Better Than Nothing

I've been meaning to write this post since Thursday, just to keep that insecure mess from being the first thing you see on this page, and to keep on writing every other day as I had been. But I've also been meaning to answer e-mails to three or four people and write e-mails to at least two more. I'm having difficulty doing anything much except what I have to do, i.e. work and make meals and run on the treadmill (literal and figurative) and teach yoga and keep going. I don't know how it happened, but there don't seem to be enough hours in the day, anymore, again. I think I'm going to have to knock off my copy-editing job one day this week to catch up on e-mails and get a damn grip.

On one of the last two evenings, I don't know which one, I opened up this New Post window to type in a note about what I would absolutely for-sure write about the next day, to motivate me to say something, for sure and certain. This is what I typed:

i'm a fraud, not a grownup 

I don't actually know how I was going to turn that into a coherent post that had something to do with writing, and wouldn't just be a sad admission before bedtime. So now it's kind of a curiosity. I remember thinking something about there being strength in this admission while I was typing it, not weakness, but I really have no idea what subject matter I was kneading at the time.

I still haven't started revising the horror novel! That deserves an exclamation point because I can't believe I haven't done it yet. It now has a deadline for revisions, because Maleesha somehow snake-oiled me into going to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference (WHERE ARE THE APOSTROPHES, YOU'RE WRITERS, GAAAH), and I set up a pitch meeting there, and the finished book that's closer to ready for a pitch meeting is the horror book, and I really really need to get 'er ready. Really. It's only just over a month away. Why haven't I started?

The decision that I made to go to the writers' conference should be a post in itself. Which I think I'll save for my next post (tomorrow? if I knock off work?), because right now I have to go and teach. Where did my hours go?

New Normal

It's okay that you can't sleep. Dealing with big, difficult things is...big. And difficult.

But I have to get up in, like, five hours. And to teach yoga to a bunch of stubbornly unsmiling adults about whom I can't stop wondering why they're not at work. 

That doesn't mean you can just turn sleep on and off like a switch. Some people are wired up with switches, and you're not one of them.

Maybe you should get up and do something else. Take your mind off it.

Like what? If I read, I'll have to turn a light on, which will disturb Matt (who does have a switch). And that book I'm reading is so addictive I'll probably just be up all night reading it. If I write, I'll have to type, which will probably disturb him, too. And what could I have to say? All I'll write about is the anxiety that's keeping me awake, worrying over what's ahead like well-thumbed beads in a rosary. Anyway, it won't take my mind off it.  

Have you tried relaxing your shoulders and breathing at the ceiling?

Yep.

Have you tried letting the thoughts drift like clouds? That thing you repeat over and over in your restorative classes?

Yep.

Tried the heating pad? Tried reminding yourself how comfortable the bed is?

Yep and yep. Nothing's working. I'm awake and I can't sleep. 

You could always try working through the revisions you need to make, mentally, or trying to do math in your head.

I don't have any math that needs doing. And trying to do revisions mentally sends me around in confusing repetitive circles, like the teacup ride, and I never have any insights worth remembering. 

Why don't you get up anyway? Matt will forgive you for waking him with your keyboard.

I know. But he's dealing with this big shit too. It's awesome, but it's big and it's scary and we're in the same little boat, and the tide is rocking us both awake. It's not nice of me to whine on about my own trouble coping. 

Can't you come to any conclusions that will satisfy you temporarily? Just to get those five hours, before you have to teach?

No. It's too big, too new and foreign. And anyway when I think about relaxing I worry about the groin muscle I seem to have pulled today. How will I teach through that? 

I'm asking the questions here.

Sorry. 

It might not be a bad pull. You might sleep on it and find it's nothing in the morning. Just like the rest of this: in a year, it'll all be old news. There'll be a new normal.

I know that. It doesn't stop now from being a white-knuckle sleepless night. 

Heard that, sister.

Bed will be warm. 

Bed will be comfortable. 

I'm going to try again. 

That's the spirit.

Although "Completism and Infinite Jest" Sounds Like a Decent Thesis

In the same day, I finished episode number 45 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and page 981 (the last page before ~100 pages of footnotes, which I also read (except for the one about Pemulis's calculus equation, no, sorry, but no)) of Infinite Jest. Marathons, both, and now completed. And not entirely dissimilar, for what it's worth; interesting to consume in tandem. There's a little sadness in my heart for both completions. I'll never watch any Monty Python sketches for the first time again, which is a little sad. And I'm finished with a Big Literary Project - certainly the biggest and most difficult single book I've ever read - which, while frustrating, had moments of great transcendence that I'm sorry to let go of.

