Drkqs

In trying to trace the path of my life, sometimes I find myself shocked at how quickly it’s gone, and how little has happened in that time. Because I have a tendency to undertake big projects and toil away at them for months — sometimes years — at a go, it’s easy for me to spend vast swathes of time in which the “big” events are all a part of a larger whole that dwarfs them. No matter the satisfactions of writing a new scene or having a new idea, such things will always fold back into the greater work, like a swell receding in the ocean. I complete a project every now and again. It’s hard for me to look back a year and know exactly what I was doing.

Then there’s the strange nature of publishing, at which I am a still a newbie. But it all seems to work at a glacial pace, especially by the standards of one who has grown acclimated to the internet. Your book is sold, then it’s unsold, then it’s sold, and no matter what, it’s going to be months — sometimes years — before anybody sees it. It often feels as though I’m shouting into a vacuum. All there is, for me, is this blog, and its various appurtenances. What was happening to me this time last year? I can look here, I guess.

There are a few problems with that. One is that this kind of public record is, by its nature, performative. Often times I’m trying to amuse or entertain, in my own small way, in this space; that means that what’s happening here, no matter how frank or honest it is, is never a whole picture. I can write from the depths of a depression in a way that people find funny. Often the only islands in said depression are those moments when I’m writing. And if, as was the case last September, I’m deep enough in it, then I won’t write anything at all. In September of last year, I wrote no entries for this blog. Why? I can guess. But there’s no contemporary record.

The reason I wasn’t writing here then was that I was massively, borderline-suicidally, depressed. The reasons are various, mostly having to do with the edits I was trying to make to my book, but they’re less important, really, than the overwhelming fact of the depression. Every day I woke up feeling kinda okay, and by noon I would be so low I could hardly move. In the interim I often moved from my house to the library where I did the bulk of the work on rewriting the book, and I would find myself stuck there like a beached whale, suffocating under my own weight. I would sit by the window of the PSU library and look down at a field where soccer teams practiced, feeling anhedonic, and write nothing. Many times I opened up word processing files with it in mind to write a blog post, and every time I found I didn’t care what I had to say. Current events were thick on the ground — wasn’t it around this time last year that we discovered that the future President liked to grab women by the genitalia without their permission? — but I couldn’t muster the energy. I had no opinions on books or movies or my personal life. I just was. And just barely.

And so it happened that I took another step that would be problematic for this blog. I began to take, not for the first time, an SSRI antidepressant. SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a class of drugs that includes Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, and Lexapro. I would like to explain to you how it works in your brain, but it can’t, and not just because I last studied biology and chemistry in 1998. The fact is that nobody’s 100% sure how they work. But we do know what they do, at least for most people. The way I’ve described it to my therapist is that they put a floor under my depression. It’s not that I don’t get bummed out when on an SSRI. It’s that I don’t crash way, way down into the depths, where I was at this time last year. I don’t find myself despondently riding the train out to the end of the line, only to ride it back. I don’t skip paying bills I have the money to pay. I don’t spend hours on end contemplating my impending death.

But SSRIs have a battery of other effects, too, each in some degree a bother: they can make you drowsy, make you retain weight, make it hard to orgasm, make your mouth dry. Though I don’t much care for any of those, I’m willing to tolerate them for the benefit of keeping my depression superterraneous. They’re not why I’ve eventually gone off SSRIs, every time they’ve been prescribed to me. No, the reason I’ve gone off my meds repeatedly is that they don’t just put a floor on my mood — they put a ceiling on it, too. There’s a kind of bright, jagged stimulation that I feel, especially when approaching a period of sustained creativity, that I really love and dearly miss when I’m medicated. It’s a state of mind in which music sounds better, plans seem more realizable, words run together on the keyboard. I’m not manic-depressive, technically. Having seen the real extremes of bipolar-one disorder in the last year of my foster brother’s life, I can tell you for a fact that I don’t have that. But there’s a thin line between what I have and what he had. The main difference is that I only lose touch with reality when I’m feeling down, and he tended to lose touch with reality more often when feeling up. There’s a broad middle space where our paths often crossed.

You hear about the suicide and self-harm statistics for depressives and manic-depressives and you might wonder why we would ever go off our meds. There are times when that’s as mysterious to me as it is to you. But there are others when it isn’t mysterious to me at all. You see, part of why this blog has been largely dormant since about November of last year is that I went on Lexapro around that time, and that feeling of bright, jagged happiness has been almost entirely gone from my life — and along with it, my greatest periods of inspiration, the sharpest edge of my (if you’ll forgive a little self-regard) brilliance, and any real faith I have that anybody will ever want to read my opinions on things. Though I haven’t spent a morning contemplating my own death (different from contemplating suicide, but related) in about a year, there have been countless times when I went to tap away at a blog entry and gave up a couple of paragraphs in because of my total lack of inspiration. I often feel flat, spark-less. Not always. Clearly, I’m still able to write sometimes while medicated. But when I am feeling that way, that’s when the appeal of being unmedicated begins to call.

I don’t want my loyal reader to worry; I’m not about to stop taking my meds, especially with winter coming up, which is always a hard time for me. I’m a little low on projects right now, so I’m not really feeling like my lack of inspiration is an enormous problem, not right at this very second. And I’m going to try a new approach. When you’re a novelist, not every word you write can be inspired; there’s a lot of slogging along, placing dull-feeling sentence after dull-feeling sentence, wondering if it’s ever going to come back. I’ve decided to (try to) employ that trick and see if I can’t force a spark through ceiling that Lexapro has put on my creativity. What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to try to update this blog more often, at least until such a time as other commitments make that impossible. I’m shooting for at least a couple of times a week. We’ll see.

I realize now that it sounds like I’m promising a lot of boring, uninspired blog entries over the next few months. Well, shit. I guess maybe I am. But hell, nobody’s forcing you to read them. I’m just forcing myself to write them. Until then, I’ll catch you on the flip-flop.

Gallows Rumor

As my loyal reader has no doubt noticed, things have been a bit quiet in these here pages the last few weeks. There’s a very good reason for that: until last Friday, I was pushing hard to make a deadline, which had the twin effects of keeping me very busy and totally zeroing out my ability to write about anything else. Seriously, emails, text messages, everything fell by the wayside, as for the first time I could really feel the last big corrections being made on a book that I’ve been hammering away on for more than five years. As I approached the end, it dawned on me that the project was enormously ambitious, in a way that I’d never really understood before. Though the final manuscript is coming in at about 120,000 words — 450-ish pages, in print form, if the internet is to believed — I’ve written well over 200,000 words, all told, and thrown out nearly half of it. The book has long, highly technical stretches; it has 75 footnotes; it contains at least 27 named characters, almost none of whom can be removed from its plot without destroying the mechanism; it involves several real-world figures; it tracks with actual events in March and April of 2008 . . . I’ve got used to feeling a bit like a failure, because of how hard it was for me to write this book. I’m realizing now that the reason it was so hard was because it was an enormously difficult project to undertake. Holy crap. I really did all that?

