A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Showing posts with label On Writing Indiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label On Writing Indiana. Show all posts
In conjuring the magic of a great movie capable of making one believe anything is possible for our heroes, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood will
similarly imbue readers with hope on every page that the main
characters can best the forces working against them. Readers will watch
Aaron torn between institution and authenticity, and as the stakes mount
and the consequences compound, Aaron must answer a question that I
invite readers to consider themselves: If there is only one sin in
Hollywood, but that sin promises freedom, is it worth the risk of
damnation?
This one might be more for me than for you. I remain awed by Morrison - the last of the Midwestern writers to hit the big time. This essay comes as I am still trying to work out “Chasing Ashes”. My starting point was, however, Ross Lockridge's Raintree County where America is a multi-colored swamp; where race is a three-corner affair. The Native Americans are in the background, driven off from Indiana. The following seems to me as proposing the same in the works of Morrison.
When I was in prison a fellow from New Jersey asked if there were Indians in Indiana. He didn't believe me when I said there were none. I knew they had been removed but the details were either forgotten or never known. When I was back here and had access again to Google, I found out the removal happened in the 1840s. My Livingston ancestors got to Ripley County in 1819, and there were still Indians, but when my Hasler ancestors arrived in 1849, they were all gone.
This might be a thing that comes easier to Midwestern writers, that race was not always a black/white dichotomy but had a tripartite nature. Moreover, that it had a settler colonialist nature with genocide as a feature. Although Faulkner touches on the Native Americans expelled from his Mississippi.
We try hiding these facts, and when we cannot, we romanticize or otherwise excuse and deny our history. In my opinion, we do well to face up to our errors and the damage still needing recompense. We cannot let our hypocrisies fester.
When talking to my students about how to make sense of these passages, it is helpful to emphasize that Morrison always distinguished between a character’s beliefs and an author’s. She also adamantly opposed censorship, complaining of the canon wars of the 1980s that they threatened both to destroy a canon precious to her (“I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare”) and to degenerate “into ad hominem and unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious and silly arguments about politics.” Nevertheless, I have found one literary “sin” of Morrison’s rather more difficult to defend in these terms: her strange, often awkward representation of Native Americans.
***
Whether eager to condemn Morrison or quick to excuse her, these critics all take her analyses of race as a remit to apply that lens to her own writing. To treat literature as if it has a responsibility to fill historical gaps or adjudicate demographic imbalances, however, is to ignore the fact that fictional characters are not sources of historical, sociological, or anthropological truth. They are literary forms, a matter of aesthetic representation, not political representation. A focus on aesthetics is in fact key to Morrison’s close readings in Playing in the Dark, which she says are less about any “particular author’s attitudes toward race” than about “the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence”—one that bears only an oblique relation to the real human beings to whom white writers were responding.
***
We know this logic well, and still use it all the time in our discourse on race: there’s white America, and then there’s everybody else, fighting over, assimilating into, or forging solidarity against it. If we were to represent this model visually with regard to European, African, and Native Americans, it might look like a “white” background against which the “black” and the “red” encounter one another, whether in competition or communion. I want to suggest that, with her aesthetic choices in depicting Native American figures, Morrison swaps this schema around. What results is a “red” background over which “black-white” racial relations play.
Charles Dickens sits at the head of a long oak table, peering over
his spectacles. Jane Austen raises an eyebrow. George Orwell taps a pen
thoughtfully. Margaret Atwood in her low, ironic, monotone, tells me to
sit. My application lies before them, thin and unconvincing. I mumble
almost incoherently about my professional identity issues.
“Has he suffered enough?” Dickens asks the panel as though it was a prerequisite. No answer.
“Has he observed society with sufficient wit?” Austen enquires demurely. No answer.
“Has
he told the truth?” grunts George Orwell almost absentmindedly while
scrutinizing the Burmese tattoos on his knuckles. No answer.
I am jittery, a bundle of nerves, and attempt a response, apologizing for the quality of my work.
“Nobody
is making you write. So don’t whine,” Atwood says, looking me straight
in the eye, her soft Canadian accent cutting through the tension in the
room. “And oh, by the way, you might write from the heart, but you’d
better polish with your brain.”
At which point I am advised to try again in a few decades and summarily dismissed.
***
And perhaps that is where the unease originates. The expectation that
writing should feel certain, when in fact it rarely does. When writing
is not mastery, but a disciplined form of uncertainty. And the more I
read about writers, the more I suspect that feeling like a fraud is not a
disqualifying condition—it may, in fact, be a prerequisite. A sort of
secret handshake. Perhaps if you’re certain of your brilliance, you may
have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Personally, Kurt Vonegut’s words
playing in my head like a mantra, keep me grounded: “When I write,” he
says, “I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
***
And maybe I am a fraud. That thought doesn’t quite go away. But neither
does this quiet pull back to the page, this small, persistent hope that
if I keep showing up, something honest will eventually meet me there.
Along with Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, I found Mario Vargas Llosa on YouTube. I read his book on writing while in prison and have read several of his novels (including Feast of the Goat). I found reading him more than worthwhile.
In many ways, mythic fiction is more popular than ever. Even as the Hero’s Journey
has arguably lost some of the obsessive luster from decades past,
storytellers and audiences alike are more entranced than ever by myth,
fairy tale, cultural symbolism, and psychological archetypes. Yet in
some ways, I feel like we’re also in a time in which we have somewhat
lost touch with the underlying touchstones of why these forms are
meaningful.
For the most part, we understand the idea of mythic fiction through a
few specific lenses. On the one hand, we might think of the old
stories—fairy and folk tales (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard’s
Wives, the Girl With No Hands, Vasilisa the Beautiful, etc.) or
mythological stories that largely arose from interpretations of the
supernatural (e.g., Kronos and the Titans; Isis, Osiris, and Horus;
Eros, Psyche, and Aphrodite; Thor and Odin, etc.).
We also experience all these stories through the more anthropological
perspective found in the works of Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola
Estes, and others like them—who not only collected the old stories, but
studied their underlying similarities, patterns, and symbolic messages.
