IN THAT IS THE KNOWING

Things I learned over the Labor Day weekend I spent in Ojai with Lidia Fuckin' Yuknavitch and Jennifer Fuckin' Pastiloff:

1. Lidia will give you writing prompts and writing guidance that don't resemble anything I've seen anywhere. I can't share them with you because it wouldn't be fair to her. But if you're bored by the same old advice with slight variations you get in workshops and craft classes and so on, seek her out. She's sly and brilliant and possibly the most complete person I've ever met.

2. Jen is one of the more unusual yoga teachers I've ever obeyed with my body's movements, and easily the most inspiring. Get into her. She has more love than the sun.

3. I need retreats like these on a regular basis.

4. I am a fiction writer. I'm not a memoirist. I can't resist being a storyteller of my own life in conversation, but every time we got a writing prompt I kept wanting to make things up. This was not a retreat away from some fearful truth, but a desire to seek truth through something I could shape more freely than my memory.

5. [extremely personal admission].

I want to share two pieces of writing I did this weekend. The first is what I wrote in response to a prompt about the most recent thing I did that scared me. I didn't have to think long: the scary thing was the short story I wrote on Wednesday, one week ago. I had no clue what I was up to - I was feeling my way, with those handrails - and I was frightened to bits about whether it was good or not. But I had to write it to meet my workshop deadline, and out it came. Like so:

Aching hand. Empty stomach. Jaw-clench headache. This phrase, that phrase, bird by bird. No memory of this morning, yesterday, anything real before this: feeling, fingers fluttering, into the blackest parlor under my hair.

All I know is these two people: a man (a boy) and a girl - they exist in different eras; they want the same thing; one takes lives and the other gives hers. The verse of it is the other all-I-know, the sense of comma and colon, where to start and where to stop and what to place in between. Sounds, rhythm; content coming back to its feet on the second round.

The light has changed. The last time I noticed the air conditioner kicking on and off was hours ago.

Sentences have geography, they have geometry, they have abstraction and recursive hearts. Their secrets have hearts and their hearts have secrets.

Sentences like piano sonatas, like well-composed sauces, like expensive perfume, like LSD light shows, like quiet fur. Yet there is no word, no sixth or seventh or fifteenth sense, for what's behind my eyes when I shape clay into birds.

Enter clause, exit clause. David. Lidia. The weight of it, the length, the beating drum. My blood and bones and gray matter, the composition of my aliveness.

The composition. Composition. Compose. Compose.

"Write fearless sentences." -Katharine Coldiron

So that might be kind of a journal entry rather than a real thing, but I'm sharing it more or less to tell you that I wrote this story, which I think is called "The First Snow," on Wednesday and I can't wait to read and revise it. I experienced many synonyms of fear while writing it, but I set them aside and kept going. Bird by bird.

The other piece is something I read aloud on the last day. Jen asked me to put it into the world. I wasn't satisfied with posting it on Facebook (too ephemeral), so I'm placing it here instead. The prompt was the two-part question "What gets in my way the most? And what the fuck am I going to do about it?"

I knew, instantly, that the answer to a) was the idea that I don't know enough. That I don't have enough education or knowledge. This notion leads me to all kinds of unnecessary decisions and actions. I wrote what follows in answer to b), but because no one was recording, you'll have to imagine me stamping my foot and roaring it at a room of 39 other women:

Write anyway. Write the shit. Write the Shinola. Write the funny and the tragic. Write the signifiers and the signifieds, the transcendental signified, the middles and the edges, the me and the everyone else. Write the heart that you don't have. Write the music made by others. Write it all, all you can, and in that is the knowing. In that is the knowing. Go to school if you want. Keep learning always. But mostly write on, and in that is the knowing. And so it is. 

How to Write Soporific Prose

Just incidentally one day during our To the Lighthouse unit, the professor mentioned that Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, was aawwwful, a thudding interminable Victorian thing. It's not that I didn't believe her when she said this (I gather that she's something of a Woolfian, so she'd know), but I wondered if "aawwwful" was a relative term when it came to Woolf and/or if the book's Victorian attributes made it much more awful to someone who prefers Modernism. I was dancing through Middlemarch at the time, so I thought Night and Day would make an interesting middle ground between Eliot and what I was reading for class.

