Cruise (whatever you think of him) - and probably a number of other exceptionally famous people about whom I haven't specifically read this - that yeah, they had It, something intangible and predestined, but they also worked harder than the reporting person had ever seen anyone work. That always made me feel better about how stardom happens. Hard fucking work.

So yeah. I worked hard in 2017. Luck and privilege and talent had plenty to do with the visible results, but I think hard work had more to do with it. If you know the right people and catch the right wave of the zeitgeist, you can get mediocre books published, but they'll always be mediocre. Good books come from hard work.

6. Let go, let go, let go. A couple of weeks ago, I opened a cabinet at work and found that the computer supplies I had carefully curated (because we sometimes need oddball peripherals, and I keep them in stock so I don't have to send to China for them in a rush), some of which I had been storing in order to bring a batch to the recycling center so as not to dump rare earth metals into the landfill, had all been discarded. Poof. Gone. I almost cried. My boss has been in a slash-n-burn mood lately as we prepare to expand our office, so I understood why this happened, but I was still pretty upset that she had asked someone else - someone who hadn't been in charge of the computer supplies - to clean them out.

Later I remembered that I am winding up my employment here, moving down to two days a week and then to one by spring, and there's no reason I should be so personally upset. Even though I worked hard on this curation, it's not really up to me, nor is it a credit or deficit on my character, what this office does with its supplies. Let go, Kat. This isn't yours anymore.

It's hard. I worked hard on that cabinet, little things here and there, for two years.

7. Take better care of my body and my home. Why don't I brush and floss every night? I don't know. It's not because of the time it takes, and it's not because I don't like flossing. Why don't I go for a half-hour walk after dinner? I don't know. Because I don't remember to. Why don't I put my clothes away at night instead of tossing them over chairs and on the floor? I don't know. Doing these things right takes marginally more time than not doing them at all, and forming good habits will help me live longer and prosper more. So this year I will try to form good habits on little crap like this.

8. Avoid travel. I mean, sort of. Late 2017 had so much travel in it that right now I'd be happy to not travel again until 2019, but I'm sure that'll wear off by spring and I'll return to well-I-suppose instead of no-way-no-how.

Happy New Year, readers and friends. I was happy to know you this year. Stick around and stay strong for 2018.

Novel-Writing / Blue-Footed Boobyness

In setting up the Casablanca novel, writing the early chapters, I've heaved a lot of existential sighs. It feels so tedious, having to tie the rigging and erect the masts for my model ship. As the New Yorker brought to my attention, 

in an interview with the Guardian last August, [Rachel] Cusk said that she had recently come to a dead end with the modes of storytelling that she had relied on in her earlier novels. She had trouble reading and writing, and found fiction “fake and embarrassing.” The creation of plot and character, “making up John and Jane and having them do things together,” had come to seem “utterly ridiculous.”

That's a terrific article if you read the whole thing, and it expressed a feeling I'd started to have about writing short stories at the time I read it in 2015. Writing fiction had begun to seem even more farcical than reading fiction usually did. Inventing people and setting them off on journeys felt hollow. Like playing with paper dolls in scenarios unimportant and soon forgotten. It was part of why I began to sway toward nonfiction, metafiction, hybrid work. Not only am I not especially good at writing regular short stories, but I don't enjoy it. 

In the Casablanca novel, although I'm writing mainly about one character and her journey and her interior life, I have to put together other elements of character and plot in order to sustain that journey, as well as - critically - the reader's interest. Okay, so I've invented a teacher who's a member of the French Resistance, and a principal who colludes with the Nazis, and a wife who's left her husband over fascism, and little teenage friends who are uninterested in the war. But making them all hang together as a whole tapestry, making cause and effect happen in a dance of inevitable surprise - that is the stuff that, in my opinion, makes it a novel. And that stuff is annoying and difficult and not nearly as interesting in the course of its invention as I ever think it will be. 

Writing all the other stuff is the work, and writing about my main character is the fun. I wish I'd remembered that novel-writing works this way before I decided to undertake this one, but I didn't, and now I'm stuck.

I hoped I would have more to say about this situation, above - enough to make a decent-sized post - but I do not, alas. Except to say that I read the book that New Yorker article was about, Outline, and it was one of the dullest, least fulfilling books I've read in yonks. Since it was the first book of hers I've read, I don't know if I don't connect to Cusk, or if her transition away from fiction has made for an awkward book or two.

Anyway, that's not enough data for a full post, so here's a few bits and pieces.

--

I briefly expressed this here in May, so forgive me for repeating myself. Since I reviewed The Book of Joan - gratitude to Julie and Brian, always and always - I've been tentatively asking various publicists and presses for ARCs to review, because I like reviewing books and doing so might lift my profile some more. In reply, I keep hearing "sure, okay, what's your address?" and it's making me ask WHAT EVEN IS THIS FARCE WHEN AM I GOING TO GET MY LITTLE DUMB LIFE BACK PLEASE DON'T LET IT BE SOON.

