Chocolate Broccoli

I came to the blog because I wanted to write freely.  - HDT, paraphrased

This week probably evens out to neutral if I weigh it all together. Totally rotten stuff happened, annoying stuff happened, strong accomplishments happened, connecting with others happened. I didn't leave the house much, but when I did, I went to a reading and met someone cool.

I'm nervous about August 15, because a bunch of bills are due and a handful of deadlines are happening. I've got work due for the Washington Post and the Women's Review of Books and the books have not arrived at my house yet. I was supposed to have been working on a website recently, but I feel in over my head about it, and I need to put together the materials for a class I'm going to teach in September, but I've just been trying to meet review deadlines. Really I need to go back to using my Excel spreadsheet, with all the books & their release dates & deadlines, but it grew so tiresome to update that I am relying on post-it notes, which isn't working. Organization shall set me free, I know it. But staring at the pile of ARCs in terror is quicker.

My schedule for the year included writing a hybrid essay in July, and I didn't. It's about Last Tango in Paris, which I rewatched early in the month (or in June maybe?), and which, as I said on Facebook, I found very different than when I first watched it, when I was, oh, twenty. Part of this is life experience, but another part is watching so many movies in between and finding that Bertolucci, while he knows better where to put the camera than plenty of other directors, is not the all-time genius I thought he was. Others have done better, even if they didn't get Brando.

It's misogynistic, natch, but I found the misogyny the least interesting thing about the film, and certainly the least curious. Poor characterization, a sort of exuberant attempt at metatext, and unexpected inconsistencies leaped out at me a lot more than the fact that the woman of the pair is usually naked and the man is usually clothed, that he's a weird obsessive creep and she's I think actually a teenager?, and of course The Butter Scene. It's all so run-of-the-mill. Men are trash. I am Jill's utter lack of surprise.

Anyway, the essay is about the uses of the body, and in that way it only glances at Last Tango, so it shouldn't have been such a chore to write that I failed to sit down to it for thirty-one days. But I did. And now it's August and I've got to gear up to write about Mildred Pierce, which I've been looking forward to since last year. Can't decide whether to try and squeeze out two essays in the next six weeks or leave Last Tango for later. Scarf down the broccoli with my eyes shut so I can enjoy the mousse? Or just eat the dang mousse and put the broccoli in the fridge?

Or both at once, if you're an UTTER WEIRDO

My bylines are getting better and better, and my emails are getting answered more often, and I'm proud of that. But - and this is something I learned in high school, and continue to relearn every freaking year - the better one does, the more in demand one becomes, until one's responsibilities crush one like a steamroller crushes a cartoon character. I feel flat. I'm tired enough from assignments and successful pitches that I don't have the energy to pitch books I haven't placed. The backlog grows, and my deadlines loom, and I feel proud but also very tired. I want to get off. I want to stop. I want a week where I'm not exhausted either by work or by guilt for not doing work. Which, truly, are equivalent burdens.

Part of the problem with this profession is the timeline of it all. My non-review work has been rejected a bunch lately, which means it's time to find more markets to send it out to. If I don't do that now, then my lag time, while I wait for responses, will be much longer later, and I won't have anything useful to do with that time. It's like missing a round when you're round singing (eg "Row Row Row Your Boat"): it messes up the pattern down the line.

[This is part of why I haven't found it easy to slow down reviewing, because I worry that if I say no now, I won't have anything at all to write about later. Plus, the timeline for press publicity varies wildly from one book to the next. Sometimes I get info for a book next month that looks amazing, so I don't want to turn it down; sometimes I get info for a book in six months that just looks okay, but my schedule is open for then, so I don't want to turn it down. This is how I end up with two dozen books on my desk.]

The timing issues at the moment are a) researching more markets for the hybrid stuff that keeps getting rejected and b) the sense that I need to query agents. I did some research recently on who might want to see my essay collection. It'd probably be wise to query them now, so when they get back to me in a few months I'll have more completed essays to send them, and hopefully the essays I sent out on submission a few months ago will have gotten accepted.

See how it all fits together? It's obnoxious, having to plan like this, especially when the people you're planning for and around are often bad planners, or at the very least unpredictable.

Oh and: I'm now the sole reviews editor at Barrelhouse. That's great, for a variety of reasons, but it's...more. More work, more prestige, more worry.

In just two weeks I'm going on a kind of vacation, but freelancers out there know that vacation is a trap and a lie, even more so than in a reliably scheduled profession. I'm going to try and schedule out my time this month so as to treat the week like a vacation (I'm planning to write the Mildred Pierce essay that week, so it won't really be a break, but it will be a break from reviews & pitches & editing).