In case you can’t tell, I’ve been working with my therapist on feeling better about myself, with interesting, if not perfect, results. I’m used to living in a constant haze of anxiety and self-loathing, a state of mind in which everything that fails to happen fails to happen because I’m a failure. For a long time, that was how I felt about this book. It had taken me so long to write because I wasn’t a real writer. I was struggling to end it because I was a dilettante. It wasn’t that it was an enormously ambitious novel about money and the American id — it was that I sucked. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel less that way. I still worry that it’s not good, but that’s a constant with me and my writings. I love them, I hate them, I cannot judge them.

But there’s another very good reason there hasn’t been much activity hereabouts for the last few weeks: I’m exhausted. I’m not exhausted from writing, though that’s also the case; I’m exhausted by the world, and its incessant spinning. I’ve had a lot of individual thoughts about what’s happening in the world right now over the last few weeks, most of them of the morbidly humorous variety, but things keep moving at such a pace that they get swarmed and dragged under by other events and other thoughts before I can even articulate them. And besides, I think I learned something from the late unpleasantness among the American electorate, and it’s not just that nobody gives a shit what I have to say: I’m wrong all the time. Not that I didn’t already know that. And not that I’m wrong about everything. But I had some unexamined assumptions — or, more like, semi-examined assumptions — that have proven to be untrue.

Chief among these is that I always assumed there were adults in the car who had their eyes on the road and their hands at ten and two on the wheel. I figured that Donald Trump, a fatuous gasbag, a transparent con-man, a villain of nearly comic book proportions, would be stopped. I thought that the unending torrent of scandal, the stern warnings of editorial pages, the uproar from mainstream politicians of both parties, the clear distain from every living President, and so on, would eventually dissuade enough people that he couldn’t win. I wasn’t optimistic about a Clinton presidency — though I do think she gets a bad rap, I think the political environment after a narrow political win in such a nasty election was going to be completely impossible for an old-school Democratic insider to navigate, especially one with so much baggage — but I was pretty sanguine about the Clinton campaign. And though it did take a spectacular confluence of events to beat her, she still lost, and by the lights I usually use to guide myself, that shouldn’t have been possible. I tried not to be one of the smug elites who sneered at Trump, especially given that I’m closely related to a fair number of people who voted for him. But it drove something home to me: the American experiment is fragile, and it may have shattered without my noticing.

I say that this assumption is semi-examined because the entire thesis of my book, and a lot of my political/economic thinking for many years, is exactly that there are no adults driving the car, just people, and even the smartest people are pretty dumb. How did I write 200,000 words on the themes of cognitive bias and rampant irresponsibility, and completely miss this? I don’t know. I wasn’t unaware of the history. Vietnam—>Watergate—>Iran-Contra—>Lewinsky—>9/11—>Iraq War—>Great Recession—>Tea Party—>Trump. That’s an unrelenting maelstrom of evidence that even the adults in the room aren’t really in control of anything, that they’re still making decisions based on self-interest, imperfect information, delusion, and group identity. And yet.

It’s left me shaken. By my lights, the first month of Trump’s Presidency have been just as ridiculous and troubling as I expected. From the spectacle of the President and aides examining documents related to a North Korean missile launch in the middle of a crowded restaurant with their smartphones on, to the blatant inhumanity and idiocy of his attempts to ban people from certain countries form the United States, it’s all exactly as bad as I thought it would be, and if I were still as sure of the roles that institutions and elites play in the society, I would be finding it hilarious. But Trump’s campaign was just as chaotic and ridiculous as his administration has been thus far. A huge chunk of the country either didn’t care, or didn’t care enough to abandon their political identity to guard against this. I realize now that one of my own biases, to which I was not previously totally insensitive but which it is difficult to police, is that I am exactly one of the elites that people were rebelling against by voting for Trump. My tribe is the tribe of the big city, the well-educated, the multicultural — the winners, more or less, of the last 40 years of American history. I’ve always been keenly aware of the privilege afforded to me by wealth, and I’ve grown increasingly aware of the privilege afforded me by my race over the last five years or so, but I think I missed the degree to which I was a part of an increasingly small class of people for whom the American story, the one white Americans have been telling themselves for a hundred years or more, continued to ring true. It’s true that liberals have lost a lot at the ballot box, and my own preferred political policies involve higher taxes and a more robust welfare state and slavery reparations and gun control and gay rights and so on and so forth — but every time taxes got cut, I benefitted; every time Hondas and Volvos got cheaper to buy, I benefitted; every time a new piece of technology emerged, I benefitted; every time urban renewal led to gentrification, I benefitted; every time a big city got more liberal, I benefitted. The practical effects of the national abdication of my agenda touched me, personally, very little, and so I think I came to believe that, in the end, the natural order was that life would march forward in more or less orderly fashion, and everybody would come to understand that the things that had made my life a richer, better place would eventually work for them. In short, I took my eye off the ball, and I feel like I just woke up to the reality that reason doesn’t win the day and the good manager model of bureaucracy and politics wasn’t the inevitable victor, in part because the good managers were almost all more or less like me. All of this despite the fact that I have no faith in humanity and a low opinion of people who have high opinions of themselves. Holy shit!

I’m meandering a bit now, but you should take this as evidence of how hard it has been to organize all my thoughts lately. That last, very long paragraph could be annotated in almost every sentence, and if I were writing this for something other than my blog I probably would be doing just that. Bleh.

One thing I want to be very clear about, however, is that, despite all the hand-wringing above, I have reached some conclusions, and they’re not all like, “I should empathize with Trump voters more.” In fact, as a person who has a tendency (to paraphrase baseball great Theo Epstein) to view the world from 30,000 feet, I actually see that set of gymnastics from people on the left as a self-defeating exercise in setting back their own agenda. It’s valuable to empathize with Trump voters more because they consistently vote against politicians and policies that will help them; but the point there is to get them to vote with you so you can implement your ideas. Going further than that would perpetuate the American story that most people of color have had to tell themselves for most of American history: what white people want, they get; if black and brown people benefit, it’s more or less by accident; and if white people want black and brown people to suffer, they will. Politics isn’t a game — it can be deadly — but it absolutely must be gamed.

This has got way longer than I meant for it to, so I’m just going to go into list mode now:

(1) I joined the Democratic Party. Despite being a liberal, I’ve never been a Democrat. I’m over that. The only power is in unity; the only unity is in party, at least in the American political context. Another semi-examined assumption: I have always preached that letting the perfect be the enemy of the good was ultimately destructive; and yet I’ve boycotted the Democrats because they were less liberal than I wanted.

(2) I re-registered to vote in OR-2, where the condo I own is. I spend a fair amount of my time there, and my vote matters more there. I own nothing in Portland; there’s a strong argument, actually, that almost all of my actual interests are in Bend — the family business, the family property, my own personal property, etc.

