Something else lost

Driving down 17th Street the other night, I passed this building on the corner of Florida Street, catty-corner from Project Artaud.

Project Artaud was one of the original factories converted to live-work spaces in the Mission District, a conversation which took place in the 1970s and which in addition to providing living spaces for dozens of painters, sculptors, dancers and actors, birthed several performance spaces and studios which are still lively places to go see art. And it's still a collectively-run building with many of the original artists -- now in their 60s and 70s -- still living and working there.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a performance artist and used to go to Project Artaud all the time for rehearsals and performances, a restaurant opened in this building. You can still see the sign -- Moxie Restaurant-Bar -- though the restaurant closed a long time ago, at least fifteen years ago, and some kind of architectural or design firm has been there ever since. Back when the restaurant was open, I not only could not afford to go to it, but I was too intimidated to do so. I felt bars and restaurants required a certain gravitas and adult presentation, and in many cases I was afraid to go into them, especially if a friend of mine hadn't brought me to them first.

So I never made it into this restaurant before it closed. And driving past it the other night, even though I drive past it several times a week (because 17th Street is a convenient cross-town route), it suddenly struck me as never before that the restaurant was not only closed, but closed long ago, so long that it belonged to the distant past when I was a performance artist and went by that corner several times a week not to go cross-town, but in order to do my art. And all that seemed very long ago suddenly, and it is: 20, 25, 30 years ago. It wasn't about the particular restaurant as the exact geographic spot that 17th and Florida represents, or more accurately, that it represented to me in the 1970s (even before I came to San Francisco) and 1980s and which is now so far in the past. More than anything else it represents my youth, my fresh, untrammeled notions and ambitions, my pure heart.

I remember going to Project Artaud during my first few days in the city, to the street address, because it was where Mangrove [8-minute video] had their studio, and Mangrove more or less encapsulated the whole reason I came to San Francisco: to do Contact Improv and perform. And even more before I went to the contact jam on Vancouver Island a week later, where I met the local contactors for the first time, I had that single piece of information: 499 Alabama, the address of Mangrove [Google Books page from the book "Sharing the dance: contact improvisation and American culture" by Cynthia Jean Novac]. The building turned out to be a large factory building that had been converted to studios and lofts: that was Project Artaud. And while the door at 499 Alabama was locked, other doors into the building were open, and I bravely went in and wandered the halls, looking at the bulletin boards outside studios and theaters where I would one day perform. And while I didn’t see any dancers and didn't actually run into a single soul, I was on a pilgrimage and just being there was enough. That’s what I mean by my untrammeled ambitions -- not careerist ambitions, but spiritual ones. My pilgrimage was not even about what I would one day do; it was about who I would one day be. And all of it -- all the performing I did, all the love affairs I had, all the adventures and rejection and ecstasy and pain -- was still in the future.

I've felt nostalgic pangs before, but they had never been as sharp as the pain I felt at the moment we drove past the former Moxie Restaurant. And my painful feelings were for a restaurant I'd never been to, but which represented, when it was still there, something I could aspire to. Back in my 20s, and really until my late 40s, my life was aspirational. I felt success and fulfillment were still in my future. I might, through a combination of talent and luck, become a more well-known performer or writer; I might, when I finally acquired sufficient gravitas, go to a cool jazzy-looking restaurant in an artsy neighborhood. By contrast, now my life is limited in other, more painful ways. I no longer think there's much chance I'll become a well-known writer, or even publish a novel. In fact, I measure out the rest of my life in the number of (probably unpublished) novels I can still finish before I die. Maybe four or five more.

This feeling of limited horizons and chances is, of course, a characteristic of middle age. Maybe the prime sign of middle age. And I'm probably lucky I didn't feel it this sharply before now.

Eugenides not pushing the envelope this time, maybe feels okay about it

Q: People are starting to notice that a generation of writers, which includes you and Jonathan Franzen, are wrestling with the question of how you create a novel after postmodernism.