(ARCs are advance reader copies, un-proofread versions of books that are printed a few months before the book is actually released to the public. They are sent out to book reviewers and to writers at some level of fame who are willing to say nice things about the book. They are sometimes called galleys.)

People who have been doing book reviews for a while might think it's silly for me to feel gratitude and awe at getting ARCs, because I've heard tell of the phase where ARCs take over your mailbox and become an annoyance. But as of now, I still feel excitement.

--

I had another No Really I'm So Done with Facebook day last week, and then the next day there was a Carolyn Hax column I simply had to talk about and I got into an interesting conversation on her wall and agh, I was dragged in again. Honk if you relate.

--

I'm applying for residencies and whatnot for next year, a process so very uninteresting that it's almost not worth the possible reward. It feels like a slow, weird, conceptual dance I'm doing. That is, it's not the energetic, buy-what-I'm-selling song-and-dance that a salesman has to do, because it's in print and it's related to art, not commerce. But it's still self-promotion and self-exposure. Like a super-crappy mating dance. Same steps over and over, full awkwardness on display, uncertainty flapping in the wind.

I'm also assembling essays for a collection to pitch. The hybrid film essays are not yet ready for a whole collection, so this one's different - odds and ends, really. Some of them come from this blog, some from elsewhere. It's a weird experience. Copying stuff from the blog into a Word doc, changing the font, reorienting aspects of the context - suddenly the words feel more official. Figuring out how it all goes together, and whether it does, is equally weird. It's me, I'm the consolidating factor. Is that enough?

All this is on deadline, which gives it a stress blanket I do not enjoy. At least it means the unpleasantness of these processes has an end point. 

Of a Reading and a Writing

For the last week and a half, I've been posting loose poems to a selected audience on Facebook every day with the hashtags #fillfacebookwithpoetry and #freetheverse. (Also #freethedrought, but that's a weird private joke between me and my friend Jason.) I am not now and have never claimed to be a poet, but the purpose of these poems is not necessarily aesthetic brilliance so much as it is resistance against the dominant discourse that's on my Facebook feed.

This is an ironic move, because the dominant discourse (on my feed, not perhaps on yours) is political resistance and fury - so, resistance against the resistance, which is itself against a conservative movement that some would label a resistance as well. I'm aware that I am making few friends with my stance, which reads a lot like head-in-sand, but what I think and feel about the liberal resistance discourse is complex and unpopular, so I decided to try and go in a different, and non-combative, direction.

The poems more or less serve as daily diaries. For instance, when I spent all day reading on Sunday: 

We begin with
Return to Peyton Place, the quickie
cheapie sequel
she wrote when her habits were
too expensive to keep, and
too hard to break

Much more sex than in the first. But
such a pleasure to walk around
in those corrupted skins again. 

Then, the doorbell, and
three copies of Odes intended for
the crone, the sex goddess, and
[my own] mother.
Plus a book by a miracle woman
with pages so beautifully
perfumed that opening it seduced me
already
before I read a word. 

Later, the first novel of a friend
(a friend, I think, I hope)
whom I wish I had better charmed, the once we met,
not knowing the power she held in her hands,
the ends of nets she grasped
which stretched all across the firmament of
SoCal lit. I don't think she had fun with me. 

(Nearly finished. Very beautiful.) 

And a dozen pages of
a strange good hostile memoir thing
with a title I envy
and a height that won't fit the shelf where
my Ws go. 

I need to return to my own work, but
for the moment
for the [Sunday] moment
the people inside me do not nag;
they converse with the others, new
company, over for an afternoon chat
on the sofa with a soft lamp
and a cup of Portland Earl Grey. 

Like I said, I'm not much of a poet. I have no problem with that. It means I get to play, without fear that someone will say "You suck!", because I'll just say "Yep, thanks!" and keep doing my thing. In this case, my thing is being received pretty well, by non-poets at least and by a few poets who really love me. And it's doing me good to do a little shaped writing every day, working at the craft a little but with no stakes. I like picking and choosing what to include in the daily account and I like listening to the words for assonance and crackle. 

I intended to do this only through the weekend, but it's getting to be a habit I enjoy. I'm tossing out to the universe the idea of building a chapbook of these poems, titling them by the day I wrote them, but I can't figure out a natural end point for them. 365 poems is way too many, isn't it? Chapbooks are like 80 pages. Maybe I'll write 365 of them and then pick the best ones. It wouldn't be a diary so much as a selected diary in that case. Whatever. Your thoughts are welcome, because I certainly don't know what I'm up to. I'm not a poet! 