(3) Marching is good, and I plan to do more of it, but it matters less than other actions. It is important to confront Republican members of congress with what they’re doing, and what they’re enabling. That’s one of the ways in which empathy can matter — it’s tempting to view them as inhuman monsters but they’re not. They do not like to be shamed, yelled at, annoyed, or whatever. I think one of the reasons that Republicans are in power in this country despite the fact that their voters are a minority is that a lot of us gave up on this kind of thing.

(4) Resist at every opportunity, and that even includes symbolic shit like buying from Nordstrom. It will remind you of what’s important.

(5) Be wary of our own versions of Fox News and Breitbart. This is empathy, too — conservatives are not necessarily less than liberals; we are all human animals. It stands to reason that we would be susceptible to the same forces, ie, confirmation bias and apophenia. In fact, you can already see it happening.

(6) Facebook is for organizing, venting, and animal videos. It is not where you should get your news.

(7) It’s time to understand that the boogeyman of the “Mainstream Media” is in fact one of the most important sinews that has held America together, and buckling to the right-wing idea that it is lying or impossibly biased against you is empowering the forces of conspiracy, mendacity, and chaos. Read the Washington Post. Read the New York Times. Read the Wall Street Journal. Don’t suspend disbelief, remain critical, but do not cocoon yourself in liberal propaganda.

(8) Recognize allies when you see them. Backbiting and infighting are stupid.

(9) Spend a few minutes every day unplugged. Go running, or for a walk. Read a book. Put a cowboy hat on your cat. Play checkers with your kid. Smoke a cigarette. Take a bath. Play the guitar. Write a note to your girlfriend and tape it to the refrigerator. Eat an apple on the back porch. Go swimming. Juggle. Go to a play. Lie in your bed with headphones on listening to Wilson Pickett. Drink coffee in the shower. Watch a black-and-white movie. Try to read something in French. Wander around the library trying to figure out which book you want to read. Mow the lawn without earbuds in. Meditate. Ride a train over a bridge and look at the scenery.

The Success Cycle

    Sometimes all I want to do is blow it all up and leave it all behind.

    When I was younger, less damaged, more sure of myself but also somehow less sure of myself, I never had thoughts like this. I never felt embarrassed to tell people I was a writer, even when I wasn’t doing much writing (as for the first three years after college, when mostly what I did was take drugs), even as I struggled to publish anything. I never wavered, never thought about doing anything else, and though I balked at journalism — something I’m fairly sure I’m going to have to get over, if I’m going to feed myself for the rest of my life — I had no inferiority complex or guilt or ambient weirdness about it. I had always wanted to be a writer, I was good at it, and if it wasn’t working out right at this second, that was fine. If I’d gone the route of the boy wonder — something I think I was probably capable of, had things bounced differently — I would have put a lot of work into the world that I wouldn’t be proud of anymore, and the work I would be doing now wouldn’t be as good.

    But for some reason, in my mid-30s, after attending a high-end graduate school and winning a couple of prizes and getting an agent and stuff — now, now I’m embarrassed to say it. Maybe some of that is just part of getting older and realizing how small and picayune your own enterprise is, how completely impossible it is to be the very greatest of all time at something. You witness the way other people go about something and it seems better than how you do it. There are all these people in the world whose whole lives revolve around art and literature and expression and film and everything; I vacillate between judging these people very harshly and feeling as though I should be more like that. But I’m just not. And I never will be. I never really wanted to be, you know? I find the instinct to read culture as though it were a novel to be pointless, possibly psychologically destructive. I think the “express yourself” model of art is dumb. Whenever I surround myself with other writers I find myself deeply annoyed after a while, by our tendency toward preciousness, by the way we can lose track of the real world when talking only to one another, by the degree to which people feel the need to get invested in the fucking politics of this shit. So many of the people I knew in graduate school were so pissed off all the time — about shit the professors said or did, about shit the other students said or did, about shit going on in the world at large. And oh my GOD, who gives a flying, farting fuck?

    But then sometimes I look at the way that makes me feel and I think — maybe that means I’m doing the wrong thing. Maybe I should find another line of work, something I can throw myself into and and exist in completely, something that will take me over and define me, let me know who I am. How is it that I struggled with identity hardly at all when I was young, but now at 36 have come to get so bungled up about the whole subject? Who the hell am I? Is this a midlife crisis? Is this what quitting drinking does to all drunks? Would anything be different if I hadn’t developed this sudden weird complex about calling myself a writer?

    Part of it is, in no uncertain terms, that I haven’t published anything significant in the realm of fiction in five years. You tell people you’re a writer and they say, “Oh, what have you written?” And you say, “Three short stories that got published, a whole bunch I never finished, and a 95% completed novel that I haven’t sold yet and have lost all faith in.” Is that what you say? Does that mean you’re a writer? Or does that mean you’re just another fucking dillettante who likes to arrogate to themselves the status of artist when what they really do is print logos on prefab American Apparel t-shirts? I sometimes think that if I hadn’t cultivated such an elaborate, bone-deep distain for that kind of thing, that might make me feel better, too. But the problem is that I just do have a bone-deep distain for the idea that everybody’s an artist just because they write Harry Potter fanfic or weave baskets or wrote a funny song for their kids. And then we’re right back around to the problem where I feel like I’m not committed enough, either.

    In no uncertain terms, some of this is about a fear of success. I have finally walked right up to the edge of finishing a book I’ve been working on for the better part of a decade. If I ever do finish it, then I have to let it be evaluated — first by publishers, then by editors, then by critics, then by readers. At each step, there’s a way for success to feel like failure. Like a bigger failure, because the stakes will be higher. And so I’m here, bleating about my fairly minor woes, rather than doing the last little bit of work on the book. Because if I finish the book, then people might actually read it, and that could be a calamity of epic proportions.

    Bah. I think I’m just tired.

The Knock-Knock Plot

    I’m not supposed to go running today. It’s funny, in my life I’ve run a lot — enough to have crossed the country east-to-west at least twice, since I took it up seriously about seven years ago — and I’ve enjoyed it at various times, but never before have I experienced the feeling of wanting to go running, being physically capable of going running, and having to stop myself doing it. Even in my best shape, right before my second marathon, days when I didn’t have to go running seemed to dawn a little earlier and brighter than other ones. The act of running could be enjoyable or exhilarating or fun or painful or exhausting or whatever, but I never, ever looked forward to it. Never stopped myself from doing it. I always had to force myself to do it.

    My perspective on that has changed over the last five months. I wrecked my left ankle jogging down a gentle slope on a seamless sidewalk back in early October. For reasons I have never been able to piece together, I put my foot down sideways, and then brought my entire weight down on it. I couldn’t walk without crutches for a week. I couldn’t walk without pain for a month. For ages and ages, I could hardly do anything at all. It was then that I began to feel jealous of people I saw out running. You know the people — they’re bounding healthily down the street, trim and neon-clad, enjoying the vim and excitement of using the body. I envied these people so completely that it was a physical sensation — I could feel in my legs and arms the urge to run after them. But I couldn’t.