Jeffrey Eugenides: Schoenberg said it's still possible to write music in C major, and that’s coming from Mister Experimental himself. That strikes a chord in me; I think with the novel, at a certain point you realize it's still possible to write in C major and have some kind of narrative content. And meaningful characters that readers can, you know it's an old-fashioned term, but people can fall in love with the characters and become caught up in their lives. If you don't have that, you cease to have the kind of novel that can be compelling.

--Interview with novelist Jeffrey Eugenides
in the L.A. Times

This is a real issue. I constantly struggle with the imperative to create new ways of seeing and story-telling, which is what the word "novel" implies, and this traditional approach. I've written before about how I love mid-century writers, and how Larry McMurtry's now obscure early novel "Moving On" was a model for me for many years. The roomy character-driven traditional narrative informed the writing of my first novel, "Make Nice." But in my current project I'm trying to get away from it.

It's a struggle, and not only because I love the mid-century novel (by which I mean the thoughtful character-driven novels of McMurtry, Heller, Highsmith, Roth, Mailer, Salter and others) but because this approach seems so natural to me. But I also love the mid-century departures from this model (Kerouac, Henry Miller) and post-modernists from DeLillo to Acker. (And DeLillo's accomplishment in the 1970s and 1980s is now awe-inspiring to me. He didn't have a model for what he was doing, he really was making up a new way of story-telling.) Not to mention the Latin Americans, including You Know Who.

Having never read a Jeffrey Eugenides novel, I can't say whether it's working for him. Maybe Eugenides is trying to fend off criticism in advance here. Maybe he feels a little bad for not pushing the envelope in his latest work. Without reading it and knowing his work, I can't say.

About the progress of my novel

I've been working on my present project, a long novel called "Knock Yourself Out," for a solid two and a half years, since the last week of December 2008, when I got a series of ideas that led directly to starting writing the following April. But other parts of the novel are based on ideas I had as early as March 1996, when I wrote a five page scenario about a man who is trapped by a snowstorm at O'Hare and has to make his way back through the Midwest, through successive blizzards, and when he arrives back in California his life is off-kilter. I paired an idea I had in late 2008, which was a sort of psychological sex thriller set in a rainy Berkeley hills mansion, with that idea, and started writing in April, 2009.

It took until the end of 2009 to write most of the first section, and then in February 2010 I took a car trip to the midwest to research the whole notion of driving in blizzards. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 road trip.") Then it took me until the end of the summer to actually finish the first part of the book -- but I still hadn't written the first chronological section, in which the guy gets snowbound. All I had written was the part set in the San Francisco Bay Area, after he returns from the trip.

Then in September and October 2010 I went to the Mojave Desert to research the second part of the book, because after the guy's life goes off-kilter he moves to the desert and gets involved with the wrong crowd. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 desert trip.") And since returning from that sojourn in October 2010 I've been working on the desert part. I'm about, oh, two-thirds of the way through it, on the downhill slope where everything has been put in place and all I have to do is work through the plot -- as least as far as a first draft is concerned.

Meanwhile, I learned something interesting about narrative. Cris and I have been watching the series "Breaking Bad" on DVD, and we just finished the third season -- or thought we did. The season is broken up onto 4 DVDs, containing episodes 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13 respectively. And somehow our Netflix queue got messed up and instead of disc 3 we got disc 4 and watched all of it without realizing we had missed anything.

Yes, we didn't realize we had missed anything. We missed seeing the third quarter of the season, three entire episodes totaling the length of a feature film, and didn't miss anything in the story. (The following sentence is for anyone familiar with the show.) Hank is still in the hospital after getting shot in episode 7; Walt has fired his first meth lab assistant and is now working with his original partner Jessie; Walt's wife Skyler is still floundering in her affair with her boss. Apparently nothing happens in those episodes we missed.

