"Men and Women in Space" : Notes on a Reading by Don Delillo

We are waiting for Don Delillo to appear.

As usual for events of this sort, there are multiple introductions. Someone from the 92nd St Y introduces the writer, Dana Spiota, whose job it is to introduce Delillo himself. The earnest reverence in Spiota's speech is both familiar and embarrassing. She praises his books as "the secret antidote to the depressing consumerist hum we all live with," but it's unclear whether she's suggesting that they stop the hum of consumerism or merely cure us of our depression, and, in either case, the claim sounds false. It might be true if you took out the word, "antidote." And what does she mean by "that particular American longing"? Is that an American quality? Is longing - longing itself, not the object of that longing – specific to a culture? No one asks these questions. There will be a time later for "select" questions, but the questions will be reserved for Delillo. In the ritual of the high literary reading, the introductions are only symbolic gestures; each is an incantation to transport the reader from the profane world at large into the sacred space of literature. The more introductions, one supposes, the deeper we go into the world of the book and the less we actually listen to the meta-language of praise.

The applause begins when she says his name.

Don Delillo is bigger in person, leggier, than what one expects. He's almost athletic as he walks to the podium. In his green buttoned-down shirt and brown pants, the author looks like a middle-aged man who has dressed himself. Maybe his wife tried to stop him – doesn't that look too earthy? – or maybe she's given up on trying to change his mind.

"There's a novel, and there is a reading," he says into the microphone. We are quiet. The audience has been awed by his books into a silence some of us believe is holy.

You think of the opening to Underworld: "He speaks in your voice American and there's a …" but he doesn't speak in your voice. His actual voice is not the voice that you heard in your head – why should it have been, when even your own voice doesn't match that sound? Don Delillo speaks in the voice of an old woman who's been smoking for so long that the years of ash and fumes have ravaged her vocal chords to something mannish, but underneath the velvet and gravel, there remains a fundamental womanliness. At times, you wonder if he has a lisp; there's a cottony thickness around some of his consonants, the word "troop" seems to have more letters, an extra 'h.' You hear it again in the end of the first chapter, which sounds stickier than when you read it by yourself: "Call or fold. Felt or baize."

He sniffles.

There is a novel, and there is a reading. The sentence sounds odd; it would be easier to hear if he'd used plurals. He tells the audience that he has reordered the novel for the reading, choosing two characters, Keith and Lianne, and following their stories chronologically, alternating back and forth.

It's surprising to hear people laughing. You never laugh reading his work. Nothing escapes that dire tone or your awareness of his work as the performance of a writer.

He pauses to drink. The microphone picks up and amplifies the fleshy, gurgling sound of a man swallowing. Smacking his lips. The way he might say "Pafko at the Wall."

He says "police" instead of "priest." He is the high priest of American letters, but he looks like the guy sitting across from you on the subway. He shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet as he fields questions from the moderator, questions written by the people in the audience on blank, white index cards that had been tucked into their pamphlets.

In response to one question, he says that he was not happy about the idea of including a terrorist in the novel. He says, "I felt I had to. I felt it would not be a fully responsible novel if I did not include a terrorist." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by the novel's responsibility, except to say that he had to try to understand the individual inside the structure, the individual "bonding with a group of more or less like-minded men…this blood connection that becomes more important than politics or religion finally." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by "finally."

When the moderator, that same boyish, bearded man from the 92nd St Y who gave the first introduction, asks him a question about architecture, Delillo says that he thinks that his novels are more three-dimensional than others' are. It's hard to know how to take this, except in a literal sense as a joke, and he isn't joking. "I don't tend to feel as comfortable," he says, "with abstract thoughts as I am with men and women in space." This answer catches some people by surprise because it goes against the mainstream criticism of Delillo as a brilliant, heady writer more interested in cerebral dialogue and aphorism than in the way real people interact with real objects in the real world. A friend turns to you and arches his eyebrow. Of course, what makes Delillo feel comfortable is not necessarily what ends up in his books, and what ends up in his books rarely makes us feel comfortable. His books do not stop "the depressing … hum" of the present, but they make the white noise seem meaningful, and that is all the comfort we can hope for.

The moderator, who has been sitting all this time at the edge of the stage in a little chair at a respectful remove from the "talent," thanks the author, and the crowd claps. Some stand in ovation, others gather their things to reach the book signing line first or to catch a cab home. Delillo disappears to the sound of applause, and the holy temple of literature falls apart, but those who leave believe they bear with them its sacred aura like a stone from the ruins.

"Help Me Get Home"

I sat in Washington Square reading Bolano’s novel, The Savage Detectives, and thinking about the aura of genuineness created by all of those raw, rambling monologues, some of them purposefully inarticulate, others insane or visionary. The book wasn’t what I’d expected from all of the praise – from Susan Sontag, from John Banville, Francisco Goldman, Francine Prose, Der Spiegel, Les Inrockuptibles – it was something wilder, more varied, duller, looser, and funnier. I couldn’t read the book without thinking of what had been written about it, in part, because the book designers at FSG had put out an ugly yellow-and-black hornet of a book, striped with scribbled bands of praise, and, in part, because of the mystifying nature of that praise, in particular the puzzling, almost koan-esque blurb from Ignacio Echevarria that ran in El Pais, in which he heralded the book as “the novel Borges would have written.” You could sit on a mountain for twenty years drinking dew from the moss of your cave and meditate on that mantra; it might lead you to satori; it might leave you insane. Either way, it probably wouldn’t help your writing.

While I was reading, turning from that maddening dust jacket back to the chapter at hand, a blonde-haired boy sat down on the bench across from me, took out his guitar, and laid out a mat that said, “HELP ME GET HOME.” He was wearing a sleeveless concert t-shirt, a pair of blue scrubs, and a straw cowboy hat. He was barefoot.