    Sometime in January, about three months after injuring myself, I started running again. I started very slowly — both in pace and in distance — but it never quite felt right. The ankle didn’t hurt, but it felt stiff and weird, and I was scared to go more than three miles or so at a given time. Then, about six weeks ago, I rolled it again. Very gently, and it didn’t hurt much, but it was a reality check. I was not ready to be running. I had to stop. But at least then I had obvious physical symptoms telling me no — stiffness, a little bit of pain. I returned to rehabbing, which involves doing the most absurd exercises in the world: first, you stand on one foot for sixty seconds; then you bend at the knee, still standing on one foot, ten times; then you hop forward and then backward, still on one foot, ten times. Maybe that description doesn’t do justice to how dumb it feels. Because that rehab exercise requires almost not physical exertion. But it is, simultaneously, incredibly hard. You fall over a lot. You look dumb, hands planted on your hips as you play what looks like a version of stationary hopscotch.

    Last week, I decided to give it another go. It had been five months since the injury, five weeks since the re-injury. I had no pain when walking or standing for long periods. Surely it would be fine. Wouldn’t it?

    It wasn’t. The ankle felt weak as I ran, and then throbbed all through the night. I had to stop again. It was reluctant — I went out one more time on it before I decided I had to stop — but I did it. It sucked.

    The major problem with actual life is that it has no plot structure. One’s life can consist of nothing but rising action with no crescendo, nothing but incident without resolution, all denouement without real crisis. People who seem like main characters end up as bit players. The love interest moves back to Pittsburgh, or gets back together with an ex, or is simply surprised to find that you consider them a love interest at all. (Or the unnerving opposite, when you discover that some coworker or friendly acquaintance has cast you in a major role in their life.) People die before they resolve their estrangements. Things get rapidly out of hand and then disappear. You rehab your ankle, and rehab it, and rehab it, and it never really gets better. If this were short story that third try at running would have been lovely, pain-free . . . and then its consequences would have been emotionally devastating, somehow. We call that the knock-knock plot. It’s also a solution for insanity.

    But I went running earlier this week, and for some reason, everything actually was fine. I ran four miles. No pain, no sprains, no lingering ache afterwards. Then I did it again the next day. And again yesterday. Which is how I find myself here: there is no immediate, physical reason why I shouldn’t go running today. Everything feels fine — better than fine. Great. I can finally take pleasure in the movement of my legs again.

    But. I have been told again and again: the easiest way to re-injure your ankle is to over-exert yourself when you come back. (Second-easiest: give up on rehab when you feel better, which . . . yeah, I’ve been doing that, too.) I have to stay off it. I have to stay off it today so I can use it tomorrow. And it’s driving me insane.

On Writer's Block / On Bad Writing Advice / Breakthroughs

 

1. On Writer’s Block

    For a long time I was the sort of person who said he didn’t believe in writer’s block. I know that I’m prone to saying provocative things mostly for the purpose of getting a rise out of people — one that always gets a doubletake from people is when I say that I don’t believe in authenticity — but this actually wasn’t that. From the age of maybe twelve until I graduated college, I never once had difficulty writing. I filled notebook upon notebook — all of them mercifully lost, now — with song lyrics, poems, personal observations. It wasn’t journaling. I don’t find journaling to be a very useful activity most of the time (it usually just devolves into complaining). I said I was emulating the poet William Stafford, who got up every morning and wrote a poem before starting the day, but I don’t think that was really accurate. On some level, I think it was just that I was a kid and was fairly sure most of my thoughts were really important, revolutionary thoughts that should be written down. It was also incredibly good practice. Though I can go through things I’ve written and find the style refining, warping based on the venue or the subject matter, a lot of the fundaments of how I write were formed long ago, in the crucible of little spiral notebooks that I spent hours and hours scribbling in. The discursiveness, the use (overuse?) of the M-dash, the high-low balancing act of poetry and dialect — those have all been there for a long time. I’m glad I wrote like that for all those years, just as I am glad I lost most of the shit I wrote back then. But it gave me unrealistic expectations.

    The poems dried up right after I graduated, when I was living in a little house with a couple of old friends from college. I wrote almost nothing at all for several years. I didn’t think of this as writer’s block at the time (in fact I thought of it as being a total failure), but I think that’s what it was. I tried to write a couple of novels, but I didn’t really have an idea for one. I tried submitting my poetry for publication, but after a while that started to seem phony and I quit. I didn’t really get back in the swing of things until the summer of 2005, when I finished Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince and then began penning a fanfic version of the seventh book that eventually sprawled to 90 pages. That uncorked something, and soon I was writing a novel of my own. It wasn’t very good, but it was writing. Within a few years I was publishing stories. After a while I got to grad school, and really developed what I think of as my adult style. I had a couple of realizations: I don’t have much interest in writing Literary Fiction of the sort that I was raised on — formless, muted stuff about people never quite saying what they mean. I don’t mind reading it (sometimes), but the fact is that writing it makes me sleepy. And so there will always be an element of science fiction, or crime, or weird adventure, to everything I write. I’m happy about that. I don’t want to be Raymond Carver anymore.

    But the bouts of block have come and gone ever since. I’ll go months in which the only things I write are blog posts and emails. (I am known as a sender of long emails. I dated a woman for a while who thought my long emails were an enormous pain in the ass, and frankly stated that she didn’t read them. No wonder we didn’t last.) Sometimes, I don’t even write that much. (To wit: the last month on this blog.) I’ve been trying to convince myself that these periods of not-writing are actually useful. There’s a sort of subconscious cognition going on, I think. After I finished the disastrous second draft of my second novel, I spent an entire summer mostly worrying that I wasn’t a writer anymore. Then, in two months, I vomited out about 50,000 words, and finished the thing. I had no sense during the long, uncertain summer that I was actually cutting the gordian knot of my novel. But not even an old bloviator like me can just make up the second half of a book he’s been working on for almost seven years on the spot. Something subconscious must have happened.

    So maybe I still don’t believe in writer’s block, now that I think about it. Maybe I’m always writing, in one sense. It’d be nice if I could avoid losing all confidence in myself and feeling like a fraud during the periods when I’m not actually putting pen to paper, though.

 

2. On Bad Writing Advice

    There’s a lot of bad writing advice in the world, but I think my least favorite was the kind I heard on the podcast A Way with Words this Monday. The hosts kept going on and on about how writing should be kept simple, and how they tell their kids that they should be aiming below the top of their register most of the time, blah blah blah, and I gotta say — this is bad advice. I mean, here on the bloggy pages, we’re mostly chatting, so I’m not digging about for my most complex sentences and recondite vocabulary. But I think that the emphasis on simplicity can be oppressive, and make a lot of writing dull and flat — in short, Strunk & White were not right. Their reign of terror must end. Unsheathe your semicolons, young writers of America. Be aware that the passive voice has uses on occasion. And, for the love of God, have some fucking fun. Writing should not feel like the act of pulling against a leash.