Turns out she was right. Night and Day is awful. Aawwwful. It's one of the dullest, most joyless books I've ever read. But man, is it ever an interesting awful. I'm learning so much from reading it.

The scenes are very bad, with all the rhythm of an oompah band at its first rehearsal. The narrated paragraphs are better, but largely descriptive - a lot of telling, much of which never pays off. We are deep inside the characters' heads, reading every last thought and emotional reaction to each gesture of every little finger, but the characters themselves are still remarkably inconsistent and difficult to grasp. Through all of this, I can feel the author trying and trying and trying to get something on the page that matters to her. In a chapter I just finished, I could feel her fever at the theoretical high emotional point of the scene, but I felt no fever in myself. The scene was an endless, stilted conversation between two characters in whom I have amazingly little investment after 300 pages, and I had no idea why it was such a big deal that they were talking to each other about who was in love with whom. Between the lines, it felt as though she was trying to write the scene when Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth. It fell flatter than a cheap stage set.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).
Apropos of nothing in this post, here's five minutes of stunts from The Great Stone Face.

The book feels like a sort of expungement. As if all the worst habits of a writer are being wrung out in print before she gets on with the business of writing well. Every paragraph is bogged down with prose that takes the longest possible route to get anywhere, and describes everything in exhaustive and unnecessary detail. Abstractions abound. We hop heads constantly, but to little benefit, which makes the book seem amateurish.

There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his explanations and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave him her reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey, omitting the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He listened attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth, he found himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense, and accepted each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it helped him to make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he had caused her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady tide of well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their feet upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the more glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination to behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she was.

Are you asleep yet? Page after page of this! Every little emotional dip and soar of young love, recorded at enormous length, and then contradicted by the next minuscule emotional change, and then around again...oh my God, seriously, it's aawwwful.

Precision v. Grace, Classical v. Jazz (or The Great Oz Has Spoken)

Last week I sort of unintentionally reread some feedback a professor gave me about a year ago.

While this piece feels done, it’s felt done from the beginning, and done in a way that, as impressive as the writing is, feels like there’s a cap on, holding everything together deliberately and tightly. I know this is what most writers aspire to, at least for a while. And then there’s the next stage, which involves letting go of all that tight control to dig deeper, to burrow, to be surprised. I think I already said this, and if not, shame on me. But really, if you can write this well, Katharine, imagine how well you might write if you were really writing. And by that I mean working the language intransitively, not acting upon but acting – not writing about (the self), but writing (the self). You clearly have all the craft skills you need to stop thinking so clearly in meaning. 

This feedback confused me. Even after I achieved some distance and met with the professor, the way forward did not come clearer. (I still didn't understand it particularly well in rereading last week.) But I set it up in the back of my mind, kind of like a canvas backdrop, while I went on and wrote to the best of my ability.

I blogged last fall about how much despair ensued when another professor unknowingly echoed what the first one had said. The backdrop rippled a little, starting to appear more realistic and less like scenery, but I still didn't know what to do with it.

This blog post does not tidily conclude with me figuring it out.

Getting Underwater

This is the truth: I'm not really enjoying the single class I'm taking this semester.

I've tried on several different explanations for size and have settled on two unrelated reasons. 1) The material is not engaging me really at all, in ways that are not the professor's or anyone else's fault. I liked studying Ulysses closely - the sensation was a series of reliefs (relieves?), an experience I might unpack in a later post - but it didn't really light up my brain. Our most recent read, To the Lighthouse, I found impenetrable (probably my own duncery there) and thus I did not enjoy studying it. It was like I'd come to class having read a completely different book than the one the professor discussed. Although I loved the first book we read, The Good Soldier, we really used it as an example for wider literary issues rather than reading deeply into the book itself, which disappointed me.

Merrily we roll along into The Waste Land, which I've read, and I liked the actual poem but found myself bored by what seems to be the point, which is all the allusions and notes and etc. And the latter is, I'm sure, what we're going to focus on in class.