As for the reading, I'm listening to the audiobook of Robert Hare's new classic on psychopathy, Without Conscience. It contains almost everything I've ever wanted to know about psychopaths. They are fascinating creatures, so hard for us normies to comprehend. I think, based on what's in this book, that I've known three in my lifetime.

School starts Monday. I'm ready. I'm ready! 

Shortness of Breath

I enjoy smoking cigarettes. That's it. That's all there is to it. I love smoking, and I will never not want to smoke.

My Male Novelist author photo

Various factors contributed to me picking it up as a genuine habit again at the end of 2015 and in January of 2016. Usually I am a social smoker, in that I'll join in when others are smoking but am perfectly fine not doing it by myself. But I found myself smoking in the car at the start and the finish of every day, and not being able to stop myself. While running, my wind was beginning to decline. I noticed I was much more irritable than usual.

So, two weeks ago, I stopped again. It was really only two months, tops, that it was a habit this time - not a matter of years, as in the past - but I am not having an easy time with it. I miss cigarettes desperately. With my body, yes, thanks to the nicotine that dug its claws into my back again, but with my spirit much more so. The sensation of the smoke going in and coming out. The having something to do with my hands. The actual nostalgia that smoking brings me, of old times, of smoking partners long gone.

Girl, cry me a river. Smoking is a pox on our society and you're better off without it. 

Eh. I suppose. The very real health effects matter a lot less to me when I'm actually engaging in the activity. And missing it is making me maudlin. I'm sorry if that seems silly, but you try giving up a habit that brought you comfort through all your teenage and early-20s years.

What are you actually talking about here?

[Hands up] You got me. I'm talking about something other than smoking. I'm talking about Facebook, too. I know I've talked a bunch about Facebook, and about giving it up, and I can only imagine how I sound when I'm doing so and then you see me on there again two weeks later. But really this time, really now, Facebook is exhausting me.

My tolerance for political discussion and engagement is the lowest limbo bar you can imagine. Because the pace of the election talk and share and yell at each other has not let up even a little bit, I'm now at the point where I have to choose between Facebook and one of the classes I'm taking this semester, lest Matt come home one day and find me doing whatever the protagonist was doing at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper." The class is skidding so deeply into political territory that I'm starting to get quiet and depressed instead of happy and engaged. I can't quit the class, so I think I'm going to quit the site. For a while.

Are you equating Facebook and smoking?

Yes. And I've done the same thing with the former that I've done with the latter: sorta quit and then cheat a lot, or quit for a while and come crawling back. I always end up with shortness of breath. I always end up distracted and wasteful and isolated.

I finally quit smoking when I was 25. It stopped being a just-me habit that year. I would maybe smoke on my birthday, or bum one from a friend outside a bar while keeping him company. But not until December 2015 was it again a thing I did without company, without occasion. It was like I'd never stopped, except that I was lonelier than before, older than before, had more to lose than before.

Maybe it's not a perfect metaphor. Anyway, I'm trying to work out the Facebook thing, because the cons column of staying and fighting on is groaning under its own weight, while the pros column has a mere few, exceptionally strong, entries. a) My stats on this blog dropped by half when I didn't post links on Facebook. b) It's the only way to keep up with certain friends. c) It allows me to offer support to friends who would never ask for it over email, or to keep up on rapidly changing circumstances. d) And sometimes I find things worth reading or seeing, worth saving.

But that's it. And my spirit is struggling to maintain buoyancy in the avalanche of Everything Else.

Geez, it's only Facebook. Chill out. Maybe smoke a cigarette or something.

Hmm. I suppose I could.

It Was in the Bleak December

The word I learned (evidently not well) in Dr. Haake's class that I tried and failed to remember in order to use it for this blog post was "crots". I knew it would be a good pun to title the post "Blood Crots" but I could not remember the word in order to form the pun. Neither could a classmate. Now I will never forget it.

It means teeny little fragments of prose, like the ones in that post. Or this post, the one that follows this crot.

--

From the story I was working on this week: "She sobs as if sobbing is screaming."

--

I stopped spending approximately half of my free time on Facebook shortly after Thanksgiving. This time was equal parts socializing, reading interesting articles friends had linked, and pointless noodling. Now I look at Facebook ~once a day, not scrolling much, not clicking on much. I miss the socializing, badly, but here are the reasons I quit:

• Politicians' faces, when even the people posting don't like the politician promoted
• Vitriol 
• Sarcasm 
• Constant observation of war 
• Constant observation of violent death 
• Advertisement-laden new-agey bullshit standing in for sincere assistance
• Opinionatedness when, honestly, it does not matter, because you will not change anyone's mind, and you're going to change your own mind anyway when a new research study comes out next year 

And every time I check in, on those once-a-day-or-so occasions, I see all these things before I've even spent five minutes. I feel more uneasy about Facebook and what I hope to get out of it than I ever have. Surely I can't just take off from it until the election is over? Or until ISIS is wiped out? Or until school shootings stop? Because those are all hamster wheels that do not stop turning when their inducements end. There is always more to chase.

