Everybody's a critic

I found this little "blog rating" tool on Badger's site. Clearly I have not been doing my job.

What's new? Still plinking at my India novel, preparing to send it to my agent, for whom it will, I hope, be a welcome surprise. I've been mentioning it to her every few months for the last year and she may have permanently put it on the back burner of her expectations, so I hope she'll enjoy getting it.

Then I'm going to start a new project pronto-tonto. The publisher of my books of sex stories asked me earlier this year to submit a proposal for a novel, and I'm just about to sign a contract (one reason my agent has not completely forgotten me). I'll be talking more about this book in the next few months, but the operative thing is that the deadline is the first of the year. Yes, I have to write a whole novel of at least 200 pages in six months.

That shouldn't be too horribly challenging, because genre writers do it all the time. In fact, many writers of romance or crime books, both fiction and non-fiction, polish off three or four books a year. They would not be impressed with the deadline of 200 pages in 6 months. So I'm not going to complain.

Still, it should be interesting. My India novel (I'm still shilly-shallying about the title, but for now it is Dear Prudence), started as a NaNo -- a project for National Novel Writing Month. That's where you're supposed to churn out 50,000 words in the month of November. And I did get a good start -- in November, 2004. I managed to do about 20,000 words that month, but then it took me two years to work out the rest of the book, the first draft of which I finished on 28 December 2006.

I did, however, keep almost all of those first 20,000 words, which makes me think that it's not a bad idea to give people an excuse to start a novel with an artificial deadline, just to see what they turn out. But it really should be called National Novel Starting Month, because only Georges Simenon could write a novel in less than a month.

But the first of the year is now a real, not arbitrary deadline for me. I'll let you know how it goes.

Done - er and done - er

Still polishing up my Bangalore book, with helpful comments from friends, and itching to get on my next project. What's that next project? A novel I have a contract to write in six months. Still trying to figure out what to do with it on the web. I was talking last night with A. about trying to do character blogs for each of the seven characters in the book, somewhat similar to what Chasing Windmills does.

They are a vlog dramatic series (now on hiatus), and if you go to that link and click on each of those pictures, you'll see a character blog. Each is written by the actor who appears as a character in the series. So that's like 11 different people each doing a character blog.

I'm not so sure I could or should do seven different character blogs myself and actually write the novel. On the other hand, it might be a good exercise to get into voice and character. Perhaps if I had more than six months it would be a good idea.

Man stuff

Cris asked me to what extent I feel, when I'm walking down the street, male -- how much of my public identity "depends" on my being a man or somehow projecting maleness. I can't quite remember why she asked, but her question reminded me of this post by our friend Chris Carraher on gender identity and "models."

I thought for a minute before answering, because the way I can honestly answer that question has changed over my life. I said that in my 20s it had been very difficult to think of myself as "a man." Part of the reason was that I always looked young for my age (e.g. this photo when I was 25 or again when I was 37). Another part of the reason is that I seldom took part in stereotypical male activities -- even the neighborhood softball team I was on during the mid-80s was composed primarily of jazz musicians -- and that was because I didn't have any close male friends.

One experience that helped me be able to adopt a self image as "a man" was becoming a high school teacher at age 28 -- before that I didn't feel anywhere close to being an adult -- and another was being in the Street Patrol when I was in my late 30s. What did those two experiences had to do with each other? Both was an experience where I had to conquer physical fear. By the time I had done a year in the Street Patrol, I was physically pretty fearless. I could wade into an argument on the street between two drunks (which was most of what the Street Patrol dealt with, frankly) without worrying about whether or not I would get clonked, and just deal with the situation.

But there are at least three different things here: First, how I feel as I walk down the street -- how much of that confidence in my ability to deal with the street and whatever situation it presents has to do with being "a man"? Second, what I project as I walk down the street does not necessarily represent what I feel inside; how much overlap is there between what people see and what I feel? Finally, there is what passersby project on me: the impression they form based on a glance.

And how much can you really tell about a stranger on the street anyway? When I taught high school, I had a big obstreperous teenager who once strolled into class proclaiming in a booming voice: "I'm a pimp!! I'm a pimp!!" Maybe he was (though he was only 16); what was funny about it was not just the incongruity of a high school kid with baby fat proclaiming his pimpness, but the balls-out self-proclamation itself. Most people don't walk down the street proclaiming who and what they are, nor do they need to -- but is there really that much difference between that high school kid's loud proclamation and a bunch of us running around, several years later, yelling "We're here! We're queer!"? How about when I had a brightly-dyed mohawk? Is that any less in-your-face?