Before I leave, there's a lot to do. I placed a portfolio of eight reviews for September books, so I don't have to worry about pitching them all, but I should probably read at least half of them this month. That placement leaves me with two August books I still have to place and...four? reviews I've placed that I have to write (let's see: Steinberg, Skibsrud, Earley...okay, three), plus three books for Locus. I've settled in to reviewing three books per month for Locus, and I LOVE it, it's some of my most unpredictable and thus wonderful monthly reading, but it's a thing semi-permanently on the list.

Damn. Writing all that out. I guess I do do a lot. Maybe that's why I stopped using the Excel spreadsheet: it's horrible to see the traffic and not know what to do to thin it out.

This is My 500th Post on This Blog

click to embiggen these 500 chickens; credit

I don't know how that happened, except one bite at a time. It amazes me that I've been keeping this blog for seven years, when it still feels...supplemental, I guess, like an appendix to my old anonymous blog. I would write anything in that blog, anything that came into my head or heart, at very great length. This one has such a different texture. I miss the freedom, but it's better that I no longer have an outlet for that level of self-indulgence.

So, happy 500th post to me. In celebration, I'm going to...write a blog post about writing.

#ShareYourRejections has been moving around writer-Twitter this week, and although mostly, people seem to be getting succor and relief from hearing how much rejection you face as a writer (truckloads), even or especially as a good writer, the people reacting ungenerously to it are doing so in predictable but still bothersome ways. I feel like this is expressive of Twitter generally: there's a pattern to how a topic moves through the Twitterverse, and I continue to hope people will break out of it, and they don't. I'm still learning how to use Twitter, and because I've never been very good at following patterns, I'm pretty sure I get it wrong a good part of the time. It feels simultaneously more confining and more dangerous than Facebook. I'm trying not to use either one too much, but what is too much?

I've read the two major books I needed to read for this month's work, and I feel so relieved. I'm lying to myself that it's still early August when it is clearly not, but the fact that I got both books read and at least one of them reviewed before August 20 feels like a major accomplishment. I'm allowing it to feel that way even if I have to pretend it's earlier in August than it is.

One book was the third in a 1,400-page trilogy, all of which I had to read, and the other was a 500-page Icelandic book that, oddly enough, is also a compiled trilogy. They both have skewed approaches to Christianity and creation, and they have a similar attitude toward WWII (as the primary wound of the 20th century). I'm thinking seriously of writing an article that compares them, although it's sheer chance that I noticed they have anything in common. Comparing them to each other mentally has been an interesting way to read them both, and I'd like to share that - although it's not perfectly fair to either, since they have totally different provenances and intents and moods and nationalities and etc. Dunno. I might wind up with nothing more to say about either once I've reviewed them both.

Contra last week's post, this week was not wall-to-wall promotion, because the two most significant bylines got bumped to next week. Which is probably fine; two reviews I didn't have definite dates for are live this week, so there's plenty to read (see below). Generally I try not to announce things that are happening or changing until they're irrevocably happening, because I have wound up with egg on my face too many times, having to walk back big announcements (or even medium-sized intentions). It's a unique species of embarrassment, and one that makes my skin crawl. So I play things close to the vest unless I am too excited or too certain not to.

On that note, I'm going wandering at the end of August. I signed up for an opportunity to spend time with wild horses outside of Bakersfield, got in on the waitlist, still can't believe it's happening, trying not to lean on it too hard as something to look forward to because it seems too beautiful and unlikely. After that I'm driving north to spend some fairly idle time in Portland and outside of it; I think I have more friends in Portland than in LA at this point, so I hope to see (or meet) as many of them as possible. In hindsight, I didn't plan my freelancing around my July vacation especially well, and I hope to avoid that mistake this time. September is looking okay, only two books I haven't read, but October is heavy.

However, the date of the very last ARC on my desk is November 13. I have nothing for later in November or for December. I've been asking around for titles, and I keep getting sent books that are already out, instead. I'm thinking I might take this as a signal to use that time in a different way, whether I write more tripartite essays, work on interviews, make progress on the Casablanca novel, look for residencies to apply for...I don't know. Maybe something will change in September.

Out in the world:

I reviewed Kristi Coulter's Nothing Good Can Come From This for the Chicago Review of Books. Kristi and I have gradually developed a friendship across 2018, but I wrote this review before I lost objectivity (if I did lose it; if I ever had it). We have a lot of acquaintances, followers, and friends in common, so you may already have read this book. But if you haven't, I hope you do.

I reviewed This Mournable Body, by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, for the Masters Review. I'm surprised at how widely reviewed this book has been, because I found it almost impenetrable. It'll go well on syllabi.

I reviewed Vanessa Blakeslee's short story collection Perfect Conditions, and then interviewed Vanessa herself, both for sinkhole. Vanessa was every inch a pro, both within her stories and when we exchanged emails about the interview. She writes exactly the kind of prose I've failed at repeatedly.