From here, we might also think of the influence of archetypal
psychological approaches, such as Carl Jung’s, in which the symbolism
becomes increasingly internalized. These explorations are what gave
birth to the fascination for modernizing such (arguably) ancient forms
as the Hero’s Journey.
Increasingly, contemporary storytellers and audiences also understand
myth and archetype specifically through popular culture’s
reinterpreation of these myths and their underlying structures—most
famously with Star Wars, but since then through an
ever-increasing number of stories that seek to understand and tap the
deep power and resonance of these old storyforms.
Not that I think it is possible to write an epic about Indiana, albeit Raintree County made a damn good stab at the epic. I do not have the time left me to write a book like that, even if I had the talent.
Here are four reasons I think the writing of mythic fiction is particularly important right now:
1. Our Relationship to the Old Stories Has Grown Thin
2. Mythic Fiction Requires the Partnership of Intuition and Intellect
3. Mythic Fiction Reconnects Writers to the Deep Source of Story
4. The Need for New Myths in a Changing World
And my critique of my writing:
Reading We Could’ve Been Happy Here made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in
my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was
not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the
economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is
not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we
have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no
longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We
have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I
could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I
want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the
emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The
Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had
to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but
there is little I see in some published stories that concern
political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some
of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think
I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After
all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a
world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury
of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but
there is the humanity, isn't it?
It surprised me by my having hit some of the marks without having read while working on “Chasing Ashes” and “The Dead and the Dying.” Or so I hope.
But even used and battered landscapes have their particularity. Detroit’s blight isn’t Cleveland’s blight, any more than Manchester’s is Birmingham’s. Nor are any two cornfields truly exactly alike, despite Monsanto’s best efforts. The British cultural imagination has been formed by writers such as Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence who are perfectly capable of distinguishing among bleaknesses; there’s no reason the American imagination should not pay the Midwest the same tribute. Especially in a period when some of the more interesting art and music consists of similar procedures repeated on a massive canvas, when cultured people are trained to find meaning in the tiny variations of a Philip Glass symphony or an early John Adams tape piece, you’d think we could learn to truly see Midwestern flatness as something richer than mindless repetition. (Willa Cather again: “No one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry.”)5
I have made a little more progress with Lingering Inland. The pieces on Cather made this same point about specificity. Others make the same point.
And it gives me some other ideas to think about. Tropes to avoid. I like the idea of confronting the idea of No-Place with our specific weirdness. There is plenty enough of that.
When, looking in your own mind for a sense of your own experiences in a region, you find only clichés and evasions—well, that is a clue worth following. So I began, here and there, collecting tidbits, hoarding anecdotes, savoring every chance piece of evidence that the Midwest was a distinctive region with its own history. In doing so I noticed yet another paradox: If the Midwest is a particular place that instead thinks of itself as an anyplace or no-place, it is likewise both present and not present in the national conversation. The Midwest is, in fact, fairly frequently written about, but almost always in a way that weirdly disclaims the possibility that it has ever been written or thought about before. The trope of featurelessness is matched by a trope of neglect (for what can one do with what is featureless but neglect it?). Katy Rossing, a poet and essayist, has described the formula:
1. Begin with a loquacious description of the Euclidean-flat homogeneity of the landscape. This place looks boring. It looks like there’s nothing here worth thinking about. Example: “The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?” (Stewart O’Nan, Songs for the Missing)
2. In fact, it seems no one has really thought about it before, they all write. What IS the Midwest? The West, South, and East all have clear stories, stories that are told and retold in regionally interested textbooks, novels, movies. The Midwest? It’s a humorously ingenuous, blank foil for another region. Example: Fargo, Annie Hall.
3. But wait a minute, the writers tell you, it turns out this place isn’t empty at all! They spend the remainder of the article crouched in a defensive posture.10
Rossing misses one or two tricks—there must also be a resentful invocation of the term flyover country (“a stereotype,” as one lexicographer points out, “about other people’s stereotypes”).11 And one must end self-refutingly, by pointing out a number of example of Midwestern distinctiveness or high achievement, all of which—the frontier, Abraham Lincoln, populism, the Great Migration, Chicago, the growth and decline of manufacturing—are so thoroughly discussed as to bring the article’s initial premise into question.12 The density of these evocations of let’s-stop-ignoring-the-Midwest only increased after the 2016 election,13 as national newspapers, ignoring the dozens of articles they had already published on the region, pledged themselves to the Rust Belt as though to a strict Lenten discipline.14
But this is what resonated most with me, a point that I knew when it was pointed out to me:
We Midwesterners talk about ourselves, and we are talked about by others, but in terms either universal or local: Abe Lincoln of the log cabin, or Abe Lincoln of world history, but not, despite the movie, Abe Lincoln of Illinois, who was formed in part by that “great interior region” he lauded in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress.16 A Midwesterner may be a human, an American, a Detroiter, at most a Michigander, but a “Midwesterner” only when reminded of the fact. Cayton blames this lack of “regional consciousness” in part on geography: “Regional identity—the creation of an imagined community—requires a strong sense of isolation. And the Midwest is not, strictly speaking, isolated. It is in the middle.” More important, however, is the intensity of local attachment: “But it is less regional rootlessness than local rootedness that makes the construction of a regional identity so difficult in the Midwest.… Localism, this pride in family, town, and state, leaves little room for interest in a coherent regional identity. In general, Midwesterners want to be left alone in worlds of their own making.”17
And therein is the point I have been missing in “Chasing Ashes.”
There is point about repression that needs serious consideration.
Critiques of emotional repression always risk imposing a single model for the Healthy Expression of the Emotions on a healthy range of variations. But anyone who has lived in the Midwest will recognize the mode Bly describes, and if you’ve lived there long enough, you’ll have seen some of the consequences she describes:
You repress your innate right to evaluate events and people, but…energy comes from making your own evaluations and then acting on them, so…therefore your natural energy must be replaced by indifferent violence.30
Donald Trump won the Midwestern states in part because he bothered to contest them at all, while his opponent did not. But we cannot forget the way he contested them: raucous rallies that promised, and in some views incited, random violence against a laundry list of enemies. Since his victory, the Three Percent Militia has become a recurring, and unwelcome, character in Michigan politics.
