The feeling you get

The feeling you get from wanting to flesh out hundreds of pages of words until they make a certain amount of sense to you is of turning your back, forcefully, sensually and in some cases regretfully on what living is, which is hearts and mistakes, cavities and unmade beds. When you turn the aforementioned into words, you tend to perfect them with more lavish imperfections, or tone them down with more subtle parsings. Sometimes I mistake it all for adolescence but that's when Big Brother Super Ego has the upper hand.

Nothing quite brings you round to the glorious irrationality of your decision to play with words than reading the letters of writers.

In this case the letters of one of my favorite living writers, Samuel R. Delany, appropriately called 1984, the year the bulk of them were written and a deliberate homage to Orwell's timeless dystopia. Just got it in the mail today from a small bookseller somewhere out there in the bookseller cyberspace.

Published by the unusual small press Voyant Publications that apparently has a website only in Chinese. Flipped through only a few of the letters but it was humbling to read sentences along the lines of, although I shamelessly paraphrase and even, to some degree, invent: "Today I wrote for fifteen hours, drank coffee, went out walking looking for fun and then came back and wrote this letter around dawn. . .meanwhile the tax man is hounding me and all I have to eat is week-old chow mein I filched from the downstairs neighbor. . ."

Today At The Rumpus

I do the rounds of the book blogs and come up with gems.

I talk about the routines of writers.

I tell of my discovery of Georges Simenon, a great Belgian.

I wonder, who is Junot Diaz's favorite New Yorker?

I perpetuate a discussion of travel as a political act.

Rainy Day Reading Doldrums

A weekend of enclosing myself. The rain has come blessedly. But it is also disorienting and deepens glum moods. Confusions. For example, I was disoriented enough yesterday to wake up early after a late night at a blistering, ear-splitting rock show (Murder City Devils), shower, get dressed, board an unusually vacant train toward Oakland, and walk towards my work....which was closed because it was a holiday. And I had forgotten, or assumed we didn't observe it. NO matter. The rest of the day I spent at a window-side table in the Outer Mission cafe I go to, reading Paul Bowles with my jaw dropping to the floor every sentence or two. More on him later.

Pondering the whole weekend long in an off-white room, keeping books and coffee within finger's length. Today at work the outside is wild and grey and rainy, with fiery, mother-of-pearl patches in the sky like the trees are on fire, but only cooly burning.

Indoors this weekend, hammering out story outlines and rough drafts. Time slips by, you adhere to a routine, it all becomes monastic. Plus the money situation compells a hermitage.

I'm curious how to assemble a short story collection in a market that isn't looking for them? My story sequences always end up becoming episodic novels to some degree. I like the idea of structure and tapestry and architecture in words. I like exquisite games that keep you re-reading, looking back, thinking like a detective. My own interest has pushed my reading outside into other genres: mysteries, roman noirs, science fiction, slipstream, genres that rely on games, I believe, more than "traditional" literary fiction.

My ideas sprout branches and then, lo and behold, another idea plops out writhing and whose demands I'll never meet any time soon. I told her my latest: Borges meets Quentin Tarantino!
The interlocked novellas of assassins in strange places creating mazes to lure unsuspecting men! Half-jesting but seriously. And then it will expand and deepen in my brain: and it becomes a novel about fate and death, two things I don't know much about, scarily enough.

Reading indoors: more Dubliners, Paul Bowles The Delicate Prey, more Delany's On Writing, Delany's critical works Silent Interviews and Shorter Views and just started the short novel by James Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice and about to start an interesting older book I have yet to crack, Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer. I'd like to explore what I'm "learning" from these books once my lethargy has shaken off.

What The Mind Is Like Under A Yellow Moon

Some people don't believe me: I am more disoriented and prone to mood swings around the time of the full moon. Also I seem pretty emotionally affected by heat and clouds. Inner weather mimics the outer. Bodies are bizarre. Bio-meteorology should be a science.

No wonder this is my favorite novel.

Eight loads of laundry, some cooked broccoli and a bulbous yellow moon shining over the Walgreen's. It's lard-yellow and seems to quiver it looks so big. People sway forward with bags of meat and plastic rectangles clamped to their ears. I'm hauling months worth of well-loved garments brittle socks and ripe unmentionables. Exhaustion turns simple things into urban trials. I hunt for quarters, no different now than the one local panhandler who seems glued to our particular cul-de-sac, for whatever reason, always loitering on the stoops in the darkness. Or standing under the awnings of people's homes, smoking and talking to no one. Until he emerges and you must confront him.