I read while he sang a song about everything that was wrong in the world. Politicians lied. The military dropped bombs. People had to work too hard in miserable, unrewarding jobs. It wasn’t a very good song, and he wasn’t a very good singer. The chorus was something about waiting for love to set him free.

When he was done singing, no one clapped. In the relative silence of that small part of the park, you could tell that he had been expecting applause. In its absence, he struck up a conversation with a young girl reading, Lady Chatterly’s Lover. She was bored with Lawrence. He was in his gap year. Living on the streets in New York was easy, he said, if you didn’t mind sleeping on a little mat. The girl was impressed with his performance if not his singing. She closed her book. “It’s like camping, but everyone pays for your food and clothes,” he added. There was bravado in the way he smiled then. I looked back again at his bare feet. Love was not going to set him free, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that if he was dedicated enough to his art or to his own artful image of himself, the singing barefoot poet, that one day, when he was good and ravaged, he might write an ode to the stupid heroic self-destructive self-proclaiming sensual poetic bravado of his youth, a sprawling, nostalgic “Non, je ne regrette rien” epilogue to an old manifesto, which someone in their tearful exuberance might call “the novel that Borges would have written.”

Found Short Stories, Volume 3

(Found in an essay entitled "Political Commitment in the Past Two Decades of Swedish Poetry" written by Gunnar Harding and published in the "Art and Guns" issue of Poetry East)

A boy ran up to me
I ran up to my father
Your son is burning, I said
My son came up to me and said: I'm burning
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My father went up to me and said:
can't you see that the boy is burning?
First we have to put out the fire, I said
My son ran up to me and said:
a boy ran up to me and said:
I ran up to my father and said:
can't you see that your boy is burning?
My son is my father, a boy who is running
I no longer see anyone, I said: it's burning
We've got to put it out: you and I are disappearing

(translated by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will from the Swedish original, "Napalm," written by Bjorn Harkannsson)

Coincidence in the Novel

From William Logan's wild ride on the tails of Pynchon's Against the Day in the VQR:

The Novel as Juggernaut

A long novel is as difficult to shift from its course as an ocean liner; and Pynchon is no novice captain of the stout tug Coincidence, the favorite of every clumsy novelist since Thomas Hardy, if not long before. (The line of coincidence starts with Oedipus Rex—Shakespeare, Defoe, Charlotte Brontë, and many another have kept it alive.) Novels are famously more conservative in their social physics than in their propriety; random acts offend the reader’s expectation of a moral fate and undermine the Whig view of history on which much modern fiction is based. Novels that embrace the Mode of Perennial Accident—sometimes generated, like the productions of Oulipo, by chance method—often comment upon fiction in a meta-novelistic way. These are gestures of an art fatally uneasy with its means.

The Novel vs. The Short Story

A good portion of Elif Batuman's inflammatory essay in N+1 on the death of the short story seems unfounded, but this paragraph seems worth consideration:

Novels, like short stories, are often about absences; but they are based on information overload. A short story says, “I looked for x, and didn’t find it,” or, “I was not looking anymore, and then I found x.” A novel says, “I looked for x, and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.” The novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself. The novel is a fundamentally ironic form; hence its power of self-regeneration. The short story is a fundamentally unironic form, and for this reason I think it is doomed.

In the Beginning #1

From a Review by Richard Gehr of James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand published in the Village Voice:

This is how Don DeLillo's epic Underworld opens: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."

And this is the way The Cold Six Thousand, the second volume of what James Ellroy has called his "underworld U.S.A." series begins: "They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee."

Note the contrast.

Dire Warnings #5

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all of our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. All things swim and glitter.

Emerson, "Experience."

Dire Warnings #4

This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because in whatever way we define the concept of civilization it is a certain fact that all things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Ch 2, (p 38 in the 1989 WW Norton Edition, translated by James Strachey)

Dire Warnings #3

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Emerson's Journals, May 24, 1847, written on the night before his forty-forth birthday. According to the footnote (on p 277 of Vol XVII of the 1909 Houghton Mifflin edition of his journals edited and annotated by his Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes) Emerson considered it one of his best sentences, but had no memory of writing it.

Dire Warnings #2

For External Use Only.

Dire Warnings #1

From The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

It's as though I was going steadily downhill when I imagined I was going up.

A Smart Man, A Good Book

In the grand reading room of the public library, writers and researchers sit beside less experienced students of the English language. Yesterday, in a moment of frustration I found myself reading over the shoulder of the Korean girl beside me. It was a beginner’s English text book, the kind designed to give an unstuffy introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary. “Look!” it announced:

A PEN ....................... A BLUE PEN
A MAN ........................ A SMART MAN
A BOOK ....................... A GOOD BOOK

I was using a black pen, but I wanted very badly for everything else to be true. Only at that moment it didn’t seem to be a very book that I was writing – and had been writing for years now – it seemed like a mediocre book that I was incapable of finishing. Maybe if I were a smart man, I thought. A smart man could write a good book.
Further down the page, there was an even darker omen:

Do you have a bad teacher?
A stupid teacher?
A bad book?
A big apartment?

For once, I took comfort in the fact that I do not have a big apartment. Maybe there was still hope.

The Art of Survival #4: Worker's Comp

Another entry in the art of survival, this one drawn an old email from a old friend, who is now a businessman:

I had dinner with Aline last night, and she said, “writers don’t die of strokes.” This fine observation came from her real life experience of seeing her boss collapse in the middle of a meeting, and probably in the middle of a sentence earlier that day.

Pathology of the writer: suicide, nervous breakdown, alcohol-related diseases, venereal diseases, boredom, bad luck, TB, dictatorship, drugs.

Pathology of the businessman: stroke, murder, plane crash, drunkenness, exotic holidays, dodgy partners, failure of the heart, failure.