Right now I'm in the same part of my book -- the third quarter -- laboriously working through the plot. I'm a plodding fiction writer, I have to write through all the actions to understand character motivation and figure out why people make the choices at the end of the book I usually already know, by the middle of the book, that they will make. But the lesson of the unnoticed "Breaking Bad" episodes for me is: nobody cares. Cut all that shit out and nobody will notice.

So I'm looking forward to doing that in my second draft. After I finish this one, sometime by the end of the year.
 

A little later: I wrote the above entry before finding this entirely accurate and sadly hilarious article in The Onion depicting a novelist's self-loathing as he realizes all the effort he has put into his novel is in vain: Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out. I found the entry thanks to an acquaintance who tweeted about it: "This Onion article is like looking at the most unflattering photo of myself ever taken."

Envisioning a better book

In the last few working sessions on my novel, I've been writing a crucial chapter -- I say it's crucial because it is really the turning point of the second part: By the end of this chapter, the main character has started down a road he will never return from.

As I work on this chapter I've been following a pattern of drafting content in one session, completely rewriting it in the next. Last weekend, for example, I completely rewrote on Saturday what I had struggled through on Monday the 25th, when I took a vacation day to write and could come up with nothing more than 150 words. The result was much better than I wrote on the Monday, that's for sure. So this chapter has taken me longer, but it's the better for it.

I still have glimpses of a better book, one in which the language is polished and things are truly good. I'm starting to realize that my first novel "Make Nice," for example, was, well, good in some ways, but not very good in the ways that count. By which I mean really interesting prose, a lack of dross, some inspiration and originality. (It does have some of that, and of course those are the best parts. The climactic scene featuring Marilyn Monroe, for example: really good.) If I were to tackle a rewrite of "Make Nice" now (which I will never do), it would be a lot better. But I think I can learn more from writing new books, not rewriting old ones.

A note from a desk

What am I doing this fine holiday? Working on my novel. In my work on Saturday I went over the 95,000 word mark, and I noticed today that I'm over 16,000 words into Part 2 -- the part set down in the desert, where I went last fall to research the setting.

If game's secret is 'making users anxious,' maybe it's also key for books

Via BoingBoing, this interview with a man who designs online games has this very interesting tidbit: Games like Farmville are...

...about exploiting the players -- and yes, people report having fun with that kind of game. You know, certain kinds of hardcore game players don't find much interest in Farmville, but a certain large segment of the population does. But then when you look at the design process in that game, it's not about designing a fun game. It's not about designing something that's going to be interesting or a positive experience in any way -- it's actually about designing something that's a negative experience. It's about "How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity" -- but it actually makes people worry about it when they're away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it's about, "How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?" And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that's all those games are, basically.

I think people knew this intuitively -- or you did, at least, if you know what Farmville is or even (like me) have never played but have talked with people who have -- but this is the most cogent, direct way I've ever heard anyone explain it.

And if a game is compelling because it provokes anxiety, the same must be true for narratives.

Now... frankly, watching a film or TV show where anxiety is a large ingredient makes me squirm very uncomfortably, sometimes to the point of turning the channel or walking out of the movie. I started walking out of movies in 1979 with Alien and I've been walking out of movies ever since for exactly the same reason: not solely because of the anxiety the film provokes, but because I felt so manipulated. And indeed, there's now a backlash against Farmville because people are seeing through how it manipulates players. It's fun in exactly the same way slot machines are fun: You feed money into it, you get to see a bunch of whirling, flashing images, and there's just enough possibility that you will somehow win that you keep going back for more.

The question for novelists is how to take advantage of this effect without making readers feel as if they're being exploited.

Or at least that's the question for me; I'm sure there are many who feel no compunction about exploiting readers or viewers, just as there is a huge audience that willingly embraces being manipulated. There's no other explanation for, say, horror movies. (Then there are the films of Quentin Tarantino, who goes beyond mere exploitation to sheer contempt for his audience.)