About that repressed violence - Indiana did love its lynchings. Indiana was the site of the first successful train robbery, but the Reno Gang had a shorter run than the James Gang. Hoosier hospitality has its limits.
Alice Munro won the Nobel, but I suspect Canadian literature means Margaret Atwood.
Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood celebrate Salman Rushdie's latest book, Victory City (PEN America, 2023) - several readings then Gaiman and Atwood discuss the book and writing.
For Albany, New York, there is William Kennedy. I had his Ironweed before my arrest, only I procrastinated in reading it. I can say I read Legs early on. What I had not known was there were a whole cycle of novels set in Albany, New York. I made up for lost time in prison. It may also be that the time had come where I could read with clearer eyes.
Today, Google News put At 97, the Bard of Albany Still Spins Tales of Gangsters and Politicians(New York Times) in front of my eyes. A celebration, a bit of fluff, and yet.... For people like me, growing up when what we knew about writers and writing only from the finished work, that ignorance drove us away from writing. I had Faulkner with his cycle of Mississippi stories, but no one else. I did not think of people like Kennedy (or Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike or Zola or Balzac, they were still far in my future from my twenty-year-old self). One thing I have learned is: it is not the place that is important but the writing. Another thing is this: within the writing is the story of humanity around you and your locality, and means opening one's eyes, one's mind, one's imagination to the life around you. Check out what Willa Cather did for Nebraska and New Mexico; what Joyce Carol Oates did for western New York, what John Updike did for his Pennsylvania; what Michael Martone has done for Indiana; what William Kennedy did for Albany, New York. What I thought this morning while working on this paragraph: where are the stories of Indianapolis?
I have spent most of the weekend since Saturday afternoon working on "The Dead and The Dying". I finished laying down the story last night around 7 or 8. Now, I hate the story, I hate the process of writing. I would have had it finished yesterday, but for an annoying headache on Saturday. When I napped because my back hurt, but I only took an hour out yesterday.
And Saturday morning was actually pretty good - things went so smoothly. I went to the bank and got my debit card replaced and groceries bought.
I may finally have worked through the effects from my choking episode from Friday morning. Saturday, there was still a heaviness in my chest and yesterday just a burning and indigestion. I laid off the RC Cola yesterday, and I ate very lightly.
It has been the better part of a week with not communicating with CC. I do not think her offending me has been mentioned. As far as I am concerned, time has come for that relationship to end.
This song feels appropriate:
I don't know if you know John Hiatt. He had a run of hits back in the late 80s and 90s. He wrote A Thing Called Love that was a hit for Bonnie Raitt. He is from Indiana, and goes back a way. The only Indiana singer/writer that I'd put ahead of Mellencamp.
I learned on Friday that the group therapy counselor thinks I need to get more sociable. Someone in the group suggested I get a girlfriend! Does no one understand I am retired? I'm doing what I want, and what I want is quiet and simple and peaceful. If putting all those words together makes sense. I feel good with what I have been writing. Being creative and not self-destructive is what I meant to do before I came home, and I have been able to stick to that.
Church went well. We will have our permanent priest this coming Sunday.
Scotland uber alles:
The man who knew how to start a riot:
Philomena Cunk takes on modern history:
That will give you an idea of what I was listening to when I was writing, or watching during my breaks.
I read this last week, and was not sure how to categorize it and then the fiction got in the way: Anne Helen Petersen's The World Has Always Been On Fire.
Most of our lives are that way, too. Apart from a few seismic events, we live our lives and live our lives and live our lives and keep living them, usually without the promise of glory or recognition. “I’ve been interested in this idea of kindness without hope,” Vuong continues. “What I saw working in fast food growing up in Hartford County was that people are kind even when they know it won’t matter. Where does that come from? I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families, but they all stayed, and they dug each other out. What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no payoff?”
Like so many other writers, these past years have been filled with moments where writing — writing anything, publishing anything — has felt self-deluded and futile. But we have to use the mediums available to us, whatever they are, to speak — but also to listen. To write — but also to read. To extend care‚ and be cared for in return. To change someone else’s mind and allow your mind to be changed. To practice kindness, even and especially without hope.
And then, maybe — and I hesitate to even write it, lest it sound too much like hope — forking subtly from our lineage of despair, there’s the whisper of the idea Vuong leaves at the end of his advice to his students. Something new.
This does hit home for me. If I am to write honestly about my world, then it has to be admitted how quiet and small-scale is that reality. It is the quotidian survival - the going to work; the drama of paying bills rather than issues that might change the course of empires; the love life of those are lacking anything operatic. If I could write short stories better, it might be the better form for what I feel are miniaturist tales. I have had this piece in my mind in the latest remodeling of "The Dead and The Dying ", but I am not sure if I hit the mark. It might be a bit hard with several ghosts being featured.
(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY—AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.
The Oxford education is based on the tutorial system. It’s a conversation in the don’s office. This was often one-on-one. Sometimes two students would share a tutorial with a single tutor. But I never had a tutorial with more than three people in the room.
I was expected to show up with a handwritten essay. But I wouldn’t hand it in for grading—I read it aloud in front of the scholar. He would constantly interrupt me with questions, and I was expected to have smart answers.
When I finished reading my paper, he would have more follow-up questions. The whole process resembled a police interrogation from a BBC crime show.
There’s no way to cheat in this setting. You either back up what you’re saying on the spot—or you look like a fool. Hey, that’s just like real life.
(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED—AND MANY FAILED.
The Oxford system was brutal. Your future depended on your performance at grueling multi-day examinations. Everything was handwritten or oral, all done in a totally contained and supervised environment.
Cheating was impossible. And behind-the-scenes influence peddling was prevented—my exams were judged anonymously by professors who weren’t my tutors. They didn’t know anything about me, except what was written in the exam booklets.