At least there is some choice.

S

The Art of Survival #3: How'd They Do It?

« Comment les roses de la littérature peuvent-elles naître sur le fumier de l'alcoolisme ? »

Thanks to a coincidence of the Dewey Decimal System and the university library’s idiosyncratic purchasing department, the volumes of Writers at Work published by The Paris Review were placed on the shelf next to a book called, Les Ecrivains et L’Alcool, a book which, according to its author, Michel Convin, began as an attempt to answer the question: comment font-ils pour continuer d’écrire en buvant autant? It’s a question for the ages, and one that the many of the interviewers from the Paris Review failed to ask when they had the chance. Convin does not exhaust the mystery of how so many great writers were able to continue writing so well while drinking so much, and he doesn’t take himself that seriously (His epigraph comes from Blondin: “He had officially quit drinking, allowing himself only a few vermouths under a pseudonym.”). Convin is best, however, when he sounds serious, such as when he informs his idle readers, that “Chez Bukowski, le vomissement n’est pas un motif moral.”

The Art of Survival #2

The Department of the Army Field Manual FM 21-76 - which "describes and clearly illustrates a vast array of topics and teaches you how to... make polluted water potable... construct a solar water still... capture amphibians and reptiles... make an Ojibwa bird snare... clean a snake... signal to aircraft with your body... AND MUCH MORE!" - provides this warning to the solitary writer:

Two of the gravest general dangers to survival are the desire for comfort and a passive outlook...

To overcome the first danger - the desire for comfort - you need to change the way you think of comfort. And the key to changing is reasoning: You compare your present discomfort with the discomfort you will face if captured. Your present discomfort is a temporary problem; as a prisoner your discomfort would probably continue indefinitely and be more intense. Knowing how much discomfort you can take and understanding your demand for comfort will help you carry on. Comfort is not essential!

To overcome the second danger - the passive outlook - you should know what can bring it on.

Some physical conditions contribute to the passive outlook. They include exhaustion due to prolonged exposure to cold, excessive loss of boy fluids (dehydration), excessive fatigue, weakness, and illness. You can avoid these conditions by proper planning and sound decisions.

Lack of will to keep trying can also result in a passive outlook. Lethargy, mental numbness, and indifference creep in slowly, but they can suddenly take over and leave you helpless.

Recognizing the onset of a passive outlook in a companion is important. The first signs are an air of resignation, quietness, lack of communication, loss of appetite, and withdrawal from the group. The best way to deal with such an outlook is to stop or counter the physical and mental stresses that produce it.

Following are the enemies of survival... pain, cold, heat, thirst, hunger, fatigue, boredom, loneliness.

You can increase your self-sufficiency - your ability to function competently on your own - with practice. You have opportunities to do so each day of your life: Make your own decisions and rely on yourself; explore new situations and solve problems. You must learn to accept the reality of a new situation or of an emergency and then take suitable action. This is one of the most important psychological requirements for survival. Do not sit down and worry. Stay busy!

The Art of Survival #1

When Kapuscinski was still alive, Rushdie asked him how he had survived being condemned to death so many times.

"I make myself unimportant," Kapuscinski said. "I make myself seem unworthy of the assassin's bullet."

The First Lady

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this reading would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt I was in bed with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aids waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do things that would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we did anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him - it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time, the way that one feels embarrassed for people who are making fools of themselves, no matter how much one dislikes them, though I was also making a fool of myself, since, in my embarrassment, I got into bed with her.

Still, I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I’m a teacher: that’s the sort of stupid thing I might say. I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she might have been in her underwear, she might just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, she might have kept on her socks, I have no visual memory of this, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two perfectly opposite interpretations. As does this dream, since I can’t figure it out if it was treasonous or dangerously patriotic.

That was the last thing I remember clearly. I think we came out of the bedroom into the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could say a word. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. The next morning I was still humming “Maniac” when I read the president’s declaration that “our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen.”

Found Short Stories, Volume 2

(Found in the Wikipedia entry for Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, imprisoned after the Nuremburg trials)

Later, Speer took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work. Heretofore the garden was divided up into small personal plots for each prisoner with the produce of the garden being used in the prison kitchen. When regulations began to slacken in this regard, Speer was allowed to build an ambitious garden, complete with a meandering path, rock garden, and a wide variety of flowers. The garden was even, humorously, centered around a "north-south axis", which was to be the core design element of Speer and Hitler's new Berlin. Speer then took up a "walking tour of the world" by ordering geography and travel books from the local library and walking laps in the prison garden visualizing his journey. Meticulously calculating every metre traveled, he began in northern Germany, went through the Balkans, Persia, India, and Siberia, then crossed the Bering Strait and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence in central Mexico.

Howling

A Japanese television crew travelled to Utah in search of a lone wolf. They carried with them a special device called a Bowlingual which was designed to translate the sounds of barking dogs into recognizable words. When the television crew finally found the lone wolf and recorded its cry, the translation the Bowlingual offered was surprising: the Wolf was not howling to mark its territory or to call down the moon, it was asking, "What should I do now?" I have been asking myself that question for the past month. Like the wolf, I am getting used to the world's silent response.