(In related news, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says society is now addicted to technology: "All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our Internet. We can't turn off our smart phones. We can't turn off our computers.")

On the right track to confuse everyone

This blogger lists some qualities in books he seeks out:

1. Dozens, if not, hundreds of characters.
   
2. Digressions all over the place that sometimes do and sometimes don't have a connection to the main plot.
   
3. Not being able to understand large swaths of the text.

Hey, I'm on the right track with the book I'm working on. My character list already has at least 75 entries. And there are plenty of digressions. As far as the last criterion, I guess I'll never know whether readers feel that way, unless through some turn of fate the book becomes widely read and I get a lot of feedback. Gee, that would be nice.

Another novel idea: Man with gunshot wound staggers into police station, admits to 30 armed robberies

This would make a great first scene for a crime novel (via the Oakland Tribune):

Oakland man reports shooting, gets arrested in 30 armed robberies

OAKLAND -- Walter Sayles came to Oakland police headquarters Wednesday to talk about being shot at that day. Instead, he was arrested after admitting committing more than 30 armed robberies at businesses in Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro and other cities.

The 21-year-old Oakland resident initially called police about 5 a.m. Wednesday from the 9200 block of Cherry Street in East Oakland to report being shot at. He wasn't hit but was treated at a hospital for an unrelated injury.

Sayles asked to speak with investigators about the shooting, and an officer directed him to police headquarters. The officer advised investigators that Sayles wanted to provide information about the shooting but also told investigators that Sayles matched the suspect description from a recent armed robbery.

Sgt. Randy Wingate and Officer Leo Sanchez began asking Sayles about some recent robberies after talking to him about the shooting. Wingate said Sayles admitted his involvement in more than 30 armed robberies going back several months at gas stations, convenience stories, fast-food restaurants and some street robberies throughout Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro, Palo Alto and other cities.

Pessoa notices everything, sees into everything

From The Book of Disquiet, § 298:

I'm riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. Taking the dress of the girl in front of me, I break it down into the fabric from which it's made and the work that went into making it (such that I see a dress and not just fabric), and the delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my scrutiny into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. And immediately, as in a textbook of basic economics, factories and jobs unfold before me: the factory where the cloth was made; the factory where the darker-colored silk was spun to trim with curlicues its place around the neck; the factories' various divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses. My inwardly turned eyes penetrate into the offices, where I see the managers trying to stay calm, and I watch everything being recorded in the account books. But that's not all: I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me -- on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don't know what face -- I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress.

All humanity's social existence lies before my eyes.

And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrets and the souls of all who labored so that the woman in front of me in the tram could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a less-dark green cloth.

I get dizzy. The seats in the tram, made of tough, close-woven straw, take me to distant places and proliferate in the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.

I get off the tram dazed and exhausted. I've just lived all of life.

Whenever I find a text like this, I wish I were a high school English teacher again. Imagine the exercises you could do with students, opening their eyes to the images and stories hidden in everyday things. Of course, all poetry has this power. But rarely is it explicated so clearly.

Lucky for me, I'm a novelist, and can take the same text to heart whenever I hit a dry patch.

Previously:
A 2008 New York Times article about Pessoa

Another book idea falling from the sky

Another passage from the news that qualifies as the premise for a novel. (In this case, understandably so, since the reporter is also a novelist.)

In the following months, snow wreaked havoc on (Moscow) whenever it fell. In three separate instances, drivers drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died. Even without snow, the movement of cars through the circular maze of Moscow was incredibly frustrating. During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice-president of Lukoil, the country's largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroën. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroën crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law -- both doctors -- were killed. The accident exploded into scandal. ...