I did well and thus got exempted from the dreaded viva voce—the intense oral exam that (for many students) serves as follow-up to the written exams.
That was a relief, because the viva voce is even less susceptible to bluffing or games-playing than tutorials. You are now defending yourself in front of a panel of esteemed scholars, and they love tightening the screws on poorly prepared students.
I can imagine high school students fainting at the idea of writing by hand. And, yes, some of these ideas could be applied to high schools. I am sure someone will call them elitist, which is pejorative these days. We are totally screwed if we denigrate competence because people are too lazy to make an effort
Another rejection for "Problem Solving":
Thank you for your submission to The Georgia Review. We have read your manuscript carefully and decided against publication.
We appreciated the opportunity to consider your work.
Why incarceration is not enough: Incarcerated women at Indiana Women’s Prison earn degrees (Mirror Indy). This changes the person more than punishment. Education changes also the family. It gives them a better sense of being - as being more than a member of the underclass - it makes them part of civil society.
Do you have any favorite restaurants or coffee shops that you’d recommend?
In downtown Muncie, there’s The Caffeinery, which is a place I really like for coffee. My automatic go-to is an iced caramel latte or maybe a frozen coffee during the summer. There’s also a place in Yorktown called Coffee Cravings, where I’ve had a good experience. As far as restaurants go, my favorite place in Muncie is By Hand & Fork. I love breakfast food, and they have great waffles. I usually get the chicken and waffles.
No fiction today. I need to take of business. And I need to cut off here to get ready for work. We're having an office meeting at noon. I find nothing good about such meetings - they're a PITA anyway it goes.
I dipped my toe in Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle, and came away thinking it was an interesting experiment without anything to offer me other than a temptation. I keep looking to see if I am, if "Chasing Ashes" should not be autofiction. What follows are my latest explorations and conclusion.
The press gives Rachel Cusk a great deal of attention. I feel ignorant and unread saying I have not read her, for all I find her ideas worth consideration.
Cusk, Experimentalism and the Limits of Autofiction is an essay by Zuhri James from The London Magazine. This is a serious knock against Cusk - and I think autofiction - that the "auto" will reflect the segregation of our lives. Navel-gazing is an accusation I do not want leveled at me - there are so many others with better applicability. No American can rightly ignore race.
If, as Baraka observed in 1963, critics are ‘influenced… deeply by the social and cultural mores of their own society’ and it is, therefore, ‘only natural that their criticism… should be a product of that society’, then all of this is extremely revealing. White, middle-class, privately educated writers are now able to write about forms of marginality that are entirely incommensurate with their own circumstances, without ever showing any solidarity with those whose lives are textured by all manners of injustice. This writing is then hailed by white, middle-class, privately educated critics whose embellishing reviews only further provide the fertile grounds for more writing on marginality from white, middle-class, privately educated writers. The result is a highly distorted and self-perpetuating cycle of normality. The dismal state of affairs that Akomfrah identified almost fifty years ago is alive and well. Avant-garde, experimental art is still a terrain largely reserved for white artists. By this point, it should come as no surprise that Cusk in Parade remains blind to the ways in which Norman Lewis’s career was impeded by the pervasiveness of structural racism across the art world. She herself operates within a genre of literature that is also systematically sealed off to artists of colour.
At the launch party I attended, you made an interesting connection between The Beggar Student and the current autofiction trend. Dazai self-consciously plays around with his identity in the book and the main character is a writer named Dazai. Can you talk a bit about the novella’s relation to the Japanese “I-novel” and autofiction?
If autofiction is a kind of freewheeling autobiography that indulges in fictitious detail, then the “I-novel” is a work of fiction based on real life, where the artifice or the “fake” part is the sense of order imposed by the efficient novelistic structure. While the idea of “autofiction” as we see it today didn’t exist in Dazai’s time, I think The Beggar Student actively resists both of these stylistic conventions.
The most potent example comes midway through the book when the thirty-something narrator, a proxy for Dazai, comes to the funny realization that he’s yet to introduce himself to his new friend, the high school dropout Saeki. He tells the boy his name is Takeo Kimura, while confessing, in what seems to be a genuine aside, that “Dazai is just a pen name.” This second part is true, but the bit about Takeo Kimura is not; Dazai was born Shuji Tsushima. I think he put this here as a reminder for his readers that he wasn’t limiting himself to the facts of lived experience. The references to hairy shins throughout his work, though? Those are real. From what I’ve read, it was apparently common knowledge that he had the hairiest shins around. Sort of like George Clooney and the pig.
I have problems with the "facts of lived experience" since I started understanding what I could write about. The imagination and memory and the accumulation of ideas constitute my "lived experience". Even such commonplace items as "Blondes have more fun" and the Pledge of Allegiance have places in my experience.
Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite! by Sarah Brouillette (Public Books) left me with several things to think about, even though it does not seem to be the manifesto I thought the title promised. Of the following, I am too far from the creative economy to feel a part of it. Secondly, I have never expected publication, I like what publication I have had but almost all of it has been a surprise, due to my criminal status. That same criminal status I adopted as permission to write as I want since there would be no publication. Lastly, that it seems the English economy is sobad for writers that autofiction may be the best way to describe
The embattled mentality of Patel’s protagonist is a product of power and class in the creative economy. The novel’s style provides further caustic response to these same phenomena, while putting it in the category of texts studied in Anna Kornbluh’s 2024 tour de force monograph, Immediacy, which offers a withering appraisal of dominant modes of contemporary writing that are very much in evidence in Patel’s I’m a Fan. The industrial conditions of writing today, argues Kornbluh, are reproduced in the form of an aesthetics of “immediacy,” which does little more than chart individual experiences. Kornbluh skewers contemporary autofiction and the growing dominance of first-person narration as self-emission that is unable to see its own social constituents, reflecting a growing absence of faith in the power of art to do anything at all of significance. Such immediate fiction, she worries, fails to offer readers the level of abstraction from individual circumstances that can illuminate our social situation, and that can thereby—or so Kornbluh argues—cohere new forms of solidarity grounded in shared experiences and desires.