The Perfumed Garden

A library, no matter how apparently sterile or stolidly institutional, is a dangerous place to go to escape distraction. Consider The Perfumed Garden of Cheikh Nefzaoui found on the shelf in a university library, a text originally translated into French in 1850 by a French soldier based in Algeria, and then translated into English by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Plucked off a shelf of Hindu philosophy, The Perfumed Garden warns its unsuspecting readers that "the coitus of old women is a venomous meal." Anyone looking for light reading will find no shortage of a metaphor ingenuity. Especially in Chapter XIII:

Know, O Vizir (to whom God be good!) that man’s member has different names, such as:

El dekeur, the virile member;

El kamera, the penis;

El air, the member for generation;

El hamama, the pigeon;

El teunnana, the tinkler;

El heurmak, the indomitable;

El ahlil, the liberator;

El zeub, the verge;

El hammache, the exciter;

El zodamme, the crowbar;

El khiade, the tailor;

Mochefi el relil, the extinguisher of passion;

El khorrate, the turnabout;

El denkhak, the striker;

El aouame, the swimmer;

El dekhal, the housebreaker;

El aour, the one-eyed;

El fortass, the bald;

Abou aine, the one with an eye;

El atsor, the pusher;

El dommor, the strong-headed;

Abou rokba, the one with a neck;

Abou quetaia, the hairy one;

El besiss, the impudent one;

El mostahi, the shame-faced one;

El bekkai, the weeping one;

El hezzaz, the rummager;

El lezzaz, the unionist;

Abou laaba, the expectorant;

El tattache, the searcher;

El hakkak, the rubber;

El mourekhi, the flabby one;

El mokcheuf, the discoverer.

Found Short Stories, Volume 1

(Found in Biological Science: A Molecular Approach, ed. by Hugh P. McCarthy.)

The simplest kind of maze is the T-maze, where only one choice is involved. Flatworms and earthworms can learn to make the "correct" choice of turns in this maze. Earthworms, for instance, are given the choice of entering a dark, moist chamber or of receiving an electric shock. The earthworms in an experiment took about 220 trials in the maze to learn to make the correct turn.

Press the A Button to Continue: Playing the Greatest Story Ever Told

One hears a lot these days about the confluence of video games and movies: there are scenes in the Matrix and the Spiderman franchise films, for example, which one feels at a loss watching without a joystick in hand. And then there are the Tomb Raider films in which Angelina Jolie played (or plays? - Are they done yet?) a video game character. We seem to have moved beyond making films about video games (Tron, War Games) in the 80s to making films of video games. But in all this talk about the videogamification of movies and the cinematization of video games, we often miss what is happening to the lowly book.

Hyper-text fiction aside, the most videogame-like books may well have been the "Choose-Your-Own Adventure" series that came out during the rise of the video game, culminating, perhaps inevitably, in the pointless creation of a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" video game. For other books, the transformation of the text into a video game is more difficult. What would the video game of The Great Gatsby be? The Man Without Qualities? We may never know, but we can now play The Bible Game, which was published last year by a company called Crave Entertainment. I have not yet played the game (and believed until recently that it was a something out of a dream, since I discovered the game manual on Halloween night in a strange apartment in the East Village while listening to a reggae song by the Olsen Twins called "Broccoli and Chocolate") but the reviews on Amazon on mixed.

The Bible Game shows us the dangers of a distorted reading of "The Greatest Story Ever Told" : you (or your children or someone else's children) end up on the David & Goliath level, where according to the manual your mission is to "hurl stones at Philistine targets!!!" Later in the game, you compete to smash the most stories to destroy the Tower of Babel, presumably to humble mankind on behalf of an angry God. The best part of the game may be its novel definition of the grace of God as a game show bonus round, a round, which by definition none of us can truly deserve:

The final round is played after time has run out during the previous round. It is a completely unique round that gives everyone a fighting chance for first place - if they are willing to risk it all.

It's not clear from the manual what you may be risking (your score? your money? your soul?) but the game is clear about who you're up against:




The game is rated E, for "Everyone."

The Common Reader

When it happened I was standing in a bookstore reading. I had stopped at Three Lives on the way home ostensibly looking for a particular book, even though I knew that the store is so small, so demurely civilized that it almost never has the book I am looking for (not even when I was looking for Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays which features - on the cover! - a photo of a woman standing in Three Lives reading), and there was little chance that it would have George Steiner's book, The Uncommon Reader. The real reason that I was there was that stopping by a bookstore on the way home seemed like a special privilege, a way of turning the inevitable commute into a late afternoon stroll. As it turned out, Three Lives did not have the book I was looking for, or even the other book I was looking for, or even the new reissue of Eichmann in Jerusalem that I'd considered buying when I saw it there only a few weeks ago laid out neatly next to the other attractively packaged volumes in the Penguin “Great Ideas” series. I thought about buying a book by Orhan Pamuk and then felt embarrassed about being a part of the Nobel Prize-winner's "bump" in sales. I ended up reading E.L. Doctorow's new book, The Creationists – his short essay on Dos Passos. I was thinking about the opening of U.S.A. when I heard a man yelling. What was he saying? The word I heard was that unprintable, unmentionable word that one seems to hear all the time, on the street, on the radio, in movies, apparently stripped of its earlier violence. He shouted it again. The doors of the tiny bookstore had been left wide open to the street, inviting in passersby. As the man walked past the open door, I saw his face clearly, though all I remember now was that he was old and white, and did not look especially insane. He was dressed in a puffy winter coat and was carrying what looked like a laundry bag. I looked around. The woman who had told me a few minutes earlier that the store could “special order” the Steiner book was standing nearby, nervously facing the same direction. I tried to go back to reading the essay, back to Dos Passos, back to my admiration not only for his work, but for the life of the author, his ambition and productivity and commitment to putting himself in the center of the action, but then I heard the man's voice again, and I could not read another word. What would Dos Passos do? I had just been reading about the Spanish Civil War, about Hemingway and Dos Passos splitting over the murder of José Robles. I thought that I should walk over and punch the man in the face. This seemed like the brave act of principle until I reminded myself how little courage it would take to hit an old man. I could not tell if he was talking to anyone in particular. Whose defense would I come to? "You filthy, no good n-----." I couldn’t see the old man any more but I could still feel his presence. I listened for a response, waiting for some evidence of a victim, some sign to tell me how to act. Was reading cowardice? A young, pretty mother walked past the open doors holding her daughter's hand. The girl said something I couldn't hear, and then the mother who was like so many mothers in the neighborhood – finely dressed, composed, and well-married – said to her daughter, "Well, I don't like that word either." The wind picked up, colder than anyone had expected it to be. I couldn’t hear the man’s voice any longer. The store clerk went back to the cash register. I looked back down at the book that was still in my hands, unable to think of any surer response than this.