Now I purposely signify less and less, unless you count the Giants cap or the Bernal Heights hoodie. I blend in. Ironically, my self-image is probably closer to my actual presentation as it ever has been.

All this may become somewhat important in the next six months, as I try to write a short novel in which the characters are all straight males -- a species about which I actually know very little. So I may have a few more meditations on maleness for the rest of the year.

But to get back a little closer to what my friend C. Carraher was talking about -- the local paper recently had this review of a performance evening by local choreographer Joe Goode and company. When I read it, I had just read Carraher's blog post, which reminded me of the annual Fresh Meat transgender performance artist weekend I went to last year around this time. When I went to that show, I was struck by how the inability of the audience to read the gender of the performers beyond the surface they present made me uncomfortable and intrigued at the same time. (See my post from June 2006.) Here's someone on stage who seems to be male, but since this is a transgender show I might suppose he started out life as female. I realize I better put my assumptions on hold, since what is going on under the surface -- even under the costume -- is much more than I as an audience member can know. And yet to realize this is to be forced to depend upon the surface only, to appreciate the performance only for what is being performed. It's a strange position to be in, unsettling and yet intellectually bracing.

Contrast that experience with this segment from the review of the Joe Goode show:

In one wallpapered room, a 1950s high school girl in petticoats and pink skirt (Jessica Swanson) is lying on the floor as though she'd been shot. Soon enough she's up and on the telephone, chatting with a video-version boyfriend about Pocahontas and other details of Virginia history in her homework.... Around the corner (or down an interior hallway), two nearly nude men (Melecio Estrella and Alexander Zendzian) are confined in adjacent tile cells.... Meanwhile, in an adjacent fur-lined niche, a woman (Patricia West) is wailing about a planned dinner at a restaurant.

Clearly the audience member's apprehension of the dynamics in those vignettes depends largely not only on the perceived gender of the performer, but a lack of doubt about that perception. What if the audience were forced to suspend their assumptions about the gender of the performer playing the "high school girl"? What if the audience was aware the "men" in the cells were transmen? do the scenes mean the same thing? An observer who has just seen a lot of transgender performance art might find the Joe Goode show one-dimensional.

And that's not to slam Goode, a long-time Bay Area performer (he was doing stuff when Carraher and I were performance artists, more than 20 years ago) whose work I've never failed to enjoy. It's just to say that there's so much more going on when the audience is put on notice that its assumptions are probably suspect.

So, having read both Carraher's post and the review of the Joe Goode piece, it was curious that Cris asked me that question this afternoon.

technorati: Fresh Meat, transgender performance, maleness

Hardly a hot day at all

We had a very minimum heat wave. It lasted from the mid-morning until about 5 pm, reaching about 82 in the city. I took a little nap in the car around 2:30 and it was really hot.

But when I left work at 6:15 and got back in the city -- just 5 miles to the north -- a cool wind was blowing in. And I just took a walk at sunset over Bernal Heights and a nice cool breeze was blowing hard. It was just short of being foggy -- just sort of hazy-sunny. Update: Here's a picture I took:




That's my kind of heat wave. About 8 hours long.

Characters who grow in the dark

I'm reading, for the first time, Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana." It's about an obscure expat in pre-Castro Havana who is recruited, against his will, as an agent by British intelligence. He finds he is expected to recruit sub-agents and to send London reports about them. He has no intention of acting as a secret agent at all, but since he does need money, he makes up a bunch of agents and then files reports for their fictional expenses. Then London sends him a female agent to act as his secretary, and things start to get difficult for our Mr. Wormold. There follows a fascinating passage in which Greene compares the imagination of the penny-ante con artist-cum-agent, Wormold, with that of the novelist:

The more Beatrice asked Wormold about (Raul Dominguez), the more his character developed, and the more anxious she became to contact him. Sometimes Wormold felt a twinge of jealousy towards Raul and he tried to blacken the picture. "He gets through a bottle of whisky a day," he said.

"It's his escape from loneliness and memory," Beatrice said. "Don't you ever want to escape?"

"I suppose we all do sometimes."

"I know what that kind of loneliness is like," she said with sympathy. "Does he drink all day?"

"No. The worst hour is two in the morning. When he wakes then, he can't sleep for thinking, so he drinks instead." It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness -- he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action. Soon after Beatrice arrived Raul had a birthday and she suggested they should give him a case of champagne.

"He won't touch it," Wormold said. He didn't know why. "He suffers from acidity. If he drinks champagne he comes out in spots. Now the professor on the other hand won't drink anything else."

"An expensive taste."