But while Kornbluh views the style of immediacy as a signal and catalyst of disempowerment, Patel, for her part, uses that same style—autofiction, first-person narration, and confessionalism—as part of her totalizing exposé of the industry of cultural production: Men remain in the top positions, people from backgrounds of cultural wealth and with prestigious university degrees are in control, and becoming a social media influencer is one of the clearest paths to making any money. Starting from nothing usually means indulging in what social media demands: constancy of self-performance, self-branding, drawing upon what is at hand—that is, personal experience: “Pornographic trauma ballads,” the narrator states, “for a little bit of status.” In this light, the immediacy of Patel’s novel is not an unknowing reproduction of existing trends, nor even merely recourse to the self in the absence of other resources. Instead—and despite what Kornbluh argues—the style of I’m a Fan is a deliberately deployed and self-conscious strategy, one responding to and critiquing the classed and racialized work of writing in the UK.
The Midwesterner raised as a Protestant find the following almost repulsive. Selfhood is something to be humble about. Eccentricity is not how I read the need to be praised and adored, but is the willfulness to live as one thinks best for one's self. I almost wrote one's own soul. Living quietly does not always mean living as one with the herd. It means that one's existence is enough affirmation.
Kornbluh sees immediacy aesthetics as, at base, a constant affirmation of selfhood: Every expression wants to be affirmed; the author writes to be praised; the influencer posts to be adored; and so on: “Affirmation is the flat mutuality that immediacy style most often solicits,” she writes, memorably. But I’m a Fan suggests something else. Patel’s work points out a path for creative work not so much wanting to be affirmed, as wanting to be in a whole new situation where one would not need to want to be affirmed.
“I want a hungry press, hungry for me,” Patel’s protagonist states, “rather than jumping for scraps of attention like some rapid dog scrabbling around in the pit of my stomach desperate for someone to listen to what I have to say.” Desperation for attention is an almost inevitable affect for writers now—an industry command. To push back against it is to risk consigning yourself to the oblivion of being unknown. It’s a gravitational pull that exerts its force especially against people who are starting with few resources and working in what can reasonably appear to be intractable conditions.
Pursuing this idea further, I listened to a podcast in which an author explained why she shaded from memoir into autofiction, Is It Memoir or Something Else? (Bleeders Substack).
I am not interested in writing a memoir, other than what appears on this blog. I think, dear, readers, you will agree I live a rather boring life. Which is exactly what I want - there has been enough craziness, and escaping it feels like freedom. Before that was tawdriness and the quotidian work life. Yet, I seem to be bleeding into "Chasing Ashes" more and more. I do not mind my ideas and feelings into the story, but not in the plot. I have always favored giving my protagonist a more imaginative plot.
When is a novel not
a novel? Michelle de Kretser should know. She is one of Australia’s
most acclaimed novelists, and twice winner of the Miles Franklin award,
aka the Australian Booker. Try her books The Lost Dog or Questions of Travel. Her previous novel, Scary Monsters,
which was two back-to-back stories that could be read in either order,
showed she was fed up with writing traditional novels. Now with her new
one, she has blown the doors off completely.
Theory & Practice
begins as a normal narrative in traditional literary fiction shape,
about a man reflecting on his past, when suddenly — needle scratch — de
Kretser steps in and cuts off his story. “At that point, the novel I was
writing stalled.” What happens next? The
book becomes a sort of bran tub of everything: memoir, essay,
storytelling, all wrapped around one another. A novel sort of novel.
No, offense, but this does not seem too far afield from the novels of Melville, Defoe, or, even Cervantes.
My conclusion: the novel will have bits and pieces of me without being about me. It feels more fun that way.
But Rep. Matt Pierce, a Democrat from Bloomington, deemed it a “slippery slope” that takes power away from local voters.
“Every four years, the voters get to decide whether they like the way that prosecutor allocates their resources and how they’re prioritizing which crimes to prosecute,” Pierce said. “… I think that if you’re gonna be for a democracy and for the idea of people making decisions for themselves through their elected officials, I think we should respect that.
Otherwise, duly elected prosecutors who “make decisions that we don’t like” will have “four or five other prosecutors looking over their shoulders and then deciding if they’ve done something wrong,” Pierce said.
Why Am I Still Attracted to White Men? by Jeneé Skinner (Electric Lit) - opened my eyes to things beyond my imagination. This white man cannot give the writer any other advice than to keep writing like she has in this essay.
I just read a review about Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's latest novel, and here I am reading Ms. Wolfgang-Smith on 8 Contemporary Novels with Omniscient Narrators (Electric Lit). Of the books she sites, I have read only Ragtime. E.L. Doctorow's novel is great, and I am glad to see someone that keeps in the light. Still, I am not sure if this is a technique I can use. It tempts me, though, as I look forward to getting to work on "Chasing Ashes."
For me, the unique pleasure of the essays has always been that they capture, with astonishing accuracy, the life of the mind. To be an essayist is to conduct part of one’s intellectual life in public—to dramatize one’s own intellectual process in front of others. Montaigne, who was arguably the first to do this, understood that the epistemic task one undertakes in the essay—to figure out what one knows—is inherent to its form. If I have found him instructive, which I have, it is not because he has taught me “how to think,” but that how to think and how one thinks are different versions of the same thing. Beyond this, I hesitate to say anything definitive, for that would be very un-Montaignian indeed.
If you have not read Montaigne, then you need to so ASAP. He is enjoyable company, and does what enjoyable company does best, he makes living interesting.
I have been bingeing on The Doors, going through the albums I did not have back before I got tired of them. Turns out Jim was wrong - "they" have the guns and the numbers.
My book finally found its home with Simon & Schuster after winning their Books Like Us First Novel contest, landing a book deal and an agent. After over a decade of research and revisions, Call Her Freedom is being released the same week as MLK Day and Inauguration Day, amidst the rising authoritarianism here and around the world.