I want to promote my writing and my thoughts on social media, but my observation of the pattern of the Internet is that all of its spaces eventually become weird and feculent flea markets rather than orderly, janitored malls. Facebook is full of what I perceive to be junk, and cutting through it is so taxing.

This is a more judgmental statement than I generally like to make on this blog. But Facebook is making me tired, when once it used to make me happy. I don't know what has changed, and I wonder if it's me, if I'm just...like...getting too old for this shit.

Oh, and the result? I feel calmer, more open, less stuffed. (Stuffed like a taxidermied animal, like an overfull diner, like the British slang.) I don't want to stop quitting Facebook. I miss it, but I miss this calm, satisfied, reflective self more. And I think I need her more than I need Facebook.

--

It's been three weeks now since I made a Yes video. For that I am sorry. What's holding me up has been: noticeable background noise outside my apartment (hammering, leafblowers), lighting problems, a lack of interest in putting on makeup on my days off, and too little mental space to think positively enough to speak positively into my webcam. All but one of these are insignificant problems, but they've held me up anyway, probably because of the last one on the list.

I know exactly what I'm going to say in my next video, but I didn't make it this week, either. Soon.

--

Latest art project: redecorating my right hand.

I mentioned the wing ring previously, but the other one is this odd hunk of iolite which appears to be a different color and clarity of purple every time I look at it. It's a fascinating gem. The story of me acquiring it might actually be a good one, but it's not crot-length.

--

I looked over my New Year's resolutions from last year. Virtually none of them were successes. This is not a mark of me sucking, but a mark of how different this year has been from the norm. After the summer I lowered my expectations significantly and turned my attention inward, which has been valuable but not as outwardly productive as meeting my resolutions would have been. I suspect 2016's resolutions will reflect the lowered bar, but I haven't really thought much about them yet.

--

As a follow-up to the last post, I BEEN READIN. READING IS SUPER AWESOME. SO IS THE LIBRARY. GO CHECK OUT A BOOK AND READ IT RIGHT NOW.

Instinct with Handrails

Last week I was on vacation, and I made a sincere attempt to go "screen-free". I didn't watch any television, or use the iPad to watch movies, or look at Facebook, or type anything on a laptop, or send any emails. I did look at my emails - the single one I hoped for didn't arrive, but I got six from Facebook in four days (six!), reminding me of all the cool stuff I was missing by not logging in. With one exception, all the others (25+) were not-really-needed notifications or junk.

But I'm not here to write about the meaning of that little experiment. I'm here because the main things I did on vacation, in place of my usual screen-focused activities, were 1) read Proust and 2) write. Volume II of Remembrance of Things Past is just as all-encompassing and gorgeous and tedious and witty and self-indulgent and YESTHISFOREVERPLEASE as Volume I.* School starts in just about two weeks, so I don't know if I'll finish it before then, but I'll make room thereafter if need be. I tried to find the best blog post from last summer that talked about the experience of reading the first volume, and found that everything old is new again; last summer I started it on vacation and hadn't finished before school started. Ol' Repetitive, that's what they call me.**

Anyway, I took intermittent breaks from Proust to read David Shields's How Literature Saved My Life. Though I've owned and wanted to read Reality Hunger for some time now, I'm glad I started where I did. It was just the right book to slingshot me back and forth (yelping in joy) between the early years of the twenty-first and twentieth centuries. The writing I'm doing is in some ways positioned closer to Proust than Shields, but the collagist sensibility of Shields is exactly where I want to live, creatively. So the work proceeded apace.

I've now told two people what the secret project is, and both were very interested, so I'm a little reassured about the idea. I'm on the ninth pie piece, of twelve, but I know already that there will be lots of rewriting, lots of wholesale throwing into the fire and starting over. What I'm doing now isn't quite down to placeholding, but it has the distinct sensation of impermanence about it - Play-Doh instead of real fireable clay. I needed to write all these thousands of words to get to where I am now, which is: everything starting to hang together, a better understanding of the characters and their conflicts, an utter exhilaration at how ideas are sprouting out of the earth of the draft. I had no idea that I was writing about at least two of the themes that are at the very core of my life and work, but poof, up they came, like onion sprouts in the pantry. So I'm writing in that direction, vaguely, tottering, half-blindfolded, hoping that the work will lead me as ably as it has so far.