-- From "Stuck" by Keith Gessen, in the Aug. 2, 2010 New Yorker

All you have to do is add the suggestion that one of the doctors -- the young, pretty one -- was carrying secret information, perhaps something about a Soviet-era nerve gas stockpile up for sale to the highest bidder, and you have all the ingredients for a thriller; it writes itself. And I haven't even included all the other color with which Gessen opens the article, such as the scene where an ambulance driver just pulls over and starts aimlessly throwing snowballs because he's been stick in a traffic jam so long that the patient he's been transporting has died. Of course, that would have to figure into the thriller plot too, because in a thriller (A) Everything not action is atmospheric, and (B) Even atmospheric details are somehow connected to the conspiracy at the heart of the thriller's plot. Like I say, it writes itself.

Previously:

The desert 'love lost lawyer'
The lonely Brinks stockroom man
The sacrificial lambs of Presbyterian College
"The Extra Man"

This is not a baseball post

"If I don't go out there and perform, those nine years of losing mean absolutely nothing."

#sfgiants OF Aubrey Huff, quoted in a San Jose Mercury News story
about last night's Giants-Dodgers game

Cris uses car trips as an opportunity to ask me things we usually don't have time to talk about. The other day, while we were driving up to our vacation spot in Washington, she asked me if I ever reflected on the fact that my life is half over. I said sure, because the way I look at it, I'm capable of writing a novel every four years or so, and if you take into account the general statistic that few novelists write anything good after age 70 (Philip Roth notwithstanding), that means I have time to write about five more novels at the most, including the one I've been working on for the last year and a half. So counting that way, yes, I see the limits.

This led to me saying how useless it was to reflect on the choices I've made which, in retrospect, represent a deviation from the goal of becoming a published novelist. If I'd moved to New York instead of San Francisco; if I'd gone to the writing program at Naropa when I had the urge in 1978; if I hadn't spent ten solid years devoting my creative energies to performance art, music and dance -- then I might have learned earlier what I now (at age 54) know about writing. It's a waste of time to regret those choices; besides, I had a lot of fun as a performance artist. (I see I've written about this before. At that time I said of my time as a performance artist, "I wouldn't trade it for two novels." Now I'm not so certain. Perhaps if I could still have had all the sex I had then and still made progress on my writing.)

Add to those non-writing years -- actually, I was writing, just not fiction -- the current years of frustration, during which I completed my first novel and got an agent for it (yay!), then had it rejected by a dozen New York publishers (boo!) followed by ... well, let's say I'm farther off today than I was three years ago.

In this context I like the quote by the San Francisco outfielder Huff, who came to the Giants this spring after a decade laboring for non-contending teams. How he must have wondered, during those years, whether it was worth it to play hard. Now he no longer has to wonder. It's a reminder to me that now I have to work as hard as I would if I had a two-book contract with a film option that had been picked up. And to have faith in what I've learned.

Related:
Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

Novelists need large stoves

Journey coming up

I'm about to take my first long vacation in a long time, and my first really long road trip in over 30 years. On Thursday morning I'll be packing up a rental car and heading over the Sierras on my way to Salt Lake City. And from there I'll go anyplace this side of the Mississippi where there's snow. In fact I'll even go as far as Indiana, since it's flat and it still counts as the Midwest.

For ten days I'll be driving around the Plains and the Midwest to find falling snow. Ideally a snow storm or a blizzard. the idea is to research a section of the novel I'm working on, Knock Yourself Out. In part of the book, the main character gets stranded at the O'Hare Hilton by a blizzard and winds up trying to drive across the country back to California. On the way he gets slammed by yet another blizzard.

Since I have precious little experience driving in snow, and no experience driving in the Midwest in the winter, I'll set out to learn. the idea is not to cover the entire Midwest, but pretty much anyplace reasonably flat that's getting slammed by snow. I have only one person I want to visit on the trip, my heretofore online-only friend Alexis, conveniently located at one corner of the area I'll be covering, in Minneapolis. So it won't be a very social trip. But I do hope to find out a lot about snow and the middle part of the country and what it's like out there.