I think we can all agree this is beautiful, but pretty weird

2), just as crucially, I'm itchy to write and I want to be doing that instead. Between work and recovering from work and school and recovering from school and doing so many social things lately and keeping us in groceries and clean laundry, though, I'm having a hard time finding space for it. It's making me disgruntled and that's bleeding over into my experience of school.

I need to do better at elephant-eating. A hundred words a day, or something. But when I think about working that way, I think about my mom, and virtual reality.

When my mom is working, there's this effect of a satellite delay between when you speak to her and when she responds. "Hey, Mom?" [one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi] "Yes, honey?" She doesn't even necessarily look at you or stop typing when she responds; it just takes her that amount of time to come out of the fifteenth century and back into the present moment to recognize that someone has spoken and she's bound to reply. She's explained to me - although it didn't really need to be explained, because I've watched it happen - that she has to go through a definite process of disengaging to answer whatever it is that you need from her, and then it takes time to re-engage with the work before she's back where she was. Even an interruption like "Where's the extra soap?" or "Want another cup of coffee?" will lose many precious minutes for her.

She says it's like being underwater, like scuba-diving: all above the surface is dull and far away, and she'll get the bends if she comes up too fast. My own metaphor for this phenomenon is like The Matrix, or some cybermovie from the 1990s where people have to plug into the New-Fangled Information Superhighway with a complex set of gear - something over your eyes, fingers into stable gloves that don't move, ears and nose plugged, something down your throat, etc. Body horror machinery that you need an assistant to get into and out of. Not just a little plug in the back of your neck, and not quite as immersive as that gross red goo with a jillion wires where you live until Morpheus wakes you up: something in between. Disengagement takes time, and re-engagement takes time. It's a process, an effort, an upsetting bother.

Pictured: my mom's metaphor mixed with mine. A.k.a. the cyber-dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic.

When I'm really, totally inside my fiction writing, my immersion is as intense as my mother's. But it takes much more time than a satellite delay to get me inside that zone - over half an hour, easy. The process of plugging in is often so laborious that I buck at the idea of doing it just to write a few hundred words before I have to stop and meet an outside responsibility. Especially for the secret project, which is such a different kind of writing than what I've done before that I need 110% of my concentration to even do it.

I must learn how to overcome this, though, and write a little at a time. I must. That's how my life looks right now, that all I have is dribs and drabs of time, not chunks of it, and I need to be using them.

Sigh.

In book news, I read Middlemarch over the last four weeks. I totally loved it. It was a pleasure. Beneath its old-fashioned exterior is a pen of such strength and wit and insight that it blew my mind.

Middlemarch was also my Big Book for 2015, so that's out of the way. I'm thinking of one of those huge Russian novels for 2016, Anna Karenina or War and Peace or some such book. I've heard all good things about those novels and I even read about a third of Karenina at one time, but I just don't have a lot of interest or motivation regarding them as of yet. Meanwhile, it's shaping up that I'm going to read the other two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past over the next two summers. Three years of Proust! I wish I could have read it all at once, but this is an acceptable compromise.

Wish me luck at getting underwater in April. My self-imposed deadline is starting to look unrealistic. :(

What Sticks

One of the better movies I've seen in the past few years is Paprika, which, if you liked the ideas in Inception, you should see. The thing that's stuck with me the most is not, according to my Google searches, what commonly sticks from this film for people. But then it's kind of a rich film. One of the main characters is haunted by recurring dreams of a man in a white shirt falling down in a red hallway. I could not find an animated gif that shows the whole moment, but this is the best I could do:

The man in the white shirt falls, or hovers, or moves backward and forward like a special effects clip from a cheap 50s movie, multiple times in the film. His hands dangle, his shirt flutters. The mustachioed man did not see enough about this man's falling to resolve the mystery within it, so tries to steam out everything he possibly can from these few seconds that he did see. Like watching the Zapruder film. Back...and to the left. Back...and to the left.

This image, of the man in the white shirt falling in the red hallway, is the best visual representation I've come across for demonstrating "unresolved". Or for showing an entire story pivoting on a central problem. Faulkner has said about The Sound and the Fury that the whole book, for him, derived from the image of Caddy's muddy drawers, and the Compson brothers looking up at Caddy in the tree and seeing them. That was the image that made him write the book (or so he said in later years); that was his man in the white shirt falling in the red hallway.