My mom asked me if it was good, if I enjoyed it, and I said that I couldn't really answer that. I told Matt that I enjoyed it immensely on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph basis, because the writing is so utterly unlike anything else in its virtuosity. So enjoyable to read Wallace doing that work - like watching Baryshnikov dance, I told Mom. But on the whole, it was a slog, and I won't pretend that it wasn't. I'm not smart enough as to have picked up everything that went on, and I think ultimately I am not smart enough not to be frustrated by the lack of conclusion in the book. I think Wallace had a real intention and purpose in beginning and ending thoroughly in medias res, without starting a story or ending it in a way that makes linear or traditional narrative sense. But I like to read, and I do not like to be a literary critic, and I wanted a conclusion.

See here for some reactions of readers upon reaching the end of Infinite Jest. I identify most strongly with "Ongoing"'s two sentences. I also listened to this half-hour interview with Wallace, done in 1996, about the book, and felt on the whole much more settled about having read it, less of a love-hate rage, after hearing his nice measured articulate voice and foul mouth. Despite the business about having actually structured the book mathematically, to which my reaction was "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?" However, smart as he is (and popular as he apparently is), I found the interviewer intolerable to listen to, and I don't know how he got into radio.

Next on my list is Then We Came to the End, which was a seriously hot book a couple of years ago and which I'm just now getting around to. 50 pages in it's pretty good and lots of fun, and maybe I'm seeing phantoms, but I see some annoying Wallace influence in it - the sort of bunch-of-random-sentences-squashed-into-one-paragraph thing, which I am not really in love with as a style. I thought it would be a relief to read something NOT written by someone brilliant beyond the ordinary realm (sorry, Joshua Ferris, but I hope you know what I mean), and it is, but Edna O'Brien is next, and then Meghan Daum. I'm tired of dudes.

As for my own work, a couple of lovely people got back to me about the Greenland book, and their feedback was helpful. One reader had this very interesting approach to certain aspects of the story, one that I never, ever would have thought of, not if you'd given me a hundred years to sort through potential reader reactions. I wish I could be more specific. Take my word that I was flummoxed and amused.

Also, I think I'm finally ready to stop fucking around and revise the horror book. I bought a red pen especially, and more than one person has agreed to read it. This process is so frustrating, y'all: writing, then revising, then reader one (Matt), then more revising, then additional readers, then hounding them all for feedback, then MORE revising, and then putting together the materials to begin hounding agents/editors, which I'm not even ready to do yet. I find myself wondering (wistfully) how people even wrote good books before the present day, when it was all typewriters and garrets and letters by post.

I read a book last fall that was set in the early 19th century in Britain wherein the main character wrote and then sold an adventure novel. It was all so simple. She wrote it, longhand, exactly as she intended to write it, and when finished, read it through once without doing much of anything to it. Her local bookshop-owner read it, loved it, and sent it to a publisher-friend. With some mild edits, it was printed and published and she received a draft for a few hundred pounds in the mail. *snap* Like that. Now I'm all wrapped up with revisions and platforms and the rules for writing a winning synopsis, and ensuring that I get enough reader feedback to make sense out of my draft, and serious novelists taking four years to write a book, and blaaaaaaaah. Can't it be more simple than this without questioning oneself? Or is it actually better this way, with more committee action and extroversion?

I wanted to write a post relating the experience of reading all six books of the original Dune saga to reading Infinite Jest, but this post just didn't turn out that way. Maybe another time. For those of you who know what's involved: yes, I really did read them all, every page. And it taught me an excellent lesson about being a completist, namely that being a completist just is NOT worth the trouble for certain aspects of life. Which is part of why I may not ever read The Pale King.

Into Each Life a Little Rain Must etc.

Lately I've been schooled repeatedly in the notion that in all experiences, there are necessarily both positive and negative elements. This comes forward in the places I work, the place I live, the people I love, the technology I use...I'm starting to believe there is no unalloyed good in the human experience.

I suppose exceptions would include enjoyment of arts; I've recently discovered some incredible music, and rediscovered a good bit more by transferring all my CDs to an external hard drive I bought. The pure joy of laughing at Buster Keaton, perhaps. I'm not sure, though. The way the universe seems to balance begs to me the idea that there will always be some negative hidden in any apparently pure positive. The best example that springs to mind is God. (Go ahead, disagree, and we'll talk about the Crusades.) 

In other news, after doing too much at the gym on Tuesday, I'm still suffering. (Good = stronger muscles; bad = owwwww.) Also, I have about three different essays in mind that I really need to get out of my head and into pixels. They're complex enough ideas that I don't think they're going anywhere, but they need to come out and stop bugging me. Also also, I have been seriously putting off revising the horror novel; it's been something I need to do all week, and I've found all sorts of amusing things to do instead, including watching a messed up movie about teenagers called The Quiet (great performances, showy direction, difficult script) and breaking into the final 150 pages of Infinite Jest. Which I think I might just head on through this afternoon.