The Last Gatsby

One of the bittersweet pleasures of the end of summer is the nostalgia one feels for the promising days only a few months earlier, back at the beginning of the season before the deep heat had settled in, back when the dogwoods and pear trees were still in bloom, and people asked each other about their plans, and all of life seemed projected forward towards the prospect of those three golden months. On a breezy day in May, drunk on my own utopian schemes for the summer, I walked into the library looking for Gatsby. I wanted a summery book, something alluring and corruptible, and apparently I was not alone. The only copy of the book left on the shelf had been thoroughly annotated. The corners of the book’s green hardcover had been thumbed down and some of the pages were missing corners. The body of the text itself was a palimpsest of misreading, layers of ill-conceived attempts at exegesis composed for years of last-minute assignments. Each reader had left signs of his or her ownership of the text: underlinings, coffee rings, phone numbers, questions in the margin – (Symbolism? Sexism!), a haphazard to-do list. One generous scholar had taken the time to provide his fellow readers with Chinese translations of the tricky words: vista (境界), buoyed (纽约), murmur (私语), divan (烟)… I reread Fitzgerald against his readers, pausing occasionally to look out the window at the people strolling through the park below. What struck me this time was the way that Fitzgerald introduces Daisy and Gatsby, the line for line beauty of the descriptions, the forward momentum, especially in this passage:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragiley bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of the picture against the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out in the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

According to his notes, the Chinese scholar read this brief introduction to Daisy, which contains in miniature the action of the entire book, as an example of foreshadowing color symbolism. Rose, he wrote in the margin, is not a real color. Rose = red+ white. Prepain [?] and bleeding. Red = anger. Represent blood. White = weak. It seems appropriate that this novel on the tragic results of willfully misreading each other – projecting our own desires onto that green light on the horizon – should be so variously and consistently misread. Without disputing whether rose is a color or whether red really equals anger, we can agree that prepain seems a strange and apt term, both for the moment when Tom Buchanan first slams the window shut and for these early days of September when we feel the sobering postpain of the summer and the prepain of what’s to come.

The Art of the Novel #3 : The Art of Love

It's been weeks and I still haven't gotten over the little sentence tucked away in the middle of Updike's essay in the New Yorker on the late works of great authors. I include it here with the preceding two sentences as context:

Hawthorne's inability to carry forward and complete, "The Ancestral Footprint" was, in Adorno's term, a "catastrophe" for him personally. His struggles to find the key—the handle—demonstrate what a precarious feat it is to write a novel, organizing a host of inventions and polished details into a single movement toward resolution. Like sex, it is either easy or impossible...

Does this simile hold up? Am I screwing the wrong book?

In the University Library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended

In the library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended, you try to find an isolated table, but cannot escape the diversity of life that the library shelters in all seasons. The woman with red pants hidden behind a carrel twenty feet away cannot stop herself from burping over and over again. Occasionally, she murmurs, “excuse me” to the otherwise silent wing of the library. A wild-haired man with headphones zips past on his way to the bathroom, never to emerge.

You close your eyes in concentration. You can feel the weight of the pen in your hand. You are listening for the burping woman in the red pants – what could she have eaten? balloons? – when you hear a sudden disembodied voice declare, “Holy shitfucking fuck.”

You whirl around looking for a man in distress. The voice came from somewhere in the aisles of German literature, but you hear no footsteps, no creaking chairs, no other sign of human existence. You think of the story of the PhD student whose laptop – with the only copy of the thesis he’d been working on for four years – was stolen while he was in the hallway, talking on the phone. He put up posters pleading with the thief to email him the files. “Keep the computer,” he wrote in one desperate message, “but, for the love of God, give me back my thesis.” You don’t know if he ever got it back, or if he started over again or if he dropped out of school. You wonder how he felt leaving the library that night after all the fraught and pointless conversations with the staff and security, walking away from everything he’d written into the night.

The worst part of you envies him.

In the library, the ghostly voice does not come back. Life on the 9th floor returns to normal. You shift in your seat uncomfortably, holding tightly to your pen. The woman in the red pants burps.

Burrito-Town is Loserville

This is not your best night. You're on your own, hungry, stuck somewhere in the middle of an unending project you never wanted to do. After 9 o'clock, you leave your apartment to wander the streets in search of something to eat. Did you even eat lunch? You can no longer remember. All around you, the streets are crowded with people determined to have a good time. You, on the other hand, end up in Burrito-town, population 13. The menu board shows off the Burrito-town chain's sense of humor. Pains have been taken to give each Burrito-town burrito a funny name. There are burrito's called, "Mr. Bean," "No, Woman, No Cry," "Pulpo Fiction," "CBGB (Corn, Beans, Garbanzo Beans)," "Old Yeller," "Holy Mole!," and "Dude, where's my chorizo?" Each of these burrito's come in multiple sizes, ranging from "Gi-normous" to "Webster."

You have a profound need for sustenance.

While you eat you watch the tv screwed into the wall above the cashier. There are a few scenes of people keep getting in and out of cars, followed by a lunch at a country club cut short by an angry outburst. Because of the bad reception and inaudible volume, whatever story the images are trying to tell is impossible to follow. Instead, you enjoy one of the many mixed pleasures of living in this city. You listen to a stranger describe his novel. There are two guys in the booth beside you. One of them is eating a "Holy Mole!," the other is just eating chips. The guy with the chips is almost finished his first draft.