I'm sure this method, drafting first before theme enters into it, contradicts questioning and assertion that I've done right here on this very blog, because I resisted the idea really strongly when it came through Pam Houston to me in 2013 - that putting theme first makes for crappy writing, and you should let the sentences lead you to theme instead. Maybe other projects won't work this way. But this project is evidently going prose first, whittling second, themes third, rewriting fourth, and after that I have no idea.

I mean, what am I doing? Is this a quantum leap in my work or just a muddle that no one will like except me? I'm pretty sure it's teaching me a great deal (and what else is there?), but it's so different that I'm nigh consumed with what even is this?!? It's like writing was when I was in high school and knew thimbles about it: instinctual. Yes, that, but now with handrails. I think of Mary Gaitskill and the fucking power in her sentences, of Joanna Newsom and the bizarro brilliant songs she makes, of Lidia Yuknavitch and the library full of rules she breaks when she uncaps her pen, of Kate Bush and how she allows others' ideas to swim peaceably into her own. These are artists I couldn't call on when I was a teenager. Plus, to no small effect, there's the writer's toolbox I've equipped over the past decade via enormous expense and personal irresponsibility. Somehow all that makes a line to grasp when I write into that weird dark room where I spent so much time last week.

As ever, iunno.

The picture at the top of this post, in case you were curious, is of a Last Straw. On Friday night I closed the lid of my time-worn spillproof travel mug, which contained a little leftover tea from the prior Sunday, and dropped it in my carry-on bag to schlep upstairs with the rest of our luggage, and IT SPILLED FIVE-DAY-OLD TEA ALL OVER MY PROUST AND MY DRAFTING NOTEBOOK, and so I am throwing it away. It is a rather elderly travel mug, in travel-mug years, and I'm kind of sick of looking at it and didn't ever love its appearance much anyway, so after this appalling insult, in the trash it goes. Shallow as I am, I hate reading water-damaged books (I still remember which Beezus & Ramona book I dipped in the bath as a girl and had to read with an accompanying crinkling noise ever after, grrrrrrrrr), so I ordered a new Volume II from Amazon, a total waste of $16 but HONESTLY, TRAVEL MUG, YOU HAD ONE JOB. The stains are kind of distinguished on the drafting notebook, but I'm still very disgruntled. At best, it made for an interesting picture, and a nice visual overview of the post, thematically.

See? Writing into the theme. Pam Houston knows what the hell she's talking about, folks.


*I have the silver Vintage paperback editions, which are bound in three volumes: Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove in the first volume, The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain in the second volume, and The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained in the third volume. These seven "individual novels" (which they aren't) were split into eight volumes, rather weirdly, when À la recherche de temps perdu was originally published, and have been published in many different ways under various English titles in the intervening century. To say that I'm working on "the second volume" is extremely confusing in conversation, but I know I sound pretentious when I talk about reading Proust anyway, so whatever.

**No one calls me that.

From a Human Larynx

I mentioned that I was taking a break from blogging for the month of February, and during that time I also took a version of a Facebook break. My general practice prior to February was to check Facebook multiple times per day when I was at work and to leave it open all the time when I was at home. I would also read it in great detail: I'd set my feed to "Most Recent" and scroll down as far as I could to read everything Facebook had to give me. I know its algorithms don't show me everything everything, but I was doing my best to be a completist.

During February, I checked it once in the morning and once at night, and I didn't scroll at all. I just looked for notifications and read what was on top of my feed. And it was the best thing ever.

I found myself with a great deal more spare time. I felt calmer. I guessed that I was missing all kinds of life events among my friends, small and large, but I found that I could live without knowing most of those things, and that I'd rather know about them from an email or a call or a coffee date anyway. I wasn't reading nearly as many meaningless or forgettable articles, and that meant I had mental space to read actual books instead.

In March, I've gone back to posting things on Facebook. Hence I feel a certain obligation to read other people's posts too instead of expecting people to react to my posts without reciprocation. And I check it several times a day again, because I want that hit of self-satisfaction when I see that someone has paid attention to something I've posted. But I no longer enjoy much of this. I like the interaction very much (my friends are scattered everywhere, geographically), but I dislike the expense of time and energy on what's going to be forgotten, by tomorrow, in favor of the next batch of content. And the attention-seeking feedback loop is just so abhorrent in all ways.

I don't know what to do about this. I'm not going to join Twitter, and I don't really know how else to a) interact with the outside world and b) keep a line of social media open for my writing. And it feels so selfish to add my own posts without reading others'. But I loved the focus that returned to me, the way my brain slowed down, the sense of not giving a damn that I was consistently missing what was going on.

Would love opinions on the issue.