"A depraved taste." Wormold said that without taking any thought. "He prefers Spanish champagne." Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn't care to think. Her unabashed description of what life was like with her two lovers sometimes shocked him. But the immediate problem was Raul. There were moments when Wormold thought that it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.

Wormold always thought best in his bath. He was aware one morning, when he was concentrating hard, of indignant noises. A fist beat on the door a number of times, somebody stamped on the stairs, but a creative moment had arrived and he paid no attention to the world beyond the steam. Raul had been dismissed by the Cubana air line for drunkenness. He was desperate; he was without a job; there had been an unpleasant interview between him and Captain Segura, who threatened....

"Are you all right?" Beatrice called from outside. "Are you dying? Shall I break down the door?"

Raul, "the professor," and Teresa are, of course, merely figments of Wormold's imagination. But they fix his attention, they concern him, and -- most wonderful of all -- they "grow in the dark without his knowledge" until he is asked about them, and immediately a character sketch comes to mind.

This passage shows the similarity between any kind of professional bullshitting -- whether one is, say, a comedian or actor who improvises, a con artist (think of Ratso Rizzo's request for money to cover "management expenses"), a parent, a salesman -- and the creative writer.

One of the ironic touches is that Wormold, whose real line of work is selling vacuum cleaners, is a terrible salesman. He just isn't interested enough. But the need for money, and the growing need to keep from being caught in his subterfuge, focuses his imagination as selling never did.

Whoa! I think I'm done!

In an exciting development, I surprised myself by finishing another draft of the novel I've been working on for the last two and a half years. I think it's ready to show to some more people.

Previously:
Interview with me as I visited Bangalore to research the novel
My blog posts from Bangalore
A post from when I finished the first draft
A previously posted excerpt

How Simenon wrote over 200 novels

In the Summer issue of Bookforum, Luc Sante discusses several novels of Georges Simenon that have been re-released. Of the "phenomenally prolific" Simenon, who wrote over 200 novels, he writes:

Famously, two days before starting a novel, he would consult a map of the place where the book was to be set, search through his collections of telephone books for names of characters, and establish the cast -- ages, backgrounds, family ties -- on the back of a manila envelope. Then he was ready, as he told a Paris Review interviewer in 1955:

On the eve of the first day I know what will happen in the first chapter. Then, day after day, chapter after chapter, I find what comes later. After I have started a novel I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day. Because it is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel... All the day I am one of my characters. I feel what he feels.... And it's almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons my novels are so short; after eleven days I can't -- it's impossible. I have to -- it's physical. I am too tired.

In this 1997 obituary, Simenon is further quoted:

I write a chapter a day. It's the character who commands, not me. I know the end only when I finish. But during the time I'm writing I concentrate, concentrate on my characters. Only the characters matter.

Short-short-short-short story

In the online version of a short story by David Hoon Kim in the June 11 New Yorker, a little sidebar lists "keywords" for the story:

Keywords: Paris, France; Love Affairs; Asians; College Students; Danish; Japanese; Suicides.

One hardly needs to read the story at all. It reminds me of the famous line in Nabokov's "Lolita": "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three."

technorati: New Yorker, short stories, David Hoon Kim

Mike Jones in NYT

Mike Jones, the male escort who exposed right-wing evangelist Ted Haggard, is interviewed in the NYT magazine today.

And perhaps not so coincidentally, the Colorado Springs Gazette interviews the interim leaders of Haggard's former church. Though most of the interview is behind a subscription wall, they do have the answer to the fascinating question: "Did Mike Jones do New Life (Church) a favor" by exposing Haggard?

Ashland trip

Cris and I took off to Ashland for the weekend. It's not difficult to get here, once you clear Bay Area traffic. As soon as you turn onto Interstate 505, the shortcut across pastures and through orchards that enables northbound travelers from the Bay Area to reach I-5 without going through Sacramento, the traffic vanishes and you go the speed limit all the way to Oregon.

The whole trip takes about six hours but because we stopped for a spell in a little town called Williams to stretch our legs, and again in Dunsmuir, it took eight. Williams is a little farm town with several nice medium-sized Victorian houses and a very long wooden warehouse next to the railroad track. I didn't take any pictures, though the word WAREHOUSES on the end of the building was quaintly lettered.

This morning I bought the Ashland paper. There are scads of apartments for rent at low prices, perhaps just vacated by students of the local university. You could rent a two-bedroom apartment for $600 a month just as a pied à terre. Of course, it takes a whole tank of gas to get here and a whole tank to get back -- almost a hundred dollars each time you come. Or perhaps you could take a bus, but that would take all day. Maybe it would be better to find a place in Williams.