Previous research trip: to Bangalore in 2007 for my novel Mango Rain.

technorati: travel, road trips, driving

Outlining your novel using Post-Its

Trying to finish the first long section of the novel I've been working on since around April, I had to resort to the technique of writing scenes or bits of conversation on post-it notes and moving them around. It's nice to have a surface like a mirror, a window, or a whiteboard for this exercise.

Readers may recall a previous post from 2.5 years ago when I showed the results of using the same technique for a different book.

technorati: writing, post-its

Woo, it's December

Lots of friends of mine have websites which were really rocking at one time or another but which have fallen into only occasional use. Others have moved entirely to the semi-walled garden of Facebook, which I refuse to join. I don't want to be one of those people whose blogs languish, so I'll give an update -- whether it's needed or not -- for anybody who checks in here. But before I do, thanks for reading and being even occasionally interested in my words.

First, I've been busy in my day job as a technical writer. We're entering the last stages of a project that started almost a year and a half ago, and as I'm responsible for tracking the deliverables -- excuse me for lapsing into business-speak -- for a team of four writers including myself, I've been spending time tying up all the loose ends. Actually that project will go until freaking April 2010, and then there's a follow-on that has become almost indistinguishable from the current project that will deliver in July. Past that, the future at work is opaque except for version numbers that are higher than the version number of the product we're working on now.

Then I've been spending time every weekend working on my current novel project. I can't even remember whether I've mentioned it much on this blog. Briefly, it's based on several different ideas that go back as far as 1996, before I even started working on the first finished novel I wrote (Make Nice) from 1998 to 2003. I started working on this latest project with a final set of ideas I had about a year ago, and I'm about 58,000 words into it -- about halfway through, or a little less than halfway through. I'm more excited about this project than I have been about a project in a long time, both because of the plot, characters and setting on the one hand, and the fiction techniques I've chosen to use on the other.

Speaking of Make Nice, I'm thinking of self-publishing that too, to give fans an opportunity to buy it and to be able to give some copies to friends. Of course, I haven't sold very many copies at all of my other self-published books, How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, but more than 0, which is how many copies of Make Nice have been sold.

So if you're a reader of my sex story collections Too Beautiful and How I Adore You, you should like How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, even though they're rather different from the sex stories you're familiar with. It's still my writing. Still kind of funny.

That reminds me of something my erstwhile literary agent said when she had taken a first read of my Bangalore book (now titled Mango Rain), which contains one sex scene. Not having read my sex story collections, but only heard about them, she said that when the sex scene in the Bangalore book started there was a noticeable falling-into-place of tone, as if I was suddenly on more familiar and comfortable territory.

And that's one reason why I'm writing novels which are not all about sex (Lesbian Camp Girls, which is definitely all about sex, and How They Scored, which is only half about sex, notwithstanding). Writing sex stories was too comfortable and familiar.

So, back to the novel writing on the weekend.

Buy my new book

You can now buy my novel How They Scored, a book about Silicon Valley, sex, privacy and the internet, and real estate in San Francisco.

This is the book I wrote in 2007 for my erstwhile publisher Cleis Press. We disagreed about the final form of the book and it wound up back in my hands. It's now available as a paperback, for $17.75, or as a download for $4.

Get it, it's funny, sexy, and au courant.

Deep springtime

It's a gorgeous spring morning in San Francisco, chilly, clear and breezy; later today it's supposed to be really windy, and already I can see the tops of the clouds being blown diagonally off their bases.

If I haven't been posting here much, it's mainly because I started writing a new novel last week, and I'm devoting as much spare attention to it as possible. I haven't been posting on any of the other blogs I sometimes post on either. I just don't want to sacrifice my momentum with the novel -- which I conceived of twelve years ago, and made several false starts on within the past five years. Having finally figured out a way to go forward, at least to rewrite the opening so that it makes sense, I want to keep going. So there won't be too much ersatz commentary, attempts at journalism, or arch mockery to consume for at last a few weeks.