Last week I held what I thought of as an open house week, where I invited a friend over to eat dinner with me each night. I did this because Matt was working a crunch week, not getting home until 8:30-9:00 and eating at work, and I hate cooking a whole dinner for just me. The idea behind this has its roots in the same place as my New Year's resolution about throwing a party: stop being ashamed of my apartment complex and just invite people the hell over. If they're grossed out by where I live, they don't have to come back a second time.

It turned out great. I loved the company. By the end of the week I was pretty tired of the sound of my own voice and I really wanted to sit in my bedroom alone for about six hours (I kind of seesaw between introvert and extrovert), but the food went over well, I had lots of fun with my friends, and everyone seemed very chill about the problems of my apartment complex.

Part of what I enjoyed so much about this open house week was the chance to interact with people face-to-face. A lot of the people I've come to know in L.A. are people I see for 10 minutes in between classes or have interacted with primarily on Facebook. Having a couple of hours of uninterrupted hangout time was a warm, rich experience. It's not that I rarely do the in-person thing, but seeing people four nights out of five was a sharp contrast to my usual nightly social interaction.

Which takes the form of reading through my silent, fractal, unsatisfying, addictive Facebook feed.

I hope to hold more open house weeks in the future. I'd much rather get the news from a human larynx than from a screen with a blue border on it.

A la Recherche de la Paix et de Calme

This is not the time or place to write in detail about my struggles with and emotions about Facebook. However, in prefacing the rest of this post, I have to say that during my vacation last week, I looked at Facebook hardly at all, in contrast to the prior week and a couple of years' worth of weeks before that, when I looked at Facebook on and off all day long. In brief, I stay on FB all the time because I'm afraid of missing anything that happens on FB, and last week, I wanted to miss everything that happened on FB, the better to pay attention to what was around me.

It was a beautiful week. It was slow, it was gentle. It was warm and cool at all the right times. There were friends and music and good wine and better food. There were loud staircases and quiet fans. There was a morning jog by a lake like a mirror. There were two men fishing from a skiff on the surface of that rippling, benevolent sun. There was life.

On my first weeklong vacation to this place - almost ten years ago now - I read The Fountainhead. It was nice to rip through it in a week and know that I never had to read it again, and I kind of marked this geographical spot in my mind as a place where I can get serious reading done. Chorelike reading, if necessary. So I brought with me the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past,* which I've owned for well over a decade, not in the hope of finishing all 1,018 pages but in the hope of getting far enough into it that I wouldn't find it easy to quit once I was home. I succeeded; yesterday I got past the 1/3 mark

and I intend to finish it this month. I don't know whether I'll start on the next one right away. We'll see.

Just in terms of conversations I've had with people (i.e. not in terms of his reputation in the highfalutin literary community), I find that Proust, like Wallace, is famous more for his maximalism than for his actual content. I'm here to tell you that's a real shame for both writers. So far, Temps Perdu is not a little frustrating, because it is ridiculous how much wordage this guy can trowel onto the simplest moments, but I have no complaints about how lovely it is to read his sentences. They're long, they're teetering, they're hard to follow, and they're almost certainly nothing like what they are in French, but they're also romancing the hell out of me.

During our travel home on Saturday, I spent a lot of time looking at things. Matt mostly played an RTS game on his iPad, but I sat (or stood, or walked) and looked around. Everything was fascinating. The way people walked and sat and ate and squirmed and coped with their kids and chatted with each other and zipped their bags and sipped their lattes. I would have missed so much if I'd been scrolling through Facebook on my phone.

I don't know, but I think, that nearly 300 pages of Temps Perdu had forced me into seeing the world in greater detail. Proust describes all he sees (or saw) at such great length that he had to have looked at that tree, that river, the interior of that house long enough or often enough to see every last thing there was to see about it. He's making a project of memory, so I understand why he spends dozens of pages on the flowers that lined a certain path from his parents' house to his great-aunt's house, but I'm not going to say it's a fun or breezy read. Nevertheless, I think it's altering, for the better, the way I see the world right now, as I'm reading it. The world seems to exist in such gradual detail. I've felt for years that the wealth of stories that exist among the human race is best demonstrated at an airport, where you can personally witness hundreds of stories happening across a single day, but I took a lot more notice of Indra's net on Saturday than I did on the flight out, before I'd started Temps Perdu.

Maybe it's not Proust, though. Maybe a week of little to no responsibility, of listening to quiet and watching leaves flutter in the wind, of strumming my uke on a porch, is what helped me slow down and look. Maybe the lack of Facebook, a week of me clamping off my brain from the dump-truck of information available there (which overwhelmed me the few times I looked at it over the week), made a much bigger difference than I can understand right now. Or maybe all three things helped me to find some peace - the intricate detail of Temps Perdu, the silenced buzz of Facebook, and the cool grass of my vacation, all combined, did the trick.

I don't really care. I just don't want it to end.


*Can I just say? The new Penguin translation of À la recherche du temps perdu translates the title as In Search of Lost Time, so the Wikipedia page and a lot of other material has been changed to reflect that, rather than Remembrance of Things Past, as it was known in English for almost a century. While In Search of Lost Time seems like a more faithful rendering of the phrase, Remembrance of Things Past is so much more evocative. And the version I own and am reading is translated that way, anyhow, so it's how I'm going to think of it. (There's other stuff to say about the translations and how I've decided to go ahead and read a translation that's quickly being rendered obsolete, but it's pretty boring.) 

"What's on your mind?"

Yesterday I wrote about 3,200 words on KUFC. Although I whinge and wheedle, I'm now sure it's the right thing to do to go on and write this book. After reading through what I'd done most recently (months ago, before this whole literary adventure), I felt a rekindling of interest in the idea and the main character, to my great relief. It's good stuff, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be a terrific book. I'm especially interested in the project because I came up with a terrible, wonderful choice for my MC at the final turning point of the book, tens of thousands of words away. The kind of choice where neither option is particularly good, i.e. a realistic choice. Great tension in that.

I feel like until now I'd been writing half-asleep, without really considering how things fit together in the world of a novel. I'm still not at the point where I can outline things very specifically more than about two chapters in advance - which may indeed be evidence that I'll have to rewrite this one, too - but I'm determined to let character propel the story, rather than just my ideas of what must come next.

I'm now about 300 pages into 2666, and I still have my opinion of BOY. Jeez oh Pete. This is a weird book and I have no idea how all this shit goes together and I can't wait to read the next hundred pages.

I'm also enjoying some new-to-me music lately. Although I'm only now listening to more than a song or two of hers, Regina Spektor feels like an artist I've been listening to for years, like a friend I've known since we were teenagers. She hardly feels new, just natural.


I found this fantastic band, the Leftover Cuties, who I think would resist "hipster" or "retro" and insist that what they're up to is 100% normal:

And I'm completely obsessed with this song (please ignore the source...):

Even better with headphones. And there's also Callas. Lots of Callas.

Finally, I'm trying to dislodge the hold Facebook has on me. I read a bunch of addiction narratives in a row, rather by chance, a couple of weeks ago. In thinking about what they had in common, and the general pattern to which addiction adheres, I discovered that the way I feel and behave about Facebook is, erm, pretty unhealthy. Of course Facebook isn't nearly as destructive as, for instance, heroin - that's a stupid idea - but it's still remade the pattern of my days in a way that is bringing me less peace. So the concentration and attention I give it is declining.

I thought I'd write a lot more about this, but it seems so lame, and I can't find the right words without skipping into other topics. And it doesn't matter much. I'm slowly backing away from Facebook, which is both challenging and pathetic, and the details aren't too interesting to anyone except myself.

In Which I Stumble Around

All right, motivation gland, you wacky trickster, I'm listening. Today is not the day for work, you say. I mean, obviously. Since it's one-fucking-thirty in the afternoon and I have done ZERO paid work. Since all I can think about is big swirly questions, and since last night's mood happened, and since I've written e-mails to both the Metropolitan Opera of New York and the author of the last book I finished. And also gotten splatters of cherry juice all over the unfinished wood surface of my desk and honestly don't know how to clean unfinished wood. It's been a chaotic day, sitting here staring at my computer for the last six hours.

I went to Der Rosenkavalier last night, the last of the summer encores from the Met. I stayed through the first act and most of the second and then gave up and went home. This opera did almost nothing for me, especially compared to the last one I went to, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, which shook me and delighted me and made me think slightly differently about art than I had the day before. Rosenkavalier felt like pop fluff, felt like Strauss wanted to write a sitcom to put talented singers into it to show their stuff, where Hoffmann felt like it was an entire, whole piece of art even without standing back to admire what the singers brought to it.

On the way out of the theater, driving home, walking from the parking lot to my apartment, I had this awful paranoiac anxious feeling, like the shadows were full of thieves and blackguards out to do me harm. Generally I find the world to be a positive place, and the number of people who want to commit crimes against other people seems quite small, but last night I felt vulnerable and unsafe. I don't know why.

Although I think it has something to do with my intake. I am very, very tired of reading fierce and eager words about guns and violence and presidential candidates and war and cancer and starvation and poverty. I know that putting my head in the sand doesn't make any of this go away, but I don't want to consume it anymore. I read something the other day that I don't remember clearly enough now to make a point about it, but it was something about the mad-eyed perspective that heavy TV watchers have (heavy = 6+ hours per day, I remember that detail), how they're more anxious than most about what goes on in the world. I was thinking about it in the shower, and I think it's the constant motion on TV that can drive you mad, the advertisements and the scrolling headlines and the pop-up coming up nexts and the credits of one show boxed below the cold open of the next. When I compared that to sitting quietly in a 19th-century home, an inadequate fire, a poor candle by which to read, uncomfortable ten-year-old clothes, I felt numb and sad and unsurprised about all that's happened in the last twenty years.