Of late, I can't get out of my mind a friendship that had multiple stages before it finally ended ten years ago. This was a human who mattered to me significantly, but whose regard for me was, and remains, obscure. Someone who made me feel understood even as he made me feel small, someone whom I admired enormously even as I saw - could not fail to see - how self-aggrandizing and blindly privileged his behavior was. He abjectly ruined my life, and gave me reasons to keep living, at various times. God, I learned so much.

I dreamed of him just under a year ago, and when I woke up the ache of missing him was almost unbearable before I remembered everything else. Since then, he's been my man in the red hallway, falling. Of the many unresolved relationships in my life, he is the one who looms largest right now, and I haven't the foggiest idea why. Aside from seeing pictures of him with mutual friends on Facebook from time to time, he's totally out of my life, and in totting up the sums, his absence is a positive. But I feel as if I'm not finished with him. As if I have been through it, but not beyond it. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia's future husband says to her "There is more to your story than you think." It's a moment in which she's required to reimagine herself, from her bones out, and I don't think that's what I require when I think of this man I once knew. But the phrase sticks.

Like the man in the red hallway. Like the specific way my friend walked, and the texture of his hair. His huge, nasal laugh embarrassing me in a movie theater. The view of the river from his desk, where he did God knew what with the nascent internet and doled out the best music anyone will ever give me. All of the things he did not say, the pain he must have suffered under a veneer of ego. The man's hand, dangling, his slipper sliding from his foot. Have I steamed out everything I can from this relationship? Or is there still more wealth that he can give me, even in his absence?

What do I build with him as pivot point?

I don't know. I don't know the answer. There is no answer to be had right now; there is no resolution to this story, easy or ugly. If I'm ending this post in a dissatisfying way, I'm sorry, but that is how I feel about the end of this friendship. Uncertainty aches and nags, and I suspect it will even if I put it, put him, on the page one distant day. He'll stick, I'm sure, through whatever else gets resolved between now and then.

Rosanna, or How I Discovered Something Worth Knowing

How do you learn things you're glad to know? For me it usually happens elliptically. Through weird coincidences. Yes, I do have an example, glad you asked.

Years ago, a friend recommended that I listen to a cover of Toto's "Africa" recorded by a Slovenian a capella group, Perpetuum Jazzile. I loved it, so I surfed on and listened to them doing "Rosanna," even though "Rosanna" was never a favorite song of mine. It was too bouncy, maybe a minute too long, with a silly synth bridge and a loud and unnecessary brass line. One of those songs that I heard enough times on my parents' adult contemporary FM station in the car on the way to the grocery store that I never felt the need to listen to it in my adult life.

Until I heard Perpetuum Jazzile do "Rosanna."

Then the song took on something new, a charm it hadn't had before. It felt like an interesting assemblage of elements instead of a mere lump of semiprecious material. After a few listens to the cover, I decided to listen to the real thing, for the first time in years, so I YouTubed actual Toto doing "Rosanna." The first comment under the video (at the time) was something like "Ah, Rosanna. Making drummers cry like children since 1982."

Wow, what?

I had no idea what that was about, and wanted to know, so I looked it up. Turns out that Toto's drummer, Jeff Porcaro, was quite possibly the best pop-music drummer of the 20th century. He was a studio musician on many, many, many recordings, a lot of them very famous indeed, and his playing was effortless, innovative, and precise. He died at 38, weirdly, while mowing his lawn, possibly after taking a leetle too much cocaine, but maybe from something else.

For "Rosanna," Jeff Porcaro wrote what is now known as the Rosanna shuffle (!), and after that my research turned into areas of music knowledge that I could no longer follow - ghost notes and other stuff about drumming that I don't understand. But this shuffle is famously hard. (There's video of Porcaro himself breaking it down. I suspect it resembles Michael Jordan teaching how to dunk.) Tons of videos exist of amateur drummers playing along with the song, concentration and pride sharing facial space. For "Rosanna"! A song that I considered one of the least interesting hits of the 80s until Perpetuum Jazzile came into my life.