Today's also my 53rd birthday, and I give thanks for family and friends who have supported me over many years, in the past, today and in the future.

Fun with characters

I'm drafting characters for a new novel, the same idea I've been working on since just before New Year's. Here are a few tertiary characters, all of whom are involved in a project called "Famous for Nothing," abbreviated F4Ø:

Meliá is the main filmmaker, she is serious about it and has standards, like the filmmaker on the Mlps project who did 30 takes of a scene. She isn't so invested in the F4Ø project per se, as a comment on society or media, as she is in her craft and in using the project as a stepping stone to something greater. But she is as allergic to plot as any of them, in fact she considers plot little short of an imperialist scheme to sedate people. "Narrative is the new opium of the masses," she says but at the same time she has no faith in documentary either, because she also doesn't believe in objectivity, so the F4Ø project is as close as she can come to being purely subjective.

Trahan, her boyfriend (pronounced TRAY-han), is vaguely European. He is a failed grad student in rhetoric. It's him who is the originator of the F4Ø concept; it's his way of articulating, in the laziest way possible, his hostile and nihilistic attitude. The reason he is so resentful is -- he says -- he is the sole survivor of a bus plunge in the Austrian Alps, surviving only after being swept downriver from the crash site and finding shelter in the forest hut of a schizophrenic whom he has to kill and eat to survive the winter -- in fact, the first thing he has to do is kill the guy in self-defense. When it all got sorted out, he was the beneficiary of a huge insurance settlement; he also became rich from a ghost-written memoir published under his name, about his ordeal. So he got the idea that he was some kind of intellectual and tried to become an academic, but in fact the people who were humoring him with the memoir and all finally reached their limit, and he was kicked out of the university with a terminal master's. He exiled himself to America where, he said, you could get people to believe anything. He finances Meliá's filmmaking and the whole F4Ø project with his wealth. The project is his aggressively hostile joke on modern culture and life in general. In the F4Ø project, his character is a bike messenger-jazz poet, which is his attempt to make fun of hipsters.

Carmichael is a would-be comedian and performance artist who has failed to define a character, a shtick or a voice. He is therefore sympathetic to Meliá's distrust of narrative, because it makes him feel better about his inability to arrive at a voice or find something to say; therefore he has taken to acting because he can take refuge in the characters he plays: they have something to say, so he won't have to. In the F4Ø project he plays the role of a hipster, i.e. a foil for Trahan's character.

Shar is a young dyke who is studying to become a tattoo artist and also works as a stripper. Because she's a dyke, Trahan finds it funny to make her play the girlfriend of Carmichael's character, and she imbues the part with every stereotype of straight girl she can muster. Of course, this isn't far from the role she plays when stripping, and for that reason she insists on being paid, whereas the others do their parts for nothing.

More celebrity memoirs the solution to publishing's problems

She says she wants to flog "celebrity-driven" books, bringing in "'really smart' writers to help shape those public figures' lives into books." As for the literary part of being a literary agent:

I'm trying not to do too much literary stuff -- which is not to say I'm not taking smart things, but there's a certain type of pretentious novel that I just hate, that I'd spent most of my career trying to write away from... I want to represent books that will actually reach people.

Like celebrity memoirs. More at my Open Salon blog

technorati: books, writers, publishing

Interview with Yiyun Li -- the personal and political

Yesterday I interviewed author Yiyun Li, whose new novel The Vagrants is the best literary novel I've read in a long time. Get used to me mentioning it, because it's one of those books you feel everyone who appreciates great writing should read.

One of the questions I addressed in the interview has to do with her intention in depicting the lives of people living in a provincial Chinese town in 1979, a few years after the close of the Cultural Revolution. She depicts those lives as very grim, filled with brutality and violence. Some of the details on the smaller scale strike one as particularly heartless, as when she talks about a family where the parents, disappointed after having six female children, don't even bother to give names to the youngest three, who are referred to as Little Fourth, Fifth and Sixth. Other details, about the way the government treats political prisoners, are violent in a more physical way -- for example, they stage a "denunciation ceremony" for a political prisoner, and cut her vocal cords before the rally so she can't shout any counter-revolutionary slogans in front of a crowd.