Despite imprisonment of journalists and storytellers in Kashmir and other occupied zones, storytelling remains an act of resistance, as does love and human kindness. Art not only reflects the brutality of our world, but it allows us to envision worlds where our interdependence and care for one and other are centered—breathing them into reality.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I think the biggest surprise was the fact that I was able to complete a book at all! There were many days where finishing felt like an overwhelming task, and I didn’t know if I’d make it. But struggling through those bad moments and coming back to my computer the next day and then the next slowly built up my confidence in myself. And that was the most rewarding feeling.
I do wish the sound quality were better on the video Translated Fiction 16 Book Recommendations, but I heard many that I would recommend - and many I had not heard of (which may be more of a recommendation):
If you are a Dorthy Parker fan, then this video interview about Parker in Hollywood should be of interest :
Want to know about American Romanticism and Transcendentalism? This video might be a good start, it is certainly interesting in its presentation!
For me, it points out how much work I need to do for "Chasing Ashes".
Ray Bradbury interviewed about Fahrenheit 451:
Vladimir Nabokov discusses "Lolita" part 1 of 2:
The video harkens back to a world that was going out as I came into the world.
I read Lolita while in prison. It annoyed me - a world and a character that makes no sense to me. Yet, it was brilliantly written. After finishing Reading Lolita in Tehran, I had a less jaundiced view of the novel. If you have not read Lolita, I suggest watching the video above and then going to Reading Lolita in Tehran before starting on Nabokov's novel.
sch 1/24
I have read only two of Yukio Mishima's novels, and that was while in prison. I knew of Mishima when I was a teenager due to how he died - it even made the news in Indiana. Although I started reading Japanese writers with Kenzaburō Ōe, and probably prefer Ōe, there is a power to Mishima that is impossible to ignore. Haruki Murakami's surrealism may play better with our Western minds, but Mishima's strangeness may be harder to swallow for its spirituality. This year is Mishima's centenary, which I did not know until today, when I read Christopher Harding's The triumph and tragedy of Yukio Mishima (Englesberg Ideas).
Though Mishima was partially eclipsed in later years by authors like Haruki Murakami, particularly outside Japan, in his centenary year he speaks to a basic unease that many Japanese would still recognise. Japanese leaders are struggling to stabilise the economy and to give an account of what their country stands for beyond the peace and prosperity that was once taken for granted but which is now threatened by China’s rise and Japan’s rapidly ageing and shrinking population. Mishima’s dream of a nation imbued with purpose and passion, seeded by childhood trips to watch kabuki plays with his grandmother, feels as compelling – and perhaps as disturbing – as ever.
The truth about fiction by Hannah H Kim (Aeon) takes a dive into philosophy, Chinese as well as the usual Western, which came at the right time for me, and I advise you take the same dive.
Why did the county care to recategorise a children’s book, especially since the committee didn’t include a single librarian? To call the book ‘fiction’, in this case, was to call it ‘untrue’, a decision undergirded by the desire to resist unflattering portrayals of American history. The power to label books as ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’ is to demarcate what is real and what isn’t, what is true and what is false, what is imagined and what is actual.
***
Why did the county care to recategorise a children’s book, especially since the committee didn’t include a single librarian? To call the book ‘fiction’, in this case, was to call it ‘untrue’, a decision undergirded by the desire to resist unflattering portrayals of American history. The power to label books as ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’ is to demarcate what is real and what isn’t, what is true and what is false, what is imagined and what is actual.
But fiction is different from lies – and hence, labelling Coombs’s book as ‘fiction’, and not ‘bad nonfiction that ought to be pulled from the shelves’, betrays the committee’s intention. They didn’t care about the status of the contents of the book so much as they cared about the contents of what we take to be real and true. All that mattered to them was that it not be considered nonfiction – and if it’s not nonfiction, it must be fiction, right?
This raises a fascinating and surprisingly thorny philosophical question: what distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? What is fiction in the first place? Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand, the inclusion of falsity isn’t enough to render a work fiction. Books with false statements – old science textbooks with disproven theories, history books with mistakes, memoirs with contradictory events – don’t change their status from nonfiction to fiction when false content is identified. Instead, we judge them to be bad nonfiction. On the other hand, not all fictions include false content since there are fictions that include only actual events, such as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), a factual account of the author’s experience of nursing a dying friend. And the fact that historical fiction exists – that a fictional work can be consistent with all known facts, yet still be considered fiction – shows that fiction doesn’t need to include (known) falsity.
What matters for nonfiction is that its content is believed to be true. A creative writing friend of mine told me that writing what one sincerely believes to be true after due diligence in research and introspection is enough to render some content ‘nonfiction’. This means that, strictly speaking, nonfiction can be false but remain ‘nonfiction’ as long as we think it’s true.
***
What grounds the nonfiction/fiction distinction is not that the former is based on truth or facticity per se, but that the former contributes to how we see the world insofar as it organises the kinds of truths that we care enough about to read and write about. The Montgomery County Commission didn’t initiate a systematic audit of all nonfiction books that might include false or misleading information. Rather, they targeted a book whose claim to truth practically interfered with their understandings of themselves and the country.
Our thoughts about reality and our thoughts about fiction go hand in hand. Of course, sometimes we care about fiction because it lets us entertain a world that is different from ours. But even when it is fiction’s departure from the real world that makes it worthwhile, the departure is measured against the background of the real world. In fact, not only the content of fiction – what we’re able or willing to call ‘fiction’ – but also the nature of fiction – what fiction is – depends on how we think about the real world. A comparative study of the way ‘fiction’ as a concept develops across cultures shows that, whenever a group of people think of reality differently, the nature and function of fiction is understood differently as well. We can observe this by contrasting analytic philosophy of fiction with classical Chinese conceptions of fiction.
***
In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.
