stress on a schedule

Fifteen pages of a novel due by Thursday at midnight. Things I’ve discovered that do not miraculously make pages appear:
–pacing aimlessly
–changing cds (”no, this is a Joni Mitchell section. no, radiohead. no, 70s compilation.”)
–checking the refrigerator to see if anyone broke in and cooked some food for me
–reading my three pages over and over and over
–searching for pictures online of my characters
–mapquesting the area my current scene is taking place
–reading a chapter of my Rwanda book
–working (this one seems particularly unjust)
–blogging.

tome hangover

The occasional state of literary indecision and lack of enthusiasm that follows finishing a large engrossing book read at a breakneck pace.

The culprit this round: What is the What, by Dave Eggers. Before I started it, I was juggling four or five books at a time, finishing several a week, excited about new ones. Since I finished, I’ve finished two books (one of them a non-fiction guide book), stalled out on three others, and am half-heartedly poking around for new ones.

_____

Dear Vacation,
Please return my book brain.
Thanks,
me

slacker

I have been asked, “hey, isn’t it time for a new post?” and answered, “yes, I’ve read half a dozen books and started class and haven’t written a word.”

In short, blog-worthy events:
–finished In the Fold
–finished The Life Before Her Eyes
–finished Les Liasons Dangereuses
–finished What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal)
–saw the interestingly adapted film of the above
–started writing class (excellent!)
–watched the first season of The Wire
–OVERDUED library books
–had thoughts on Jane Smiley but didn’t participate in blog conversations
–procrastinated horrifically on a writing assignment for work due to Bullshit Authorly Issues

Right now, even the summary is exhausting.

Rachel Cusk rocks my face off

It has been a long time since I’ve burned through a wallet of tape flags, marking sentences and paragraphs and subjecting innocent and busy bystanders to impromptu readings from a book. Although I really liked Cusk’s The Lonely Ones, I am loving In the Fold (so much so that I went to her name first at the used bookstore and grabbed the one copy of The Country Life). She doesn’t use any character or plot pyrotechnics; the setting isn’t particularly novel either. But my goodness, the writing. She pulls out pitch-perfect images with very little apparent effort, and she manages to sound almost comically light when delivering scathing thoughts. Check it:

(about the way the narrator’s wife changed after having a baby)

It was Rebecca who had wanted the baby, but from the start I had the subdued sense that Hamish would ultimately be transferred to my sphere of responsibility, like the pets people buy their tender, clamorous children; children who then harden, as though the giving, the giving in, were proof in itself that in order to survive and succeed in the world, you must be more callous and changeable than those who were so easily talked into acceding to your desires.

(about the start of marriage troubles)

Often, when it rained, Rebecca and I had sat on our doorstep in the evenings with the stone roof overhead, but increasingly I stood under it alone, shutting myself out of the house in order to consider the possibility that my life with Rebecca was unsustainable, a thought that was like a small panicked pet I wasn’t allowed to keep indoors and hence was forced to exercise outside, where it ran crazily up and down the front steps in the dark, occasionally venturing a few feet out into the street.

(I like that both of those sentences are long and contain pets as a metaphor and that I hadn’t noticed that they had this in common until I typed them.)

as might be obvious

from my most recent entries, head cold + dextromethorphan != the ability to write a coherent sentence.

Battle New Yorker

In 1999, I went to a conference on teaching composition. I was working at the junior college, and the conference must have sold the mailing list of attendees without any sort of titles attached. For about a year, I received special offers on textbooks, composition mags, conferences, and workbooks. The only one I followed through on was a ridiculously cheap subscription rate for a year of The New Yorker (something like eighteen bucks for an entire year).

The first few issues I read as soon as they came to the house, cover to cover, in a swoon. Then I let one sit while I finished up a book. That began the avalanche. One became six in no time at all. Next thing I knew, I had all of 2003 in a slippery pile. It would give me grief when I skipped ahead and read the newest issue. Even when I finished one, I couldn’t throw it away. It’s The New Yorker! There’s some great writing in there! By the time I moved here I had two paper bags full of the beasts, and more coming in each week.

I am proud to announce that last year I had a vision of a time, in the not-terribly distant future, when I will have ONE New Yorker in my living space. My current system is moving them out at a rate of one every four or five days. Keys to success:
1. I no longer read old political articles from 2003. It was a hard step, not reading all of each issue, but a necessary one.
2. If the short story doesn’t grab me by the third paragraph, I skip it. Sorry, New Yorker, but we all know you’ve had a rough patch with fiction the last few years. Getting better, but still.
3. I developed a distribution line to assuage any guilt about throwing them away. When I’m finished, my girlfriend reads them. When she’s done, I give them to a friend. When he’s done, he leaves them on the BART (or so he tells me–it might be the literary equivalent of a nice family out in the country with a barn and plenty of ducks for Rex to chase).

By late 2007, I anticipate all of the space my New Yorkers are taking up will be filled, instead, with literary journals (what on earth does one do with a finished good-but-not-perfect Paris Review or Tin House?).

reading year in review

I’m late to the party, I know. I blame work, my wrists, the holidays, and the library.

