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.

(It Doesn't Have Anything to Do with Buddhism)

The other night, I finished a book called Zazen, by Vanessa Veselka. I found it via The Rumpus, a site that, from this perspective, is so much immersed in the literary life in the San Francisco area that it's a little myopic. However, it's helped me to learn that there exists an underground literary scene here in this country, and I read Zazen in part to find out what that scene is like. (The book reviews on the site also led me to a book called The Postmortal, on which I gave up a third of the way through because I couldn't sleep after reading it. Like Feed, which gave me waking nightmares for months on end, only not as succinct.)

I knew before I read this book that I was not likely to be a part of this scene, not now or ever; I'm not an experimental writer, and my few attempts to imitate edgy po-po-mo fiction have resulted in work that's so disconnected from my instincts that I don't even know if it's any good. Now I'm certain: this scene is not for me, and this type of work is not really for me, either. I enjoyed reading Zazen enough to leave it on my Amazon wish list, because I'd like to refer back to it and maybe read it again in the future, but I didn't really understand the mechanisms of the fiction as I was reading it. It was an artifact from another land.

Veselka is a fascinating writer, with intelligence burning like a gas flame under every word, incredible metaphors, and gorgeous, hard-hitting sentence-by-sentence craft. The book was kind of like an octopus in my mind, tentacles worming their way in and clinging and dragging me in, so that my face was right up close to the book's bizarre world, and I had to take the time to get re-tendriled into that world if I took a break before reading on. It reminded me of two other books: Beloved, by Toni Morrison (in the way that time and space were not very well-described but I still had a solid sense of place), and more strongly The Open Curtain, by Brian Evenson, which is probably the most unnerving book I've ever read. Madness lurks in the basement of that book, and the experience of reading it is a little like going mad yourself; the world kept tilting, gradually, as I was reading until I'd look up from the book and it would take a moment for everything to right itself again. Zazen resembles but doesn't resemble the world I know now, so it was like diving into a different dimension every time I opened it again. The narrator is plainly not all there, or perhaps too much there, and seeing her world through her was uniquely effective and a little frightening.

Yet the book was so poorly copy-edited that I kept being un-immersed in frustration every chapter or so to try and figure out what the author meant through the errors. You always end up wondering, if there's poor copy-editing, what else might have been better served by more attention to the text - what else the author and editors missed in the proofs. And there was so much about the book that I found unclear. Some of the metaphors extending from chapter to chapter were too obtuse for my middling non-underground intelligence, and eventually I had to accept that I couldn't quite know the order of events - during the first third or so we kept skipping around in time (I think) without clear markers. I also found the politics of the book to be sort of screamy. There was a lot of ranting that I think the book endorsed rather than merely presenting. I'm quite a bad activist, because I like my art carefully partitioned from my politics, with only little leaks along the wall. Any relationship more intimate and you wind up sacrificing the quality of one or the other, I've found. Most political artists would disagree (naturally), but if I am opposed to the politics of the art, I have a harder time enjoying the art on its merits instead of dismissing it altogether, and that dismissal isn't fair. It's an unpleasant paradigm.

I think that people who write and read in this style of literature regularly would either accept these things or treat them as part of the art. Vagueness, in particular, seems to be a facet of edgy/literary fiction that is well-celebrated but that I personally never enjoy. And I think they find frustrating or opaque books to be that much more arty and interesting, finding the shining diamond edges more compelling than the mud which sometimes surrounds them. I always ask why the mud couldn't just be cleared away. And I think that's why experimental lit isn't for me.

Still. It was a good idea to stretch outside my usual fare, to see what's possible out there in west coast fiction. And like I said, I really enjoyed the experience of reading the book. I just know I don't want to restrict my reading to that kind of book (too cerebral, too much of a project), and I doubt I'll ever write a book like it.