Yesterday, I did not leave the apartment - the time was not spent writing or reading, but mostly in sleeping. I felt like a bum.
Nothing has been written today. I managed one submission. But I did get to the dentist with my Humana card, and to the grocery twice (Aldi's in the morning and Payless in the afternoon). CC came by in the evening, gathered some of her stuff, and left.
The big thing was the delivery of my new computer. It did not happen. I missed it when it was delivered. I could not get into the FedEx site to fix the incomplete address. I could not penetrate their AI at the other end of their telephone number. I had had similar problems with Best Buys the night before - especially the inability to get past their AI customer service to a human being. I was on my way to Best Buys to cancel the whole deal when I got a call from FedEx. The poor woman from India who was on the other end got a good dose of my spleen. The computer is supposed to come to on Friday. Sure.
A piece I had set aside seems appropriate here: When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future.
In that same week a piece for The Baffler by Noah McCormack called “We Used to Read Things in This Country” contained a passage that stopped me in my tracks: “It is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated.”
Maybe this is another form of catastrophizing. People are still buying books, young and older readers alike. Certainly there are some high schools that are still assigning and engaging with The Great Gatsby in full. But with the rise of Big Tech and AI I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that our values as a society appear to be changing for the worse.
I will do no more business with Best Buys or FedEx. Ted Gioia may be right about cultural stagnation, and the worsening of the internet. There needs to be an off-ramp from AI. Obviously, it cannot do anything for which it is not programmed, and from my experience there is not much for which they are programmed. If you put up with this intolerable level of service, then you are selling yourself into slavery.
This evening I baked a little - the rooms are too chilly. I worked on this post.
I have felt some of the feelings expressed in Maria Cichosz's For Better or Worse: On the Failure of the Stand-Alone Excerpt (Craft). I tried doing this trick once, and it was painfully hard.
When you turn part of a novel into an excerpt, what you’re really doing is asking it to function like a short story, a form that could not be more different. Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, describes the raw surgical process of transforming one into the other: “Sometimes a chapter stands alone as a story; more often, some cutting and splicing and piecing together of different elements from a novel is required.” These are not cosmetic changes, but deep structural shifts. “Sometimes this requires the author to write additional lines or passages; sometimes plot points are adjusted slightly; sometimes a fifty-page section of a novel is pared down to twenty-five, or passages that are a hundred pages apart in the book are combined. Our goal is to publish something that is a satisfying story in its own right—not to present a writing sample from a forthcoming novel.”
No kidding.
She also opened new questions for me - while reassuring me that my lack of talent for the short story is shared by others.
My aversion to excerpting is not, as I’ve learned through trying, a problem of love—or rather, not only love. It’s a question of form and process, how one informs the other, and the way these ultimately amount to a kind of love. An appreciation of the affordances of long-form fiction and the structural impossibility of ever fully translating these into short-form writing, because the two modes demand very different relationships with the writer. All creative writing requires love—of language, of form, of subject—but the novel alone requires hard-core commitment.
You meet many ideas, but how many of them do you fall in love with? How many worlds would you consent to inhabit day in and day out for months, possibly years, over the course of false starts and failed drafts, thousands of hours of work and exponentially as many words, for better or worse? The novel is an act of devotion. To write a novel, you must love a story enough to want to spend a significant chunk of your life with it. The novel is not just a finished piece of work—like any extended relationship, it is a process of living that unfolds through time.
***
This is why novels take so much time. In craft, we are used to anatomizing narratives into discrete considerations of character, dialogue, setting, and plot, but it is much harder to articulate how these all grow from and depend upon a hidden understructure formed by the writer’s consent to live with a fictional world through time. In Flick’s words, novels necessitate “a different kind of big-world thinking that connects characters to plot to dialogue to setting.” This imaginative labor begins long before the actual writing starts and fills days that are, in terms of word count, empty, but in terms of experiencing a story, incredibly full: the ordinary bus ride that becomes a dream space, the shift in late afternoon light that opens a window onto summer light in a fictional room. These moments are as much a part of the writing process as drafting or editing, yet are often given short shrift because they are difficult to quantify and proscribe. There is no way to reliably produce them beyond giving yourself to a story, making the labor of imagining the most intimate and demanding of writerly tasks.
Which goes to remind how much I have not done with my own writing this week. If I could write like I sleep, then yesterday would not seem such a disaster.
Gods, Dogs, and the Dark Magic of Toronto Novelist André Alexis (The Walrus) might offer a different way of approaching the novel.