In the Laundromat I hear Tagalog being spoken which to me sounds like Khmer and Spanish combined into something musical. I drop the lady's sock with the pink ball on it I'm washing and the older woman laughs at me as she picks it up. I've been found out, or something. Laundromats like libraries you don't have to have a purpose to be there.

I feel (off again/on again) more inured to the headache of street noise, to sidestepping trash like tumbleweeds crowding the sidewalks. Trash here heaps at the bases of trees like penitent offerings. But nature isn't moved. Only in retreat. An old, rickety, drooling man making his way to Burger King asks me where I'm from. I say, from around here. Oh, from here? Have you noticed any changes? Have you?? OH--I mean San Francisco, I've only been "here" though for 5 months. Ah, I see, then you're still new. YOU DON'T KNOW YET...and we walked on, him to his burger, me to my bus.


What I can't accept are the countless car alarms going off in this neighborhood, especially if they're blaring out of a stretch hummer limousine. There's not enough dynamite in the world to stick in the tailpipe of that monstrosity. So being the wavering, occasional misanthrope, I turn to fiction and poems. An old, old remedy. I sometimes wish it was sports, especially soccer. I want to be a bigger soccer fan.
I have towers of bound paper with blurbs on their backs. I hope they teach me things. Among more recent books I think necessary to sift through and savor:

1. Dubliners. James Joyce. Re-reading this because it sort of fell on the mental wayside after I studied him in college. I started with "The Dead" and will move backwards. It definitely retained its sucker-punch to the heart effect with nonchalant precision. Nothing new needs to be said about how timeless this story is. I do want to make a list of all the verbs Joyce uses so far because from what I can tell he never fails in applying the perfect words, especially verbs to any given sentence situation. Enviable to say the least.
2. Collected Poems Of Hart Crane.
3. The Jules Verne Steam Balloon by Guy Davenport.
4. About Writing by Samuel Delany. This book has been in my bag or on my person for many a month now. The pages are falling out, most of the passages are underlined, and I'm only half way through. A fairly necessary book if you desire to write fiction.

So yes, beyond books, the weekend was intense, weird, overwhelming and full of stories within stories. One of those wonderful yet dangerous coincidences brought two friends, an Alaskan and an Arizonan to converge on my filthy city, both stand-up fellows and thorough iconoclasts with libertarian tendencies. Fun was had, even in the rain. The first night came after a long, bustling workday of assembling a large, multi-state legalistic paper trail. Once sent into the void, or mailed, we lunged out into the warm Oakland evening. 8 helicopters dawdled in the pale blue sky, creating a ruckus like a Herzog movie set or how you imagine a war. The Fox Theatre was having its grand opening; a protest was about to start; the First Friday art-walk was imminent; Oakland downtown suddenly seemed invested with life and people and cars. We found a lovely old club with polished wood and brass and large gilt-frame mirrors. The magenta-haired woman with tattooed breasts served us cheap lagers. I saw my old housemate with the weird cockney accent. I had reasons to grieve too. And get philosophical. I absorbed good advice from a man who has an enviable amount of happiness and meaning in his life. The red-haired was replaced by a woman in suspenders wearing a sailor cap who had an understandably steely gaze for the sudden mob that had formed. Little things take the heart far. Adornments are necessary, sometimes tip the mind right off the edge. Helicopters reappeared. We wondered aloud about sacrifice and family. Everything can't all be ripped to the bone. City-spaces exploding with activity and promise. Fireworks, a treasure hunt, alley offerings, secret playgrounds, lurid interludes, loss, sadness, anger and desire. Streets are cordoned off so people may walk amidst the festival wreckage. Smoke hides things, uncovers others. I come home dazed. She's been busier than I have, and with more challenging endeavors. Smiling laughter encloses me like a warm cotton fort. The physics behind oscillating gazes. I never knew I had slightly yellow eyes until she said so. In a tangle of laundry and sketchpads, fishnets and garters, leather boots and leather belts: repose, laughter, solace.

It feels like there is a lot to talk about or try to make heads or tails over. City things. Private things. Family things. Sad and angry things happening at a nexus. More later.

Space And Place Part 2: In "BIG" Novels.

Here I want to talk about great big novels that have become working models for what I'm trying to write. Trying to write is the key phrase.

I want to mention four of the longer works I read in the last three or four years: Shantaram, Dhalgren, Little, Big, and The Royal Family, novels that respectively evoke the underworld and slums of India, a dystopic Midwestern-Berserk America, a supernatural New England and a gritty, crime-ridden San Francisco.