 

3. Breakthroughs

    I have felt for a while now that I was on the verge of turning into a new, better person than I’ve been for most of my adult life. This isn’t really in evidence in my actual life — I still get depressed, I still drink more than I probably should, I’m still short-tempered and confrontational sometimes, and I still flee from relationships the instant they threaten to turn complicated or serious — but I’ve had this feeling, like a stone in my stomach, that I was about to break through some kind of imaginary wall and find myself in a sunnier, warmer, more sweet-smelling world. I can’t tell you why. I think that part of it is just feeling prepared to actually do things differently. Try the metacognition necessary to understand why I have been the way I’ve been, what steps I can take to change the things that can actually be changed, and what I’m just going to have to accept about myself.

    This blog has been a part of that project, at least sometimes. One of the reasons I decided to lean into some of the uncomfortable stuff — especially the stuff about race that I was writing about over the summer — was that I had a sense that being honest about it was the only way to get it sorted out. I’ve had the experience of really stepping in shit on this front, almost entirely out of the cluelessness that’s born of growing up white in a mostly-white place like Portland. I felt like the only way to sort out my embarrassment, and try to move forward as a smarter, more mindful person, was to write about it. And in public. Because embarrassment and shame sometimes metastasizes into something altogether worse. Though I didn’t think I was in danger of turning into a reactionary, I wanted to see if talking about it out loud would somehow inoculate me against that. (Answer: the only way that’s going to work is to keep writing about it, whenever it comes up. There’s never a time when you’ve “cured” yourself of racism and bias.)

    But there are other ways in which it hasn’t been, not in the way I had hoped it would be. There are good reasons for some of that — I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t write about people you date casually in a place where they might find it — but a lot of it has been the old fear: of being known. I don’t want anybody to know me too well, because then they would understand just how awful I really am. I’ve already confessed to being entitled and motivated by fear and full of rage and judgement and sometimes pointlessly cruel. I wouldn’t want anybody to know the really bad stuff. And I wouldn’t want anybody to have a store of examples.

    But the breakthrough, if it’s going to happen, will have to be a process of becoming. I’m never actually going to bust down that wall and come over all rosy one night. And so here, at the bottom of this post, I’m going to start a new tradition: I will keep myself accountable, and in public. Maybe that will help.

 

Goals, short-term

Limit myself to two beers, except on special occasions

No smoking. Period. (I’ve been pretty good about this the last few weeks.)

Read for at least an hour every day.

Never have a day on which I don’t leave my apartment.

 

Goals, long-term

No more dating women I don’t really like.

Try not to feel like I’m too broken to stay with women I do like.

Try to monetize my writing better.

A new (hopefully temporary) home.

Hey hurrbody -- So the blog disappeared for a few days. Turns out I'm a dummy about keeping my records up-to-date, and Hover didn't have my current credit card info, so the old domain -- touchedwithfire.fm -- went dark. They're telling me I'm going to have to re-purchase it, and that it's going to be a few days before that's possible. Of course, that was a few days ago and I haven't been able to re-purchase shit, so who knows. Maybe that old site is just . . . gone. Hope not.

Anyway, we have a new home here at touchedwithfire.audio, which strikes me as a cheap knockoff domain compared to .fm, but maybe that's just because it's the second one I bought. The whole blog archive is here, as is the podcast, which appears to have gone to iTunes despite never having seen the light of web-day before now.

And so, onward and upward with the arts. I think I'm gonna go finish writing my novel now.

Some Complaints

Physical

Ankle, dull consistent pain, as of a tendon

Foot, left, numbness when running in new shoes

Foot, right, purple toenails tending toward falling off

Back, left, soreness, as of a bruise, but no bruise visible

    Sub-complaint: absence of wings

Eyes, both, vision noticably worse than just a few years ago

Hair, too gray, too long

    Sub-complaint: I don’t like going to the barber but I met a cute girl the other day and she         told me she was a barber at one of the local hip places but I can’t remember which one              and I risk going to the barber and leaving with only a haircut

Weight, too high as always

 

Political

Congress, intractability of

    Sub-complaint: the inexorable tendency of national parties to radicalize

    Sub-complaint: the untenability of nationalized party system without a parliamentary                 system in which it can work

    Sub-complaint: the heavily Republican character of my congressional district

President, current, imperfectly liberal on foreign policy

    Sub-complaint: reflexive assumption of liberals that free trade is evil

    Sub-complaint: radical militarism of said President’s opponents

President, future, lack of interesting candidates for

    Sub-complaint: Hillary Clinton seems like a perfectly competent person who would probably     do a reasonably workmanlike job as President, but her visceral distaste for the campaign trail     will probably cost her any election in which her opponent is not Donald Trump or Ted Cruz

    Sub-complaint: Bernie Sanders is a classic lefty stalking horse but his internet fans seem             to think there’s a conspiracy against him

        Sub-sub-complaint: being President is not about having perfect ideas

    Sub-complaint: Worry that Marco Rubio will be the last man standing on the Republican side     and will trounce Hillary Clinton in the general

    Sub-complaint: Donald Trump’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: Ben Carson’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: etc, etc, etc about white people

Gen X, conservatism of

Baby Boomers, conservatism of

Internet, tendency of to exaggerate offense and privilege outrage

    Sub-complaint: tendency of young internet commentators to demand ideological orthodoxy     (see also: Aesthetic complaints)

 

Aesthetic

Novel, mine, lack of faith in ability to complete

Jonathan Franzen, continuing outsized fame

State of criticism, its consisting mostly of political fault-finding and condescending Stalinism         masquarading as liberalism

The Bugle Podcast, declining quality / possible cancellation

Harmontown, extreme decline in quality

The Americans, not currently airing

Superheroes, their vapidity and omnipresence

Geeks, their fetishization

Austism, its fetishization

Classic rock, its continuing domination of airwaves and restaurant playlists

 

Sporting

Oregon Ducks football, terribleness

Seattle Mariners, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: unwillingness of some M’s fans to admit this

Boston Red Sox, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: ditto

Tennis, no more majors until January

Tennis, domination of Novak Djokovic

    Sub-complaint: Andy Murray’s inability to break out completely

    Sub-complaint: Rafa’s injury woes

    Sub-complaint: Roger’s inability to beat the Djoker

Tennis, racism in

Cricket, my inability to buy a baggy green hat

Basketball, how much less interesting it is to watch than play

Arsenal, ongoing futility

 

Personal

Impermanence, insistent feeling of

Singleness, persistence of for the last few months

    Sub-complaint: Inability to stay with one person for more than a few months. I swear to             God, I am not your garden-variety committophobe. Or am I? I actually don’t know.