I reviewed SELF-Ish, by Chloe Schwenke, for the Los Angeles Review. I was genuinely sorry to write a mixed review, because Schwenke's story is important and difficult and necessary. But she needed more guidance than she got in turning that story into a memoir.

Next week: two fun articles, one sourpuss book-related piece. See you then, for my 501st post.

Vacation, HAVE to GET Away

I'm on vacation. Sort of.

My family didn't take vacations when I was young. My father was not a vacation guy; he was about as far from Clark Griswold as you can imagine in terms of wanting the family to be a certain way, or building silly/heartfelt traditions, or anything like that. I remember visiting my grandparents on both sides a few times when I was young; I remember going to summer camp; I remember going skiing in the winter. I don't remember going somewhere other than our home during the summer for relaxation and sightseeing. It just wasn't a thing we did.

These days, my husband and I rarely take vacations. We went on a honeymoon in 2011. We went on a trip a few years ago to the state of Washington for a friend's wedding, and extended the stay for a week in which we utterly, totally relaxed. I read Proust and stayed off Facebook. We looked at the view and ate croissants. It was wondrous. Last fall we went to the UK, but due to a miscalculation on my part, that trip turned out to be more stressful than relaxing, and some of it felt like work.

But that's it. We've been together for 12 years and have taken two full-relaxation vacations, one of which was our honeymoon.

Most of our vacation time at present is spent seeing family. Which is lovely, but not relaxing. Relaxing, to me, means zero expectations set or met. It means no sightseeing or activities unless in an equal ratio to napping in a hammock. It means no need to wear pants or makeup. Our families don't operate this way on vacation, so there's always adjustment of expectations at the beginning of a trip. I must remind myself that hammock time may be my priority on vacation, but it isn't my hosts'.

wat

We have friends who go on trips to Japan and Italy who bustle through their weeks there, seeing things and doing things and going to fancy dinners and meeting new people. I have an acquaintance who spent his honeymoon on an African safari. I respect and sometimes love those people, but I still consider them slightly nuts. For me those would be stressful vacations, which is a contradiction in terms, right? Vacation is for fun and relaxation. Information intake is not relaxing to me. I do information intake for a living.

The arc of every Vacation movie involves learning to reconnect with family in spite of all the superficial trappings of whatever the relevant holiday trip is and means. Leaving out those trappings in the first place saves me a bunch of steps.

So here I am on vacation, relaxing to about half the degree I ideally would. Which is great; it's still relaxation. But since I've started working from home, I've lived in such wonderful quiet, with so much time to let my own thoughts bounce around the inside of my head. Being with people who expect my attention is more of an oddity than it is the norm now. So I'm looking forward to getting back home, to the peace and quiet to which I've become accustomed, rather than being here on vacation with animated loved ones who have lots to say and ask.

Out in the world (vacation does not stop bylines):

An essay about non-standard writing reference books at CRAFT. I really enjoyed writing this essay, because you wouldn't believe how often I've tried to insert these books into online advice threads only to be buried by "On Writing On Writing On Writing".

I reviewed New Poets of Native Nations for sinkhole. I called it a perfect anthology and I'm not exaggerating. Buy it. Also, I love reviewing for sinkhole, and hope to do lots more of it.

I reviewed The Blurry Years, by Eleanor Kriseman, for the Masters Review. It was an unusual book. The editor let me get away with a lot of vaguenesses, which I wrote in so I wouldn't spoil the reading experience. I'll say this: the book has a scenario in it that I have never seen in any other book, ever. If you like coming-of-age novels, particularly about girls, don't miss this one.

A Networking Story (with Parentheticals)

What a month it's shaping up to be. Six of my reviews will appear in four publications, plus there are six more that could appear this month, plus a super-fun listicle I can't wait for you to read. I've attracted a lot of wonderful books to myself in the recent past, even if some of them are very long. The past week has not been especially productive, but I think I was burned out. I read 21 books in June. That number includes a couple of 40-page chapbooks and a couple poetry books, but still. That's a lot.

In another week I'm going on vacation and I'm taking both work books and fun books with me. I decided my trip-out plane book will be The Grip of It, which I really should've read last winter when duncan recommended it, but now it's finally on my coffee table. Can't wait.

Today I want to tell you a story. I constructed it with fictional names and titles to make it clear, but still anonymous.

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.

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.) 

Out of the Office

On Sunday, I'm going on vacation to my favorite place in the world, a sort of-town in upstate New York. It's where I got married, and it's been since I got married (three years ago) that I spent any time there, and I'm so damn happy that we can make it there this year.

I found the picture below - created and animated by Rebecca Mock - on Wil Wheaton's Tumblr a while back, and it immediately made me think of a day in my vacation spot. Just stick a ukulele in for the iPad, and that's me for the next week.

In the meantime, love each other and yourselves.