Three of them are by American authors and are deliberately, vividly, and strangely about America, or what remains of that myth in our collective imagination. Shantaram is by an Australian and is about India but is really a universal tale of personal redemption, at least by my standards.


(Katy said I'm a graphomaniac, which might explain the long-winded flavor of these blog rants.
It might also explain my love for big novels.)

Big novels are like big cities and many of the big novels I've read in the last couple years, or at least the ones that have influenced me the most are books where imagined spaces become major characters in themselves.

These four books are perfect examples of this kind of textual world-making:

In Dhalgren, the city-scape that you'll never forget is Bellona, a perpetually fogged-over, rubble-strewn, bombed-out, shape-shifting city where some unnamed calamity has occurred and people live there like squatters and criminals.

In Little, Big, the eccentric, Edwardian estate of Edgewood, with all its complicated facades, evocative gardens, unquantifiable square feet and demonic edges, is the chimerical gateway to the Fairy World, or so it would seem.

In Shantaram, India is made into the most fascinating, terrifying and seductive character ever. A quick read too, its that gripping.

The Royal Family is a sex-and-drug noir set in San Francisco's Tenderloin with some asides in the most disturbing Las Vegas circus you can possibly imagine.
ALL of these fictional environments are tantalizingly real, even if they are all also extremely strange.

I read these four in the last few years, living in San Francisco and Oakland, right when I felt like I figured out what I really wanted to write about and had developed stronger editorial discipline as well as a sense of bravery in exploring things that were dark and difficult. Not that knowing makes you any more productive. (Not that heartbreak makes you any wiser the next time either.) Much of my desktop, both hard-wood and computer, is littered with unfinished projects.

I am somewhat certain that I'm on the right creative track. I feel at least perpetually inspired. And much of this is due to the influence of these four novels, three of which: Delany's Dhalgren, Crowley's Little, Big and Vollmann's The Royal Family I would love to write some critical study about. Besides the fact that two of them detail with some pretty unsavory aspects of urban life, they all read like equally enchanting experiments in a kind of American magical realism. Although fantasy, sci-fi, pulp, erotica, journalism, cut-up, adventure, fairy-tale, magic, and picaresque all play a part too.

These books all gave me the same sensations: the feeling of walking around inside a book physically, of basking in the mystique of a book's geography, spying the scenery, feeling the uncertainty induced by dark alleyways and parking lots, acting like a voyeur on a street full of dilapidated tenements where desperate people engage in desperate, unusual and monomaniacal acts. Reading can be as fun as voyeurism, eavesdropping or espionage. And the Big Novel is, in some ways, the ultimate act of writerly exhibitionism, so there you go, it invites you right in.
I savor the long-term sense of immersion that the Big Novel causes. Yes, it's escapism. Yes, it's an abdication of life. But so are most things in life that gives us pleasure. Recently, I experienced this absorption in Bolano's nearly thousand-page 2666. That particular immersion took me to some very dark places--but places I needed to understand. A few years back, I experienced a sort of immersion, but more like a distraction--and for the life of me, I can barely remember the book except for a few cartoonish sex scenes and countless scientific words I didn't know---in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The best character in that book is a Russian guy but I forget his name. Maybe, after I take some more physics, rocket science and history refresher classes, I'll give the book another read and feel more rewarded.

One of the hardest obstacles facing me now, as I write fiction, is the ability to fashion fully-fleshed environments or vivid fields of action in my narrative. To create a space the reader can step into and believe in. THAT I can believe in. For me, settings become major movers and shakers, antagonists and catalysts. Mood is key. In my slowly-congealing collection of short stories, some of which are loosely interconnected via recurring characters and places, I rotate between various locales, mostly in California so far, and many involving certain buildings and institutions that are critical to character interaction and conflict. For example, in one tale that is set in a reimagined Santa Cruz meets Venice Beach, a place I call Naagula, the narrator, a junior monk lives at a monastic abbey that is separated in space by a dark, treacherous Chasm from an all female science and technology school. Antics ensue. Well kind of.

Often my fictional locales are more or less real places, like Oakland or San Francisco, Buenos Aires or Rome, small town Colorado or some steamy metropolis on the East Coast. Other times I blatantly re-imagine a place that already exists but completely shake it up like a kaleidoscope so many of its integral details are warped or modified or made impossible and weird. I used to love Legos and Sim City and Legend Of Zelda so no wonder this comes, if not naturally to me, then at least habitually....