Boredom, consistent

    Sub-complaint: embarrassment over feeling bored

Social anxiety

 

Existential

I AM GOING TO DIE ONE DAY

Some Failures

    I probably ought to be seeing a shrink. This has been apparent to me for a long time, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve had bad experiences with shrinks over the years and I’m not deeply motivated to repeat those. I also don’t want to go on antidepressants, because in the past they’ve made me fat, caused trouble with my sleep, and screwed up my sex life — all without seeming to do much for my mood. Three different times I’ve been put on one SSRI or another, each for about a year, and the only thing I have to show for any of those experiences was weight gain.

    But I’ve got habits that need modification, and I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to do it on my own, having not worked yet, is not likely to suddenly start working now. These habits include (but are not limited to): eating too much, drinking too much, never quite quitting smoking, talking myself out of pitching radio stories, getting angry in the supermarket, and being a dick to people on the internet. I’m told that this new-fangled cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful for these sorts of things. I’d like to give it a shot.

    But part of the problem with having difficulty with motivation, social anxiety, and depression is that these things make it hard to take the necessary steps to get help. I just really, really don’t want to call a shrink to make an appointment, to the point that I will put such a thing on a to do list, and eventually hide the to do list so that I don’t have to see that item on the list.

    That’s it. I would go on, but you’ve heard it — and probably felt it — before. Plus I might have exhausted my writerly gas tank by pushing through that too-long tangent I was talking about the other day. It’s finally done, at about 10,000 words, which is about 8500 words longer than it should be. But the only way out was through; now we’re through. Now I have to go back to writing the real book. Which I’m feeling a little bummed out by.

    My feet hurt in a really specifically familiar way. I’m worried I’m not going to be able to run this marathon.

    I’ve been obsessing about things that make me unhappy.

    I just remembered that I was going to write about Livewire in this post. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll remember tomorrow.

Detours

1.

    I had sworn to myself that I was going to finish this draft of the novel — something close to the final one — by the end of this month. That gives me tomorrow and the next day to wrap it up. It’s not going to happen, I tell you what. Not because I haven’t put in the work — I pumped out 64 manuscript pages this month, which amounts to about 80 pages in printed form, which would bring the book in for a landing at about 390 pages, which is about what I was shooting for.

    Unfortunately, those 64 manuscript pages include a still-unconcluded detour in the plot that I assume will be cut out on revision, but which I don’t think I can move on from until it’s finished. The novel is ostensibly about a 32-year-old former investment banker trying to get over a bad breakup, and it’s told in a florid, keyed-up first person that I landed on in an attempt to simulated the kind of anxiety that I experience a lot of the time. The problem, in no uncertain terms, is the first person aspect of it. I’ve never really liked writing the first person very well, the evidence of this blog aside; I find it limiting and tiresome after a while. I’ve been working on the book for five — almost six — years, and I’m heartily sick of my main character’s voice. So when he sat down across a table from someone else and began to hear their story, I knew I was probably going to wander off track for a bit. I just didn’t expect the wandering to go on for 8000 words, and a week and a half of work. Now, instead of writing the final scenes of the book, which were finally starting to seem inexorable, I’m following another character, a minor character, for page upon page upon page. I can’t decide if I should worry about this. The fact of the matter is that I’m no longer in a place where writing at all is a surprise. I need to be finishing this thing. Ugh.

 

2.

    When you run a long distance it pays to map out your route so that you finish close to your front door, or at least close to an easy way to get back to your front door. I failed to do that yesterday, and it was . . . well, it was awful.

    I had it plotted out, I thought, so that I would hit mile 15 somewhere around the intersection of SE 26th and Clinton, about six blocks from my apartment, which would leave me a brief walk up a gentle slope to cool down before I collapsed in a heap of sweaty clothes and sore muscles. Instead, I got sidetracked somewhere in northeast Portland, and found myself huffing to a conclusion at the base of a bridge more than a mile from home. This is an awkward distance. I can’t bring myself to call a cab to take me such a short distance, and catching a bus would probably only prolong the journey. So I had to walk it, limping, grimacing, and swearing the whole way.

    I’m trying to remember if the long distances were this awful when I last was doing serious running. Yesterday I spent the last two miles exhorting myself out loud, “C’mon, goddamn it, you can do this, fuck, do it, come on, you’re going to make it,” over and over again, as I shuffled a couple of 11+ minute miles. I don’t remember hitting that point until I was going much further than 15 miles before. But then again, I don’t know if I would be doing this if I actually remembered what it was like to do it before. I remember being thin and having a lot of energy and feeling good about myself and dating a lot. I think it’s possible that I simply forgot how fucking hard it is to run a marathon. And it is. Hard.

    Then again, maybe yesterday was just one of those days. By mile five my left ankle was bothering me. By mile seven this muscle that’s been bothering me for weeks — the tensor fasciae latae — was really starting to burn. This muscle is near the hip, and it’s obscure enough that I’d never heard of it before it started hurting me, but I sure as hell know what it’s called now.  By mile 11 my pace had seriously slackened. As I was coming over the river, still 2.5 miles go, I’d reached the point where it felt like I was running in slow motion. Even if my pace was off, how is it that those last 2.5 miles took more time than some years of my life seem to have? I was checking my watch and the GPS on my phone every few steps. And sometimes you just have those days. Last week I felt pretty good for the whole long run.

    I don’t really have much else to say about that, except that I feel better today than I did last Monday, despite the run itself having been far worse. Who knows, man.

Hey, somebody should pay me for this shit.

    I was going to write about 9/11 today, being that it’s 9/11, but it looks like that material is going to get repurposed into episode 2 of season 1 of the Touched with Fire podcast, which I’m hoping to get out by Tuesday, called “#NeverForget”. On the one hand, nobody really gives a shit about what I have to say about 9/11; on the other hand, there’s a certain meritocracy of opinion in blogging, inasmuch as I can only get you to care about what I have to say by saying it in an interesting way. Perhaps if I were a policy wonk or a politician or had been a serious national journalist for a long time, I would have built-in credibility on the matter. Instead, I’m just a guy with a keyboard. The only way I can get you to care is by being interesting about it. We’ll see if I’m able to do that. I keep writing the script, and it keeps wandering off in weird directions. I could probably do like 10 episodes on 9/11, but I think people would lose interest after a while.

    Anyway. I don’t have a hell of a lot to say, today, because most of the day has been spent trying to write that thing and not really getting it done. I feel like I kinda exhausted myself with that post about Friends that I wrote earlier this week. I was enjoying it, but I got to the end and thought — why didn’t I get paid to write this? This is better than most of the shit on the AV Club.

    The answer to that is that freelancing profoundly freaks me out. For some reason I don’t get bummed out by fiction rejections anymore (or at least I didn’t before I had my agent, who kinda does that shit for me now). But proposing an article and being told no, over and over again, really gets to me. I guess it’s because I prefer to just do the work and see if anyone will buy it, rather than try to explain what it’s going to be before I even open up a word processor. How would I have pitched that Friends piece? “Friends was actually a pretty crappy show. I think it’s because they cast it for hotness rather than talent. Also, I’m going to dither about some social issues, and there are going to be footnotes. Lots of footnotes. No, I still haven’t finished Infinite Jest.”