I consider this information about Jeff Porcaro and the Rosanna shuffle to be ephemera well worth knowing, whether I ever find practical use for it or not. You never know what's going to be of use inside your head, though. Hell, maybe I'll be across beers from a drummer one day and this will be the only thing I have to say to him. And let's not leave aside the fact that today I got an entire blog post out of it.

In any event, I'm really glad I know this, but the way I got to it is so knotted and forked that it's a wonder I learned it at all. From a friend pointing me to a cover of a song I love, to a cover of a song I was once kind of eh about, to the song itself, to a comment on YouTube (which I suggest has the worst comment threads in the entire universe), to Wikipedia, and thence to new knowledge.

KABLOOEY! NEW KNOWLEDGE! 

I seriously doubt I would've had occasion to learn Jeff Porcaro's name any other way. This Escheresque path to knowledge is the way I learn lots of things worth knowing, and incidentally, it's also the way I pick up little details that make writing more fun and interesting than it would otherwise be. I like finding a place in story, in character, to put the random stuff I learn. I haven't found a place for "Rosanna" yet, but I suspect I will.

Reading Is Magic for Muggles!

[In trying to find a clever title for this post, I Googled "reading slogans" and some of them are exactly as lame as I remember from my elementary school library. This list. Egh.]

One of the things I love most about learning, especially learning in multiple fields, is how everything winds together. This week we read Plato in one of my classes, and were discussing the allegory of the cave; I mentioned in class that if you come from a film studies background, the allegory of the cave is always where you start, because that's what cinema IS. Two or three of the students turned around in their chairs to look at me, and although they could have been thinking "God, shut up," or "You are such a suckup," I think (from their faces) that they were thinking "Wow, I didn't put that together, but it is so cool."

It is! School is cool! And it's remarkable to me the way that philosophy verges on language verges on linguistics verges on math verges on philosophy. That's a tiny circle, but it can get bigger very easily, because everything does connect. You can interpret the allegory of the cave, just to take one particular foundation of Western thought, in any of a dozen fields of study and I'm pretty sure it will shed light (heh) on all of them in some way.

Sigh. Learning is so dreamy.

I've ended up with two classes this semester instead of three: Major American Novels II and Hybrid in Narrative. One is a very standard, straightforward class on...major American novels and the other one deals in experimental lit, both reading and writing. I believe that they will reflect very interestingly on each other. There have already been connections, of course, barely two weeks in. I'm bummed out about not getting into either of the other two classes I was gunning for, but them's the breaks.

We began in Novels with The Sun Also Rises, which I tried to read in my high school years and which bored me so horribly that I went back to...jeez, what was I reading then? García Márquez? I found it a lot easier to read this time, but I don't think I'll ever really love Hemingway. Some of the other students in the class also found the book boring. Next is As I Lay Dying, which I've read and liked, and I'm kind of giddy with anticipation about what the folks who haven't read any Faulkner are going to think of it. Some of them are going to hate the shit out of it, and I can't wait to hear about that.

Incidentally, at the beginning of 2014, I started a paper journal to record my impressions of all the things I take in: books, movies, operas, etc. In part I did this to keep those opinions away from this space, because I was using them as an excuse to put up posts on days when I couldn't think of anything to write about. In part I did this to collect all my intake in a way that is actually easier to index and recall than what I have here. (The search box on this site is so unreliable that I kind of can't believe it.) And a third part was that I could write as much as I wanted about books and movies, without worry that I'd bore anyone but myself; the piper to pay is that I have to write it all by hand. 

So I've been reading at the same pace as ever, but talking about it somewhere else. In January I've read some Ann Patchett, some Robert Stone, Mary Gaitskill's first novel, a biography of David Foster Wallace, a fascinating novel by Lionel Shriver, etc. And I did a ten-day marathon of all six original-series Star Trek movies, about which I had a lot to say. But I feel far better organized when I divide my life into separate boxes rather than tangling it all together.

Of course in reality it all goes together, like all the fields of inquiry do. But that doesn't mean you're as interested in the whole pattern as I am.