But that delay leaves me without much to write about here, despite how much more enjoyable it's been. See? A mongrel good or a mixed bad. No wonder I'm a particularist. 

You Will Die a Million Deaths

So, I hit a story point in Infinite Jest that's really giving me pause. I'm going to presume those of you out here reading this are either never going to read the book or have read it already (or have started and given up on it (them's statistics I really want to see)), because SPOILERS AHEAD.

A character's talking to another character in a bar. Remy and Kate. Kate has extreme clinical depression, and Remy is legless and has all kinds of weird complicated shit going on around him plot-wise, too much to explain. His wife was born without a skull, which we've known from way back, but here around page 780 he explains how he came to marry a woman born without a skull. (Yes, it's absurd. Just roll with it.) The story is long, but at its essence, Remy was very, very depressed and on the point of suicide when he met his wife, a creature even more pathetic than he, and his mission to love her and care for her became the center of his life. He isn't romantically in love with her (I gather), but he's in love with the purpose in life that she affords him. Throughout the book, we've heard often about his willingness to do various things for the sake of his wife, presuming all along that it was for love of her. But it's really not; she has to stay alive so that his purpose in life stays alive. If she doesn't live, and continue to need him to care for her, then he has no meaning in life.

I should add at this time that this is all my interpretation of this aspect of the book, and I have no idea if it's correct. In theory, I should have added that at the beginning. Oh, well.

The fact is, his motivation is selfish. He doesn't want to slip back into the blackness of depression in which he existed prior to meeting and appointing himself savior of his wife. It is too much for him to comprehend, going back to that. This is something I understand, and something Kate in theory should understand, as she gave an exceptionally cogent account of exactly how bad it is to be depressed early in the novel. (She doesn't understand; she provides the counterpoint of this discussion.) However, it gave me a lot of food for thought about our motivations for doing the things we do. The noble wish to nurture and rescue a woman with a ridiculously crippling [and unrealistic] disability, for this character, has at heart a thoroughly selfish motivation.

Is it very different for the rest of us? Aren't most of us just feeding the monkey? I've been following the implosion of Anusara yoga with some interest, and although I don't begrudge John Friend his characteristics as a flawed mortal, I do think it shows us adequately that no guru is devoted to his followers without saving some of that devotion for himself. Is any human a saint?

Revision (un)Ready

Matt has now read the first draft of the horror novel, and he has helpfully told me about all sorts of lovely difficult revisions I need to make. Yay. In the meantime, I made an absolutely humiliating admission on Facebook, that I've never been high (from marijuana), and needed feedback about a sequence I wrote wherein my narrating character gets that way. Several people immediately jumped up to offer their expertise, kindly not making me feel stupid at all for not knowing whether I'd written it right or not. Matt says they were just happy to offer expertise about something they'd never thought they'd be able to offer expertise about. As usual, he's probably right.

I'm rounding third on Infinite Jest. It's approaching easy to read at this point. I told Matt the other night that part of what's keeping me going is that I really want to know if Wallace's going to create an actual whole out of the sum of this book's many, many, many parts. Thus far, when things get tossed together and a connection makes itself known, it's extremely satisfying; like Magnolia, if a little less visceral. It would be nice to know that everything's really going to hang together, that it's not just going to be a big tangle.

The book is also inspiring. Although I do not in the least want to write like Wallace, I am inspired by him to toss some rules out the window when composing. If on a reread what I've said isn't clear, I can backtrack, but there's no need to work through that clarity on the first pass. Often what comes out raw sets me to something better and clearer, if not quite formal.

I've just started and stopped two different approaches to filling out this post, and was happy with neither of them. This blog is about writing, right? So why am I going on and on (and on) about other stuff instead?

I think it's because the only things in front of me in my writing life right now are revision. Revision of the Greenland book (eventually...), revision of the horror book, revision of a difficult short story. Revision of my original idea for my next book - it's still going to be what I thought it was, at bottom, but I'm thinking of seriously reworking my main supporting character from what he's been for four years or so. I don't want to do any of this revision. I look ahead and I see this slog, this long and yucky process from which good results are not guaranteed and opportunity for despair abounds. Literally every task to which I've set myself when it comes to writing fiction has taken a shorter time than I have budgeted, and all revisions have ultimately been a good idea, so I don't know why I can't just get over it and do what I'm supposed to do. I believe I can sell this horror book, more credibly than I believe I can sell the Greenland book, and I'm all enthusiastic about query letters and synopses and whatnot. But first I have to revise it, I have to get it in shape for test readers, and I'm stuck there, at that idea.

What I'll do is, on Monday I'll sit in front of this very laptop and I'll just get to it. No whining; just action. But on this Sunday morning it feels better to wallow and worry.

My Life in the Sand

Did you know my first declared major in college was politics? My husband didn't, either, until the other night. I was telling him how infuriated I was about various issues of the day, and told him that I was reminded of the sensation I had in college, which was the last time I actually paid attention to what was going on in the world.