I had big plans for ‘06. Then 2006 punched me in the face. I was so sick that I could barely follow television sitcom plots, let alone read anything, from late April until I recovered from surgery in mid-September. Take that, goals. Even a frantic December book-binge couldn’t help.

numbers:
–I set a goal of 50 novels. I read 33.
–I set a goal of 4 books of poetry. I read 1.
–goal of 4 short story collections, read 2.
–wanted to read 2 works of nonfiction, read 13. (winner!)
–total books read: 49 (I win no awards for math. I know I am missing a book somewhere in the count, but I’m not going to go find it right now.)
–books by men: 28
–books by women: 21
–books with dogs: 7
–books with gay theme or content: 5
–books with earthquakes: 2

favorites:
–favorite new author: Russell Banks (other contenders: Dan Chaon, Edward P. Jones, and Rachel Cusk)
–stayed in my good graces: Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franzen, Francine Prose, Jim Crace, Nicholson Baker, Joan Didion
–favorite books, vaguely in order: Continental Drift, The Known World, The Year of Magical Thinking, and The Line of Beauty
–book I’ve picked up and quoted from, in addition to ranted and raved about, the most: Strong Motion

loathed:
–disappointed in author: Tim O’Brien, Toni Morrison, Marilyn Robinson
–can’t stand author: Tom Wolfe, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
–worst books, no order: The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tomcat in Love, The Hidden Life of Dogs, The Middle Ground

blog awkward

I arrived at this blogging spot in the road after following a link from the Nanowrimo forums (someone probably made a clever post and I clicked through to her page). That blog likely had a sidebar with other links, and in the space of a few days, I was a Reader of Blogs, something I had successfully avoided thus far despite my frequent internetting. I settled on half a dozen of them, all literary, all friends with each other, and after that rash of small but palpable earthquakes a few weeks ago (and the entries that followed), all apparently within a few miles of me.

Now, I know this is ridiculous, but this made me feel guilty. Like I was stalking these bloggers if I recognized the cafe or restaurant or library they mentioned, like I was creeping into their houses and reading their mail by refreshing for new posts. This feeling was compounded when I attempted to comment on a few of the blogs (sort of a “hey, I’m here in your room, just so you know”) and for the most part, failed to do so correctly. This blog has maybe three readers: I started it because I can see the value of publically committing to my reading list and having access to it away from home, because I’ve never had a blog, and because this way I’m not running around with book critiques that I feel obligated to torture my non-litgeek friends with. I know it’s public, much the same way all other bloggers must know this, and therefore, I shouldn’t feel like I’m snooping when reading blogs, even if they are all friends of each other, even if I totally know that salad place rocks, even if I goof up and flub comments.

Hi, I like your blog.

December 20

Fixed: internet! Mostly fixed: hand/wrist/forearm.

Oh, a lovely new library. I successfully returned my checked out book (on time, no fine) to one of the branches near to my place, a pretty brick outpost with very few books. Three and four year old books were still filed in the New section. The new library though, a few blocks closer, so tiny from the front, jammed in behind a bank–packed full of books, every book on my list, including the new releases. It took me five minutes to figure out that the fiction section was tucked into a warren of narrow rows behind the main desk. There is only one sign pointing into the door that leads to it, and it says “Teens” and hangs over a stack of audio books. I was impressed by the new fiction and gay fiction sections before I found the standard fiction already–so much that if it turned out they had no fiction other than the few shelves I had seen, I would have been happy. They had more in those few shelves that I wanted to read than the other library had in the entire adult half of the building. Checked out: Pam Houston’s Sight Hound, Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones, and Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby.

I poked around recently, mostly inspired by the massive number of MFA/post-MFA blogs I’ve been reading lately, and found a reasonable (price, location, expectations, instructor) fiction class. I can’t say that I’ve missed workshopping (uh, at all), but I have missed having a teacher and other-issued deadlines. It’s a month off, by which time, with any luck, I will be entirely healed.

broken

This is a month of slightly broken things. First my wrist and hand went to hell (still hurting, though less each day and only after more provocation), and now my internet connection is only working sporadically.

novel: Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang
Finished, enjoyed. I will admit to a lot of culturally idiotic trouble with names–it took me a long time to work out who was who with not only the actual names of the characters but also the Chinese nicknames for relationships (such as big and little sister). This isn’t just a problem I have with Asian names, but with any large-scale naming system in which many of the names are similar (I see you waving your hand over there, Mr. Garcia Marquez) or in which most of the characters have multiple names they respond to. Hmm. Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know that this has anything to do with culture: if I was reading a book with two characters named Dan and Don Polk, both of whom occasionally went by Bro, I think I’d have a hard time with them as well. Anyway, it was a distraction, but not enough of one to prevent me from really appreciate what Chang was doing.

Ah, a criticism that I nearly forgot: when the omniscient first-person narrator actually showed up in the story (instead of leading me through the stories of her family, as she did for the majority of the book), I didn’t feel anything for her and almost resented her coming into the story. She was far less interesting and (oddly) less developed than the other characters, even though she was the one that had been telling the whole story. Her storyline left me cold.

novel: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt this, and I’ve missed it: I think this novel is flawless. Unflinching, ambitious, grounded, complex, and masterful. The plot pulled me along, the characters made my heart hurt, and the history was entirely believable (I don’t even want to check and see how much of it he invented).

craft: Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Prose’s Reading Like a Writer
Still simultaneously reading both of these, an approach I’m digging. They play off of each other in interesting ways.

more on poetry and writing later. if the internet is cooperating, the bastard.