***
The Chinese word for ‘fiction’ (xiaoshuo,小說) literally means ‘small talk’ or ‘small sayings’. Chinese literary culture had a rigid hierarchy of discourses, with Confucian classics and official histories at the top of the pyramid, while imaginative narrative texts like xiaoshuo were placed at the bottom. However, it would be misleading to say that xiaoshuo was denigrated because it was imaginative, whereas philosophical texts and histories were elevated because they were ‘real’. Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived. Xiaoshuo wasn’t understood in contrast to reality, and it wasn’t metaphysically second class. It was at the bottom of the discourse hierarchy because its function wasn’t as grand as the classics’.
***
So, instead of asking how fiction might be defined (ahistorically, logically), we should ask what work we want fiction to do. Our questions about fiction come from identifiable metaphysical starting points. If we find ourselves continuing to crave a definition of fiction, we should also ask what need it will meet: what theory of fiction do we require to solve current problems?
***
One of the most interesting – and promising – features of fiction is that it creates a space between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. Good fiction tends to destabilise such dichotomous ways of approaching the world through thoughtful content, innovative form, or self-referentiality. Is there some special work we can expect of fiction, such that we can rethink its nature and function towards that end? The fiction/nonfiction distinction is one worth keeping, and philosophers of fiction continue to have their work cut out for themselves.
I omitted much to get to the point of what has gotten me thinking about writing that does not care to mimic reality. "Chasing Ashes" is very much on my mind, even while I try to muster enough energy for mundane legal research. When I first conceived of "Chasing Ashes", I had in mind several ideas about life and America. I wanted to drag in all that was in mind - both of history and of fiction - that made me and made America. Reading this makes me think I may be onto something - even if I cannot properly execute the thing. I think we should give the Chinese ideas on fiction serious thought. Read the full essay and see what you think.
I read Salman Rushdie with a great deal of amusement, but also with an eye to what he does with the novel. This seems to be rooted in his dividing his time (or is it his mind?) between India and England. I wonder if the same thing can be duplicated here.
In its early stages, Indian writing in English met disapproval and disbelief. It was argued that no alien language could express the Indian ethos. As such, Madhusudan Datta and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the earliest practitioners of Indian writing in English, gave up their pursuit and turned to their mother tongue. Some Indian writers doggedly used English in their creative endeavours, but they were few and far between.
For me, can we in the Midwest use the same forms and tropes as they do in New York, or the West Coast, or the South?
We are not the close-quarter ethnic meshing of New York; we are not the future promised by California; nor are we the residue of a Lost Cause to keep human beings enslaved clashing with American idealism that is the South.
We are the people who stayed rather than go further west; we are the people who filled and led the Union armies; we have been here so long we have lost the Old World ties that lie behind our names.
We have a tradition of sentimenal fiction. We are also the home of Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, and Toni Morrsion.
I will finish with this from Agarwal's essay:
R. K. Narayan’s Guide was published in 1955. Graham Greene considered Narayan not only an inimitable and charming interpreter of the Indian way of life but also a great contributor to English literature. In the Guide, Narayan charts the life of an ordinary person from childhood to death. His life takes unexpected turns and twists, from being a tea vendor at Malgudi Railway Station to Railway Raju, to a famous guide, to a lover, to a criminal, and to a saint. He ascribes it to fate. Narayan gives an authentic picture of life in villages. He describes how his characters form relationships, excitement, ambitions, and failures.
Through these tales, he tells his readers about innocent people and how they believe in fate and are driven by faith. He presents the most characteristic traits of the Indian ethos. But V.S. Naipaul thinks otherwise. He says, “For all their delight in human oddity, Narayan’s novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious fables and intensely Hindu.” Yes, they are not social comedies for Indian life. It is not restricted to comedies and tragedies. They are specific and transcend the forms and concepts of art forms of the West. Yes, they are intensely Hindu. But that is what India is.
I have had enough of today. I was up early, and I have been working on Dad's trust.
The email remains - under 10 to respond to.
I got this rejection for "When Thomas Kemp Went Missing":
Thank you so much for sending us your endeavors. It's unique reflection of the underside will not be revealed at this time, but please keep us in mind for creative work in the future!
“This discovery represents an extraordinary contribution to the knowledge of the maritime history of Sicily and the Mediterranean and highlights once again the central role of the Island in the traffic and cultural exchanges of antiquity,” said Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, Sicily’s regional councilor for cultural heritage and Sicilian identity, in a statement on the shipwreck. “The wreck, dating back to a crucial period for the transition between archaic and classical Greece, is a precious piece of the submerged Sicilian cultural heritage.”
The echoes between the curiosity cabinets of yore and our own media-steeped world offer opportunities for teaching digital and visual literacy, critical analysis, and historical thinking in the college classroom. As a historian of science who has taught about the history of collecting, I encourage my students to try to imagine themselves in the shoes of museumgoers and naturalists past. Images of historical artifacts from these cabinets as well as depictions of the collections themselves—all available to students through Artstor on JSTOR and similar resources—provide a tangible gateway to experience remote worldviews and mores. Such images can especially help STEM students see the value in humanistic questions, not least because curiosity cabinets were some of the original interdisciplinary spaces.
***
As an antidote to the divided attention that shapes student life, close observation of images can force students to slow down in an age of rapid information consumption. As a follow-up activity, the class digs into printed illustrations of wonder chambers in small groups. Each group receives a separate image to analyze. First, they spend five to ten minutes simply looking at the scene before them—identifying objects, pondering the collection’s organization, and noticing more the longer they look. Once that time is up, they take another ten minutes to discuss which three objects from the scene they would nominate to feature in an exhibition for their peers about the history of early museums.
Reading this, I thought how little mentorship we give to kids using the internet. Before, at least for me, there was someone to explain what was real and what was not. On the other hand, considering how many people voted for Trump, there is little critical thinking to be found in adult Americans.
Speaking of Our Fearless Leader, he has stepped into being an architect and artistic critic: Trump’s Culture Wars Come to Architecture. I am not much a fan of modernist architecture. However, the essay's author, Anthony Paletta, makes some good points I want to remember.