    Here’s the thing: I think that piece, mispellings and a couple of stemwinder sentences that got away from me aside, is about as good as it can be. What if someone did accept it, but they were like, “Lose the footnotes”? Or, “Lose the part where you harp on about no homo.” I think that stuff makes it interesting, and I’m not sure being told that my wonderfulness needs to be placed in check by some stranger on the internet is going to do me any favors.

    But still. I spend two hours writing that thing, the least I could have done was made some money off of it. If I charged just 10 cents per word, that would come to more than 300 bucks. Daddy needs some new pants. That’s enough for three pairs of chinos from Banana Republic. I could make my one skill — writing, and quickly — really pan out for me, if I wasn’t such a poop about it.

    Anyhow. That’s enough of that. I’m going to watch football now. Look for “#NeverForget” to drop on Tuesday. Here's a picture of my cat.

Her name's Hana, and she's majestic.

Wallace Agonistes

    Oh, good, another essay about David Foster Wallace.* We actually don’t have a lot to say about the bastard — and let us reiterate that, in our brief experience of the man, he was in fact a complete bastard — that you haven’t already heard. Yes, we lement the rapid beatification of the weird ghost of him that lives on in media. Sure, we ape his style — we all ape his style, especially yr. corresps., who came to the great writer’s work late but with voracity and a certain convert’s zeal that led to a brief but transformative period of post-adolescent growing pains, replete with page-long sentences and a 900-word vocab list on our hard drive that we have cribbed from every book, article, podcast, and yes (even**) television show we have watched for the last four years. And sometimes we worry about escaping his shadow, as do all white GenX male writers with a penchant for footnotes and a sneaking suspicion that we aren’t so much tortured artists as, you know, assholes. The irony being is that yr corresps haven’t actually finished Infinite Jest yet, though we talk about it every summer, though we own 3 or maybe 4 copies of it, though we’re quite proud, to the point of mentioning it rather too often, that we’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow and V. (twice!) — this could be a compensatory gesture, not unlike a man with a micropenis buying a candy red Hummer — and found both tomes to be rewarding and really, honestly, not all that difficult.

*by us or by anybody

** especially?

 

    But we read this piece in Vulture earlier today and it has been eating away at yr corresps ever since. Much of the piece is admirable and wonderful and accurate and high and true and fine and moist and sticky and lovely, especially the bits about the beatification above-mentioned. But —

    Oh, fuck it, I’m not going to go all in on that device, it was killing me. Go read “Big Red Son” . DFW, the bastard, does it way better than I ever could anyway. Suffice it to say that if you read that piece, and then you read basically anything I’ve written on this blog in the last oh, say, forever, you’ll notice a certain resonance between DFW’s style and my own — not a shock — and that, in general, he does it way better than me and I should probably give up on this writing thing and go into refrdigerator repair — refridgerators, those aren’t going to get phased out like home phones and VCRs, are they? Aren’t billions of us still going to need to find a way to keep our food from rotting without burying it in the ground with a block of salt?

    I’m off track. Anyway, not that the people at Vulture care, but I have a super-complex relationship with their output, which is often admirably thoughtful and does a good job of executing the necessary postmodern task*** of taking all media seriously and not being snobbish about television or new media.† But there’s also a strong strain of twittishness in a lot of their criticism, emblamatized by the site’s obsequeous stance towards the mean, soulless, manipulative, gimmicky and unverisimilitous Mad Men. (I don’t like Mad Men. And yes, I’ve watched most of it. Leave me alone.) In attempting to make sure everything is taken seriously, sometimes things that are fundamentally not serious (like costume soaps about vacuous asshats who work in advertising) end up receiving a lot of praise that feels to me disingenuous, or at least — what? — a little blind.

***one at which DFW failed, BTW

† I’ve long thought that the reason DFW failed at this, by the way, is that he had just unremittingly dreadful taste in everything other than books. The occasion for all these effing essays of late is probably the release of the certain-to-be-horrifying End of the Tour, based on a book-length interview with the much better title Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Wallace’s taste in movies runs the gamut from great action — Die Hard — to terrible action — Braveheart — to, basically, camp — anything by David Lynch. He’s revealed to be a lover of disposable grunge queen Alanis Morrissette. (When I met him, the rumor was going around that he was into the execrable Xian grunge band Creed, which, ugh.) And TV, my god — it was hard not to have bad taste in TV for a long time, but in truth he seems more concerned with game shows and commercials than the rather long list of quality, non-cynical stuff that has been airing on TV since way before the modern “golden age”: I challenge you to mount a serious argument that Barney Miller was cheap or ugly. It wasn’t.

 

    Nope, still off track. Anyway, what I was trying to say is that I actually kind of liked the DFW essay, but I have some complicated feelings about the author’s thoughts on “This Is Water”, DFW’s Kenyon College graduation address that has, since his suicide, become a sort of touchstone of the beatification movement. I mean, some of those are rooted in my complicated feelings about DFW and his apparent feeling that there was a crisis of sincerity in the world and part of his mission was to lean in to his own feelings, break through the impenetrable distance between minds, and calm said crisis with his genuineness. I’ve never felt any crisis of sincerity. I’ve leveled the criticism at DFW before that he has a tendency (as do we all) to universalize his own problems; he performs a sort of spiritual metynomy by which his alienation comes to stand for the human condition, and I don’t know that that’s accurate.˚

˚That said, the alienation is, I think, real, at least for a lot of us — it just manifests differently. I have no problem genuinely feeling things; sometimes it feels like I feel too many things, which is why I avoid human contact a lot of the time. But I do, despite having no reason to, feel completely apart from humanity, if we define “humanity” as “the ongoing project of keeping the species of homo sapiens sapiens alive and in progressively better circumstance."

 

    Christian Lorentzen, the Vulture author, performs precisely the same move in criticizing “This Is Water”. If you haven’t read “This Is Water”, there’s an extended passage about a generic you who is going to the supermarket after the end of a long day, and struggling with the effort of not growing impatient, or angry, or judgemental, or any of those things. Lorentzen writes:

 

Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I’ve mostly enjoyed my visits to grocery stores over the years. In any event, it strikes me that there are more difficult things about adulthood than navigating the express-check-out line, and more that it demands of us than overcoming self-centeredness and reflexive sourness. What Wallace describes as a universal rite of passage into maturity seems more to me like the daily struggles of a serious depressive, which he was. To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page.

 

Fairplay if you find this version of DFW boring. I don’t. But this feels like a willful misreading of what the essay is about. This isn’t meant to be “a universal rite of passage into maturity”. It’s about this one huge thing, a thing that it is transparently obvious that nearly every human struggles with — empathy.†† The example of the grocery store seems esepcially apt to me, simply because it is mundane, because it happens to nearly everybody at one time or another that they are in a public place with a bunch of strangers and the combination of exhaustion and neon lights and screaming babies and bad news on the radio and a crappy job and so on and so forth just erases empathy and turns them into a vat of seething grievances. It’s not that it’s like this all the time. It’s that it’s like this for everybody sometime. If it’s never been like that for you, then congratulations, you are the greatest human of all time and the rest of us are shitty little assholes.