I might take a week or so off of Facebook. Just to sit alone and percolate in what I've already acquired, instead of searching for new! new! new!. I just hate missing things. Some of my friends, and some of my "friends", are so clever, and have access to such fascinating and unique stuff. If I miss it, it could be lost, and it could be a thing that improves my life. I nearly didn't go to Les Contes d'Hoffmann, either, and it's already enriched my life despite the short time between when I consumed it and now. But one of the things I reread on my bookmark day earlier in the week was this, which I read many months ago and still has more to tell me every time I read it. Surprising for a silly CNN article with uniformly evil comments on it.

This week I finished reading Clockwork Heart, by Dru Pagliassotti, and I'm going to recommend it to anyone who has the time for a lovely steampunk adventure. I enjoyed it more than I've enjoyed the last several books I read, for sure, and this morning I wrote the author and told her so. Right now I'm reading a memoir, The Chronology of Water, and it's probably part of why my mood is chaotic and thoughtful, as it's profound and frightening and beautiful. It's got an astoundingly clear-eyed and confident perspective on being female, further evidenced by the remarkable article the author wrote about the boob on the cover.

I could write on about that, about the cover and the concept of Body and the trouble with overanalysis and the lesson from Last Tango in Paris that I've taken with me everywhere I go in life, but I think I better make this day worth something and get to my manuscript. I've read a lot this morning, and it's all reminded me that I have my own things to say, more than just a ramble on a blog.

A Suspiciously Fragile Camel

Today's blog day, and I've been racking my brain all day long for something to write about here. Nothing coherent is coming to mind, so I'll do bits and pieces instead.

I've consumed a lot of great media lately, but it's been, like, YouTube videos of artists I know I love, or movies that everybody else in the dang world has also seen and loved, or whatever. Nothing new to say there.

A lot of stupid homeowner crap is going on. I'm trying to get the house clean for guests I'm having on Sunday and I am so miserable at cleaning. I have a fancy new washing machine, and that's good, but it cost a lot and I suspect it contains potassium benzoate, and that's bad.

I ran just over 2.5 miles yesterday and it about killed me. Completely square one compared to the 3 miles I ran last week. The Warrior Dash, which has been the whole point of these stupid shin splints and sore arms and hassle and whatnot, is in a week and a half so it's hardly relevant for much longer, but lesson learned: do NOT wait a week between runnings unless I want to lose serious ground. 3 days, max.

I'm twiddling my thumbs over the sci-fi story until it's time to tear through it for the open-door revision, which will happen around Monday. Can't wait. I'm thinking about starting something else, but I'm so stressed and spun up about personal shit that I think writing on a new project would be adding a big bale of hay to the back of a grumpy-ass and suspiciously fragile camel.

I taught my last class this morning at a location where I've been teaching since January, and I am enormously relieved. It might have been a bad move strategically to stop teaching there, but MAN it feels good to be free of that place.

Facebook has become sort of a problem for me lately. I've been keeping it open all day long and watching it like a hawk for interesting or respondable stuff, and it's, uh...really not good for me to do this. In the last couple of days I've gotten involved in some interesting conversations on Facebook with film people, which has really redeemed the whole enterprise in my mind, but I know I need to stop. I need to put it down and back away. And not care what's happening on Facebook every damn minute of the day.

I developed this theory about why we're so obsessed with our devices. I think it's because these devices promise intimacy and human connection, and then they don't quite deliver the way we hope they will, and so we click them off disappointedly and then come back 15 seconds later hoping that this time there will be more to the interaction.

That's part of the draw Facebook has for me - that and all the downright interesting stuff that flows through my feed. Neat links and funny pictures and just clever minds at work. But I need to click it off and concentrate on my own stuff. Easily said, hard to do. Especially because Facebook has made it so that it's very difficult to be sure and certain that you haven't missed anything. Which is kind of a thing for me.

I've been reading this writer's chapter-by-chapter smackdown critique of 50 Shades of Grey, and I am SO glad she's relieving me of the burden of reading this book. Omigoodness. She's extremely funny, which doesn't hurt, but she's also clearheaded and smart, which is by far the best part. Here's chapter one and you can go from there, if you so choose. Right now she's running a contest to name the, in romance parlance, member of a main character, and the entries made me snort and nearly fall out of my chair.

That's all for now, sports fans. Although, if you are sports fans, I don't know why you're here; I don't like sports.