I learned not long after Matt started being at home all the time that his habit was to watch the previous evening's broadcast of The Daily Show every day on the internet; presumably he did this at his job while on break, and now that he's at home, he does it at home. It mutated to DVRing it rather than watching it with obnoxiously repetitive commercials on the internet, and then I started watching with him. It's a show I've always liked, but I am not in the habit of watching first-run television at all.

I strongly believe that Stewart provides the least biased journalism in America. He makes jokes, no doubt, but he makes jokes about everybody. And I sincerely believe that he's not beholden to any other interests than his own. Of course we've been watching The Colbert Report after Stewart's finished, and I'm torn about which one is more effective. I think Stewart has the harder task, but I also believe Colbert has done more actual activism, more to attempt change.

Both of them attest to being comedians, not commentators. Even though they are more than aware of the environment effected by the 24-hour news cycle (because they would not be capable of their jobs without that environment and a high level of awareness about it), I think they are not quite cognizant of its extent. I trust no television journalists at all except Stewart (and dead ones like Cronkite and Murrow), and I think he would be surprised to hear that. The reason is simple: the "real" ones are more farcical than either of them, and appear too dead-eyed and well-coiffed for my taste. Col-bear may be a character that Col-birt is playing, but he is absolutely no more ridiculous than certain commentators.

Case in point: this. I find myself speechless at this story. Like, I can't even construct an argument in this space to talk about why this story makes me so angry that I'm dizzy and my heartbeat is irregular. I thought, well, surely Limbaugh isn't going to be taken seriously on this. And then I scrolled down and read the first dozen or two dozen comments, and my mouth got dry from hanging open. Who are these aliens, who fail to understand what paying for prescriptions entails? Who have no conception of hormonal medicine? Who...gaaaaaah.

This is just one of the stories bouncing around our national political scene in the last several months that has gotten me riled and furious about What's Going On, as Marvin Gaye had it. Women's reproductive health is obviously the biggie for me, but everywhere I look I seem to see corruption and greed, about which I feel horribly impotent. I can laugh, at Stewart and at Colbert, but laughing doesn't fix it.

This is how I feel about it:

And it was how I felt about it back in the early 2000s when I was in college. I was inspired by an incredible professor to become a politics major, but I lasted less than a year. I was depressed, horribly clinically depressed. Due to other factors as well, but partly due to the ugly discovery that the political cycle hadn't changed at all, across the world, throughout organized history, and that in all likelihood it never, ever would. Politicians would continue to be corrupt, the media would continue to be partly a freedom but mostly an accomplice and a palliative, and the system would churn forward with very little actual change.

During my sophomore year I took a 101-level class in film studies, and to my surprise I kept getting As on the papers without really trying (I have never been a natural A student). I discovered not only that I was really good at film studies, but that I really liked film studies; it was more interesting to me than pretty much any subject matter I'd ever studied, and it got me excited about learning in a way politics no longer did without my inspiring professor. So I switched majors, and I stopped paying attention to the news and to current events, and for many years my life was happy. I stayed absorbed in fictional media and left entirely alone the media related to politics.

And now Stewart and Colbert and their exceptional wit have brought me back to being angry and depressed 9 hours a day. Because once you start paying attention to the stuff that satirists draw your attention to, it's pretty hard to stop. You stumble across Monsanto, you read some of the egregious things that our government has passively endorsed, you see the balsa-wood structure behind it all. You start to really think about courageous bozos vs. well-intentioned cowards and who's likely to come out on top and whether it even matters and why the job of the politician, to represent us, has gotten pressed and reprinted as greenbacks and styled and gelled as TV-ready hair.

And you get really, severely depressed.

Matt was amazed I used to be a politics major. His exact words were "You were? Really?", and we agreed that it was for the best that I changed to film. I'm presently trying to decide whether I should bury my head back in the sand. The world didn't end in 2002 and it's likely not going to end in 2012, and it didn't hurt me to be politically ignorant for all that time. In its individual-level way, it helped me, in fact. The question of whether it's better to be willfully ignorant and happy with your little life, or to get informed and be fucking miserable, is one that I've been struggling with on and off since my sophomore year in college, but never at such a dramatic peak as I am right now.

And the thing is, Colbert is really really funny. He leaves me with a residue of joy, even when I'm angry. I was waiting for someone to make the perfect joke about the contraception flap, and he did it:

The Colbert Report
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But I don't know. My life in the sand was untroubled. Quiet. Filled with art and music. This way, I either channel my rage into a non-profit and never say die, or I sit in my house screaming at my clenched fist until I can move to Canada (if Canada ever gets warm enough for me to move to). Neither is a Middle Way as satisfying as ignoring it all.

Of course, following the Oscars isn't too satisfying, either.