"It's about this guy," he says. "He's a regular guy, he's got a job, an apt, whatever, but one day - and I'm really sure yet exactly how this happens, but I think it involves getting into a car accident with the Devil - the guy ends up with this amazing power. Everything he wants to happen, happens. He can, like, control everybody with his mind. He goes to the office and he gets a raise. Just because he wants it."

The other guy with the burrito interrupts him, "What does he do with this power? Does he become President? Does he figure things out in the Middle East?"

"Whooah, that's way out my league. This is my first novel." He dribbles some green salsa on his chips. "What the guy really wants is to get a girlfriend."

"Shouldn't be too hard."

"It isn't. But that's the problem. I mean he can get any girl he wants. There's no challenge anymore. The moral of the book is, kind of, be careful what you wish for - and there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. After a while the guy gets fed up with the mind control. I mean, he realizes that the girls don't really want him. It's not real. He ends up getting really depressed. He just sits in his apartment and watches tv all day. Pretty much what he was doing before he got the special power, only now his apartment is a lot nicer, because he makes, like, mad bank."

The "Holy Mole!" guy nods. "If I had more money, I'd buy one of those hd plasma flat screens."

"Yeah, totally. And get digital cable."

You've eaten half of the burrito and you're full, but you stay to hear the guy with the chips explain how the book ends.

"Well, one day the dude meets a girl he can't control, and the whole question is like, 'is she the devil or is she the love of his life?"

"That's some profound shit. Which one is she?"

"Both."

"Wow."

"Yeah, originally it was a screenplay. But I got a lot of feedback on my blog about how the plot was hard to follow. So I figured I would make it into a novel."

"Cool."

It's time to go home and write.

Art of the Novel #2 / The Podcat

Is Christopher Lydon the thinking man's Charlie Rose? While he may not have the pull of his older colleague, he's definitely sharper and more web-savvy. Lydon's mp3 interviews played a major role in popularizing the podcast. His new project, Open Source, is a radio show, podcast, and a blog. In the past month, Lydon has interviewed Philip Roth, the critic James Wood and Mark Greif of N+1 on the NY Times Book Review's Great American Novel Survey.

Philip Roth discussed the Art of the Novel, the elemental joys of the Jersey Shore, and how his father picked up a woman using the line, "Hey, You're in Dr. Horowitz's spot!" In their conversation on the Times Survey, Lydon prompted Wood, Greif, and Moby Lives / Melville House publisher, blogger, podcaster, Dennis Loy Johnson to speculate on what the next Great American Novel will look like. Yesterday, Lydon talked with John Updike about sex, god, and New Jersey.

The Art of the Profile #1:

The celebrity profile is not an ancient art. The formula for the integration of the interview with a survey of the celebrity's life was devised by a German mathematician sometime after Einstein's annae mirabilis, 1905. Not much has changed since then, aside from the flourishes "New Journalism" added during the 60s. Mostly, the profile falls into the tried-and-true magazine model of the bait-and-switch. The magazine cover announces an in-depth interview with the celebrity subject, but aside from a provocative close-up photo or two, we see little more than the obvious. There are notable exceptions of course - occasions when the writer's talent and commitment overcome the conventions of the genre. Mostly this happens when the subject sexually propositions the journalist, as in the case of the stupendous profile of Principal Stanley Bosworth in New York Magazine and the Guardian's profile of Michel Houellebecq, in which the celebrated controversialist poses the question, "Would you like to be in my erotic film?"

(See Also: the self-hating, self-portraits on Houellebecq's web journal).

The Art of the Novel #1

“The Amazonian boy is first provided with a breech-cloth when he is five years old. His earliest lesson is in its manufacture, for every Indian fashions his own clothing, is his own tailor and cloth manufacturer. He goes to the bush and selects a tree, on which he makes a space 6 feet long by 9 inches in width, and strips from it both outer and inner barks. He separates the two layers, and cuts the strip of inner bark in two, and carries the pieces to the river where the material is thoroughly soaked. Afterwards this is beaten with a small wooden mallet until it forms a yard length of bark-cloth 9 inches in width. Nothing further is needed, for this makes the breech-cloth and it is sufficient to pass between the legs and tuck securely over the waistband in front and behind. There is no variation from the type or method of manufacture, and this simplest form of clothing is common to all tribes inhabiting the wide stretch of country between the rivers Issa and Japura.

The breech-cloth is never discarded by the male Indian, nor, in sight of a man or a woman, would he ever remove it. When bathing he wades in a sufficient depth before he interferes with its adjustment. Even when a man dies his breech-cloth is buried with him.”
--- From The Northwest Indians: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes, by Thomas Whitten, F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I. Captain HP (14th Hussars). NY: Duffield and Company, 1915

Babel in the East Village

This afternoon, I stopped by the St. Mark’s Bookshop to look through the Collected Stories of Isaac Babel on my way to buy groceries for dinner. I found the book in the back of the bookstore, on a shelf below Paul Auster and above Italo Calvino. I knelt down and read about how Babel had been killed by the NKVD, after he was arrested, forced to confess, and shuttled to a prison camp in Siberia.

To my left, beyond the table of discounted books, an agitated man with white-hair and a short, neat beard was talking politics with the woman behind the desk. When he mentioned Rumsfeld, he swung his arm above his head to make a point. When I looked over to him I noticed that I was crouching next to a rack of postcards with photos of the president and his administration. Their faces had been doctored, certain features were elongated, others erased. Rumsfeld was a monster with tiny eyes and a sharp pointed head.

“The people I know who have been shot,” man with the white hair declared, “were shot because they were thoroughly understood.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said the woman. “It’s better to be misunderstood.”