One is political:
It is also wrong to pretend that the reaction against modern and contemporary architecture is distinctive of Trump supporters, or to treat this as a manifestation of white supremacy instead of a broader, if complex, question of taste. On the left, for example, Nathan Robinson and Brianna Rennix’s Current Affairs piece from 2017, “Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture,” has been repeatedly cited in recent weeks, and Matt Ford at The New Republic weighed in with “The Non-Fascist Case for Traditional Architecture.” There have also been a number of accounts sympathetic to the order from Trump-skeptical conservative figures. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat’s argument that construction might best inspire a range of the public if it varied in character by administration likely isn’t wrong.
And historical:
Still, if there is a problem with contemporary building, it is not—as the Trump administration suggests—government elitism all the way down. The politically divisive debate over popular versus elite taste obscures other reasons why we don’t see more traditional construction, and that is a gap we should not leave for vengeful antimodernists to fill. Their account often amounts to the fairytale that austere academic elites took all of our nice buildings away, which we could have back if only we tipped them all out of the castle. In fact, the sway of fervent modernists over this domain has unquestionably declined, and these people aren’t usually the ones commissioning buildings anyway. The primary drivers of the decline of classical construction have been, instead, the economy of modern building methods and the adoption of standardized building materials, as well as a steep increase in labor costs in the last century.
And the ever-delicious irony that the elitists on the Right are complaining about what they endorse:
Indeed, civic construction trends have tended to follow those in the rest of society, which over the long midcentury ascendance of modernism were being set not by government and academic authorities but often by big business, tract homebuilding, and the like. Most unsatisfactory government commissions look like anonymous office buildings, not like avant-garde efforts designed to shock. If some right-wing populists are coming around to dislike these things, then all the better for an understanding of what has actually been going on, but their stock villains—left-leaning elitists—have not generally been updated with any accuracy. Deconstuctivist king Peter Eisenman, for his part, has declared that “most of my clients are Republicans, most of them are right-leaning,” and Sean Hannity lived in a Richard Neutra house. Former Civic Arts Society Board member and current Research Fellow Catesby Leigh did note, in a City Journal piece prefiguring much of the language of the executive order, that several of the order’s targets “cater to quintessentially private sensibilities that regard architecture in subjective, emotivist terms.”
I mentioned Mavis Gallant in Having Survived To Friday Night..., and today The Los Angeles Review of Books has Nadia Ghent review of “The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant.”
What The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant allows us to enter is not a museum of midcentury fiction, dead and irrelevant, but a master class in writing, one that is capacious and alive. Hallberg has beautifully arranged the 44 stories geographically and in roughly chronological order, similar to Gallant’s 1981 collection Home Truths, which creates a journey that puts the reader in the place of Gallant herself traveling from North America to Europe, from New World to Old, from the familiar to the unknown. It is a dislocation both physical and existential, where brief moments of illumination sweep across a character’s consciousness before it is plunged back into uncertainty.
Also from LARB is Annie Lou Martin review of Anna Moschovakis’s new novel “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth", The Destabilizing Force of Language. Whoever wrote the headline, I thank you. That is why I read the review and was rewarded with having to think about my own writing.
This paragraph struck me and I could not stop:
Moschovakis’s narrator, an out-of-work Method actress, becomes obsessed with killing her younger roommate, Tala. When Tala disappears, the narrator begins receiving messages from an enigmatic group with a Pynchonesque mystique, a catalyst for her already slippery psychic hold on reality to become precariously tenuous. Shifting surfaces betray a shifting core. As the narrator’s obsession with Tala’s absence deepens, language fractures, and the basic composition of reality undulates.
***
In An Earthquake, as in her other work, Moschovakis is clearly concerned with the way that language itself acts—as a way to construct and disrupt distinctions between self and other, as mimicry, as an object, as a way to establish direction, as a stabilizing and destabilizing force. Her sense of poetics never strays far from the material, from the body itself as an object that acts and is acted upon. Etymology is a teleology that crumbles when pressed; the narrator muses on “junk metaphors” like “go off the deep end,” pulls words apart to extract new meanings (“rehearse” contains the word “hearse,” etc.). Scratch an actor and you find another actor; scratch a word and you find another word.
***
It’s tempting, when reading a novel so clearly written by a poet, to elevate every image to the representational. The physical shifting of the surface of the earth betrays an unstable core, just as the narrator’s unstable sense of self manifests in her shifting facades as an actor. The reader is clued in to a deceptively simple set of conditions: there’s a relationship here between the surface and the core, between what’s said and what’s meant. But to read this novel as a clean metaphor would be reductive, and like any good poet, Moschovakis is concerned with the physicality of language on the level of both image and form. The form itself is unstable, shifting, and becomes increasingly less “stable” as the novel goes on. Each section breaks down, at the end, into a poem, like a sudden running up to the edge of language itself, causing friction, refusing a stable sense of meaning making. It’s a breakdown of structure to the point where even the sentence “disintegrates.” As the novel progresses, the language mimics the process of a mind engaged with an increasingly defamiliarized environment—obsessive, associative, and anxious.
I have not yet separated words from reportage. This I attribute to my years as a lawyer, as much as my reading of Hammett and Vonnegut and Hemingway. I cannot sing because I do not have an ear for melody. Nor am I any kind of poet, not even a poetaster. I need to think more about words creating images.
Language as a disruptive actor intrigues my brain. I like the idea while not sure how to use it.
The Paris Review released James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78. I have not time to read it. I was good and only napped for an hour, cleaned up the bedroom, but I have not had time to read the interview.
“No matter what ideology you turn to, no matter how utopian it is, it does not solve the problem of hypocrites, frauds and charlatans. And that is the topic of most of my satire. It’s not really the ideologies themselves,” he says. I begin to ask him more about his writing on identity politics, but he walks away.
So wealth is what they resent while idolizing billionaires. There is a satire there.
3:41 pm
Around 5 with the dishes done, and the bedroom tidied, I came back to the computer. I called KH. We chatted for a while about Bollywood movies. Then it was back to work for me. Now, I have had enough. Good night!