†† It seems to me that the only people who don’t struggle with empathy are sociopaths. They just don’t have it, or ignore it.

 

    You can hear me starting to get pissed off. I’m going to dial that back. But this is just another example of a trend in criticism that has been cropping up over the last few years — a sort of ad hominem, bad-faith criticism that assumes the worst of an author and engages mostly in smug self-congratulation. My instinct is to say that this is an outgrowth of the infinite combination of the internet and the fetishization of authenticity, but I don’t really know enough about the former or care enough about the latter to make an informed judgment. Anyway, it blows.

    Okay, this is too long now. I’m done. Don’t be a jerk.

Are endings fascist? And other worries.

I once told someone that endings are fascist. By “once”, I mean a few months ago, and by “someone”, I mean a woman I was trying to impress. But it was the kind of thing that, once I said it, I wasn’t so sure I didn’t believe it.

I mean, of course it’s more complicated that. Sometimes I wonder ifn the problem might be that I’m not very good at endings, so I tend to feel that they’re fascist because they piss me off and I like to feel as though it’s not my fault. I do think that a great deal of many artistic “manifestos” boil down to a list of excuses to be the way the artist already is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I am always suspicious of artists who assert that their way of arting (not a word — I’ve had some wine; it’s almost Christmas; don’t judge me!) is the way of arting, or the most interesting way of arting. My ultimate feeling is that the vast majority of what we do doesn’t really matter at all, and while manifestos might help people feel like they’re not wasting their time, most of them just aren’t that true, or meaningful. I guess I’m a nihilist in the end: none of it means anything. But then, why explain yourself if it doesn’t matter? Just do what you do.

Anyhoo. Where was I? Oh, right, endings. It really was one of those things that one says to impress a woman that turns out to reveal a little more than one expected. What’s fascist about an ending? I guess what’s fascist about it is that most endings impose a single meaning on a story, whether they want to or not. But then, the human psyche works so that an ending that imposes no meaning feels weird and unsatisfying, and not always in a way that is really that rewarding. Maybe endings are less fascist — which feels judgmental, and I get less comfortable with judgment as I get older — than they are a collection of catch-22s. Or paradoxes. I don’t know. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping those things straight.

Now that we’re coming to the end of this post, it’s time for me to tack on a meaning. So, what’s the upshot? Maybe the upshot is that I should spend more time hitting on off-the-wall poet chicks. Worst case scenario, I’ll accidentally say something I kind of believe again.

On "Prose from the Observatory".

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about Prose from the Observatory that I loved so much. What is it that one loves about a book when one loves it? Why is it so much easier to talk about books to which one does not feel any particular connection — or which one loathes — than it is to talk about books one loves? Most of the conversations I have about books that I love boil down to one of two basic modes. The first goes like this:

“Did you read Cat’s Cradle? I love that book.”

“Me, too! Did you read Valis?”

“That book is rad. How about The Diamond Age?”

“No, I haven’t read that one yet.”

“Well, it’s awesome. It’s about nanotechnology.”

“Awesome.”

The second goes something like this:

“So there’s this part where there’s this graph, right? Like a line graph? It’s in the shape of a sine wave or a cosine wave or whatever.”

“Okay.”

“Except it’s a graph of, like, his libido and stuff, and it keeps going up and up and up until he has sex and then it goes back down. Unless he performs a manual override, and then it only goes down so far —”

“Manual override?”

“Um, he masturbates.”

“Oh. Oh, funny.”

“Yeah, it’s a really funny book.”

“Sounds like it.”

And it turns out you misremember what a sine wave looks like and you’re describing it wrong and it’s all wrong generally. But, having failed to land the description of this part, you then launch into a description of the part where they’re hiking down a river in the Philippines and the heroine gets shot with with a crossbow and Enoch has to give her the elixir of life, and this whole time you thought it was a myth even in this science fiction universe …

So, both of these discussions are about science fiction books, which is not a coincidence. There was something subterraneaneously science-fiction-like in Cortazar’s writing that appealed to me deeply. Not that I didn’t believe that his research on the eels was accurate, or that really anything wasn’t accurate: it had to do, I think, with his aim, which seemed to be to disorient without distorting, to give the reader a sudden and new perspective on a familiar subject (the ocean, the stars, the night). A great deal of very great science fiction works in this way, as well, and it’s something I might like one day, if I can figure out how, to do with my own writing.

I guess that’s why I found Cortazar so intriguing: because I can’t, no matter how hard I try, write credible or interesting science fiction, and he seemed to offer an alternate vision of how  one might go about achieving similar aims: rather than go to space, or the future, we instead go to a place where language rolls over and over itself, turns inside out, lives in a surreal space on the border between fiction and poetry, works in concert with visual art: these are things I think I can do. Words are, after all, the only thing in the world at which I am particularly good.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m never going to be one of the great experimental writers. I’m still too attached to stories, scenes, characters — plots. But since coming here I’ve grown concerned that I have, over the last ten years, grown staid and conservative, unquestioning of assumptions that need to be challenged. That I’m taking tools out of my kit for no reason. There are things I used to do when I wrote poetry that I think could inform at least pieces of things that I write now: following sounds places to find new meanings; annulling my marriage to post-Austen sentence-level wizardry. (Though that wizardry, assuming I have it, is something I really enjoy doing. Maybe part of what I’m saying is that I need to make myself uncomfortable. It’s hard to write things that are any good if one spends the whole time on a sort of literary beanbag chair eating popcorn and watching reruns of Saved by the Bell.)

Anyway, I’m wandering off-track. There was another aspect of the Cortazar book that I found really appealing: the fact that it married prose with image. (Which is part of why I included the sine wave conversation — to show how difficult it is to describe even the most basic of visuals using nothing but words.) Clearly, this is not an utterly new idea — in fact it’s old — but it’s one I’ve kind of failed to incorporate into my work. I’m not a great photographer or artist, but neither are my characters: I wouldn’t use the visual art qua visual art, per se; I would use it to illumine story, create jokes, and so on. I’ve been scheming on a Power Point presentation that doubles as a short story: the visual representations in that would not be beautiful; in fact, they would consist largely of graphs, but they would complement the writing (and, ultimately, performance) in a way that would be interesting.

What I’m not interested in doing is something as cheap and ridiculous as what, say, Jonathan Safran Foer does: no, I would prefer to do something in which the images are both orienting and disorienting, strange and ordinary, in which they add humor — not in which they reduce 9/11 to a flipbook with stick figures, which struck me as mordant, if unwitting, self-criticism on Foer’s part.

ANYWAY. So. Julio Cortazar. I liked that book. I’m still in the process of figuring out why or how I liked it, but I did. There you have it.