“I totally disagree,” he said. “I want them to understand me. That’s what’s important.”

“But then they’ll shoot you.”

“Great.” He threw both hands above his head.

“But you’ll die.”

“At least then they’ll understand who they were messing with.”

The Paper Cut

After alcoholism, heart-disease, near-sightedness, divorce, bankruptcy, and depression, the paper cut is the most serious occupational hazard of the writer. Its menace passes largely unnoticed, and we are all its silent victims.

All paper cuts are not created equal, but each is nasty in its own way. The truly painful paper cut seems to hurt more than it has any right to. We understand the justice of bruises, burns, and scrapes - the pain we feel seems proportional to the evidence of the injury, but the case of the paper cut confounds us. A little epidermal slice, a spot of blood, are all we have to show for our affliction. Any calls for sympathy are in vain. The paper cut infantilizes the writer. We suck our fingers in disgrace.

Moreover, the paper cut is the painful reminder of the physical nature of the book. As much as we may wish to believe that in the beginning was the Word, we know that things were here first, and that they will remain long after the last remnants of language have disintegrated.

An Oral History of Our Time

Thanks to Joseph Mitchell's book everybody knows Joe Gould's secret. The great project he told everyone he was working on, the oral history of our time that would encompass the chitchat at artists parties in the Village, the political speeches at rallies at Union Square and the talk in the hallways of flophouses on Bowery, that grand work that would make him the equal of Gibbon, was never realized. The dime-store composition books he left behind contain only a spotty diary account of his own habits:

June 7, 1946: I saw Bele De Triefant. He said he had a pair of shoes for me. I had an ale at the Minetta.
June 8: De Triefant had not brought the shoes. I had a drink at the Minetta.
June 11: I saw De Triefant. He had shoes for me. I took them. I went to the Minetta. I drank.
June 12: I went to Goody's. I had some beers. I lost my shoe. I went to the Minetta.
(from Charles Hutchinson & Peter Miller's article in the Voice)

The books are now housed on the 3rd Floor of Bobst.

There a few brave souls today who seem to have taken up his project. Like Gould, they believe that "what people say is history." One of these brave souls, of course, is the guy behind OverheardinNewYork. Another is whoever put up this story from a rapper named Saigon:

"I was at 23rd and 9th Street, that’s where everybody goes after the club," Saigon told HipHopGame.com. "I’m out there with me and my man. My man is 135 lbs. soaking wet. I have an $18,000 chain on. I guess someone thought I was food. They were probably scheming the whole time. I didn’t even realize it. One of them asked my man if he sold weed. My man was like, “Nah.” We were with these girls. One of the kids walked up to me. I thought he was a fan. He snatched the chain right off my neck. I took it right back from him and my man knocked him out. My man dropped him. We’re stomping this nigga out thinking he’s crazy that he’s going to come and snatch my chain.

We didn’t know he was with somebody else. His homeboy came behind me and stabbed me in my temple. I lost a lot of blood. When he stabbed me, I started fighting the nigga but I was losing a lot of blood. I faked a jack like I had a ratchet on me. I didn’t have no burner. I was like, “Hit the nigga, hit the nigga.” They started running. Me and my nigga were standing there and they ran.I had my chain and both of their cell phones. They dropped their cell phones when they started running. I’m out there like, “Yeah nigga!” but at the same time I’m losing a lot of blood..."

[More]

Gross Anatomy: The View from the 9th Floor of the Library

The view from the 9th floor of the library extends downtown over the rooftops of Soho all the way to Wall Street. If you stare hard to the Southwest you can make out the blue hills of New Jersey. I often bring my work to the 9th floor, which houses the university science library, and sit by the window. The view offers just the right amount of distraction for me to work. One gray day like today when the city seemed particularly ugly (and New Jersey had disappeared into the mist), I distracted myself reading the mysterious titles of medical books on the shelf in front of me. Wound Care and The Acute Hand sounded like titles of poetry chapbooks. An Atlas of Vulval Diseases…Iowa Head and Neck Protocols… The ambiguous Principles and Practice of Nurse Anesthesia… I put away my work and took Obstetric and Gynecological Milestones ILLUSTRATED off the shelf. Chapter 26 was titled “Thomas Wharton and the Jelly of the Umbilical Chord.” Another chapter was a reproduction of William Hunter’s illustrated Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi from 1751, a work of art whose terrifying images of dissection show the body to be both beautiful and monstrous. They make Damien Hirst's Virgin Mother look like a third grade diorama.

Links to Historical Anatomies on the website of the National Institutes of Health.

James Wood on Flaubert

There is a good James Wood and a bad James Wood. The good one sings when he writes about Bellow, the bad one just sulks eloquently. The bad James Wood published a poisonous condemnation of the "New York" novel and its practitioners McInerney, Ellis, and recently Rushdie, in The Guardian on Oct 6, 2001. The headline was "How does it feel?" The good James Wood has just given us a thorough and insightful essay on Flaubert's legacy in the guise of a review of the "magnificent" new biography of the writer.

Wood offers a fine reading of Flaubert's "superb and magnificently isolate" details in this passage from The Sentimental Education:

At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses' workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller's stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.

Flaubert, he argues, "is the greatest exponent of a technique that is essential to realist narrative: the confusing of the habitual with the dynamic... [his] details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously."

EL Doctorow on the Research in the Novel (An interview by Ron Carlson)

(This interview with the writer Ron Carlson was done for the show Books & Co on KAET TV in Arizona. I'm posting it here because it seems to have been dropped from its home web server. I found it in Google's cache and have uploaded the way I found it, except for the correction of a missing comma)

Ron Carlson: What obligation do you have to your research? Because you've done a lot of research. You've written a lot about different places.