Given this cruel picture, I asked the author if she intended the book to be an indictment of Chinese society, and she answered very forcefully:

I don't have any intention for the novel to be an indictment of anything. That is a big NO. NO. NO. The situation may seem Chinese and specific to this era, but if you look at history, horrible things happen all the time. Brutality and violence happen all the time. On all scales. I can't shy away from that if I am writing a book.... My story happens to be set in China, and the characters happen to be Chinese. But if you read, say, Toni Morrison's novels, would you say she is depicting an unfairly negative picture of America?

I replied, "Certainly negative, but I would not say unfairly so." But there's more to say. Most Americans are secure enough in their views of their country that they don't object to negative, yet fair, criticism. I don't think China is yet secure enough in its reputation to feel the same way. You'll remember how sensitive they were last year to criticism of their human rights record, and how they took pains to ensure that the picture of China -- during the Olympics, at least -- was a positive one.

Regardless of her intention, I wouldn't be surprised if some people see Li's book as an indictment of Chinese society. But she went on to say:

I think that is a very narrow way of looking at literature... a very soviet, socialist view of how literature should represent certain things. I feel that as a writer the only people I feel responsible to are my characters. And I would need to treat them very fairly.

Of course, that's the right approach for any artist to take. But what strikes me is that, as far as the content of her book is concerned, she feels her first allegiance is not to either the country of her birth or her adopted one -- one she had to struggle to stay in, as I mentioned yesterday -- but to her book's characters.

I admire that very much, and I found much else to admire in the book itself, as I state in the interview.

technorati: writers, Yiyun Li, China

Mystery vs. thriller vs. farce

The detective story is about solving the problem, getting to the center of the labyrinth and restoring some sort of order. The crime story is about chain reaction, about events and the ripples that move outward from them. The detective story demands greater story coherence; crime stories are more about style and energy. Chandler, who wrote mysteries, made story mistakes, and we forgive him what we wouldn't countenance for a second in Agatha Christie because his style was just so utterly, joyfully, mind-blowingly wonderful. ... Story works best when it just happens on the page. At the same we, as readers, crave shock and event. From the writer's point of view, the big and surprising twist creates a huge amount of energy -- and always, always problems later. Novels, even novellas written to order for Playboy, are written over time and tend not to be seamless. Perhaps this is for the best -- it's another way in which they can reflect the mess of life.

From the Jacket Copy book blog on the LA Times site.

(Not sure what he's referring to when he mentions "novellas written for Playboy." Do they publish serial novellas?)

This is like something Cris and I were discussing earlier this year. I wrote in my notes for my current novel:

Thrillers and farces, she said, work by ratcheting up tension, and by setting up a precarious situation and then setting everyone loose. Everyone has a goal, usually conflicting, and as they all try to fulfill their goals, things get more and more chaotic whether it's a thriller or a farce. People feel compelled to thrust themselves into a situation, thus destabilizing both the new situation and making it impossible for them to return to their previous state. She used the word "pressure" to describe this effect: the characters' character traits create "internal pressure" that compels them to do these things. Add the other characters and the setting and you have the ingredients of a farce, or a thriller if the characters' goals are sinister enough.
Situation comedy, she went on, works a different way: by setting up what she called traps for the characters. She referred to a film we saw part of on TV, "The 40 Year Old Virgin," in which the characters suffer a series of situational setbacks -- for example, when Steve Carrel and Catherine Keener first try to have sex, her teenage daughter bursts in on them. ... She also said something that was very pithy, if slightly unrelated: In a mystery, the story is resolved when the crime is solved. In a thriller, the mystery may be solved without a resolution to the story.

technorati: narrative, writing technique, novel writing