Cue the Berets and the Wine

A few weeks ago, I submitted the Kathy Ireland story to a market, and almost immediately I got an email back from one of the editors asking me whether I considered it fiction or nonfiction. I had no idea how to answer this question. The real answer is for us to sit around with wine, in our berets, and talk until someone has to go pay the babysitter. But that's stupid and pretentious and inefficient to tell an editor, someone who probably just wants to forward my submission to the appropriate slusher.

By wordcount, the Kathy Ireland story (let's shorten it to KIS) is nonfiction. Most of its 1,600 words consist of me narrating about film and my experience at an opera, and all of those parts are either true or my true opinions. Then there's about 500 words of fiction: two sections of me imagining the interior thoughts of Kathy and of Meryl Streep.

After I finished writing, I wasn't sure myself whether it was fiction or nonfiction. My tendency is to think that a shred of fiction, of the intentionally invented, paints the entire work with that hue of literary endeavor. You apply Photoshop to a picture, bang, it's Photoshopped; you can't be a little bit pregnant. On the other hand, the KIS is, really is, nonfiction, for the most part, in a way that's important to me. I strained to tell as much of the truth as I could in the KIS, in a way that was new to me when I wrote it last spring but which has become closer to a default mode as I've written more stories like it.

I still call it a story in my mind, because calling it an essay would be disingenuous and calling it "this weird thing I wrote" is not very professional. When I describe and/or submit it and similar stories, I've been calling them "hybrid essays", a pretty and approximate term that doesn't mean all that much outside of academia and a small cadre of writers like Maggie Nelson.

A growing part of me is simply uninterested in how work like this is categorized. I'm interested in what other people will say about it, but in an intellectual rather than a personal way (like, cue the berets and the wine, I got no babysitter to pay). I don't have much invested in the labels that gatekeepers will put on the KIS and work like it. I get the need for that kind of labeling, because I know firsthand that it's impossible to figure out where to find Maggie Nelson in a given bookstore. Such labels, failing all else, are a practical necessity. I'm fine with that, I comprehend that, I haven't a whisper of anarchy in my personality and you couldn't convince me that there should just be a single label of BOOKS under which everything is tossed alphabetically. Definitely not.

But how I think of myself as a writer just isn't involved in such a calculation. I always try to tell the truth, and whether that's a literal truth which has a set of, let's say, journalistic standards to which I need to hold myself, or a life-truth that is best communicated using situations and characters and ideas that I made up - more and more, now, it's all the same to me.

What I have to say seems to demand that I cross the streams. So be it. I read Nelson's Jane: A Murder last week, and it felt so much richer for combining poetry and nonfiction, much more so than a normal prose book about the same material would have been. That's something I could stand to hear about my work.

But it won't be said about the KIS anytime soon. It got rejected by the market that wanted to know what I considered it.

My reply said that by word count it was nonfiction, but it did have a little fiction in it. And I apologized for not being able to answer the question properly. The real answer is that I want the reader to consider the work herself and tell me what she thinks. What I think of my work is unsurprising; I live inside my head full-time and am reasonably aware of my opinions. What others think of my work is much more interesting to me.

In fact, I'm extremely curious to know where other writers and readers draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. Do you, too, have this idea that one stitch of fiction makes the whole hem fake? Do you think that essays which stretch the truth, like John D'Agata's famously do, should be named fiction instead?

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.

TL;DR Reading in Public Is Fun But Weird

Prior to March of this year, I had read my work (aloud) in public zero times. As of Saturday, I have done so twice. Here is video of me reading from my essay, "This is Not a Safe World", at The Last Bookstore on Friday, April 24th.

I am not as short as I appear to be.

You can find the entire essay in the 2015 issue of the Southern California Review, which I know you can purchase in person at The Last Bookstore and which I'm assuming you'll soon be able to purchase at this website, although the new issue's information doesn't appear there just yet. Like I said in the last post about it, the essay's very personal, trigger warning, yadda yadda. I'm not ashamed, I just don't want to make you uncomfortable.

I can't tell you what a weird, heady, impossible experience it was to do this reading. In the car on the way home, I yelped "I'm confused!" more than once in trying to explain to Matt how I felt and thought about it.

The prior reading took place at CSUN on March 20th and was in honor of the spring Northridge Review's release. Even though I'm happy that the story appearing in that issue finally found a home (it's the oft-rejected story that guest-stars in this post), I failed to blog about that reading or promote it here. Now I wish I had, because the two experiences were quite different.

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.

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.

Inappropriate Splurts

Yesterday I took the second exam of three for my summer class, and I honestly do not know what possessed me, but I decided to treat three of the four essay questions as fun creative exercises instead of serious, grade-dependent essays. For two of the questions I imagined dialogues between the theorists, and for the other I wrote a letter from the theorists to the leaders of the society they're judging. (It would be prohibitively boring to explain this in more detail.) I endeavored to explain the theories with diligence through this creative filter; I didn't just screw around. But Mean Brain continues to tell me that I made a complete fool of myself and probably didn't even cover the whole theory in detail and WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO TURN YOUR MIND INTO A TUNA MELT DURING THAT TEST YESTERDAY.

I don't know. Except that I haven't written any fiction in something like two months (perhaps longer, because it's been Revision City around here since the spring), and I suspect that failing to use that release valve has caused creativity to splurt into totally inappropriate places.

Like, Shelley and Wordsworth, after drinking too much wine, came to blows about whether a poet should be solitary or social in one of my "essays." And Kant said "la-dee-dah" to Hume. Those are inappropriate splurts, I think.

Or this. This kind of splurt is what happens when you generally repress sexuality across a society.
It's a slippery slope from weird exam answers to anthropomorphic cigarette packages. 

Only one more week of this class and then I can write. Oh, except not really, because I signed up to take the GRE at the end of the month and I need to learn geometry. Thankfully, the end of July will mark the end of my summer chores; I get to play for all of August. And with luck I won't have to take the GRE, nor learn geometry, ever again.

With further luck, my professor will find my answers delightful instead of idiotic. God, what was I thinking?

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.***