E.L. Doctorow: I don't know if what I do can be called research. It's so idiosyncratic and subjective. I've known too many writers who have researched things so thoroughly that they're stopped in their tracks.

Ron Carlson: That's what I'm asking.

E.L. Doctorow: And I believe when I'm asked this question "How much have you researched," I say, "Just enough." You start writing, and if you are writing well, I think really you create kind of a magnet force field around you. Whatever you need will come to hand. You'll see something in the street or run into -- I'll give you an example. In "Ragtime," I wrote a scene in which this -- the old silhouette artist Tateh and his little girl take streetcars from New York up to Lowell, Massachusetts, on the interurban street lines, which I knew were very widespread in those days, in the 1910s era, but I felt, well, this is really a stretch, and I’d better find out if it was possible to do this. But I didn't know how to go about researching it. So I was wandering around in the New York Public Library in the mid-Manhattan branch through the stacks, and my knee banged into a shelf of oversized books that were protruding from the shelf, and there was one with a big orange cover that was very prominent. So I just picked it up and looked at it, and it was a history of trolley car companies in America. And I’d found out, yes, you could go to Lowell, Massachusetts, from New York paying nickels with each new line. In fact, you could go from New York to Chicago by streetcar in those days, and it was a great system, and it was destroyed probably -- J.P. Morgan bought up some lines that he felt were competing with the new haven railroad. He destroyed them. Then the general motors corporation went around to cities saying buses are much cleaner and better, which was not true. And so trolley cars, streetcar transportation folded. Too bad.

Ron Carlson: But you found that book by accident.

E.L. Doctorow:By accident.

Ron Carlson: So it's a little different now with the internet. Everyone researches everything on the internet. It's all I hear about. People are "Googling" and finding out this stuff. You don't have a research staff? You just do your own research, correct?

E.L. Doctorow: I don't use a research -- one book I hired a guy to get some old magazines for me. I guess that was for "World's Fair." but, you know, a lot of what you make up is simply applying yourself logically to the situation, and there's really not that much trouble. I never corrected the problem in "Welcome To Hard Times." I left it. You know the Hawthorne story, the birthmark, where this man's married to this beautiful woman and she's absolutely perfect, and he loves her, but she has a little birth mark on her cheek in the shape of a tiny hand, and he's a natural scientist, so he concocts a potion and says, "Drink this and the birthmark will disappear and you'll be perfect." Because she loves him, she drinks it and the birthmark disappears and at that moment she dies. So that's why I've left Jenks out eating the roast haunch of prairie dogs.

Ron Carlson: Leave your beautiful flaws.

E.L. Doctorow: You want flaws.

Ron Carlson:Sure, I understand. Talking about research, so many times the question becomes your responsibility to be exact, but, I mean, what you're saying is very much more kindred to what I've experienced, that is to say, as you focus on the work, that what you're writing becomes its own research, that you create and find the information you need.

E.L. Doctorow: I think so. You do look things up, but basically you have to trust the act of writing to guide you.

Notes from a Reading: Darin Strauss and Jonathan Lethem on Writing Novels

Washington Square, March 30, 2006.

During the Q+A, Darin Strauss confessed he watched The Godfather 2 twenty times over the course of writing his first novel, Chang and Eng, to study the double-narrative structure. People these days, he argued, are paranoid about plagiarism. A writer should read widely taking what he can. On the other hand, one should be cautious about research. Strauss said that it was only when he was writing his first novel that he discovered the real truth behind the funny response Doctorow once gave to the question: how much research do you do for a novel? - As little as possible, he said.

Jonathan Lethem warned aspiring novelists that “an idea for a novel is not enough for a novel.” He said that his general reaction to reading “apprentice fiction” is “Do more. Do this and something else or 10 other things, but not just this one thing. Do more.”
After the Q+A, Strauss read briskly from his novel-in-progress about an adman in Long Island. As listeners, we sometimes felt forced to run to catch up to him, chasing one biting description after another. In the office scenes, the description was often aphoristic (“Small talk abhors a vacuum;” “The dotcom bubble’s contribution to the world of business was a residue of counterfeit wackiness.”) His metaphors and similes created a strange beauty from the dreary world of office supplies: “The overhead light jiggled. Everyone held still as if they were being photocopied.”

Lethem read from the beginning of a new novel about the breakup of a couple who are in the same band together. He’s the guitarist. She’s the bassist. Both of them have day jobs that take up most of their time. He works at the zoo, cleaning up after kangaroos. Though Lethem read with flair, the first section felt a bit flip – a satire with an easy target: sorta-hipsters stewing in their unrealized ambitions. The audience laughed along in sympathy. Especially the poets. In the scene, the band writes a song together, improvising the lyrics. Lethem sang the refrain, “Keep away from my monster gaze!” It was a real performance. He sounded a little like David Berman from the Silver Jews. The lyrics needed to be improvised because the band’s songwriter was “having a problem with language.”

“What do you mean?” the guitarist asks.

“You know, the place where it comes from.”

The MFA poets in the room laughed until tears came to their eyes.

The later scenes from the book involved an awkward conversation at the grocery store and a kidnapped kangaroo in a bathtub.

A brief reception followed. Refreshments were served.

One-Word Poem

Big Al: So, Eric, you teach writing. I’m a terrible writer. The worst. When I was in grade school, our teacher told me we had to write a one-word poem.

Mike: What the hell’s a one-word poem?

Big Al: Exactly. It’s stupid. I said 'I’m not gonna do this shit.' So she calls up my mother and says , 'your kid’s an asshole he won’t write his poem.' My mom says, 'if he don’t wanna do it, don’t make him do it.'

Mike: How about 'fuck'? That’s a good one-word poem.

Big Al: Nah, she said it was like 'love.'

Me: That sounds like an awful poem.

Mike: Yeah, 'fuck' is way better.