And so began one of the most unusual experiments in Canadian literature. Between 2009 and 2021, Alexis wrote five interlinked novels in five different genres, all of which dealt with philosophical questions of order and chaos. The books were not a series but a network, an arrangement of four points with a fifth in the centre: a quincunx. It was a structure he borrowed from the seventeenth-century polymath Thomas Browne, who believed the Garden of Eden had been laid out according to this same mystical design. By the time the last instalment of The Quincunx Cycle was published in 2021, Alexis would be one of the best selling fiction writers in Canada, having won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize, two Rogers Writers’ Trust prizes, and the top spot on Canada Reads 2017. It was an extraordinary run.
The review expands this description a bit, a little history of what became of this project, and a heads-up that there is a reissued edition that Americans might be able to get their hands on.
Here’s Alexis, a writer who, after a major career setback, constructs an elaborate schema for a cycle of novels about the relationship between order and chaos in which the characters are constantly frustrated in their desire to make sense of the world by the capricious will of cosmic forces. The second of these books ends up becoming a massive success, but it’s the least characteristic of the cycle, and when he finally publishes the final novel—the centrepiece of the whole project—it’s a bit of a flop. If André Alexis appeared as a character in an André Alexis novel, this is exactly how his career would go.
Earlier this fall, Coach House Books released a new edition of Fifteen Dogs to mark its tenth anniversary. It includes an expanded text, a foreword by the American poet Eileen Myles, and an essay by Alexis himself on the origins of the novel. Alexis says his intention had originally been to edit and rewrite sections of the whole series and publish it as a single volume, but when he set about the task, he found it was beyond him. “It felt,” he says, “like I was looking at the work of another human being.”
This far too much for me to even try at my age, but it is tempting. Perhaps not so much the theme of chaos and order (although what else is life but the yin-yang of chaos and order), but the cycle of interrelated novels. Faulkner did this a little bit - Quentin Compson appears in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. I am thinking of Rashomon spread over different novels. A stray thought just streaked through my brain - something that Mishima did, tried to do, or maybe a misunderstanding on my part.
I submitted "Saved By The Georgia Peach" to Factor Four Magazine. My attempt at flash fiction. Yes, I know what I just wrote about not being simpatico with the short story. This magazine also has a page describing the editorial process, Story Selection Process, that I suggest you check out.
Reviewing Netflix's "Death by Lightning" series | Public History Podcast - is long and more interesting than I expected it to be, and might get me to sign up for Netflix. Who would think James Garfield would be so interesting. Well, I do think Garfield's death was more injurious to the Republic than is generally credited.
I ran across The Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, which seem inconsequential, but Scottish philosophy is an important school of thought. Scottish philosophy influenced the founding of America and is the source for capitalism (Adam Smith was a Scottish philosopher).
I actually read H.V. Chao's Raymond Chandler (Adroit Journal) a week or more ago,but made no mention of it until now. This delay is not to my credit. It will stick in your mind, and your heart, too. Just one paragraph for you:
This is something that did happen to me: on December 10, 2014, I went to Home Depot with my wife. I guess this is a western, in that my wife is a civilizing influence. When I was a boy I read about a boy and a girl who ran away to a museum. I thought I’d do them one better by running away to a furniture store. Home Depot is kind of like that: a gallery of pretend. There’s a lamp for every kind of lifestyle, more lamps than lives you can ever live, even if you grew up lucky enough to have parents who said you could be anything. The model kitchens make me want to pick a mock domestic spat over some issue my wife and I have yet to face. Not money, we already fight about that. A baby, maybe? She will slam the fridge and cross her arms, and I will flick the tap on and off with an idiot grin, delighted by the lack of water. Through the paneless window we can spy on neighbors waffling over a new dishwasher. But not today. Today we have come shopping for a new front door, one that fits flush and doesn’t let in a draft. A front door is like the face you show the world, she says. In the next department down, doors hang hinged along the aisle like pages in a giant book. One door closes and another opens. Flip, flip, flip. They are running some promotion. Plastered on each door is a life-size Elvis Presley as a cowboy, pistol drawn. The poster is tinged pastel, with day-glo stars shooting out. I feel dizzy; I have to sit down. My wife asks, “What’s the matter?” but I can’t explain. What should I say? That we’re lucky? That I feel guilty about our luck? That I’m dumb about the problems of the world and don’t know which is worse: that I think we’re safe or that we’re really not, or that no matter how unsafe we are, there will always be someone worse off? I want to hold her and say, in spite of all our problems we have our whole lives ahead of us, but instead I hold my head in my hands. Flip, flip, flip. It’s too ridiculous; it’s just Elvis. It never happens to anyone you know, until someone you know can’t believe it happened to you. Endless choices. Endless doors. And behind every door, a man with a gun in his hand.
And I still have not written about Saturday's trip!
But I did get another rejection:
Thank you again for the submission of your short story "Going For The Kid" to Haven Spec Magazine. Unfortunately, we have decided to pass on this one, but we wish you the best of luck on your writing and publishing endeavors.
Sincerely,
Leon Perniciaro, Editor
Haven Spec Magazine
sch
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment